Comment by overgard
11 hours ago
I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good, and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor catnip but the research shows it's not having the effects claimed.
Blaming the employees is BS. A pretty large % of the people losing their jobs are also high performing excellent people. I feel like anyone who worked at one of these companies doing lay offs knows this.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that the people that got laid off were the ones that deserved it. Obviously politics, situational factors (wanting people back in the office), etc are a huge part (I myself am recently laid off and I don't think I deserved it!) What I was trying to drive at is developers have lost a lot of leverage and negotiation because there are too many people fighting for too few roles. Also I can't help but wonder if people have lost trust in developers because of the dilution of talent.
That being said, I don't think it's unfair to point out that creating a massive influx of new developers without jobs that provided good mentorship (most jobs are awful at mentoring junior developers) is going to have huge consequences that we're now dealing with. I think the "learn to code" thing was a massive mistake. Encourage the people that want to, sure, but don't try to pull people in that are only marginally interested in a paycheck.
The layoffs are not necessarily executed in a way that takes performance into account, but that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.
Its only the part about casting any aspersions at the people laid off for being low performance that bothers me because I know so many incredible people for whom they absolutely did not deserve it and its not fair to assume anything about their value or quality of their work specifically.
> that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.
Not that I disagree with you here, but it is hard to square this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's limitless demand for software.
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Depends on the industry and product, as usual. On an large level, I do not think there's "too many engineers and not enough problems to be solved". Companies are simply hunkering down for a recession we can't say out loud.
Also wtf were we supposed to do? I graduated during the great recession. No one was hiring. Everyone from the president on down told us to learn to code. So we did.