The Brutal Truth Behind Tech Layoffs

In the recent months companies like Unity, Amazon, Intel, IBM, Nokia, Samsung, and many more have fired hundreds of thousands of tech workers collectively.
In this video I dive into the dark side of the tech industry and what is fueling this current wave of mass layoffs, the whispers of "employee farming," and the hiring practices fueling a collapse within the industry.
Please like, subscribe, and leave a comment about your experience working in technology or a related industry doing layoffs.

[@mrinalkrant2523]

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🤖 *AI Impact on Tech Layoffs* - Layoffs in the tech industry are often linked to concerns about AI replacing programming jobs. - AI is not an imminent threat to programming jobs, especially those involving complex logic and low-level languages. - The fear of AI replacing programmers is a minor factor in the current wave of tech layoffs. 03:30 📉 *Preparation for a Looming Recession* - Some layoffs in the tech sector might be attributed to companies preparing for a potential economic recession. - Economic indicators, such as interest rates, are being monitored, and companies are making strategic decisions. - The anticipation of a recession plays a role in the decision-making process, though it's not the primary cause. 05:09 🚀 *Hyperspecialization and Employee Farming* - Tech companies are experiencing a trend of hyperspecialization in roles, creating jobs that might not be necessary. - Employee farming involves companies artificially inflating their workforce to create an image of continuous growth. - Massive layoffs occur when companies realize the need to streamline and eliminate unnecessary roles, impacting hyperspecialized positions. 09:44 🔄 *Negative Consequences of Hyperspecialization* - Hyperspecialization leads to the creation of jobs that lack intrinsic value and do not contribute significantly. - CEOs, at times, are not effective in managing resources, leading to the hiring of unnecessary positions. - Employees in hyperspecialized roles often feel disconnected and uncertain, contributing to a cycle of layoffs and negative job experiences. 11:36 💼 *Value of Generalist Programmers* - Generalist programmers, well-versed in various frameworks and languages, have intrinsic value. - The stability of a job is higher for generalists, as they can adapt to different needs and bring a broader skill set to the table. - Recommendations for programmers: focus on becoming a generalist with a deep understanding of core architecture. 14:59 🌐 *Catalyst Event: Elon Musk Buying Twitter* - Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter led to significant layoffs, around 71% of the workforce. - The event highlighted the efficiency gains possible by reducing unnecessary roles. - Other tech companies are now considering similar approaches to streamline operations. 16:34 💡 *CEO Realization and Leaner Operations* - CEOs are recognizing the bloated nature of their corporations and considering leaner operations. - The influence of Elon Musk's approach is encouraging companies to reevaluate their workforce size. - Layoffs are, in part, a result of companies realizing the need to shed excess employees and focus on efficiency. 17:43 🚀 *Company Layoffs Trends: Cloud Fair and Unity* - Companies like Cloud Fair and Unity are laying off employees, reflecting industry trends. - Cloud Fair seems to be mirroring Elon's approach by cutting hyperspecialized jobs, similar to Unity. - Unity's mismanagement, highlighted by unwise business moves, is contributing to its layoffs. 19:48 🛡️ *Advice for Programmers: Avoid Hyperspecialization* - Programmers are advised to avoid hyperspecialized roles for job security. - Being in a more general role makes you less likely to be easily fired during layoffs. - Companies often target employees in overly specialized positions during layoffs. 21:25 🌐 *List of Major Tech Companies with Layoffs* - Numerous major tech companies, including Amazon, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Meta, Zoom, and more, are undergoing significant layoffs. - The layoffs are attributed to companies vastly overhiring, engaging in what the speaker terms "employee farming." - The overhiring trend extends to several dozen companies, all letting go of thousands of employees. 22:04 💻 *Impact on Tech Interviews and Hiring Practices* - The speaker criticizes the current state of tech interviews, calling them painful and overly specialized. - Predicts a shift in hiring practices towards valuing generalists more than hyperspecialized roles. - Expects an improvement in tech interviews with a focus on fundamental knowledge and a resurgence of practical tests like FizzBuzz. 23:16 📈 *Potential Rise in Value for Individual Programmers* - Anticipates that good programmers may become more in demand and see increased earnings. - Expects the weeding out of overly specialized individuals to increase the value proportion of individual programmers. - Highlights the historical shift where programming wages have become comparable to some blue-collar jobs and suggests a potential reversal in this trend. Made with HARPA AI

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for this, very useful!

[@mrinalkrant2523]

@@JoshChristiane thanks.. Your videos are excellent content.. AI does such a good summary in a min with no cost... ❤️... We are having a wonderful time...

[@sinan.e]

> "17:43 🚀 Company Layoffs Trends: Cloud Fair and Unity" It's Cloudflare, not Cloud Fair ;)

[@tomekhome]

it's easier to watch the video, than to read this LOL

[@mrinalkrant2523]

@@tomekhome listening is gold

[@Sanguen666]

"The jobs are fake, The Money is fake, the Economy is fake" - Luke Smith

[@meinbherpieg4723]

The suffering, exploitation, and inequality is real though!

[@Sanguen666]

@@roddeazevedo hahaha an excellent soviet saying! 😁

[@Sanguen666]

true! @@meinbherpieg4723

[@sunso1991]

That is a fantastic video essay!

[@apricotcomputers3943]

I knew that the moment I was in san Francisco. But everyone was busy, busy, busy😂

[@bobbrian6526]

The reason companies hire so many programmers is all about power. If you have a team of 5 programmers, then those 5 people have huge power over the fortunes of the company, they can just leave and make the enterprise fail, or demand any level of salary. By having large teams, and none of those people responsible for anything more than a small aspect of the whole a company protects itself from having to deal with powerful workers. The workforce can be shed whenever cost cutting is required, no problem, and workers can be disciplined by the fear of being laid off

[@JoshChristiane]

You're totally right, it's another path of compartmentalization really. Just like NASA does. Limiting any individuals ability to have too much sway over any single system. Great observation!

[@fluffysox6072]

Really intelligent take

[@jonrue6387]

aka increasing the bus factor

[@darklighttechnology]

Cleaver, yet so scandalous. Great comment

[@shrunkensimon]

Another reason why the giants hire so many is to reduce the competition from other companies by soaking up all the talent, even if that talent ends up doing nothing with their talent in exchange for silly money.

[@sinnombre5466]

I remember working at Google HQ, everyone was either eating free food , at a pointless meeting, looking for parking or in line to get free food…. Hardly anything ever got done… I always knew if they got rid of everyone and only kept the top 20% performers the whole operation wouldn’t skip a beat

[@JoshChristiane]

I saw and experienced the same exact thing as you. Totally true.

[@yoced1468]

I heard they higher people even if they did nothing so other companies couldn’t higher them. In some respects being pointless was predetermined.

[@gkossatzgmxde]

@@yoced1468higher?? really???

[@jurnoss]

@@gkossatzgmxdelol

[@vamsikrishna3855]

@@gkossatzgmxdehe meant hire.

[@stanleyshannon4408]

I am the quintessential generalist with decades of experience successfully developing software. Being retired now, I've been easily picking up remote contract work for the last several years. I am suddenly not getting a single new offer. Something is going on.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm sorry to hear that, I hope you find some good projects to work on. Even when you're retired it's fun to work on new interesting stuff. Thanks for your comment and insight in the industry.

[@systemsconsult9282]

Shady HR "Partnerships" and integrations and algorithms (foreign and domestic) needs called out for what it is ...shady Discrimination

[@filthyfrankblack4067]

They don't want you knowing the "new" secrets of the tech. Don't count out agisum as there has been alot of focus on people under 25 for the last few years. I would lie and change your age on the applications to see if that helps.

[@shawnkelly695]

Did you vote liberal?

[@stanleyshannon4408]

@shawnkelly695 I always vote for whoever the establishment tells me not to vote for. I no longer believe terms such as liberal and conservative are relevant to an understanding of modern politics. There is the rules based international order and there is the badly disorganized resistance constantly being distracted by squirrels.

[@keyone415]

I'm a software engineer, and I've been through multiple rounds of layoffs at a big tech in the Bay Area. Believe me when they cut for layoffs, the decision between who stays and who goes comes from very high up leadership, they have absolutely no clue who's the high performers or not. I've seen teams where all the senior high performers were let go, typically leaders look at the quarterly planning and they decide which projects they want to deprioritize, which one they want to keep their focus on. Based on that they do the layoffs. Sometimes you see senior engineers they were on a major overhaul of a platform project to save on infrastructure costs for the long run, they are the experts. But the average engineer has a tiny feature to work on, but that tint feature has more value to leadership short term, so byebye the seniors 😢 Leaders only think short term for their own career path

[@JoshChristiane]

I too worked in Silicon Valley for a while, so I saw that first hand as well. I think there is truth to that, but I know it's a sad reality. We all wish for companies that value the highest performing individuals in their field as opposed to the short term fulfillment goals of the company. It's the world we live in and we have to just adapt to the industry or get left behind. Thanks for your comment!

