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The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

• deleted 8mo ago
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• black_13 8mo ago
  [dead]
• austin-cheney 8mo ago
  From around 2010-2020 the stock market was rewarding growth more than profit. That means large tech employers hired like crazy to indicate growth. Then came COVID and the economy contracted. As a result the stock market changed to reward profitability. So, excess developers had to go. We are still feeling this. I do agree that AI is not to blame for this. In fact I will go further and claim that AI is a net negative that make this worse for the employer by ultimately requiring more people who average lower confidence and lower capabilities than without, but I say that with a huge caveat. The deeper problem is not market effect or panaceas like AI. The deeper problem is poorly qualified workers and hard to identify talent. It’s easy to over hire, and then fire, when everyone generally sucks and doesn’t matter. If the average employed developer is excellent at what they deliver these people would be easy to identify and tough to fire like engineers, doctors, and lawyers. If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative. AI and these market shifts thus hide a lower level problem nobody wants to solve: qualification.
  • radicalethics 8mo ago
    I think we'll see something counterintuitive happen where hiring picks up dramatically. Companies are willing to overspend and over-hire to automate everything away once and for all.
  • hrimfaxi 8mo ago
    How exactly are good doctors easy to identify and hard to fire? And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do? If people can't identify qualified professionals without relying on credentials, they probably aren't qualified to be hiring managers.
    • lm28469 8mo ago
      > And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do? Simple, the 80% of code monkeys who are not good at what they do will cause way more damages than the "professionals who are excellent at what they do". And out fo tech I can guarantee you the vast majority of people use llms to do less, not to do more or do better It's also easily verifiable, supposedly AI makes everyone a 10x developer/worker, it's been ~3 years now, where are the benefits ? Which company/industry made 10x progress or 10x revenue or cut 90% of their workforce ? How many man hours are lost on AI slop PRs? AI written tickets which seem to make sense at first but fall apart once you dig deep? AI reports from mckinsey&co which use fake sources?
      • copilot_king 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        • nkrisc 8mo ago
          So where are the AI-induced gains?
        • gadflyinyoureye 8mo ago
          If it is AGI and you have access to it, pivot from code now. You will make millions or billions on pharmaceutical products in as little as one month. Start making cures for non small cell cancers; those are untapped markets. Reverse aging. Even at $1mill a treatment over ten treatments, you would be sought after. Go! Get off HN! Rule the world.
          • HWR_14 8mo ago
            While I disagree it's AGI, AGI is not omniscience. It just means it general and able to address the same wide range of problems as human intelligence.
      • linuxftw 8mo ago
        It's really only in the last year the LLM's have gotten great and can output massive blocks of code that are functional. LLM's are at least a 10x speed up on the 'producing code' portion of the job, but that's often only a fraction of the overall job. There's lots of time spent planning and in meetings, doing research, corporate red tape, etc. For writing code and unit tests, generating deployment yaml and terraform, for me it's easily a 30x speed up. I can do in 1 or 2 hours what would have previously taken a week.
  • ido 8mo ago
    It wasn't covid - it was the post-covid coming down from all the free stimulous and ZIRP. The Russian war in the Ukraine is a much closer market to when the economy started tanking for devs.
    • sznio 8mo ago
      covid was a last gasp for zirp. the interest rates were growing since 2016 and would've remained high if not for the pandemic. covid required a quick return to zirp to save the economy from a crash, then required a quick return to high interest to save the economy from inflation. if not for covid, the zirp era would end more gently. covid overhiring was the last hurrah for companies to use the low interest. if not covid, there wouldn't be overhiring and subsequent firing the market would be as bad as now (or dare i say, *normal*), but it would be stable bad, not whiplash.
  • pjc50 8mo ago
    Qualification is a very difficult problem, but I think everyone resents the characterization of "bad devs". Things like the Metaverse failure - apparently $70bn spent for no results - are primarily management failures. Like the Cybertruck, they succeeded 100% at building a product that the CEO wanted. The problem is that the CEO is basically the only person that wants that product. There's also the thought nobody wants to examine: what if the consumer market total spend is kind of tapped out?
    • copilot_king 8mo ago
      [dead]
    • linuxftw 8mo ago
      Plenty of people wanted the Cybertruck, it's just that price is too high. It was originally announced to be under $40k, and with incentives, could have been in the $30k's. The F-150 Lightening had the same problem.
    • austin-cheney 8mo ago
      Yes and no. Excellent developers deliver excellent products, like with the Cybertruck example. I wouldn't buy one either, but it appears to be well crafted. Stellar developers are one step better. Yes, they too delivery excellent products, but they also produce things of value that nobody asked for. Business examples include Teflon, Postit Notes, antibiotics, linux, git, and much more. The US Army changed leadership methodologies about 20 years ago to account for this. The current leadership philosophy is called Mission Command. In the fewest possible words a leader provides a stated intent and then steps back to monitor while subordinate leaders exercise their own creative initiative to meet that intent. The philosophy before that was called Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). MDMP required leadership buy in for each step of a process from among a set of discussed courses of action. MDMP is now largely relegated to small personnel teams.
      • code_for_monkey 8mo ago
        i think the cybertruck is pretty well known to be crafted poorly, doesnt it always have problems with pieces falling off, or bursting into flames?
  • raxxorraxor 8mo ago
    > If the typical developer is excellent at what they do AI would be a complete net negative. No. There is work done by AI today no developer can match in speed and speed is relevant for development cost. Excellent developers would very likely employ these tools.
  • mktk1001 8mo ago
    Even if the average employee is pretty good at what they do, why wouldn't AI boost that productivity to another level?
• Ronsenshi 8mo ago
  This tracks, reminds me of Cory Doctorow's talk on reverse centaur situation where he gave a nice rundown of the tech market of the past 15+ years. Do anything and everything to remain in "growth stock" category. Spend money on useless features, on engineers working on those useless features - as long as it will make your company look like it has bright future and space to grow.
