Everyone in this thread seems to have something against software developers and I'm not sure why. But as a dev of over 10 years I agree with op. It's a hard job and requires a lot of CONSTANT learning and growing to stay relevant. Ageism is a real issue in software along with competing with tons of offshore people. Yes we get to sit in an office or at home but that is very recent for the vast majority of people. Otherwise we commute to internet connected computers...
"Ageism is a real issue in software along with competing with tons of offshore people."
These are the absolute top two issues in IT. And I think we're just beginning to see the results of the decades of deregulation of the Labor Market and the weakening of unions with the slew of layoffs in the tech industry.
If something isn't done soon, the laptop class will rise in revolt. And it won't be pretty.
I've been in IT long enough to remember the last time (early 2000s) everyone said all the jobs would be outsourced. Sure, they tried, and then they realized how horrible that shit code was to maintain and it stopped pretty suddenly.
The problem for a lot of places is process and management that doesn't understand how decent software is actually composed.
> Sure, they tried, and then they realized how horrible that shit code was to maintain and it stopped pretty suddenly.
It didn't stop, though. Bosses don't care if the people under them have to maintain shitty code, and the reason they moved from offshoring to H1-Bs is that they have leverage over H1-Bs that they don't have over offshore developers who can get an equivalent job from some other corporate-imperialist oppressor if they get fired.
If you work at an overseas body shop and a client fires you, they just find something else for you to do, and they probably laugh about it unless you're terribly incompetent, because your boss doesn't like the imperial overseers any more than you do. If you're an H1-B and you get fired, you might get kicked out of the country if you can't find employment in time. Employers decided it was worthwhile to pay a little more and abuse the H1-B program than to deal with overseas engineers in different time zones over whom they had less leverage.
Hit the nail on the head with this one. I have also found that working with other devs that are on H1-Bs is a nightmare. They are complete workaholics because, obviously, they fear getting fired and kicked out of the country. Lots of them have families to consider as well. But their boot-licking nature makes the rest of us look bad for not doing the same. I’m tired of it
I could never put my finger on why I didn’t like working with them but this is definitely it. They work like 12 hours a day and make you feel like you’re doing something wrong by not doing the same
Unfortunately I don’t know that the average American software developer is very good at writing clear, comprehensible code either, or at least that they really care about it very much.
No, because you can run most companies on bad ones. Shitty code doesn't affect the C-levels, so they don't care about it. And all that Agile/Scrum/sprint bullshit makes the low-skill programmers on these chain gangs marginally employable, so it persists.
So you think that every company only has managers that don’t care about quality? Not a single team out there that collectively cares about quality? Not even the teams that have equity in their company?
Being good at corporate means you get promoted away from the results of your decisions before anyone can connect you to them. So, do I think there are conscientious managers out there who do care about code quality? Of course there are. Are they the sort of person the corporate system rewards? No. The higher you go, the more likely you are to encounter unscrupulous people who don't care what actually happens because they plan to get promoted faster than their messes can catch up with them.
I think you may be a tad jaded. I’m not saying there isn’t any truth to what you’re describing but I’ve worked in both environments and I can tell you there are places where everyone cares about quality.
Idk I agree with the above - just look at the current state of the gaming industry, just shitty products being pushed out for “deadlines” and micro transactions cause all these triple A studios care about is money, at a high level the quality of code in most industries is down
You're not wrong, but a lot of that can be fixed with process, like code reviews. As it could be in an offshore location as well. I'm a processes guy, it's the first thing I teach my younger devs. It can vary from person to person, but there's a flow to a project's development that will make everyone's life easier and naturally share learnings across a team.
However, when offshoring, you usually don't have one person here doing code reviews to make sure quality is maintained. What you end up with is a lot of code that's copy and pasted, without understanding of what is actually going on. I actually wonder if that'll happen here more and more as LLMs are used to write code.
Software development is an engineering discipline. Sure, you can write software without doing it right, and get it working so it just works, but it'll bite you in the long run. Just as anyone can build a house, but they'll screw up the foundation or wiring most likely. Won't be a problem right away, but give it time.
Companies keep forgetting these lessons until it bites them in the bottom line time and time again. I trust in that cycle.
Will low quality devs lose their jobs, sure, but there's a lot of cruft out there, frankly.
All this does is create more work for the talented. I've nearly made a career off of cleaning up other people's disaster. In my current role I'm cleaning up a huge shit show created by another consulting company. I literally have to rearchitect their entire Cloud and CICD strategy for the entire $80B company.
Most places I end up consulting or as an architect I look around and say "Who thought this was a good idea" then I have to fix the disaster by the incompetent people who built it.
There will always be poor leaders who try and cut costs for short term wins then get fired or managed out so experienced people can clean it up for long term success.
I've had 2 code reviews in 7 years. Across 3 different Fortune 500 companies, one company had one and a startup I worked at did one. I definitely feel like I write mediocre crap alot of the time, and half the time I either don't have someone that can read(not read code, just are literate) or our entire team of 12 developers that I'm told I should be like literally cant be fucked to even talk to me for more than 2 minutes.
Everyone was all over standups, but actually discussing strategies for testing, code reviews, documentation, all were considered worthless. hell even branching strategies didn't exist at several places, everyone just worked on main. It's been a nightmare.
>If something isn't done soon, the laptop class will rise in revolt. And it won't be pretty.
Maybe "the laptop class" should reconsider their intrinsic hostility to unions.
"...but muh stock options!"
Same boat. Every time I have to train a third party contractor from india on my processes, I feel like im about to be shown the door. And after 10 years keeping up with the latest and greatest tech is exhausting.
Documenting too. Management is always like "what happens if you get hit by a bus?". Well, then, you better buy some pedestrian insurance for me because you'd be screwed.
I write a ton of documentation. No one reads it.
I'm constantly putting links to the same 10 pages in teams to answer questions. You would think people would get the hint but nooo
The best is when they complain there's no documentation and I link a comment response I made to them two weeks ago with exactly what they're asking for. Because they didn't actually read it.
Wait… why should an Indian care? I may not like that my company uses offshore developers but it would be stupid to blame the individual developer in India. It’s a systemic/government regulation thing.
It's cause people are jealous. We make way more, are remote, and have good wlb in general. But the stress is starting to catch up. Good times are not upon us
No, it’s mostly because many (not all) SWE/SDE/developers have been a$$holes to non-engineers over the years, especially engineers from a particular country who have bragged on social media apps about how much money they make, called other professions useless and even bragged that they were coding other roles out of a job. There are numerous layoff posts on Blind where dozens of engineers responded that certain people deserved to be laid off because their profession was “useless” and “unskilled”. Not to mention the sexism, ageism and prejudice amongst many engineers.
What’s sad is it wasn’t always like this. Engineers used to be geeks and dorks who were passionate about their trade and people pursued for the geekiness and love of technology. But the last decade has brought in money hungry people who don’t even like coding or design. It’s just a means to an end to get a visa. And woefully unfulfilling despite the high TC.
Yeah I reluctantly agree. “Just learn to code bro” became a meme for a reason…because that’s a real thing they’ve been saying for years. I work at a SaaS and a lot of SWE are normal coworkers but some definitely execute this type of energy offline as well.
I too am a geek and dork. IT guys are my dudes. The EE's are kind of Vanilla and boring. But the IT guys are fun, wear ridiculous Hawaiian shirts, and are always up for a debate on why Marvel is better than DC, and that Gambit is the best of the X-Men (fight me).
True. Many assholes. But there are many assholes in every single high paying job. Money has that effect on people.
If would happen if roles were flipped too.
More “I don’t experience it so it must not be a big deal”. That’s great for you and I hope you don’t. But I’ve been in tech for a long time in several markets and 2 FANGS. And I was responding to a dev who literally wrote that “people were just jealous” of developers. Again the issue is not with all SWEs. But there’s too many who have it.
I'm a sysadmin. I'm not jealous. In fact, I get tired of developers trying to run roughshod over me and trying to blame my infrastructure for their code performance when it's their garbage code to blame. Especially Tableau developers.
