> The market is still incredibly strong for SV caliber devs
Perhaps if you're comparing it to other industries, but compared to tech's own (recent) past, it's most definitely not "incredibly strong".
Not trying to be snarky, but have you actively searched for a role recently, say in the last 2 months or so? Recruiters reach out far less frequently now on LinkedIn, the common theme even among many experienced engineers these days is instant rejections, or if not that, then being rejected after goin through the final round. Very few are able to land well paying, interesting roles within weeks (or a month at most) of starting their search like they were able to even as recently as a year ago.
It's still possible to find work, but you'll quite likely have to accept a lateral move (at best) or accept a pay cut these days if you've been laid off.
Jobs fill with applicants within 30 minutes. Recruiters have 100+ applicants to chose from. Roles are not interesting. I wish you luck if you are searching..
> Jobs fill with applicants within 30 minutes. Recruiters have 100+ applicants to chose from.
That's not different than pre-layoffs.
The overwhelming majority of applicants are not qualified, or are "tech adjacent" applying for SWE to try to get "a foot in the door" (I kid you not, it happens).
> but isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?
In this market? I'm skeptical. I'm sure some fraction of them can do so at equivalent or higher pay, but the tech market at the moment is quite soft and I wouldn't be surprised this was taken into account and served as another motivation for this move from MS.
That's fair, I was a victim of the layoffs of 2022 (well, sort of), and it took months to find a job paying well enough to cover my mortgage. I did find one, and I really like it, but it took a lot of time and effort to find...certainly harder than it was early last year.
> Entirely possible that the quantity of trading jobs available isn't nearly as high as something like MS though.
Yes, exactly. Other companies like Jane Street definitely exist in the finance space and pay really well but collectively hire far fewer engineers than FAANG + FAANG-like companies do. The thing I like about them though is that most of the time their comp is all cash (salary + bonus) so you don't have to wait around for anything to vest before you can move on, if you so desire.
Yeah, that's what people tell me, though the Jane Street interview is pretty tough; I've interviewed with them three times, and also been declined three times...so maybe I'm disproving my own point here.
I mean, they were honestly fairly typical interviews, just a few pretty tough CS problems.
In one I remember one problem asked me to implement a hashmap, which wasn’t too hard, and then the second one had to do with some sort of latency prediction thing, where cleanups had to be done after certain numbers of milliseconds. I am afraid I cannot remember the details, but I remember that the second problem was quite difficult.
I suspect I could do much better now (or at least I hope I would), but I have not interviewed for them in like five years.
> I know that'd do much more good for my family than me avoiding the pain of sending out a lot of resumes every 2 decades.
Every 2 decades?! I'd say it's more like every 2-3 years.
Also I'm not sure the salaries are "outrageous" except for a select few devs working at FAANGs, and those only make up a small fraction of all developers out there. The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working.
If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong.
> The majority are making at best a comfortable but not "outrageous" salary wherever they happen to be working.
I've talked to a lot of old people, seen plumbers and tradespeople at work and visited Asia a couple of times. Read a bit of history in my spare time. The majority may believe that but they are working from instinct rather than evidence. The evidence is they have one of the most comfortable, low risk existences in the history of humanity. Both in an absolute and relative sense, also when compared to currently living humans.
But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people.
> But that isn't even important. What matters here is unionising won't make it better. It'll probably cause them to revert to the mean by driving wealth out of software companies. Companies don't sack people out of a love of sacking people.
Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry.
How would you "drive the wealth out" without eliminating demand for software, which has been on a long upward trend because it underpins so much and because increased productivity leads to demand for further productivity increases + maintenance of the existing increases?
If it's just some "unionized employees are lazy and don't actually do stuff" trope, I don't buy it.
The Hollywood model has always seemed like it could work quite well for software companies, especially startups or "release-oriented" things like games.
* wildly different success rates for different project, resulting in wildly different compensation depend on what project you're on
* generally short "try to make a big hit in just a few years" time frames
* sometimes things turn into long-lived recurring series
* incentives to push crunch time and other crazy work practices if not checked by something
Obviously it's not a perfect 1:1 match everywhere, but a lot of similarities and it's an example of creative, flexible work happening with collective bargaining and better-than-government-mandated minimum standards.
The union/non-union split could even end up looking like a split between top-tier VCs and studios and everyone else hustling trying to break in...
> Hollywood talent having unions hasn't driven wealth out of the entertainment industry.
The stereotype is starving actors and artists. I don't want to copy their strategies. I want to be a capitalist in a free market; we have wine and big comfortable leather bound chairs. People who like joining unions seem to get angry with me because my approach leads to me having huge amounts of stuff.
I happen to fund my capitalist ways with a software engineers salary, which is quite high. If I get sacked once a decade or so I'm still going to crush most of Hollywood in terms of economic outcomes.
