I know the leftist in me is supposed to have sympathy for these people and get them to unionize. But only after I stop laughing and enjoying this moment. For years these fucks told the rest of us to “learn to code” and pretended like studying anything else at uni was a fucking waste of time.
GUESS WHAT FUCKERS. SO WAS CODING. Looks like we’ll be baristas together, only I’ll have three years of experience!!!
"learn to code" was always about increasing the supply of labor so they could reduce their costs.
The 2001 crash is a pattern. For years people would "Learn HTML" to get into jobs and others were encouraged to follow. The crash flushed many people out, and outsourcing of the early aughts devastated the whole profession. Today it's "Learn to Code" and "AI" are the new hip terms of art. It's all about slashing labor costs.
it's more interest rates than AI or "learn to code". most of the programming jobs were deeply dependent on VC funding for companies that never intended to make a profit. with the rise in interest rates, VCs stopped getting a continuous influx of cash to invest in these companies so they suddenly want their investments back ASAP. it's why reddit is suddenly IPOing, for example. large companies can't cheap debt to buy smaller competitors, so the only exit plan is to turn a profit - most of these companies planned to get bought out by a larger player. the larger companies are also struggling because higher interest rates mean their customers are spending less, so their bottom lines are looking bleak, hence all the layoffs since fall '22.
You are correct. What I meant is exactly what you say (structurally) because both cases had rising interest rates as a cause, but each instance has it's own buzzwords to "explain" why its happening; Outsourcing -> AI, "Learn HTML" -> "Learn to Code".
It's going to have to get much much worse before engineers unionize. I am sorry to say my fellows do not occupy reality in a class sense and these layoffs are just a taste of what's to come.
I also don't encounter a lot of the "learn to code" types irl, if ever. If anything, i hear pushback on outsourcing and bootcamps. I wonder how much of that sentiment was actual engineers vs students online who hadn't entered the workforce yet.
Most engineers I know are OK but not at all class conscious people.
I also have some bias here, I don't live or work on the coasts so the silicon valley elistist tech bro musk worshipping cutthroat competitive culture you see at big tech is just not there. And those types tend to be the loudest shittiest dudes online.
Midwest here, most folks just treat it as a job like any other. Still won't fucking unionize though, US propaganda is too strong.
for some reason techies who have never worked in the trades tend to be more "learn a trade" type guys
coding is a trade.
You're an individual paid to use skill to make things that someone else profits from. You may be paid well but you're also at the bottom of the ladder, having to do what you're told, discarded as it suits the employer.
My point is both are alienated and aggrieved, and they both use some “grass is greener” shit to justify why the problem isn’t the capitalist system but just that you chose the wrong line of work
The only people I’ve ever actually heard say “learn to code” are like Cory Booker and co
Yeah it tends to show up IRL more as a proposed solution than an insult. The whole, we just need to train these laid-off coal miners in West Virginia how to code, that will reverse the economic decline there.
There are l2c programs in a lot of elementary schools right now. Parts of STEAM curriculum
Everyone seems to mythologize 2008 but I was working age in those years and it is just as bad now as it was then; maybe worse
One point I've seen making that case that it's not as bad as 2008 is that this time companies mostly aren't shutting down, but instead just downsizing. Which is true, but I think part of that is just because the economy is more "consolidated" into large companies than before. Think of the Apple car or Metaverse shutting down and presumably laying off most of the people on those projects; each likely had at least a few hundred employees, which in 2008 could have been entire companies. Or AWS, which most of the western internet runs on at this point, if they layoff 10% of their employees that's potentially thousands of engineers putting pressure on the rest of the tech labor market, yet on the surface it doesn't look that bad since AWS continues to exist and "it's just 10%".
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everyone should be a plumber so that anyone can fix plumbing on their own instead of paying others to do it. how will a person get food if everyone's a plumber?
You have to understand, these arguments aren’t about solving macroeconomic issues. They’re meant to chastise people complaining about the macroeconomic issues, hey you individually could potentially do this one thing that would given you a comfortable life, ergo the macroeconomic issues aren’t real. It’s a modern day version of “let them eat cake.”
Retire early due to being a small business tyrant and stealing the fruit of your employees labour?