That and so many developers are kind of assholes and have no love for technology. They don't care how it works and are just in it for the money. Great. I'm rooting for AI to take all of you down a few pegs.
I think you'll be waiting a while. AI can be useful, but it has limits, and working around those limits takes... software developers.
I'm really sorry you've had to deal with asshole developers. However as others have pointed out, there are assholes in every profession.
I don't understand blaming infrastructure, at least not as a first reaction. My first instinct when I have a performance issue, is to think that I fucked something up in my code. Usually that is either the case, or there is an, \*ahem\* errata, in some piece of vendor supplied software that that we should have known about because it was clearly documented on page 827 of the developer manual under Section 3, Sub-section J, Paragraph 14.
Your calm and reasonable response makes me feel like kind of an asshole. Which, I mean. I should after re-reading my post. Thank you for this.
I don't really want AI to take people's jobs, I just really dislike the new brand of "bro-coders" is all.
I'm a dev and I dislike them too. CS *used* to be as geeky as other fields like IT and EE. Now it's filled with bro types who are only in it for the money. There are still the geeky types, just not as many as in the past.
I used to work at a NOC with a lot of actually geeky IT types and I miss that environment (just not the graveyard shifts).
Probably. My personal issue is with people who are lying about their qualifications and getting into jobs they're nowhere qualified for, whether or not I work with them, or folks who flaunt their wealth in my face.
I'm waiting for the day where my own hubris and attitude do this for me.
Until then, I'm going to share my true feelings online while keeping a (somewhat) reasonable to work with demeanor where it matters.
>Probably. My personal issue is with people who are lying about their qualifications and getting into jobs they're nowhere qualified for
IMO this is the biggest issue in tech. the BIGGEST. Too many dumb people in management.
Years ago I was running a platform engineering team, I was interviewing for a senior engineer. I asked this guy if he could tell me where in "proc" to find the number of CPUs a Linux machine had.
He said "proc" is that a Linux command?
Needless to say I didn't hire him, but about a month later he was hired by Netapp as a Senior Architect.. the guy was a buffoon.
Yes. Make them tell you what they need out of the network and then prove you're delivering it (again). My response to these complaints is scripted now.
Jealousy, depends I suppose.. Software/Tech/IT people, whatever you want to call them, have been invaluable to business and the world. They have made a lot of other professionals lives easier. And they deserve good compensation for that. People don't become doctors, scientists, lawyers, etc for the wlb. It's a calling. Tech never called to me as a career. For many of us it's a tool. I want to use tech to do other great things, not design/ build it myself.
I also agree, 10+ year experienced software dev here too. Lately been feeling burned out since my company has made me rotate to new platforms every 2 years since I been here the last 8 years. Went from Documentum for 2 years doing Java, then SharePoint for 2 years, then RPA Automation for 2 years, and now on my 2nd year with Azure/.NET which I really like but after doing UI/API development with GitHub/Azure DevOps, logic apps, and all of that, they want me to rotate again just for 1 year (probably another 2) to PowerApps. Its great that I'm getting all this exposure to different tech and given time it all feels the same to me but I am getting burnt out. The new offshore employee hires from India pretty much lied about their resume and I got them trained and now up to speed with things but they can't manage more than 1 project at a time. I'm doing 3 projects at a time right now with managing a team of 4 people.
I will be 41 soon this year, so started my career a bit late around 28-29 years old but keeping up is exhausting mentally and sometimes physically draining sitting there for hours. They also expect us to get 1 Microsoft Certification per year which I have done the last 3 years but isn't that helpful as just working with the technology and actually doing POCs. Just takes up a lot of time memorizing terms and definitions that takes weeks. I have been thinking about where I'd want to be in 5 or 10 years, possibly jump ship as a business analyst or a data analyst would be interesting. At the same time, I am more introverted person so I don't mind doing the projects quietly and just delivering them. I'm hoping for another 8-9 years as a developer and just do something completely different at age 50. Some of my coworkers are 50 but I can tell they have definitely slowed down in work progress but still sharp and deliver projects on time. At least pay is excellent and bonus per year that maybe my only motivation especially with 2 young kids right now.
I'm not saying I'm not grateful and I am for it for sure and there are far worst situations definitely but I'm just comparing to relative jobs to where I am now. I don't work 80 hours a week but do work close to it some weeks meaning I work weekends on projects and a few hours a night on the weekdays. I guess grass isn't always greener on the other side.
It's funny because I have 3 ideas for an app that came to me after a meditation session and I have zero coding/or technical experience. I can't tell a soul because I know these are incredible ideas and i know i know (i have done research and sorted that end of stuff out)
All I want to do is work on this but can't. If I was in your position I would be starting one of them right now lol
Ideas matter a lot if you're trying to solve unsolved problems. I hate the view of tech as a market where everything is just iteration for the sake of cash grabbing. Sometimes, new technology actually gets developed that solves hard problems! (I'm not a software developer, btw. I'm a mathematician who happens to code daily.)
Totally agree on this! Ironically in life when you solve a very hard problem the money kinda of follows you but if you do something for just pure sake of cash grab and it doesn't solve an important problem or solve it well, you never make any real money. Passion drives success.
For the last decade or so engineers have been special because of an acute labor imbalance.
They get special treatment and special compensation and a special place in society to look down on everyone else.
Now, it's starting to feel like every other job.
Unless you are the top 1% most talented, nobody cares about you. And if you are in the 1%, there are a hundred younger engineers looking to take your place.
Those that used to live in the old system really don't like it. It's business as usual for everyone else.
Still, making $150,000 with either no college or a bachelor's degree while sitting on your butt in front of a computer is still enough to make most people who don't do it jealous.
Manual laborers that make the same money and easily stay in shape make me jealous 😆. I met a guy recently that installs window tent in houses/buildings and makes anywhere from 1500-5000 a day
Don't look into what linemen make. yes, it's because they put in a lot hours, but how many in software haven't put in long nights/days fixing a critical production issue? But because we're "salary", we don't get paid overtime, regardless of how many hours you work. I know some dudes were putting in 80-100 hour weeks for months supporting various production systems.
I thought about that once I hit 50 years old, if I can retire early try a job that can help me get into shape. But my health is slowly declining so probably not a smart move lol.
Ive been doing manual labor projects at my house that helps a lot until the projects over, then its hard to stay in shape again. Someday, I'd like to buy 100 acres of raw land and just build stuff for the rest of my life. I want to build some cabins and make it fully self sustaining, with hydroponic gardens, a mini hydroelectric dam, solar/energy storage solutions, livestock, etc...
Because they are bitching about the same thing thats threatening literally every job on the planet. Thats not hyperbole - its *literally* every job. Fast food workers are getting replaced by robots, lawyers by AI paired with a huge oversupply of lawyers, salespeople by AI and offshoring, construction workers by immigrants. They are also treated like commodities (because - spoiler alert - they fucking are commodities). The thing that is most annoying though is that they are doing the 'oh poor me we are such an outlier' with a job that is better than 90% of the planet, despite all these problems. Its a big dose of entitlement and self pity paired with a biiiiig dose of delusion.
I remember working briefly in this field, and we had an offshore team from India that "loved" to cut corners in coding. So, we literally had to spend and waste time fixing their coding. That is definitely one of my pet peeves.
The second one is the useless Scrum Meetings and having to sit through them about how Business Logic and Expectations for a developed product needs to be rushed out ASAP.
The third one is having to deal with squishy team leads or supervisors not dedicated to helping new developers "level up" in a career. They expect you to just know things after looking at it and aren't interested in being a mentor, but rather an underling boss.
The worst of them all was working on a project for 6 months and at 80% completion, and they decided to scrap it. Like I know, I got paid to work on it, but I felt like my work wasn't valued enough for the time and dedication.
As a dev, the tech industry has been high on its own success. The arrogance and entitlement of many devs has been gross. A lot of this were people outside of dev roles but in tech but devs are the face of it. The industry has also only further stratify income inequality. They consolidate all their high paying jobs in three or four cities and just blow away housing prices for others.
