It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
hbn · 15h ago
Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time?
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
jaymzcampbell · 13h ago
> a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement
I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
rkozik1989 · 19h ago
>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort.
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
arethuza · 19h ago
I'd have said the Golden Age started about the time Linux distros allowed you replicate the full Unix workstation experience on a basic PC - which I think in my case was around '93 or '94 - right around the same time as the Web starting to become a standard technology.
freedomben · 17h ago
Agreed, and importantly the increasing availabilty of open source compilers/interpreters that made it possible for the broke kid to sling real code.
afpx · 18h ago
Of all the impressive software developers I had pleasure to meet before 2012, I never met one who did it for money. They loved their work, the craft, the science, and sheer joy of the creative process. That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.
freedomben · 17h ago
I think it was the rise of SaaS and major-scale big tech. That was also the point where structure sucked a lot of the fun out of it by converting SWEs into code factory workers by removing most of the forms of artistic expression from it (yes SWEs aren't always the best UI designers or product managers or program managers, but I think it was a mistake to remove them entirely from the equation. Regardless whether it was a mistake, it really sucked the joy out of it for many people, myself included).
thewebguyd · 18h ago
> That culture ended quickly pretty around 2012-15, but I never figured out why.
The learn to code movement, the plethora of bootcamps promising to make you "job ready", and how it became more widespread knowledge that software development was a "quick" way to a 6 figure+ salary. It's around that time it spread beyond just the nerds and became the hot new easy money career, or at least people thought at the time.
2008 played a role as well. People saw that tech was relatively resilient, and one of the only industries accelerating after the crisis. After 2008, chosen majors at universities saw a drastic change as well from humanities and arts into more job-focused degrees, CS being the major one.
Still happening today, although the job market isn't what it used to be, tech is still one of the very few fields where someone can quickly earn 6+ figures without a PhD.
Honestly if salaries would have kept up in other fields, we probably would not have seen as many people rushing to software development as a safe haven from economic instability.
surgical_fire · 18h ago
People figured out that their passion was being exploited by some very rich and greedy people for obscene amounts of money.
If you can't fight it, you can at least profit from it too.
klik99 · 17h ago
Open source really flourished due to lots of sponsoring of projects, I could see an argument that money caused a golden age in 2010s, but money also attracted the type of person who could, without irony, say "It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort."
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
zwnow · 15h ago
Because my industry experience has been exactly that. It's importing stuff and puzzling packages together. There really isn't a lot of jobs where you actually have to implement interesting algorithms yourself.
hecanjog · 19h ago
This was my experience, too. During that period there were free tools and accessible information for learning, search was useful and the excitement was about making things. Not products to sell, interesting software to use. Then it all got paved over into a shopping mall. Those tools and information are still around. (If you look hard enough past the edges of the shopping mall.) I just spent my morning before work once again working on free software, but the mainstream culture of programming is depressing to me now.
zwnow · 19h ago
I define golden age by how much I have to do to support my family. How much work there is and ultimately how much $/hr you are paid for it. Your interpretation is also very valid. The article complains about there not being available jobs though, so I went that route.
ecb_penguin · 19h ago
That would be a golden economic age. We're talking about the craft of programming. They're different things.
surgical_fire · 18h ago
If that's your metric, then the golden age never ended, and we are still in the upward trend.
There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.
If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
freedomben · 17h ago
That's true, but I think you need to account for the state of hardware and operating systems too. Unless you're on Linux, the hackability and control over your own computing environment has never been worse (aside from when those things weren't accessible at all). Yes I can build almost anything nowadays, but actually using it is a different story, even just for personal use (ask people with iPhones and increasingly Android about that).
surgical_fire · 15h ago
> Unless you're on Linux
Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?
I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.
lokar · 19h ago
I remember when people paid (a lot of) money for a good compiler / tooling setup.
ecb_penguin · 19h ago
You are spot on. People are confusing programming with money
einpoklum · 18h ago
The post title, and your comment, made me wonder - what criteria should we use for considering some period of time as a "golden age" in programming? I definitely agree it should not be the level of compensation, but it could still be any number of things:
* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.
* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.
* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.
* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.
* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.
etc.
techpineapple · 19h ago
Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor.
