We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.
If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at.
But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business.
Well, here is the wake up call.
No, we are not paid to rate the best cappuccino of the valley, converting the most stable software of your org to Elm nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set.
We are paid to solve problems.
If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem.
>But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business.
Aren't you seeing it backwards? Other professions should have the same "luxuries", in a humane working world. Instead people are treated like cattle.
IT being an "amazing productivity" boost, means those "divas" you describe just get small part of the value they create, especially since a heck of a lot of the rest ends as unprecedented profit levels...
Under a capitalistic labour market theory, employees are not and can't be "overpaid" (and surely not for decades on end). They are paid exactly what they are worth, as price is based on supply and demand equilibrium.
Under a marxist labour market theory employees still can't be overpaid if the company makes a profit on top of what it would re-invest in itself (infrastructure, etc.).
So, under neither theory workers can be overpaid under any normal circumstances.
At worst, under capitalism there can be a higher market rate that gets adjusted to a lower one, but at each point in time none of those was "overpaid", it was the best the market knew to set. The higher rate was appropriate supply-and-demand-wise for when it was applied (and it might raise again as IT companies compete for developers, and so on).
Let's not forget the "US/Europe needs X millions more developers" reports churned out every few months...
As someone who spends every day in a state of the art FAANG office, I don’t think anyone deserves or needs this level of comfort. I think it’s wasteful and unnecessary. I can make my own coffee, I don’t need on-site baristas doing it for me.
If US/EU get just a significant fraction of those developers needed, software dev salaries will go to the level of other engineering, say mechanical, construction or material one. Employers would be very happy with that. And lets be honest here, its not that different job despite what some bigger egos think about their work and echo chambers that keep them in that dream.
I don't agree those other engineers are treated as cattle, merely as normal employees. IT, mostly in SV and other places cargo-culting ie Google is often really treated like divas. Bear in mind that this was never true in corporations where IT was treated as a cost center, ie banking. But from various HN posts it seems that typical young SV dev has no experience with that and many feel they are changing the world for the better, when reality its at best a zero sum game, and often not even that (ie optimizing ad revenue stream for your corporation is definitely loss for mankind as a whole, or anything that makes societal parasites who breed depression like facebook/insta/tiktok more effective at their goals).
But folks for some obscure reason need to feel that their work has a good purpose and high moral ground, hence sometimes quite advanced mental gymnastics seen also here.
This is just academic gymnastics.
If market conditions dictate that a worker produces 10 dollars in value so you hire people for 9 dollars, and then the value of their production is reduced to 7 dollars you need to fire someone.
In the real world there is uncertainty in the projected value their work (if it can even be measured, and not taking into account non economic consideration). So someone can be overpaid for a while until it is discovered, at least in the way most people think about the meaning of overpaid.
Most developers don't live in the Valley, most of us didn't earn astronomical salaries during the past decade, most of us didn't have to run code reviews past a "diversity committee". We mostly just got on with our job like everyone else.
Of course we debated languages and frameworks but so what? Every profession has its arguments over tools and processes. Everyone complains about their manager and endless meetings.
Of course, It's a caricature dedicated to HN readers.
I have met plenty of competent devs, working seriously and providing values to humanity, well enough to justify the not so huge salary they get.
But stating the obvious is not going to make people think.
However, the message that part of the community is growing into entitled spoiled kids, shocked that their shinning arses can even be touched by a lay off, is something I did want to convey :)
Developers are dramatically underpaid, just like all non-exec labor. It's ridiculous to complain about devs making 300k-500k a year when execs are pulling in millions or tens of millions a year with 10M-100B worth of equity under their belt. Focusing on anything other than that is a complete distraction and counterproductive. Devs should be getting 10X their current salary and execs should be getting 1/100th theirs.
I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.
Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit.
The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take.
Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration.
Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.
This comment right here is proof of the bubble - normalising 300-500k per year salaries. Developers don't have a skillset that is harder to develop than university academics or mechanical/electrical engineers in industry. Out in the real world for equivalently skilled professionals in other industries, a 100k salary is great and a 150k salary is fabulous. I'm a 16-year-experienced engineering team leader responsible for process safety on multiple billion-dollar oil and gas facilities and I'm on a great base salary 140k, which is more than many of my peers. There are engineering professors who outstrip my skills level by a factor of ten who are on half my salary.
The exponential elevation of dev salaries into the stratosphere was a natural overshoot of demand vs supply of suitably skilled labour. Now the overshoot is resolving itself starting with decreased demand. Anyone who banked on 300k-500k salaries being the norm has made the same mistake as oil and gas folk have done in every boom throughout the 20th century.
>I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.
You are correct, though I will not say that underpayment per se is the problem. It's more along lines of housing is very expensive due to a whole combination of govt interference like taxes, inflation, regulations etc.
If you truly think that this radical change will make the company more productive, what's stopping you from raising a seed round for your new company built on this innovation as competitive edge?
I have been coding for 20 years now, pretty much on every continent, in many different projects.
At least half of them have failed.
I've seen NGO moving to docker based micro services for their data collection tools and burn the donators money for 2 years before dying under the weight of the complexity they just created.
I've seen start up working on ideas for months that made no sense, only to run out of cash but the belly full of useless lines of code.
I've seen corporations hiring 7 people to do the work one single senior dev could do, then from meetings to audits, proceed to ensure the budget would explode and the product never released.
I've seen fancy operations, with free food and fashionable people full of colors and style. And they spent 2 third of their day virtue signaling, fighting over how to do thing, what should have been done instead, and what we should do in the future. But certainly doing nothing right now.
I don't believe the free market is pricing the value of most things fairly. Just like I don't believe diamonds have much value, and never did, even before when people were still buying them for their wedding ring.
Yes, most of us are overpaid, given the problems we actually solve.
But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long.
So it was ok, to hire 100 people, and have 12 of them being actually useful, because you didn't have time figure out which ones.
However today the economy is contracting. The low hanging fruits have been harvested. And it's no longer economically viable for the companies (that were never our friends in the first place) that they care about how special devs are.
Pay is a function of value. If you produce a lot of value, you get paid a lot. This is true for all jobs unless the business has figured out a way to get away with keeping most of the value for itself.
When a dev is producing code that generates $x millions either they're going to end up getting paid a lot or the business is going to end up making more profit. To suggest that a dev is 'overpaid' is just saying that you think tech companies should keep more profit from the value they create instead.
It's important to remember that despite all the layoffs, talk of recessions, and 'bad news' around at the moment, company profits and revenues are still way up. Meta's revenue went up $30bn in 2021 ($85.96bn in 2020, $117.92bn in 2021). It fell to $116.6bn in 2022. Maybe the revenue will plunge back down to 2020 levels again this year which would justify slashing the headcount, but I doubt it. I think it's a lot more likely that Meta will announce record profits at the end of the year.
A very free-market take. Do you believe that a fresh graduate at FAANG is really generating 6 figures in value? Do you believe that US employees on average generate 3x the value of their European counterparts?
I couldn't afford my lifestyle if pay was a function of value; it'd cost too much. Pay is a function of how hard management believes it is to replace someone.
The value you produce is merely an upper limit on your salary. Your salary is more based on offer and demand, meaning how much your management believes it would cost to replace you.
This is way, way too simplistic and implies that you somehow can know what the value is... The whole discipline of ethics within philosophy for thousands of years had been grappling with this... because it's hard!
Now, just to give you a counter-example, where it would be very hard to argue that the job compensation was based on value: there was an article about a year ago about some government bureaucrat in either Spain or France who's been dead for seven years, and the government forgot to notice, so it was sending him a paycheck month after month. -- How's that for generating value?
Now, of course, there's also a debate on universality of value. Some believe that the value is universal, but the reality is s.t. it's hard to justify this belief. For example, the value provided to a dictator of a fascist state by his bodyguards doesn't seem to align well with the value those bodyguards provide for the rest of the state (and especially for the neighbors of that state). So, how can you argue that the bodyguard's pay is justified? Why do you have to take the perspective of the dictator rather than the people being under their thumb?
And of course, there is a debate about how to measure the magnitude of value: is it absolute or, again, proportional to the subject of it. Those who believe in universal value also tend to believe in absolute value, but they don't have to. So, again, a thousand dollars might be a difference between being able to make good on rent and becoming homeless for a poor person while for a rich person a thousand dollars might be so insignificant that they don't even notice spending it. And then again, you need to work hard to convince others that the value is absolute (i.e. that dollars don't capture the value and so on).