  • pbronez 8mo ago
    Wasn’t familiar with this, tracked it down https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers... > There’s a bit of automation theory jargon that I ab­solutely adore: “centaurs” and “reverse-centaurs.” A centaur is a human being who is assisted by a machine that does some onerous task (like transcribing 40 hours of podcasts). A reverse-centaur is a machine that is assisted by a human being, who is expected to work at the machine’s pace.
• rvz 8mo ago
  > Yesterday, the news of 16k Amazon layoffs plus two LinkedIn posts on the same topic back-to-back encouraged me to finally write about it. Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins. With almost 1.6M workers, the layoffs there are at least in the 5 figures and they will not stop to do the easiest thing possible in order to increase profit margins and that is to take jobs away from warehouse workers (using robots) and corporate jobs (using AI agents). > Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.” Leetcode can be easily gamed and cheated and is a waste of time. Now you need to make money for yourself instead of dancing around performative interviews since an AI Agent + Human out performs over 90% of workers doing the mundane work at Amazon anyway. You are being scammed without knowing it.
  • g947o 8mo ago
    > Amazon is fundamentally a logistics + robotics company and is one of the worst companies to join for 'stability' as they have razor-thin margins. You seem to forget that AWS exists.
  • deleted 8mo ago
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  • graemep 8mo ago
    They have an 11% operating margin. That is far from razor thin. Their biggest business is AWS. They have subscription income, and they sell digital downloads and streaming which are high margin. https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/Amazon-2024-Annual-Report.pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2025/ar/...
    • dangus 8mo ago
      Yeah, nobody makes this “margins are too low” complaint about Costco, which makes the majority of its profit on memberships, the exact same business model as Amazon Prime. Amazon the logistics company is paid for by the $100+ per year that its customers just give to Amazon to get basically nothing in return.
• pydry 8mo ago
  I remember after the Brexit vote (i.e. years before anything actually changed) there was a rash of British companies who clearly would have gone bankrupt anyway blaming their ailing fortunes on Brexit. There is remarkably little pushback on company narratives about layoffs or ailing economic fortunes from journalists which is weird because it's more normal that they are not truthful. The Brexit vote is nothing like this though. AI is probably the biggest corporate gaslighting exercise I've ever seen in my entire life.
  • copilot_king 8mo ago
    [dead]
  • graemep 8mo ago
    There were some remarkable claims made about Brexit. The best I can recall was a bus company closing a local bus route "because of Brexit", an year or two after the vote and therefore years before it actually happened. Also very common to blame things on health and safety, GDPR, etc.
• lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
  The industry was always a disaster, but if you take a disaster and put AI in the mix you get a disaster at light speed. It was always getting worse and worse but now it’s speedrunning it.
  • jagged-chisel 8mo ago
    Computers are a lever, a force multiplier. If your process is shit, you can shit faster with a computer. LLMs are another force multiplier. If your computerized process is a disaster … well, you said it and you’re right.
    • ben_w 8mo ago
      When I was young, the quote was still: To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.
      • jagged-chisel 8mo ago
        That quote was on my mind as I wrote that message. I think I saw it as a child but some time after I had begun writing BASIC code. It took a moment’s thought at the time, but I soon came to realize its truth.
  • Cthulhu_ 8mo ago
    Not so much AI itself, but the billions invested into it and the hardware required - anything you invest billions into but that doesn't have similar return on investment is a fast track to an economic crash / correction. The Y2K tech companies are a previous example, investors were champing at the bit to invest in uh, pets.com or whatever but turns out it didn't / wouldn't earn enough money to earn it back.
    • lifetimerubyist 8mo ago
      I agree with the economic argument. But I literally mean if you have a crappy business and put AI into it you’re just gonna make your business worse. AI as a tool is not actually a solution for very much. AI can mark a good process better but it will also make bad processes way worse. It’s a power drill upgrade when you were previously only using a screwdriver, but it’s still not a table saw.
• jasode 8mo ago
  >In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess. Traditional factories do make wrong guesses about the future and overhire all the time. Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off+1600 https://www.google.com/search?q=Ford+f150+lightning+laid+off...
  • Bayramovanar 8mo ago
    Sure, factories also overhire sometimes or shrink their businesses but not at the scale or frequency we see in tech.
    • YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
      Manufacturing sector has the most job cuts over time because the prediction of China not surpassing them was wrong. Tech employment on the other hand almost never decreased.
      • paulnpace 8mo ago
        While the surpassing is true, something I've found interesting is that across very different industries that have nothing to do with one another, and including publicly traded and private (though still huge) companies, I have heard directly from buyers that top management has given them a directive to find new suppliers in China. From a supply chain management perspective, this does not make sense. The directive should be something like "find the best suppliers on the planet."
    • paulnpace 8mo ago
      I've never worked in tech, but I've worked at manufacturers of various different sizes and places in the manufacturing supply chain, including finished goods. Manufacturers can't hire beyond the places in production that someone can stand and do something. There needs to be some kind of equipment or process for worker to contribute in some meaningful way, even if it is merely for a projection of increased production (e.g., hiring a second shift for a facility currently running one shift). What I wonder is if in tech, the "equipment" is a computer that supports everything a developer needs. From there, new things can be added to the existing product. Manufacturing equipment is generally substantially more expensive than a computer and supporting software, though not always. Might this contribute to the differences, especially for manufacturing that normally runs 24-hour shifts?
• m00dy 8mo ago
  >Europe just became a lower-cost extension of Silicon Valley. Stay away from europe while you can.
• ciconia 8mo ago
  > The liquidity that flooded the tech sector didn’t just inflate valuations; it inflated teams, egos, and expectations. Yes it's kind of obvious to anyone who's looking at the actual work being done: the constant churn of OS updates, the JS-framework-du-jour, apps being updated constantly... It seems to me like a lot of this is just busy work, as if engineers need to justify having a job by being releasing inconsequential updates all the time. Bullshit jobs anyone? I for one would really like things to slow down, we all deserve it!
