“Learn to Code” goes bust.
I know the leftist in me is supposed to have sympathy for these people and get them to unionize. But only after I stop laughing and enjoying this moment. For years these fucks told the rest of us to “learn to code” and pretended like studying anything else at uni was a fucking waste of time.
GUESS WHAT FUCKERS. SO WAS CODING. Looks like we’ll be baristas together, only I’ll have three years of experience!!!
"learn to code" was always about increasing the supply of labor so they could reduce their costs.
The 2001 crash is a pattern. For years people would "Learn HTML" to get into jobs and others were encouraged to follow. The crash flushed many people out, and outsourcing of the early aughts devastated the whole profession. Today it's "Learn to Code" and "AI" are the new hip terms of art. It's all about slashing labor costs.
it's more interest rates than AI or "learn to code". most of the programming jobs were deeply dependent on VC funding for companies that never intended to make a profit. with the rise in interest rates, VCs stopped getting a continuous influx of cash to invest in these companies so they suddenly want their investments back ASAP. it's why reddit is suddenly IPOing, for example. large companies can't cheap debt to buy smaller competitors, so the only exit plan is to turn a profit - most of these companies planned to get bought out by a larger player. the larger companies are also struggling because higher interest rates mean their customers are spending less, so their bottom lines are looking bleak, hence all the layoffs since fall '22.
It's going to have to get much much worse before engineers unionize. I am sorry to say my fellows do not occupy reality in a class sense and these layoffs are just a taste of what's to come.
I also don't encounter a lot of the "learn to code" types irl, if ever. If anything, i hear pushback on outsourcing and bootcamps. I wonder how much of that sentiment was actual engineers vs students online who hadn't entered the workforce yet.
Most engineers I know are OK but not at all class conscious people.
I also have some bias here, I don't live or work on the coasts so the silicon valley elistist tech bro musk worshipping cutthroat competitive culture you see at big tech is just not there. And those types tend to be the loudest shittiest dudes online.
Midwest here, most folks just treat it as a job like any other. Still won't fucking unionize though, US propaganda is too strong.
The only people I’ve ever actually heard say “learn to code” are like Cory Booker and co
Yeah it tends to show up IRL more as a proposed solution than an insult. The whole, we just need to train these laid-off coal miners in West Virginia how to code, that will reverse the economic decline there.
There are l2c programs in a lot of elementary schools right now. Parts of STEAM curriculum
Yes, I have been in software development for close to 15 years and I have never seen it this bad. Everyone seems to mythologize 2008 but I was working age in those years and it is just as bad now as it was then; maybe worse, especially seeing as we weren’t collectively in denial about a plague wiping out millions of the working population at the time. It has been almost 1.5 years since I was furloughed, and I don’t even get calls back anymore. Echoing sentiment elsewhere in this thread that tech workers are an especially clueless bunch as far as class relations, too; I have been attempting to organize for as long as I’ve been in this field and absolutely none of them want it. We had experienced the largest white collar labor leverage in living memory (mandatory remote work) that we just let them take from us because this field is all miserable men who can’t actually stand to be around their families and nonexistent home life. It would be remarkable if it weren’t fucking all of us over, and they all love it. Very bleak.
Everyone seems to mythologize 2008 but I was working age in those years and it is just as bad now as it was then; maybe worse
One point I've seen making that case that it's not as bad as 2008 is that this time companies mostly aren't shutting down, but instead just downsizing. Which is true, but I think part of that is just because the economy is more "consolidated" into large companies than before. Think of the Apple car or Metaverse shutting down and presumably laying off most of the people on those projects; each likely had at least a few hundred employees, which in 2008 could have been entire companies. Or AWS, which most of the western internet runs on at this point, if they layoff 10% of their employees that's potentially thousands of engineers putting pressure on the rest of the tech labor market, yet on the surface it doesn't look that bad since AWS continues to exist and "it's just 10%".
everyone should be a plumber so that anyone can fix plumbing on their own instead of paying others to do it. how will a person get food if everyone's a plumber?
You have to understand, these arguments aren’t about solving macroeconomic issues. They’re meant to chastise people complaining about the macroeconomic issues, hey you individually could potentially do this one thing that would given you a comfortable life, ergo the macroeconomic issues aren’t real. It’s a modern day version of “let them eat cake.”
