Web Jobs Shrinkage and Layoffs - Jonathan Blow

[@tedbendixson]

The thing to understand is that the jobs aren't really technology jobs. That's not what you're actually getting paid to do. Yes, you need to have some technical skill to do the jobs, but most of the jobs are about your ability to tolerate incompetence, bureaucracy, and non-technical nitwits who ask you to build bad software. The pay is high because of the bullshit, not because you are great and deserve it. What's the Venn Diagram of ability to program computers / design applications / tolerate idiots and bloated corporate infrastructure? There only so many people who fit that description, and the pay will always be high for those who do.

[@BasharAlkhalili]

"most of the jobs are about your ability to tolerate incompetence, bureaucracy, and non-technical nitwits who ask you to build bad software" Well said! As a mid-level software engineer at a non-tech company, I've recently come to the realization that I'm getting paid not to solve genuinely hard engineering problems, but to build software that "mostly" works despite all the bureaucracy, conflicts, and inefficiencies within the company that try to break it. I find myself spending most of my time not coding, but in meetings and on emails and chats, making sure that the integrated parts don't fall apart. Tolerating all this is the true challenge!

[@MyShakeweight]

The tech requirements aren't terribly hard, but it is difficult to take desires from non-tech people and turn them into what they actually want. A big skill really in most software engineering roles

[@SumoCumLoudly]

The poor performance of 90% of websites tells you that vast majority of web Devs don't have a clue.

[@nerdycatgamer]

@henriquemarques6196 Your english is great :) I really hope HTMX can become popular and fix web development. To me it's just so much more logical for the majority of the logic to be on the server and just have it serve html to the end user.

[@KilgoreTroutAsf]

i remember studying OSs and SAT solvers and group theory and microcontrollers during my CS degree. why the f*** would anyone want to spend 4+ years studying math to end up doing some mundane monkey job for a corporation instead of anything remotely new, challenging or interesting?

[@kushalpsv]

People need money to take care of themselves and people surrounding them, again there is rat race to show that you are doing good to everyone. I mean yeah I want to work on new interesting myself but it takes time and not everyone is willing to take that trade off, atleast at this point

[@annusingh4694]

Money. But your point is right, now there is WebAssembly too

[@farqueueman]

cause smart people are stupid.

[@samarthtandale9121]

True. What I wonder even more is that is why can't we simply automate these jobs right away! I mean, if the OS can be automated then ... How hard is web design really (both frontend and backend)?

[@alastairtheduke]

You'd be surprised at how hard it can be to architect something that won't cost the company a fortune@@samarthtandale9121

[@BrayanRuiz-m3w]

well this was true, we are living this right now

[@-Engineering01-]

Yea he was right af

[@vijayakumar_3]

Yes

[@nhanimaah786]

I agree with jonathan here. As a former web developer, I can say that there are lots of BS jobs in that space. I can't complain because I was paid to rewrite in house frameworks and tools over and over again for 140k a year. Me and my team members spent most times not coding. Too many unnecessary meetings, etc. So glad I left before the bubble burst.

[@segamanable91]

What are you doing now?

[@nhanimaah786]

@@segamanable91 I am currently a hybrid between embedded and audio programming. I work for a large telecommunication company.

[@BasharAlkhalili]

@@nhanimaah786 I wonder how you were able to make the transition since web development and embedded/audio programming are very different in terms of the necessary past experience, programming languages used, and probably even academic background.

[@nhanimaah786]

@@BasharAlkhalili I have a bachelors in physics with strong emphasis on electronics and instrumentation. I have a masters in wireless communication. I had lots of matlab and simulink side projects. I also dabbled into some realtime programming with unity3d. It wasn't too difficult for me to transition. Web dev was more like a hustle for me. So happy I was able to cash out.

[@SimGunther]

When big banks fail under the weight of $234T in derivatives and the system doesn't change for the better so that kind of derivative activity actually gets punished, the world gets what it deserves.

[@KilgoreTroutAsf]

i read a serious study a while ago concluding that finance is largely a parasitic appendage to a capitalist economy that destroys real productive tissue, destabilizes the economy and whose profits are largely funded by taxpayer money.

[@lewisnorth1188]

This aged like port

[@civilservant9528]

Which port? The one in Baltimore?

[@mav45678]

People laid off from "tech" industry will easily find coding jobs in "everything else" industry, who may be only paying only $100k-$200k, but is desperate to hire.