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Independently of the above:
> When a dev is producing code
I worked for my previous employer for three years. It was before they had any paying customers (a start-up). After I quit, for various reasons, they decided to get rid of my code, and replaced it with something else. In other words, while I worked for my former employer, none of my code generated any value, but I still got paid. They still aren't even breaking even (they have something like five customers), and none of my code is in use anymore. How do you explain my salary then?
And I'm definitely not the only example. Large companies are known for throwing money on something that ends up being a flop, speculatively. So, it looks like there's more to it than simply writing code for the product that generates profits. Don't you think?
Let me put it this way: why should companies use value based pricing and extract ridiculous amounts of profits from consumers for their mediocre services, that goes into the pockets of just a few shareholders, whereas the labor of workers who actually produced the stuff be rewarded by a completely different logic (akin to cost based pricing)?
When workers have some actual leverage, suddenly the free market is a problem and not a magical fairy anymore.
If companies on the market can sell overpriced garbage to enrich their shareholders, surely you can't seriously complain about laborers being overpaid, even if they are. Its all the same game.
The whole system is totally unfair and unreasonable, developers being overpaid is not the problem and such a minor thing to focus on.
Stating those people are overpaid doesn't negate the fact that dev is incredibly well paid position with luxurious work conditions that people manage to complain about while being bad at it.
If you accept the premise that we should mock incompetent divas shareholder and CEO, then you should accept the premise we should mock our own community.
Plus a bit of self-deprecating humor is good for the soul.
Nurses? Our job is a lot easier and less important and working conditions are much better. And yet, a fresh grad straight out of school gets a few times more money than an experienced nurse. And, what is worse, a lot of devs honestly believe that they deserve it.
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.
Maybe in the US, but in the UK a highly paid software developer can barely buy a 2 bedroom flat in a suburb where 30 years ago the salary of a junior factory worker was enough to buy a house.
> If you had any professional doing the same
Other professionals are less productive by orders of magnitude, just check what’s going on in the accountancy department of a random company. You can double their productivity introducing Excel’s pivot tables a V-lookup. Or try to get a plumber to fix your toilet within time and budget.
IT workers are as divas as Basketball players (to some extent): why on earth Lebron James earns millions? Answer: because the team that owns him makes much more than that by selling his image. Easy. Same of IT workers: IT companies make millions per employee, so they pay us hundred of thousands in exchange. Easy.
Oracle makes millions, but is it because of their amazing devs?
Doctors don't make millions, is it because saving human life is not valuable?
Correlation is not causation.
Not to mention Lebron James actually ships. Indeed, he plays the matches he is paid for. And doesn't cry on TV the coffee is not good enough in the stadium.
It's hard to read because of the lack of structure, but in the end they're complaining that some code golf competition's winner wasn't legible code that's great to maintain.
If your job is to work on code that looks like that, that really sucks and I'm sorry for you, unless you love doing it, in which case cool. But for most of us it's really not and while I often feel close to being broken, I'm 100% convinced that plenty of jobs are much more taxing, and if I reduced my hours, it would be a breeze. But there's features to build and bugs to fix, and I'm going to retire in a year or three in my forties because that's how good tech pays even people like me who can figure stuff out but are by no means geniuses.
Frankly, because the meaning and purpose of "diversity" has been corrupted to the point that it actually causes issues like the one described. Similar to the corruption of the word "racism".
I think you're missing the point by assuming git branch renaming is the primary (only?) cost. Diversity (meaningful diversity of thought and opinion, that is) actually has business value. That's the reason it was pushed so hard from the top way back in the day, it was seen as a means to improve product offerings and problem solving processes.
These days "diversity" is nothing more than a euphemism for weird racial, sexual orientation, and gender fetishes. These "diverse" workplaces are, ironically, echo chambers for the same patterns of thought based around the idea that superficial characteristics like gender and skin color are meaningful predictive traits
I work like a dog and have been since engineering school. Actually was working like a dog in school too. I think I genuinely deserve the pay considering the day to day stress of the job and the complex workload.
Lots of people work like dogs and it seems to have no strong correlation with their pay. It's never been about "deserving", it's just supply and demand.
Developing code (duh),
leading a team,
reviewing PR's
monitoring the continuous release pipelines,
providing production support,
recruiting (takes a surprising chunk of my time),
sprint ceremonies,
Fixing bugs and talking to QA
And yet that's written by someone who is working for 10 times minimum wage from his home on his adjustable motorized standing desk. While ordering sushi (because I can afford to every day and the maid is off, because I can afford a maid) for lunch, I received a text message from my friend, a nurse, saying that she will do 50 hours this week and she can't come to the diner we plan.
I'm French, lived in Africa, worked in Asia and the US, and, no, this is not a twitter thing.
I already considered myself amazingly lucky just for having hot water, electricity, and always have heat/sleep/food.
Well, yes. But the solution to most of the stuff you point to is to have better management to rein in the divas, better hiring, better training for those managers and developers, more stable stacks so there's no excuse to rewrite into Elm, etc.
Which our industry also seems to have given up on, because it costs money. So we'll have divas, bad devs, wasted resources, Elm.
Of course, the alternative to spending money on fixing this is much more expensive: just hire more devs... but who said our industry is rational.
I mostly agree that we are divas and that 2023 is a wake up call.
I agree that tech stack churn is a big problem, although I feel that it's a sign of immaturity of the industry and domain themselves rather than an issue with individual developers. Much of our job is to find more efficient/robust ways to fix issues, progressively compressing the job of N people into something that can be done by o(N) people. That means that we are trained and selected to spot inefficiencies and take them personally. That also means taking new technologies for a drive.
I'm sure that there are better ways to do this than trying them in production, but as long as we operate in an industry that cannot differentiate between self-training-for-next-job, research, industrial prototype and industrial product, we won't be able to fix this problem.
I hope that, as the industry matures, this dust will settle a bit. Perhaps one aspect of this will involve letting developers take a few paid weeks once in a while to work on prototypes with whichever technology they want, as a form of self-training. Another will be making companies actually liable for the damage they cause when they try and pass early prototypes as products.
As for diversity, I tend to disagree. In my experience as both a dev, tech lead and sometimes CTO, diversity is not just a political choice, it is also practically useful, for the same reason nepotism and consanguinity are bad. Diversity is what saves you from blind spots (aka "acquired stupidity"). Diversity is also what lets you hire brilliant people who have been overlooked by other companies.
In the often adverserial world of exchanging labour and creativity for money, shares, prestige, and because we programmers care please don't blame us for not being able to assess how much the business should pay us.
Our job is attempt to know our expected potential worth and then negotiate for that recompense.
There are things we often don't know, i.e. megacorps may hire us to stop us working elsewhere.
If a business chooses to neglect to know this because it is either not worth it to them find out or they are incapable that is not on the worker.
This is esentially an attempted value crash or hyperdeflation of the monetary value of labour.
This meme of we can do more with hugely vastly less talent is a spreadsheet fancy of MBAs far from the coal face of code or customers.
The real cost is all the top talent people bail and only those who can't or won't leave remain.
But management think they can properly assess the value of people finessing a process they can't do and little understand and probably are insulated from and only see through metrics to which Goodhart's law means the stats are juked.
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.
Overpaid relative to what? Certainly not the value created.
There's this meme that software engineers are just capricious and don't "deserve" the money (often it's a weird form of jealousy from other fields who simply can't match an engineer's output) but it completely ignores the enormous gains in productivity enabled by the field. Is there any other field where such an impact can be had by a small team in the Valley?
> If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at.
You seem to have a very particular view of the profession.
> But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business.
Is it luck? People saw the writing on the wall decades ago.
While your post was certainly hyperbolic I was uncomfortably surprised by how many people disagreed with you.
For me the thing that disappoints me today in our industry is the number of mediocre professionals who give themselves too high of an elevated status just because they get paid more than the average person in their society.
At the end of the day we’ll have bigger problems if the trash doesn’t get picked up or if that power line doesn’t get fixed than we will if some developer doesn’t solve some abstract problem.
We don’t “deserve” anything and maybe we earned it through hard work but not enough of us appreciate our good fortune of being professional programmers.
I mean no disrespect but a lot of this sounds like stereotypes of what software engineers do. Yes having free coffee and maybe even free lunch are nice perks, but those are very small compared to salary + office space cost. And RTO has shown the latter to be negligible anyways.
