We're in a big interconnected social system. If you're landing changes, it's dependent on the internal tooling, internal documentation, and the broader social system that you're a part of. Attachment to individual outcomes is the problem. The productivity comes from the integration.
Maybe the sense of alienation people are experiencing right now is because code is the one concrete thing they drive which is "independent" from this social matrix. Most of the real value I've ever delivered doing this SWE thing wasn't through code, it was through understanding the system, recognizing issues, and working with leadership on addressing them
Their stock hasn't really seen much upside from this whole AI thing, so I don't really see how they'd get punished that badly. At least they have a public cloud business where they can rent out capacity to reduce the loss.
Maybe if OpenAI goes bankrupt, they might be punished more. Or it could be an opportunity for them to scavenge. Oracle is a lot more fucked if that happens.
I don't think big tech is going to be hurt that much. Or if they hurt, it will be for unrelated business reasons like ad spend going down.
Maybe capacity spend will go down for the time being and the hardware stocks will go down. Maybe a bunch of these startups will go backrupt or get acquired. The defensive play of building out the infrastructure and software stack is probably going to continue. These companies have been playing catch up with nvidia for a while now and won't make that mistake twice.
It's kind of mind blowing how much work remains to be done with these models (e.g. finding ways to integrate them in the rest of the economy, finding more resource efficient ways to run them, ads monetization).
It seems like right now, a lot of stocks like oracle, adobe, IBM, and intuit are getting reevaluated.
Don't join amazon, especially as a first job. The reason being, there is usually a shit ton of political stuff going on which you won't see as a new grad. The general way companies like amazon work, they try to bring in non-jaded people like you who have no clue what the fuck they're walking into.
For example, if your TL or manager doesn't like you and is deliberately setting you up to fail, you might not catch it early enough to be prepared. They won't tell you in the open either. They'll deliberately try to hide it and trick you into thinking that you're safe. Once you're in that position, they'll try to force you to work as much as possible and leaving is more difficult.
If you go the Cambridge route, you're getting domain knowledge which could let you get specialist roles (and likely a better support structure) at better companies. It's a no-brainer really. Amazon is desperate for practically any warm body they can get because no one with options wants to work there. If you're ever at a point in your career where you have to join amazon, it means that you played the game wrong and got blindsided by a layoff or something. (Ditto for all the other shitty amazon-like sweatshop companies, Elon companies, etc. Don't forget this: company reputation matters)
Imo this will be the future model: a company puts a gun to your head, gives you agents, and tells you to figure out how to maximize the utility output you provide as an employee. They might put a token limit which incentivizes efficient token usage.
There's a lot of "room" here for creativity, i.e. the agents don't know how to milk the agents efficiently, which is essentially your new job. The agents might not know how to structure tasks so that the agents run overnight and run the proper experiment.
The difference between mediocre and 10x will increase. The more aggressive SV performance culture is probably going to become more mainstream.
Frankly, I think this whole model is way more burnout inducing. You're not really doing software engineering anymore. You're running this mental loop in the background of trying to multiplex between agents and mapping unstructured business problems to agentic work.
It's probably going to infect other industries over time. Software is the first big wave. I don't think people with computer skills who are good at computers will be screwed out of work long term. The tech industry has a lot of concentrated technical capital in the form of tooling and automation that other parts of the economy could significantly benefit from. Short term it looks bad, but long term, computers will become more and more dominant over the economy.
I don't think companies have yet figured out how to adapt their hiring, managerial practices, or internal incentive structures to reflect this. Most of what they're doing now is extremely crude and terrible for morale.
My plan is to just stay in the game as long as possible and bag as much money as possible. Delay family formation (gen z) or buying property so that the money is liquid. Job hop as needed because of all of the consolidation and acquisitions that are happening right now.
If the whole industry implodes, I'll probably just go and get another degree or a PhD and try to pivot into an adjacent field.
But for right now, I think that staying in tech makes the most sense. The WSJ and these other bootlicker newspapers want people to be uneducated and unable to move abroad or escape the corporate hellscape this country is turning into. More money is more freedom from these managerial cunts who are stumbling over themselves to fuck up everything. I genuinely think that things will not positively change until the educated people start leaving the US en masse and shit up the whole US economy.
But I'm wondering if anyone here can chime in with smart ways to pivot where you can apply the same type of skillset that leads someone to do well in SWE. Is statistics a good route?
I'm kind of confused. It's not clear to me how or why the line keeps going up. People are spending less because of economic insecurity, everything is more expensive because of tariffs and war, interest rates have been high for four years.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?
I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes
Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.
In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.
As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.
Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't
This corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable.
It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend.
They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now
> management clearly have no idea how to tell which people are actually working
they probably do, it's just a matter of incentives, i.e. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
maybe companies try to fix this with PIP quotas or something, but then this gets taken and perverted by the managers to where it has the opposite purpose and the highest rating goes to whoever helps build the empire the fastest
I think it increases the amount of enjoyment, there's less semantic language specific stuff to deal with and you can spend more time on the core task.
I think from my perspective at least, claude code / codex + improved information retrieval capabilities is good enough. The rest of the handwavey billionaire bullshit is just noise to me. I think it's wrong to sour on the technology, better to sour on the rich assholes who want to taint it with their personal agenda
I don't think it's purposeful from a company leadership perspective.
Imo what I've seen happen is it's just empire building. Say you're a billionaire CEO and you have a bunch of money to spend on accomplishing some business goal. To deploy that much money, you need layers of management. Every time you introduce a new layer, that layer will have its own incentives and spin off its own narratives to benefit themselves while simultaneously giving the opposite impression to leadership.
This is probably just a natural byproduct of sufficiently large organizations. The same way the middle layers of the network stack tend to consolidate (e.g. TCP), there's some invisible hand of incentives which makes this inevitable
I think the point is to push people out primarily.
This gives them a narrative for doing that by asking for something which isn't doable. Then middle management applies the expectation unevenly to people below them based off of political favor.
Maybe the sense of alienation people are experiencing right now is because code is the one concrete thing they drive which is "independent" from this social matrix. Most of the real value I've ever delivered doing this SWE thing wasn't through code, it was through understanding the system, recognizing issues, and working with leadership on addressing them