  • pjc50 8mo ago
    Because it's important to recognize sometimes when someone you disagree with is right about something, I would like to note that Musk sacking most of the Twitter staff has not made the site unable to stay up. (The site has got worse for other reasons)
• light_triad 8mo ago
  Gravity is coming back to Silicon Valley: workers are realizing that the Bell Labs image they were sold was mostly innovation theater and hoarding talent for websites overstuffed with ads designed to manipulate users into buying junk
• sylware 8mo ago
  I am about to give my take on software development: Most [sane] software out there, but not all, has a main development time which is ridiculous compared to its life cycle (you could code in binary machine code, for several ISAs, it would not even matter). Then, it is extremely hard to justify _HONESTLY_ a permanent income in software development. Really, really hard.
• oytis 8mo ago
  Anecdotally, I didn't see more safety for engineers working on cash cows. Quite the contrary, if a product is already bringing revenue, it is an easy decision for the business to squeeze a bit more margin by letting people go. Stable, cash-generating projects are often first to be put into efficiency/maintenance mode.
  • mexicocitinluez 8mo ago
    Also anecdotally, I've had a handful of software development positions throughout the years (never at a position with more than 200-300 person company) and have yet to be laid off due to money. I've yet to be laid off at all, but that's irrelevant. I truly believe that these new tools will actually hurt the bigger companies and conversely help smaller ones. I'm in healthcare. The big players in the EMR space are Epic and Cerner. They are one-size-fits-all behemoths that hospitals have to work against than with. What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
    • anonymous908213 8mo ago
      Aren't they still going to need to reach out to the big players because of the regulatory environment? And for good reason, as it happens. We don't need hospitals handing over the public's health data to the cheapest person they can find to prompt it all into Claude.
      • antonymoose 8mo ago
        You can be a small player and still deliver immense value in health care I work at a firm in a niche with about 30 employees. We follow all regulations and go above and beyond them in regards to security.
        • mexicocitinluez 8mo ago
          Absolutely. I'm in the same boat (a bit bigger with around 200). It's crazy the underlying business has succeeded despite being boxed in by the software they're currently using. And at least in my niche, you only have a few options. Each with their own unique quirks. Instead, EMR's could position themselves as more of a "data provider" where you build bespoke software on top of the underlying storage. And to that end, having the abiliy to pump out small, focused apps can be really beneficial.
• miohtama 8mo ago
  There is some fat in the system that likely needs to cut off. Here is Google complaint about not serving lobster biscue: https://x.com/Andercot/status/1768346257486184566?s=20 https://x.com/Andercot/status/1768346257486184566?s=20 Zero interest rate phenomenon.
  • rvz 8mo ago
    This is likely the first time many have not experienced a widespread economic crash since 2008. We could get another 2008-like market crash before 2030, once the major AI companies begin to IPO onto the public markets.
  • dangus 8mo ago
    Reminder: this tweet could be totally made up.
    • AdamN 8mo ago
      Also lobster (or any other seafood) bisque isn't really expensive in the scheme of things.
• zkmon 8mo ago
  Ofcourse, AI does have an impact. We can't close our eyes to that. Atleast, it created a belief that massive layoffs are affordable now without affecting productivity.
• cael450 8mo ago
  Unfortunately, I think the next head of the fed is going to be appointed specifically to reduce interest rates, so we’re probably just going to go back to the 0-rate trough.
  • pjc50 8mo ago
    Quite likely. This will be great for growth. .. and terrible for inflation, but that can be blamed on other people.
    • NoGravitas 8mo ago
      Yes, it will, as always, be blamed on wages, even when wage growth is slower than inflation.
    • disgruntledphd2 8mo ago
      I don't see how this can happen, tbh. Like, the chair is just one vote, and the regional Feds have almost a majority. Presumably, whoever gets the job will say they'll reduce interest rates, but I don't see how they can actually accomplish this without getting the rest of the Fed on board.
• randomtoast 8mo ago
  If you make a prediction that the stock market is about to collapse every year, then one year you will eventually get it right.
  • direwolf20 8mo ago
    The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. But why do you think gold has tripled in price?
    • roncesvalles 8mo ago
      1. Mass hysteria. 2. Central banks rotating into gold to de-risk from USD combined with their usual slow bureaucratic processes. By the time they've decided that gold needs to be bought, the price has already run up by 50% and it's no longer a good idea to buy, but they still need to execute on their decisions anyway. The USD isn't going anywhere for the simple reason that the USA can simply counterfeit any non-USD currency and there's nothing the issuer can do about it, whereas if anyone tries to counterfeit USD, they should expect a nice little missile to land inside their room no matter where they are in the world. "Reserve currency" status is entirely based on how effective the issuing entity is at taking care of counterfeiting.
      • direwolf20 8mo ago
        North Korea is a prolific USD counterfeiter. Where are the missiles? Digital currencies can't be counterfeit. China is cashless, so are some parts of Europe.
        • roncesvalles 8mo ago
          >Where are the missiles? The scale doesn't seem to be large enough to warrant military action. It seems NK had mostly used it as pocket money for its embassy staff and has now stopped. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#North_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar#North_Korea: "The U.S. Secret Service estimates that North Korea has produced $45 million in superdollars since 1989. [...] Since 2004, the United States has frequently called for pressure against North Korea in an attempt to end the alleged distribution of supernotes. It has investigated the Bank of China, Banco Delta Asia, and Seng Heng Bank. The U.S. eventually prohibited Americans from banking with Banco Delta Asia. [...] The United States has threatened North Korea with sanctions over its alleged involvement with the supernotes, though it said those sanctions would be a separate issue from the nuclear sanctions." >Digital currencies can't be counterfeit. Yes they can. 51% attack.