[@hansoloo98]

"only"

[@chunkspiggle3916]

This does not seem to be the case 1 year later

[@yosdef]

im literally attending a web-dev oriented bootcamp right now :(

[@sukapow]

Get a refund bro asap😂

[@yosdef]

@@sukapow idk i get that web dev jobs are eventually going to die out but i feel like ive learned a great deal about coding/"talking to the computer" because of this bootcamp. the specific one i am attending has a job finding guarantee other wise theres no charge. my only fear is getting a job and then getting laid off within like a year

[@sukapow]

@@yosdef web dev jobs aren't dying... They're being move to India. You never read a lot of America companies even Microsoft hired India companies to maintained their website in a low cost. The American and other countries dollars are worth more money than India money. Specially we have wix, WordPress, and ect to make website easy. Your fear should being a fool for wasting your time on a risky career that keeps evolving.. It's easy to fool people into tech that's why I don't go to bootcamp or school to learn it. It's really a self taught. Maybe focusing on something better like idk Mobile dev bc on most average human are addicted to their phone. But you need a really good computer if you wanna do mobile. Heck try VR, maybe there a future in it You need to know psychology if you wanna become rich when making software like Mark Zuckerberg did.

[@space_cowboy007]

@@yosdef props to you for training, i hope you don't limit yourself to JS only because that space can teach bad habits.

[@yosdef]

@@space_cowboy007 appreciate it man. i have heard that sentiment before. luckily ive been learning python as part of the bootcamp too and additionally learning C++ on my own time just because i find memory management interesting. i really do like webdev, but i wouldn't mind getting any CS job considering how rough the market is right now. By the way, nice user name

[@microdavid7098]

interesting video

[@Meleeman011]

only 10 percent? thats nothing. seems reasonable

[@feralaca123]

Time will tell. And the web is not the only thing thar is suffering. Production lines are being shut down everywhere. We may experience real scarcity of goods and services. I don't think that the web will die. But everything will shrink.

[@MechShark]

It's going to get worse for the West as the larger companies have already began an even more aggressive push to outsource to India. We're basically copying what happened in manufacturing, on an accelerate time scale. Going to be interesting.

[@gnatinator]

It's just to keep stock prices up moving into the new year. Jons perspective only makes sense as a lean startup. Elon has been forced to cut because otherwise Twitter will go bankrupt. Operating with a skeleton crew of engineers is not sustainable-- forget about growth or development when all you can do is maintain what you have.

[@SpeedfreakUK]

You might want to look up The Pareto Principle

[@georgeokello8620]

“One true for startups” is also false. So far based on performance of Russell 2000 in COVID era policy, about a a third of the companies are profitable on very thin margins with corporate debt where interest payments were near zero percent. Given that Federal Reserve policy has been to increase rates, a vast majority of these companies that a responsible for employment of most Americans citizens are mathematically zombie corporations to arguable been bankrupt as even in 2017, the assumption of the market was they could afford investing in workers with very low financing rates. The only companies whom can rebound in hiring more devs are Apple and Microsoft as they have extra cash reserves they have saved up pre 2018 and even they are not going to invest in re hire under very expensive refinancing terms given interest rates.

[@iseeyou9488]

lol I've never seen a comment section hating people who make websites

[@karlimo4034]

This bitter, cynical Sheldon Cooper called it, it´s happening right now.

[@orlovskyconsulting]

People should do more interested into business running sidegigs dont waste own time and invest well.

[@kripposoft]

JBlow says some smart things every now and then but I can't stand how insufferably whiny he comes across. He reminds me of that socially inept dude in CS classes who always wanted to be perceived as smarter than everybody else, but that you could not stand to work with.

[@SumoCumLoudly]

Only one socially inept dude in a CS class?

[@etodemerzel2627]

@@SumoCumLoudly Just one, because you can only perceive people as socially inept if they're more socially inept than you are.

[@ericm9495]

@@SumoCumLoudly not _A_ socially inept dude in CS class. _That_ socially inept dude in CS class.

[@theonewithoutidentity]

I'm more of a left-winger but I am too very unhappy with the state of the political discourse around economics, it seems a lot of people think jobs are some kind of human right and not just a way of facilitating faster and cheaper production of things. It's all becoming very divorced from reality.

[@whatshendrix]

A web dev starting now is just a lazy person who wants a higher salary and isn't really interested in any kind of programming. These people don't realize that you still have to be really good at it and they simply don't have the capacity for that. They're willing to write a few hundred lines of code per month and that's all they're going to learn from, whereas an actual professional will write more and better code in a day and spend some time after work hours working on something else as well. You can guess what the difference in learning rate is.