I'm serious here, as far as I can tell unionising is a bad idea. I wouldn't do that if I was trying to live a wealthy and comfortable life.
I question if you're making a good faith argument there. Your "starving artist" stereotype applies much more to non-union Hollywood than it does to union Hollywood. You can be a starving artist without needing any union. Get rid of Hollywood unions and there is 0% chance you stop having starving artists. There's only so many people and so many hours in the day, compared to how many people desperately want to create stuff to try to make it big (or just to create at all), so that attribute will never go away.
Again, software has a unique attribute of how good software creates demand for even more good software that Hollywood can never match.
There's two ways to get people to take chances:
* desperation
* a good safety net
VCs help with the latter already for founders. I think a good union could help a lot with it for would-be startup employees.
1) I work in software because it offers the most money for the least work.
2) What type of wages do you expect people to be making in Hollywood? It seems like a pretty hard industry to make money in. The people making money will be executives and superstars who need no union.
I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer.
3)
> There's two ways to get people to take chances
That seems to discount the reality that Silicon Valley startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world right now. No safety nets. Not much desperation. A relatively high number of workers becoming millionaires.
Making it harder to run a business by empowering employees to just shut things down when times get tough is unlikely to help get businesspeople to take more risk.
> I'd bet the median union member in Hollywood is poorer than the median un-unionised Red Hat engineer.
There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect. I never asserted that everyone in Hollywood is better off than the average engineer at any particular company, or whatever dumb strawman you want to come up with.
You dismiss the role of unions for the highly-compensated in Hollywood but ... do you have no curiosity about why they exist? Why the superstars aren't constantly trying to tear down the union? Can you imagine no world where the superstars were worse off if they had been the victim of more predatory behavior early in their career before they were superstars?
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I'm not fully sure I even agree that SV startup culture is the highest risk-taking environment in the world. SV startup culture in particular is VERY well-capitalized companies, greatly lowering the risk for founders.
You will see a lot of people in that world complain about it being hard to hire - they don't want to compete with bigtech salaries. The salary/equity difference between founders and employees means the latter group is often shouldering as much or more risk, without as many chances to take money off the table. So, typically, you get inexperienced kids who don't need great health plans or benefits and will work for less money. Easy to see ways a union could be mutually beneficial there - no need for every startup to have to worry about company-provided health and benefits, for instance.
Management being worried about a strike seems perfectly fine - employees are in exactly that position regarding being laid off constantly in most of the US (at-will employment). So employees know not to fuck around, generally. Maybe it could be a better thing if managers similarly had to respect their employees a bit more - maybe it would prevent a lot of the "let's hire a bunch of new people during a pandemic just in case this weird blip turns out to be a permanent change, however unlikely that seems otherwise!" idiocy that started a bunch of this at FAANG companies, if "we can just lay them off easily if needed" isn't as easy as all that.
> There's not the same market, for the third time. Stop ignoring that aspect.
But the argument today is literally that we should be homogenising the practices of the market which pays employees well with the practices of the market that is famous for forcing women to sleep with people for opportunities.
I refuse to back down on this point - that is a terrible strategy and we should not do that. We should be doing the opposite of what Hollywood does in this instance. The evidence is overwhelming. I would not choose to work in Hollywood if I wanted to make money and be paid well. None of us would, I suspect, since this is a tech forum.
I would rather be working for Red Hat, even with this round of layoffs.
> 2) What type of wages do you expect people to be making in Hollywood? It seems like a pretty hard industry to make money in. The people making money will be executives and superstars who need no union.
Funny, the superstars themselves certainly do not agree with that sentiment in general; and indeed, the industry was infamous for exploiting superstars prior to unionization.
Software superstars far outperform Hollywood superstars. That isn't close either. Some of the richest people in the world are people who succeeded in software. The wealthiest people in the world for the last 5 years have been ex-computer technicians.
The difference is instead of wasting their time with union politics to try and make their lifestyle work they were busy trying to figure out how to make money. The answer was a resounding "not unions".
As respectfully as possible: what on earth are you even arguing at this point? You claimed that Hollywood superstars "don't need unions" -- I pointed out that the superstars seem to feel they do, and that prior to unionization they were oft exploited. What does their compensation relative to a handful of tech entrepreneurs have to do with that?
I work because I want to make money. My argument broadly is that we should adopt policies that maximise compensation for people who work to make money. Specifically, we should resist unions in the software industry because they are likely to have a net-negative impact on compensation. I expect my job would end up in Vietnam eventually, for example, and in the short term expect that wages would stagnate compared to an alternative strategy that doesn't involve unions.