Retire early due to being a small business tyrant and stealing the fruit of your employees labour?
Retire early because of a large scale nationalised democratically run construction industry that prioritises early retirement for physically intensive work?
The thing I’m noticing about trades is that the most successful businesses are the ones with multiple licenses under the same brand, so they’ll be an electrician, plumber, hvac whatever else all at the same time. It’s becoming more difficult to learn a single trade and then open your own business and make it big. Way easier for a company to go on say an electrical call and then ask the homeowner if they would like their AC checked while they’re there for example.
its gonna be really funny when generative AI fucks up a bunch of code and these people have to try and hire someone who actually has a clue but all of them have moved on to other industries.
trying to read code written by AI is going to give me an aneurysm.
Everyone should be petit bourgeois is the new let them eat cake.
Unironically I feel like I've been seeing more and more of the Right out loud say "we should return to feudal times where everyone was either a craftsman or worked a tract of land!"
Obviously, the food just comes to you through a big pipe.
Shoutout to my dad in 2020 who told me to become a blockchain developer because it was the future.
I am not a programmer at all, btw.
What was that saying, uhh, um, "in a gold rush, pan for gold"?
i dont really know what to do. i learned to code and right now i can't get a job.
all of my experience is in programming, so i can't really get into other industries. i can't do most jobs bc i am disabled and cannot drive, so the fact all the current advice is "do a job that requires the ability to drive" really isn't helpful. like even if i made enough money to move to the city i still couldn't be a plumber.
if anyone has any advice on jobs that are remote i would appreciate it
finance firms, honestly. they're immune to the underlying causes of this crash so they're still hiring programmers.
ill look into it, thank you!
as a dumbass, recent graduate, and person who just started programming for a finance company as my first job - how/why are finance companies immune to the crash? it makes sense that they must be, because we do nothing and spend too much and honestly this company (on my level at least) should be fucking hemoraging money. its the most David Graeber bullshit jobs thing possible and yet we're actively hiring, its wild
sorry 1 day late but, isn't it pretty ghoulish to work at a finance firm? You'd be advancing the ability for capitalist cutthroats to leave more people without jobs and without houses because of the inherent instability of the market, increasing leverage and putting more and more capital into extremely turbid waters that could wash away hundreds of thousands of people's life savings overnight. I guess it's not as bad as being a cop or working at the MIC, and Marxism != moralism, but am I wrong to see the people working as quants to be around the same as the petit bourgeoisie?
all the current advice is "do a job that requires the ability to drive"
a decade or so ago i was convinced we were no more than 30 years away from eliminating human drivers as a job, and now i'm working on inventing time travel just so i can go back and push me into a locker.
Half-joking here, but -
Become a consultant. This is essentially what you'll do:
The key is to make them feel like they should be grateful to hear your words of wisdom. You just need to come across as wise and enlightened to the ways of the corporate world, no substance required. If your advice doesn't pan out, blame your clients. They'll keep coming back like the rubes that they are
i am WAY too autistic for that lmao
Current market is bad even for experienced developers, don't expect it to recover fast. It first needs stop downsizing.
My first idea is to find someone who wants to (or has interest) to employ disabled person. In my country there are some incentives and people generally want to help out by hiring disabled.
Other option is casting a widder net. While tech companies are downsizing, economy is not bad. Try to find some close to IT job in non tech company where you can help them out and slowly grow.
Been applying to DevOps, but I'll be sure to look for the other ones you suggest as I hadn't heard of those, thank you!
wow you mean the money faucet running dry means suddenly all the startups that could never and would never turn a profit suddenly collapsed? shocking
Was it coders saying that? I thought it was out of touch politicians.
It actually peaked with techbros on twitter aiming at journalists when there were mass layoffs after pivot to video failed. The politician line was always STEM education, "learn to code" was a twitter dunk thing.
It was neoliberal Obama administration. Obama Becomes First President to Write a Computer Program
A handful of speculative super-bubbles are on the verge of popping (one might argue that sites like Twitter have already popped and just won't admit it).