• ForHackernews 8mo ago
  I don't really understand this writer's objection: Big tech is big money and big risks. If some giant FAANG company is going to take a gamble on paying you $350,000 TC you should be squirreling most of that away for yourself in case the bet goes south. If you want stability, go write Java for an insurance company for $85,000/year in Hartford, CT. OP is horrified to discover risky gambling happening in Las Vegas.
  • Bayramovanar 8mo ago
    hey I am the writer of the post anecdotally, my last job was an insurance company I got laid off from there too :)
• copilot_king 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
    Cult members don't want to hear their false god is a liar. Apparently 73% of LLM resources are used for emotional context support. People need to go outside for a daily walk, and meet real people. Most folks are actually fun to be around. =3
• JumpinJack_Cash 8mo ago
  The speculative nature of tech has always been present. The point is mass media communication and frictionless money movements across the world and market access which is so freely availible to the small retail investor. It's a recipe for disaster because an extraordinary claim can attract billions of dollars with nothing but hope and dreams to back it up. Imagine if the Wright Brothers had today markets and mass media at their disposal, they'd be showered in billions or even trillions but the actual model didn't make any money because it was R&D
• mexicocitinluez 8mo ago
  > Most engineers (including me) spent months grinding LeetCode at least twice in their career, studying system design, and passing grueling 6-round interviews to prove they are the “top 1%.” Really grateful that the opportunities I've been given weren't predicated on knowing things completely irrelevant to my job. I have spent exactly zero time solving LeetCode problems in my career (beyond algorithm stuff in college).
  • roncesvalles 8mo ago
    It's perfectly possible to have a successful SWE career without touching Leetcode-style questions. It's just that most of those jobs don't pay well.
    • askonomm 8mo ago
      As a Clojure developer I have the opposite experience. The more they ignore my open source work, the more they never call up any of my references, the more they give me useless test jobs and assignments unrelated to the actual work, the more it's a signal of a place with poor engineering culture and generally also not that great salaries. However the places that actually do read my open source work, do contact my references, and where the interview has had no tech assignments of any kind other than a simple discussion about a variety of topics, perhaps just going over some of my OSS projects, the higher the salary has been. This is in Northern Europe though, your mileage may vary.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
  Westinghouse Electric Corporation built early electrical grid turbines, and worked extensively with consumer product markets to close the circle of demand. Accordingly, more retail products required more energy, and more energy required more turbines. The LLM proponents are trying the same naive move with intangible assets, but dismissed finite limits of externalized costs on surrounding community infrastructure. "AI" puts it in direct competition with the foundational economic resources for modern civilization. The technical side just added a facade of legitimacy to an economic fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_exclusion_principl... Thus, as energy costs must go up, the living standards of Americans is bid down. Individuals can't fix irrational movements, but one may profit from its predictable outcome. We look forwards to stripping data centers for discounted GPUs. =3 "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
• d3ckard 8mo ago
  The main issue IMHO is the monopolization of the industry, especially in the US. Once the giants do layoffs, the rest of the market can't absorb the people effectively, which leads to oversaturated job market. We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.
• epolanski 8mo ago
  > The result is the worst of both worlds. European engineers now face US-level job insecurity with European-level compensation and limited mobility. Firing people in most of Europe is still not as easy as it is in the US. The opposite is also true, it's not that easy to leave your employer and you have to give 1/3/6 months notice before leaving, depending on your role/seniority/contract. Sometimes companies even make you sign 12 months notice contracts clause where they pay you a fixed monthly bonus but you can't leave without giving a 12 months notice, my SO has signed one.
  • direwolf20 8mo ago
    Indeed. It's not impossible to lay off people in Europe but they can't just say "you're fired!". There's a process and it costs time and perhaps 3 to 6 months of salary and you have to prove the layoff is needed. The business is incentivized to reduce hiring and find other work for the employee to do, instead.
    • roncesvalles 8mo ago
      To be fair, "you're fired!" doesn't happen in the US tech industry either. Even for performance-based firings, the employee almost always gets a few months of salary and garden leave in exchange for a release of claims. One of the positive effects of America being an overly litigious society. Unemployment insurance also kicks in.
  • carlosjobim 8mo ago
    > This is just false, firing people in most of Europe is still not easy. Down sizing is a perfectly legal reason to fire people in Europe, and it happens all the time when big companies do mass firings. The difficult part is getting to choose which individuals to fire.
    • epolanski 8mo ago
      1. Most of Europe make it hard to do layoffs and most countries have different systems to prevent mass layoffs (including a state contribution to the salary, the Italian Cassa Integrazione is an example). Down sizing needs to demonstrate that you need real reasons for it, which implies demonstrating financial issues and lack of work and inability to reassign/retrain to different roles. Not easy. 2. American companies find every time that doing layoffs is very hard for them in Europe. Most recently Amazon, which, unable to lay off their people in Milan went through secondary tactics like demanding Return To Office (from people that signed hybrid or fully remote contracts) and other tactics involving mobbing or generous severance packages (up to 1 year in salary). Still, if the worker said no it was no.
• cong-or 8mo ago
  Interesting framing. The article makes a compelling case that we're seeing the hangover from 14 years of ZIRP-fueled hiring rather than an AI apocalypse. But I'm curious what people think the equilibrium looks like. If the "two-tier system" (core revenue teams + disposable experimental teams) becomes the norm, what does that mean for the future of SWE as a career? A few scenarios I keep turning over: 1. Bifurcation - A small elite of "10x engineers" command premium comp while the majority compete for increasingly commoditized roles 2. Craftsmanship revival - Companies learn that the "disposable workforce" model ships garbage, and there's renewed appreciation for experienced engineers who stick around 3. Consulting/contractor becomes default - Full-time employment becomes rare; most devs work project-to-project like other creative industries The article argues AI isn't the cause, but it seems like it could accelerate whatever trend is already in motion. If companies are already treating engineers as interchangeable inventory, AI tooling gives them cover to reduce headcount further. For those of you 10+ years into your careers: are you optimistic about staying in IC roles long-term, or does management/entrepreneurship feel like the only sustainable path?
