Comment by echelon

Comment by echelon 3 days ago

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New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.

Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.

If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.

It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.

None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.

Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.

The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.

Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.

Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

QuiEgo 3 days ago

I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.

My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.

We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(

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  • echelon 3 days ago

    > I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.

    "This time it's different."

    20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming.

    Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems.

    > We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest.

    We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc.

    We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.

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    • QuiEgo 2 days ago

      My personal experience, YMMV:

      I was told that once video conferencing got good and internet and infrastructure became better in other places, "this time it will be different."

      I was told once universities in other countries started pumping out a pool of great candidates, expats who worked for FAANGs in the US would go home to found their own companies using that pool, and those companies would take over the world. "this time it's different."

      I was told during covid once everyone was remote, why would people not just hire the cheapest remote workers going forward? "This time it's different."

      Don't get me wrong, I absolutely have seen more and more offshoring over time, but there's a huge inertia behind the US tech industry that's hard to change. The VC / startup ecosystem and all of it's resources have huge Bay Area inertia - it mostly hasn't even spread to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world, despite the cost of living and constrained talent pool in the Bay Area. There's something about getting a bunch of people with the same mindset in one spot and having them know each other, socialize with each other, make friends and networks with each other that still matters. Founders tend to build off the people and connections they know and are connected with personally.

      I'm hoping it will take long enough to change for me to finish my career. We'll see. This time really may be different :).

      EDIT: p.s. Agree totally it's way to complex to tell what's actually happening. The _impact_ of the end of ZRIP, the rise of AI, major tax changes on R&D amortization, and US tariffs pretty much landed at the same time, so who knows?

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      • alephnerd 2 days ago

        The difference is, offshoring in the 2000s was largely private sector driven with minimal subsidizes and investment promotion programs lead by countries and their local governments.

        On the other hand, in the 2020s, India, Israel, most Eastern European states, Ireland, Costa Rica, and a couple others have launched industrial promotion subsidizes for software offshoring - often providing US$10k-30k per head in federal and local subsidizes along with subsidized office space and real estate and tax windows.

        That along with the internal frictions of async work largely being ironed out due to the COVID remote work period along with an exodus of mid-level managers on work visas during the early pandemic layoffs which had an outsized impact on Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European techies in the US made offshoring much more cost competitive and effective than it was 25 years ago.

        Putting your head in the sand saying it's no big deal is honestly very stupid if you are hoping to maintain your career for the next 5-10 years in any white collar job.

        And it's only going to get even more competitive now that the Indian government is enacting labor reform laws to align Indian labor laws with China's [0], making it even more cost effective for businesses to offshore by reducing regulatory overhead [1].

        [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/india-imp...

        [1] - https://www.fortuneindia.com/business-news/tech-sector-expec...

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  • matwood 2 days ago

    I got my first programming job in ~98 while still in college. I had family members telling me then that programming was a dead end and was all going to be outsourced. I lived through .com, GFC, etc... This does feel more like a reversion to the mean at this moment rather than some crash...yet. I feel for the people who only have known a job market that was easy to step into and paid great salaries because they don't know anything else. It's a lot like the people who think they are great stock pickers because they've only been investing in the greatest bull market we've ever seen.

    When I came into the job market the rule of thumb was it would take 1 month/10k of salary to find a new job. Over time that moved to 1 month/20k of salary or so. Even then, someone making a FAANG type salary should be prepared to look for a ~year for a new job matching that salary. Being able to bounce from job to job while getting big raises along the way was the exception, and ZIRP only exacerbated it.

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  • windward 2 days ago

    You're zooming out and considering this negative sentiment with similar times in the past. I think that's wise. I think we should keep zooming out to other industries. Imagine you're an engineer for GM in Detroit in the 70s - would you consider the mean to be your contemporary middle-class lifestyle, or what it is in 2025? Similar for steel and semiconductors.

    It goes for other places, too. Is the US's financial strength of today its mean, or is it where the UK was pre-Suez Crisis? Where Japan was in the 80s?

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    • QuiEgo 2 days ago

      Let’s hypothetically say we’re all doomed. Say our jobs are going the way of manufacturing in the 70s-80s. What’s the play then?

      If I was a new college grad I’d stay away from programming, but that’s been true for a while regardless of offshoring, the job market is just too soft until managers figure out they are killing their senior engineer pipeline and go back to investing in people.

      What about the people already in industry? What’s our play?

      Live under your means and save as much as possible? Already doing it.

      Learn a new trade? Does not feel realistic while working a demanding full time job already, but if things get bad enough, sure.

