> There's just too many devs chasing too few jobs imo, programmers have become somewhat of a commodity and it's going to get much worse now with interest rates higher and staying higher.
Programmers, sure. Engineers? Everyone seems to be fighting to hire them.
Writing code from a detailed spec is the easy part. Back in the days, people were doing it directly in assembly before someone came up with a compiler. When the great offshoring craze started, suddenly everyone was now an "architect" writing these specs and submitting them to an "AI" (called a programmer in India) to be translated into (sometimes working!) code.
So the coding part was cheap and easy, but getting the detailed spec hasn't gotten any easier than it was. And the industry learned (mostly thanks to FAANG) that the best people to write these specs were also capable of coding them faster than by splitting teams in two and having the actual programming be done elsewhere.
> At the same time there are professions like child care, education, healthcare where personnel is always needed and overworked.
Then maybe they should make these jobs more like engineering. Where's the Google of child care?
Seriously, one of the big caveat of education and child care is that comp is on a pay scale, voted by the public, and you get paid for years of services and not results. So the teacher that can't get fired because of union rules, that keeps getting complains after complains and doesn't care will get more money than you and will get first pick for any assignments.
Thanks to over-regulation, healthcare is by far the most dysfunctional field of work in the western hemisphere. Turf wars between professions, bloated administrations and out of control spending is the norm. Most of the overwork is due to completely dysfunctional management.
> Who are all the people companies like Meta, Alphabet, Amazon are firing?
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
Programmers, sure. Engineers? Everyone seems to be fighting to hire them.
Writing code from a detailed spec is the easy part. Back in the days, people were doing it directly in assembly before someone came up with a compiler. When the great offshoring craze started, suddenly everyone was now an "architect" writing these specs and submitting them to an "AI" (called a programmer in India) to be translated into (sometimes working!) code.
So the coding part was cheap and easy, but getting the detailed spec hasn't gotten any easier than it was. And the industry learned (mostly thanks to FAANG) that the best people to write these specs were also capable of coding them faster than by splitting teams in two and having the actual programming be done elsewhere.
> At the same time there are professions like child care, education, healthcare where personnel is always needed and overworked.
Then maybe they should make these jobs more like engineering. Where's the Google of child care?
Seriously, one of the big caveat of education and child care is that comp is on a pay scale, voted by the public, and you get paid for years of services and not results. So the teacher that can't get fired because of union rules, that keeps getting complains after complains and doesn't care will get more money than you and will get first pick for any assignments.
Thanks to over-regulation, healthcare is by far the most dysfunctional field of work in the western hemisphere. Turf wars between professions, bloated administrations and out of control spending is the norm. Most of the overwork is due to completely dysfunctional management.