  • direwolf20 8mo ago
    Look at any other industry. It's going to be like that. Low–wage employees without agency.
  • peacebeard 8mo ago
    I am 10+ years into my career. I don’t think mgmt / entrepreneurship feels like the only sustainable path. But I believe I may become a manager of a 5-10 Claudes.
    • micik 8mo ago
      What are your Claudes going to be building and who is going to fund it?
  • 8mo ago
• carlosjobim 8mo ago
  Should information technology be a stable employment sector? As far as I'm concerned, the main purpose of IT is to automate work. Tech companies make these systems of automation and provide them to other industries, so they can automate. Making a program or an IT system is something you only do once. So once it is completed, it is expected that a lot of people who helped make it have to go. It's like building a skyscraper. Massive amounts of work to build it, and when it's finished, most workers have to move on. Of course an IT company can continue to expand into perpetuity, but what if they don't have the leadership talent or resources to create a new giant project after one has been finished? Then the sensible thing is to down-size. "Well don't hire too many people in the first place to rush your project into completion" - Then you get left behind.
  • direwolf20 8mo ago
    There is churn in the work being done. An automation solution for one company shouldn't be expected to work for the next company. Every company has different processes, and developing software to fit the exact needs of one company will continue to be useful. Some software is finished, like Microsoft Office 2003, and requires no additional work except to force ads on people. Those jobs may end.
• jakubmazanec 8mo ago
  I'm not arguing against the core arguments of the article (I agree with most of the points), but on the other hand, software development is (at least currently) an essentially iterative process - one that differs greatly from other production processes (e.g. buildings, cars). We all know how difficult it is to estimate how much development time something takes. Planning is hard and outcomes have therefore greater variability.
  • noosphr 8mo ago
    Your aren't building a car when you are writing software, you are building a car factory.
  • Bayramovanar 8mo ago
    I generally agree with you, but if you look deeper, cars, buildings, and the underlying know-how didn’t appear in a day either. Those were also iterative processes: first tires and mud houses, then horse carriages and brick houses, and eventually cars and buildings. In that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from engineering today. Working on core engineering functionality of a company is essentially the same kind of process. The difference lies in whether you’re working on core functionality, or on some iterative experiment that nobody knows will succeed.
    • jakubmazanec 8mo ago
      I'm talking about how a single product is produced, not about its evolution through centuries. Anyway, the point wasn't to compare specific details, it's just an analogy.
    • OfflineSergio 8mo ago
      When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them. Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often. You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product. The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.
• stego-tech 8mo ago
  I will add some commentary from my subjective POV in IT: “Efficiency” is a damned lie. Enterprise IT is one of the most inefficient spaces out there, full of decades of band-aids layered atop one another in the form of fad products, fancy buzzwords, and “defining leadership” projects. The reason you cannot get shit done at work quickly isn’t because of bureaucracy or management layers standing in the way so much as it’s the vested interest in weakening IT and Ops teams so that those higher-ups can retain more of the profit pie for themselves. My entire job is to make technology become so efficient that it fades into the background as a force amplifier for your actual work, and I’ve only spent ~1/3rd of my 15+ year career actually doing that in some form. I should be the one making sure documentation is maintained so that new hires onboard in days, not months. I should be the owner of the network and/or compute infrastructure the business needs to operate, not some MSP in another country whose contract you’ll replace with a lower bidder next year. I should be the one driving improvements to the enterprise technology stack in areas we could benefit from, not some overpriced consultant justifying whatever the CIO has a hard-on for from his recent country club outing. Consultants, outsourcing, and fad-chasing aren’t efficient. They do not better the business, overwhelmingly. AI won’t magically fix broken pipelines, bad datasets, or undocumented processes, because it is only ever aware of what it is told to be aware of, and none of those groups have any interest or incentive in actually fixing broken things. The tech industry is woefully and powerfully inefficient. It hoards engineers and then blocks them from solving actual problems in favor of prestige projects. It squanders entire datacenters on prompt ingestion and token prediction instead of paying a handful of basically competent engineers a livable salary to buy a home near the office and fucking fix shit. Its leaders demand awards and recognition for existing, not for actually contributing positively back to society - which leads to stupid and short-sighted decision-making processes and outcomes. And all of this, as OP points out, is built on a history of government bailouts for failures and cheap debt for rampant speculation. There’s no incentive to actually be efficient or run efficient businesses, and this is the resultant mess.
  • dangus 8mo ago
    I think you need some kind of source to back up the idea that IT or the software industry as a whole isn’t efficient. Software companies have much higher profit margins than companies that ship physical products. There really aren’t many industries that do better margins than software. To sell software, you don’t need a production facility, warehouse, nor do you even need an office building if you don’t want one. https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/margin.html https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
• resters 8mo ago
  Proven businesses can always borrow at fairly low rates. When capital gets really cheap it starts to incentivize greater amounts of risk taking because investors actually want risk. If you are starting a dry cleaning business, you have a cost of the equipment, rent and other well known factors. Starting a tech company in a new and unproven area has different expenses and a different risk/reward profile. Malinvestment can come in a lot of flavors. Cheap capital will result in too many dry cleaners and also too many startups that probably shouldn't have gotten funding. The downside comes in various forms. 1) existing dry cleaning businesses are less profitable because of increased competition, and 2) startups hire scarce engineers and drive up wages, which drive up costs for everyone. Cheap capital is justified bc the goal is growth, but it is a blunt instrument that creates hot spots and neglected areas simultaneously. Compare the approach used in the US with the approach taken by China. Chinese firms face significantly more competition than firms in the capitalist US, but overall China's policies are crafted with a more deliberate eye toward their distributional consequences and notions of the greater good are much more subject to sharp critique and pressure across social and industrial strata. What we are seeing in the US is that policymakers have come to believe that the growth-focused approach is an escape hatch that can be used to reduce the effects of other bad decisions, but at some point the size of the inflated economy gets big enough that it takes on a political life of its own -- post-911 defense contractors have dramatically more lobbying and policy-influencing power than they had prior. Today, systemically risky financial industry participants have significantly more political clout than they had before the 2008 correction. In other words, the fabric of (political) reality shifts and it becomes hard to identify what normal would look like or feel like. In my view, AI adds fuel to the existing fire -- it rapidly shifts demand away from software engineers and onto strategists -- give the team a strategy and now with AI the team will have it done in a few weeks. If not, a competitor will do it without poaching anyone from your team. And market forces include both creative and destructive forces. Firm failure is a feature, not a bug.