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
zwnow · 19h ago
I remember a documentary on people that had no work a while back. It was filmed in a town where sailing boomed. Nowadays there are almost no sailors left, lots of them never learned a different job. And we still need sailors nowadays. Same with mining/miners.
Booming industries will always die out eventually.
deadbabe · 18h ago
It’s not high salary for low effort.
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
lokar · 19h ago
I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire.
From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.
The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.
I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
blehn · 18h ago
Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles
icedchai · 17h ago
This sort of corporate rot even infected smaller companies. Teams where we have a 1:1 PM to Engineer ratio, 3 person dev teams with a dedicated "engineering manager" that invents useless meetings to justify their position, individuals claiming they have no time for hands-on work due to all the meetings...
Ferret7446 · 8h ago
Define "natural". IMO the demand absolutely was natural, you just don't agree with it (perhaps for perfectly good reasons)
skirmish · 16h ago
Also: telling a senior SWE (L5) that for good performance reviews they must act as a tech lead and spend most of their time in "alignment" meetings with other TLs and managers. Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.
ryandrake · 16h ago
> Also: a team of 3 SWEs where each claims to be a tech lead of an area, purely for good performance reviews.
This kind of forced role inflation is infuriating, and happens at every company I've worked for, big or small. You can't just get by on technical mastery anymore--you always have to be seen as a "leader" of some group or "leading" some project. Even if you just want to stand still in your career and get cost-of-living raises, there is this widely held expectation that you're always cosplaying as a leader of something.
lokar · 17h ago
I’m talking about like 2003 to 2010 or 2015
ryandrake · 16h ago
Every company and every team I've ever worked for has had somewhere between 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog that they were staffed to do. Entire projects that were seen as priorities, but never even started because there was just no staff available to do them. Hundreds of "P1 important" bugs not getting fixed (and never getting fixed) because the limited staff was working on "P0 emergencies" all the time.
For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.
OldfieldFund · 15h ago
> 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog
This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.
ryandrake · 15h ago
I mean, if you worked at any of these companies, you could see the bug list for yourself. These are not fake bugs filed by corporate conspirators. They're actual software defects that affect real users.
OldfieldFund · 14h ago
I'm not saying the bugs aren't real. But there is a non-specific frontier of control, so to speak. And the stock prices of the big companies are always going up, and there aren't any major disasters. Usually.
With more people, there could still be more bugs, and disasters could still happen. Limiting resources can work well in corporations.
castwide · 18h ago
In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
WorldMaker · 18h ago
Some of that is easily explainable as just the ancient corporate mistake of seeing and paying recruiters as a commission-based sales force. They have vacations to pay for and sales quotas to meet and the easiest way to do that is volume over substance.
But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".
Aurornis · 18h ago
> The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind.
Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.
At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.
It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
castwide · 18h ago
I can appreciate the desire to focus on abilities first, but this felt like a shotgun approach to the same old checklist strategy. Like a crawler found my resume somewhere on the web based on a few keywords, and the recruiter couldn't even tell me what the keywords were.
quantumsequoia · 8h ago
It's called pooled hiring, and it makes sense when a company is hiring lots of people for lots of teams. Most large companies do this when hiring rates are high. You end up with better employee-team match when you interview a candidate first and then match them based on their skills/interest, rather than contacting them for a specific role they may or may not be interested in.
Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons
freedomben · 19h ago
This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two).
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
ecb_penguin · 19h ago
Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
tickettotranai · 19h ago
If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.
ffsm8 · 18h ago
Ultimately, all actions multinational companies take are rooted in greed.
Questioning that feels a lil naive?
Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?
wahern · 17h ago
Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?
I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.
We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.
And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.
ryandrake · 16h ago
> Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?
Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.
Paratoner · 17h ago
> How do we determine what excessive employment is?
Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.
klik99 · 17h ago
Yeah, the parent comments feel confused, it's kind of a truism that corporations make decisions based on greed. Capitalism, at it's best, tries to align personal/corporate self-interest with the interests of society. If you can't beat 'em, try to direct their interest towards things that benefit society. Keyword here is "try", I mean it's better than feudal lords pursuing self interest by constantly killing each other. The article does a good job of showing how that drive has really made a mess of the job market, and criticizing it because it blames all this stuff on corporate greed is really confusing since both critics and proponents of capitalism agree corporate decisions are all driven by self-interest, they just disagree on the outcomes.
antonvs · 18h ago
They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.
afthonos · 18h ago
So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything.
