- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now::Nearly 300,000 tech employees have been laid off since last year, data shows.
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It’s a dark time too be right now.
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I think they’re saying this conversation is about tech workers, but your comment included everyone. Obviously everyone matters, but in this moment in time the tech world is on fire.
Edit: but I do agree with your sentiment. I’ve been desperately wanting to get out of my current situation, but for the last 4 years it’s been “OMG recession is coming recession is coming!” So I can’t leave…
Lmao yeah, pretty much exactly that. I forgot my satire sign.
Oh, really? That doesn’t even make sense because “all lives matter” isnt even about all lives mattering…
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That’s why I’ll never have kids.
This is definitely not the main reason I’ll never have kids but it is absolutely on the list. Lmao
Imagine purposely bringing another being into this shit hole we live in. I could never.
Executives: We’re doing more with less!
grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room
Executives: Better profits! Lower costs!
grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room
To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.
On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.
On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.
Exactly! That’s why TARDIS is full on fuel.
“It’s a good time to unionize tech workers right now…”
Best time to form a union was yesterday. Next best is today.
I remember seeing articles on habr about unionization and that it is better done now when it is eazy.
Is it easy? Tech salaries have crazy potential, I’m not sure I’d be willing to trade job security for the limitations on that potential that a collective agreement might impose. It’d still be a tough sell.
Is it easy?
Relative to possible future? Sure.
the limitations on that potential that a collective agreement might impose.
I’m trying to imagine it… Trying to imagine “and salary shall not be more than xxx$/hr” in collective agreement. Sorry, I can’t.
Salaries != Wages. Found the dev who needs a union lol
I wanted to say whatever “оклад” from russian labour laws translates to. Amount of money that will be paid no matter what.
When it was a dark time for the empire the shogun cut off the heads of 141 lords… Maybe we should start there.
Land lords
Dotcom bubble. 2008 crash. Covid. Now this.
We’ve all been through these. Buckle down. Ignore the outliers. It’s a chance to rethink and do what matters to you.
Also, ALWAYS have a Plan B, C, and D.
I left the US for less raw salary but better job security and living somewhere I like more (in most respects; nowhere is perfect). Still make way above average for Japan and have a great standard of living
I work at a large tech company, and the feeling here is unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. There are a few camps:
- Workers on visas that are utterly petrified of losing their jobs, and are struggling to plan for anything long-term, since companies that lay people off can’t file green cards for employees.
- Workers that are just numb to everything. They don’t give a fuck, they are jaded with the bullshit their employer pulls, and work is just work.
- People that would happily take a voluntary layoff to GTFO, spend some time with family, and potentially move to something better.
What seems to be the dominating feeling that everyone has, is that they no longer support their leaders. They feel there are too many middle-managers, they realise that their C-Suite staff are fucking useless, and the CEO’s are almost universally awful as leaders. Sundar has caused Google to nose-dive in popularity, Jassy is so ineffective that no one even knows he is CEO, Musk is a known sociopath going through a mental breakdown, Zuck bet everything on VR to mask huge privacy/product failings, and alongside all of this are dozens of CEO’s that forced employees back to the office or laid people off for bullshit reasons.
My hope from this dark time is that companies arise that focus on the employee first, learn from the mistakes made by big tech, and purposefully manoeuvre around FAANG until they are relegated to boomer tech. Until then, like most SWE’s, I’m just hoping things get better soon…
Are you referring specifically to the big, popular tech companies everyone knows about or to the whole industry? Because there are a lot of smaller companies who aren’t yet run by psychopaths, at least not any more than usual.
I trust my boss but his boss is the CEO and I think the CEO is a piece of garbage.
an overpaid piece of garbage
Given that no one noticed he went on vacation for three weeks I agree.
To be honest that sounds like a CEO that trusts the workers, if he’s letting you guys do the f you want. Unless i misunderstood and somehow he still manages to f stuff up for you.
Maybe I just don’t really like being told what to do so I am being unfair to the guy. You do have a point.
But i agree that it’s basically a useless role anyway, and it’s paid 10-50x the average salary
Keep in mind the core value of most of these companies is “we have a web page”. If only all these unhappy developers could somehow create their own webpage and we could all switch to using the web page of a better company…
(Preaching to the choir here, since we’re on Lemmy. I guess nobody is making money or employing people because of Lemmy though.)
I like your optimism. What would an employee first focused company look like?