[@AdwWeb_dev_criptocurrency]

this guy only talks criticism. that I don't want to hear. so much negativity. Keep that to yourself

[@TFDusk]

This take is silly to me in some parts are either bad faith or a misunderstanding of certain pieces. The take of "Every company should be firing 50% becaused they were hired during the pandemic" makes absolutely no sense. Company are expected to grow generally with or without a pandemic. Is their supposed to be absolutely no growth at all for the economy to do well? Like just because a company hired 30% in the pandemic does not equate that 30% need to go to go back to pre pandemic levels. That isn't how that works. The fact he's also saying these are imaginary jobs is also silly. Comapnies don't hire people to just sit on their ass to do absolutely nothing, they hire from a need to have people to handle a task. During the pandemic, their was an increased surge of people being at home with many buisnesses being closed and unprecident levels of activity online. Many people as well as buisnesses needed to scramble online through a multitude of services in order to stay afloat, and that demand needed people to work those applications. This isn't imaginary work; if they didn't need the people why the fuck would a company just give people money to actually do nothing. I'm making the guess that he doesn't believe that people actually work when they are remotely from his comments but regardless of that belief to believe no jobs existed during the pandemic is just silly. Web dev jobs aren't going away anytime soon. The demand has simply shifted back to how it was pre pandemic in some areas with higher amounts of inflation as a consequence of the pandemic. I don't expect inflation to last longer than a year before their is a fed pivot to reduce inflation back, as the federal reserve isn't looking to keep interests rate at all time highes for the rest of time as people need to work to provide value to the economy, that is how stuff works. The only real truth right now is that it is absolutely harder to get hired if your just coming out of college because they're is an increase of experienced engineers on the market with less supply for jobs. Since companies right now are not really taking chances on new hires, it's going to be harder to get hired if you are average as a junior. The market however for web developers and software engineers in general is still a high influx for jobs, and if you have adequate experience with a good resume you haven tplenty to choose from.

[@nhanimaah786]

With all due respect, I think you are lying to yourself. The government does not choose when to end inflation, that's not how the economy works. As for increase in demand of web dev jobs, lol. You are clearly not paying attention. There will be a serious ripple effect. Lots of talented web programmers have been let go from their jobs, and many more to come. That will add to the queue of people looking for jobs. No wonder companies want you to solve all the algorithms before they hire you, this is because there are thousands in line and if you do not do it, someone else will. Add to the fact that web development can be done by anyone with more than a double digit IQ. Math is not needed and university education is not needed. Barrier to entry is extremely low. Add that to the bulk of no code tools and you will see that 2023 and beyond will be winter for web devs.

[@Tsunkuotaku]

@Dusk keep on huffing that hopium. It'll keep you going through the coming rough times.

[@TFDusk]

​@@nhanimaah786 First off, I never stated or am trying to imply the government ends inflation, I stated that eventually there would be a fed pivot. The Federal government cannot just keep inflation levels at all time highs, either inflation comes back down naturally from increased interest rates, or something in the economy breaks that forces the federal government to step in to bail the economy back out. Examples of this are the pandemic, the 2008 housing market crisis, the war in ukraine, etc. If the federal government does nothing if an event like this occurs then it would lead to a great recession, which is what they are trying to avoid by raising interest which increases the amount of unemployment. However, the pandemic ended in and the consequences kicked in. Non sustainable companies in order to save costs are cutting employees, which is what literally any CEO is going to do in order to please shareholders. This isn't just web development, this is with most tech jobs. Web development got hit harder than most other tech industries because the majority of products and companies that were developed and scrambled during the pandemic were people looking to build websites that didn't have this service before. A lot of experienced web developers are being let go, but you're absolutely delusional if you believe even during this crisis their isn't a wide job pool looking specifically for experienced developer talent. Well talented indivduals are not struggling to find jobs, its low performers as well as entry level develoopers that are just entering these jobs. Theres always going to be tools that will continue to automate away jobs, and I'll give the same argument that I gave when talking with people at my old job when I used to work as a warehopuse worker for Amazon. New tools and technologies even in the case of potentially replacing peoples jobs also create new jobs. The web developers that are going to struggle are going to be the ones that cannot adapt, but even in those scenarios there are still going to be a plethora of jobs.

[@georgeokello8620]

@@TFDuskclearly you don’t understand corporate balance sheet constraints and it’s effect on employment. The over hitting effect is just an end result of l very low interest rates that signal to corporations that they can take cheap corporate debt and get future discount window in developing tech ie the corporations investment/borrowing structure is betting on growth. High interest rates are the signal for most corporations to go to a de growth regime which the bond and repo markets have already bet on deep recessions. Companies still betting on growth will go bankrupt very easy. Talking about web dev jobs will always be there regardless of growth is just moronic. A web dev job like all other jobs have constraints attached them like in terms of the company been able to finance them. If the company cannot afford the financing, hiring any role better yet a web dev role is mathematically null and void.

[@georgeokello8620]

@@TFDuskIn addition to that, the Russell 2000 represents companies whom hire a vast majority of ppl including your web devs and so far almost a 3rd of those companies are profitable at very thin margins to the point that should they enter this upcoming refinancing period with the recent interest rate increases, they are essentially bankrupt. A vast majority of these jobs were in existence under the assumption that interest rates were going to be low and supply chain shortages were improbable. In the future though there will be web dev jobs, a vast majority of them will be cut off as machine learning and data engineering are the more high in demand jobs that even outstrip web dev by a large margin.

[@SR-ti6jj]

Cope