Retire early because of a large scale nationalised democratically run construction industry that prioritises early retirement for physically intensive work?
You can be the plumber. I'm currently positioning myself to be the town pipe layer, laying pipe in evey home.
Layin pipe, one household st a time, the way the good lord intended.
The thing I’m noticing about trades is that the most successful businesses are the ones with multiple licenses under the same brand, so they’ll be an electrician, plumber, hvac whatever else all at the same time. It’s becoming more difficult to learn a single trade and then open your own business and make it big. Way easier for a company to go on say an electrical call and then ask the homeowner if they would like their AC checked while they’re there for example.
its gonna be really funny when generative AI fucks up a bunch of code and these people have to try and hire someone who actually has a clue but all of them have moved on to other industries.
trying to read code written by AI is going to give me an aneurysm.
Unironically I feel like I've been seeing more and more of the Right out loud say "we should return to feudal times where everyone was either a craftsman or worked a tract of land!"
Shoutout to my dad in 2020 who told me to become a blockchain developer because it was the future.
I am not a programmer at all, btw.
i dont really know what to do. i learned to code and right now i can't get a job.
all of my experience is in programming, so i can't really get into other industries. i can't do most jobs bc i am disabled and cannot drive, so the fact all the current advice is "do a job that requires the ability to drive" really isn't helpful. like even if i made enough money to move to the city i still couldn't be a plumber.
if anyone has any advice on jobs that are remote i would appreciate it
finance firms, honestly. they're immune to the underlying causes of this crash so they're still hiring programmers.
as a dumbass, recent graduate, and person who just started programming for a finance company as my first job - how/why are finance companies immune to the crash? it makes sense that they must be, because we do nothing and spend too much and honestly this company (on my level at least) should be fucking hemoraging money. its the most David Graeber bullshit jobs thing possible and yet we're actively hiring, its wild
yep my job is also bullshit. my entire org should be like 10 people if you cut all the bloat. all I know is that my company provides liquidity on trades so they make money even when the economy is crashing.
See I'm currently going through a CS degree and I have no idea why a finance firm would need a programmer. And what kind of firms are we even talking, like banks and credit unions, or something considerably more arcane?
Finance firms use computer algorithms to make market predictions and automate their buying and selling. A lot of math majors go into finance.
sorry 1 day late but, isn't it pretty ghoulish to work at a finance firm? You'd be advancing the ability for capitalist cutthroats to leave more people without jobs and without houses because of the inherent instability of the market, increasing leverage and putting more and more capital into extremely turbid waters that could wash away hundreds of thousands of people's life savings overnight. I guess it's not as bad as being a cop or working at the MIC, and Marxism != moralism, but am I wrong to see the people working as quants to be around the same as the petit bourgeoisie?
probably? it's just the only place to get work right now. if/when the money spigot turns back on, I'll go back to something with fewer ethical issues, but right now I just need work. plus my position is pretty bullshit so I'm pretty sure I'm just receiving money. like my job is so abstracted away from what actually earns them money and so focused idealistic platitudes that it's hard to see how it improves their ability to do much of anything. but yeah, not claiming it's ethically great.
no it's all good, I went through this with my wife when I took the job. I was against it until I realized this. it also helped that their majority money maker is "providing liquidity to the market" - which means they're doing arbitrage against other financebros and I give way less of a fuck.
Current market is bad even for experienced developers, don't expect it to recover fast. It first needs stop downsizing.
My first idea is to find someone who wants to (or has interest) to employ disabled person. In my country there are some incentives and people generally want to help out by hiring disabled.
Other option is casting a widder net. While tech companies are downsizing, economy is not bad. Try to find some close to IT job in non tech company where you can help them out and slowly grow.