The overwhelming majority of software engineers and systems architects and coders are either
a) doing just fine in their non-imploding industries, such as finance and energy and manufacturing
b) eating the same pile of dogshit they've been eating for the last 30 years, assuming they're doing entertainment software or working Fivr jobs or otherwise engaged in the most precarious forms of software development work
This isn't bad news for coders. This is bad news for Silicon Valley VCs and their promise of unlimited borrowing capacity.
they've already moved from "learn to code" to "go to trade school and learn to weld"
Mmmm mmmm heavy metals and carcinogens!
My uncle died early because he was a hard working welder. My friend's father died early because he was a hard working welder.
Sure you get paid well to weld, if you don't mind 15-30 years off your lifespan.
knew folks working in construction who had thrown their backs out at the age of 25 and just kept on at it. Motivated me to get out of manual labor.
Is the danger of welding a problem with welding or a problem with welders not following reasonable safety procedures?
Until the next artificial tech bubble leads to over-expansion and then it’s back to “learn to code.”
Yeah trade school is absolutely not for everyone. I went to be an auto mechanic and it’s definitely not for everyone between the kind of people you work with and the damages it does to your body.
I still think we should learn to code just cuz its a genuinely useful skill and we shouldn't let giant corporations determine what software we use
That applies to all skills, but unfortunately there are so many hours in a day dor us to learn skills. Somee of us can code, some can bake. Some are excellent woodworkers, and others have a knack for gardeneing/farming. All skills are valid and needed in society. What we REALLY need to do is meet up with various people with various skill sets and form co-ops/communes to ensure everyone has everything they need.
I do wanna learn some Python for if I ever brush up on my GIS skills.
https://www.shanley.com/blog/stop-feeling-bad-for-tech-workers-these-people-are-the-enemy
Okay so I haven't read this dudes entire body of work so I don't have a totally clear view, but I did read this article and, hot take, everything he says here could be applied to all workers in the imperial core.
Yeah, this is just describing the difficulties of unionising a labour aristocracy. And you absolutely can unionise that.
I think you're right, but as someone in tech, I've talked with the EXACT people that the author describes as not self-identifying as workers, and it's not just the same false consciousness you see in all settlers. This paragraph was particularly salient,
Their entirety of identification as workers comes from being better than everyone else. They are like air benders of morality, doing the most fraudulent arguments to justify how the tech industry has somehow turned, on their watch, into Mordor. They aren’t even telling people the TRUTH about what is happening in the tech industry. They should have been whistleblowers; the positive perception that the outside world has of tech is very much maintained by the employee’s silence. Things in the tech industry have advanced far beyond what the general public thinks. The reality of what is happening in the industry is about 1000x worse than even generally understood in a mainstream that more or less accepts the industry deeply problematic at best. But techies are complicit even in the very worst of it: like the startup-created, VC funded surveillance towers that help round up children at the US/Mexico border and feed them right into detention and death and sexual violence. The programmers themselves have created an absolute maze of false logics to justify directly working on software that directly kills people and is used against the People by policing and intelligence agencies and the military. In this particular case, the argument is that they can’t be responsible for how their software is used, even when designed specifically to do that thing; nor can they be responsible for working somewhere which requires that thing. Oh, okay!
Having posted here before about my efforts to try to get people to see MIC companies for what they are, I can freely share that every single time it's just an insane uphill battle to get techbros to even recognize they're the same species as the victims of the systems they build at Palantir or whatever other garbage company. I might not be as pessimistic as the author (I'm also not exactly in the imperial core, per se) since I have had some success with the occasional person, usually those who aren't cishet white or white-passing dudebros, but MAN are techbros ridiculously reactionary.
As someone actively trying to get into the industry, this is a certified bummer. I'll keep working at it anyway.
<3 Keep your head up comrade. As shitty as all the Tech Bros / STEMlords can be and as much as the backlash like this is (somewhat deservedly) also aimed at them I do wish it was easier to both celebrate their reality check while also not celebrating joblessness for anyone, as well as being careful about keeping structural critiques aimed at structures so it doesn't splash damage our comrades so much. It will bounce back, because our whole fucked up system is designed around that (only to crash again, yay) but I believe in you and it's not wrong to keep pushing even if, or especially when things look dire.
That being said, I do see why critiques of structures can be applied to those that uphold them and I know it's not the intent of anyone here to do either of the two negative things I mentioned so this isn't some kind of scold post for OP or anything, just that I empathize.