200 years ago it would’ve been crazy talk to get Saturdays off. In some countries it still is. I don’t think not having to work 996 is a sign of waste or laziness, it’s a sign of progress.
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.
I once had a job where we created and supported a bunch of Golang microservices in the backend. Like you alluded to, I couldn't help but feel that I was a glorified, overpaid plumber.
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions
I have to disagree with this for a number of reasons. By and large in tech people work overtime meaning per hour pay is lower than what you think. To be decent at your job you need to constanty learn, also not factored into wages.
The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health.
Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family.
Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers.
All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.
I'm going to be honest with you, working in tech myself, these points feel incredibly out of touch.
> The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health.
In many professions you're expressly forbidden from sitting, even when carrying out tiring physical work. Most tech employers are willing to purchase an adjustable standing desk should you request it.
Outside of tech, people are frequently prevented from hydrating, nourishing, or relieving themselves unless given permission to do so by their employer.
> Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family.
This is in no way exclusive to tech workers. If someone earning a tech salary cannot afford to live reasonably close to their place of employment, how long do you think the commute is of the person serving them coffee or cleaning their office? We also benefit from having the option to work remotely.
> Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers.
Again, not unique to tech workers and certainly less impactful. Tech managers have relatively little power in comparison to other sectors. In the service industry your manager can effectively fire you with no oversight by simply not scheduling you. A server will be expected to manage 4 or more tables at a time, remembering who ordered what, even when interrupted by requests from other customers.
> All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.
Most people working in tech enjoy those things as well. If you can't, you might consider re-evaluating your situation.
So.. exactly like most every other job in other sectors? With the added benifits of zero physical dangers, no exposure to the elements, no personal costs for tools, and comfy office chairs? There are innumerable trades people who envy such perks.
Long commutes, time away from family, not having family, skipping vacations, and working in crowded spaces are all par for the course in the modern economy. Id say more but it is 5am and im already late.
Exhibit A of the kind of thinking the OP is talking about. Try exchanging jobs for a week with 5 other randomly selected people in the U.S. much less third world countries and see who doesn't fight tooth and nail not to go back.
Please rattle down this list to a hotel employee. Gardener. Flight attendant. Bike mechanic. Store clerk. Teacher. Builder. Some poor fuck slaving away in a dead-end back office job.
I guarantee you that in the absence of witnesses half the people will give you a good walloping.
Lol. When I was a student, I worked all sorts of shitty jobs. Here's how it looks when I compare overtime hours I worked in different places.
1. Factory work: no overtime ever. It's against the safety regulation. When the bell rings, you must go home or punitive measures will be taken against you.
3. Working as a waiter / room service: you fight for overtime because you get paid extra. Especially if you do overtime on holidays. It's hard, but is totally worth it.
2. Other shift-based work, s.a. night guards, cleaning, cab dispatcher. It usually happens if the next shift is tardy / stuck in traffic etc. It's annoying, but doesn't happen a lot.
3. Bakery. Holly hell! You have to show up at work at like five in the morning and you get two breaks during the day when you can sit down. Your day ends up around five in the afternoon, unless it's a holiday when everyone wants extra donuts / cakes / pastry, then you go home at eight in the afternoon. No pay can possibly justify this, but you work for pennies.
4. Newspaper. Every now and then you need to sit in the office an wait for the important game to finish so that you can publish the score the day after. Meh. It's fine. You spend time sipping tea and chatting to the other person staying with you.
5. As a programmer: you switch your status in Slack to WFH. Also, the amount of overtime work I ever put in as a programmer was negligible. I know people in game development work their butt off and do a lot of overtime. But that's unique to that field. The rest of the programming world just doesn't see overtime at all. Well, maybe NOC, but they aren't really programmers.
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6. I'm not a doctor, but my wife is. Doctors work the most overtime of all professions I know. They don't even really have that as a concept as, for example, if you are a surgeon, you just keep going until the surgery is done. If it takes days, then it takes days.
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.
This is a great answer. And there's a niggling worry in my mind as to whether the sudden capability explosion of LLMs might eliminate the bottom 50% of us completely.
Yes but that may take 5 years as everyone learns the OpenAPI API (to call it) and integrate the response in a text box and release the AI autocomplete features around the product suite.
Boomers existed in a society were everything were not sold yet. Were every pieces of land was not occupied and optimized yet.
Now the theater is full.
It's not that boomers earned much and today a lot of people earn too little.
Is that then things were less rare than today compared to the demand.
Also, I earn way more than my father and grand-father, and my life style just cannot be compared, nor the energy I consume or waste I produce.
So as an IT guy, no, this is not enough to explain it. And boomers were certainly not divas. Their working conditions were definitly not as good as in IT today.
Are we overpaid? The average software company is pulling in half a million per employee. That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people. Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses on their own without any of those people.
Software and the engineers that make it proves itself to be very valuable, engineers should be compensated accordingly.
Individual engineers who start multi million dollar businesses also prove over and over again that they need those “worthless” other business people by immediately hiring them once they get to a certain size.
Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management.
... but aren't job postings a poor measure of actual hiring? Once you reach the point of not being able to hire the people you want in a timely manner, you can create _lots_ of postings, on different channels, at different levels of seniority, with different kinds of focus, etc, as a desperate and ineffective measure of getting some qualified applicants in your pipe.
I noticed there were a lot of job listings for crypto which just stayed up for ages. I suspect they had trouble hiring as they need someone smart enough to work on this stuff, while also lacking the ethics to avoid scamming people, and often being dumb enough to be scammed themselves in to having part of their payment be rug pull tokens with conditions blocking selling for x months/years (after the pull)
These no hope listings probably inflated numbers a fair bit.
Crypto companies have a more sinister reason for keeping job postings up.
It's all about marketing for crypto companies that have tokens on exchanges. Their goal is to raise the token price so they can dump on retail. Having many active job postings show that they're active in development and they have plenty of money to keep the project going. If they don't have any job postings, it can be interpreted that they've already rug pulled.
It's all part of how they fool the gullible.
There are literally analytics companies that use job postings as a data point for crypto companies to see if they're active or rug pulled.
Keeping job postings up is free.
Source: Worked in and consulted for a few crypto companies years ago and analyzed many crypto scams.
I subscribe to a couple RSS feeds for some remote job sites.
A very large % of jobs are for crypto (ok "fintech" but look closely it's crypto) in March 2023. I wonder how these companies are still going, or maybe the listings just haven't been taken down yet.
But that would always be the case and wouldn’t explain the pandemic bounce. You need there to be a sudden relative increase in this type of behavior at the beginning of the pandemic.
If you're looking for jobs on Indeed I'm confused as to what you're doing. I found nothing useful there when looking in February, meanwhile LinkedIn was incredibly useful.
Did about 15 interviews and accepted an offer. No issues.
Indeed never had a single attractive company to apply to in that time: It was all consulting.
It may be a location thing, but in the upper midwest I see just absolute garbage on LinkedIn and just mostly garbage on Indeed. Both are full of consultancy garbage, but LinkedIn refuses to show me local jobs. I suspect they don't want to return a mostly empty search page, so they fill the results with Accenture consulting listing that are supposedly for my smallish metro. Indeed at least shows me local listing.
Although my situation might be a hit niche for this board, since I'm in a small area and I'm not interested in remote work for mental health reasons. But odd that a geography change causes such a complete reversal of which site is better. LinkedIn is still worth it for the professional network features, but honestly I kinda would prefer the Craigslist interface since that is actually searchable.
My last search, Indeed was great. They did free, decent resume consultation with me, and assigned me some rando to point out some good listings to apply for here and there (that surprisingly were generally well curated). Got several interviews and a job in short order.
(no affiliation, they just were surprisingly helpful... I still don't know why, my situation at the time did not make me an amazing candidate or anything)
I’ve noticed that many applicants for positions at my company from Indeed.com are entirely unqualified. Often truck drivers, etc. for a software engineering role and the resume will have no engineering related experience.
I’ve been told that many of these applicants are people applying to jobs they have no hopes of getting interviewed for. In many states you must prove you are actively looking for a job to collect unemployment benefits.
They’re a terrible measure. From a comment I made about this assumption elsewhere on HN a few weeks ago:
I am hiring at an early stage startup myself. There is absolutely no way we’d extend offers for all of the roles we have open if a candidate arrived for all of them next week. Growing that much so quickly would be a disastrous onboarding experience for most of the new hires and potentially risk our ability to build a consistent culture with the team. So we’ll hire whichever candidate(s) successfully complete the process first and then pause the other roles until we’re ready to onboard more people.