I would say it would be similar to Google from the early-ish 2000’s. Lots of offices worldwide to facilitate in-office working and immigration issues, while also having freedom to work remotely if desired. Also, a structure that leads with empathy, and managers judged on not just output but employee happiness.
There was a lot of freedom in big tech over the last few years. I could transfer pretty much worldwide within a month, I could work on several different moonshot industries with no worry of losing my job (because I’d just transfer to another team), and the market was good enough that if push came to shove I could take some time off and find a new role with minimal issues. I think an employee focused company would keep that freedom, while also keeping employees happy and without fearing for their job.
Interesting trend in the comments - technology veterans who went through the dotCom crash have quietly moved to union jobs, and aren’t sweating this iteration.
Worth keeping in mind.
Unions aren’t exactly a saving grace
I would argue they are. My reasoning for this argument would be pointing at the history of the working class.
What is your reasoning for saying they are not?
Corporations wouldn’t fight unions so hard (historically trying to kill their members) if unions weren’t both effective and a threat to their power and wealth. They really, REALLY do not want us to unionize.
I read an article this week about how the Kinks were black listed from playing in the US in the mid to late 1960s because they pissed off someone involved with the stage/theater workers union. It was wild to me that a union could hold so much sway over commercial operations in the US.
Low pay for one. They start you low even if you have experience. You lose the ability to negotiate your pay or promotions.
This kind of bullshit generalization leads me to believe this conversation wouldn’t go very far. I’ll stop here. Cheers.
lol. Sounds like a cop out because you have no counter argument. Not a surprise
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I’ve never met a dev in a union. What companies have a union?
Google has one, but it’s still very small at the moment.
I think NASA does
Technology unions are common in public sector roles.
Probably because the culture is different in a few key ways:
- Government workers rarely even get a cost of living adjustment, without a union, even when they’re critical. Politicians often have the final say, and often don’t care about retaining key staff. (Or actively try to lose key staff…) This leads to a situation where the Union has strong public support, because the Union’s motives are aligned with allowing basic government services to continue during political wind changes.
- A government doing Union busting gets immediately called out as Fascism. The government telling you you can’t get together to talk about how the government should change - is not a good look.
This sounds like more wishful thinking than reality. Like what SWE roles are there that are union? I graduated right after the dotcom burst, with a Computer Engineering degree, I now work as a SWE, and I don’t know a single one of my peers that has entered a union.
wishful thinking
It’s an observation about what other SWEs are reporting elsewhere in this thread.
I’d be extremely careful about believing what you read in the comment sections of lemmy.
Sorry everyone, I made the mistake of trying to better myself and get out of this blue collar hell hole existence I live in and started learning web development last year. Naturally this has to happen then lol
:P
Bouncing between high paid tech work and driving forklifts and lifting boxes every few years is not fun. Wish this industry was more stable
This hasn’t been my (anecdotal) experience, or that of anyone in my network.
The industry is unstable no doubt about that, but we’ve never had trouble finding better places to land.
IMO if you’ve been in tech building your skills for a few years, you really shouldn’t have trouble finding work. '01 was weird but there was still plenty of work, especially in defense. '08 was scary but turned out to be a great time to join a startup. Sometimes it’s a lateral move instead of up, sometimes it requires relocating , but if you’ve been doing good work and building your professional network you should never have to go back to driving forklifts (unless you choose to).
Are you actually in the market right now or just making stuff up? You use a lot of qualifying language in this post that makes it sound like you’re just reassuring yourself. It comes off as condescension.
There are hundreds of thousands of unemployed devs right now, plus all the scrub gold chasers trying to break into the industry. And not everyone has connections that can get them a job. Networking is still a numbers game, it isn’t magic.
I’m not sure what qualifying language you took offense at, and I wasn’t intending to be condescending.
I admitted that my experience was indeed anecdotal, but I stand by my statements. If you’re good at what you do in tech, you have a few years of experience, and you’re willing to take take positions that differ from your comfort zone you should never be without well paying work.
I’m always in the market as you put it, even though I’m not looking to leave my current position any time soon. I did 2 interviews in the last 7 days, and I turn down offers probably once a month.
I know this isn’t how it works for everyone in tech, but once you get your career grooved it isn’t unrealistic.
