[yawz]

Because of the downturn, I wonder how many people have given up on their careers at Tech? How many more will respond to the call of a different professional life that pays less, but that will be more fulfilling? Even as recent as yesterday I heard a past-colleague tell me "maybe Tech isn't for me, after all. I'll try my hand at this other thing."

[nrjames]

I'm not sure it's the downturn, necessarily. I used to be enthralled with tech, full of energy to explore new tools, programming languages, etc. I think I slowly awoke to the fact that it's not the tech but the people that make it interesting and rewarding. For me (and I'm not trying to project on anybody else), interactions and activities with people who were doing things that are not tech seemed deeper and more genuine -- almost as if it was easier for me to get to know them and enjoy their company in a non-tech context. As a result, my hobbies and interests have pivoted to activities that don't involve computers much at all. My career remains in tech and I try to put my best efforts into the work that I do, but it's becoming more difficult as I continue to realize that life, for me, is better when most of it is spent away from screens.

[Seanambers]

Tech pays so much, people can afford to move on. That's probably the biggest reason.

[ghaff]

It's not most people or even most people in tech obviously. But I know a fair number of people in tech, especially post-pandemic, who reassessed things and decided they had enough money and really weren't enjoying their jobs any longer so they moved on.

[jethro_tell]

I know a number of people that were true believers until the the pandemic. I think that as tech workers, we are generally really isolated from a lot of real problems people face. I remember having sick family members, kids that were out of school with nowhere to go and nothing to do and I could watch the weight of boardom and loneliness weighing on them and the additional responsibilities of having the kitchen stocked and open for 3 or 4 meals a day and then sitting there and listening to some shithead rambling on about a useless product and fake deadlines so someone I didn't know or care about could make 15% instead of 10% this year.

I kinda reassessed who is benefiting and the actual importance of a lot of the work you do. Even though it's all framed as 'mission driven' and 'Changing the world' a lot of it really is only important so some mega corp can make a couple extra points on their stock.

I've talked to a bunch of people in the industry that had similar realizations. I've heard things like 'it's not something I can do today, but in x years . . .'

I believe there were a lot of people who reassessed an have a different view and that is and will continue to change the trajectory of many tech careers over the coming decade.

[dehrmann]

Do you think remote work has made it less interesting for you?

[eek2121]

No. The countless garbage-tier attempts to measure productivity have, however, and the interview process for ALL companies should absolutely be regulated. Until realism can change things, I'm going to retire.

[CM30]

I suspect there will be quite a few people in this situation, but it won't be the majority of people simply for financial reasons. If your idea of a fulfilling career isn't tech, law, finance, medicine or business/management, it may simply be impossible to do it full time and have a decent quality of life in many places.

For instance, writing jobs pay terribly overall, with the quantity of them going down a lot due to the decline of traditional media and the advent of AI. Unless you've got a FAANG income nest egg or a trust fund to rely on, I wouldn't recommend anyone get into this kind of work as their main career, regardless of how fulfilling it might be.

Ultimately I suspect many people will be forced to try and stick out this recession/downturn just because tech is their best bet of a decent living.

[hnthrowaway6543]

Tangential to the article since that was a voluntary departure, but this is absolutely happening, yes.

My partner decided to get "into tech" in ~2018. Her reason more or less amounted to looking at me and determining "it's a cushy job that pays very well." For a while, I tried pointing her to various sources to start learning a bit about software development and programming; there's no barrier to installing PyCharm CE and Github, after all. But there was zero interest and zero natural curiosity. She just did some certificate coursework, passed, then started looking for a job, and nothing beyond that.

In a lot of ways, software developer has been brought down to earth as a more "normal" career. You don't really hear about lawyers working on passion law projects at night or mechanical engineers designing skyscrapers as a hobby; the path for that is just go to school -> get internship -> get fulltime job -> do your 9-5.

The thing is, my partner isn't alone. She represents the vast, vast majority of new software developers in the past 15 years. The industry has grown, the pay has exploded, people who worked retail could parlay a 6-week bootcamp into a six-figure salary. Obviously people would hop in even if they didn't know what a compiler was.

But in a post-ZIRP world companies are seriously reevaluating the value of the average software developer. In 2010, a software dev was far more likely to have at least some personal interest in software, or even just computers in general. Now, you have software developers who never touched an actual, non-phone/tablet computer before entering their university courses. They're not stupid--they can pass a leetcode interview just fine--they just don't care about technology beyond using it as a means to pay rent.