I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
gruez · 17h ago
>> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 15h ago
Per the banker analogy, it'd be like if the banker hired all of the personal trainers so other bankers wouldn't have access to them, give most of them nothing to do because it turns out the banker only needs one, and then fire them all once the other bankers won't be able to hire them as easily, all without any regard for the impact this strategy has on the trainers' lives and without being upfront and honest with the trainers about the strategy.
Yes, that's greedy.
ttoinou · 18h ago
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
Is the argument against layoffs purely based on the stock market value of the company ? That sounds very reductive
dietr1ch · 18h ago
Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.
ttoinou · 17h ago
Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"
yyyk · 14h ago
>A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down?
What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.
* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.
netcan · 18h ago
The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it...
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
bluetomcat · 18h ago
Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.
gruez · 17h ago
>Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens.
???
What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase.
>They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines.
That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.
bigbuppo · 19h ago
The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.
johnfn · 18h ago
Are we not supposed to pass judgement on a blog post just because it's opinion-based? If I put the most nonsensical opinions into my blog post, I hope people tell me that it's not very good.
freedomben · 17h ago
I don't disagree, but I also don't think that gives the article a pass to make whatever claims they want without getting any pushback. Especially where they posted it to HN, they should be expecting to be challenged. I could (and probably should) have been nicer instead of calling it "terrible", but I don't think we (a site like HN dedicated to intellectual curiosity) should give bad claims a pass just because they are "opinion." We don't let journalists make unsubstantiated factual claims that are self-contradictory just because they listed it under the "opinion" section of the paper/site, and I don't think we should have different standards for a self-published piece. I'm not advocating censoring it or taking it down, I'm just critiquing it.
bigbuppo · 13h ago
Where is your peer-reviewed research that shows your opinion on this is correct? Do you have the numbers to back that up? Is there any verified source of data that says, "I love it when the people of HN find my blog post and start screaming at me for shit that doesn't matter."
szundi · 19h ago
Parent commenter presents perfect arguments to show this opinion or whatever it is is based on questionable grounds
sugarpimpdorsey · 18h ago
> This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
freedomben · 17h ago
> The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism?
> It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification.
> Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
sugarpimpdorsey · 17h ago
You can do all that without being dismissive and telling everyone the post "isn't worth reading" (while believing your comment is).
freedomben · 17h ago
Fair, point taken. I concede my language was overly harsh. Was a bit of a hot take. I don't retract it, but I do think I could have been nicer.
graemep · 18h ago
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
freedomben · 17h ago
I don't disagree, but then it seems like the definition of "greed" that you are using is essentially synonymous with "running a company." If we want to use that definition, then the claims become true, but the term "greed" also becomes meaningless as it applies to everything we as humans do. "Greed" becomes the motivation behind why I took two slices of pizza instead of one, or why I turn the thermostat down in the winter to use less fuel (and thus save money), or why I turn the thermostat up in the winter (to get more comfortable, even though I'm using more gas). We greedily want to stay alive, so we use resources to procure food at the expense of other living creatures. For that matter, all life on the planet is driven by greed.
graemep · 16h ago
I do not think it is synonymous. Running a company means pursuing profits, but it does not mean you have to ignore all other considerations. You can have ethical limits, server customers, look after the interests of your employees, reduce your environmental impacts etc.
Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things.
IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.
danesparza · 19h ago
Agreed. This article doesn't even touch on other factors like tax law changes that influenced corporate hiring (specifically for software development teams). That seems like a glaring omission.
ponector · 15h ago
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
benreesman · 18h ago
TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one.
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
There. FTFY.
freedomben · 17h ago
Definitely a much better article :-)
I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat).
That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA).
Appreciate the discussion!
ManlyBread · 18h ago
>This is a really terrible article.
I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
rozap · 15h ago
Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that.
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
johnfn · 18h ago
+1
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
bryan_w · 4h ago
Cost of capital
neuroplots · 17h ago
TFA is simplistic and combative, but not entirely incorrect. When companies are cash-rich, they hire generously but invest in vanity projects that do nothing for the careers of the people staffed in them. When they’re poor, they fire people and use the fear factor to extract even more work.
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
at-fates-hands · 17h ago
I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.
j45 · 18h ago
Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.