[@keyone415]

@@JoshChristiane Yeah unfortunetly, the very strong engineer will go and choose to work on the technically most challenging project to advance their career to get the next level promotion, but that project may end up being on the "deprioritized" project during a mass layoff.

[@moonbiscuit8742]

​@@keyone415exactly

[@GoodNWellOff]

Gained a sub for this awesome video love the structure awesome sound quality and your take was knowledgeable and genuine

[@MrMcWitt]

This is wildly true. Its crazy, last month I presented my major feature which spanned nearly all of the front end that took 2 months to build and was very complex but behind the scenes, only to get a 'nice... why'd that take so long?' I was like "well how long do you have?", meanwhile a guy after me (a good developer no shots fired) presented a VERY minor change and the director gave him a bunch of props cuz its something that he can show off in meetings to make himself look good. The some of the engineers understood, but yeah, was pretty frustrating.

[@stonesfan285]

All in all, we're all just bricks in the wall.

[@locotx215]

"hahaaaaaaa . . charade you are . . . "

[@Sci-Fi_Fan296]

I know that he mentioned that in the video at about the half way point however Pink Floyd comes to mind for some reason.

[@easygreasy3989]

Whos wall?

[@thetobinator95]

All in all we're just another brick in the wall 🎶

[@ewplayer3]

Mother will they put me in the firing line? Same album, different song.

[@BlakeWilliams4u]

As a tech recruiter for the past 12 years, this is worst market I've ever seen. The jobs we do have to fill are all ultra niche hyper specialized with picky hiring managers and/or have undesirable characteristics such as low end under market pay ranges or firm onsite requirements. The roles seem to go unfilled indefinitely because the people who actually want the job are rejected and the people the clients want to hire are declining the offer. We never come across the "generalist" jobs you're encouraging people to find unfortunately. Great video though - appreciate your insight.

[@JoshChristiane]

Completely agree with you. I think my idea is to generalize and become a good programmer as a whole with many technologies, then "as needed" you can specialize where necessary in order to get a job. This method protects you because if you get fired/laid off you can quickly adapt to any other technology. I'm not anti-specialization, I just expect companies to treat employees as expendable, and you don't want to get stuck.

[@KirelRed]

I highly specialized in the 2000's. In 2016, I was laid off because my specialization was no longer needed. I've had to change my entire career because of hyper-specialization.

[@JoshChristiane]

Not just you, many people like you, my wife included. People need to accept how the industry is changing and adapt to it appropriately if they want to survive.

[@gavinlew8273]

Specialisation is very useful in surgery and medicine.

[@ZdzichuRaczka]

6:25 - someone has to work and pay taxed. Without it our systems are doomed :/ . 11:15 - i dont want to be a resource, i want to be a human being :< .

[@KirelRed]

@@gavinlew8273 It's useful in IT also. But when technology changes, your specialization doesn't always fit the new paradigm. I specialized in a specific type of version control for developers. And its been 5+ years since I even looked at it. The new type is radically different from what I did (UCM - base clearcase/clearquest) Believe me, nobody is hiring when my skills are so out of date.

[@ScorpioSunset-ux8mv]

@gavinlew because the hardware and software doesnt change

[@raymond_rnt]

I am so burnt out by this industry. I'm all but done. If my position actually goes away since they are doing RTO, I doubt I'll ever get another job in the field. I have no debt, a paid off house, and low living expenses.

[@JoshChristiane]

At least you're in a position where you can retire temporarily or permanently since you were wise with paying off your debts. You were smart for sure. But you can still find a job later if you're experienced I'm sure, especially in one of the recession proof sectors.

[@bigneiltoo]

I have an interview coming up in 2 hours for a near perfect match. On site, $98 an hour. Military software and graphics related (my speciality). I have 30 years experience. Made $105K last year and $149K in 2022. My 20 year average was about $100K but it's been lots of relocation. It almost always sucks somehow.

[@bigneiltoo]

Yes, it's not a bad situation if you can go flip burgers and cover rent. Not exactly retirement, but not too bad.

[@raymond_rnt]

@@bigneiltoo God, I just never want to have to be in an office again. I don't mind the work, I hate working in an office though.

[@raymond_rnt]

@@bigneiltoo hell, Marco's pays their drivers $25 an hour. My expenses last year were $17,613 for the entire year....

[@jesseburgoon9365]

I didn't look through all of the comments, but many managers at companies over hire because they are working towards their next promotion. I have seen things like "you need to manage a team of X to get promoted" or "you need to be a manager of managers to reach the next level" so many times.

[@herroic]

There are companies that do the reverse, as well: “you need to fire X number of employees this quarter to get promoted.”

[@jordanlover23]

My company does exactly that. “Manager of managers”, no matter how many direct reports you have, the importance of your team, or the quality of their/your work.

[@lyl3645]

During the pandemic, some tech workers have 4 “full-time” jobs simultaneously (making over $600K/yr); it shows some hires are excessive. Infinite “fake” growth is unhealthy and unsustainable.

[@styrofoamsoldier]

100% this, I remember hearing about that and laughing my ass off. There's no way I could do the work I do for three companies (heck, two would take too much) at the same time without going insane in a couple of months. It's insanity to even think about, I would work 24/7. I'd be lying if I didn't say that it also tickled my impostor syndrome a bit but mostly I was sure we weren't doing the same amount of work as our US big tech counterparts sometimes were.

[@aliquewilliams3080]

There’s a couple of things he’s mistaken about. #1: The layoffs has nothing to do with how good a software engineer you are. Like he mentioned, entire teams “that shouldn’t exist” are being eliminated. Whether or not you’re are good at your job within the team is irrelevant. #2: Total compensation has already dropped. There’s no reason to believe that the layoffs will result in higher compensation. There is a far greater supply of unemployed software engineers now than previously.

[@JoshChristiane]

I don't disagree with you at all, all good takes!

[@Dipj01]

Most of the people in comments section are like, "yeahh those who got fired were lazy, not hardworking or passionate like ME! This won't affect those who are truly hardworking and passionate, like ME!" When the reality is, many (not all of course) people who got laid off from these companies were actually intelligent and hardworking (especially the ones from FAANG, it takes a lot to get into them). Many got fired simply because there isn't enough work for them, regardless of how good they are. The industry is broken right now, too many candidates too few jobs. The people here try to make themselves feel better by believing if they simply grind more, they'll have no problem finding jobs. The truth is, many of them won't. Simply because there aren't enough jobs anymore. (Almost) everyone is already grinding and working extremely hard. And are still looking for jobs 6 months after they got laid off. You're not special just because you're grinding a lot, cause everyone is too. Grinding is the new default, and grinders like you and me are now average because of it.

[@casualgamer9075]

@@Dipj01Probably the most accurate thing I have read about this topic. I’m strongly considering moving to Application Security or a technical Product Manager role because I have notice the this as well. It sucks because I do enjoy my current role. Best to you @Dipj01.

[@bra195]

​​​@@Dipj01 So, programming is done :( ???

[@sonderexpeditions]

Yea. I work in big tech and we had people who literally invented programming languages and popular tools most of us use. They just completely dismantled entire orgs. Even my first team which was all iot devices was completely dismantled and they had the most brilliant people I've met.

[@alichamas63]

The tech industry was started by people who were passionate about tech, then it was flooded by people who "wanted to work in tech", it's just a natural correction to get back to the essentials. I've worked as a developer in tech for over 25 years and am glad we're finally over the period where people were living their best lives in tech, without doing any real tech. There's been way too much bloat and bullshit over the years.

[@JoshChristiane]

You're completely right on. The bloat is absolutely insane. All of the people saying otherwise likely have not worked at a large FAANG company in a senior position, otherwise they'd have seen what I saw... Just so much excess everywhere.

[@tacorevenge87]

Indians

[@tomekhome]

I had a short contract as a networking consultant at IBM few years ago. I almost immediately thought - what are 90% of those people doing. I could replace the whole floor just by myself, if they stopped interupting me with their nonsense. Elon did exactly that at twitter.

[@ericspecullaas2841]

I'm actually doing a tech startup but I'm going about it on hardmore. I'm all by myself using ai to do most of the heavy lifting but I do know how to code its just much faster with ai if used correctly

[@SynDragon-xe1xb]

Tech is where the money is, so that's natural

[@lukehaswell3075]

jobs are losing value daily with massive layoffs, Last year I was working full time budgeting groceries, unable to afford date nights, and missing time with my kids just to make extra money. These days I learn how to make money online, Using my job to finance my goals, You can't be an employee forever everyone should know by now, making extra cashflow interest everyday or weekly should be the goal now.

[@JoshChristiane]

100% true. It's best not to have to rely on corporate leadership to feed you, any type of side hustles you can get started... now is the time.

[@davegustavo4726]

Having a job doesn't mean security rather join a business trade.

