I know a few people who graduated with a CS degree in the last 2 years who have given up completely, at least in the short-term, on finding tech jobs. A few tried pivoting to tech sales but found difficulties there as well. I also know a few who landed tech jobs. Those with more success were definitely more interested in the subject, and continued coding during the (+6 month) job search, while those who ended up giving up seemed pretty sour on coding from the get go, lamenting their choice of degree.
I suspect an H1B decision reduction is a step in the correct direction here, but
I think you are mistaken in this, unless there is news I am not aware of. Chile and Singapore citizens have a H1B1 work visa available to them with similar conditions as the H1B, except for a restriction on intent to immigrate, and a different quota pool; this was instituted by respective bilateral FTAs. The recent news about them is just that the H1B1 is not subject to the recent developments concerning the H1B.
Yes, this news is the US administration clarifying that H1B1's aren't affected by the increased fee for H1B's. Chile and Singapore have small populations, and even with the minute few Singaporeans working in the US (under the H1B1 and otherwise), they are likely overrepresented as a fraction of their total citizenry, owing to their intensive education and hence relative global mobility.
The H1B1 has been around for over 20 years now. It's just... something that exists. These are concessions that a large country like the US can easily give in bilateral agreements to small countries because demographic issues owing to immigration are not likely owing to how small these countries are to begin with. It's not something possible for countries like India, China, Indonesia, etc.
> I suspect an H1B decision reduction is a step in the correct direction here, but
I think this is a terrible idea that only helps those like your friends: people that got into tech because of job prospects but never cared about the field.
It's going to hurt American IT companies and in the end all IT workers if the field becomes less competitive and more mediocrity will survive.
> I think this is a terrible idea that only helps those like your friends
Well, it will also help the tens of thousands let go from top tech companies over the last two years, many of which do care about the field. I can assure you the fact that someone has an H1B says almost nothing about how much they 'care about the field'.
I think a better way to get the mediocre out of the field is to make some other, perhaps slightly easier, field a more attainable and well paid career path.
That's life unfortunately, demand goes up and demand goes down.
There is no degree that guarantees success, no job that lasts forever, and no guru with the secret to happiness. You've just got to be clever and adaptable and stay on your toes.
"It's natural" is a lie we tell to shift profit from the masses to the rich. There is nothing uncontrollable about the human behavior we call economics.
I do not know what to make of this comment. It is so much of what you see on social media that derails constructive conversation. There is nothing terribly wrong with the comment but it feels adjacent to low effort. To make your point, you have constructed a scenario that may or may not happen, but, to me, it lacks introspection and "arguing in good faith".
I am not even disputing what you have stated as a possibility. It is just, there are other possibilities. Maybe the Government Pension Fund of Norway is a good counter example to what you propose?
"Governments influence economics all the time in subtle and not so subtle ways."
They do. Influence, but not control.
So .. au contraire.
The demand to just "control" the market is a really low effort populistic approach to me, that refuses to analyse deeper.
Economy is made up of people. Who have a free will and act out of various motives. So if one instance is controlling the economy it means this instance is controlling all the free will of those people. History shows it can be done, but for a hefty price and I was born into such an experiment I consider failed all in all.
So I am not a free market fanatic, but I see the growing authorian tendencies very critical.
Btw. next time you come to criticize me, maybe check the guidelines yourself first.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Hm. The way laws are written in reality, it might as well be some (dark) magic entity to me. The process of giving input there is not made easy. But if your point was, it is in our hands to change anything and also that, then yes.
I merely replied to the very orignal and never tried out approach of "controlling the economy" indeed with the standard response. If you are willing to debate alternatives for real, I am all ear. But yes, totalitarian approaches I will not like.
We saw how they tried to implement this in the Soviet Union. Sure there were almost no rich. Everyone was poor af. And there was no escape from it unless you willing to hijack a plane.
> There is no degree that guarantees success, no job that lasts forever, and no guru with the secret to happiness. You've just got to be clever and adaptable and stay on your toes.
Only because we've allowed society to make it so, to treat people as things to be used and consumed for money's benefit.
Society doesn't have to be this way, though the current system has apologists skilled (and not so skilled) at making it seem so.