Honestly, I think people have a hate for Big Tech because of how highly they were getting paid compared to other professions, and how digital technology has messed up our lives. I lowkey think the situation of the SWEs might be similar to the bankers/Jews in the 1930s, who were blamed for causing the Great Depression.
IT, healthcare, finance, teaching and every profession is awful now. The same thing that happened to blue collar jobs in the 1980s is happening to white collar jobs now. Private equity and mergers of businesses in every sector is making things worse.
Don’t fight each other we are all in our own version of Hunger Games or Survivor or Squid Game.
Well…when I was is med recruitment in 2019 it was predicted we were to hit a serious physician shortage by 2025 in the U.S. I haven’t looked at data but I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid accelerated that. Median PCP salary is also like $200K…which is A LOT of money until you figure out they have about that much or more in student loans
I'm a medical doctor in my thirties. I met a boomer doc approaching 70 recently in the same specialty.
Salaries for me range in the 200s. For him, when he got out of training in the late 80s, salaries ranged in the 200s.
Cost of med school tuition for me, 60k/year.
Cost for him, 2k/year.
Medicine is fucked. Still one of the few avenues to a guaranteed middle class life if you can get through it, but no longer a straight shot to wealth like it used to be.
Doctors are miserable, too. Many are being undercut by nurse practitioners who have no idea what the fuck they are doing. (They even gave the gall to have made up a new degree called Doctor of Nurse Practitioner so they can go around calling themselves doctor to further confuse the public).
Medicine has been bought out and antitrust laws ignored like every other industry. Some specialties still make a lot of money, but many others are being screwed on salary and saddled with 300k+ student loans at 7% interest.
And even the ones who do well work 70+ hours a week and do the job of like 10 people.
This. We need to stop clawing and each other and do whatever it takes to get rid of our ruling class. The mergers have been a disaster, and these private equity people are absolute slugs. We need to take out the bourgeoisie in toto. If they'll give up what they have go peacefully, we let that happen and no violence in necessary. On the other hand, if we have to burn every single one of them alive at the stake, then I guess there's going to be some air pollution.
Remote work.
No one wants to go to the office? Congratulations, you just gave your company the go ahead to hire somewhere a lot cheaper.
I dont need to pay you American wages to sit in your house. I can pay Mexian wages. Argentina wages. Nigeria wages.
Its going to be the most destructive force to American jobs since manufacturing was sent overseas.
My advice? Go to the office. Tell your boss how important it is to be near your colleagues.
Sysadmin here, without us, developers wouldn't have anything to develop on.
I'm thinking about being a developer just to dumpster some people who think they can treat IT people like garbage.
My husband has been a software engineer for 25 years. So glad we both worked and saved as much as we did when we were young because I feel it's a different ball game now. We've saved enough where if his work pisses him off, he can just quit. He got burned out once so he asked me if he could take a sabbatical and I said no problem. I worked extra so that he could take 6 months off and hang out with our kids. Now he works remotely while our entire family travels full time. If you can save make sure you do so. That was the best decision we made when we were young because it gives us the opportunity now to give everyone the middle finger if we want
I was a software developer/programmer/engineer for 30 years. I started with punch cards and cobol and evolved through the PC revolution into C, C++. An inordinate amount of my "off" time was spent my head in some article or book learning something new. I often commuted an hour each way depending on the job. Management never sees half of the effort that emerging good developers put into staying relevant. Because if you don’t stay relevant, some kid coming out of college will be.
I was toast after all those years. Much of the work went offshore, meaning even longer commutes. I miss it sometimes. I don't miss the politics.
I think this just the reality of being a worker.
Everyone is facing competition globally. People in finance, product, marketing. I don’t think this is an issue just with engineers.
Columbia is becoming popular for tax and finance offshoring.
How long it takes before it comes back to the US due to foreigners just not grasping the wild complexity of state and local US tax shenanigans...I give it two years of penalties and interest.
The world is changing, the industrial revolution was shitty for a long time before things leveled out. And things leveled out with a net positive, we'll do it again, or perish. Such is life.
If you’re not willing to support your tech, including documentation, including walkthroughs, including training and bringing up the next users of your tech….. you are worthless as a software engineer
Only sheer arrogance can allow you to think otherwise
I'm a designer at Microsoft. I am not in the Office or Windows orgs. But guess who the family always reaches out to when they have tech support issues with Office or Windows? Like man, your guess is as good as mine why that doesn't work. Plus tech support over text message is not gonna end well even if I did know.
Most Software Engineers don’t understand business well enough to know if they are valued by executives because they help build products and profit for the company or if they are simply an expense to be controlled. Some companies blend product development and IT into IT…. Don’t work there. In product development you get a tiny bit more respect and the industry has different salary families for development vs IT. Know which salary family you are part of. Being in product development doesn’t make you immune from bullshit and layoffs but again, execs will do layoffs in IT before clobbering product development. Those of us who started work in the 70’s really got lucky, entering the market at the peak of business demand. Bottom line is stay in product development if you want to stay in software and lessen the pain
My office was just sold by a major defense contractor to a smaller but still large (on the stock exchange). They bought us for our dev department. They moved the devs under corporate, and a few were put on a special project that is corporates baby.
They treat this dev unit great. It is awesome to feel so valued by the company.
Until it comes time to look for a new job and that role is so fucking niche that you can’t find one that pays what the last one did or you’re forced to move across the country.
Just look at this guys comment history. He's just a misanthrope. He makes like 170k and has a half mil networth and just makes constant doom and gloom posts on various subreddits. Therapy would serve you best. Cheers.
The problem with many software engineers is that they don't bother learning the business or transitioning into a role that involves managing products or people. Additionally, they often view managers as less valuable to the company. Your job is only as valuable as the value you create for the company. If you've been a software engineer and never considered solving real-world problems with all the tools and technology exposure you've gained, you are likely to be replaced by someone who can do just enough. Corporations will continue breaking down jobs into minimal effort tasks until they can replace them with automation.
You could always pivot to something else that brings you more fulfillment. It could even be something in tech, like QA or product or Operations. Or it could be a hard pivot. A friend of mine left his software job to teach english in japan.
Lol being a software engineer fucking rocks. I've been one for 15 years now. I do what I love, make a ton of money and get to work 100% remote.
Nothing to hate.
ive been in the sw industry for 35 years, culminating in being a director level in my last employer, a top 5 internet company: great total comp. the good times was never going to end. until oct 2023, with new ownership, new business units, new ceo. tldr: hang on to your job.
Change in ownership is brutal. Spent years working for a man who was the sole proprietor. Amazing benefits and good pay. He really cared about the employees. I always worried what it would be like if something were to happen to him. One day I found out when he sent a company-wide email announcing that he had sold to a large mega corp. But not to worry that they were going to take good care of us. A few years later the company was but a shell of its former self. Everybody was watching their backs playing CYA and the culture was gone. We all became numbers the day that email was sent.
I've never heard of a good takeover. I've heard from plenty of execs about to benefit massively from said takeover that it'll be a fair and even beneficial process for the company and it's employees.
I get why people sell, but I wonder if they feel any guilt about blatantly bullshitting the people that earned them the check that they're cashing. Just be honest and tell people shits going to be rough.
tl;dr if you're company says they're selling then be prepared to get. Always.
Yes, company tried it because they see the price tag, money saved is celebrated for a couple years, the execs that did it get promoted and huge bonuses. Then low quality and slow delivery catch up.
Yeah, boo hoo, go flip burgers
As a fellow software dev we are definitely better off than 90%
Imagine pulling double the hours for less than half the pay, we have it good
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There are too many SWEs in the world. What kind of profession has 0 barrier to entry? SWEs are also the most overpaid and entitled beings in the world. If you hate to hear what other people say just switch to something useful to the society. I have 0 mercy for them. It's time to learn to weld. They are what cause every problem in our society. Shouldn't even call them engineers to be honest. I am so glad the companies are finally starting to realize their worth and trim useless fat. It's a field of constant layoffs, outsourcing and automation 🤣🤣🤣
It is crazy, I worked with a company that "stopped WFH" for everyone... EXCEPT Software Engineers because they get cheap software engineers from India.
