I was at the early end of when programming was being pushed thing. Found a welding degree was an option.
Get a welding degree, welders will never go out. The 08 slump happened, and suddenly I was coming out of school requiring 2 years of work experience to get a job, but couldn’t get an entry level job because I was too experienced when the local factory moved to Mexico.
Moral of the story, the industries are not your friend and are happy to fuck you over no matter what you pursue.
I hate this article. We have tiktok and views and all the other bullshit.
Gotta say if you are posting on tiktok and using it I wouldn’t hire you.
But more importantly this trend was happening before AI. The layoffs are an adjustment, or more bluntly a chance to cut to shore up profits and defend mismanagement and bad decisions: like using AI as a sudden company resource.
It sucks, but the writing was on the wall that this field was saturated for a long time, and IT is cheap to outsource which doesn’t help.
There are so many bigger picture problems with American companies that articles like these just gloss over the them.
There is no better time than right now for computer Science students and laid off workers to try and form guilds and collectives (small businesses really) that are poised to come in and fix the inevitable mess that is going to follow. Either in the US or to help the EU move away from the US.
If you are profient at making videos (fuck the term content creator) now might be the time to consider making ads and copy that is 100 percent obviously human and sell your services to companies who inevitably are going to try to spin themselves as human in the next 2 to 5 years.
I have noticed the better colleges have been pushing the computer science kids to learn project management as either an ability to use while working in teams, or as a fallback option.
The plan was always to over saturate the market with coders so the big techs could lower their wages.
it dint work the way they did, they hired too many, and scrambling to use AI to lay them all off.
They told them to code so that they could steal their ideas and add them as “features” on their own platforms.
My favorite line was “All high school kids should learn to code.”. What? No they shouldn’t. Maybe a computer literacy course should be required, but there’s no reason for everyone on earth to know how to code.
They should know a little bit about coding. Not to become Devs, but just so they have an understanding of what it is and about how it makes the world work.
Hard disagree. Everyone should learn basic logic and how to do simple automations on the computer. It really is basic computer literacy. And conputers are a near and increasingly more so constant in every part of the economy.
Specialing in software engineering isnt needed, the same way everyone should basics about food and nutrition but not every needs to be a cheif.
Well, writing bash scripts is sometimes useful in everyday live.
Yeah no shit. This was the plan all along. Big tech wanted to flood the market with too much talent so they could lower pay for engineers. This was always the plan.
They never gave two shits about women in coding, or inner city coding caml’s. They wanted mass cheap labor.
The cherry on top is right as that labor was coming out they got a double whammy of AI too.
You give them too much credit, they’re idiots with no forethought and they’ve proven it countless times.
AI got conveniently into the mixed of hiring, by screening resumes too. for a while there were so many “coding bootcamps” you can sign up in person, im guessing they all went extinct when the pandemic/AI craze hit.
Then code for free. Open source is a huge threat to these fuckers that made you bust your asses and then NOT HIRE YOU ANYWAY.
They are hoping you just do something else. I say code something else and take their fucking power away.
A threat? They will be more than happy to take work done for free and use it for their own needs. I guess at least if it’s a copyleft license they can’t just outright steal it.
All the big tech companies are built on open source projects… No idea what the guy you replied to was on about.
Any useful thing you code will be used to feed the beast.
Usually companies avoid GPL code like a plague
That’s where the magic plagiarism LLM comes in to launder the code.
Company: “buy this code from us” Consumer: “no, the guy you stole from is giving it away for free. We’ll take from him directly and cut you out.” Company: Vaderno.wav
If the code is GPL they’ll generally be scared to use it. I agree with you for non-copyleft open source though
Yep, corporate software developer here and they’re scared shitless of incorporating anything gpl’d.
When all the valuable code is free, the price of valuable code will be 0.
People will only profit from the value of the code, not the creation/ownership of the code itself. LLMs seem like they’re dropping the cost of code creation significantly (50-90% so far)… impacted players should plan accordingly.