Hollywood's practices have expressly failed to maximise the amount of money they earn - at all levels they earn less than people who went in to non-union fields. It does not follow that we need to copy their practices. Indeed, this is superficial evidence that their labour practices are failing. What law of gods or man exists to say that actors should be paid less than a Red Hat software engineer? They get paid badly because of how their industry is designed, unions and all.
Now I am happy to be on the record saying that the unions aren't the biggest problem that actors face - mainly their problem is that entertainment is a low value add industry and a lot of people are willing to starve if it gets them on a big screen. But the core problem is that small companies in the entertainment world can't make a good profit and can't afford to pay their employees much. The unions ain't helping with that problem, the unions are exacerbating it. I've avoided the whole industry because it looked like a hotbed of people who were going to stay poor and I don't want the industry that I'm in to start copying their failed ideas at how to align management and labour to make money.
> Hollywood's practices have expressly failed to maximise the amount of money they earn - at all levels they earn less than people who went in to non-union fields. It does not follow that we need to copy their practices. Indeed, this is superficial evidence that their labour practices are failing. What law of gods or man exists to say that actors should be paid less than a Red Hat software engineer? They get paid badly because of how their industry is designed, unions and all.
You keep conveniently ignoring the simple fact that actors were worse off prior to unionization. No amount of rambling is going to change that; unionization improved their wages. I will not be responding further because it's increasingly obvious that you are not willing to actually entertain fact-based apples-to-apples comparisons and, frankly, you seem unable to differentiate your beliefs from facts.
I dunno, how much of a change do you think it caused? How much does the typical actor make? I going out on a limb assuming it isn't better than the average wage. These aren't people who are savvy with monetary decisions. They're the sort of people who try to unionise to make more money and then end up living off breadcrumbs and thin soup based on the people I know from showbiz. When it comes to high wages they've done pretty much everything else wrong before joining a union, and then they unionise to continue that trend. I want to optimise my financial outcomes; a good start is copying success stories (which, again, mainly involve being flexible and responding quickly to changing circumstances) rather than trying to learn from famously-struggling actors.
The evidence here is that the job you do (software vs. actor) has a bigger influence on your pay than union-vs-non-union. The unions are allowing actors to stay in jobs where companies believe they are adding no value. We're better off in the world of software with our systems that promote people quickly moving to jobs where people think we are adding high value.
We'd literally all be better off if the free market were left to reign, kick them out and have the actors out to move into jobs where they are making a valued contribution. That is what happens in the software industry and all the software engineers I've met are making bank. Maybe some would have to move industries to something more useful than acting - seems likely, seems miserable and seems like they'd end up looking back and saying things like "yeah it sucked but I ended up making a lot more money and retiring comfortable because I learned a trade".
That's not the difference. You're being willfully obtuse. Less imagined "time-wasting union politics" [whatever you think that means for SAG] doesn't change the TAM for an Oprah or a Brad Pitt to let them be a Jeff Bezos.
You latched onto the stupidest of all possible ways to interpret my post and compare the two fields because you don't want to engage with the actual things Hollywood unions do or how they actually work.
The people in a wealthier industry have more money than people in a poor industry. You just picked an answer that shows that.
Unions will make the software industry less wealthy. Eventually that will flow down to wages.
I'm not being obtuse, I'm being effective at getting wealthy. An approach I encourage for everyone else in the software industry I might add. You're holding up an example that is worse at making money than I am and saying people should copy it. No! People should copy the industry that is effective at minting millionaires. People should be copying the freedom of software rather than software copying the industries that unionised and stayed poor.
But we already have the actual, real-world, non-hypothetical example of Hollywood pre- and post-unionization, and the latter is more effective at creating millionaires (to use your own arbitrary metric) than the former. So why are you insistent on comparing it to an entirely different industry?
This is an even more obtuse point than your last attempt.
Go open a non-unionized laundromat and see if you make more money than Hollywood. That's all that matters apparently, right? Or maybe a sweatshop - seems like another great "free market" place to work!
You're a political tool making statements of faith instead of objective evaluations.
But you have once again picked an industry composed of people who are not wealthy and said we should copy them to make money. There is a reason when we think "unions" the industrys that come to mind are, in the main, full of workers who don't have much job security or income.
Unions are wealth-destructive. If you destroy the wealth in an industry, it cannot afford to pay high wages. If the industry has no wealth to destroy sure, unionise. You were already going to get paid nothing and you'd still get paid nothing. That'll lock down any hope of changing practices to improve things. I don't want to work in an industry that has unions; I want to be in an industry that is full of economic zest. The reason why software engineers do so well is because they are in one of the freest markets going. The wealthiest software engineers happen to be in the freest markets too. There is a bold and obvious correlation between freedom, high wages and wealthy employees.
Reducing the freedom of software companies will not help me live comfortably. Won't help most of the rest of us either. If people don't have useful work to do at a company, they should go and find a different company to work at. That is the fastest and also most effective way to maximise wages for everyone.
