The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.

Let's not act like we need to import 80k "high tech" workers that amount to writing react components and spring endpoints.

Hardly anything hard that we couldn't force companies to train workers to do, but they don't want to ever help people they just want to suck up all the money in the room while decimating entire populations.zzzzzzz

Also, as an American I don't really benefit if US corporations are doing "better." How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school, but they sure can get their serving of Zuckerberg slop? I'm supposed to care about these companies success? Really? I hope they go down in flames.

The problem is that the rich and elite have captured and dictated American tech policy for far too long.

Most of the H1 candidates are in shitty roles that are well defined low/moderate skill jobs for giant companies. Hire people whom you can’t actively exploit and those are the kind of jobs where unions can organize.

The alternative is offshoring the work, not hiring Americans.

The smart thing would be to just let people immigrate. Instead we have a weird tiered system with a small number of highly skilled specialists and an army of serfs facing deportation if they piss off the bosses.

Because they can afford to buy the 'right' to do what they want, and you can't, and what they want is cheaper labor who they have more control over, and H1B workers will never rock the boat because the visa is a sword hanging over their heads.

Downvote all you want, it's the truth.

The insta-downvotes are their bots attempting to cover up this fact.

I understand that you are pissed off (as am I too) but debating with an army of bots, LLMs, wankers and Russians is unfortunately the status quo, quotidien.

On the bright side there are lots of lovely folk hereabouts with a large thing between their ears.

That escalated quickly and I enjoyed this comment a lot

Heck, I find it odd we don't even model the problem, let alone solve it.

There's no tickbox for "this submission requires additional access", no way to sort for/against them, not even an informal convention like putting [paywall] in the title.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Regarding the second link, I'll happily engage with something specific dang said on this topic if you want to link to it, but a link to every time he said the word "paywalls" is not a productive contribution to this conversation.

> You’ve just missed out—free access to this article has expired. Register to view

I would prefer to just skip them, but they are not easy to spot.

So the issue is not necessarily the over-hiring.. more that the large tech firms are running out of projects to take that are value-creating. Which is not surprising - the labour market in its currently state is absolutely not perfect in allocating labour.

It should be noted that fixing tech debt is not necessary value-creating from a financial standpoint. What engineers think is value creating has nothing to do with what a CFO determines to be a value creating project - whose job is to maximize firm value.

The rate of non-tech business growth has slowed, who is going to continue to buy all these cloud software services? Tricking consumers into subscribing to AI tools or extra storage only goes so far.

When interest rates are low, even low value creation projects are viable.

When rates are high, those exact same projects are no longer viable.

Therefore, i would argue that the labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes.

"labour market is not perfectly allocating labour, but it is close enough for practical purposes."

No its not lmao. Do you even know what characteristics a 'perfect labour market' is even comprised of? Go on, surprise me.

"more of".

If you wanna finesse the discount rate by a few percentage points go ahead. Cash flows contribute more toward the end value number.

in b4 some numpty writes about the fed changing a market set rate.

There were companies growing organizations faster than they could be made productive. They acquired a lot of bureaucracy, excess structure, and inefficiency. The current backlash is trying to reverse the excess structure and middle management buildout so they can get back to more functional teams.

I very much agree.

A lot of tech job growth during the late 2010 and pandemic period were frankly BS for a ROI perspective. Late 2010s was really the first time in tech that I started to feel like most of the stuff that needed to be built was built, and increasingly I was working on BS projects offering less and less value every year.

Consider:

- In the 80s developers were needed to write fundamental business software for word processing and spreadsheets

- In the 90s computers became mainstream and there was a huge demand for consumer software

- In the 00s the internet took off and we needed people build the web

- In the 10s the smart phone revolutionised computing and we needed people to build apps and rebuild websites to be mobile-first

But towards the late 10s entrepreneurs and investors seemingly ran out of no-brainer tech investments so increasingly started trying mental stuff still promising tech-like returns – block-chain, metaverse, Web 3.0, [insert traditional industry here] but a tech company.

I'm not saying there's nothing to build or maintain anymore, but I also no longer see where people think the exponential need for new software and software developers could come from, and I suspect this would have become obvious earlier if it wasn't for ZIRP.