[@jessicamegan5850]

Our money way of life absolutely needs to be blown up, but at the same time, people also need to be more responsible. I know for a fact that there's a lot of people that simply don't make enough money. I make roughly 100 k plus a year and in California, rent prices alone eat up almost 3/4 of what I make. Throw in dependents, and other financial obligations and it's easy to end up in the negative.

[@johndeanconway7931]

Big ups to everyone working effortlessly trying to earn a living while building wealth even after the massive layoffs. My wife and I we are both retired with over $2 million in net worth and all paid off debts. living smart and frugal with our money, made it possible for us this early, even till now we earn passively with our asset coach. Adapt to a lifestyle, be thrifty, set a budget, save money and build more streams.

[@jessicamegan5850]

Impressive! having a great savings and more streams to earn makes life goal’s easier, I make most stock purchases when the market is in a confirmed uptrend or cheap cost, although most stocks I bought months ago which showed strong signs of doing well has greatly underperformed. It’s okay for me on the long run, however it’s a good time to add to existing holdings at follow -on opportunities.

[@_observer_-xk7hb]

Another reason why tech companies hire so many programmers is that software these days is crazily over engineered. In the 90s software systems were developed simply and efficiently with emphasis on good code design and good code quality. These days it's all about daily's, scrum, Jira, meetings, meetings about meetings, complex test frameworks, automation test code taking 5 times longer to write than the actual functional code and which generally provides little value, greatly complicates development and refactoring and distracts from the actual code design. Programmers these days often don't even know the difference between using an array and a linked list. All they're interested in is the latest testing framework or whatever they think is the latest rage. There is also often a lot of over engineering of distributed systems. Companies using every kind of event backbone, database, etc merely because the programmers think it will look good on their resumes.

[@maxelusbawark5545]

Couldn’t have said this better myself, especially the meetings about meetings. After a year of literally not doing anything, I decided to pick up 2 more jobs simultaneously. While also free lancing. All I can say is it was free money so why not

[@milanpospisil8024]

Yes, too much meetings. Thats slowing us down. And also tests - writing tests in cypress is pain, because they tend to fail occasionaly. When you have large project, there is big chance tests will fail somewhere and you must investigate why, so you are delayed in writing code, because all code must pass the tests. And writing the tests is pain itself too... When you do something, you must wait for tests passing, review... its very slow process.

[@mgmchenry]

1/10 times I hear these complaints from an excellent software engineer who has been around a long time and knows how to structure a process around building high quality software that creates a high quality product using a high quality team, and can break these ideas down well. That might be you. 9/10 times I hear this flavor of comments from a grumpy developer that resents writing software that someone else is going to maintain, that requires a team to produce in the first place, that has requirements that a lone wolf average programmer can't come close to, or an excellent lone wolf programmer can produce with the drawback it may need to be rewritten from scratch when that feature becomes someone else's problem. I would never ask John Carmack to write a unit test, and I don't need him at the stand up if he can give decent projections when his features will be ready. When you have an exceptional engineer, you can hire someone else to do the documentation and write some unit tests and go to meetings to interface with other teams that have questions. Most of us are not John Carmack. There are a lot of good programmers out there convinced they are exceptional software engineers and feel indignant about adopting standard practices. The reality is even though exceptional engineers can write better software, exceptional engineers are not that common, they might not be interested in your problem set, and they can be expensive. All the stuff you brought up can be taken to an unproductive extreme, but it also has a purpose when used properly to allow a team with varying levels of experience and raw engineering talent to produce a product that can maintain a level of quality after years of development and evolution.

[@SaucyCamel]

I agree with you to an extent. The problems for which we write software today are quite a bit more complex than in the past as things like the load the system should be able to handle is vastly greater than back then. Where I agree that it is overengineered is that people are solving problems that they think they will have, instead of solving the ones they actually have. People are smashing microservices and kafka into places that could easily be solved by a simple API, or building these insanely difficult to maintain serverless solutions just because its a buzz word right now and all the rage. Solve the problem you have, not the one your ego thinks you have or because you heard some new cool buzz word. We should really just push back as developers when some wet behind the ears project manager hears a new term and wants it implemented if it makes no sense.

[@xbmcme9768]

Who the hell uses a linked list for anything other than passing an interview?

[@fukbichesgetmoney100]

It’s crazy that people at Google are getting paid $500k a year to eat free food, play ping pong, and sleep in nap pods. The layoffs were much needed.

[@rodschmidt8952]

What they're actually paid for is what they're supposed to be doing in between eating free food, playing ping pong, and sleeping in nap pods.

[@bobmcbobson8368]

Which they never did

[@CERAC...]

Your video is a much-needed call to attention about the brutal reality of tech layoffs. Too often, these stories get buried in the news cycle. Thank you for speaking up and giving a voice to those affected and for creating a space for open dialogue about this challenging issue."

[@aaronbono4688]

It's not just the ceos, managers are compensated based off of how many people report to them and so they want as many people under them as possible.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's a VERY good point that I missed. Thank you for noting that.

[@vDungeon]

I have seen that at EPAM 15 years ago, but not in any other company later. Don’t know what is happening at EPAM now.

[@2112sac]

Excellent video, you are one of the first people I have ever seen notice this issue. I literally watched a video on here talking about solving the programmer shortage and was like "shortage?" we have a glut of programmers, WAY too many of them. Now there might be a shortage of excellent programmers and there is definitely a shortage of even competent architects but there are easily 4 - 5x as many people with a job title that equates to something like programmer than we actually need and most of them will never be capable of adding any value whatsoever to any employer in that role.

[@JoshChristiane]

You pretty much just summed up exactly how I feel, and have been feeling for almost a decade. Just too many people oversaturating a field that has no business being this over employed.

[@ericandbeethoven]

I am in Fintech with a strong background in both Finance and Tech. One very important factor that you didn't mention - High, Rising Interest Rate environment. Tech industry is very sensitive to the cost of capital. Projects & Products thus were scaled back, delayed or outright canceled thus causing layoffs. We're entering Lower Interest Rates environment and you'll see hiring pick back up. January Jobs numbers support this. Also, there's currently a 65% probability of recession over next 12 mos per Fed Model. Note that it was around 70% in Q4 so the probability of recession is decreasing. To your point about CEOs and Management in general not being terribly good, I really doubt they make decisions with this granularity of data. It's more driven by fear and copying what their competitors are doing.

[@JoshChristiane]

This is dead on, 💯 agreed.

[@chengat]

@@JoshChristiane do you disagree with anything at all? Lol

[@picadosinferno]

My company has 17k+ and it probably could do with 2k, we are so bloated that I have been preparing since covid to get fired, it hasn't happened yet but I'm fully prepared if it does.

[@JoshChristiane]

Yeah this is a story I hear over and over again, it's hard to argue with reality. Brook's law, Bell's lab study, and the QSM Studies have been done showing that anything beyond a handful employees working on a single software project actually just ends up slowing it down. Imagine having 400 cooks making one soup, nothing would get done because they all get in each other's way. But companies just kept hiring because it didn't matter if the soup ever got made, as long as they just kept promising investors that it's being served soon.

[@jenny-DD]

My neighbor got fired and is now lead cashier at McDonald's

[@ci6516]

And u don’t think Walmart can’t function with 1/3rd the employees ? I drive a forklift , company can make due with 10 guys buy has 30

[@nicolcacola]

Good for him/her getting in the grind to make it work. Not everyone will be willing to do that ​@@jenny-DD

[@collin9085]

@@ci6516 This is exactly how costco works. You may remember about 15 years ago when people were discussing why costco can afford to pay it's employees twice as much as walmart. It basically came down to the fact that costco is much more selective and requires their employees to work harder. The math works out the same for both companies. And economically, it doesn't benefit society to have more people with no jobs (costco model) or more people all earning less (wal-mart model)

[@vthenarheqa]

My previous company (that just fired me in the big round of layoffs) was/is also doing the "silent layoffs" or "secret layoffs" as well - essentially what they do is eliminate the position, so they get to fire you "at will" with basically no cause because hey, the position doesn't exist any more so we don't need anyone to fill it.

[@JoshChristiane]

And that has happened to so many people I know, so I know it's true.

[@katarzynakapusta2525]

I just wonder why the hell is it still so hard to survive in this economy when you're a small, lean company, relying on your own skills, when the huge ones don't know what next to throw their money into...

[@JoshChristiane]

A seemingly innocent question, with huge answers that go way beyond my personal capacity to understand or even begin to answer. But in part I'm sure it's a lack of corporate regulations, too much red tape on smaller companies to compete (which those corps lobbied for). Massive tax breaks for the big companies, and government grants for the too big to fail, while all but ignoring small time investors and startups. Everything is exponentially harder when you don't have scale. Think about a rock star for example, they get all of their gear for free, and yet ironically they don't free stuff when they could easily afford to buy their own. But then a small band or musical artist has to work 10X as hard to be able to afford the gear the big shots get for free. That is the same story in every industry, the bigger you get the easier it gets to get bigger.