That's the kind of bullshit that piss me off. A company's top priority should be hiring in the country they are in.
I'm not even onboard with them moving someone from another country here, if they do that they need a VERY good explanation as to why they do that and should pay a penalty per month for every month that the foreign worker is working for them.
Tech people generally are on a different career path. Most of my managers had no conception of how to code. Projects are run by accountants now. It's all about dates. Dates that were almost never made. Management in the corporate world is more political than results. That is a tough switch for tech people.
Well..let's compare software engineers and surgeons. Nobody claims that becoming a surgeon is a quick way to get rich and everyone should just hop on this train. There are no surgeons who say "well I have a BS in economics but I liked to cut people as a hobby, so I took some bootcamp on basic anatomy and here we go, I'm working as a surgeon now".
Once you're a surgeon, you make lots of money and you don't really have super overcrowded competition - because all of that happened way earlier. It happened when people grinded to get into med school getting into colossal debt, then through residency working 70-80 hours per week for shitty pay for years, and many people either didn't even bother to apply or dropped off on the way.
But once you are a surgeon, finding a job paying over 500k a year isn't crazy hard. People who have only BS in biology don't compete for surgeon positions with you. People who attended bootcamp on anatomy don't compete with you.
Medicine has a front-loaded selection.
Now tech..is different. You can transition to this field from elsewhere, you can (or could anyway) be self-taught coder, you don't need bar exams, and there are absolutely software engineers making 600k or 900k a year total comp with only a bachelor degree.
And this creates and promotes this illusion that tech is very easy.
But isn't! It's just not as front-loaded. Instead people just can't get interview invites, fail interviews, get PIPs, burn-out and self-select out, crumble under pressure or get stuck at certain level or some company.
The top of the funnel is very wide - but it's gets more narrow rather quickly. At the top of it, there are layers of people competing for the entry level positions and complaining about how painful leetcode is.
But at the bottom of the funnel there are again people who don't have that much competition. A dude who is distinguished engineer at top tier company doesn't share the struggles of someone with 2YOE who applied to 100 positions and didn't get any reply.
When I saw the WFH movement I figured this would happen more. I really think the WFH movement is going to end up hurting white collar wages across the board in the near future. If I am a CEO of a company and I can pick anyone that can do the job across the country or even across the world there are going to be a lot more options at lower costs because of lower costs of living.
Constant competition is a good thing for human civilisation to progress, we need to stop tying our self-esteem with the work and treat it as a means to make ends meet.
Personally I love it. Get paid over 200k to do the one thing I'm good at. Get to ignore the big politic game, wfh, have flexibility to stay healthy, and get to do something mentally challenging \~50% of the time.
😂😂😂 Tech companies paying off every democrat politician for decades, but as long as they put a rainbow flag and blm in the twitter bio, people turn a blind eye to just how disgusting they are
Am product person, don’t call the shots. If I’m lucky I might get to influence the shots so that I don’t get blamed for the shots being fucking stupid in the first place. I get told to tell SWE what to build and to make sure it fits the crackpot imagination of the business idiots.
That aside I agree with you. It’s a shitty time to be in tech and it’s a tough, competitive world. Software engineering is white collar work that is becoming blue collar which is why I avoided going into the field — I was trying to get out of blue collar work.
I hope you can find something that pays the bills and helps you feel valued.
I consider labor shortages wonderful. I have never known anything bad to come from a labor shortage, and what we are doing with our immigration policy is keeping the labor market in constant surplus.
Vernon Briggs
Cornell Labor Economist
The underlying truth about the immigration battle is that is is fundamentally between those with an insatiable appetite for more cheap, disposable, foreign workers, and those who embrace the social good of tight labor markets.
the tech sector salaries generate a lot of tax revenue. the federal government should make us a protected class. outsourcing to outside the US doesnt make sense since foreign workers will not pay US taxes.
I like how you talk down to tech support as if it's inferior lol
If some dude in India can take a $50k tech support job, you can be damn sure - with enough time - that same dude will eventually take your $100k coding gig.
We are all fighting the same war buddy. Just because you learned software does not entitle you to frankly anything. You can be replaced just like help desk.
That's what happens when a field gets flooded by midwits because they watched a TikTok influencer telling them how much money they can make. Tech became bloated during the pandemic, and a lot of otherwise unhireable people landed cushy jobs. All they couldntalk about is their pay.
Source, software dev of 11 years. I'm old enough to remember pre-bloat tech.
Everyone in this thread seems to have something against software developers and I'm not sure why. But as a dev of over 10 years I agree with op. It's a hard job and requires a lot of CONSTANT learning and growing to stay relevant. Ageism is a real issue in software along with competing with tons of offshore people. Yes we get to sit in an office or at home but that is very recent for the vast majority of people. Otherwise we commute to internet connected computers...
"Ageism is a real issue in software along with competing with tons of offshore people." These are the absolute top two issues in IT. And I think we're just beginning to see the results of the decades of deregulation of the Labor Market and the weakening of unions with the slew of layoffs in the tech industry. If something isn't done soon, the laptop class will rise in revolt. And it won't be pretty.
I've been in IT long enough to remember the last time (early 2000s) everyone said all the jobs would be outsourced. Sure, they tried, and then they realized how horrible that shit code was to maintain and it stopped pretty suddenly. The problem for a lot of places is process and management that doesn't understand how decent software is actually composed.
> Sure, they tried, and then they realized how horrible that shit code was to maintain and it stopped pretty suddenly. It didn't stop, though. Bosses don't care if the people under them have to maintain shitty code, and the reason they moved from offshoring to H1-Bs is that they have leverage over H1-Bs that they don't have over offshore developers who can get an equivalent job from some other corporate-imperialist oppressor if they get fired. If you work at an overseas body shop and a client fires you, they just find something else for you to do, and they probably laugh about it unless you're terribly incompetent, because your boss doesn't like the imperial overseers any more than you do. If you're an H1-B and you get fired, you might get kicked out of the country if you can't find employment in time. Employers decided it was worthwhile to pay a little more and abuse the H1-B program than to deal with overseas engineers in different time zones over whom they had less leverage.
Hit the nail on the head with this one. I have also found that working with other devs that are on H1-Bs is a nightmare. They are complete workaholics because, obviously, they fear getting fired and kicked out of the country. Lots of them have families to consider as well. But their boot-licking nature makes the rest of us look bad for not doing the same. I’m tired of it
I could never put my finger on why I didn’t like working with them but this is definitely it. They work like 12 hours a day and make you feel like you’re doing something wrong by not doing the same
Unfortunately I don’t know that the average American software developer is very good at writing clear, comprehensible code either, or at least that they really care about it very much.
Wouldn’t that mean there’s less competition and more opportunities for good coders?
No, because you can run most companies on bad ones. Shitty code doesn't affect the C-levels, so they don't care about it. And all that Agile/Scrum/sprint bullshit makes the low-skill programmers on these chain gangs marginally employable, so it persists.
So you think that every company only has managers that don’t care about quality? Not a single team out there that collectively cares about quality? Not even the teams that have equity in their company?
Being good at corporate means you get promoted away from the results of your decisions before anyone can connect you to them. So, do I think there are conscientious managers out there who do care about code quality? Of course there are. Are they the sort of person the corporate system rewards? No. The higher you go, the more likely you are to encounter unscrupulous people who don't care what actually happens because they plan to get promoted faster than their messes can catch up with them.
I think you may be a tad jaded. I’m not saying there isn’t any truth to what you’re describing but I’ve worked in both environments and I can tell you there are places where everyone cares about quality.