I've been applying to IT jobs too but they're also competitive as a lot of programmers are applying to them atm. But I'll keep that up, thank you for your advice
what level of IT are you applying to? (for example helpdesk, technician, sysadmin, network engineer, etc.)
asking because I'm kind of thinking of switching from SWE to IT (I don't like programming as much and arent as good at it as I expected when I started years ago) and I'm just curious whether even the lower levels roles like helpdesk are flooded
helpdesk and network engineer mostly but kinda just anything that pops up (which is most roles that have engineer in the title). i have experience in security engineering, which is close enough to a lot of IT stuff sorta kinda if you lie on your resume a little. helpdesk is the most flooded bc it has the least requirements i think, but i haven't had any luck with the other ones either soooo i dunno
good luck finding a job that isn't soul crushing comrade
all the current advice is "do a job that requires the ability to drive"
a decade or so ago i was convinced we were no more than 30 years away from eliminating human drivers as a job, and now i'm working on inventing time travel just so i can go back and push me into a locker.
Half-joking here, but -
Become a consultant. This is essentially what you'll do:
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Find out what the client wants to hear.
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Find out how much they want to pay to hear it.
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Triple the price.
The key is to make them feel like they should be grateful to hear your words of wisdom. You just need to come across as wise and enlightened to the ways of the corporate world, no substance required. If your advice doesn't pan out, blame your clients. They'll keep coming back like the rubes that they are
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Been applying to DevOps, but I'll be sure to look for the other ones you suggest as I hadn't heard of those, thank you!
Was it coders saying that? I thought it was out of touch politicians.
It actually peaked with techbros on twitter aiming at journalists when there were mass layoffs after pivot to video failed. The politician line was always STEM education, "learn to code" was a twitter dunk thing.
Wasn't saying "learn to code" to journalists a response to journalists saying "learn to code" to other industries getting laid off?
No, "upskilling" was the line from like mainstream centrist journalist. Pretending that the attacks were some populist grassroots thing from formerly laid off workers is kinda made up. It was mostly techbros or excel guys with made up job titles that were doing that.
It was neoliberal Obama administration. Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program
wow you mean the money faucet running dry means suddenly all the startups that could never and would never turn a profit suddenly collapsed? shocking
A handful of speculative super-bubbles are on the verge of popping (one might argue that sites like Twitter have already popped and just won't admit it).
The overwhelming majority of software engineers and systems architects and coders are either
a) doing just fine in their non-imploding industries, such as finance and energy and manufacturing
b) eating the same pile of dogshit they've been eating for the last 30 years, assuming they're doing entertainment software or working Fivr jobs or otherwise engaged in the most precarious forms of software development work
This isn't bad news for coders. This is bad news for Silicon Valley VCs and their promise of unlimited borrowing capacity.
they've already moved from "learn to code" to "go to trade school and learn to weld"
Mmmm mmmm heavy metals and carcinogens!
My uncle died early because he was a hard working welder. My friend's father died early because he was a hard working welder.
Sure you get paid well to weld, if you don't mind 15-30 years off your lifespan.
knew folks working in construction who had thrown their backs out at the age of 25 and just kept on at it. Motivated me to get out of manual labor.
Is the danger of welding a problem with welding or a problem with welders not following reasonable safety procedures?
Until the next artificial tech bubble leads to over-expansion and then it’s back to “learn to code.”
Yeah trade school is absolutely not for everyone. I went to be an auto mechanic and it’s definitely not for everyone between the kind of people you work with and the damages it does to your body.
I still think we should learn to code just cuz its a genuinely useful skill and we shouldn't let giant corporations determine what software we use
That applies to all skills, but unfortunately there are so many hours in a day dor us to learn skills. Somee of us can code, some can bake. Some are excellent woodworkers, and others have a knack for gardeneing/farming. All skills are valid and needed in society. What we REALLY need to do is meet up with various people with various skill sets and form co-ops/communes to ensure everyone has everything they need.
Well python is pretty easy to pick up. U don't have to be a full on software engineer, u can write simple scripts
It's good to know, but I honestly can count on one hand the amount of times I've used my coding skills to automate something I needed to do outside of my projects/work/gaming. It's pretty low down my list of practical skills, just based on personal experience.
Somee of us can code, some can bake. Some are excellent woodworkers, and others have a knack for gardeneing/farming.
I'm one of those crazy people that want to do all of that
I do wanna learn some Python for if I ever brush up on my GIS skills.
https://www.shanley.com/blog/stop-feeling-bad-for-tech-workers-these-people-are-the-enemy
Okay so I haven't read this dudes entire body of work so I don't have a totally clear view, but I did read this article and, hot take, everything he says here could be applied to all workers in the imperial core.