[@rodschmidt8952]

@@JoshChristiane Yes, economy of scale. And everybody's heard of IBM but nobody's heard of you. And "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" Interesting strategy. You want to out-lobby the big companies and strangle them with red tape. But do that, you'll have to make bigger campaign contributions

[@karlybyrd1551]

So good luck if you're trying to get into the industry, because now it'll be flooded with people who already have all the experience. I've seen these lists of requirements for entry level positions, it's wild.

[@shosetsuninja3112]

This helped me understand why I was laid off. I believe I am a good generalist. I love building things. As my company pursued hyper specialization, my hands were tied more and more from doing anything useful. Now I collected severance and got a new job doing something useful. 🥳

[@JoshChristiane]

Excellent! I'm glad you found something else, I'm sure you're happier being allowed more freedom to think. Thanks for the comment. 😁

[@6antonioinoki]

“specialization is for insects”

[@egglyph]

It has nothing to do with you. Absolutely zero. It was random. You should be asking yourself not “why?”, but “when?”

[@genzen6129]

Go to college, spend years learning, spend years paying off said education, then get laid off…..

[@JoshChristiane]

That's been the experience of many of my friends, sadly. :(

[@tutatis96]

Never felt so blessed that i live in Europe. Always been debt free, if they fire me i can rub my belly for like 2-3 years and I'm 27.

[@x86ed]

I’m a cook, but I’m a cook that works in a rocket test facility. So I’m around this stuff all day even if I’m not actually programming. One major thing that people don’t consider is the companies themselves being unwilling to use AI because of the IP. There is no way in a million years they will let their source code be copy/pasted into anything related to AI, and they even crack down on the questions you can ask because they are well aware of how AI learns. So there is a long long way to go before any kind of full integration. I would say that it’s not ai that will replace workers, but workers that use AI will replace workers that don’t use AI.

[@JoshChristiane]

Excellent point and well written. Funny how the cook commenting is the one with the most common sense. 🤣 My experience has been the more educated people are, the more they struggle with basic common sense. And that's become even more clear to me after making this video and dealing with an onslaught of comments from well educated people who can't see the forest for the trees.

[@pete531]

they just need local AI who doesnt evolve

[@Cybercolascorner]

Im glad you said, 400 people working on UI for snapchat? how is that even possible, like you said, it is by far THE worst UI of ANY comparable social media app

[@JoshChristiane]

I do not understand how people can even use it. TikTok is extremely well designed. You may hate the app as many do, but in terms of just UI, TikTok might be the best I've seen in over a decade... That's probably partly why it's so popular. Everything is extremely intuitive. I also find Telegram is very very well made.

[@Elizabeth-mf3dn]

400? 😮 I wanna know what their day to day tasks are

[@NotAFanMan88]

Even within IT, it depends on the role. There's a huge bloat in Business Analysts and Project Manager roles which aren't really necessary. Actual developers that know the internals of a project are way more useful than talking heads that only cause more confusion.

[@JoshChristiane]

I've absolutely seen that to be true within most fields I've worked in. While I only have professional experience in technical industries I'm sure it's true across the board.

[@altbinhax]

David Graeber wrote a great book, "Bullshit Jobs" ; we're in a hyper financialised society that lost its way long ago.

[@JoshChristiane]

Awesome book! And really good point. Thanks for watching and commenting and reminding me who wrote that book!

[@CameraMystique]

The "Bullshit Jobs" will become more government jobs (new departments etc). Otherwise, what will you do with the unemployed? If you need 10 programmers now, you will need 2 programmers for the same job in a couple of years (never 0, but never 10 again), what about the others? Especially when your product has automated tons of other industries around, so no alternative jobs either? I've lived it in Greece and France decades ago, the gvt going into debt to create useless government departments, because no jobs were actually needed (for different reasons in each country). Not even war can create new jobs anymore. One could say "that's a good opportunity to have the machines work and live with a little less clutter, and just enjoy free time" - but inflation and taxes won't let us do that either. As you say, we lost our way long ago.

[@altbinhax]

@@CameraMystique The nineteen sixties was the time of expanding government jobs which tapered through the late seventies, but with the Chicago School of economics employment conditions changed. In short the post industrial society envisaged by people like Alvin Toffler has descended into George Orwell's dystopia, but with lashings of privatization.

[@CameraMystique]

@@altbinhax Sometimes I'm thinking that Orwell's dystopia eventually becomes inert from within. When lives become so uninteresting and predictable, that it's not worth monitoring or guiding them anymore. On another note, if AI destroys so many jobs and incomes, who will buy the products advertised by Google's clients?

[@whitemakesright2177]

​@@CameraMystique If you only really need 10 man-hours of work a day to provide for 10 people (hypothetically), it would make the most sense to devise a system where everyone works 1 hour. Instead, we have a system where 1 person does all the real work, and the other 9 have bullshit jobs. I don't know what the "correct" system would look like, but you're right that it will likely require a stable currency.

[@jeffcauhape6880]

There are probably more engineers who want to be cowboys than cowboys who want to be engineers.

[@JoshChristiane]

Amen. I'd rather be a cowboy for sure.

[@dennistyler9852]

Giddy up

[@rodschmidt8952]

except in India... well...

[@coronaphone710]

I cant afford both lifestyles, its all about the money

[@AbedDan]

Thank you for your analysis. I have been in tech industry for the last 13 years , started as IT support, managing servers , IT project management, product management and lastly a software engineer. I hope that what you said about being a generalist will be true.

[@pixelroutine4609]

You’re not wrong. I’m building a game company with 1 employee. Me. I can do art (good at 2D, decent at 3D), code and design.

[@JoshChristiane]

And you're probably better than if you hired 5 people to do all of that for you, because you care about it and are willing to wear many hats. Never let being 1 person hold you back. I wish you much success! Make sure you link me to any games you come out with in a comment, I'd love to be the first of many to buy and play your games!

[@ifstatementifstatement2704]

Yeah I'm doing a mobile app for the first time (I'm a backend) programmer and with chatgpt have been able to learn fast what I needed to do the frontend well. I've also started a company and with chatgpt have been able to go through all the steps necessary to setup my business. Same goes for marketing. All of that by myself. So I know I can get the knowledge to do it all well but all these aspects take time and are full-time jobs in themselves.

[@journeytrials]

I would like to work with you! Crazy but I have great idea for a game!

[@daneydasing4276]

Dont think he will work for you free on your ideas!

[@King_Fury]

same ....i am a 3d modeller and ai engineer

[@thedabbler2753]

When an incident occurs these days the call consists of a dozen or more seat warmers and only one person who can fix the problem. So much deadwood.

[@amorelus]

I worked in a big Automotive Company for their software. One task was to add German Text. I had a question. I received two emails, about a German Text, Both are too wide for the width, so I asked what is the preferred text. I asked the manager who is head of German Translation. He put in a chainmail for whole translation department. Him, and all this subordinates were debating and arguing about what's the best text to use. Then team that handled Japanese text joined in, then team Spanish, then team Portuguese, then team Polish, Team French. Eventually I had over 100 people arguing back and forth. Instead of having 2 possibilities, I had hundreds of options. I asked my team lead, who is right? He said all of them, if I pick one the rest will be offended and I can lose my job. They all each want to look good. So I asked head of translation I need one answer, so hey said he'll schedule a meeting next week to discuss this. Every week same issues. and Every week they wanted another meeting to get the vote down. In mean time I have nothing to do but wait for an answer, 3 months later. The team finally agreed to used the text "OK" because Germans understand that text. After 2 and half years of doing pointless funneled basic task that did not allow me to add value and worth to team. I decided to quit and move on. Not why I went to college, to update text and deal with bloated management.

[@donnafromnyc]

Example...the nation state bad actor hack at Change Healthcare United Health. Now in Day 4.

[@Stovetopcookie]

That’s why Musk fired 70% of Twitter employees and nobody noticed.

[@itsacookie1]

Honestly the tech industry needs salary adjustments. Paying fresh out of college students 150k+ to basically train them to not be a total detriment to any project for the next year or two is wild.

[@NotMarkKnopfler]

Yep. I think you're 100% correct about this. I wrote a web-based time management system (staff, hours, billing, payroll) in classic ASP in 2004 for a company in the Isle of Man. On my own. They are still using it in 2024! The point being you don't need lots of people to write _most_ applications.

[@kubanaid5960]

My boy your knowledge no longer matters .AI will soon replace you. You need to learn Cyberscience.

[@user-sy4mp8hq6i]

​@@kubanaid5960Such a dumb reply.

[@nmphotog]

This is a pretty astute analysis. I went through an interview this week as a contingency in case my current contract starts to reduce headcount. The team was far more siloed than my current role which is much more encompassing. There were members actively ridiculing me for not knowing exactly the answer on a very obscure item you will only see in a text book. These people clearly had no substantive experience outside their specialization. When I asked questions back at the end of the interview, they were all sitting in silence for items that were foundational, commonplace and critical. I came away thinking that their entire team could be done by a single person as a side task to their main job and the reality is, that is probably what will happen.

