[dvt]

In the last decade, the software engineering industry has turned into a grift that has pushed out hundreds of thousand of low-quality "engineers" through coding bootcamps or online courses. Many of these people have no passion for the craft or interest in building products.

Then, when money was cheap during COVID, companies over-hired unscrupulously. Now, given that markets are cooling off and there's some political, geopolitical, and economic uncertainty, companies are hedging their bets, and laying off is usually the right move, especially as interest rates are going back up.

There are perfectly viable explanations for the situation the industry finds itself in without invoking the AI boogeyman, especially considering that just about every study out there shows that AI use correlates with a fairly modest increase in productivity, and that it won't turn anyone into a "10x engineer" overnight.

[menaerus]

Over-hiring could be one way of explaining the effect we are seeing, however, where are those "coding bootcamp" or "online courses" engineers? I honestly ask because I have never worked with one in almost 2 decades of being in the industry, and I worked across many different domains. What I see is on the contrary - the people who are getting laid off are people with legit engineering degrees from legit engineering Universities.

Also, over-hiring by the very definition implies a sudden surplus of engineers on the market. I can't quite understand where did these engineers all of the sudden come from? The number of engineers outputted by the Universities YoY is pretty much close to O(1) so I am not convinced to this theory at all and I see it only as a good excuse that companies are making in order to make them look better.

I spoke with my friends few days ago, and one of them runs the company so he asked me on the opinion of the AI frenzy. I gave him my view and by the end of it he told me that he feels uneasy but that he has to let go part of his employees because he simply does not need them anymore - they are literally replaced by the AI model and one or two or N-M engineers operating the model. Yesterday he needed 10 people for the job, today it is 2 or 3 people.

So, I think that the AI has already changed the landscape dramatically, and what we are seeing are not the post-COVID effects.

[witx]

Where I'm from and peripheral countries, the industry is riddled with bootcampers and button pushers. My company even has a big bootcamp for reconversions

[menaerus]

What are you trying to suggest? That people without the University degree who have been trained for monkey coding do exist? Sure but that's not what I was saying nor does it skew the picture in any significant way.

[witx]

What I'm trying to convey and you fail to understand is the picture you have in your mind is very much affected by your reality. The fact that you don't see these bootcampers doesn't mean they don't exist.

[menaerus]

Not only you don't have a depth of thinking critically, and understanding my point, but you're also unbelievably arrogant.

[witx]

The only thing I did was to point out that anedoctal data doesnt give you the full picture. Why the insults though?