Even if we return to near-ZIRP, there's going to be less demand for massive software dev teams. Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% to cut.

So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.

[kbolino]

I think we have another problem looming, beyond the realization that many engineers are unnecessary:

Most of the business models in tech are unsustainable. The ad-revenue driven explosion of the Internet over the past ~15 years has long since reached saturation. The data mines are all tapped out, and what have we learned? Mostly, nothing. Following a person's habits can help you target ads and drive them towards (mostly) unnecessary consumption. Then what?

Without ZIRP we're going to run out of the easy credit fueling such consumption. The economic hamster wheel is going to have to slow down. Then the realization that the SnR on the data being collected is practically 0 will set in. An immense amount of investment dollars was thrown at companies that charge nothing to the end user but collect and sell data to third parties. Yet that data is almost completely worthless.

I personally think fee-for-service is eventually going to make a (bigger) comeback, though another round or two of ZIRP might stave it off for awhile. As it does return, it is going to put even more pressure on companies to run lean teams.

[Mc91]

> Everyone hates him, but you have to begrudgingly admit that Elon successfully demonstrated you don't need massive dev teams to build and run software, even at Twitter's scale. (obviously it has other problems due to Elon's incompetence, but nothing more developers would solve.) Most companies could cut their dev team size by 50% and end up net-positive due to less overhead--the challenge is figuring out which 50% to cut.

What do you mean this revelation was recently demonstrated by Elon? The NATO Software Engineering Conference 1968 paper talks about the problems of having too many programmers of low skill. The 1969 paper talks about the same thing. Fred Brooks wrote the Mythical Man Month in 1975, covering this topic extensively. This has been talked about extensively for over half a century with regards to software, it wasn't just discovered by Elon in the last year.

[jeremyjh]

Nothing you said contradicts GP, who didn't claim Elon discovered anything. Elon did recently demonstrate what has been known for a long time - but not widely believed.

[fauigerzigerk]

>Elon did recently demonstrate what has been known for a long time

You mean because he fired a lot of people and the website is still up?

Revenue has been falling precipitously. I'm not sure anything has been demonstrated yet.

[manmal]

Revenue hasn’t fallen because devs were fired, but because people responsible for selling ads were.

[fauigerzigerk]

No, I don't think that's what happend.

If I remember correctly, he reduced the content moderation team, which led to an increase in hate speech, misinformation and CSAM. That's why big advertisers left and revenues crashed.

He then told those big advertisers to piss off and refocused his advertising business on smaller customers, which is why he doesn't need so many ad sales people any more.

Perhaps he should hire some developers and data scientists to better automate content moderation.

[da39a3ee]

GP said "demonstrated"; you even quote them. They didn't say "discovered".

[slyall]

> So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.

This happened after the dot-com burst in 2000. At that time there were a lot of people in Tech who would have otherwise gone into marketing, accounting or whatever.

A lot of these moved out of tech into other fields. Or they moved into less technical roles like project manager or management.

[dustincoates]

I think this is a good call out. There are many in tech who, if salaries fall, will go into other industries. Then there are those who will figure out how to do with less—because they couldn't imagine working in anything else.

[johnnyanmac]

>So, yes. The tech downturn for this group of people--the non-passionate 9-to-5ers, particularly juniors--will last for many years, and that will lead to many jumping to other careers.

1. I don't like the implication that junior = non-passionate. I'd even argue the opposite. Those new and hungry are most likely to be exploited and take whatever over the grizzled vet who's long had reality slap them in the face. There will always be non-passionate people but well: that falling passion seems to correlate quite well with the falling passion of companies to even pretend they want to better the world. Tit for tat.

2. The downturn is very much not correlated with passion. I've seen some 9-5'ers survive several rounds of layoffs and I've seen some of the hardest working engineers with almost a decade of experience slashed to the surprise of everyone. You look further in industry and you see some vets of even 15,20+ years cut. This isn't some calculated move to "drain the swamp". As usual, corporate is throwing darts on the board instead of seeing what each engineer brings to the table. If you're unlucky enough to be working on the wrong product at the wrong time (which at this point is just anything non-AI. Nothing is safe), it doesn't matter how talented you are.

The games industry is very much full of underpaid, underappreciated passion and is being hit just as hard as the rest of tech, so passion clearly isn't the answer to job security.

[Buttons840]

If the most valuable programmers have a personal interest in tech and use it as a hobby, then businesses will realize this and will look for people who do tech as a hobby or who go to hobbyist meetups, etc, and then people who just want the money will start going into the hobby spaces. I wonder how much more potent our industries could be if they were filled with only people who deeply cared, and everyone else just got a generous UBI?