Then there’s also the reality at this stage you need people who can wear multiple hats. And there’s a bunch of roles where your ideal candidate doesn’t have a neat pre-established label. So sometimes we’ll post the exact same role with different titles to try and make sure it gets the attention of someone who most strongly aligns with one of those job titles.
At a previous place we worked remotely, and so the same job would be posted as both remote and then also as a dozen different specific city locations too. But if we were hiring multiple of any roles you wouldn’t multiply that, you’d just post the one listing(s) and keep it open until all the positions were filled.
A jobs page is a marketing artefact for potential hires, it’s not a financial reporting/forecasting tool.
TLDR: don’t make any assumptions from a job board about how many roles a company is realistically hiring for.
This would also explain part of the uptick in postings post-pandemic, as companies become more open to hiring remotely are more likely to post dozens of identical job postings in a variety of cities.
The reality for most of us I suspect was sitting at home on our couch fixing an obscure bug in a CI pipeline while half-listening along to an all-hands meeting.
They don't necessarily match, but the aggregate directional numbers are meaningful. Indeed postings aren't free. The mismatch between tech and overall also matches the broader narrative about a tech recession, but the rest of the economy is doing sorta ok, at least until January 2023.
So you're right, but it matches enough things that I wouldn't dismiss it.
Actually I used to work producing data from job posting stats. I think there’s a strong correlation between job demand and job posts (job posts cost money, after all!) but as you point out, it may not be linear, as the more desperate people are to hire, the more they’ll post.
People were appalled by the Twitter firings, but seriously, how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform?
I don't know the number, but the number before the firings was too high. From what I've gathered by watching from the sidelines they are probably now gone too far south from the correct number.
However the lesson to learn is not to not fire people. Yes. Of course it sucks when you lose your job, especially if it was for no fault of your own - just because some middle manager jack-off got too budget one year and decided to hire everyone with body temperature above room temperature. But we need to start culling the herd.
We have too many noobs who are just wreaking havoc across our code bases, making products and user experience worse. Hardware gets faster and faster every single year, but end users don't see any benefits. We see some benefit since we are on the top of the food chain enjoying our $5K max specced Macs, but even then we should see much faster and way more reliable software than we see today. It is so fucking sad when I try to load a website and it takes 30-60 seconds for all the javascript bloat just to get to me and I'm even running all kind of blockers so I won't be getting nearly as much bloat as a normal end user.
Tech used to be cool. Now it is just money all the way down. Just think how fucking cool the current AI wave would be without all the neutering that is going on since none of the big companies dare to take a risk and actually let people have even a bit of fun.
Are you seriously trying to put the blame for software bloat and bad UX on "noobs" implementing things poorly?
Popular web pages being choked with ads and modal banners is the result of business decisions to put those there. Jira being notoriously laggy and confusing is the result of prioritizing feature breadth over UX. Apps being built in heavy frameworks is the result of founders and CTOs deciding that they can ship faster and be more likely to make it to the next funding round if they color within the lines than if they focus on speed. Major company products often being poorly designed is the result of organizational fragmentation and lack of a global perspective.
Does everybody always do the best job they could within the constraints they have? Obviously not. Are the problems with technology in general primarily the result of _bad engineers making implementation mistakes_? Absolutely not!
In the last 20 years, if there is one thing that really changed in this profession was the amount of leeway developers have to criticize product and UX decisions. We're approaching "none".
The amount of political capital you have to spend just to avoid bloat is not available to most senior developers, let alone to "noobs".
It seems like you're making a point of outrage of something that's evident. If you hire way more than the market was used to, you'll hire less qualified people, and unless tooling is better to replace the reduced skills and experience, lower quality software will be produced. I agree OP was doing a lot of drama about "noobs ruining everything" which is also a stretch, but this negative effect should be self evident.
>Are you seriously trying to put the blame for software bloat and bad UX on "noobs" implementing things poorly?
>Popular web pages being choked with ads and modal banners is the result of business decisions to put those there
Who do you think has implemented all that shitty ad and banner code? It for sure wasn't a professional. If ads had initially been implemented by competent programmers they wouldn't have contained nearly as many avenues for abuse and actual malware spreading mechanisms.
More so professional programmers can pick their work. Noobs have to settle for writing shitty ad code.
>bad engineers making implementation mistakes
Most of these noobs aren't even "engineers" they are bunch of near tech illiterate "normies" who have just graduated from two week code camp. These are the people who unironically say "my job is just copy-pasting from StackOverflow". I am sorry to say this, but you (whoever is reading this and hard disagreeing) might be the problem.
> but seriously, how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform?
How many people does it take to run an international advertisement platform with a microblogging service?
I mean it is all a matter of framing here. I hardly believe most of twitter staff has been developers and systems people, but many people who talk with potential customers, deal with specific problems that arise from being present in 200+ countries etc. If you're doing that seriously that takes a certain amount of people.
Also: of course a company can downsize. But it matters how it is done. Defending the disregard for the human lives the way this was done had wins you nothing except the chance to be affected by similar methods yourself in the future.
That aside: Tech used to be cool in a time where tech people didn't have to care for all of that. When it was just us building our lego towers. But now lego towers run the world and building them the same with disregard for the outside world would be truly deranged.
Engineers were hired for growth. Just maintaining a platform will result in the slow decline you are seeing at IBM. You need a culture of innovation to tap into new opportunities and for that you need to have engineers that are not working on just maintaining the core platforms.
I agree that the balance is tech hires was skewed in recent years. That was mostly because tech companies naively assumed the COVID hyper growth was sustainable.
> how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform
Not everything scales. Compliance doesn’t, for example. You need people to handle compliance across regions. That means lawyers, product managers, and ultimately engineers.
There was a tech bubble, period. Still is. Lots of tech with inflated value, driving massive hiring that would never result in enough value to justify the jobs.
I know multiple companies hiring for teams with dead or dying projects. They hire anyway because if they don't they'd have to explain to the higher ups how the projects those higher ups green lit are useless. They need more people to make it seem like the stupid shit they're doing will generate revenue, when they know it never will. Keep the gravy train going as long as possible.
Most of it was/is around other bubbles, like the crypto bubble, AI bubble, B2B bubble. Crazy ad spends have been making it worse. The pandemic inflated some sectors and deflated others, but mostly tech was fine while other industries floundered.
I'm not convinced that we are in an AI bubble. In June 2007, Apple released the iPhone. Its stock price was $4.45 adjusted at that time. A year later, it was $6.50. 15 years later, it's now $153.
The iPhone is a real product, though. AI is more like an automated fortune teller. Just because your fortune sounds really convincing doesn't mean you should use it to buy lottery tickets.
Of course it was a bubble 2021 was nuts. People with just a few years experience were getting senior jobs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, then leaving soon after to a new job earning even more. All the while WFH doing so sweet FA. I've never seen anything like that job market.
I’m baffled how so many smart people bought into the “new normal” narrative and believed that our pandemic era weirdness would last forever.
It was across the board. People in my hometown set up restaurants, cafes, coworking spaces - businesses that don’t see an ROI for a few years at least - all because they thought the young people who had returned home during the pandemic would stay there forever.
Of course, now almost everyone has gone back and these businesses are dead or struggling.
For the love of god you can get for hundreds of thousands of dollars actual senior engineers from Europe. It's baffling that US companies are not doing it.
Every mass layoff article posted on HN (Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc) had people posting comments showing the staff counts sometimes doubled in size in a few years prior then reduced by 1/5th (or less) of the pre-growth number via a layoff. A bubble would typically cannibalized all the growth, not a small subset.
I can see how an overeager company who bought into their short term growth numbers as long term realities might overhire during unexpected growth when you don't really know what the upper limit is.
A short term (relative) explosion in demand growth can put businesses in a difficult spot where they can't handle the growth presently and they don't know if the 10% increase will turn into 20%. Hiring is a longer term investment you can't just turn on/off since on-boarding and training is a big investment, and humans are involved, so there's a fundamental timeline disconnect.
There's also the flood of capital from the public markets. Even before COVID tech stocks increased quite a bit.
This is pretty different than a "bubble" which is a completely fake boom that explodes 100% then falls back to zero when people realize it's bullshit. This is more like a boom that goes from +20% to +10%. Which yes still ultimately left a sizeable group in the crosshairs.
Finally someone who isn’t over eager to catastrophically moralize the situation instead of being level headed.