But it's not a lack of productive things to build. We also have other trends hurting demand for new SWEs today. Consider how today completely non-technical people can start and scale an ecommerce company without any developers. Things that would have taken armies of developers just 10-15 years ago, can now be largely done in an afternoon on platforms like Shopify. It's actual hard to believe that just 15 years ago selling things online used to be very hard if you weren't technical.

Similarly starting in the early 2010s even being a developer got significantly easier because increasingly there was packages for everything. Things I might have spent weeks building before could now be built in days or less. And another thing that changed was sites like stackoverflow and blogs which help you solve problems and learn new skills. I remember trying to learn how to do things before 2010s was hard, and before the 00s it very hard.

And of course now we also have AI coding tools which don't just hurt the overall demand for developers, but effectively expands the supply of developers to anyone with an internet connection and computer.

So to summerise:

- There's much fewer good investments to be made in new software today.

- Where there are investments to be made you need far less developers.

- When you need developers there's far more people who can do the job.

Even if tech companies are doing well and the number of tech jobs is increasingly, the above means the average person trying to find a job in tech today will find it much, much harder than they have in the past. People working in tech today genuinely should consider a career change if they're primarily in tech for the money.

Block, for example, said that they had experienced record profits… in spite of their, “hiring spree.”

This is just capitalism working as usual, only more of it, faster.

AI has a part in it. So does austerity policies and the rise of a certain political climate.

What's missed in understanding is 'how exactly does this functionality work for this specific case?' or 'can we implement this tiny one off feature in some legacy code base'. Both things are why you keep the guy that wrote it around. And you couldn't really replace him. Because digging into what he wrote was hard.

Now, LLMs can do that stuff better than the guy that wrote it.

Software devs were non-fungible. Now they're commodities. When things become commodities, they lose their value.

I'm not sure why I haven't heard people talk about this aspect. It's the biggest effect on jobs.

> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

But it answers the what, how, and allows one-off features.

So the guy that wrote might (or might not) still have the edge with the why. But that's not the moat it used to be.

Jevons paradox

Projections are useless. The past does not predict the future.

BLS is useless for the same reason, amplified.

When bubbles burst, investors change tack, and when investors pull back, companies turtle and do layoffs.

After Y2K, investment moved on to real estate. In 2008, that bubble burst. It moved on to social media next.

I would argue that bubble burst somewhat silently during COVID with the quiet deaths of Xitter and Facebook (from a standpoint of cultural relevance), and investment transitioned towards and into its current AI bubble.

Investors are always going to move on once the lustre of a field has waned, and I'd hazard that we'll see investment move somewhere other than software tech next (if I had to prognosticate, I'd say it's moving into robotics/ drones).

The upshot here is this was a longstanding BSD bug but mostly because nobody is paying BSD bug bounties and a null-pointer dereference may induce a crash but rarely (if ever) leads to privilege escalation as buffer overflows generally do so isn't as high-priority. The estimate on the cost is $20-50k of tokens.

$50k gets you a lot of developer time, upwards of 2 months. As has been stated in a bunch of threads, much smaller models could also find this bug. The defense is "they didn't" and "once you know it's there, it's easier to find" but again, nobody has been paying BSD bug bounties. Put another way: far fewer people have been looking.

My point is that the economics of these models are still highly debatable. What they will do is allow you to use 1 engineer with AI tools instead of 2-4 engineers.

And we've arrived at the real goal here: to reduce head counts. Why? To suppress labor costs. To get people who didn't get laid off to do more free work.

In addition, AI capex is used as an excuse to cut costs ie reduce labor, for exactly the same reasons.

Lastly, the threat of this happening in the near to medium future is also used to scare labor and reduce costs.

Sufficiently largecompanies can't grow anymore. Their only path forward is to raise prices and redcue costs. For tech companies, labor is a significant cost. That's what's going on here.

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmarcushutchins/video/762774007353...

God, I wish I was American sometimes...

The problem with the tech layoffs is that it’s poisoning the well downstream. Smaller employers have repeatedly cited their layoffs as justification for abysmal, unlivable salaries, and demanding those of us looking for work suck it up and deal with it while they search for bottom-dollar unicorns.