[@JoshChristiane]

That was my experience in a few interviews I did as well. They're designed to humiliate you sometimes as much as they are to hire you. It feels that way at some companies anyways.

[@malthus101]

I really wish you would have told them exactly what you just said here!

[@bitkahuna]

@@JoshChristianethe hazing interview. and the "we've been asked to interview you, but we don't want the company to hire you because it may hasten the layoffs" problem

[@_nimrod92]

Dude your spot on your assessment on why things are the way they are. If you incorporate proper software architecture from the get-go where it scales up over time you don’t need 1000’s of programmers to work on app like Tinder or as the example you use of Snap Chat. It really only needs small team and I mean probably like 10 if not less. It’s a huge disservice on what colleges and bootcamps promote on tech shortages when realistically its flooding the market with people. Theres only so many teams these people can join which I feel like your video needs to be shown to everybody trying to break into tech.

[@JoshChristiane]

You are absolutely right. Totally correct. The oversaturation of any market is bad for the employees in the end. All of the boot camps and thousands of programs for education serve their purpose, but as too many flock to tech we are leaving a vacuum in other industries.

[@fc7307]

The problem with these boot camps is that they are dishonest since they need to sell their courses to as many people as possible. They made naive people think that you can earn a big salary just by taking a few months of their bootcamp.

[@MannyLoxx2010]

Just found your KZbin channel, Josh!! Great content!! 100% facts!! As a Hardware, Network and Software Engineer, I have seen everything you mention on this video!! I have not specialized in tech, because of the mess in IT and Tech, since the Fall 2022!! I'm not even doin Software Engineering, anymore, since 2022 because of how hard it is to get a Software Engineering role. I've been doing Hardware, Network and some Servers Engineering ever since!!

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for leaving a comment, I appreciate your kind comment and viewership. I totally agree with you, the market is insane right now, but hopefully with time it meets equilibrium and becomes again what it once was. I'm hopeful for the future of working in technology, one way or another.

[@BalazsLengyelMD]

Well congratulations Josh, you have just gained another follower with me. It might be validation bias on my behalf but I really like when every now and then I find someone who sees through the fraudulant work system we live in.

[@m-ok-6379]

Another big problem was bootcamp programs that dumped so many underqualified developers into the market. I know so many people who got hired when in companies because they knew somebody inside the company and these people couldn't write CSS if their lives depended on it.

[@harrytsang1501]

Bootcamp people are only hired because their wages can be down talked. Everyone knows they cost more to train and will give company code to ChatGPT

[@egglyph]

Those people have about zero impact on the jobs market though. They don’t make it through the screening, let alone actual interviews

[@Eli7PM]

@@egglyphnot now but before the pandemic, they did.

[@leezhieng]

I hired one such developer "graduated" from bootcamp program. The only thing he know are stuff learned from the bootcamp and nothing else. Anything beyond that is not comprehensible, and has zero exposure on other techs that are deemed basic for a real developer (he doesn't even know what is MySQL or what is OOP).

[@herzaislad]

I am great at css (and javascript), I didn't have computer science degree, though, learnt it by myself online. I also know php, mysql, go, well not so deep, but enough to build my own apps (that I only use personally). Do you think companies will be interested to hire me now?

[@nathanrapport8661]

ChatGPT may not be replacing my job but it's gone a long way toward replacing stackoverflow for me. "Give me an example of how to X in language Y." Fast and accurate.

[@JoshChristiane]

For me as well. It definitely won't replace myself or any of my employees at my company, but it has made everybody 10 or 15% faster at dealing with common issues. The big area where it hasn't been helpful for us is HLSL, and OpenGL, but all of the standard code it has helped guide us in the right direction.

[@moravec481]

“Good programmers will now make more because the weaker ones are being fired” I don’t see this happening any time soon due to how saturated the market is. If you are talented but do not yet have a fancy resume, it’s quite hard to get noticed.

[@JoshChristiane]

A lot of truth to that. I am only trying to find an optimistic view in an industry that is as you stated very oversaturated. Let's say I'm cautiously optimistic.

[@victorwade2343]

I actually remember the time when companies would turn down interest in my peers because they were "overqualified" for basic entry-level positions. The same peers who needed an entry-level position because senior positions required experience. And how do we gain experience? Of course.

[@globalfamily8172]

A lot of middle managers who started in coding are being laid off. Directors, architects, etc

[@isaacmoore3639]

I graduated with a materials engineering masters in 2021 and having found no jobs in my specialty, I decided I would *never* hyper specialize again. I pivoted to manufacturing and data science, dusting off old software development skills. I’m staying out of the ‘software development’ role while I focus on making value added commits at my company. I get to learn new things all the time! That’s the best part of my role.

[@JoshChristiane]

Sounds like a really good job. I am hearing this exact thing from everybody I know in tech, hardware is still going strong. I'm probably going to move back into hardware eventually.

[@nacpatil]

The issue with your approach is that you will be competing with an engineer in india working for 15 dollars an hour. Unfortunately the quality of these engineers is getting good. In any case by becoming generalist we end up becoming one applicant out of 300 others. Whereas in materials if you are even decent you have lot more stability. Coming from someone who did phd and got into serious software engineering.

[@isaacmoore3639]

@@nacpatil thanks! I didn’t want to do research or work on military applications so I really didn’t think ahead on that choice. The remaining jobs are hyper localized in materials around rivers or in specialty manufacturing hubs. I did not want to move. I’ve found a mixture of manufacturing, general problem solving, and advanced data warehousing and data analysis stills to be appreciated at this company. There are a few other skill sets I might add I can still branch into here. My current goal is is to be competent in as many portable skills areas as possible so I can be hard to fire but easy to hire. If companies find out all these specialists can be replaced by a a few generslists in 10 years, I’m ok to wait that long to win big if I don’t have to give up winning medium in the short term. In any case, I’m opting out of the bloated overspecialized model of career for good.

[@Alcatraz111]

Brother the video is amazing. Precise, relevant and easy to understand. I subscribed and have a feeling that if you keep up with this quality of work, eventually your channel will explode. Wishing you best of luck

[@nicksmith8166]

I remember when all the tech bros were telling people in other industries to “learn to code.” We’ve come full circle.

[@jeremytupas1273]

Thanks for such a sensible take on the matter. One thing that wasn't covered is the market for junior developers. It seems like companies only want to hire seniors, but if this continues eventually there will be no seniors left as they will inevitably leave the industry for whatever reason. Curious to hear your opinion on this if you don't mind? It's tough to get in as a junior right now.

[@BramSLI1]

I'm a Service Desk tech, but I've made myself practically indispensable by learning every aspect of the role and doing all of the extraneous things for this role. I also train our new hires. I've been very worried about losing my job, but this gives me hope. I do several different roles in my job and I'm also the guy who resolves the most tickets. We're currently beginning to hire international workers because they can pay them less. I have been worried that I've been simply hiring my replacements, but I don't see how that's possible with everything I do. Only time will tell, but this gives me hope because of how I've diversified myself in this current job.

[@JoshChristiane]

It's a good thing you diversified your skill-set. Whether you get laid off or not is impossible to predict, especially with the chaos and uncertainty of the market conditions right now. But if you're a hard worker who's passionate about his job and excels in every position you're in, you will work your way to the top regardless of what job or company you're in. Joseph started as a slave and became second in command to the king through his incredibly hard work ethic, that story may be thousands of years old but the same principles are true today.

[@egglyph]

Unfortunately it doesn’t help when the whole role is deemed redundant. I.e. a company decided service deck has to be scaled down x10 and outsourced.

[@Auxillia]

It does help that you work hard and go above and beyond. But the biggest factor is having a good boss and your boss has a good upper management. When it comes to layoffs, the managers have to fight for their team to stay. You don’t have any power in that fight.

[@dava00007]

Not to sound too dire, but I have been at this place in a helpdesk before (for a giant firm). The company eventually let everybody go where I worked at and replaced us with the outsourced team, despite the other team not being up to the task AT ALL. When local management told the higher ups about it they were told "not to be racist". Long story short, the company lost more of its clients because the guys on the other side of the pound were not ready (or unable/unwilling) to replace us, it lost over half of its total employees and went from being a major player in IT services with giant corporations as clients to a mid-size company. They saved a few box in the short therm, but lost so much more over th following 3 or 4 years. On the bright side I got a pretty good severance package because I had been there almost 15 years and I got a better job since then. So pay attention to what's happening, whoever is taking the decision may do it even it it makes no sense. Polish your Linkedin profile and if you have a good job offer take it (no need to be pro-active at the moment).

[@torvic99]

Just get multiple jobs, that’s what I recommend..

[@CaravaggioRoma]

the main reason is the hike in interest rates, which made the blitzscsle growth model impossible to continue. you need to rationalise your resources. what goes up must come down. always.

