The business geniuses, who make up the executive suite, only care about off loading their shares at the high price. Leaving a legacy business has gone out of fashion.
And regarding H1B, I'm curious to see how it plays out since both Trump and Harris are on record supporting and eyeing an increase in H1B. Will Vance help turn Trump back to opposing them and committing to end H1B despite the money from tech billionaires?
Bottom line is tech salaries got out of whack from during the early 2020’s.
FAANG was paying entry-level grads 200K to start.
I knew that was not going to be sustainable.
As a software dev, I can definitely say AI isn’t quite ready to replace individual people by a long shot. In the past year we have employed AI tools to help speed along the code development process. At times it works, but only for the most boilerplate stuff that I could just as easily copy from one place and paste into another.
For more bespoke problems, it makes a solid try, but more often than not there’s at least a small number of errors, and sometimes it misses the mark totally.
AI needs to cook for a little while yet before it’s ready to replace humans. Unless of course you want to build an upside-down pyramid and expect it to stand upright.
Management at my company needs to read this.
salaries are a fixed cost which can be dwarfed by quality products in a successful company.
while reducing those costs may reduce the losses... it also increases the chance of failure.
we’ll need to out compete them with brazen pro-American tech ingenuity.
we need companies that hire ONLY Americans and aren’t afraid to say it.
Long story below. Consider this your warning.
In the fall of 1992 I designed, from the ground up, an online transaction processing system to do medicaid medicare and private insurance eligibility verifications. All of these came into the datacenter through a dial-up system. (2 channel banks into 2 USRobotics boxes with 24 modems in each). I designed this system so that any component could be swapped out for something bigger, faster, and the system would just carry on. I had multiple paths of redundancy, backup battery power, everything. Planned down to the tiles on the floor in the datacenter. In exchange for this design work and sacrifice they promoted a different guy to VP who did basically NONE of the work. So, I left the company. About 4 years or so ago I met a guy who had just left the company as a developer. I asked him about how things were there, and he told me that in the last couple of years(!) they had FINALLY managed to replace the old system. He described the problems that they were suffering from. All because not only had *I* left, but everyone that I had worked with had left, and no one understood the design. So assumptions were made that were wrong, short-cuts were taken that caused single points of failure, and all sorts of other stupidity. “Where’s this going?” you ask. The company would become Change Healthcare. You know, that company that got hacked a few months ago and took down all the billing systems? Yeah, that was my company. I was employee #16. The system was never designed to be connected to the internet, and it sounds like the shortcuts that the former dev told me about in the main OLTP system were extended to the online servers as well. :-\
The moral of the story, don’t run off the people who not only understand the system, but can also DO the work and get results.
When Microsoft outages caused by a CrowdStrike software glitch that paralyzes airlines and other businesses, the importance of well-paid software techs becomes reality.
I saw this snowball start rolling downhill 20 years ago seeing the most-experienced programmers aging out without the younger ones fully understand what they inherited. This was the main plot point in the movie "Space Cowboys" and has arisen in real life where minders of Cold War tech are often clueless as to what they're dealing with.
I got the hell out of I.T. when I realized we're not only thrown under the bus but expected to be happy living there.
“.. Techies, especially software developers, are terrible at marketing. Especially when marketing themselves.”
They really are. I run a team of techies and they are all brilliant. Take them to a restaurant with a large menu and ask them to order and their heads explode. What young techies do not understand is the knowledge and wisdom of more mature techies are what fuels their careers. We help develop their soft skills, challenge them into using critical thinking skills and demonstrate for them the tips and techniques they didn’t learn in coding school.
Unfortunately, companies are looking at cheaper resources, but do not understand the costs associated with losing that knowledge and wisdom.
People forget that systems hang around longer than anticipated...COBOL and FORTRAN running even today.
Over the last 15 years the number of application frameworks available to choose from has exploded and the languages have also advanced to the point of almost looking like a different language (e.g. JavaScript).
Put this together, many companies are creating unmaintainable systems - we’re already in a place where job descriptions ask for frameworks A,B,C and others asking for X,Y,Z, that often accomplish similar goals. It’s a mess of competing technologies. Many of them aren’t going to continue to be popular years from now and companies won’t be able to find anyone that has the background to work on their combination of frameworks they chose.
I hope I’m wrong but that’s what it’s looking like from my perspective.
the biggest problem in any job is that management doesn’t have a way to measure institutional knowledge. This is especially true in a tech environment in which both infrastructure and applications can be orders of magnitude more complex than management think they are.
Why do so many millennials use the phrase “these days”? It is common in their illiterate world.
He starts off wrong in the first sentence. Technology and the people who know how to work it ARE a commodity and things work best when they’re treated as such. When you know they’re a commodity you know their value. When you stop acting like they’re a commodity you start acting like it’s magic.
And the relative value between experienced coders and young is largely random. Because things change so much your experienced coder can fall behind, but they might not. Depends on them. And sure the young doesn’t have the years of mistakes to have learned from, but he’s up on all the new hotness (which isn’t new hotness to him, it’s just what he learned).
And for AI. It can be useful. But like all tools it’s use depends on the user. It is neither panacea nor albatross, it’s just there.