I was a 9 year fang veteran whose pay was grown 70% without my input over Covid. Everyone hired except me who felt this would cool. I tried to stay level headed and build a money making division. I succeeded. And was laid off for my efforts.
So I hope the people who like telling people like me we were just dumb idiots overhyping ourselves never get a taste of how things really work.
Still counts as a bubble. The bulk of the tech hiring done during that period wasn't just to meet the increased pandemic demand but rather based on lofty corporate projections saying that the demand was here to stay. But then a couple years later the exponential growth didn't continue, didn't slow down, didn't even stabilize – it completely reversed back to pre-pandemic levels. And then all those companies found themselves with significantly higher payroll costs than they could afford.
If there weren't protests, then we would still be locked down. Government loves lockdown. It is wrong to refer to it as pre-pandemic as opposed to pre-lockdown. But you probably are still wearing a mask in your car when driving by yourself.
One feeling I'm stuck with after reading the comments here, is that every commenter is "above average". It's "the others" that are bad developers that's just doing plumbing, or changing the frameworks every month, or just cashing a paycheck. What I'm doing is of course good and valuable work...
To be fair, I suspect there is a correlation between being interested in things like HackerNews and being an above-average developer. I've met some pretty poor developers who couldn't really give a stuff about innovations, best practice, etc, they just churned out mediocre code they'd learned at university, or copypasted, then clocked off at 5pm.
I mean, if you just use the metric of "care enough about my industry to follow news and discussion threads about it", HN is already going to filter bad out somewhat, I'd imagine.
I don't assume it's the top half only, but it should weed out the worst kind, right?
I wonder if we’ll go through an irrational counter bubble. Where the prevailing wisdom will say “don’t hire too many devs, they create trouble with their activism” and “look at what <startup> did with 10 people” and “with copilot/ChatGPT we don’t need hardly any devs”
There is a lot of talk about Google as the role model of what not to do. Their employee base became a center of activism that bullied the management around. Not much came of it at the time because the company continued to generate tons of cash. But now everyone is seeing how mismanaged Google has been and likely distracted.
It’s not the devs fault but rather bringing in too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
> too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
I heard a kid ask what politics was all about. It's an interesting question for anyone to stop and think about.
Everyone will come up with their own conclusions, but I personally would ask what in a workplace is _not_ political ?
From hiring practices, environmental impact, customer/community management (minorities, disabled people, freedom of speech etc.), social mission, where the funds come from, where the lobbying money goes...your argument could be that employee should ignore everything a company does except what they are explicitly ordered to care about, but that doesn't look like what we socially expect from employees and people will be personally affected by how their company behaves as a whole.
I'm not arguing for extreme activism everywhere you work, but saying the workplace is free of politics goes way too far on the other extreme.
Ex-Googler here. I'm kind of surprised Google leadership lets themselves get bullied so hard. E.g. when Diane Greene lied several times about the nature of Google Cloud's involvement with the Air Force, a ton of employees complained, but it's not like they quit the next day. The retention numbers were always very smooth curves seemingly unaffected by the drama of the day. If you went around and talked about the latest thing, 80% of employees had no idea what you were talking about.
It's kind of cynical, but if Google management doesn't want activism, they should ignore their employees, wait for the activists to burn themselves out and quit, and then be happy with all the paycheck collecting cogs that remain.
A lot of people were talking 5-10 years ago about what would happen to Google when the original devs cashed out and mediocre company suits took over. We are living through that reality now. For the first time in 25 years Google actually looks vulnerable- the opportunity to win in internet search is up for grabs now in a way that it hasn't been since the '90s.
And when the new search giant steps onto the scene, you can bet that they will be paying top dollar for their devs.
Google's wounds were self-inflicted and totally public: introduce a product, let in linger for 2 years, kill it, over and over again, dozens of cycles of this.
No political explanation needed, just very obvious senior level mismanagement.
Readit News
We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.
If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at.
But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business.
Well, here is the wake up call.
No, we are not paid to rate the best cappuccino of the valley, converting the most stable software of your org to Elm nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set.
We are paid to solve problems.
If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem.
Aren't you seeing it backwards? Other professions should have the same "luxuries", in a humane working world. Instead people are treated like cattle.
IT being an "amazing productivity" boost, means those "divas" you describe just get small part of the value they create, especially since a heck of a lot of the rest ends as unprecedented profit levels...
Under a capitalistic labour market theory, employees are not and can't be "overpaid" (and surely not for decades on end). They are paid exactly what they are worth, as price is based on supply and demand equilibrium.
Under a marxist labour market theory employees still can't be overpaid if the company makes a profit on top of what it would re-invest in itself (infrastructure, etc.).
So, under neither theory workers can be overpaid under any normal circumstances.
At worst, under capitalism there can be a higher market rate that gets adjusted to a lower one, but at each point in time none of those was "overpaid", it was the best the market knew to set. The higher rate was appropriate supply-and-demand-wise for when it was applied (and it might raise again as IT companies compete for developers, and so on).
Let's not forget the "US/Europe needs X millions more developers" reports churned out every few months...
1. very copyright friendly regulations, EULAs
2. poor data privacy, transportability/migration regulations
3. Section 230
4. lack of good antitrust laws - especially in market places and advertising markets.
5. and lets not forget the complete anti-union sentiment and lack of "professionals" to unionize
I forgot about the complexity of stock options and transparency around compensation.
Imagine if startups had to disclose as much as a franchise or mlms regrading how the compensation works.
public funded research that's given away to "tech" companies
Tax incentives with no strings attached.
universities that provide the labor force for the companies to cherry pick the best from figure out whether someone should swipe left or scroll up.
This was almost cathartic.
I don't agree those other engineers are treated as cattle, merely as normal employees. IT, mostly in SV and other places cargo-culting ie Google is often really treated like divas. Bear in mind that this was never true in corporations where IT was treated as a cost center, ie banking. But from various HN posts it seems that typical young SV dev has no experience with that and many feel they are changing the world for the better, when reality its at best a zero sum game, and often not even that (ie optimizing ad revenue stream for your corporation is definitely loss for mankind as a whole, or anything that makes societal parasites who breed depression like facebook/insta/tiktok more effective at their goals).
But folks for some obscure reason need to feel that their work has a good purpose and high moral ground, hence sometimes quite advanced mental gymnastics seen also here.
Most developers don't live in the Valley, most of us didn't earn astronomical salaries during the past decade, most of us didn't have to run code reviews past a "diversity committee". We mostly just got on with our job like everyone else.
Of course we debated languages and frameworks but so what? Every profession has its arguments over tools and processes. Everyone complains about their manager and endless meetings.
I have met plenty of competent devs, working seriously and providing values to humanity, well enough to justify the not so huge salary they get.
But stating the obvious is not going to make people think.
However, the message that part of the community is growing into entitled spoiled kids, shocked that their shinning arses can even be touched by a lay off, is something I did want to convey :)
I'll add that if you can't easily afford a family house next to your office, you're not overpaid.
Some time ago I used to work in a large organization on the very bottom of the food chain. I was making, say, $100k a year, which was quite decent money. Sitting there, doing same thing I could've grown to a "senior bottom of the food chain" of $150k. That was the limit. A soft one, but still the limit.
The organization was quite picky in selecting their workforce. Think FAANG. So in every team you have a bunch of quite smart opinionated folks, who somehow have to be steered in the same direction. With that I see it kinda reasonable for the team lead to make at least $200k a year. Give or take.
Now we move one step up. Someone has to pull all these "creme de la creme" cats together and herd them, so that at the very minimum teams don't work against each other. Ideally work together for some common goal. And I can understand team leads who is not willing to go to this snake pit for 30% salary increase. Why would they? 50% - may be. 70% - that sounds interesting and worth consideration.
Bottom line: according to my humble experience in "the organization", the salary roughly doubles each time you get up the ladder. And being on different steps of this ladder I can understand why.
Resume progressive redistribution by taxing wealth more than income, switch back to pensions (and fully fund them), and fund the social safety net.
You are correct, though I will not say that underpayment per se is the problem. It's more along lines of housing is very expensive due to a whole combination of govt interference like taxes, inflation, regulations etc.
The rest of us plebes, who make more or less the same kind of white-collar salaries as non-programmers, are certainly underpaid.
For sure, there's a lot of bullshit, drama and fud regarding our place in the world.
But when companies are making bank on your labour, despite the fact you have above average rewards, you aren't overpaid.