Consider if it is possible that having kids start their working life in crippling debt to get jobs that don't exist is something we don't actually want as a society? Is it something that we can avoid and is not actually "life?"
I mean, what's the alternative? Should universities simply not offer courses for any amount of money for degrees without viable career paths? "It doesn't matter how badly you want to study anthropology, the market is full up, so go away!"
Incorrect. Tenured government jobs in some developing countries offer housing, protection from firing, and success if your definition of success is not needing to try ever again. Good luck on the search, you're competing with 1,000,000 equally qualified applicants for that position.
Allegedly more people are coding than ever, with thanks to kids having coding on the curriculum.
The problem with all engineering is that stuff gets built, and, once it is built, you don't need all the engineers that built it anymore. Things then get into the 'cottage industry phase'. Ecommerce is fascinating in this regard. Being able to sell stuff online was a goldmine at the start, with every business needing to get online to sell their products and services. However, platforms such as Shopify, Etsy and Amazon came along and companies ditched their expensive programmers to use the new SaaS platforms for ecommerce.
Video games and anything 3D entered the 'cottage industry phase' a long time ago and the same with social media things, the infrastructure is built and those in the game just play musical chairs going from one gig to another, with relatively few openings for new people.
Outsourcing due to globalisation comes into it, why pay for programmers in a Western city when you can move the operation to Eastern Europe or India? Undoubtedly this is a factor, however, there comes a time when everything is consolidated and just built.
Compare with the build out of networks in the Nortel days. If you knew how to do things with fibre optic splitters and big boxes with lots of lights on them then everything was golden, whilst the boom lasted. But then everything was built and it entered 'cottage industry phase'.
Bad for the people who wasted time and money getting the degree, good for the people who can pay lower wages now that supply is so far ahead of demand (at least at the entry level)
Considering the glut of employees, the minimum hiring bar for entry level is now a masters degree. Why? Because you have a nearly unlimited number of people that can code well, are young and have a masters degree. The person without the degrees is getting their application tossed into the bin at the entry level. There is no reason to consider them (Note, I do not agree with this, but this is the reality). This is very much a situation you can have your cake, and eat it too.
If the president, media, teachers, influencers, the richest people on the planet, and my parents say it? I probably would. I think it's disingenuous to imply this wasn't strongly recommended as the ideal way to get a high paying job straight out of college that only improves over time.
Not to mention the (arguably almost spiteful) campaigns to tell professionals in other fields to "learn to code" if they lose their job, as though it's a fit for everyone.
Even the way you've phrased it, nothing says a job is guaranteed. The phrases "software engineering careers are currently _the best_ in terms of ROI" and "an aspiring software engineer is not guaranteed to succeed" could currently be simultaneously true.
The point was not that Big Tech wanted more programmers because they would have more job postings.
The point was that Big Tech wanted more competition in the labor market to drive down programmer wages.
As they have demonstrated time and time again, the CFOs at "Big Tech" companies abhor paying programmers what they are worth. They do not care that they make $1 million in profit for your work, they hate that they pay you $300k, and they are willing to do anything (including multiple cases of illegal conspiracy) to pay you less than that.
I think hiring is less bleak here on the east coast.
Software Developers in most of these large companies are underpriced.
Not sure that I see this as some concerted effort of the man vs normal people looking at the landscape of jobs. Relative to education requirements, tech has been an amazing opportunity for many. Pretty common to see posts on tech forums of humble bragging about high salaries, low effort, or ease of job hopping (for even higher compensation).
Even using $300k as an example of a programmer getting ripped off relative to their worth -few industries afford opportunities to make anywhere near that much money. The median US pay is ~$40k.
This idea that a job is inherently "worth" some amount of money is way off. The entire point of a market economy is that prices are driven by supply and demand. And salaries are just prices.
If more and more people are capable of delivering high quality software, but the demand for it doesn't increase at the same rate, then it should be worth less.
Furthermore, hirers aren't evil people for wanting to pay less, any more than job seekers are evil people for wanting to get paid more, or shoppers are evil people for wanting discounts. The supply side is always going to want higher prices, and the demand side is always going to want lower.
