alt Hacker NewsNew folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.
Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.
If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.
It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.
None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.
Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.
The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.
Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.
Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
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This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by
a) getting really good at clarifying requirements
b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood.
Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
> If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars.
ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.
> New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.
We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow.
What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out.
Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost.
One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.
> Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?
That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.
Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.
I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.
My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.
We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(