The question becomes who's contributing and who's changing the window dressing, and are the latter a neccessary expense to find the former.
At least half of them have failed.
I've seen NGO moving to docker based micro services for their data collection tools and burn the donators money for 2 years before dying under the weight of the complexity they just created.
I've seen start up working on ideas for months that made no sense, only to run out of cash but the belly full of useless lines of code.
I've seen corporations hiring 7 people to do the work one single senior dev could do, then from meetings to audits, proceed to ensure the budget would explode and the product never released.
I've seen fancy operations, with free food and fashionable people full of colors and style. And they spent 2 third of their day virtue signaling, fighting over how to do thing, what should have been done instead, and what we should do in the future. But certainly doing nothing right now.
I don't believe the free market is pricing the value of most things fairly. Just like I don't believe diamonds have much value, and never did, even before when people were still buying them for their wedding ring.
Yes, most of us are overpaid, given the problems we actually solve.
But we are in the IT golden age, if you throw computers at things, you get a 100x return. And money was cheap for so long.
So it was ok, to hire 100 people, and have 12 of them being actually useful, because you didn't have time figure out which ones.
However today the economy is contracting. The low hanging fruits have been harvested. And it's no longer economically viable for the companies (that were never our friends in the first place) that they care about how special devs are.
And so we get fired.
Pay is a function of value. If you produce a lot of value, you get paid a lot. This is true for all jobs unless the business has figured out a way to get away with keeping most of the value for itself.
When a dev is producing code that generates $x millions either they're going to end up getting paid a lot or the business is going to end up making more profit. To suggest that a dev is 'overpaid' is just saying that you think tech companies should keep more profit from the value they create instead.
It's important to remember that despite all the layoffs, talk of recessions, and 'bad news' around at the moment, company profits and revenues are still way up. Meta's revenue went up $30bn in 2021 ($85.96bn in 2020, $117.92bn in 2021). It fell to $116.6bn in 2022. Maybe the revenue will plunge back down to 2020 levels again this year which would justify slashing the headcount, but I doubt it. I think it's a lot more likely that Meta will announce record profits at the end of the year.
I couldn't afford my lifestyle if pay was a function of value; it'd cost too much. Pay is a function of how hard management believes it is to replace someone.
Now, just to give you a counter-example, where it would be very hard to argue that the job compensation was based on value: there was an article about a year ago about some government bureaucrat in either Spain or France who's been dead for seven years, and the government forgot to notice, so it was sending him a paycheck month after month. -- How's that for generating value?
Now, of course, there's also a debate on universality of value. Some believe that the value is universal, but the reality is s.t. it's hard to justify this belief. For example, the value provided to a dictator of a fascist state by his bodyguards doesn't seem to align well with the value those bodyguards provide for the rest of the state (and especially for the neighbors of that state). So, how can you argue that the bodyguard's pay is justified? Why do you have to take the perspective of the dictator rather than the people being under their thumb?
And of course, there is a debate about how to measure the magnitude of value: is it absolute or, again, proportional to the subject of it. Those who believe in universal value also tend to believe in absolute value, but they don't have to. So, again, a thousand dollars might be a difference between being able to make good on rent and becoming homeless for a poor person while for a rich person a thousand dollars might be so insignificant that they don't even notice spending it. And then again, you need to work hard to convince others that the value is absolute (i.e. that dollars don't capture the value and so on).
----
Independently of the above:
> When a dev is producing code
I worked for my previous employer for three years. It was before they had any paying customers (a start-up). After I quit, for various reasons, they decided to get rid of my code, and replaced it with something else. In other words, while I worked for my former employer, none of my code generated any value, but I still got paid. They still aren't even breaking even (they have something like five customers), and none of my code is in use anymore. How do you explain my salary then?
And I'm definitely not the only example. Large companies are known for throwing money on something that ends up being a flop, speculatively. So, it looks like there's more to it than simply writing code for the product that generates profits. Don't you think?
That depends on competition, right? If competition offers more, you either match up or give up.
When workers have some actual leverage, suddenly the free market is a problem and not a magical fairy anymore.
If companies on the market can sell overpriced garbage to enrich their shareholders, surely you can't seriously complain about laborers being overpaid, even if they are. Its all the same game.
The whole system is totally unfair and unreasonable, developers being overpaid is not the problem and such a minor thing to focus on.
If you accept the premise that we should mock incompetent divas shareholder and CEO, then you should accept the premise we should mock our own community.
Plus a bit of self-deprecating humor is good for the soul.
I find that what dev experience should be normal working conditions for everybody, not just devs.
> We are paid to solve problems.
> If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem.
Totally agree. But this shouldn't prevent us from solving problem working in good conditions.
Normal working conditions these days used to be close to the best imaginable working conditions in the 19th century.
Even for someone bagging groceries at Walmart.
Compared to what?
Directors of HR, product managers, lawyers, managers of all kinds, etc. all make similar money.
Software engineers are paid what they're paid because their work allows companies to scale their products to serve more users.
This "paid too much" is nonsense, we can barely (if at all) afford houses where near where we work.
Nurses? Our job is a lot easier and less important and working conditions are much better. And yet, a fresh grad straight out of school gets a few times more money than an experienced nurse. And, what is worse, a lot of devs honestly believe that they deserve it.
Two things can be true.
Maybe in the US, but in the UK a highly paid software developer can barely buy a 2 bedroom flat in a suburb where 30 years ago the salary of a junior factory worker was enough to buy a house.
> If you had any professional doing the same
Other professionals are less productive by orders of magnitude, just check what’s going on in the accountancy department of a random company. You can double their productivity introducing Excel’s pivot tables a V-lookup. Or try to get a plumber to fix your toilet within time and budget.
Oh give me a break
Doctors don't make millions, is it because saving human life is not valuable?
Correlation is not causation.
Not to mention Lebron James actually ships. Indeed, he plays the matches he is paid for. And doesn't cry on TV the coffee is not good enough in the stadium.
Mostly they don't. Not even close.
Tell that to this guy: https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
If your job is to work on code that looks like that, that really sucks and I'm sorry for you, unless you love doing it, in which case cool. But for most of us it's really not and while I often feel close to being broken, I'm 100% convinced that plenty of jobs are much more taxing, and if I reduced my hours, it would be a breeze. But there's features to build and bugs to fix, and I'm going to retire in a year or three in my forties because that's how good tech pays even people like me who can figure stuff out but are by no means geniuses.
And a good explanation of why so many devs reach burn out.
But two things can be true.
Why does every tech bro rant these days include a section blaming "diversity" for a bunch of problems?
Did renaming master to main really fuck up the system that badly?
I think you're missing the point by assuming git branch renaming is the primary (only?) cost. Diversity (meaningful diversity of thought and opinion, that is) actually has business value. That's the reason it was pushed so hard from the top way back in the day, it was seen as a means to improve product offerings and problem solving processes.
These days "diversity" is nothing more than a euphemism for weird racial, sexual orientation, and gender fetishes. These "diverse" workplaces are, ironically, echo chambers for the same patterns of thought based around the idea that superficial characteristics like gender and skin color are meaningful predictive traits
Developing code (duh), leading a team, reviewing PR's monitoring the continuous release pipelines, providing production support, recruiting (takes a surprising chunk of my time), sprint ceremonies, Fixing bugs and talking to QA
i think this guy understands the industry very well. maybe you are the one with tik-tok opinions?
I'm French, lived in Africa, worked in Asia and the US, and, no, this is not a twitter thing.
I already considered myself amazingly lucky just for having hot water, electricity, and always have heat/sleep/food.
But this life a lot of us enjoy in 202*?
It's damn luxurious.
Which our industry also seems to have given up on, because it costs money. So we'll have divas, bad devs, wasted resources, Elm.
Of course, the alternative to spending money on fixing this is much more expensive: just hire more devs... but who said our industry is rational.
I agree that tech stack churn is a big problem, although I feel that it's a sign of immaturity of the industry and domain themselves rather than an issue with individual developers. Much of our job is to find more efficient/robust ways to fix issues, progressively compressing the job of N people into something that can be done by o(N) people. That means that we are trained and selected to spot inefficiencies and take them personally. That also means taking new technologies for a drive.
I'm sure that there are better ways to do this than trying them in production, but as long as we operate in an industry that cannot differentiate between self-training-for-next-job, research, industrial prototype and industrial product, we won't be able to fix this problem.