      Use the political apparatus to protect my employment? The system is built to prevent me from doing that. Fighting the system very well could put my employment at risk, which defeats the whole “get what I can while I still can” plan, if I assume doom and gloom on the horizon. I’m also unlikely to actually change anything by taking that risk, so the ROI is horrible.

      Is there some other outcome or plan of action here I’m not seeing?

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      • windward a day ago

        Good question. I've gone with:

        >Live under your means and save as much as possible?

        which, while obvious, isn't being done by all of us.

        A part of me gets angry that collective action was so unpopular thanks to the view that it dragged down those who could excel individually. Every time I see software people act powerless in front of these steamrolling, enormous tech giants that control every facet of our lives, I think about how much power we had - and are on the verge of giving up.

        I also try to confront the future, rather than turn a blind eye to it. Can I be happy and find self-actualisation without this identity and financial status? That's a question everyone should think about regardless of what happens.

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        • QuiEgo a day ago

          I love the idea of FIRE as a life goal and driving financial strategy. The core principal is you save enough money up that the dividends from your investment returns (the FI part of FIRE) is enough to live off forever.

          If you hit FIRE, awesome, you’re free from ever caring about offshoring or RTO or AI or whatever again.

          If you don’t hit it, you’re sitting on a pile of money when a rainy day comes.

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  • jneen 2 days ago

    I've had my job offshored in the past, in case a personal anecdote is relevant here.

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  • pjmlp 2 days ago

    Adding my voice to sibling comments, this is from European experience, I have had several times been dumped from consulting projects, and having to do competence transfer to the offshoring team that would take over our team roles.

    Around five times since 2007.

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tibbar 3 days ago

This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by

a) getting really good at clarifying requirements

b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.

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  • johnnyanmac 3 days ago

    >Junior engineers can fight back against this by

    Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.

    >This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:

    This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.

    And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.

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    • kaashif 2 days ago

      Surely people who can't get a job aren't "junior engineers" - they're just graduates.

      Junior engineers, i.e. people who have already been hired, can indeed fight back by getting really good at their jobs.

      But you're right, it doesn't help you get hired if you can't even get an interview.

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      • lnsru 2 days ago

        Being real good does not change the fact, that one is cost factor and at the end only a row in payroll spreadsheet. Junior with low salary and low compensation during layoff -> priority departure.

        Having in couple hours unannounced meeting. My boss told me over private channel, that he just got fired. It’s very interesting and the home mortgage does not really help today. I was really good. Better than expected and accomplished few optional projects. Looks like it didn’t help again.

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    • [removed] 2 days ago
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  • 05 2 days ago

    > learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

    This sounds almost word for word like The Onion’s classic: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots

    [0] https://theonion.com/secretary-of-labor-assures-nation-there...

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    • tibbar 2 days ago

      Wow. That is ... too painful and true to life to really be funny at this point. But, ok, still funny.

      To be fair, I meant something a little different -- something like -- learn how to be a robot priest who can get it to follow the desperate prayers of humans. And, like, how to unstick the robot arm when it accidentally punches through a wall. Etc.

      Not that that is particularly comforting, in an existential sense. Maybe buys you a couple years till you have to pivot again.

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      • bluefirebrand 2 days ago

        If "a couple of years until you have to pivot again" is all new grads have to hope for, they might as well forget it

        Instead they should start learning how to shoot guns and build pipe bombs.

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  • conductr 3 days ago

    > when the bottleneck is communication + taste

    That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.

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  • echelon 3 days ago

    Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees).

    I'm genuinely curious.

    I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.

    Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.

    From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.

    We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.

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    • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

      I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development.

      I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc.

      Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination.

      Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder.

      > We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.

      It seems to be working…

      https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

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      • Lio 2 days ago

        > GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK

        GenAI does not exist yet.

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    • [removed] 2 days ago
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    • ookblah 2 days ago

      this is honestly what i think is going to happen as everyone is still figuring this out and why for large companies i think they are walking into a giant ass trap and the execs can't or don't care to see it as long as it boosts the stock.

      most people (read: MOST) working at X corp aren't going to be using AI to accelerate their work, they are going to "phone it in" like you said or buy themselves more time to do other stuff. i think with the onslaught of vibe and slop most people don't have a vested interest to go above and beyond to ensure quality as long as it works, even experienced devs. that's honestly probably what i'd be tempted to do.

      where we see the most exponential gains will be people who are paid enough to care, smaller teams that have a direct vested interest in long term success (founding teams, etc.) or people paid to just clean up a mess.

      hiring and the landscape will be super interesting to see in the next year or so. probably team structure will change drastically as well.