[@justincase9638]

Yes but - not just the cost of money - not sure about Software development houses - but Healthcare IT applications get more complex, need to adhere to more and more auditing, reporting, interfacing, - more complexity requires more time more time is money too many people spending a year to install an application. Then the business looks to cut people. The remaining folks need to work harder - they get a small bump in pay but work twice as many hours. They won't hire more people. What I see is every industry becoming more complex and more audited and more costly to manage. Use LLM's where you can, reduce head count and keep going. I don't agree with the general direction of this channel's explanation. Every single industry is becoming more complex more inter-connected and developed to be run by fewer people.

[@user-cr1iz8fw6h]

This is definitely one of the reasons. All the boomer 80s developers in the comments being like “I’m awesome.. everyone else sucks so they’re laid off”🤣

[@mattlawrence7130]

I've been in IT for decades. I've been unemployed now for several months and have decided to retire because of how bad the market has become. I'm a former developer who moved into IT operations a couple of decades ago. Unfortunately, companies are often deciding that since everything is running they don't need ongoing maintenance, which leads to debacles like the MGM Grand ransomware disaster.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's a good point, for sure. Laying off people especially in the cyber teams could lead to major network hacks since you have to evolve constantly to changing threats.

[@mattlawrence7130]

@@JoshChristiane And to make it worse, many companies have adopted the policy of "just give developers root access". Developers just want to write code. That is their passion. So they will often do the minimum required to get back to writing code. A year ago I was working on a contract with an organization that was running hundreds of Linux systems that were 5+ years out of support. They didn't see anything wrong with that.

[@prsprague43040]

Not just true for software developers. Focusing your career in one or two major disciplines and having diverse capabilities within those major areas makes you infinitely more valuable to an employer than a one-trick pony. Businesses are constantly evolving and shifting focus. Our ability to adapt as needs change will greatly determine the trajectory of our careers.

[@JoshChristiane]

Correct. I'm so glad to see other people who understand this, it's fundamental for your career. It's hard to believe people will argue with such obvious common sense. Thanks for watching and commenting!

[@jusbus92]

This isn't LinkedIn

[@md.jannatultasnim2661]

correct

[@mr-jon]

i think you nailed it. being someone who has such broad programming skills is really difficult. seeing my company give up on all oracle products was a huge blow for me, and now i have to completely relearn how to do things with other products or quit and find a company that wants to use oracle tech stacks

[@JoshChristiane]

Oh man that IS hard. I'm sorry about what happened to you, but for people like us it's an opportunity to take a step back and re-assess the industry and our current skill-set to improve and adjust. If you're competent and I'm sure that you are, then I'm sure you'll adjust fast, or at least move on to another company that can appreciate your value as a quality generalist. Thanks for commenting! And good luck in your future and career. :)

[@wagonet]

KZbin suggested this to me and for some reason it knew this was up my alley. Great vifeo

[@noname-ch6fd]

the cause behind the tech layoffs is simple, most companies were running on debt and paying that interest to kick the can, never really turned a profit, so interest rates go up; the cost of debt goes up. now these tech companies have to run on their product; how many project management application and hr application are we gonna have?

[@alexaneals8194]

One problem in our industry, is that we are still mostly just highly paid amateurs. The number of times, I have seen or heard programmers decide to try an re-write the entire stack in a new language just because it's the latest rage is ridiculous. A professional will consider does it make business sense to switch to the new language, paradigm or etc.. The other aspect is the disdain among developers for documentation. The idea is that we don't need to document what we build. Any other engineering field requires complete and up to date documentation. If a bridge collapses and the civil engineers and maintenance staff don't have a documentation, heads will roll sometimes literally. I have had to troubleshoot systems where documentation was either non-existent or so out of date that it looked like it was written with pen and quill.

[@JoshChristiane]

I have seen all of that to be true as well. Thanks for the insightful comment.

[@vl4n7684zt]

AI can do all of this now. (commentary, documentation, refactoring, changing the language). Still need someone to review it, though.

[@alexaneals8194]

@@vl4n7684zt Only if the refactoring is known. As for changing the language, it is also limited. The languages I program in AI has not been trained on sufficiently. Besides, changing language should have a business or a pressing technical need for it and not just because the developers want to use a new language. As for documentation, the most important part of documentation is not what the code is doing, but why and AI cannot do that.

[@derechoplano]

@@alexaneals8194 Agreed. The problem is that developers hate writing. They prefer coding. This is why they chose IT in the first place. Otherwise, they would have been managers or something. I know that writing documentation can be boring, but, hey, you are paid to do a good job, not to enjoy your hobby. About the change of language, I am sick of it. Every two or three years, there is a new toy: a new language, a new platform, a new methodology. This toy is only useful for 1% of use cases but developers are highly paid amateurs and everything has to be adapted to the new toy, with lots of cost, effort and problems. And waste of previous investment. Hey! You are paid to produce value, not to have fun! Grow up!

[@flashoflight8160]

Naive. I'm not supplying documentation to help the company save money by firing me and hiring a cheaper replacement. They can figure it out from the original source code.

[@troymann5115]

25 yoe here. This seems to ring true. Being a generalist has been the key to success in my career until very recently. I have real work experience in literally 10 frameworks plus AI/ML. Since the leetcode heavy interviews disproportionally reward candidates with little to no experience, I have stagnated into staff engineer roles. Secondly, others in my age group have been complaining for a while that they cannot hire talent that can get anything done. Overspecialization certainly would explain that! I look forward to a market that rewards productivity again, but anything could happen. Fantastic video! Really enlightening. Makes a lot of sense.

[@JoshChristiane]

I wish for a future where competence is rewarded as a top priority, as opposed to easily filling seats. Sometimes you just have to make waves. Thanks for your comment, it's appreciated!

[@razorswc]

I dislike the interview process we have today. I get bad anxiety with interviews, and it makes it harder to land jobs. No one seems to take my multiple recommendations from past coworkers and managers on LinkedIn seriously.

[@jasonkoroma4323]

@@razorswc Yea I feel ya, modern interviews are a waste of time.

[@reframeservices]

As an a “unicorn”, a software developer who also do design and UI/UX I’m not concerned at all that AI will replace me anytime soon.

[@skhalili]

Super insightful, Josh. Quick question: what's your source for the number of specialized employees per tech company?

[@JoshChristiane]

With Facebook it was an estimate given to me by one of my excellent friends working there currently. He didn't know the exact number so he just threw out a generic estimate. After googling for any public information I could find, I found that estimate is probably fairly accurate. It could be ~25% off give or take, but probably pretty close to a realistic number. Not to mention I worked a similarly sized FAANG company and that's pretty much almost exactly what it was there as well when I compare percentage of employees. Then at Snapchat I did the same thing, except I don't have a friend there so I had to estimate on my own using 2 different factors. The first was average parity between UI dev and other software developers I found in job listings, and the second was using Linkedin data to assess who worked where based on public employee listings. These numbers are solely an estimate and much of my point was hyperbole anyways, if they're off by 20% or whatever that wouldn't surprise me at all, but in the industry those are pretty typical numbers as a whole. These companies would never tell you, and to be honest probably not very many people working there even know. The only way for you to get this data yourself would be to go on LinkedIn like I did, but then manually find each person working there and look for their job titles. You might even be able to get away with a smaller sample size since most titles are listed in the immediate bio without even having to click on their profile. Not sure why anybody would ever need such specific data, but the only way to get an exact perfect number would be to contact Snap directly.

[@hanaahmetspahic7159]

I can appreciate this perspective because this isn't something I've thought about before.

[@annives]

Agreed. Although hearing these points, I find it so relevant to what I've seen working in the field and when I've done interviews.

[@bigm980]

Lol thats crazy to me. Ive been a software engineer for 15 years, hes regurgitating what ive been telling friends and family when they come to me concerned about the news. Fact is people went to school for programming that shouldnt have, because theyd get a job in big tech when they shouldnt have. Those days are over.

[@kellya.osborne3397]

I can already see how so many software developers will be offended by this but it's true.

[@JoshChristiane]

Absolutely, sometimes the truth isn't so pleasant.

[@Anon-tt9rz]

these lay offs may seem huge when taken out of context, but if you look at the actual numbers of how many tech employees amazon hired vs laid off, those lay offs are drop in a bucket, amazon hired 1,200,000 employees over less than 10 years, fired 18,000, that's nothing, there is still imenese tech growth in many new fields like biotech, ai and all fields related to it, 3d printing, mobile and so on, even older sectors like finances and trading are still doing just as good if not better than 10 years ago, people like to be dramatic

[@nedgivash5986]

I don't think those programmers in FINTECH have to worry too much. When a programmer writes code, he already knows he will have to give account for it's problems but when AI generates code who will we hold accountable if it performs really poorly? Can a company blame the loss of investors' money on AI? I really would like to know how this would work.

