Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years.
It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt.
But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...
These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas.
But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway.
Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability?
I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.
I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.
I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.
Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.
Claude Code is similar. It's fairly clean for AI coding standards but it's also most likely much, much bigger than what it should be for what it does.
the near term is not an issue, because most ai code is still reviewed by experienced engineers with experience. the problem comes in the future where junior engineers who never acquired enough experience to handle engineering problems
Ain’t nobody reviewing the majority of vibe coded output.
In the mature service I worked on, adding new code was “templatized”, you had to add feature flags, logs etc which didn’t vary much no matter which feature it was. The business logic was also not that complex, I can see AI tools one-shotting that and it indeed is a productivity boost. You would be surprised to know that most work was exactly this, writing rather mundane code. Majority of the time was spent coordinating with “stakeholders” (actually more like gate keepers) and testing code (our testing infrastructure was laborious). This was at MSFT. There are lot of teams that are innovating at the frontier (mine wasn’t, at-least not technically), I don’t know how AI tools work in those situations.
> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.
"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.
But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
At MSFT, Product Managers were Technical Program Managers. Yes, a good PM is a joy to work with.
>But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.
Pretty easy. Get them to talk about a project they've managed and start poking holes. Who was on the team? How did they organize meetings? What were the bottlenecks? How well did everyone get along? What did they do to help grease the gears? Did they have to change the process? How did they like the software? Which software did they use? Did they have to administer it themselves? How did they deal with management changes / team changes / tons of support requests / issues in production? Where did they draw the line between PM work and engineering work?
You can interview prep for all those questions and lie.
> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.
Within 18 months I was unemployed.
There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.
But it all came back, and more.
The number of tech employees worldwide in 2026 is probably 2x or more compared to 2001. Maybe even 3x. Things are not the same.
also add in that the single largest source of tech growth in the last 3 years has been building tools that will obliterate the need for tech employees.
replacing SRE-4s with AI is the point
My observation is mag7 got less picky in hiring.
Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7.
And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky.
And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.
Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors.
If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.
Other industries and other countries. Until recently, other industries were struggling very hard to find developers for example.