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johnnyanmac 3 days ago

Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood.

Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).

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  • echelon 3 days ago

    A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move.

    If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit.

    Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc.

    Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V.

    Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies.

    Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.

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    • johnnyanmac 2 days ago

      I think it depends on which kind of entrepreneur you're aiming to be. VC breakups are amazing if your goal is to box in and become a market competitor. But as of the last decade or so there's been plenty of "incubators" to take into account. startups whose goal is instead to be sold off to some major company and get their payday that way. Those kinds of models would deteriorate, and are likely what want to prop Big Tech up.

      I do hope we have more genuine competitors fighting out there for breakupps. But it's hard to say these days.

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      • bluefirebrand 2 days ago

        > But as of the last decade or so there's been plenty of "incubators" to take into account. startups whose goal is instead to be sold off to some major company and get their payday that way. Those kinds of models would deteriorate,

        Good, because this is an extremely toxic and damaging version of capitalism

        Every company should be seeking to stand on its own, not become assimilated by the borg

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  • matwood 2 days ago

    > how about re-banning stock buybacks?

    This is pretend boogie man. Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries. Companies are not charities, they exist to make a return. If hiring people and/or paying more will generate a larger return than giving the money back to shareholders either through buybacks or dividends, then companies will do that.

    AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns (shareholders believe so) and buybacks are being pushed out as money goes elsewhere[1].

    [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-stock-buybacks-ai-1...

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    • johnnyanmac 2 days ago

      >Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries.

      Nope, but that's what trends show us from the decades between its ban and bans being lifted. All I know is that companies flowing money back into itself and having executives shift in and out every few years clearly hasn't worked.

      It's just one stepping stone to make sure companies have skin in the game again.

      You can argue dividends but that means the money gets taxed quicker, so that also helps the people.

      >AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns

      Sure, for now. I think that problem will fix itself sooner than later, so I'm not too concerned about that. Trends come and go.

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      • saxenaabhi 2 days ago

        Why not just stop taxing dividends? CIT already has been paid on it, so why charge PIT on it? Like estonia.

        That would mean there's no incentive for companies to buy back stock instead of dividends.

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  • ac29 2 days ago

    > turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?)

    What would banning stock buybacks accomplish? Companies can still return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends.

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    • echelon 2 days ago

      Dividends are immediately taxable.

      Stock buybacks are designed to let the shareholder see the same upside, but decide when to take the taxable event. Long term gains are also preferable to non-qualified dividends.

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      • Marsymars 2 days ago

        Even worse for non-American stockholders of American companies - the IRS charges a 30% foreign withholding tax on dividends. If you ban stock buybacks in favour of dividends, it’s a big tax increase on foreigners, so US stocks lose a whole pile of value for American stockholders when foreigners dump American equities until the ROI equalizes. (Roughly 20% of US equities are foreign-owned.)

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    • johnnyanmac 2 days ago

      Dividends don't grow the stock as quickly. They can and will do that, but the goal is to change the incentive structure back to long term growth and not "stock buyback and dip from company in a year".

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      • lotsofpulp 2 days ago

        There is no evidence to indicate buybacks reduce long term incentives for executives compared to dividends.

        If anything, all the businesses with the most long term growth have done the most buybacks because they are paying the employees in stock, which employees gladly accept because they bet the business will have long term growth.

        And executive compensation is not vested until business targets are met a few years in the future.

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cyberax 2 days ago

> New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.

We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow.

What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out.

Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost.

One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.

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  • ryandrake 2 days ago

    > What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out.

    This has been true in software for decades. From the very first time I was senior enough in my career to start conducting interviews on the "employer" side of the table, we've seen a huge number of candidates who literally (in the literal meaning of literally) could not code. Like you would ask them to write a for loop, and they froze up and couldn't do it, or just started talking, hoping we would move onto more "behavioral" questions. This has been pretty much a constant in the software industry for as long as I've been in it.

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  • matwood 2 days ago

    We posted a job a year ago for a dev. We received terrible candidates, but still tried to fill it from the pool. 2/3 ghosted the interview and the other I'm not sure had ever done anything in iOS. I just pulled the job instead of wasting more time. I'm planning to post another job in the new year and I'm not looking forward to wading through the garbage.

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intended 2 days ago

> Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?

That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.

Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.

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baq 2 days ago

> If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.

I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars.

ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.

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