AnimalMuppet · 18h ago
Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.
j45 · 14h ago
Yeah, seems like a behaviour that increased during ZIRP and started reversing when that went way.
At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing.
It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.
nullc · 18h ago
> It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition.
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
wiseowise · 19h ago
Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming by *checks notes* creating it in the first place?
DaSHacka · 18h ago
The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's, before many of these big tech companies existed. Or at the very least, before all of them truly got to be "big" tech.
Aurornis · 18h ago
> The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's
I think everyone's idea of the "golden age" of programming happens to coincide when they were young and everything was exciting.
Ask people of different ages and you'll get different answers.
DaSHacka · 12h ago
I don't agree, I was born in the 2000s and I still think the 90s (or 80s) was the golden age of computing at large (and programming, with it).
So many dedicated, intelligent people who loved computing for computing's sake. The opportunities they created from that mentality attracted a ton of business-eyed bros with no appreciated of technologists that slowly rotted the industry into what we have today.
Whenever setting up a system and dealing with sluggish 500MB electron apps filled with slow-loading JS and baked-in ads, I wish I could go back to the time when systems were simpler and made by intelligent people that actually cared, at least more than they do now.
Sure I have a fondness and nostalgia for the games and tech I grew up with (in the 2010s) like the Wii, 3DS, Windows 7, Poptropica, Club Penguin, and the earlyish iteration of Chromebooks we used in Elementary school, but I can't even try to lie by claiming they have anywhere *near* the soul of the games and systems that came before.
I have no idea what the real 'culture' of nerds and hackers was like in the 90s, I can only go by people's first-hand accounts. However, I've had plenty of opportunities to interact with the technology from that era, and can't even imagine arguing what we have now is of a better 'quality', even if more technologically advanced.
kfajdsl · 18h ago
I don't think that's the case in TFA, because then why would recent layoffs matter?
nosefrog · 19h ago
My first programming job in SF paid $60k/year 10 years ago. I'd like to thank big tech for driving salaries up.
chubot · 19h ago
Yeah I mean I have to thank Facebook, because I was at Google in 2011.
Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us
We learned later that was because Facebook didn't participate in the Steve Jobs-initiated cartel of Google-Apple-Pixar-Adobe-Intuit-LucasFilm-eBay
Eric and Laszlo of course made no mention of the collusion that turned out be illegal
dehrmann · 18h ago
In 2015? That seems low for an entry-level job at a startup, then. $60k is more like 2010.
nosefrog · 15h ago
It was low. I got a bump to 90k that year, then 130k when I jumped companies, which I thought was a mind boggling amount. Do entry level devs even get out of bed for $130k these days?
nsxwolf · 18h ago
Are you sure your experience didn’t drive your salary up?
mathattack · 19h ago
It's supply and demand.
It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s.
There's only a 4x increase? I think the amount of positions have increased by far more than that.
bogdan · 19h ago
How does this correlate to job demand? I imagine demand is on par if not higher.
mathattack · 12h ago
Good question. A couple caveats on the data:
1 - These #s are just domestic.
2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much)
3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs.
4 - Domestic only.
My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing.
I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995.
Big Tech and empire builders there followed the classic business rules, additionally highly encouraged by Wall Street.
When its cheap, grow fast, when its expensive shield the bottom line, don't make risky moves and cut the fat.
People are same everywhere, you can't just put the blame on Big Tech. Other industries would do same when given opportunity
thisisit · 18h ago
I don't think the writer is aware how regular business cycle works.
It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring.
Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here.
The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.
xlbuttplug2 · 18h ago
As a mostly fraudulent software developer, I've always considered it a privilege to earn copious amounts of money sitting in my bedroom.
gooch · 19h ago
Starts with "It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy." Goes on to describe a classic business cycle.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 8h ago
The title is "Big Tech killed the Golden Age of Programming"
But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming.
A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement"
What exactly is the author's concept of achievement
Perhaps it is financial (not programming)
For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans
Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates)
With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices
From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming
To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming"
Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks
But opinions may differ
davidw · 18h ago
More than anything, I miss hacking on cool stuff without quite so much "corporate" involved.
I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.
I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.
That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
maxdo · 18h ago
It’s a bit naïve—almost a textbook neo-western, ego-centric mindset—where everything is attributed to a brilliant personality, and all setbacks are blamed on some mysterious villains.
But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.”