> Or maybe a sweatshop - seems like another great "free market" place to work!
I mean, people mocked the Chinese for this back in the 80s, now they are wealthier than the English. So, yeah. Turned out that was the path to prosperity. India kept trying socialism and ended up decade(s) behind.
If I were in China, I would advocate sweatshops and I would also have been vindicated as they pulled themselves up from poverty to success by working hard and building stuff with poor labour practices.
All the Asians started poor and just worked hard. They didn't strike, they didn't unionise their auto manufacturers and force jobs overseas. They allowed sweatshops to run. They made the biggest improvements to their lifestyle in a generation in all of human history. If they had allowed more freedom to their population they would have gone further too. Chinese wages have risen so much thanks to allowing those sweatshops that now it isn't profitable to run a Chinese sweatshop any more.
EDIT typing a bit quickly. "Wealthier" was wrong - I meant higher energy per capita. See https://ourworldindata.org/energy . The wealth will catch up to the energy though, China is on a wildly great ride. We should, ironically, be copying some of the economic practices of these nominal communists.
> If you're getting sacked every 2-3 years, with all due respect, you are doing something wrong.
Sacked?! If you think the only time people switch jobs in the tech industry is when they get sacked, with all due respect, you know nothing about the tech industry, and your views and understanding about most corporate jobs today is most likely very, very outdated.
If you're already voluntarily switching jobs every 2-3 years, then nobody should care that Red Hat is forcing its employees to switch jobs every ... when was the last time they had a layoff, I dunno... years. It is barely an inconvenience.
when you switch jobs voluntarily, then you can do the job hunting on the side and you can reject offers that are not obviously better than your current job.
when you get laid off then you may have to take the first offer that comes along, even if it pays worse because (at least in the US) many can't afford to be out of a job for long. in germany you have to take any offer that pays at least 80% of your current salary if you don't want to loose unemployment benefits.
getting laid off is a massive difference compared to switching jobs voluntarily.
My story: laid off 3/20 because of the pandemic. Had a nice gig with a nonprofit that saw their revenue crater because of lockdowns. Followed by a year of contract work, followed by a year working for an established firm owned by private equity. PE went slash and burn in 2/22, went to a startup in March only to have their Series C fail to close, another startup in June with funding, who did a 30% layoff in December because they needed to conserve capital-their funding plans for 2023 fell apart. I had more jobs in the last 3 years than I’ve had in the previous 25.
> Blaming recruiters for jobs you regret is like blaming the waiter when you ordered the wrong food.
It's definitely on you as the job-seeker to ensure that the role is an actual fit on multiple levels, but there's certainly recruiters out there that can be unscrupulous and will deliberately steer you towards roles that may not be in your best interests. Over my ~13 year career in the industry I've encountered some great recruiters but for every one good one, I'd say about 3-4 were just in it to collect their commission/fee/etc and move on to the next. Issues I've had to deal with:
1) People using recruiting simply as a stepping stone to something else - these types had no incentive to ensure long term job-seeker satisfaction and would often try really hard to get me to accept a role even if it was far below my acceptable comp range or in an area I didn't have much interest in, because they were desperate to meet their billing quota or whatever for the quarter
2) Some would neglect to mention things such as high churn (due to poor management or overworked staff), boring work (maintaining legacy systems with little to no greenfield dev involved) etc and instead only focus on the positives
Essentially, their loyalty lies with those paying them, and it's worth keeping this in mind anytime you find yourself working with a 3rd party recruiter. Those that've been in the industry for a while probably already know this, but for newcomers or those that just haven't worked much with them, these are important things to be aware of.
I should highlight however that there's some upsides too, the biggest one being the ability to bypass the usual hiring pipeline since the recruiter has a working relationship with the hiring manager.
Right. Recruiters get paid by the employer, so they have a clear motivation to make quick placements. Nothing dishonest about that, just understand the business model.
Recruiting has a low bar to entry so you deal with recruiters who don’t have good contacts or don’t know much about the field and required skills. Eventually you find a good recruiter, someone who can match you with good jobs.
The idea with type hints in Python though is that they’re meant to be checked using some static analysis tool like mypy/pyright/etc. The runtime behavior for the most part remains unchanged in the sense that the Python interpreter won’t enforce the types in cases such as the one you’ve provided.
That's a good point. However, it could also happen that a good chunk of frontend work gets folded directly into the product owner/manager role. Hard to say which way things could go but it's interesting to speculate.
Yes, while I agree AI code gen will be disruptive, I have a very hard time believing PMs or UX will soon be able to "talk to AI" and get an actual logical product out of that. The subset I've worked with certainly wouldn't. Feels like possibly the engineers will do more PM work.