[eek2121]

They drove me out and my tears are made of C, so....

[throwaway63467]

I would assume that he just earned so much money that he’s rich and can now do something else with his life without caring about money. Good for him.

[away271828]

"Rich" is a bit of a loaded term. But, yes, if someone has had a successful 35-40 year career in tech and has managed their finances reasonably, it's not unreasonable that they might decide to pack things in some years early--especially if they're not wild about working at a behemoth company that isn't as much fun as it used to be.

[UncleOxidant]

> But, yes, if someone has had a successful 35-40 year career in tech and has managed their finances reasonably, it's not unreasonable that they might decide to pack things in some years early

Early? If you've been in tech (or any job, really) for 35 to 40 years you're going to be in your 60s (or close) which is a normal time to retire.

[zhivota]

Yeah the real difference with tech, at least as it's been for the last while, is you can do it after 10-20 years. I've had a very middling career overall and after about 15 years I'm very close to being able to just move on and do anything else without worrying about day to day expenses.

Now people who have run faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill with their inflated tech salaries, they are going to be in trouble.

[dajtxx]

Lol, I’ve been at this for 36 years and am in more debt than ever with 4 kids to still support. I’m doing it wrong.

[ghaff]

Retiring in late 50s vs. retiring at 65 (much less later) still qualifies as some years early I think. Obviously a step function difference from retiring/"retiring" in early 40s.

[Scubabear68]

There is a vast difference - literally vast - between Google employee’s salary over 14 years vs the median salary in IT overall.

This is especially true if you consider salaries world wide vs just the United States.

[dajtxx]

Yeah, it’s really demoralising for those of us not on SV / FAANG salaries reading the comments on HN.

[gedy]

Even in the best of times, the best engineers I've worked with basically we’re just putting up with companies and management because the work was interesting and pay was good.

With so many people looking for work at the moment, I think a lot of these same companies have kind of a big head about themselves. Interviewing always sucks, but having to jump through a bunch of hoops, be ignored, or ghosted by some dopey SaaS company is really discouraging for a lot of people.

I myself decided to take a sabbatical so as not to deal with all this right now.

[away271828]

It's not 2001 but it's almost certainly harder for a later career person in particular get hired than, say, 5 years ago. I know quite a few people who presumably feel comfortable financially and have walked away from at least full time involvement with tech.

[johnnyanmac]

I haven't given up, but the past few years have accellerated my plans to try and become self-suffient in the field instead of relying on corporate to respect and compensate me. At least if I fail to appeal to an audience it will be on my own laurels and not because The company was fine with my labor but needed a 0.1% better earning call statement.

I of course can't speak for everyone, but I imagine there will be more startups/small companies forming over the next few years from people that were otherwise satisfied at BigCo. Tech has definitely felt like it devolved to being a cog in the wheel of raw profits over a field of innovation meant to make lives easier. You can't really get that back without sizing down.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

In my case, I dove deeper into tech, but I love this stuff. Since no one wants to work with a greyhair (no beard), I just do it for free, for folks that couldn't come close to affording the kind of work that I can do.

[johnnyanmac]

My biggest fear. Ive never shaved and you can count the number of hairs on my chin after 30 years. At this rate, I'll never truly evolve into the endgame greybeard guru (/s)

[matt3210]

I loved tech until I started working in tech. What else is there though? I can’t really do anything else

[inoffensivename]

I was a software engineer for 20 years, now I'm an airline pilot. Change is a good thing!

[nktrnk]

The question I’ve been thinking about: what’s a better time to quit —- in a downturn or when things are going up?

If you can hold on to a job in a downturn, it’s a good opportunity to invest when the market is lower (which interestingly is not exactly the case now) so that you can benefit from it later.

But I guess the best time to quit is when you’re ready. Regardless of where in the cycle it is.

[ghaff]

I wouldn't over-generalize. But there is some belt tightening at companies. Many companies have grown/changed. People may not feel up for a late career reboot even if, under different circumstances, they might have put some more years in.

[oldpersonintx]

Lots of people will be leaving tech, not by choice. Unlike longterm Googlers, not everyone can afford to not get paid for six months.

Also, this isn't a "downturn"...the companies are mostly doing better than ever. This is a permanent restructuring in resource allocation. Companies are going to shrink headcount even as their businesses flourish.