Yeah, this is just describing the difficulties of unionising a labour aristocracy. And you absolutely can unionise that.
I think you're right, but as someone in tech, I've talked with the EXACT people that the author describes as not self-identifying as workers, and it's not just the same false consciousness you see in all settlers. This paragraph was particularly salient,
Their entirety of identification as workers comes from being better than everyone else. They are like air benders of morality, doing the most fraudulent arguments to justify how the tech industry has somehow turned, on their watch, into Mordor. They aren’t even telling people the TRUTH about what is happening in the tech industry. They should have been whistleblowers; the positive perception that the outside world has of tech is very much maintained by the employee’s silence. Things in the tech industry have advanced far beyond what the general public thinks. The reality of what is happening in the industry is about 1000x worse than even generally understood in a mainstream that more or less accepts the industry deeply problematic at best. But techies are complicit even in the very worst of it: like the startup-created, VC funded surveillance towers that help round up children at the US/Mexico border and feed them right into detention and death and sexual violence. The programmers themselves have created an absolute maze of false logics to justify directly working on software that directly kills people and is used against the People by policing and intelligence agencies and the military. In this particular case, the argument is that they can’t be responsible for how their software is used, even when designed specifically to do that thing; nor can they be responsible for working somewhere which requires that thing. Oh, okay!
Having posted here before about my efforts to try to get people to see MIC companies for what they are, I can freely share that every single time it's just an insane uphill battle to get techbros to even recognize they're the same species as the victims of the systems they build at Palantir or whatever other garbage company. I might not be as pessimistic as the author (I'm also not exactly in the imperial core, per se) since I have had some success with the occasional person, usually those who aren't cishet white or white-passing dudebros, but MAN are techbros ridiculously reactionary.
Bourgeoisified workers do not see themselves as working class because they were specifically elevated above the rest of the working class for their usefulness to the imperial project. They have to be elevated, because otherwise they'd stop being complicit.
So if the bubble is popping that just means they're being re-proletarianized. I think those types of people are going to find out really fucking fast that they are mere workers like the rest of us, and if we don't radicalize them they're just going to become psycho reactionaries.
I guess that's the point, right? These settlers already were carrying out the necessary actions the imperialists, landlords, etc needed through their gentrification and development of automated surveillance or military systems. Now they're being re-proletarianized and desperately wish to keep their mouths on the treat dispensers, they'll kick everyone else down the pile as long as they can keep sucking on the treat teat.
I'm hopeful that time in the dirt with the rest of us will soften them up. Without a constant supply of treats their boogie ideology will either collapse because they'll realize they weren't the special boys they were told since childhood or their egos will collapse instead and their ideology will reconstruct itself as reaction.
As someone actively trying to get into the industry, this is a certified bummer. I'll keep working at it anyway.
<3 Keep your head up comrade. As shitty as all the Tech Bros / STEMlords can be and as much as the backlash like this is (somewhat deservedly) also aimed at them I do wish it was easier to both celebrate their reality check while also not celebrating joblessness for anyone, as well as being careful about keeping structural critiques aimed at structures so it doesn't splash damage our comrades so much. It will bounce back, because our whole fucked up system is designed around that (only to crash again, yay) but I believe in you and it's not wrong to keep pushing even if, or especially when things look dire.
That being said, I do see why critiques of structures can be applied to those that uphold them and I know it's not the intent of anyone here to do either of the two negative things I mentioned so this isn't some kind of scold post for OP or anything, just that I empathize.
I think there is still plenty of demand (or at least, need) in fields that interface with the real world, and finance as others have mentioned. The amount of shoddy and out of date software I have to deal with working in a lab is astounding. There are decades of work to be done still to improve things in manufacturing, life science, lab equipment, industrial equipment, process engineering, etc.
Skill issue. I would simply write a barista script in the AngularJS framework.
not me, when 99,999 coders get laid off because AI took their jobs, they're all going to sit around and do nothing all day, meanwhile I'm going to be the one who continues to apply for jobs or use those AI tools to make 50 micro-startups!!!