I’m always willing to take positions different from my comfort zone but it feels like no one wants to hire me unless I have experience with all their tech stack and languages or am willing to take a pay cut. But I can’t in this environment, I have loans and a family and expensive rent and groceries to pay for. It’s kind of annoying because I actually would like to change it up lol.
I hear you, it’s always tough out there, keep at it you got this.
The reason I take multiple interviews a week even when I’m not looking change positions is because it takes that level of legwork to maintain my career.
I don’t want to sound like I’m down playing how difficult it is to succeed in our industry. It takes a bunch of work, and networking, but getting ahead if you have talent is 100% doable.
Thatd a good idea. I really need to do the same thing: apply and take interviews all the time even when I’m not looking to change. At the very least, it’ll help me know what to frameworks and platforms to study for instead of studying broad tech interview concepts.
That’s why I went back to factory/infrastructure. The highs are not high and the lows are not low.
Same. I have a low paying white collar job that I don’t enjoy. I thought I would start learning development just in time or AI and then layoffs. It makes me feel really sick and scared for the future.
A lot of posts and videos have been put up about how it will be fine. That AI won’t take jobs and even with the layoffs, they say head counts are still up, but it feels pretty hopeless to me.
I don’t know what else to do, so I’m just going to keep trying and keep pushing myself to be a better dev. Maybe I’ll get there someday.
There are a lot of companies out there that need help with their technology. Even if AI could solve the problem, they still need someone to implement it. Keep your head up and keep working hard!
I don’t know what else to do, so I’m just going to keep trying and keep pushing myself to be a better dev. Maybe I’ll get there someday.
I mean worker unity and all, but it ain’t being better (if it ever was) that gets you ahead in this field. It’s who you know not what you know or what you’re capable of.
Same. I’m literally bad luck Brian reincarnated.
You can’t be if I already am! Lol
always been
Hmmm. I’ve seen threads on social media from experienced devs having been unemployed for a year now and rather devastated by it.
I know a guy who was let go a year ago. Dude’s like 170 IQ - and while people say that, this guy’s dizzyingly smart. 3 degrees, he can teach, code to spec, rebuild your delivery pipeline so it fucking howls, manage nerds, and he’s been interviewing like it’s his job for a year without lasting results.
Some shitty company in Connecticut just flew him out for a project wrap-up, as he’s been helping save their ass since their completely out-of-his-depth manager reached out on a public forum for some clue. Like, without him they’d’ve been 4 kinds of fucked and he was looking for something to keep him sane for a few weeks.
Handshake and a free dinner and sent him packing. Because they could. They got what they needed, and they foolishly think they can get it again when this idiot fucks up again in a month.
I worry a lot of nerds are getting fish-hooked like that, when they just want to make things go and maybe also eat regularly.
Handshake and a free dinner and sent him packing. Because they could. They got what they needed, and they foolishly think they can get it again when this idiot fucks up again in a month.
Pretty common with OEMs. They hire to develop the new product line, let them go, and make the products until they literally can’t anymore.
I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.
Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.
We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.
Some claimed to have been around long enough to gone through the 2008 recession, but dot com crash would certainly be very unlikely.
I’ve been working in tech in one form or another since about 1994 and even before that if you include “writing some software for some guy’s cash register.” I’ve been through a few of these. They suck, but two years from now it’ll be forgotten.
Ohai. I rode the 1998/99 wave, got hit with the crash, took a cut in one job and grabbed a side-hustle, got laid off in 2006 in the company’s 117th round of layoffs (bru-tal), and never been laid-off again. Because if I even smell a whiff of stink-of-death, I’m out. I still have the side-hustle, and in the gaps I just bulk up on it to narrow the gap. Works okay. Now my main gig is union, and since I deliver on my goals and I’m not a sociopath, I have some confidence they’ll keep me around for a few years. That’d be neat.
Yup. I went back into academia, then rotated between that, military, and government work. Now I’m waiting to see if the other shoe drops and I either sponge off my partner or buy a beach house in Mexico.
Whats your side hustle?
I adjusted to the lower tier fish. Less money, but more stable and less stress.
Since you survived through the year 2000 you gotta tell us your Y2K story
Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.
The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.
This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.
Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.
'97 here. Could do this shit in my sleep by now lol
Spot on. A word of advice to people in the tech field: save while the sun shines because another thing you can’t time besides the market is when the money will be flowing your way.
I’m somewhat optimistic about the long term prospects because if new technology isn’t the future then what is?