  • jacquesm 8mo ago
    Cheap venture capital is uniquely driven by the interest rate more than any other factor. Low interest rates drive money away from safer vehicles towards more risky vehicles because they still offer a return. This is good far people starting companies, but in the long run the decision makers on those investments almost always turn out to have mis-priced the risk factor and end up with negative returns. This then causes the market to dry up again and if the interest rate hasn't dropped even further then a lot of companies that need follow up investment will now get killed off. It's a very Darwinian landscape that results from this and I've been wondering for years if there isn't a better way to do this.
• deleted 8mo ago
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• bhadass 8mo ago
  solid analysis but i think you're missing the logical endpoint here: this doesn't end with companies "relearning scarcity"... it ends with the permanent contractor-ification of various types of work at these tech companies (not just tech roles, but other types of roles at these companies). already, contractor-to-employee ratio has gotten higher and higher at these companies in recent years and I expect this to continue. ZIRP (especially the "double tap" ZIRP in 2021/2022) created this monster (bootcamp devs getting hired, big tech devs making "day in the life of" tiktok vids). contractors give: instant scale up/down without layoff optics no benefits overhead no severance obligations easy performance management (just don't renew) this mirrors what other industries typically do after large restructuring waves ... manufacturing got temp agencies and staffing firms as permanent fixtures post-rust belt collapse. tech is just catching up to the same playbook.
• nalekberov 8mo ago
  Mostly true, but AI accelerated that process: - Senior Engineers now often is sufficient for most tasks, Junior Engineers seems like a burden rather than a boost during development process - Companies feel comfortable with hiring fast and firing fast - Tech Market is now flooded with not-so-good engineers having good experience with good AI coding assistants - which already are capable of solving 80% of the problems - they are ready to work for much less than really experienced engineers In general, yes, companies overhired many software developers, hoping they will continue hyper growing, but then reality has kicked in - this was not sustainable for most businesses.
• shiandow 8mo ago
  Having stable core revenue teams and disposable experimental teams seems like an excellent way to ensure the experienced developers will leave as soon as they can, and that any new knowledge leaves the company as soon as possible. So in the end you lose both your ability to acquire new knowledge and to keep existing knowledge. There has to be a better way surely?
• __MatrixMan__ 8mo ago
  This is just scarcity based economics failing us in the ways that it has been for decades now. The only thing that stands out about tech is that from 2010 to 2020 it seemed to be withstanding the rot.
  • prewett 8mo ago
    Since the world has finite goods and everyone wants more, I'm not sure what kind of economy besides "scarcity-based" you expect to find.
    • __MatrixMan__ 8mo ago
      That worked well back when what we wanted more of were things that we all agreed upon were desirable. More food, more housing, more cars and tools and clothes. Nowadays most of our efforts are in pursuit of contradictory goals. Creating an AI god, going to Mars, ethnic cleansing projects... these aren't things we unanimously want more of, they're one of two alternatives that some of us want to achieve and the others want to prevent. The logic of scarcity is a poor mediator for such things. We don't have to dispense with scarcity entirely in order to stop using it as a proxy for decision making about outcomes that have nothing to do with scarcity.
• vmg12 8mo ago
  > But in Tech, the playbook is different. Companies over-hire software engineers intentionally. To play the lottery. The actual reason tech companies overhire is because people get promoted based on the number of people that are "under" them. All leaders are incentivized to fight for headcount.
• kypro 8mo ago
  Personally I think all these posts miss 50% of the issue... I agree it's not AI, but I suspect it's only partially an interest rate story. Tech changed a lot from 2010 to 2020. Prior to 2010 almost everything built required a huge amount of development effort, and in 2010 there was still a huge amount of useful stuff to be built. Remember – prior to 2010 a lot of major companies didn't even have basic e-commerce stores because the internet was still a desktop thing, and because of this it really only appealed to a subsection of the population who were computer literate. Post 2010 and post iPhone the internet broadened massively. Suddenly everyone was online and companies now had to have an e-commerce store just to survive. Only problem was that there wasn't a Shopify or even npm to build from... So these companies had to hire armies of engineers. Similarly there was no Uber, online banking was barely a thing, there was no real online streaming services, etc, etc, etc... During this time almost everything had to built by hand, and almost everything being built was a good investment because it was so obviously useful. Around 2015 I realised that e-commerce was close to being a solved problem. Both in how most major companies had built out fairly good e-commerce stores, and also in how it was becoming relatively easy for someone to create an e-commerce store with almost no tech skills with solutions like Shopify. I'd argue somewhere between 2010 and 2020 the tech industry fundamentally changed. It become less about building useful stuff like search engines, social media sites, booking systems, e-commerce stores, etc – these were the obvious use cases for tech. Instead the tech industry started to transition to building what can only be described as "hype products" in which CEOs would promise similar profits and societal disruption as the stuff built before, except this time the market demand was much less clear. Around this time I noticed both I and people I knew in tech stopped building useful stuff and were building increasingly more abstract stuff which was difficult to communicate to non-technical folks. If you asked someone what they did in tech around this time they might tell you that their company are disrupting some industry with the blockchain or that they're using machine learning pick birthday cards using data sourced from Twitter. I used to bring this up to people in tech but so many people in tech at this time had convinced themselves that the money was rolling in because they were just so intelligent and solving really hard problems. In reality the money was rolling in because of two back to back revolutions – the internet and the smart phone. These demanded almost all industries made a significant investment in technology, and for a decade or so those investments were extremely profitable. Anyone working in tech profited from those no-brainer technical investments. Post-2015 the huge amount of capital in tech and the cheap money allowed people to spend recklessly on the "next big thing" for many years. 2015 to 2020 was such an amazing time to be in tech because people were basically throwing money at you to build literally anything. But time's up now. Companies are realising that a lot of the money they invested in tech in recent years isn't profitable and isn't even that useful. So now they're focusing in on delivering value and building up profit margins. The tech market isn't broken, it's coming back down to reality. Like railway workers post the boom we must face that most of the core infrastructure has now been built. A few of us will stick around making the odd improvement and maintaining what's already there, but that boom isn't coming back. Many of us will need to seek new professions.