[@jakejason4333]

literally noone is gona get offended by this video. what are you talking about

[@thecollector6746]

The problem here is that neither you or the clown in this clip know what they are talking about. "A.I." had fsck all to do with any of this. Tech companies over hired during the pandemic because they foolishly thought that interest rates would remain at basically zero, Venture Capitalists would continue to give them unlimited money in return for zero return ,growth would be non-stop, and that even the most ridiculous ideas and business plans would eventually produce profit.

[@robchr]

I think part of the reason these companies hire is because they are hierarchical and management based. Having larger number of reports and people under your position will increase your salary and potential for promotion.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's a good point for sure.

[@wagonet]

Buddy i work with always says "ensure you add value, everyone is replaceable". I am always making sure of this to ensure my own sanity and job security.

[@Some_Guy_From_The_Internet]

My thoughts on this issue exactly. Thank you for sharing this in such a nicely thought out and nicely presented way. Getting yourself into the market as someone who can just use several programming languages, frameworks and wear a lot of hats and just be a good generalist is what is going to keep people on their jobs. I think that's already happening. I'm seeing a lot of smaller companies trying to get their back-end devs to start going full stack or even devops. It's just how it is. Recession looms in and and most people in the IT industry will have to diversify their portfolio.

[@tthomas2923]

Companies fail to realize layoffs will equal businesses going out of business. If people have no money or access to credit people won’t buy. Common sense. Companies are going to drive themselves to close.

[@JoshChristiane]

You are right, and to be honest it's mostly their own faults from over-growing. Chipotle almost went bankrupt when the e-coli breakouts started because they expanded their locations WAY too quickly and almost buckled under its own weight. Slow but steady and logical growth is the recipe for long lasting success.

[@gugolinyo]

Exactly my thoughts for quite some time. A few good points I didn't think too. Thank you for sharing your angle on the issue.

[@JoshChristiane]

My pleasure! Thank you for watching.

[@bobbyspeaker]

This is great, I’ve been seeing this too. Still watching to the end, I hope this changes.

[@girlien]

really nice thoughtful video. there's so much noise out there that any signal is hard to detect. even if you're not exactly right or just right about some major layoffs, this analysis seems solid. good job and thanks!

[@JoshChristiane]

Great comment, thanks for watching the video!

[@XEzechielX]

Glad to hear someone say what I've been thinking all this time. I got into programming (not "tech") because I was passionate about it as a kid, so it's been frustrating to see button engineers get paid their big tech salaries while I'm delivering value in a non-US country. Next let's see companies lay off more front-end engineers, designers, product owners, scrum masters, management consultants... companies can be lean when they don't need to provide adult daycare services.

[@stoneneils]

I got into it as a hacker programmer in the 80s.. .just make it work and do it fast. Never got into coding to be a 'team player'. Maybe one or two other guys but not 55.

[@AS-if5jg]

Lol Frontend engineers? What will you give your customer , a command to run on the terminal?

[@XEzechielX]

@@AS-if5jgthat would actually be better than loading 50mb of js

[@xxxxMonkeyGirlxxxx]

The place I worked at has been replacing US software engineers with software engineers from India. One of the executives told us they can get two India software engineers for the price of one American.

[@3.14name]

This is exactly what big brands do when they open stores that only generate costs and are 90% empty in random malls just to close them after a year. Just as a stunt to show they opened a store

[@JoshChristiane]

I never thought about that, but it's a good point. I have seen that.

[@pragatirpatra]

I am working in a big e-commerce company. Our company has been cutting off job positions since long slowly. In my team, we had 27 members and now we have just 2. And I can see the output of the work is more or less same.

[@Psy1nZero]

Man, thanks for the insight. I got curious and started to follow story lines past few days and this is most insightful video I seen. There were datapoints where unity tried to squeeze money out. Warhammer Totalwar 3 also had drama with trying to squeeze out money with poor DLC and getting nasty at their hardcore fans on youtube for stating their opinions. With this year's round of layoffs now I understand why companies got desperate to extract more money in aggressive way.

[@JoshChristiane]

That's exactly right. I have a video coming out on Friday about what happened to Unity and what is in store for their future. Thanks for the comment!

[@Psy1nZero]

To add bit more point next bit I'm wondering is if this "hot job" cycle of tech is over. There was point where being lawyer was the thing. Then investment banking (ended 2008). Then tech. Now curious if this could be the case and on lookout for datapoint to support / disprove.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm wondering the same thing. This could be the end of that cycle and beginning of the next. It'll still be some form of tech for the next I think, but you can only see looking forward.

[@WillCutAndRun]

Thanks for the video, I'm most of the way through a coding bootcamp and hearing that hard work pays off is encouraging. I assumed most of this but it's good to hear with someone who has been more involved in the industry. I'm focusing on Game Development as well but as you've stated I want to learn as much as possible. Thanks!

[@JasonTaylor-po5xc]

I always thought of Silicon Valley as its own universe where the laws of physics and math work differently. For example, someone once told me that many FAANG-type companies were like a "club" in which it was hard to get in (months of LEET/HackRank challenges) but you never actually used those skills once in. I know there are exceptions like Amazon know for working their engineers crazy hours. It's unfortunate because I see non-SV/FAANG companies use the "tech collapse" as a negotiating point on compensation/offers. Additionally, many tech folks' salaries are artificially high, which has many downstream consequences in the Bay area or other hot IT markets. The reality is most software jobs can be done remotely, which means rural Kansas is just as valid for a tech worker as the Bay area.

[@Jazna1]

I am so grateful that most of my career as a legal secretary was during a time when my excellent skills in note-taking, fast typing and proofreading were highly valued. No one cares about error-free writing or punctuation anymore and I'm retired, thank God. The "paperless office" was a false promise and some day we're going to regret it. When the power grid goes down, where is the proof of your contract? You're effed. I feel bad for young people who grew up in this fake BS society.

[@JoshChristiane]

You are COMPLETELY correct. Long gone are the days of some physical manifestation of your work. We put in endless hours for bits and bytes, only for them to replaced by oversaturation of the market and then be lost into the nether that is the IoT.

[@HansBaker-cj8tc]

if the power is out for an extended period I think we'll have bigger problems than not being able to find a document lol

[@joepic85]

Everyone is a fast typer and note taker today.

[@pohkhui]

You are right, too many people enjoying drinking coffee, eating snack, sleeping...

[@JoshChristiane]

There is a time and place for those things and many comforts. But not the full work day, haha.

[@rezNezami]

Your points are on spot. The main problem is softrware companies behave like start-ups even after they have grown clossally. Here I focus is on the company structure and the employee and work culture. The industyr need to behave like a mature industry structure-wise. For this there is dire need for unionization. Yes, it can solve lots of problems. Once an employee is unionized, it makes all the changes to be scrutinized, company has to think long term, seniority list will make it very difficult to get rid of a team altogether without concerns for how long the person been with the company and so on.

[@moroxs]

This video inspires me and gave me so much hope! Thank you! Amazing content 🎉

[@LukeAvedon]

Nice to see you making videos again!

[@JoshChristiane]

Thank you, I'm happy to be back.

[@eswag153]

This is accurate. Can build huge apps with just a few good people. As it gains loads of traffic you just need to hire more for maintenance to make sure things are repaired quickly to not lose money.

[@yurikostin6172]

Such a wholesome video! Thanks a lot! It's very interesting and I cannot agree more with all the ideas.

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm glad you thought so, I don't want to make solely negative content, but the reality of the world is that sometimes you have to try to find the positive message in all of the chaos. I hope to inspire people to work hard and not worry so much.

[@savvysirivie]

Very thoughtful, thank you. I own a solo massage business & cannot find actually good software that does what it claims without bloated features that don’t really work. Profit driven tech companies are missing the boat on the functioning we need. It is frustrating that I feel like I need to learn code to create my own app or something.

[@annives]

Great video, thanks for making it!

[@JoshChristiane]

Glad you liked it! Thanks for watching!

[@anmolfrost]

I was laid off because the company saw 34% growth instead of 89% and reallocated the resources to different teams, they disbanded 30 people because suddenly they were redundant, the company hired all of these individuals last year. Talk about this insane human greed where leaders are expecting growth year on year? I have 6 years of development experience. So I disagree with your point that skilled developers are not being laid off, they are, what if the project they were working on as been redundant for the business?

[@JoshChristiane]

I'm sorry you were laid off, that sounds like a horrible experience. We are talking in generalities here though. Of course some skilled programmers are being laid off outside of FAANG companies. I was more referring to the really big companies doing layoffs and as a whole what's happening in the industry. I have been fired in the past too while working on valuable projects where my expertise was needed, so we have all been through that. But I don't think that exact thing is what's happening en masse right now. Based on my limited ability to research the topic I saw a lot of pork being cut from these big companies. I don't mean to imply your situation is impossible, even if it's rare it is absolutely happening.

[@palovibes]

Having finished a coding boot camp and now headed back to college for my BSc, I caved in to the fear. Realizing the future job market will be super saturated gives me anxiety. But, I find comfort knowing I came to this field because I genuinely love it and am totally ok with any job. I just want to build things and never stop learning. Love your set up also. Is that a channel strip in the desk? Once I saw the Genys it was an instant sub. Thanks for sharing. A bit unrelated to this, but what language do you recommend learning to build music plugins?