But seriously, don’t pretend like your high salary will last a lifetime and plan accordingly.
I don’t think the money is magically just going to come back this time. I doubt that interest rates will ever drop to the levels they were at before the pandemic.
I fully expect this lull to last at least a few more years, and I doubt the industry will ever recover to pre-pandemic levels. History rhymes, it doesn’t repeat, and two very different situations from the past are not necessarily indicative of the future. Plus even if it does recover, you still have to get noticed with 1000 scrubs applying to every job they see. Or pray that your network lands you something, if you’re lucky.
It can also be a common occurrence and devastating to an individual at the same time. It sucks, and people vent.
I’ve been in this game a long time and been laid off from about half my gigs. It sucks every time. If it wasn’t for the fact that the pay is good and that I like doing it, I probably would’ve moved to something more stable already.
A certain subset of dev thought they were untouchable. Now they are finding out they’re the same level of peasant as the rest of us. Hard fall. :/
Always will be
Is this a joke? Software development regularly comes out on top as one of the best jobs. Good pay, relatively low stress, and good work life balance.
Good work life balance? Low stress? Well paid? Not soul crushing?
Nah fam. Pick one, hope to get your second pick, and if you’re lucky, skilled, and play your cards right you can get three. You might get none of them.
No one gets all four… Despite what it sounds like, it’s an inherently creative job where you rarely get to pick your project and are regularly put on an impossible timeline.
Wage suppression is well documented, and for some reason no one gives raises… Despite the fact even the best devs need half a year, bare minimum, to be fully up to speed with a mature system. If you’re lucky, when you jump after 18 months (the optimal time at a place to keep your salary growing, especially in the first decade) you’ll inherit a system in good condition with people who can explain it. If you’re very lucky.
That being said, it’s one of the only middle class industries left. I recommend it to everyone who has the aptitude - it’s one of the most useful skills to have, even if you rarely use it.
We need a tech workers union.
I understand other workforces have it worse. however we could get there if we don’t push back now.
There is one, Boeing engineers have a union. Also we have ASME and IEEE which are kinda like unions.
There’s always been the FSF.
1k job applications since June I’m ready for the inevitable end
700+ applications and multiple recruiting companies later and still only 3 interviews since May. With almost a decade of software development experience. It’s actually a little reassuring that I’m not alone here and it’s not just a problem with me. Best of luck in your search friend!
Ok whew I thought I was just doing something wrong. Glad to hear but also not glad to hear figuring what we’re having to go through
If people randomly drew your name out of a hat, on average you would have to apply to “the average number of applicants for positions you are applying for” number of jobs to get hired. Keep at it, some jobs see thousands of applicants.
Just wanted to drop this update in here for anybody going through this now: I finally got a job offer, but it took over 1700 total applications, and 11 months! I hope you have had some luck in finding something since your original comment!
All the best to you, my dude.
Learn plumbing, poo will always flow.
Sounds like a shitty job.
…I’ll see myself out.
You sure? We don’t always have to poop in the toilet.
One thing I’ve learned in my time of DIY is that plumbing could never be a back up plan. Man I hate it and it stinks and cramped. Not easy work.
That’s why it pays well. Garbage person jobs pay well too. Few people want to wake up early and smell like garbage all day.
I know a guy who works at a dump in LA county. He’s retiring with pension in his early 50’s. I’m kind of jealous.
This sounds intuitive but these “dirty jobs” aren’t nearly as available and profitable as people believe. Relatedly, Mike Rowe is an asshole.
That’s why it pays well.
Care to back it up with numbers? Because it’s been like 4.6 Gy since I last saw a garbage disposal person or a plumber driving their SUV out of their 3-floor house.
Backups are the plan, if you’re a plumber.
So they’re juicing their profit margins for a couple years. Let’s see what happens in another couple years when they failed to invest in the next things because they laid everyone off.
I wouldn’t be too concerned. 300k is not really that many compared to the size of the industry. And there is a ton of aging software that is falling apart due to a lack of investment. Like the airlines. And all the utilities that keep getting hacked. And hospitals. With governments starting to hold companies responsible for getting hacked, there will be jobs to rebuild hold software a plenty.
Most work environments I’ve been in enable 1 developer to do work that requires 2 developers to maintain.
Yeah, or 3. Lol.
And seeing what mass copyright infringement corporation OpenAI just dropped we can expect it to be a million more by the end of the year.