It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled.
Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems.
The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.
paxys · 19h ago
These big tech companies are collectively hiring thousands of software engineers every week. Smaller companies and startups are hiring tens of thousands more. If you can't get a job, that's on you.
falcor84 · 18h ago
> They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.
What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.
esafak · 19h ago
Big tech g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ lavishly supported programmers for a whole generation. This is something to be happy about.
epolanski · 19h ago
Don't be naive, there was neither generosity nor support, it was always about business: talent was scarce and plenty of competition for it existed. Thus compensation kept going up.
The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
esafak · 19h ago
Adam Smith: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
I am not using the word generous in the unselfish sense, but the large, abundant sense. Apologies for any confusion.
bigtech salaries are weird because all sides feel like they're getting away with something.
bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.
employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.
HarHarVeryFunny · 19h ago
I wouldn't call it generosity - it's supply and demand like anything else. There is money to be made from tech products, whether that's software itself or anything (i.e. almost everything) containing software. There is a limited supply of good developers with the skill/experience to develop complex products and ones with high reliability requirements.
It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true.
Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.
overstood · 19h ago
Times aren’t tight, the premise of this article is flawed. Big tech is insanely profitable and investors are loving it. The cuts are not a hard necessity but a choice made for a different reason.
donatj · 19h ago
This. The cuts were made for short-term stock gains over long-term viability. It's absurd.
cptskippy · 11h ago
In the last 30 years the frequency of layoffs from major tech firms has been accelerating. Starting back in 1997 with Apple, through the dot-com bubble, recession, real-estate crisis, pandemic, and post-pandemic the justifications have varied from boom-bust cycles, post acquisition restructurings, to not meeting market expectations. These layoffs have been intermixed with major hiring booms, the most recent around AI.
Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall.
I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
abixb · 18h ago
>What happened wasn't just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.
Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.
Dead internet theory in full effect.
waldopat · 18h ago
I wish I could like this post, but it unfortunately shows a lack of historical framing. So, as an elder millennial, I thought I'd backfill with some data from the 1990s onward. (I'm a bit of a management/tech history nerd as well and studied it in grad school)
TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.
1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.
1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant
2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust
2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.
2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.
2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.
2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.
If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
mikert89 · 19h ago
No it was venture capital and low interest rates
izzydata · 19h ago
This seems to the case from what I've seen. The economy was doing great and federal interests rates were practically non-existant. It was the age of free money which big tech took advantage of to higher a lot of people and gave big salaries to keep the best of people. Perhaps just to prevent competition.
I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
Kapura · 18h ago
Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.
gishglish · 18h ago
> Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.
It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore.
I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
Kapura · 16h ago
and thus, the capital spent on a squarespace website leaves that community, never to return.
hazek112 · 18h ago
Also... 82% went to Indian visa recipients. The rest have been offshored as quickly as possible.
jleyank · 18h ago
To me the golden age of programming was the 60’s and 70’s when gods walked the earth who thought up pretty much all of the stuff we use or do. Networking, operating systems, languages, …. Hackers, for the most part, did it because it scratched their itch or because it helped out a buddy. Or demonstrated their powers in the appropriate way.
Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
brianjlogan · 18h ago
They didn't hire people to control labor. They were enabled to hire people for R&D because it gave them a tax loophole.
And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.
bigbuppo · 19h ago
And what's that core business again? Collecting as much data as you can on your users and then using that to sell ads, or possibly the data itself.
jollyllama · 19h ago
This article is meaningless because there's not a single number to distinguish the claims being made.
sylvainr65 · 14h ago
Still hiring every other months in my company. Hard to find real talented developers. My guest : most of them are already employed. This article does not reflect my reality at all.
nsxwolf · 18h ago
My bank account doesn’t remember the part where non-big tech salaries went up.
rvz · 18h ago
No it did not.
It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
Hilift · 16h ago
Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere.
Oh man, was it implemented as an ISAPI extension? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.
Hilift · 14h ago
Something like 4 million lines of code with hundreds of people working on the same thing. It was converted to Java by 2002 so they knew it was a crisis.
barnabee · 17h ago
Yep, it should be no surprise that things that ought to require no code or very little code but currently require tons of it are not safe long term careers for programmers.
If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
gchamonlive · 19h ago
Never before it's been so easy to contribute to open source.
A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software.
Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm.
There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer.
You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM.
We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming".
The golden age is NOW.
Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich?
In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.
AndyKelley · 18h ago
What a lazy and worthless analysis. It argues, poorly, that big tech created the golden age of programming until the economy destroyed it while purportedly arguing the opposite.
Aperocky · 19h ago
The discussion here reminded me of a funny (but probably true) anecdote where all you had to do to actually get working answer from stackoverflow (RIP) is to create an answer that is blatantly wrong.
You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
hollowonepl · 19h ago
I’m not buying this at all. Good people always find job, and if you don’t you need to work on better network or better skills or both. Author by the picture looks young. Maybe passionate about programming but lacking fundamental life experience that could let him look beyond personalization and typical socialistic view of bad corporations intentionally damaging job markets as targeted goal.. that’s just nonsense
taeric · 19h ago
It is hard to get passed the first paragraph here. Even if I think "big tech" does terrible things, I think blaming them for a boom/bust cycle is idiotic.
Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.
jeffbee · 19h ago
The author doesn't appear to have any industry experience whatsoever, which might have contributed to the post being a series of baseless assertions, followed by a non sequitur.
mjr00 · 19h ago
From the main site it appears they've been working full-time since 2021, after graduating.
Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
No comments yet
alephnerd · 19h ago
The author seems to have some experience, but they are early career AND in Canada (which is a hard market to land a well paying tech job even at the best of times). Feeling despondent when facing such a double whammy seems unsurprising.
jeffbee · 19h ago
An HTML jockey who gets to call himself "full-stack" because they let him run the mysql server doesn't have the experience necessary to deride the careers of the roughly quarter million technical staff at the large companies as "fake work".
alephnerd · 19h ago
No offense, but as a SWE turned PM turned VC, you're all code monkeys to me anyhow.
Dissing someone as a "HTML jockey" is just rude. People need to start somewhere, and the class of 20 and 21 had a horrid job market because of early COVID hiring freezes - it recovered for class of 22 but tanked immediately afterwards.
I don't deny that I dislike his opinion on "fake work", but you are falling into the same trap as well. All work is equally important, but wages are a result of a skills arbitrage, so demeaning any kind of work is just plain dumb.
And luck does play a role - class of 08 never recovered financially, unlike class of 07 and class of 09. If you miss the train, it sucks.
jeffbee · 18h ago
Really, you don't think anyone from the class of '08 got hired at Nvidia or whatever? Give me a break. Anyway the author doesn't make the case for this in his post, it's just stuff he made up in his head.
alephnerd · 18h ago
I'm not taking offense to your dislike of the author's argument (I agree with you - it's not a strong argument), I'm just taking offense to your tone.
> you don't think anyone from the class of '08 got hired at Nvidia or whatever
1. I'm not saying no person from 08 would have been hired at NVDA. I'm saying statistically, it would have been harder simply because new and early career unemployment in all majors was at it's highest. If you miss the train or fall out (eg. layoffs or getting fired) it's very difficult to hop back on.
2. NVDA only became hot recently. I myself passed on an NVDA offer in the mid-2010s because their stock was essentially a penny stock and base salary was low by Bay Area standards. I kick myself to this day for that decision :') - and that gets to the crux of the failure of the author's argument.
Tech employment only became "hot" for barely a decade. The rest of the time, salaries weren't much different from other white collar roles. It was BigTech that made SWE salaries enticing.
constantcrying · 18h ago
Has the author heard of "outsourcing" before?
As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
llm_nerd · 19h ago
If I get the contention of the article right, big tech was so greedy that they hired lots of people they didn't need, and paid them tonnes of money. I feel like I'm massively misunderstanding either the submission, or the definition of greed.
This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady.
But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.
lbrito · 19h ago
Meh.
I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.
alephnerd · 19h ago
This is cyclical to a certain extent.
The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20.
Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers.
Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
gishglish · 19h ago
> Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer.
All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
wiseowise · 19h ago
Okay, I'll bite.