The supply and demand is a convenient myth, skirting a lot of the nuance and artificial factors. If supply and demand did work like the proponents of "simple answers" claim, then every remote software engineer of similar tenure would earn about the same amount anywhere across the globe. That's just one single very simple example, to make my point obvious. There are countless slightly more complex examples too. In fact, it can be made even simpler - let's forget comparing two different engineers, let's pick only one. If one full remote software engineer moves between countries without even changing the job, his compensation may change dramatically, simply because in one country wages are suppressed at X level and in another at Y level. Same hold for any other activities too, not only SWE.
In my amateur opinion, the compensation for each particular job is highly dependent on the historical accidents and unrelated political and economical events, and the rate of quality code (or whatever other end product/service) is a distant secondary factor in that.
Most of big tech enjoys some degree of monopoly power through network effects, so it's a little disingenuous to wave "It's the market, stupid" in this case.
Quite apart from the fact that in the jobs 'market', one side is forced to participate, else they starve.
Eh, businesses die and starve all the time. Most businesses fail, and competition to hire is brutal.
Big tech are among the top tier businesses. So I don't think it's fair to compare them to average employees. Rule #1 if you want to do well in the market is not to commoditize yourself, and average employees are commodities: people who slot into job titles with almost no differentiation between others competing for the same job title.
It's more accurate to big tech to top tier employees. Your execs, your staff engineers, your top sales talent, your startup founders who get acquired. Just like big tech, these people have a lot of negotiating power, tons of options, sometimes multiple clients, and often a nest egg so they can take time off work and be picky.
I think we can agree that a 'starving' company is not the same as a starving human.
Your other points about differentiation are especially valid, now, but the great mass of people have limited capability there. Should they just starve?
I don't disagree that business will always try to drive down labor costs, but this is kind of a weird take given west coast tech companies are the ones that normalized $500k-$1m total comp for the rank and file software engineers with 5-10 years experience. East coast, let alone the rest of the world never even sniffed that until FAANG set the standard.
It's not that there was some conspiracy to get more people into software. Software is fun, pays well and is accessible - no wonder more people wanted (and still want) to get into it.
> It's not that there was some conspiracy to get more people into software. Software is fun, pays well and is accessible - no wonder more people wanted (and still want) to get into it.
Yeah, and also the perception that they were some of the last good jobs left. IIRC, other areas of the middle class have been declining for a long time.
Ehhh they are paying software developers a good deal more than they are worth in any other industry or country.
You’re not going to convince me that $300k is underpriced, that’s doctor/lawyer pay without having to spend 10 years in med school. Dev salaries are a bubble.
Plenty of those developers did indeed work in projects with giant userbases. Layoffs are not about success or failure or how large the userbase is, they're about adjusting expenses and appeasing shareholders.
Yeah, I've seen really strong engineers being laid off. My point is that viewing software engineers as magic money cows is wrong, they don't make money by themselves - and those who do start their own companies and stop being software engineers.
It may not be "by themselves", but they're still a key component of the machine. Without the cows, you don't get any milk, no matter how many milkmen you have to sell it.
Yes, they are components in a machine, and if machine is generating N dollars per second, it doesn't mean that they are generating it. It's also perfectly reasonable to try to find components as cheaply as you can, and don't always go for highest-quality components if it doesn't have a significant effect on how machine is functioning.
Yeah, I mean, my comment can be read by billion people. But I don't think I deserve three figures for commenting, at least not until the comment has actually been read by billion people.
Compared to the money that tech companies make, way underpriced.
The reason that companies pay engineers more than in other industries/countries, is that in general companies in other industries/countries don’t make nearly as much as SV companies.
The implicit contract goes as follows: You pay ~50,000 engineers around $400,000/year, and you essentially get a money printer and get to be one of the richest people in the world. Who wouldn’t take that trade?
In general, you can’t do that in any other country or industry.
Big tech doesn’t generally make money by selling software.
They make money through monopoly effects on their social networks and ad platforms. They need some devs to build/maintain that platform of course, but devs are not as core to their business as they think they are. The monopoly status is the money printer.
Of course, but how do you become a monopoly? By selling your software, often implicitly through eyeballs and clicks. I disagree that devs aren’t important to this process. You want to make your software as ridiculously low- friction as possible. If making your software 10% faster/smoother/better is going to result in more users, you should be willing to throw as much money (within reason) at that problem as it takes until you have strong network effects.