• pu_pe 8mo ago
  I don't really understand what the author is arguing for here. Yes, tech companies (and everyone else) hired a ton of people when money was cheap, and now they are doing lay offs. I suppose the alternative would be employing people for life? Or that it should be costlier to fire people (ie like in Europe)? Also, if you are using AI to even write such a simple blog post, then perhaps corporations are indeed using it for all kinds of purposes too, and that undoubtedly reflects on their hiring.
  • lingrush4 8mo ago
    The author never really argued for anything. He's just whining
• FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
  Is this just for the big guys like FANG, AI companies? There is huge part of tech market that is just humdrum blue color software. Keep the ERP system running, build a new efficiency report, trouble shoot why the payroll missed bob last week because of a un-validated text entry field. Or because of the years of zero interest, tons more people went into software, so now it is over-populated, and thus puts pressure on regular hum-drum software jobs.
• _heimdall 8mo ago
  >In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess. This is interesting, in my experience its seemed to be the opposite. In manufacturing, its must easier to come up with a specific number of employees you need for a given project or contract. If the contract is expected to sign you may hire early to get ahead of it. If the contract falls through, or an existing contract is cancelled, you know exactly how many people you need to cut to balance labor with your current commitments.
• Havoc 8mo ago
  Don’t think it needs to be either or. ZIRP, AI, over hiring, and a wave of boot camp labour supply I suspect all contribute. Plus we’re also likely approaching saturation on a lot of fronts with attention and ad density saturation. Things like YouTube seem to be on the edge of how much ads they can force feed without people just not using yt because it’s unusable. Enshitification isn’t a cycle, it’s a one way trip. Combine that with over hiring and it’s bound to hit a wall
  • TheOtherHobbes 8mo ago
    But on the other side there are countless opportunities for valuable revenue-generating products that aren't based on dopamine addiction and/or ad tech. It's a values problem, not an opportunity problem. Tech industry management is locked in a death spiral because it lacks the ethics or the vision to create real value, as opposed to extractive predatory value. This applies equally to consumer relationships and employee relationships. The default value is "How can I screw these people over to get more of what I want?" And that is - ironically - a failure of brain chemistry and emotional regulation. Because making number go up is a catastrophic addiction in its own right.
    • Havoc 8mo ago
      > there are countless opportunities for valuable revenue-generating products that aren't based on dopamine addiction and/or ad tech. Perhaps a bit of a hot take but I’d be inclined to disagree. The boom in big tech is I think almost exclusive driven by dopamine, brain rot and ad tech either directly or indirectly. Meta and Google - almost entirely ad funded. Netflix - binge watching and they’re trying hard to force more ads in. Apple makes the black rectangle to watch the content and ads - without the iPhone 1 doomscrolling wouldn’t be a thing. Amazon runs an ad empire, produces video content for binge watching and has a store designed to maximise consumerism and retail therapy. Even the portions that are more infra like AWS - I’d bet a large portion of that fulfilling demand by things that are part of the attention/dopamine economy. All those TikTok dances aren’t served off a raspberry pi. Don’t get me wrong not trying to discount tech as not having genuine ethical value or opportunities not existing. But the explosive growth seen in tech over past 20 years specifically is I think almost exclusively driven by adtech and attention economy. And if that reaches saturation either this changes tracks to similar on AI or the growth plateaus. Other value creation certainly exists and is valid but I don’t see it filling the shoes of adtech. Google and meta indirectly acknowledged the problem years ago already with their balloons over Africa to connect more eyeballs to the internet plan. If you can’t force feed more ads to current user base then you need more users. It’s telling I think that a wild plan like balloons in Africa was the plan selected, rather than going for the countless other valuable opportunities as you say. Speaks to the relative profitability
• maciejzj 8mo ago
  Mind you that the IT over investment sucked money out of other industries. My friends who chose different career paths do not seem to be particularly content either.
  • 4gotunameagain 8mo ago
    It's insane how many billions went into idiotic "tech" companies like wework when it could've been invested somewhere with an actual outcome or benefit for society. Let's not even bring the gig economy into discussion..
• infecto 8mo ago
  Could this not be simply summarized as ZIRP fueled a bubble in tech long before AI? Mass layoffs have been cycling on and off since ZIRP stopped. I doubt we will see that change anytime soon.
• captain_coffee 8mo ago
  > Europe just became a lower-cost extension of Silicon Valley. Pretty much spot on. The UK included in the above definition of Europe as well.
• NoGravitas 8mo ago
  IMO, this is a not-wrong but less insightful perspective on what Ed Zitron talks about in The Rot Economy. Cycles of overhiring and layoffs happen, but they're not the core mechanism. AI isn't the cause, but it's also not a scapegoat. It's just the current placeholder, like blockchain and the metaverse, that allow companies to have their valuation based on growth rather than profit. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
  • baggachipz 8mo ago
    Right, AI isn't the reason, but it sure as hell is an accelerant and part of the pattern that ultimately is extremely unsustainable. It's going to be really ugly when it ends but it's inevitable.
