How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status
How working for Big Tech lost 'dream job' status
Mass layoffs have eroded the shine of the tech industry.
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Working for these companies lost any charm, when it stopped being about innovation, and working on cool things, and started being about min-maxing profits, at the cost abusing workers until they are suicidal
Especially considering most fun innovations get scrapped either way.
Most of the "fun innovations" are awesome ideas that would get a small startup a ton of business and make them widely successful. But the problem is that these companies are so large, that even those successful innovations barely make an impact on the company. So many initiatives at these companies have to be pitched as huge and game-changing in order to be funded in the first place. Which means they need to hire huge staffs, to justify their importance.
The managers make extremely optimistic forecasts: they have to, to get the project funded at all. Then, when the project is successful (but not as successful as promised) the bean counters scale it back to the size it should have been in the first place. So the headline is all these layoffs, when the real problem is that these companies are too darn big to operate efficiently.
I believe it also is for creating hype among investors. “Look at this new amazing product lineup we got! Self driving cars! Invest in us before those huge things turn into reality!”
And to get on the more conspiratorial side, it might also be to dry up the market of talent. It’s hard for competitors to make a product if all talent is already doing cool stuff elsewhere.
I, too, am a, very big, fan, of commas
That's what happens, when the two grading choices in your language class are either 0%, or 100%
Wasn't it always like that?
You always needed the money, but imo it seems like the culture has been shifting away from making tech products to gaming profits, in a way that seems more unrelated to the product than ever before.
Like my company has had two rounds of layoffs last year, mass exoduses, but all I see from the Bamboo HR emails is us bringing on enterprise partner managers, growth hackers, etc.
Meanwhile the actual product is maintained by an ever dwindling rosters of devs, many of whom are certainly at least soft looking for other work.
Depends on how you put it. Realistically, to a degree. The issue is that with any new business type, they are forced to prove their worth at first, so it's always ran by passionate people. Later on, it all slowly transitions into the clusterfuck we have today
And it's not from today, in the 90s a friend of mine was hired for IBM, imagine!!! I don't think he made a year there, it was already horrible.
Friend of mine had a heart attack in his early thirties working for AT&T in the nineties. I ended up in the ER with acute chest pains working for UBS.
These days, I'm generally able to weather the daily shit storms, but I'm mostly dead inside just waiting for the sweet, sweet relief of the real mortal deal.
I kinda wonder what the machine is going to have at its disposal to extract more out of me after I've left this mortal coil. Reanimated labor I suppose.
I got a pretty decent raise a couple weeks ago. As I usually do, I expressed my appreciation, but added the commentary that when a hundred percent of my time away from work is spent bedridden from exhaustion, what's the difference between an $X thousand dollar raise and an $X million dollar raise.
devs are such babies. I went to school and got licensed as an a&p (9 part proctored exam with written, practical, and oral components) and was working in the weather for $16 an hour, working my way up and dodging layoffs (which dont make it in the news because blue collar) to 25 an hour after years and years.
This is working as an aircraft mechanic, at various levels. This is a high hazard environment filled with carcinogens (solvents like methyl ethyl ketone), fall hazards, operating heavy equipment.
I got qualifications like engine run and taxi qualifications that result in $0.25 raises.
Mandatory overtime, busting knuckles, freezing in the cold, boiling in the heat, standing on concrete all day.
Oh and if I fuck up, planes crash, people die, and I go to jail.
I got a job as a software developer in the same area working for a medium sized company no one has heard of (300 person engineering department) and I work 8 hours a week, with no deadlines, at home, and make 3 times the salary. The worst I have to do with is identity politics and stupid meetings, 🤷.
These jobs are absolutely dream jobs for people who have perspective on what bad jobs actually are.
“I’ve had worse jobs, and my current job is unrealistically laid back for the field being talked about. Everyone else is a baby.”
This is what you sound like.
Here’s a thought: Different people have different experiences in similar jobs.
Here’s another: Different people experience things differently, because they are different people.
As someone who has worked in fast food, warehouses, and woodworking: I know how privileged I am to be a software developer.
Ive seen kids right out of college get hired and make more than I did, despite my having 20+ more years of experience … just because I’m self taught with no college. And then they bitch about how bad the job is.
Insane.
There's also the little detail that I'm not a dev. But let the guy have his moment I guess.
I am so much NOT a dev, that it took me a minute to even register what you were trying to say. I thought of a college classmate whose name is Dev.
I too have had my time in hard physical labor.
But you do you. Enjoy your Internet sanctimony.
I wasn't attacking you, or even referring to you as a dev, though it would have been a fair assumption regardless given the topic at hand.
I also wasn't claiming 'hard labor' is better or anything, just that there is a large discrepancy between the quality of life and work of the jobs the article is referring to and the jobs that the majority of people actually work.
Many software developers need perspective on the privilege they have, this is coming from someone who has worked a variety of jobs in different industries, attended trade school and university, and is currently a developer.
Fwiw I was generally agreeing with you.
This. It used to be the dream because we believed in what technofuturism had to offer. We believed in instant access to knowledge and we thought we could all make it cheap enough that it would be an uplift across humanity.
We came up with so many cool things in the process. Little did we know we were simply building the foundations of our dystopian cyberpunk corpo future.
"We just wanted ice cream cones and fast cars" (South park).