Once you have a monopoly it becomes less necessary to do anything, which is maybe where we find ourselves today.
Big Tech companies make money by extracting value from other parts of economy. Not only developers are normally not the ones creating that value, they are also not the only part of the mechanism that extracts it - sales, marketing and legal are at least as important
I strongly disagree. Big tech got to be big because they made better products than their competitors, at least initially. I don’t think google/Facebook even used to run ads in the early days.
>You’re not going to convince me that $300k is underpriced, that’s doctor/lawyer pay without having to spend 10 years in med school. Dev salaries are a bubble.
How many years of learning at home good developers needs?
"College grads with tech backgrounds - the lottery ticket, or so we thought in American life - are having a harder time getting jobs than biology majors."
Sounds about right in terms of importance to society
Maybe surveillance, data collection and targeted ads is not a realistic "business model" long term. ZIRP ends, reality hits. Big Tech has to cut costs and employees are a big cost, especially overpaid ones ("tech" employees believed they were assets, now they know the truth)
Silicon Valley is betting the farm on "AI". The Hail Mary
"That's more than twice the unemployment rate among recent biology grads, which is just 3 percent."
If uneployment for recent biology grads at 3% is "not looking good" then for recent computer science grads at more than 6% unemployment, things are looking much worse
American society’s view of the importance of biomedical research is directly written down in NIH grantmaking and funding levels. It’s not looking good.
I knew lots of people that got into coding in the early 2000s and couldn't find a job after graduation.
Why? They just took the classes and expected a cushy job.
I, on the other hand, worked on lots of my own projects and contributed to open source. I had a job lined up after graduation and haven't been out of work since.
Most of them got out of tech completely.
You can't just expect to follow a list of pre-written steps and then get rich from it. Life has never worked this way, but people continue to expect it.
Same. I went to a fairly middle-tier CS program, graduated in the mid 2010s. A good chunk of my CS class just never got CS jobs. One is a car salesman, one is a math teacher, one went into academia for linguistics, many went into IT or helpdesk, many work odd jobs or generic white collar jobs. I would guess only about 10-15% of CS grads ever land into the cushy six-figure Bay Area SWE career at well-known companies that people associate with the term "Software Engineer".
Becoming a SWE is hard and it was never easy. You needed projects, internships, hundreds of hours invested in interview prep, aggressive networking and, even after all that, excellent luck. It is not something that naturally follows a CS degree. Maybe it does for the kids at the Stanfords and MITs (who, might I remind you, have already won wars to even get there). Not for the average Joe Jr from University of Flyover State.
Seems stranger to blame your failings on others. Maybe not actually. There is a whole lot of this going on. You're just one of the many at this point I guess. And it takes a real special kind of idiot to think that anyone in the past took a wholistic view on hiring. Just mind-numbingly stupid with zero basis in reality. It's always been nepotism first. I suspect you're just benefiting from it less.
Tech is absolutely NOT "the only field that requires so much outside work, constant upskilling, etc". A good doctor never stops going to conferences, reading, publishing articles, etc.
But the doctors who never go to conferences and who don't stay up to date on anything are also called Doctor and work in the exact same places. Good luck telling the differences between them as a layman. I agree with you though. And the percentage of "Good Doctors" probably rivals the percentage of "Good Engineers" or "Good Anything" really because care of a craft is not the norm. Doing the bare minimum to avoid getting fired is the median we are exposed to on a daily basis across professions.
The juxtaposition in the headline implies that A.I. coding tools are the cause of unemployment for new grads. I find this sort of headline to be intentionally misleading. But sadly, A.I. gets clicks. There's no evidence that A.I. coding tools are causative of unemployment. The simpler and more likely explanation is that big tech companies overhired during the pandemic and now are doing layoffs to adjust course. Correlation being presented as causation is lazy reporting.
> As the industry embraces A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.
I've seen zero job loss from AI but substantial job loss to off-shoring. What you said about over-hiring I think is also true, but if you look at headcount numbers they have dropped only marginally. The geographic distribution of that headcount however has shifted in a big way to India, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The reason is obvious, people in those countries are paid far less (often 1/3 or 1/4) compared to their US counterparts.
It seems this rarely gets discussed in the media though. As you said, AI gets more readership attention. I also get the impression people feel there's something culturally offensive about discussing off-shoring.