> All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
What does this have to do with Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe?
gishglish · 19h ago
Bread and circuses
No comments yet
bigbuppo · 19h ago
So, all these people laid off from big companies that were doing real non-chatbot AI and ML research combined with robotics or other machine control to do things that would have changed the world for the better if the project hadn't been killed because it was only making zero billion dollars (the $999,999,999.99 they brought in doesn't count), are perfectly capable of working some place else that wants to, you know, do that farming thing they were working on, or shift gears to building machines that make housing affordable by reducing the labor costs by 75%.
rozza · 18h ago
citation needed
krapp · 18h ago
I would argue that the "Golden Age of Programming" came about due to the existence of Javascript and the ubiquity of the web, introducing the masses to a simple, easy to use development and distribution environment. Also that brief time when free web hosts like Tripod offered CGI access and scripting.
The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age.
To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.
throwmeaway222 · 18h ago
When you pull a large portion of people that would normally be doing the following jobs:
* maintenance on buildings
* growing corn
* building homes
* making tacos at taco bell
* roll your own guess
And make them have job titles like "Head of Equity" or "People Partner Team Member" or "roll your own here too" and give them a 100k-200k+ salary, then everyone making Corn, Tacos, Homes are going to demand more money because why work at Taco Bell if you can literally get a job in Big Tech?
It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes.
We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control.
Done. Now get off HN and get to work.
wiseowise · 13h ago
> We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
I've found people that fit this mould to be insufferable to work with
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
The learn to code movement, the plethora of bootcamps promising to make you "job ready", and how it became more widespread knowledge that software development was a "quick" way to a 6 figure+ salary. It's around that time it spread beyond just the nerds and became the hot new easy money career, or at least people thought at the time.
2008 played a role as well. People saw that tech was relatively resilient, and one of the only industries accelerating after the crisis. After 2008, chosen majors at universities saw a drastic change as well from humanities and arts into more job-focused degrees, CS being the major one.
Still happening today, although the job market isn't what it used to be, tech is still one of the very few fields where someone can quickly earn 6+ figures without a PhD.
Honestly if salaries would have kept up in other fields, we probably would not have seen as many people rushing to software development as a safe haven from economic instability.
If you can't fight it, you can at least profit from it too.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
There were never as many tools, programming languages, IDEs, framework, services and tools available for programming. And with the advancement in technology, even a pretty old laptop is still powerful enough to run it all. You now even gave LLMs that are interesting (even if very flawed) code assistants.
If anything, the golden age of programming is a tomorrow that is always postponed another day.
Why would anyone interested in programming use anything else?
I am forced to use a Mac at work, but I digress.
* The ease with which one could learn to program in a useful/popular language.
* The fraction, or the number, of people who program, or who are "decent" programmers, for some definition of decent.
* The ease, or short length of time, it would take one to write a piece of software which would find wide use and reasonable acclaim.
* The ease with which one can find libraries and tools to support your work as a programmer, and documentation, examples and tutorials to improve your skills.
* The extent to which programming experience and written code can, and is, shared widely, rather than restricted to a (large or small) number of silos.
etc.
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.
The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.
I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
This kind of forced role inflation is infuriating, and happens at every company I've worked for, big or small. You can't just get by on technical mastery anymore--you always have to be seen as a "leader" of some group or "leading" some project. Even if you just want to stand still in your career and get cost-of-living raises, there is this widely held expectation that you're always cosplaying as a leader of something.
For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.
This is an old trick to get people to work hard. It's no accident that every tech company does this.
With more people, there could still be more bugs, and disasters could still happen. Limiting resources can work well in corporations.
But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".
Big Tech hiring often focuses on candidate abilities first and then the specific job later. It's actually more efficient to do it that way than to start interviewing someone for a specific job that you discover they're not qualified for because you can match the candidate to a role after understanding where they fit in.
At many Big Tech companies there's a separate team matching phase that comes after the interview.
It's also helpful in general for us candidates because you can get a job without having to satisfy someone's arbitrary checklist of experience at prior companies.
Has nothing to do with whether hiring is for headcount or other reasons
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
Questioning that feels a lil naive?
Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?
I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.
We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.
And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.
Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.
Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.
I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?
Yes, that's greedy.
What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.
* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
???
What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase.
>They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines.
That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism?
> It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification.
> Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things.
IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
There. FTFY.
I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat).
That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA).
Appreciate the discussion!
I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing.
It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
I think everyone's idea of the "golden age" of programming happens to coincide when they were young and everything was exciting.
Ask people of different ages and you'll get different answers.
So many dedicated, intelligent people who loved computing for computing's sake. The opportunities they created from that mentality attracted a ton of business-eyed bros with no appreciated of technologists that slowly rotted the industry into what we have today.
