Comment by samr71
2 days ago
Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Was path dependency for careers always this bad?
2 days ago
Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Was path dependency for careers always this bad?
I don’t feel like it was. Every role is hyper specific nowadays.
And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience.
>"And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience."
This is often because the culture of job-hopping for better pay every 18 months has eroded the willingness to pay for training or adaptation. Why pay for someone to learn if they're just gonna leave soon; the pre-trained person is a better deal if you'll have to pay to retain anyway.
Which was caused by cost cutting measures, MBA disease, in companies to begin with.
We’re just seeing the end of the cat and mouse struggle that’s been going on since the 60s. And massively accelerated in the 80s.
It’s unfortunate for companies though because they’re the ones that will lose out in the end when all the experienced people start retiring and they have no one to hire.
It’s an untenable position to not train people, period. There is no schooling you could go through that would educated junior dev to the level of a senior dev. And it’s the same for any other role. Experience is not optional.
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It's a more mature industry.
I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.
My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers.
Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.
Plenty of server software being developed in the early 2000s. (Though minicomputers were mostly off the scene by then.)
Pretty much.
Well, and mainframes. And trading and financial systems. And numerical/scientific computing. And network services. And web sites and e-commerce. And flash, java applets, and browser plugins. And control systems. And operating systems and tooling. And cell phone applications. And games. And video/image/audio/music processing. etc etc
Oh, wait... maybe not!
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