  • judahmeek 8mo ago
    Your linked article seems aligned with https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
• semiquaver 8mo ago
  > Till ~2010, a layoff was a sign of failure. It meant the CEO messed up. > > In 2024, a layoff is a signal of “discipline.” Companies lay off thousands, and their stock price jumps. Citation needed. Author started their career after 2010 so they are not basing that on personal experience. In my experience this is not true.
  • RoadieRoller 8mo ago
    I am not OP. But to support his arguments. CEO Failure News Example (2013): https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/06/fail-week-kevin-ryan/ https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/06/fail-week-kevin-ryan/ 'Stock Price Jumps' Example (2026): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-stock-jumps-pre-market-135928134.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-stock-jumps-pre-market... Not sure if it is the articles I picked up, but the amazon example doesn't have a single mention of Andy Jassy!
    • semiquaver 8mo ago
      It’s very easy to find examples of stock prices jumping after major layoffs going back may years, e.g. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/jan/03/att-rings-in-year-with-layoffs-40000-to-lose-jobs/ https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/jan/03/att-rings-in-y... That article even says “ Wall Street, in keeping with its cheerful attitude about layoffs, […] investors bet that profit-sweetening job cuts, though perhaps not as dramatic as AT&T’s, would remain in vogue among large corporations. Large layoffs have always been looked upon favorably by investors.
• pelasaco 8mo ago
  When the unwind came, companies cut the layers that existed because hiring was easy, not because the work was essential. In a tighter market, the advantage shifts back to people with real systems experience and operational depth
• root_axis 8mo ago
  IMO the issue is even more fundamental than the article presents. The software product market is approaching a saturation point. All the low hanging fruit has been commoditized, so buying something off the shelf is now generally preferable to having engineers on your staff. After the pandemic hiring spree, even the big tech companies realized they didn't have enough productive work for all these engineers. The effect is compounded by the return to normal interest rates, so investors are no longer desperate to dump their cash into every random startup idea. Ultimately, software engineers aren't going away, but the era of desperate need is over for good.
• 1970-01-01 8mo ago
  Let's look at reality. In reality, warfare, k-shaped economic growth, and influential social media tantrums from Elon, POTUS, and other big billionaires are the más problemas stifling our job market. Go ahead and sit AI in last place as 'reasons' why the tech market isn't improving, but do not call it a scapegoat. We have many distinct problems here. A lot of them are not financial. It's a dumpster fire getting free heat, free fuel, and the oxygen supply has never been more pure. AI is simply the dumpster vessel putting it all together. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle
• random3 8mo ago
  The author describes hiring strategy relative to Fed policy as one assumption that presumably motivates the current context in the market, but completely fails to make a point about AI, or to generally back their claims. In fact, even the main claim seems to be pulled out of the hat wrt to Europe where there’s no Fed. No hiring/layoff numbers, etc. I get it that it’s just a guy with a blog, but it’s on top of HN now, and IMO vacuous, describing one motivation that’s been floating around for quite some time. Perhaps as long as they wanted to write about it until this “last straw”
  • direwolf20 8mo ago
    Europe is still connected to US financial markets. The USD is the most influential currency. When it contracts, money in general contracts.
• RivieraKid 8mo ago
  A thought I had about this topic, this is a simplification of reality to illustrate a point: Software developers are doing R&D, you create new stuff that continues to exist forever. This is unlike most jobs, in which you produce goods and services that are consumed and then you have to produce them again. What if we are getting to the point where all of the low-hanging stuff is invented? For example, every bank has an app which works and rarely needs to be changed. Or take a social network like Facebook, going from zero to a product with 1B users took a lot of development but since then, it's been mostly static, why employ thousands of developers dedicated to Facebook? Etc.
  • tylerchilds 8mo ago
    These are the right questions and core to the actual “ai race” Before ai, all we had was compilers and interpreters to take instructions and turn them into machine code and byte code A lot of political painstaking went into which compilers and even with “better options” there’s only really a couple big fish of workflows to take an orgs ideas to production. What passes as a compiler and what passes for a programming language exploded. I’m very interested in “the final compile target” of these systems AND the output of that still being human readable and influenceable.
  • hgs3 8mo ago
    > it's been mostly static In a well-functioning competitive market, no company should be able to rest on its laurels. The problem is industries have consolidated and trustbusters are nowhere to be found. Notice when tech is new (the web, smart phones, AI) there's an initial burst of competitive companies? That's because the market hasn't consolidated yet. Ask yourself how many dot-com millionaires would realistically be able to duplicate their success in 2026, given the same product but launching today. Aside from consolidation, discoverability is a huge problem, especially in the era of AI slop. Building a superior product is easy, getting it noticed and building traction is hard.
  • daxfohl 8mo ago
    The ridiculous thing is that we're spending trillions of dollars to develop these coding assistant AI things at the same time we're running out of useful stuff to code.
• wolfcola 8mo ago
  Post 2022, tech CEOs decided that workers had too much power and needed to be brought down a peg, so they did layoffs and worked to get Trump elected to erode worker power even further. Just look at the leaked group chats with Andreesen.
• daxfohl 8mo ago
  I think there's an argument that AI is helping the (non-AI) software job market. If tech companies are seen as laying off "too fast", then investors will penalize them for not retaining enough people to compete in AI. So companies have to do some layoffs, both to rebalance for the economic downturn and to claim "progress in AI", but not so much that it makes them look weak to investors. Whether they actually need the employees for anything is secondary.
• AbstractH24 8mo ago
  So we've moved on from blaming ZIRP and the pandemic to blaming AI? Could have sworn I saw folks blaming the Amazon layoffs on the pandemic still yesterday
• AbstractH24 8mo ago
  I'd be curious to know if this trend is unique to tech and the last 30 years Or if you'd find it in previous industries that have had a huge influx of VC-like investors funding companies with the hope they'll at some point in the future be profitable.