The plan was always to over saturate the market with coders so the big techs could lower their wages.
it dint work the way they did, they hired too many, and scrambling to use AI to lay them all off.
Then code for free. Open source is a huge threat to these fuckers that made you bust your asses and then NOT HIRE YOU ANYWAY.
They are hoping you just do something else. I say code something else and take their fucking power away.
The jobs didn’t follow because “big tech” lost what was left of its collective mind and put their heads all the way up each others asses.
The jobs were never going to follow either way. It was a way to make more workers so they could pay everyone less. If there’s 100 people practically begging for your job for half the pay, good luck negotiating a raise.
“The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary,” Ms. Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif.
This has never ever been true for any job, especially at 21 years old.
I mean maybe there’s a rare trade that gives you the bick bucks from the get go, but even law practice and finance takes a lot of unpaid work to finally get properly paid.
Might not have been true, but has definitely been the narrative pedalled to young people for years.
There is always some career that kids get pushed into with a promise of “jobs in demand” and “guaranteed salary”.
Yep… I didn’t mean they weren’t lied to… But you’re right, they were lied to.
It was true around the .com boom, and the advice might have been good for a few years, but like everything else: following yesterday’s trends will get you lost in a crowd of the clueless and under-informed.
Additionally, just “knowing how to code” has never been an actual ticket to success.
Software engineers are hired to solve problems, not write code. If you can write code but can’t solve problems and create innovative solutions you’re no better than a monkey.
Yeah there’s a lot of people that “learned to code” that never got anything out of it.
i always found those places with coding camps odd, how are they going to apply it to a job, im not in tech.
In the late 1990s our MSCE graduates were starting at $70K which is easily in six figure territory today when adjusted for inflation.
Six figures is far from what it used to be.
In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.
During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn’t even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.
And even if you weren’t getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+
Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn’t “that much” money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.
Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.
This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it’s a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won’t have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.
That’s finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.
My favorite line was “All high school kids should learn to code.”. What? No they shouldn’t. Maybe a computer literacy course should be required, but there’s no reason for everyone on earth to know how to code.
They should know a little bit about coding. Not to become Devs, but just so they have an understanding of what it is and about how it makes the world work.
Fair. That could be rolled into a computing course and makes sense to me. I
Hard disagree. Everyone should learn basic logic and how to do simple automations on the computer. It really is basic computer literacy. And conputers are a near and increasingly more so constant in every part of the economy.
Specialing in software engineering isnt needed, the same way everyone should basics about food and nutrition but not every needs to be a cheif.
Well, writing bash scripts is sometimes useful in everyday live.
What’s the word from “billionaires are job creators” people? Oh, yeah. Their the ones laying everyone off in order to use “AI”.
I was at the early end of when programming was being pushed thing. Found a welding degree was an option.
Get a welding degree, welders will never go out. The 08 slump happened, and suddenly I was coming out of school requiring 2 years of work experience to get a job, but couldn’t get an entry level job because I was too experienced when the local factory moved to Mexico.
Moral of the story, the industries are not your friend and are happy to fuck you over no matter what you pursue.
Learn to code, then just make your own killer app to become big. Easy. /s
They told them to code so that they could steal their ideas and add them as “features” on their own platforms.
I hate this article. We have tiktok and views and all the other bullshit.
Gotta say if you are posting on tiktok and using it I wouldn’t hire you.
But more importantly this trend was happening before AI. The layoffs are an adjustment, or more bluntly a chance to cut to shore up profits and defend mismanagement and bad decisions: like using AI as a sudden company resource.
It sucks, but the writing was on the wall that this field was saturated for a long time, and IT is cheap to outsource which doesn’t help.
There are so many bigger picture problems with American companies that articles like these just gloss over the them.
There is no better time than right now for computer Science students and laid off workers to try and form guilds and collectives (small businesses really) that are poised to come in and fix the inevitable mess that is going to follow. Either in the US or to help the EU move away from the US.
If you are profient at making videos (fuck the term content creator) now might be the time to consider making ads and copy that is 100 percent obviously human and sell your services to companies who inevitably are going to try to spin themselves as human in the next 2 to 5 years.
I have noticed the better colleges have been pushing the computer science kids to learn project management as either an ability to use while working in teams, or as a fallback option.
Couldn’t care less. I don’t want people writing software who are only in it for the money.
“Go do what we told a billion others to do! Don’t break the mold!” Yea, big shock there.
Its true many must be dissapointed, but there are too many people just with no talent in the industry. i’m quite sure the good one still have very good jobs/
If you’re a half-decent developer AND can talk to people there are still lots of jobs. Roles that are pure coding have been shipped to Poland, India, and the Philippines. People forget that coding is only like 40% of a software project
Care to elaborate what Poland is doing on that list? Eastern European devs are qualified but just as pricey as those from the west.
I relocated to Poland, devs are not cheap, but way cheaper than US.
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That is what the democrats told people who lost their jobs to closed coal mines and closed manufacturing plants.
Democrats didn’t close the manufacturing plants. Capitalists did.
Biden tells coal miners to “learn to code” – The Hill | https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/476391-biden-tells-coal-miners-to-learn-to-code/
I know, that’s why I said “manufacturing plants” and not “coal mines”.
Capitalists closed the coal mines too.
Modern day mining techniques require a small fraction of the manual labor they used to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining
(Of course they also probably ruin the environment, but nobody seems to give a shit about that.)
I would argue that in many places closing coal mines was the policy and governments did pass laws to speed up the process. Not really the case with manufacturing plants.
Closing coal mines is probably good policy anyway. Coal mines suck it.
Serving capital has been the primary organizing function of the Democratic Party for at least the last 40 years.
Yes, both parties. But they didn’t pass any laws to ban manufacturing in US. Capitalists moved manufacturing to Asia because it was cheaper.
Both parties virtually paved the way for jobs to leave the country - it didn’t benefit the majority of their constituents.
👍️
I knew a guy who left Detroit at 30 to install A/C systems in Florida, made good money but by 40 he was tired of crawling around hot attics, so he went back to school, learned to code and went back to Detroit to work software instead of the factory floors… he did alright, didn’t set the world on fire, but also didn’t retire to an early grave with health problems from breathing fiberglass in 130 degree confined spaces.
Yeah no shit. This was the plan all along. Big tech wanted to flood the market with too much talent so they could lower pay for engineers. This was always the plan.
They never gave two shits about women in coding, or inner city coding caml’s. They wanted mass cheap labor.
The cherry on top is right as that labor was coming out they got a double whammy of AI too.