I hope that, as the industry matures, this dust will settle a bit. Perhaps one aspect of this will involve letting developers take a few paid weeks once in a while to work on prototypes with whichever technology they want, as a form of self-training. Another will be making companies actually liable for the damage they cause when they try and pass early prototypes as products.
As for diversity, I tend to disagree. In my experience as both a dev, tech lead and sometimes CTO, diversity is not just a political choice, it is also practically useful, for the same reason nepotism and consanguinity are bad. Diversity is what saves you from blind spots (aka "acquired stupidity"). Diversity is also what lets you hire brilliant people who have been overlooked by other companies.
Our job is attempt to know our expected potential worth and then negotiate for that recompense.
There are things we often don't know, i.e. megacorps may hire us to stop us working elsewhere.
If a business chooses to neglect to know this because it is either not worth it to them find out or they are incapable that is not on the worker.
This is esentially an attempted value crash or hyperdeflation of the monetary value of labour.
This meme of we can do more with hugely vastly less talent is a spreadsheet fancy of MBAs far from the coal face of code or customers.
The real cost is all the top talent people bail and only those who can't or won't leave remain.
But management think they can properly assess the value of people finessing a process they can't do and little understand and probably are insulated from and only see through metrics to which Goodhart's law means the stats are juked.
Overpaid relative to what? Certainly not the value created.
There's this meme that software engineers are just capricious and don't "deserve" the money (often it's a weird form of jealousy from other fields who simply can't match an engineer's output) but it completely ignores the enormous gains in productivity enabled by the field. Is there any other field where such an impact can be had by a small team in the Valley?
> If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at.
You seem to have a very particular view of the profession.
> But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business.
Is it luck? People saw the writing on the wall decades ago.
For me the thing that disappoints me today in our industry is the number of mediocre professionals who give themselves too high of an elevated status just because they get paid more than the average person in their society.
At the end of the day we’ll have bigger problems if the trash doesn’t get picked up or if that power line doesn’t get fixed than we will if some developer doesn’t solve some abstract problem.
We don’t “deserve” anything and maybe we earned it through hard work but not enough of us appreciate our good fortune of being professional programmers.
200 years ago it would’ve been crazy talk to get Saturdays off. In some countries it still is. I don’t think not having to work 996 is a sign of waste or laziness, it’s a sign of progress.
I once had a job where we created and supported a bunch of Golang microservices in the backend. Like you alluded to, I couldn't help but feel that I was a glorified, overpaid plumber.
I have to disagree with this for a number of reasons. By and large in tech people work overtime meaning per hour pay is lower than what you think. To be decent at your job you need to constanty learn, also not factored into wages.
The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health.
Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family.
Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers.
All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.
> The working conditions are horrible. You sit at a desk, usually in a crowded lowd office, which is highly detrimental to your health.
In many professions you're expressly forbidden from sitting, even when carrying out tiring physical work. Most tech employers are willing to purchase an adjustable standing desk should you request it.
Outside of tech, people are frequently prevented from hydrating, nourishing, or relieving themselves unless given permission to do so by their employer.
> Often you need to commute long hours meaning you are detached from social and family life. Many struggle with starting a family.
This is in no way exclusive to tech workers. If someone earning a tech salary cannot afford to live reasonably close to their place of employment, how long do you think the commute is of the person serving them coffee or cleaning their office? We also benefit from having the option to work remotely.
> Moreover, you have to constantly chase small tasks, constantly shifting focus and have to deal with obnoxious managers.
Again, not unique to tech workers and certainly less impactful. Tech managers have relatively little power in comparison to other sectors. In the service industry your manager can effectively fire you with no oversight by simply not scheduling you. A server will be expected to manage 4 or more tables at a time, remembering who ordered what, even when interrupted by requests from other customers.
> All things considered, tech is not a well paid job. Not by a long shot. While we "enjoy" sitting in offices and an apparent high income - at an enormous cost for us - the guy next door owning a corner shop enjoys a family life, likely owns a property and doesn't need to worry about keeping pace with daily changes.
Most people working in tech enjoy those things as well. If you can't, you might consider re-evaluating your situation.
Long commutes, time away from family, not having family, skipping vacations, and working in crowded spaces are all par for the course in the modern economy. Id say more but it is 5am and im already late.
I guarantee you that in the absence of witnesses half the people will give you a good walloping.
Lol. When I was a student, I worked all sorts of shitty jobs. Here's how it looks when I compare overtime hours I worked in different places.
1. Factory work: no overtime ever. It's against the safety regulation. When the bell rings, you must go home or punitive measures will be taken against you.
3. Working as a waiter / room service: you fight for overtime because you get paid extra. Especially if you do overtime on holidays. It's hard, but is totally worth it.
2. Other shift-based work, s.a. night guards, cleaning, cab dispatcher. It usually happens if the next shift is tardy / stuck in traffic etc. It's annoying, but doesn't happen a lot.
3. Bakery. Holly hell! You have to show up at work at like five in the morning and you get two breaks during the day when you can sit down. Your day ends up around five in the afternoon, unless it's a holiday when everyone wants extra donuts / cakes / pastry, then you go home at eight in the afternoon. No pay can possibly justify this, but you work for pennies.
4. Newspaper. Every now and then you need to sit in the office an wait for the important game to finish so that you can publish the score the day after. Meh. It's fine. You spend time sipping tea and chatting to the other person staying with you.
5. As a programmer: you switch your status in Slack to WFH. Also, the amount of overtime work I ever put in as a programmer was negligible. I know people in game development work their butt off and do a lot of overtime. But that's unique to that field. The rest of the programming world just doesn't see overtime at all. Well, maybe NOC, but they aren't really programmers.
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6. I'm not a doctor, but my wife is. Doctors work the most overtime of all professions I know. They don't even really have that as a concept as, for example, if you are a surgeon, you just keep going until the surgery is done. If it takes days, then it takes days.
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You forgot to write "in the US".
Maybe part of these repetitive problems repeating themselves stems from the sameness.
In return we were granted a little more freedom than the average worker.
Still happening. Everything must be REACT now. For reasons.
We don't make too much, everyone else makes too little.
Now the theater is full.
It's not that boomers earned much and today a lot of people earn too little.
Is that then things were less rare than today compared to the demand.
Also, I earn way more than my father and grand-father, and my life style just cannot be compared, nor the energy I consume or waste I produce.
So as an IT guy, no, this is not enough to explain it. And boomers were certainly not divas. Their working conditions were definitly not as good as in IT today.
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Software and the engineers that make it proves itself to be very valuable, engineers should be compensated accordingly.
Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management.
Software is a team sport.
Beware of survivor bias, for every successful business, there might be a 1000 failed ones.
Well, if those people are allmost worthless, then why not proof that, by making a buisness that thrives without them?
These no hope listings probably inflated numbers a fair bit.
It's all about marketing for crypto companies that have tokens on exchanges. Their goal is to raise the token price so they can dump on retail. Having many active job postings show that they're active in development and they have plenty of money to keep the project going. If they don't have any job postings, it can be interpreted that they've already rug pulled.
It's all part of how they fool the gullible.
There are literally analytics companies that use job postings as a data point for crypto companies to see if they're active or rug pulled.
Keeping job postings up is free.
Source: Worked in and consulted for a few crypto companies years ago and analyzed many crypto scams.
A very large % of jobs are for crypto (ok "fintech" but look closely it's crypto) in March 2023. I wonder how these companies are still going, or maybe the listings just haven't been taken down yet.
I’m fairly certain that there were quite a few job postings that were one of the following:
- one of several for the same position, framed in different ways (as parent reply suggested)
- fishing for a unicorn candidate who undervalued themselves
- absolute fantasy… no one who was qualified for the job would take it with that company for what they were offering
I think that some of this may have been used as an illusion to project growth where there was none.
This is what we call the 'I can't find any qualified domestic candidates, so I need to sponsor an immigrant' hiring strategy.
Can you show the analysis for this claim?
If you're looking for jobs on Indeed I'm confused as to what you're doing. I found nothing useful there when looking in February, meanwhile LinkedIn was incredibly useful.
Did about 15 interviews and accepted an offer. No issues.
Indeed never had a single attractive company to apply to in that time: It was all consulting.
Although my situation might be a hit niche for this board, since I'm in a small area and I'm not interested in remote work for mental health reasons. But odd that a geography change causes such a complete reversal of which site is better. LinkedIn is still worth it for the professional network features, but honestly I kinda would prefer the Craigslist interface since that is actually searchable.