[@JoshChristiane]

Great comment and questions. The channel strip is built into the desk, yes. I just mount my preamps and interface in there, it's useful for when I'm producing music or tracking. The Genelecs are great, they're my B pair that I just use when doing basic listening. I've actually developed music plugins (VST3) before so I'm the right person to ask haha. The answer to that is it depends on the exact type of plugin, because not all languages have access to all the libraries you might need. It's a huge topic really. There are libraries built into Java that are extremely useful for music plugins, as well as C#. Within the .NET frameworks group there are a bunch of libraries specifically for music plugins so that's another good option. C and C++ also have some great options, but I found them way harder to develop with because there is so much less information on their libraries and how to use them. Personally I used C#, but I think in terms of libraries Java has the most in general for audio plugin dev.

[@palovibes]

@@JoshChristiane Awesome! Thanks for the thorough info. Show us your A montitors 🫣 Looking foward to learning and this plugin Odyssey. Happy coding and viva la musica 🦄

[@chasethomas6241]

Wow, love this super clear analysis and your comfortable, measured, smooth delivery!! A pleasure to watch.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thank you, Chase. I really appreciate the kind comment and your viewership. Have a great day!

[@HeiseSays]

As a real architect, I used Chat GPT to write Python scripts for Blender to place objects randomly. I still needed to know enough Python to understand what was happening and edit the code.

[@JoshChristiane]

That was my experience using it for game development as well, as well as programming custom shaders. It helped for suer, but it wasn't competent enough on its own.

[@yoshid8987]

Look at AutoGen. Give it a role and task add yourself to confirm logic, Bye bye junior dev. Definitely not there ye,t but its coming

[@Daikini0]

As a backend developer, I see that these AI tools are just fancy form of googling a problem, it is providing better ideas, but they simply can't solve problems. I see no capacity to understand a problem and actually provide the solution, unless you want to create a snake game out of scratch. But business specifications are different, you need to interact with people, and not blindly program what you see there. Maybe it will be different in 20-40 years, no idea, it is beyond my retirement.

[@ralph17p]

I agree. AI might not be able to solve problems, but it can spit out the building blocks of the solution to that problem and make a single programmer more efficient. Then you only need one programmer when you previously needed two. It's like predictive text - it might not know exactly what message you need to send, but it can speed up the generation of the message by making fairly accurate guesses as to the next word you need.

[@dekumutant]

Im so glad ive worked at smaller tech companies instead of the huge ones. Smaller can still be hundreds to thousands relatively. Ive been forced to be such a generalist and do everything in under resourced environments. The growth ibe experienced as a dev is unreal

[@JoshChristiane]

Oh definitely, same here. I've loved working at the smaller tech companies I've been at as opposed to working for Amazon. You just have so much more ability to express your views and control your aspects of the project.

[@666marat666chanel]

Thank you Josh for having common sense in this strange world. You are completely right!

[@elagrion]

Senior Software Engineer here. No, Facebook iOS app can not be engineered by 12 people. You can have an app with the core functionality of Facebook done by a few people - yes. But not a behemoth like Facebook. At one point, companies like Facebook became so big in scale that they realized they could make or save money by doing the smallest, most insignificant optimizations and improvements. That led to an insane amount of features. That led to insanely complex systems. That led to teams that are maintaining just 1 button. Because you need to move mountains just to change freaking button color (figuratively speaking). Again, you can build app that will be 80% as good as Facebook to most users. By yourself, probably. But then you will grow, and eventually become a dragon.

[@JoshChristiane]

I like this comment because you understood what I'm saying, and while you disagree with my perhaps exaggerated point (hyperbole) you at least understood where I'm getting at. I was a senior and tech lead for quite a while at two FAANG companies, and while there was some insanely overtly complex mechanisms in place for even minor changes to anything, there is no doubt in my mind that what I witnessed was the vast over-hiring of talent. Nobody was bad at their job, they were just assigned so little to do each day that people sat around twiddling their thumbs totally unaware of what to do next. I used to make jokes about it while working there to other colleagues and called it the "what now" syndrome. Hundreds of people sitting at their desks just lost for what to do. It's impossible to manage that many people properly when the task you're given from above you is so small. Thanks for watching and commenting!

[@elagrion]

And yes, I do recognize that the bloat is real. You can reduce system complexity and team sizes in most big companies. However, it's hard. Really hard. Much easier is to throw money, bodies and new JS frameworks at the problem.

[@JoshChristiane]

You got it. That's exactly correct.

[@elagrion]

Haha, I know the feeling ). I left the biggest fintech company in Europe last year. And in my current job, with just 7 engineers, we are building advanced drone reconnaissance software. One the Ukranian military relies upon heavily. The difference is staggering ).

[@bigneiltoo]

Most of the layoffs were HR related positions, and programmers under age 30. I'm noticing job screening is much more specific now. You have to have ALL 3 skills, etc.

[@JoshChristiane]

I've noticed that as well, I think you're right. I also think HR was massively overstaffed at a lot of companies, so not surprised they were the first to be cut. You only need so many managers. I have also noticed older programmers and senior devs were far less effected by these layoffs (so far anyways).

[@amcmillion3]

This is it. I am a backend engineer with 5+ years of experience and while I am not having recruiters beat down my door I am getting deep into interviews with several companies. There are opportunities for experienced devs.

[@bigneiltoo]

@@amcmillion3 Yesterday I had an interview with a top company ($98/hr). The guy decided to just randomly ask me 30 C++ questions from some list. For every question he acted extremely skeptical (a gaslighting technique that is okay for 2 questions, not okay for 30 questions). When I went back and scored myself I scored about 85-95% but overall felt like it went poorly. I was never given a chance to screen share any demos or show any images. I'm frankly really tired of the fact that we can't just get a license or some standardized certification at GD C++. I'm so tired of people coming up with their own personal tests over and over. If they are not standardized they are sort of useless. But they won't allow a standard unless the top scores are 50% female, 50% non-white and 50% trans.

[@planesrift]

Funny how they are doing the opposite in my country. One of the big tech (ASUS) fired all programmers (mostly senior) over a certain age in a whole department just a few months ago. And it's an old saying in China that if you're over 35, you're basically too old for programming jobs.

[@davidrich27]

What is “all 3 skills”?

[@shannonl.phillips2642]

Thanks for the video, I missed your videos

[@JoshChristiane]

Glad you liked it, more to come soon!

[@alzamonart]

Been working on IT and Web projects since the late 90s and I've never, or rarely, have had the "luxury" of being a one-trick pony in the business and being paid obscene amounts for it - quite the opposite, in fact. But now seeing it in retrospect, becoming a generalist by force has well turned into a blessing in disguise - at the very least, much less prone to be replaced by an AI engine in these times. Thanks for sharing these observations.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for your comment!

[@friendlyboylulea]

Awesome video. I love your comment on UI designers at snap chat! It's just crazy that they have hired 600 UI designer ('engineers') to design a few buttons and interaction flow charts. I'm a associate professor in computer engineering but having previously worked at Volvo, Google, and Amazon, I've been asking myself the same questions.

[@JoshChristiane]

Thanks for the comment! Sounds like we have worked for some of the same companies, very cool shared experience. Guess you saw some of the same obvious issues I saw.

[@motherfudger6664]

As I was listening to this I also realized this corporate bloating in tech that really took off a decade ago probably helped fuel the housing crisis as well. And now we're still stuck with the latter.

[@JoshChristiane]

Very good point. As salaries in some specific subsets of the white collar rush became too wealthy, they used that to buy up all the housing. Prices went insane as a result, then the feds increased rates. Now prices for housing aren't coming down very fast due to the toilet plunge protection basically preventing natural market fluctuations. Everything is just super manipulated in this economy.

[@Aoiraider]

I never went into IT even though my generation was hounded into tech jobs at the risk of being “left behind”, and I think a lot of those people being laid off were the people who simply went into tech as a safe lucrative option that lacked any passion (or for the matter talent) for the work. We can’t all be rock musicians as a career, but we should be more critical of simply choosing the safest most straightforward options in our vocations I think.

[@JoshChristiane]

Oh absolutely. This is good advice. People should pick their job based on a multi-faceted approach to work. 1. Passion and natural aptitude for that profession. 2. Industry demand. 3. Future industry outlook. Just to name a few. When you find something you love that's in-demand you'll find great success. Too many people went into tech just because it was the hot thing to do.

[@AgentSmith-16384]

i have been in IT since '98 and i don't know your age but you speak so much truth

[@JoshChristiane]

I've been in tech for fewer years than you, since 2012 give or take a few years. But some things never change... I'm sure most industries have gone through this same boom and bust cycle, and all the madness that comes along with that. Telecoms dealt with the same exact problems in the 80's.