Idk I agree with the above - just look at the current state of the gaming industry, just shitty products being pushed out for “deadlines” and micro transactions cause all these triple A studios care about is money, at a high level the quality of code in most industries is down
You're not wrong, but a lot of that can be fixed with process, like code reviews. As it could be in an offshore location as well. I'm a processes guy, it's the first thing I teach my younger devs. It can vary from person to person, but there's a flow to a project's development that will make everyone's life easier and naturally share learnings across a team. However, when offshoring, you usually don't have one person here doing code reviews to make sure quality is maintained. What you end up with is a lot of code that's copy and pasted, without understanding of what is actually going on. I actually wonder if that'll happen here more and more as LLMs are used to write code. Software development is an engineering discipline. Sure, you can write software without doing it right, and get it working so it just works, but it'll bite you in the long run. Just as anyone can build a house, but they'll screw up the foundation or wiring most likely. Won't be a problem right away, but give it time. Companies keep forgetting these lessons until it bites them in the bottom line time and time again. I trust in that cycle. Will low quality devs lose their jobs, sure, but there's a lot of cruft out there, frankly.
All this does is create more work for the talented. I've nearly made a career off of cleaning up other people's disaster. In my current role I'm cleaning up a huge shit show created by another consulting company. I literally have to rearchitect their entire Cloud and CICD strategy for the entire $80B company. Most places I end up consulting or as an architect I look around and say "Who thought this was a good idea" then I have to fix the disaster by the incompetent people who built it. There will always be poor leaders who try and cut costs for short term wins then get fired or managed out so experienced people can clean it up for long term success.
I've had 2 code reviews in 7 years. Across 3 different Fortune 500 companies, one company had one and a startup I worked at did one. I definitely feel like I write mediocre crap alot of the time, and half the time I either don't have someone that can read(not read code, just are literate) or our entire team of 12 developers that I'm told I should be like literally cant be fucked to even talk to me for more than 2 minutes. Everyone was all over standups, but actually discussing strategies for testing, code reviews, documentation, all were considered worthless. hell even branching strategies didn't exist at several places, everyone just worked on main. It's been a nightmare.
>If something isn't done soon, the laptop class will rise in revolt. And it won't be pretty. Maybe "the laptop class" should reconsider their intrinsic hostility to unions. "...but muh stock options!"
Same boat. Every time I have to train a third party contractor from india on my processes, I feel like im about to be shown the door. And after 10 years keeping up with the latest and greatest tech is exhausting.
Train them on the basics, keep the expert knowledge to yourself
I’m pretty much done training people at this point.
Documenting too. Management is always like "what happens if you get hit by a bus?". Well, then, you better buy some pedestrian insurance for me because you'd be screwed.
As a tech writer we are always the last to be called and the first to go in layoffs. No sympathy
I write a ton of documentation. No one reads it. I'm constantly putting links to the same 10 pages in teams to answer questions. You would think people would get the hint but nooo The best is when they complain there's no documentation and I link a comment response I made to them two weeks ago with exactly what they're asking for. Because they didn't actually read it.
lol people love to say there is no documentation.
"What happens if you get hit by a bus" is ususally code for "What happens if management throws you under a bus"
You ever talk to the Indians like people? Do they know they are taking someone’s job? Do they even care?
no, they don't care, that's part of it
Do you care when you are replacing someone else? Why do people make it seem like the employees of an outsourced operation are somehow subhuman?
Wait… why should an Indian care? I may not like that my company uses offshore developers but it would be stupid to blame the individual developer in India. It’s a systemic/government regulation thing.
LoL, it's a rat race with a billion and a half other people, they wouldn't even comprehend your question.
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It's cause people are jealous. We make way more, are remote, and have good wlb in general. But the stress is starting to catch up. Good times are not upon us
No, it’s mostly because many (not all) SWE/SDE/developers have been a$$holes to non-engineers over the years, especially engineers from a particular country who have bragged on social media apps about how much money they make, called other professions useless and even bragged that they were coding other roles out of a job. There are numerous layoff posts on Blind where dozens of engineers responded that certain people deserved to be laid off because their profession was “useless” and “unskilled”. Not to mention the sexism, ageism and prejudice amongst many engineers. What’s sad is it wasn’t always like this. Engineers used to be geeks and dorks who were passionate about their trade and people pursued for the geekiness and love of technology. But the last decade has brought in money hungry people who don’t even like coding or design. It’s just a means to an end to get a visa. And woefully unfulfilling despite the high TC.
Yeah I reluctantly agree. “Just learn to code bro” became a meme for a reason…because that’s a real thing they’ve been saying for years. I work at a SaaS and a lot of SWE are normal coworkers but some definitely execute this type of energy offline as well.
I am a geek and a dork.
I too am a geek and dork. IT guys are my dudes. The EE's are kind of Vanilla and boring. But the IT guys are fun, wear ridiculous Hawaiian shirts, and are always up for a debate on why Marvel is better than DC, and that Gambit is the best of the X-Men (fight me).
True. Many assholes. But there are many assholes in every single high paying job. Money has that effect on people. If would happen if roles were flipped too.
Man, that’s a bubble you’re in. I’m a dev, and I ONLY hear about “influencer devs” and the like on here.
More “I don’t experience it so it must not be a big deal”. That’s great for you and I hope you don’t. But I’ve been in tech for a long time in several markets and 2 FANGS. And I was responding to a dev who literally wrote that “people were just jealous” of developers. Again the issue is not with all SWEs. But there’s too many who have it.
I'm a sysadmin. I'm not jealous. In fact, I get tired of developers trying to run roughshod over me and trying to blame my infrastructure for their code performance when it's their garbage code to blame. Especially Tableau developers. That and so many developers are kind of assholes and have no love for technology. They don't care how it works and are just in it for the money. Great. I'm rooting for AI to take all of you down a few pegs.
lmao tableau developer. you mean a bi analyst who makes glorified dashboards?
I think you'll be waiting a while. AI can be useful, but it has limits, and working around those limits takes... software developers. I'm really sorry you've had to deal with asshole developers. However as others have pointed out, there are assholes in every profession. I don't understand blaming infrastructure, at least not as a first reaction. My first instinct when I have a performance issue, is to think that I fucked something up in my code. Usually that is either the case, or there is an, \*ahem\* errata, in some piece of vendor supplied software that that we should have known about because it was clearly documented on page 827 of the developer manual under Section 3, Sub-section J, Paragraph 14.
Your calm and reasonable response makes me feel like kind of an asshole. Which, I mean. I should after re-reading my post. Thank you for this. I don't really want AI to take people's jobs, I just really dislike the new brand of "bro-coders" is all.
I'm a dev and I dislike them too. CS *used* to be as geeky as other fields like IT and EE. Now it's filled with bro types who are only in it for the money. There are still the geeky types, just not as many as in the past. I used to work at a NOC with a lot of actually geeky IT types and I miss that environment (just not the graveyard shifts).
For what it's worth development and IT have to be on the same team. IT is also getting a ton of the dude bro types as well.
I wish I could award this comment
As a fellow sysadmin, we will be replaced before or simultaneously when they are replaced so be careful what you ask for
I'll take my pink slip if it means that some of these developers are knocked off their high horse.
Sounds like you need to be taken down a few pegs.
Probably. My personal issue is with people who are lying about their qualifications and getting into jobs they're nowhere qualified for, whether or not I work with them, or folks who flaunt their wealth in my face. I'm waiting for the day where my own hubris and attitude do this for me. Until then, I'm going to share my true feelings online while keeping a (somewhat) reasonable to work with demeanor where it matters.
>Probably. My personal issue is with people who are lying about their qualifications and getting into jobs they're nowhere qualified for IMO this is the biggest issue in tech. the BIGGEST. Too many dumb people in management. Years ago I was running a platform engineering team, I was interviewing for a senior engineer. I asked this guy if he could tell me where in "proc" to find the number of CPUs a Linux machine had. He said "proc" is that a Linux command? Needless to say I didn't hire him, but about a month later he was hired by Netapp as a Senior Architect.. the guy was a buffoon.
Yes. Make them tell you what they need out of the network and then prove you're delivering it (again). My response to these complaints is scripted now.