It’s a fundamentally different model, not a broken one. It will break a lot of businesses if they don’t adapt.
But they can, and do.
Slip a pointless easter egg into the code. Make sure that if you don’t know it’s there, it can only be found by careful examination. Then sue any company whose code displays the easter egg and didn’t follow the terms of the license, and you’re set for life.
Only if you can afford better lawyers than they can.
If you have a slam-dunk case, you can usually find a lawyer who’s willing to take their pay out of the winnings.
Certain areas of law have provisions for this, others don’t. GPL law tends toward the not very lucrative side of things. What are your monetary damages? Well, I was going to make $0, but they broke my terms so now my GPL software is better known but I still make $0 - compute damages please?
Dual licensing is a thing, so it’s not 0€$£. Also if they didn’t care for the license, it’s probably also not crediting you for your work, so your software isn’t even better known.
I was referring to AI scraping.
wait… it will be a matter of national security and like you know “you and what army”
Yeah, I thought that foolishness was behind us with the crypto export impossible to enforce rules, but it’s baaaack with AI.
Learn to code, then just make your own killer app to become big. Easy. /s
The jobs didn’t follow because “big tech” lost what was left of its collective mind and put their heads all the way up each others asses.
The jobs were never going to follow either way. It was a way to make more workers so they could pay everyone less. If there’s 100 people practically begging for your job for half the pay, good luck negotiating a raise.
What’s the word from “billionaires are job creators” people? Oh, yeah. Their the ones laying everyone off in order to use “AI”.
The amount of times people failed to undetstand economics at this point should be shammed about.
Wealth isn’t a matter of deserving it. Any wealth earned by entertaining certain elites visions of what you ought to do is and always will be a function of those elites discretionary spending, and thus always at their discretion.
If you are trying to convince a group of people to give you their wealth in exchange for something, the something is almost always something that is comparitvily easier for you to provide but more importantly something that group needs or wants.
If you spend 3 decades earning certification that you know something, great. What does that give someone? Nothing. It is at best a signifier that you have a comparitive advantage, but is that true, do they people giving their wealth to you belive that? If no to either, its probally not worth it.
Etc etc etc
This isnt just capitalism btw. This is true in intetpersonal relatiinships, mutual aid groups, intertribal bartering, etc.
Its true many must be dissapointed, but there are too many people just with no talent in the industry. i’m quite sure the good one still have very good jobs/
If you’re a half-decent developer AND can talk to people there are still lots of jobs. Roles that are pure coding have been shipped to Poland, India, and the Philippines. People forget that coding is only like 40% of a software project
Care to elaborate what Poland is doing on that list? Eastern European devs are qualified but just as pricey as those from the west.
“The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary,” Ms. Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif.
This has never ever been true for any job, especially at 21 years old.
I mean maybe there’s a rare trade that gives you the bick bucks from the get go, but even law practice and finance takes a lot of unpaid work to finally get properly paid.
Might not have been true, but has definitely been the narrative pedalled to young people for years.
There is always some career that kids get pushed into with a promise of “jobs in demand” and “guaranteed salary”.
Yep… I didn’t mean they weren’t lied to… But you’re right, they were lied to.
It was true around the .com boom, and the advice might have been good for a few years, but like everything else: following yesterday’s trends will get you lost in a crowd of the clueless and under-informed.
In the late 1990s our MSCE graduates were starting at $70K which is easily in six figure territory today when adjusted for inflation.
Six figures is far from what it used to be.
In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.
During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn’t even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.
And even if you weren’t getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+
Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn’t “that much” money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.
Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.
This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it’s a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won’t have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.
That’s finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.
Additionally, just “knowing how to code” has never been an actual ticket to success.
Software engineers are hired to solve problems, not write code. If you can write code but can’t solve problems and create innovative solutions you’re no better than a monkey.
Yeah there’s a lot of people that “learned to code” that never got anything out of it.
i always found those places with coding camps odd, how are they going to apply it to a job, im not in tech.
“Go do what we told a billion others to do! Don’t break the mold!” Yea, big shock there.
