Comment by roenxi
9 days ago
Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.
You are behind the times... Big Tech lost that luster more than a decade ago when they turned into your standard cookie-cutter enterprise types.
So... what's actually changed? Is the pay no good now?
They lost their engineering aspect and are normal businesses now that treat their employees like replaceable cogs and cost centers like all enterprise shops. Nothing particularly bad about tech as they pay better than most other enterprise shops. It is more that they are no longer the tech/engineering led places they once were.
My friends who have been there for many years are overall very wealthy and continue to earn enormous amounts. So the pay continues to be good.
it's still ridiculously good compared to the alternatives, IME it's that a huge cohort of people came into tech during COVID and that was not a normal market. Now things are tightening up and the sense of entitlement is on display.
I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.
Compared to, say, construction work... it's kinda OK. It won't mess your body up as badly, you do get to stay out of the rain, and it pays about the same.
There's a huge difference, though, between tech jobs. Some are Jira mills, where you spend your days picking up Jira tickets, completing them, arguing about sprints and story points, soullessly going through to motions of writing software without any of the joy of writing software. Some are more joyful, where you actually take ownership of large chunks of software that people actually use. Some are further along that spectrum and you're the only person who knows how the software works and life is a continual stressful fight against stupid business decisions while keeping the plates spinning.
And as for anyone anywhere getting involved... no, not really. I would say it's harder to get a job in Big Tech than it is to get a construction job, for sure. And you're more reliably going to have a solid income as a plasterer or bricklayer than as a programmer these days.
Heck no! Working in tech is an absolute nightmare! The pay is excellent which is why people do it, but the actual work environment sucks. Agile and modern performance review culture means that you are constantly pressured to work faster and churn out more code to keep your job (quality of course is never a priority). The "shift left" movement means that more and more work (testing, infrastructure, product management) gets heaped on developers plates. The burnout rate is sky high.
Tech is an awful industry to live in. It just happens to be one of the few jobs in America that can reliably provide enough money for a decent quality of life. Whether you can actually enjoy that life is more up in the air.
yall are babies, 99% of jobs on earth suck ass but they dont pay half a million
Neither do most tech jobs.
When my dad worked as a butcher, he would cut himself all the time and the company was obligated to provide him mesh gloves to prevent such things, even though he was too stupid to use them.
Meanwhile in tech, we all sit in a chair 8 hours a day, something well known to cause real harms, and a creature that was never ever built to do Knowledge work is encouraged to run that system full bore for most of the day, even off hours, and when that inevitably harms you, burns you out, you get kicked to the curb.
When meat packing plants did this kind of thing 100 years ago, unionization was prominent and extremely effective at making sure my dad would be provided those gloves decades later. When unionization comes up for tech workers, a bunch of morons who are apparently incapable of reading history books insist that they negotiate better than any union could (laughable) because they make $300k a year while their employer pulls in millions a year per head.
It's truly astonishing just how little you have to trickle down to some code monkey to get them to think they are winning, and be willing to work against their own interests.
That union sure would have been helpful dealing with AI bullshit.
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Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? It's more profitable if you don't have to treat your employees well.
> Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks?
... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? Software engineers have always wanted to automate everything. The advice has been "automate it!" for the last 30, 40 years.
It is different that the steamroller is heading for our own domain this time, but really. The industry isn't doing anything new or out of character. Of course management were going to automate software engineering at the first opportunity. Any software engineer would. One of the things I've discovered since Claude crossed 1,500 on CodeArena is I don't even like writing code. Waste of time, writing good-enough code is a machines job.
> ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared?
Of course not. Paying people has always been undesirable for the people paying. Software has been an exceptionally cushy job for an exceptionally long time, so people are exceptionally excited to pay less.
Since the act of typing has never been the bulk of a software engineer's time -- the act of understanding has been -- the way that AI speeds up development is by allowing the shortcutting of understanding. The understanding of details is what has historically made software engineers expensive and difficult to replace. Any idiot can type fast, but typing fast doesn't someone a software engineer. The excitement is about automating the understanding of problems, because understanding is expensive.
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I don’t know where you’re getting the work is light part. It’s long hours and incredibly stressful work. You’ll probably never hit this level of stress in years of trades work.
it's pretty team/org dependent. on the aggregate i suspect big tech works pretty light hours compared to other jobs in the same pay scale
I would invite you to come experience the trades for a bit, particularly in senior positions.
Having worked at two big tech companies, I’d say one was the most laid-back, stress free environment I’ve ever worked in, and the other was pretty middle of the road.
It is obviously a range. Most of my personal firends work a couple hours a day and get pampered.
Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.
The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.
There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.
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Or because the logistics behind scaling are much much much easier than any physical product.
Why do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.
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