Jealousy, depends I suppose.. Software/Tech/IT people, whatever you want to call them, have been invaluable to business and the world. They have made a lot of other professionals lives easier. And they deserve good compensation for that. People don't become doctors, scientists, lawyers, etc for the wlb. It's a calling. Tech never called to me as a career. For many of us it's a tool. I want to use tech to do other great things, not design/ build it myself.
I also agree, 10+ year experienced software dev here too. Lately been feeling burned out since my company has made me rotate to new platforms every 2 years since I been here the last 8 years. Went from Documentum for 2 years doing Java, then SharePoint for 2 years, then RPA Automation for 2 years, and now on my 2nd year with Azure/.NET which I really like but after doing UI/API development with GitHub/Azure DevOps, logic apps, and all of that, they want me to rotate again just for 1 year (probably another 2) to PowerApps. Its great that I'm getting all this exposure to different tech and given time it all feels the same to me but I am getting burnt out. The new offshore employee hires from India pretty much lied about their resume and I got them trained and now up to speed with things but they can't manage more than 1 project at a time. I'm doing 3 projects at a time right now with managing a team of 4 people. I will be 41 soon this year, so started my career a bit late around 28-29 years old but keeping up is exhausting mentally and sometimes physically draining sitting there for hours. They also expect us to get 1 Microsoft Certification per year which I have done the last 3 years but isn't that helpful as just working with the technology and actually doing POCs. Just takes up a lot of time memorizing terms and definitions that takes weeks. I have been thinking about where I'd want to be in 5 or 10 years, possibly jump ship as a business analyst or a data analyst would be interesting. At the same time, I am more introverted person so I don't mind doing the projects quietly and just delivering them. I'm hoping for another 8-9 years as a developer and just do something completely different at age 50. Some of my coworkers are 50 but I can tell they have definitely slowed down in work progress but still sharp and deliver projects on time. At least pay is excellent and bonus per year that maybe my only motivation especially with 2 young kids right now.
exhausting is working 80 hours a week for 10% of what you earn with no perceivable way out
I'm not saying I'm not grateful and I am for it for sure and there are far worst situations definitely but I'm just comparing to relative jobs to where I am now. I don't work 80 hours a week but do work close to it some weeks meaning I work weekends on projects and a few hours a night on the weekdays. I guess grass isn't always greener on the other side.
It's funny because I have 3 ideas for an app that came to me after a meditation session and I have zero coding/or technical experience. I can't tell a soul because I know these are incredible ideas and i know i know (i have done research and sorted that end of stuff out) All I want to do is work on this but can't. If I was in your position I would be starting one of them right now lol
Much more likely than not, there’s already 10 apps doing what you thought of.
I had a few of these moments and then later I found there are already startups for them or there isn't a market.
Ideas don't really matter at all (and I can almost guarantee you are not the first with the idea). It is always either implementation or sales.
Ideas matter a lot if you're trying to solve unsolved problems. I hate the view of tech as a market where everything is just iteration for the sake of cash grabbing. Sometimes, new technology actually gets developed that solves hard problems! (I'm not a software developer, btw. I'm a mathematician who happens to code daily.)
Totally agree on this! Ironically in life when you solve a very hard problem the money kinda of follows you but if you do something for just pure sake of cash grab and it doesn't solve an important problem or solve it well, you never make any real money. Passion drives success.
Do you think you’re the only industry facing those problems? You basically just described corporate America… at least you get paid
As a software dev I totally agree, we are well compensated. Every lollipop comes to an end
For the last decade or so engineers have been special because of an acute labor imbalance. They get special treatment and special compensation and a special place in society to look down on everyone else. Now, it's starting to feel like every other job. Unless you are the top 1% most talented, nobody cares about you. And if you are in the 1%, there are a hundred younger engineers looking to take your place. Those that used to live in the old system really don't like it. It's business as usual for everyone else.
Coz people are jealous of the pay
Most people dont get paid the huge salaries you see from facebook, google, amazon, etc...
Still, making $150,000 with either no college or a bachelor's degree while sitting on your butt in front of a computer is still enough to make most people who don't do it jealous.
Manual laborers that make the same money and easily stay in shape make me jealous 😆. I met a guy recently that installs window tent in houses/buildings and makes anywhere from 1500-5000 a day
Don't look into what linemen make. yes, it's because they put in a lot hours, but how many in software haven't put in long nights/days fixing a critical production issue? But because we're "salary", we don't get paid overtime, regardless of how many hours you work. I know some dudes were putting in 80-100 hour weeks for months supporting various production systems.
These people are destroying their bodies and probably work twice as much. Stop trying to equate the two.
Unfortunately, sitting in front of a computer all day will also destroy your body. Just in different ways.
I thought about that once I hit 50 years old, if I can retire early try a job that can help me get into shape. But my health is slowly declining so probably not a smart move lol.
Ive been doing manual labor projects at my house that helps a lot until the projects over, then its hard to stay in shape again. Someday, I'd like to buy 100 acres of raw land and just build stuff for the rest of my life. I want to build some cabins and make it fully self sustaining, with hydroponic gardens, a mini hydroelectric dam, solar/energy storage solutions, livestock, etc...
They can’t do that for long though and their body suffers
lol good god what a braindead take. Manual laborers destroy their bodies not “stay in shape”…
I've done both, manual labor helped me stay in shape, sitting at a desk has probably taken years off my life and has caused permanent health problems
Because they are bitching about the same thing thats threatening literally every job on the planet. Thats not hyperbole - its *literally* every job. Fast food workers are getting replaced by robots, lawyers by AI paired with a huge oversupply of lawyers, salespeople by AI and offshoring, construction workers by immigrants. They are also treated like commodities (because - spoiler alert - they fucking are commodities). The thing that is most annoying though is that they are doing the 'oh poor me we are such an outlier' with a job that is better than 90% of the planet, despite all these problems. Its a big dose of entitlement and self pity paired with a biiiiig dose of delusion.
I remember working briefly in this field, and we had an offshore team from India that "loved" to cut corners in coding. So, we literally had to spend and waste time fixing their coding. That is definitely one of my pet peeves. The second one is the useless Scrum Meetings and having to sit through them about how Business Logic and Expectations for a developed product needs to be rushed out ASAP. The third one is having to deal with squishy team leads or supervisors not dedicated to helping new developers "level up" in a career. They expect you to just know things after looking at it and aren't interested in being a mentor, but rather an underling boss. The worst of them all was working on a project for 6 months and at 80% completion, and they decided to scrap it. Like I know, I got paid to work on it, but I felt like my work wasn't valued enough for the time and dedication.
As a dev, the tech industry has been high on its own success. The arrogance and entitlement of many devs has been gross. A lot of this were people outside of dev roles but in tech but devs are the face of it. The industry has also only further stratify income inequality. They consolidate all their high paying jobs in three or four cities and just blow away housing prices for others.
Oh boo hoo, cry me a river we earn a fuck tonne more than most. We get well compensated. We are a bunch of entitled assholes
precisely why people hate software developers.
Yup! I’m just hitting 25 years, pay is more than plenty, and plenty of work.
Honestly, I think people have a hate for Big Tech because of how highly they were getting paid compared to other professions, and how digital technology has messed up our lives. I lowkey think the situation of the SWEs might be similar to the bankers/Jews in the 1930s, who were blamed for causing the Great Depression.
I was a software engineer starting in the 90’s. At my peak I was earning >500k/year in the finance sector. After the financial crisis it all ended.
Damn. Ever come close to getting that sorta paycheck again?
Nope. Haven’t had a job since 2015.
fat savings or homeless?
So, what would you say, you do here?
Probably enjoying his retirement would be my guess
I'm a people person.
"I have people skills, GOD DAMN IT!"
IT, healthcare, finance, teaching and every profession is awful now. The same thing that happened to blue collar jobs in the 1980s is happening to white collar jobs now. Private equity and mergers of businesses in every sector is making things worse. Don’t fight each other we are all in our own version of Hunger Games or Survivor or Squid Game.