AI isn’t replacing the IT crowd outside of the expected junior roles, and even that’s starting to rebound as executives realize Juniors were how they got “white glove service” for themselves - a Senior Engineer isn’t going to wipe their ass for them, job market or not, because said Engineer’s time is infinitely better spent on literally anything else.

One other thing I’ll note is that the layoffs also seem to be remnants of the Brogrammer hustle culture: tech folks were enjoying more time for themselves to grow or live life outside of work specifically thanks to a few good years of paying down technical debt with properly-staffed teams, but the grifters up top see anything less than a 9-9-6 as somehow stealing from the employer and slash accordingly. The remnants are expected to do more work for less pay, with AI tools somehow filling the gap (even though these same employers often don’t want to pay for proper tooling to maximize use of AI).

This is definitely an industry downturn as those who stand to gain maximize their immediate returns. From the perspective of the C-Suite and Boards, the safest (albeit unethical) move is to betray: if AI is a bust, they’ll have made their wealth and can fuck off; if AI eliminates jobs and work, they believe their wealth will protect them in the future dystopia of their own creation.

It’s in that context (“fuck you got mine”) that the broader narrative fits with the myriad of puzzle pieces out there (higher interest rates, stock pumps, circular financing, tariffs, aging population, AI, etc).

they dont care because nobody has a real gut feel affinity for computer programmers or the work, the sort of feeling that is required to animate somebody to action. it's never been a profession with any esteem, and the field never professionalized in the past 60 years, which is a shame, because we now see the outcome.

And that money sink is causing the layoffs. If AI really helped like it expected to, you would grab any dev you could so that you could have a army of 100x devs.

Humans are still cheaper for the real costs. Augmented humans are on average a few percentage points better.

That fiber build out will last for decades, a Blackwell GPU, not so much.

No, because no one has any use for those monstrous GPUs outside of ML and some research projects. They can't even be dropped onto the consumer market because a SOHO is not equipped to house devices like that. The best case scenario is that the boards get dismantled and the VRAM gets salvaged for refurbishing. They've built these machines so specialized that they're essentially disposable.

Either way, the moat is about 7 inches wide.

But the secondary market that grew out of it was because once it is in the ground it has a long lifespan and low upkeep costs, this is not the same thing as ultra high power density data centers.

Cooling needs to be balanced with demand, they may not work for even cloud scale type loads without serious issues etc…

Not that it matters, my hometown has an announced DC and it is looking more and more like it is a shill, as do several of the others in the area.

This seems maybe a bit reductionist.

AI will have diminishing returns because at a certain point, coding is not the bottleneck and coordination is or some other thing that hasn’t been optimized yet. The exact bottleneck seems like it depends on the organization.

My theory is that in general, augmented devs are much more productive, but 100% of that gain doesn’t translate into 100% more software delivered to customers, and there is a point where coding isn’t the longest pole.

But I don’t think most orgs are at that break even yet, and I think we can still get more out of engineering before we plateau.

Bad news gets sold better. Even better hysteria. Why not write a hysterical article to milk some ads money on doom and gloom? Because we value your privacy, we use cookies and similar technologies. Some collect your data, like your IP address. Others collect anonymous data. Together with our 177 (holy fuck) trusted partners.

It's just that the tech workers are the canaries in the coal mines for the other white collar knowledge workers.

This is "AGI".

Are you paid by OpenAI and/or Anthropic?

No. The VCs and angel investors screaming “abundance” are the paid promoters.

The problem is their “utopia of abundance” is not for us. They know the opposite is the reality (layoffs, offshoring, wage suppression and AI backlash)

They built their own bunkers and moats for a reason. Because true “AGI” will bring an abundance of very angry people going after them.

That is not worth being paid for by any AI lab.

also if you want to test/force ai adoption you have to put pressure by firing some

now wars will put us into further stasis or decline via increased inflation pressure.

Then covid went away, life went back to "normal", tons of juniors everywhere who moved to IT because of WFH and the salary.

Then comes AI, within the IT field, I am seeing first hand companies firing by the thousands because of AI.

Only Blue collar was being affected in the past, but now is everybody, no matter of your degree, experience, you either already had a hard time or you will have.

If Google Quantum computing somehow finds a massive breakthrough, we are all fu :)