Whenever setting up a system and dealing with sluggish 500MB electron apps filled with slow-loading JS and baked-in ads, I wish I could go back to the time when systems were simpler and made by intelligent people that actually cared, at least more than they do now.
Sure I have a fondness and nostalgia for the games and tech I grew up with (in the 2010s) like the Wii, 3DS, Windows 7, Poptropica, Club Penguin, and the earlyish iteration of Chromebooks we used in Elementary school, but I can't even try to lie by claiming they have anywhere *near* the soul of the games and systems that came before.
I have no idea what the real 'culture' of nerds and hackers was like in the 90s, I can only go by people's first-hand accounts. However, I've had plenty of opportunities to interact with the technology from that era, and can't even imagine arguing what we have now is of a better 'quality', even if more technologically advanced.
Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
We learned later that was because Facebook didn't participate in the Steve Jobs-initiated cartel of Google-Apple-Pixar-Adobe-Intuit-LucasFilm-eBay
Eric and Laszlo of course made no mention of the collusion that turned out be illegal
It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s.
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&qu...
1 - These #s are just domestic.
2 - They don't contain near-CS degrees like math and .electrical engineering (which may not have grown as much)
3 - They leave out bootcamps and similar training programs.
4 - Domestic only.
My (only slightly educated) guess is that many US based CS grads who used to go to internal IT jobs are now at tech companies. CS grads from India and elsewhere now take up most of the internal IT positions due to outsourcing.
I asked Perplexity [0] and they said that from 2000 to today software engineering emnployment went from 680K to 1.53MM. That's closer to 2.25X. Maybe it rises to 3X if you back up to 1995.
[0] - https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-many-software-engineeri...
Big Tech and empire builders there followed the classic business rules, additionally highly encouraged by Wall Street.
When its cheap, grow fast, when its expensive shield the bottom line, don't make risky moves and cut the fat.
People are same everywhere, you can't just put the blame on Big Tech. Other industries would do same when given opportunity
It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring.
Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here.
The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.
But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming.
A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement"
What exactly is the author's concept of achievement
Perhaps it is financial (not programming)
For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans
Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates)
With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices
From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming
To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming"
Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks
But opinions may differ
I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.
I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.
That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.”
It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled.
Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems.
The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.
What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.
The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
I am not using the word generous in the unselfish sense, but the large, abundant sense. Apologies for any confusion.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generous
bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.
employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.
It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true.
Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.
Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall.
I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.
Dead internet theory in full effect.
TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.
1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.
1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant
2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust
2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.
2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.
2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.
2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.
If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore.
I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-ch...
And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.
It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...
If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software.
Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm.
There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer.
You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM.
We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming".
The golden age is NOW.
Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich?
In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.
You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.
Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
No comments yet
Dissing someone as a "HTML jockey" is just rude. People need to start somewhere, and the class of 20 and 21 had a horrid job market because of early COVID hiring freezes - it recovered for class of 22 but tanked immediately afterwards.
I don't deny that I dislike his opinion on "fake work", but you are falling into the same trap as well. All work is equally important, but wages are a result of a skills arbitrage, so demeaning any kind of work is just plain dumb.
And luck does play a role - class of 08 never recovered financially, unlike class of 07 and class of 09. If you miss the train, it sucks.
> you don't think anyone from the class of '08 got hired at Nvidia or whatever
1. I'm not saying no person from 08 would have been hired at NVDA. I'm saying statistically, it would have been harder simply because new and early career unemployment in all majors was at it's highest. If you miss the train or fall out (eg. layoffs or getting fired) it's very difficult to hop back on.
2. NVDA only became hot recently. I myself passed on an NVDA offer in the mid-2010s because their stock was essentially a penny stock and base salary was low by Bay Area standards. I kick myself to this day for that decision :') - and that gets to the crux of the failure of the author's argument.
Tech employment only became "hot" for barely a decade. The rest of the time, salaries weren't much different from other white collar roles. It was BigTech that made SWE salaries enticing.
As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady.
But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.
I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.
The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20.
Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers.
Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer.
All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
> All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
What does this have to do with Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe?
No comments yet
The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age.
To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.
It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes.
We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control.
Done. Now get off HN and get to work.
Yeah, no, lol.