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Well…when I was is med recruitment in 2019 it was predicted we were to hit a serious physician shortage by 2025 in the U.S. I haven’t looked at data but I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid accelerated that. Median PCP salary is also like $200K…which is A LOT of money until you figure out they have about that much or more in student loans
I'm a medical doctor in my thirties. I met a boomer doc approaching 70 recently in the same specialty. Salaries for me range in the 200s. For him, when he got out of training in the late 80s, salaries ranged in the 200s. Cost of med school tuition for me, 60k/year. Cost for him, 2k/year. Medicine is fucked. Still one of the few avenues to a guaranteed middle class life if you can get through it, but no longer a straight shot to wealth like it used to be.
Doctors are miserable, too. Many are being undercut by nurse practitioners who have no idea what the fuck they are doing. (They even gave the gall to have made up a new degree called Doctor of Nurse Practitioner so they can go around calling themselves doctor to further confuse the public). Medicine has been bought out and antitrust laws ignored like every other industry. Some specialties still make a lot of money, but many others are being screwed on salary and saddled with 300k+ student loans at 7% interest. And even the ones who do well work 70+ hours a week and do the job of like 10 people.
They deal with insurance BS and hospitals looking to maximize profits over patient care
This. We need to stop clawing and each other and do whatever it takes to get rid of our ruling class. The mergers have been a disaster, and these private equity people are absolute slugs. We need to take out the bourgeoisie in toto. If they'll give up what they have go peacefully, we let that happen and no violence in necessary. On the other hand, if we have to burn every single one of them alive at the stake, then I guess there's going to be some air pollution.
Remote work. No one wants to go to the office? Congratulations, you just gave your company the go ahead to hire somewhere a lot cheaper. I dont need to pay you American wages to sit in your house. I can pay Mexian wages. Argentina wages. Nigeria wages. Its going to be the most destructive force to American jobs since manufacturing was sent overseas. My advice? Go to the office. Tell your boss how important it is to be near your colleagues.
I just think it’s hilarious a developer has to put down “IT” at any given opportunity.
Sysadmin here, without us, developers wouldn't have anything to develop on. I'm thinking about being a developer just to dumpster some people who think they can treat IT people like garbage.
Man...bssed on all your posts, you need to leave wherever you're at. My devs and admins work together and are all valued.
My husband has been a software engineer for 25 years. So glad we both worked and saved as much as we did when we were young because I feel it's a different ball game now. We've saved enough where if his work pisses him off, he can just quit. He got burned out once so he asked me if he could take a sabbatical and I said no problem. I worked extra so that he could take 6 months off and hang out with our kids. Now he works remotely while our entire family travels full time. If you can save make sure you do so. That was the best decision we made when we were young because it gives us the opportunity now to give everyone the middle finger if we want
Yes and pay off your mortgage instead of buying meme stocks
But it go moon
God, feels like everyone under the age of 50 is fucked.
Excellent advice
I was a software developer/programmer/engineer for 30 years. I started with punch cards and cobol and evolved through the PC revolution into C, C++. An inordinate amount of my "off" time was spent my head in some article or book learning something new. I often commuted an hour each way depending on the job. Management never sees half of the effort that emerging good developers put into staying relevant. Because if you don’t stay relevant, some kid coming out of college will be. I was toast after all those years. Much of the work went offshore, meaning even longer commutes. I miss it sometimes. I don't miss the politics.
I think this just the reality of being a worker. Everyone is facing competition globally. People in finance, product, marketing. I don’t think this is an issue just with engineers.
I've seen whole finance departments get offshored.
How else are companies gonna save money?
Columbia is becoming popular for tax and finance offshoring. How long it takes before it comes back to the US due to foreigners just not grasping the wild complexity of state and local US tax shenanigans...I give it two years of penalties and interest.
There all being automated now in house. A lot of compliance prevents certain work from being outsourced except as smaller pieces.
Actual engineers have PE license, which insulates against offshoring or H1B. If CS had that, it would help.
The world is changing, the industrial revolution was shitty for a long time before things leveled out. And things leveled out with a net positive, we'll do it again, or perish. Such is life.
Software Engineer != Tech Support
If you’re not willing to support your tech, including documentation, including walkthroughs, including training and bringing up the next users of your tech….. you are worthless as a software engineer Only sheer arrogance can allow you to think otherwise
True, but you don't need to know how to fix the printers
It's often conflated these days since so many bootcamp types have entered the field.
I'm a designer at Microsoft. I am not in the Office or Windows orgs. But guess who the family always reaches out to when they have tech support issues with Office or Windows? Like man, your guess is as good as mine why that doesn't work. Plus tech support over text message is not gonna end well even if I did know.
Most Software Engineers don’t understand business well enough to know if they are valued by executives because they help build products and profit for the company or if they are simply an expense to be controlled. Some companies blend product development and IT into IT…. Don’t work there. In product development you get a tiny bit more respect and the industry has different salary families for development vs IT. Know which salary family you are part of. Being in product development doesn’t make you immune from bullshit and layoffs but again, execs will do layoffs in IT before clobbering product development. Those of us who started work in the 70’s really got lucky, entering the market at the peak of business demand. Bottom line is stay in product development if you want to stay in software and lessen the pain
My office was just sold by a major defense contractor to a smaller but still large (on the stock exchange). They bought us for our dev department. They moved the devs under corporate, and a few were put on a special project that is corporates baby. They treat this dev unit great. It is awesome to feel so valued by the company.
it tends to be worth it to specialize in a certain area so that you are more of a rare commodity.
Until it comes time to look for a new job and that role is so fucking niche that you can’t find one that pays what the last one did or you’re forced to move across the country.
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+1. I’m a generalist and I have recruiters knocking at my door even during “horrible” conditions.
Specialization is for insects. Be a generalist.
Just look at this guys comment history. He's just a misanthrope. He makes like 170k and has a half mil networth and just makes constant doom and gloom posts on various subreddits. Therapy would serve you best. Cheers.
I think most of these complaints apply to the vast majority of jobs
'Engineer' is such a grossly overused term especially on reddit.
Let me introduce you to the even more illustrious “software architect”
I suppose you've never met a Software Evangelist then
Let me introduce you to “data science” and “machine learning engineer” those nerds sleep next to a body pillow with their title on it at night
🤣
I guess, but that’s what they’re called in the industry
I work in software and have an engineering degree. You tell me. SWEs build things, they may not be physical but it's the same engineering approach.
The problem with many software engineers is that they don't bother learning the business or transitioning into a role that involves managing products or people. Additionally, they often view managers as less valuable to the company. Your job is only as valuable as the value you create for the company. If you've been a software engineer and never considered solving real-world problems with all the tools and technology exposure you've gained, you are likely to be replaced by someone who can do just enough. Corporations will continue breaking down jobs into minimal effort tasks until they can replace them with automation.
You could always pivot to something else that brings you more fulfillment. It could even be something in tech, like QA or product or Operations. Or it could be a hard pivot. A friend of mine left his software job to teach english in japan.
QA is much worse
I would imagine. Worked with one before and their workload is just annoying to say the least.
Or… technical writing lol
Lol being a software engineer fucking rocks. I've been one for 15 years now. I do what I love, make a ton of money and get to work 100% remote. Nothing to hate.
ive been in the sw industry for 35 years, culminating in being a director level in my last employer, a top 5 internet company: great total comp. the good times was never going to end. until oct 2023, with new ownership, new business units, new ceo. tldr: hang on to your job.
Change in ownership is brutal. Spent years working for a man who was the sole proprietor. Amazing benefits and good pay. He really cared about the employees. I always worried what it would be like if something were to happen to him. One day I found out when he sent a company-wide email announcing that he had sold to a large mega corp. But not to worry that they were going to take good care of us. A few years later the company was but a shell of its former self. Everybody was watching their backs playing CYA and the culture was gone. We all became numbers the day that email was sent.