(no affiliation, they just were surprisingly helpful... I still don't know why, my situation at the time did not make me an amazing candidate or anything)
I’ve been told that many of these applicants are people applying to jobs they have no hopes of getting interviewed for. In many states you must prove you are actively looking for a job to collect unemployment benefits.
I am hiring at an early stage startup myself. There is absolutely no way we’d extend offers for all of the roles we have open if a candidate arrived for all of them next week. Growing that much so quickly would be a disastrous onboarding experience for most of the new hires and potentially risk our ability to build a consistent culture with the team. So we’ll hire whichever candidate(s) successfully complete the process first and then pause the other roles until we’re ready to onboard more people. Then there’s also the reality at this stage you need people who can wear multiple hats. And there’s a bunch of roles where your ideal candidate doesn’t have a neat pre-established label. So sometimes we’ll post the exact same role with different titles to try and make sure it gets the attention of someone who most strongly aligns with one of those job titles.
At a previous place we worked remotely, and so the same job would be posted as both remote and then also as a dozen different specific city locations too. But if we were hiring multiple of any roles you wouldn’t multiply that, you’d just post the one listing(s) and keep it open until all the positions were filled.
A jobs page is a marketing artefact for potential hires, it’s not a financial reporting/forecasting tool.
TLDR: don’t make any assumptions from a job board about how many roles a company is realistically hiring for.
People filming themselves eating free snacks and doing yoga and whatever else other than working.
So you're right, but it matches enough things that I wouldn't dismiss it.
I don't know the number, but the number before the firings was too high. From what I've gathered by watching from the sidelines they are probably now gone too far south from the correct number.
However the lesson to learn is not to not fire people. Yes. Of course it sucks when you lose your job, especially if it was for no fault of your own - just because some middle manager jack-off got too budget one year and decided to hire everyone with body temperature above room temperature. But we need to start culling the herd.
We have too many noobs who are just wreaking havoc across our code bases, making products and user experience worse. Hardware gets faster and faster every single year, but end users don't see any benefits. We see some benefit since we are on the top of the food chain enjoying our $5K max specced Macs, but even then we should see much faster and way more reliable software than we see today. It is so fucking sad when I try to load a website and it takes 30-60 seconds for all the javascript bloat just to get to me and I'm even running all kind of blockers so I won't be getting nearly as much bloat as a normal end user.
Tech used to be cool. Now it is just money all the way down. Just think how fucking cool the current AI wave would be without all the neutering that is going on since none of the big companies dare to take a risk and actually let people have even a bit of fun.
Popular web pages being choked with ads and modal banners is the result of business decisions to put those there. Jira being notoriously laggy and confusing is the result of prioritizing feature breadth over UX. Apps being built in heavy frameworks is the result of founders and CTOs deciding that they can ship faster and be more likely to make it to the next funding round if they color within the lines than if they focus on speed. Major company products often being poorly designed is the result of organizational fragmentation and lack of a global perspective.
Does everybody always do the best job they could within the constraints they have? Obviously not. Are the problems with technology in general primarily the result of _bad engineers making implementation mistakes_? Absolutely not!
In the last 20 years, if there is one thing that really changed in this profession was the amount of leeway developers have to criticize product and UX decisions. We're approaching "none".
The amount of political capital you have to spend just to avoid bloat is not available to most senior developers, let alone to "noobs".
>Popular web pages being choked with ads and modal banners is the result of business decisions to put those there
Who do you think has implemented all that shitty ad and banner code? It for sure wasn't a professional. If ads had initially been implemented by competent programmers they wouldn't have contained nearly as many avenues for abuse and actual malware spreading mechanisms.
More so professional programmers can pick their work. Noobs have to settle for writing shitty ad code.
>bad engineers making implementation mistakes
Most of these noobs aren't even "engineers" they are bunch of near tech illiterate "normies" who have just graduated from two week code camp. These are the people who unironically say "my job is just copy-pasting from StackOverflow". I am sorry to say this, but you (whoever is reading this and hard disagreeing) might be the problem.
How many people does it take to run an international advertisement platform with a microblogging service?
I mean it is all a matter of framing here. I hardly believe most of twitter staff has been developers and systems people, but many people who talk with potential customers, deal with specific problems that arise from being present in 200+ countries etc. If you're doing that seriously that takes a certain amount of people.
Also: of course a company can downsize. But it matters how it is done. Defending the disregard for the human lives the way this was done had wins you nothing except the chance to be affected by similar methods yourself in the future.
That aside: Tech used to be cool in a time where tech people didn't have to care for all of that. When it was just us building our lego towers. But now lego towers run the world and building them the same with disregard for the outside world would be truly deranged.
Mostly due to the manner in which it was done, not so much the necessity or lack thereof (depending on your viewpoint).
There's classy ways to do layoffs, and then there's whatever the hell that was.
I agree that the balance is tech hires was skewed in recent years. That was mostly because tech companies naively assumed the COVID hyper growth was sustainable.
Not everything scales. Compliance doesn’t, for example. You need people to handle compliance across regions. That means lawyers, product managers, and ultimately engineers.
You underestimate the amount of people it takes. There are so many things to do, dev, SRE, ops, support etc.
It depends; do you plan to add new features, keep servers running, offer high level of security and a nice community while operating on a large scale?
I know multiple companies hiring for teams with dead or dying projects. They hire anyway because if they don't they'd have to explain to the higher ups how the projects those higher ups green lit are useless. They need more people to make it seem like the stupid shit they're doing will generate revenue, when they know it never will. Keep the gravy train going as long as possible.
Most of it was/is around other bubbles, like the crypto bubble, AI bubble, B2B bubble. Crazy ad spends have been making it worse. The pandemic inflated some sectors and deflated others, but mostly tech was fine while other industries floundered.
We might be at the "$6.50 point" for AI.
It was across the board. People in my hometown set up restaurants, cafes, coworking spaces - businesses that don’t see an ROI for a few years at least - all because they thought the young people who had returned home during the pandemic would stay there forever.
Of course, now almost everyone has gone back and these businesses are dead or struggling.
But to SF? Mountain View is now more expensive than SF for a one-bedroom apartment.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sweet%20FA
If you look at the rate online sales growth during the pandemic if anything it's a surprise that tech-hiring wasn't even more elevated.
I can see how an overeager company who bought into their short term growth numbers as long term realities might overhire during unexpected growth when you don't really know what the upper limit is.
A short term (relative) explosion in demand growth can put businesses in a difficult spot where they can't handle the growth presently and they don't know if the 10% increase will turn into 20%. Hiring is a longer term investment you can't just turn on/off since on-boarding and training is a big investment, and humans are involved, so there's a fundamental timeline disconnect.
There's also the flood of capital from the public markets. Even before COVID tech stocks increased quite a bit.
This is pretty different than a "bubble" which is a completely fake boom that explodes 100% then falls back to zero when people realize it's bullshit. This is more like a boom that goes from +20% to +10%. Which yes still ultimately left a sizeable group in the crosshairs.
I was a 9 year fang veteran whose pay was grown 70% without my input over Covid. Everyone hired except me who felt this would cool. I tried to stay level headed and build a money making division. I succeeded. And was laid off for my efforts.
So I hope the people who like telling people like me we were just dumb idiots overhyping ourselves never get a taste of how things really work.
>Higher payroll costs than they could afford.
I find it disingenuous for companies having record profits, stock buybacks etc to use such an excuse
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Welcome to HN!
I don't assume it's the top half only, but it should weed out the worst kind, right?
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It’s not the devs fault but rather bringing in too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
I heard a kid ask what politics was all about. It's an interesting question for anyone to stop and think about.
Everyone will come up with their own conclusions, but I personally would ask what in a workplace is _not_ political ?
From hiring practices, environmental impact, customer/community management (minorities, disabled people, freedom of speech etc.), social mission, where the funds come from, where the lobbying money goes...your argument could be that employee should ignore everything a company does except what they are explicitly ordered to care about, but that doesn't look like what we socially expect from employees and people will be personally affected by how their company behaves as a whole.
I'm not arguing for extreme activism everywhere you work, but saying the workplace is free of politics goes way too far on the other extreme.
It's kind of cynical, but if Google management doesn't want activism, they should ignore their employees, wait for the activists to burn themselves out and quit, and then be happy with all the paycheck collecting cogs that remain.
And when the new search giant steps onto the scene, you can bet that they will be paying top dollar for their devs.
No political explanation needed, just very obvious senior level mismanagement.