Comment by raw_anon_1111

Comment by raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

48 replies

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I saw this coming way before AI became a thing around 2016 when I was 42. Software development was becoming a commodity where there were plenty of “good enough” developers where no matter what, it was going to be saturated.

If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network.

At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.

Anecdotally, I found software development adjacent roles quickly when I was looking both last year and the year before.

kortilla 2 days ago

Software developer salaries went up significantly after 2016 and it was a super hot market for developers in 2020. So whatever you saw wasn’t a good indicator.

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  • godelski 2 days ago

    It's easier to lower standards than to raise them.

    There's always a race to the bottom. I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that what's considered the "minimum viable product" has decreased over the years. It's also no secret that software is getting worse.

    As to salaries, I think you forgot how things worked before. The reason companies like Google introduced free food and all the incentives was because increasing salaries was not a better way to attract better talent, since salaries were already high. So either now something has changed where better talent cares more about money or we're attracting talent that cares more about money. As in either the same people changed or we're attracting a different type of person. Personally, regardless of age, regardless of field, I've seen a strong correlation with the best people not caring as much about money. Once the salary is good then they care more about how interesting the work is or how they can reduce stress in their life. Money matters, but it has decreasing utility as it grows.

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    • lan321 2 days ago

      I feel this is more true in the sense that when they don't care about money you can get them below market value and not that they are better. I find the most valuable employees to be the financially literate ones. The ones who're constantly thinking about the money aspect.

      'Will we get more customers?' 'Will they be more likely to stay with us?' 'Are we screwing ourselves out of sales by offering to host a server for remote control on the PC connected to the tool, even though it's cool and we can implement it in a week?'

      I'm more on the 'do it because it's cool' side and have had to be wrangled a couple times with such questions since what makes interesting work for myself often doesn't align with client needs or hurts sales, as stupid as it might be.

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      • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

        I have had 10 jobs over 30 years and I am now at only the third company where I gave two shits about the company’s success or saw it more than just a stepping stone to my n+1 company.

        I agree with you completely. They can just keep giving me cost of living raises and respect my experience and opinions (not saying they always have to go along with them) and I will be the last person here if they shut the lights off.

        I work in a consulting company where I lead projects and I have an almost obsessive commitment to seeing the customer happy within the constraints of our contract that I wouldn’t even think I was capable of earlier in my career.

        I pay close to attention to my employer’s goals and strategies and stay aligned. I lurk in our sales Slack channel and care very much about how I can add revenue even though I know it wont make but a little difference in my comp.

        FWIW: the other two companies I cared about deeply were startups where my opinion was respected and they gave me more autonomy than I could have ever expected. The first I was leading a project for their largest customer and the second a decade later I was just kind of thrown the reigns of our cloud architecture strategy even though I had no experience at the time.

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  • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

    It was very much bimodal. If you were working in BigTech or adjacent, that was definitely true. If you were working in enterprise dev like most of the 2.5 million+ developers working in a tier 2 city outside of the west coast in the US, comp was definitely stagnating.

    In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.

    It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.

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  • fooker 2 days ago

    Yeah someone joining a good company as a senior engineer in 2015 would retire with about 15M in assets now assuming smart investments (say... half on big tech stocks, half in market indices)

    Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.

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    • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

      This is very much tech bubble thinking.

      Most developers in the US don’t work for tech companies and will never make ovdd $200K inflation adjusted. Developer salary is very much bimodal

      https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

      If you are working for boring old enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies or even most YC funded companies, “senior” developers will top out at around $160K-$170K inflation adjusted in tier 2 cities.

      I spent my pure developer career [1] in Atlanta GA. Well known companies based there like Home Depot, Delta, Coke, and GE Transportation are paying their top developers around what entry level developers getting in BigTech.

      But choose your non west coast city and you will see the same.

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      • fooker 2 days ago

        Okay, assuming you could invest 100k out of your 170k per year into companies you know were doing well on tech from 2015, how much would you have ?

        (say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook)

        The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation.

        There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.

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lordnacho 2 days ago

> At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.

I think software is going through what scribes went through when education went universal.

At one point, just knowing how to read and write gave you a cushy job. It didn't matter what, maybe you were in government, maybe you were a clerk organizing trade.

Somewhere in the last 20 years, this happened with coding. At the start of the millennium, knowing how to code meant you could fill some role. Now, everybody knows enough of how to do it that it's assumed for many roles, just as reading and writing is for every office job.

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  • mywittyname 2 days ago

    > Now, everybody knows enough of how to do it that it's assumed for many roles

    Is it? I don't know anyone who can code proficiently outside of people who work tech jobs (or used to).

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    • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

      The thing is that there are enough people who are good enough enterprise CRUD developers - especially for remote roles and/or outsourced developers - that it’s hard to stand out from the crowd or command increasingly higher salaries. Gen AI has made the problem worse.

      Even if you are targeting a major tech, if you are trying to differentiate yourself by how well you can reverse a btree on the white board, there are plenty of people who can do the same. It’s not a differentiator that you have previous experience in BigTech any more. So do thousands of others.

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  • raw_anon_1111 2 days ago

    For me, I saw it happening around 2014. I was six years out of the long fog of my “expert beginner” phase and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I was considered a “senior” [1] full stack developer and no matter what I did - mobile, actually learn front end better, I was still going to top out at around $150K (and sadly enough, that is still what I’m seeing in Atlanta when I lurk on LinkedIn).

    I knew I had to get into BigTech or adjacent after my son graduated as a software engineer.

    Around 2016 I belatedly discovered cloud consulting where consultants would come in and “transform” organizations. I learned in hindsight that they were a bunch of old school net ops folks who only knew how to do bad lift and shifts that costs the company more money and treated AWS like a Colo.

    I wanted to do the same but focus on what I learned the term for years later was “modernization”. Bringing in a software developers mindset on cloud consulting. By 2020, I was no longer thinking about BigTech and was focused on getting into consulting. I had never heard of AWS’s Professional Services department until a recruiter told me about it. Even then I didn’t know it was full time working for AWS directly until that was also explained to me.

    [1] yes in hindsight I know that a title of “senior” to someone who pulls well defined tickets off a Jira board is laughable.

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