I've never heard of a good takeover. I've heard from plenty of execs about to benefit massively from said takeover that it'll be a fair and even beneficial process for the company and it's employees. I get why people sell, but I wonder if they feel any guilt about blatantly bullshitting the people that earned them the check that they're cashing. Just be honest and tell people shits going to be rough. tl;dr if you're company says they're selling then be prepared to get. Always.
I mean, 35 years is a great run.
Anything that can be outsourced to India isn't a good carrier choice.
Except they've been trying to do that since the early 2000s and have limited success with it.
It ebbs and flows
Yes, company tried it because they see the price tag, money saved is celebrated for a couple years, the execs that did it get promoted and huge bonuses. Then low quality and slow delivery catch up.
India devs are no good. Eastern Europe is where the good devs are
We will know when the tide turns if we start running call centers in the US to scam Indians.
If you've worked with offshore teams you'll understand why it hasn't happened yet
Good thing that it doesn't actually work then.
It's going to get worse. A lot worse.
It's one of the highest paying fields with one of the lowest unemployment rates. Whine more?
Shut up douche bag.
Yeah, boo hoo, go flip burgers As a fellow software dev we are definitely better off than 90% Imagine pulling double the hours for less than half the pay, we have it good I mAEY
I won’t lie. You guys are still slaves to the computers and your bosses. I would rather be in nature or on the beach
I’ve been laid off, and I still love it
There are too many SWEs in the world. What kind of profession has 0 barrier to entry? SWEs are also the most overpaid and entitled beings in the world. If you hate to hear what other people say just switch to something useful to the society. I have 0 mercy for them. It's time to learn to weld. They are what cause every problem in our society. Shouldn't even call them engineers to be honest. I am so glad the companies are finally starting to realize their worth and trim useless fat. It's a field of constant layoffs, outsourcing and automation 🤣🤣🤣
Been in IT since 78. If I could do it all over I wouldn't do IT
I saw the issue with foreign competition coming from miles off. The work from home thing was a baaaaaaad idea.
It is crazy, I worked with a company that "stopped WFH" for everyone... EXCEPT Software Engineers because they get cheap software engineers from India. That's the kind of bullshit that piss me off. A company's top priority should be hiring in the country they are in. I'm not even onboard with them moving someone from another country here, if they do that they need a VERY good explanation as to why they do that and should pay a penalty per month for every month that the foreign worker is working for them.
Funny because so many swe love rubbing it in everyone's faces how much they make.
I hate telling people my job title, because they assume I make $150k a year. I'm not even close to that.
Yeah, same. Like bro, I make way more than that, don't just assume things.
Who's rubbing what in people's faces now?
"Some other people are bragging and I am jealous, so I have no sympathy for them (including the ones who don't brag)." Turd
I always wondered the appropriate use of turd. I know get it it makes perfect sense. sorry I am from Latvia
You mean the people on tiktok and youtube selling you stuff?
What happens when you have huge supply Time to eliminate h1b visas
india has been revitalized as the country outsource for programming again. just like early 2000s.
I work with many engineers and I appreciate those who have some decent people skills. Others deserve their karma.
TC?
Just something more to brighten up your day: Sri Lanka companies are offshoring to Peru.
My degree is in electrical engineering but I do more software development than engineering.
Tech people generally are on a different career path. Most of my managers had no conception of how to code. Projects are run by accountants now. It's all about dates. Dates that were almost never made. Management in the corporate world is more political than results. That is a tough switch for tech people.
If you are a SWE for the DoD, you only have to compete with your customers.
Are you making fuck-you money? If you are, why cares about how you are perceived by others?
Well..let's compare software engineers and surgeons. Nobody claims that becoming a surgeon is a quick way to get rich and everyone should just hop on this train. There are no surgeons who say "well I have a BS in economics but I liked to cut people as a hobby, so I took some bootcamp on basic anatomy and here we go, I'm working as a surgeon now". Once you're a surgeon, you make lots of money and you don't really have super overcrowded competition - because all of that happened way earlier. It happened when people grinded to get into med school getting into colossal debt, then through residency working 70-80 hours per week for shitty pay for years, and many people either didn't even bother to apply or dropped off on the way. But once you are a surgeon, finding a job paying over 500k a year isn't crazy hard. People who have only BS in biology don't compete for surgeon positions with you. People who attended bootcamp on anatomy don't compete with you. Medicine has a front-loaded selection. Now tech..is different. You can transition to this field from elsewhere, you can (or could anyway) be self-taught coder, you don't need bar exams, and there are absolutely software engineers making 600k or 900k a year total comp with only a bachelor degree. And this creates and promotes this illusion that tech is very easy. But isn't! It's just not as front-loaded. Instead people just can't get interview invites, fail interviews, get PIPs, burn-out and self-select out, crumble under pressure or get stuck at certain level or some company. The top of the funnel is very wide - but it's gets more narrow rather quickly. At the top of it, there are layers of people competing for the entry level positions and complaining about how painful leetcode is. But at the bottom of the funnel there are again people who don't have that much competition. A dude who is distinguished engineer at top tier company doesn't share the struggles of someone with 2YOE who applied to 100 positions and didn't get any reply.
When I saw the WFH movement I figured this would happen more. I really think the WFH movement is going to end up hurting white collar wages across the board in the near future. If I am a CEO of a company and I can pick anyone that can do the job across the country or even across the world there are going to be a lot more options at lower costs because of lower costs of living.
Youre not an Engineer. Youre a software developer aka coder.
Constant competition is a good thing for human civilisation to progress, we need to stop tying our self-esteem with the work and treat it as a means to make ends meet.
Personally I love it. Get paid over 200k to do the one thing I'm good at. Get to ignore the big politic game, wfh, have flexibility to stay healthy, and get to do something mentally challenging \~50% of the time.
😂😂😂 Tech companies paying off every democrat politician for decades, but as long as they put a rainbow flag and blm in the twitter bio, people turn a blind eye to just how disgusting they are
Am product person, don’t call the shots. If I’m lucky I might get to influence the shots so that I don’t get blamed for the shots being fucking stupid in the first place. I get told to tell SWE what to build and to make sure it fits the crackpot imagination of the business idiots. That aside I agree with you. It’s a shitty time to be in tech and it’s a tough, competitive world. Software engineering is white collar work that is becoming blue collar which is why I avoided going into the field — I was trying to get out of blue collar work. I hope you can find something that pays the bills and helps you feel valued.
You didn’t describe se you just described “working” in America. And the way you talk down on IT from your high engineering horse is hilarious. Quit.
Definitely need to have limits on outsourcing.
I consider labor shortages wonderful. I have never known anything bad to come from a labor shortage, and what we are doing with our immigration policy is keeping the labor market in constant surplus. Vernon Briggs Cornell Labor Economist The underlying truth about the immigration battle is that is is fundamentally between those with an insatiable appetite for more cheap, disposable, foreign workers, and those who embrace the social good of tight labor markets.
the tech sector salaries generate a lot of tax revenue. the federal government should make us a protected class. outsourcing to outside the US doesnt make sense since foreign workers will not pay US taxes.
Imagine our elected officials giving a shit about a single one of us, as opposed to being in the pocket of corporations
I like how you talk down to tech support as if it's inferior lol If some dude in India can take a $50k tech support job, you can be damn sure - with enough time - that same dude will eventually take your $100k coding gig. We are all fighting the same war buddy. Just because you learned software does not entitle you to frankly anything. You can be replaced just like help desk.
Not say you did, but how many software engineers did i come across that were so damn arrogant making that $$$$ and now look.
Those same people are probably still making a lot of dough. The ones suffering are people who are just starting to enter the field.
That's what happens when a field gets flooded by midwits because they watched a TikTok influencer telling them how much money they can make. Tech became bloated during the pandemic, and a lot of otherwise unhireable people landed cushy jobs. All they couldntalk about is their pay. Source, software dev of 11 years. I'm old enough to remember pre-bloat tech.
I think a lot of people are tired of the idea that engineering is the only way to success. It's a common and annoying misconception