That's the then POTUS doing his job as the mouthpiece for policy already set in motion by others .. bipartisan others:
Retraining programs have received bipartisan support.
The U.S. Department of Labor announced a fund of nearly $5 million for working training programs in Appalachia earlier this year.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently announced $2 million in funding from the National Dislocated Workers fund, and Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced a fund of more than $1 million from the same fund.
The reason the US is circling a divisive k-hole is the readiness of US citizens to immediately throw anything as blame on "the other".
You don’t have to look hard for examples of sales promising things that engineering then has to try and deliver. I think Dilbert comics from the 90s rang that bell nearly every week.
The USA is ruled by lawyers and sales people and most recently by blatant liars and con artists.
China is ruled by engineers. And their leadership has correctly identified the weaknesses of our approach and are working to exploit them and demonstrating significant success at doing so.
In 64 critical technology driven areas, China now leads the USA is all but 7. The data is available for all to see and from multiple sources. And unfortunately, name calling and denial won't change it.
I think both engineering and sales take the customer for granted.
Engineering often views their role as taking in specs and outputting product with little regard to whether or not the product is actually worth buying.
Sales views customers as a resource to exploit rather than an entity to serve.
Both sides have gotten so far and lazy from American hegemony that it’s no surprise China has usurped the US.
> Both sides have gotten so far and lazy from American hegemony that it’s no surprise China has usurped the US.
China has usurped the US because a handful of businessmen decided to personally make money over several decades by basically exporting capability and know-how for modest short-term profits, and the Chinese government was far-sighted enough to help them and make sure they got the better end of the bargain (over the long term).
The lazy and incompetent western worker trope is just BS to justify this destructive enrichment strategy.
Of course, profit motivated offshoring is a cause of the current situation. But it feels a little revisionist to attribute that as the _only_ cause.
Culturally, the country derided blue collar work for a long time. The fact that everyone should attend college and strive for white collar work was unquestioned orthodoxy.
Ultimately, this cultural mindset led to the commoditization of society. Everything was a resource to be managed and optimized. Efficiency was paramount. And this viewpoint wasn’t just espoused by the capitalist class, it was shared by our “brightest” academic minds. Nobel laureate economists (e.g. Paul Krugman) told the public how great globalization would be because it increased economic efficiency.
What was missed in all this is that not everything is a resource that can be managed in a spreadsheet, CRM, or JIRA tracker. Delivering value is an art. It requires skills honed through practice and taste that comes from appreciation of craft. Culturally, we’ve lost appreciation for the process of creation. We want to be fat and lazy and do our “important” jobs and get paid. But that won’t work for long.
> Of course, profit motivated offshoring is a cause of the current situation. But it feels a little revisionist to attribute that as the _only_ cause.
> Culturally, the country derided blue collar work for a long time. The fact that everyone should attend college and strive for white collar work was unquestioned orthodoxy.
I'd bet much of that attitude (at least in the masses) was driven by offshoring. Why go into blue collar work when sooner or later the plant's going to get sent overseas? If you're selling offshoring, you've got to weaken the opposition by denigrating the assets you're sending a way, and you've gotta offer some glimmer of hope to the people you're disrupting (and that hope can he a college degree and a white collar job).
> Ultimately, this cultural mindset led to the commoditization of society. Everything was a resource to be managed and optimized. Efficiency was paramount. And this viewpoint wasn’t just espoused by the capitalist class, it was shared by our “brightest” academic minds. Nobel laureate economists (e.g. Paul Krugman) told the public how great globalization would be because it increased economic efficiency.
Personally, I consider those guys to be the businessmen's lackeys.
Sure, if you choose to assume everything follows from your belief, then of course you’ll find yourself correct!
Just a counterpoint, the federal government started guaranteeing student loans in the 60s. There was clearly a pre-offshoring push for a more educated populace.
When that's true, I don't think that's the fault of either of those divisions. The job of one is to build things, and the job of the other is to sell things, and that's it. Considering and analyzing the customer's needs would probably fall under R&D or market research, and piping those findings into other divisions would have to be the job of leadership. So in other words, if a company is making and selling things nobody wants, it's the fault of the decision makers.
I suspect an H1B decision reduction is a step in the correct direction here, but