I think there is still plenty of demand (or at least, need) in fields that interface with the real world, and finance as others have mentioned. The amount of shoddy and out of date software I have to deal with working in a lab is astounding. There are decades of work to be done still to improve things in manufacturing, life science, lab equipment, industrial equipment, process engineering, etc.
Skill issue. I would simply write a barista script in the AngularJS framework.
Java might be more suitable for that
I would simply move to a peripheral country poor enough for outsourcers to hire me. In fact they were already doing it, gentrifying the shit out of everywhere.
Plus Romanian is an easy language
It's the interest rates. You can't borrow money for basically free anymore. Previously risky ventures financed on loans now just don't make financial sense anymore, so they get cut. And that's still true because interest rates are still high.
It's 100,000% this. Venture capital went fucking wild from 2008 onwards because interest rates were so low you could take out a loan for practically zero interest to fund whatever dumb idea was being tossed around. FAANG in particular hired like fucking mad during the pandemic, and when interest rates inevitably raised they all realized they were dumping billions of dollars into dead-end projects that would never deliver profit.
It's shitty that, as usual, workers end up eating the cost of capital's hubris, but this downturn in the industry was inevitable.
The core mechanism of coordination was/is the capitalist class/private bank cartel, through Fed. Res. Chair. Powell raising interest rates, which ended the 14 year cheap money spree that started in the Great Recession.
It’s both. There has been a spike in tax rates, and they wanna nose dive the government, always. But they are also lemmings with no imagination for finding ways to operate that don’t involve cut cost and provide shittier services.
Damn I picked a bad time to "learn to code"
Definitely not a recession
A speculative bubble can pop without throwing the whole country into recession.
Learn to code bros have fallen. All that’s left are the Go to trade school bros who act like trades are completely free to learn, guarantee unionized employment and don’t absolutely destroy your body.
Oh no, they're boomers with cushy white-collar jobs who want YOU to go to trade school.
From the way they see it, trades are manly and if you become a macho man in the trades, they can live vicariously through you in being manly as a way to make up for their own insecurities in their masculinity.
How about "Learn to plumb"? All that code is going to be useless when your sanitation and water delivery systems collapse due to a lack of tradesmen.
Currently teaching my twelve year old son and eleven year old daughter how to plumb. They dont have to do it forever, but theyll have a skill they can fall back on and make a semi-living wage until they find a direction of their own. My son is having a hard time understanding that we cant all be coders, or whatever. My daughter tells me its what she wants to do because its what her daddy does.
Based daughter
I think this is mostly going to end up hurting PMC ghouls who were middle managers at like Google, Facebook, or Twitter, at least in the long run. The world would have to radically collapse in order for coding/IT jobs to stop growing in general, since every business and industry is only going to get increasingly entangled with digital technology. What's drying up are the "Lead Metaverse Development Specialist" type positions, as the US Government slows down the free money tap and giant tech conglomerates have to stop setting cash on fire.
That's all to say: I think it's fine to laugh at this. If these people have real skills beyond "project management," they'll probably be fine (or as fine as anyone) eventually; they might just have to get real jobs.
Yeah this anecdotally checks out. We had lay offs at my company and like 80% of people affected were management of some type. They specifically didn’t cut people “that contribute” so kinda just admitting how bullshit many of these jobs are. Some junior level devs were affected too though and that was sad of course
Yep, and it's only going to get worse, specially if you look at new AI systems like Devin
Do you have a source that presents an unbiased evaluation of this technology? Because I really question the ability of machine learning models to write complex software, so I'll believe it when I see actual results (all I could find with a quick Google search were what amounted to press releases).
My guess is, the AI will spit out code that, by itself, won’t be functional, but it’ll be in a state where a small team of coders could fix the oddball things that create errors and inefficiencies. So you would still need real coders, just not as many. Which I’m sure would be an absolute treat for coders, constantly having to debug bizarro AI code.
Never heard of Devin, but ChatGPT (the current leader) can barely follow instructions well, but is usually faster to get the information I need than Googling questions/topics for a wide variety of tasks. It's pretty much only good at things that had solid stackoverflow answers, including combining 2 questions or answering it for any language. Anytime you attempt to add complexity or details, previous details just fall off at random eventually. Sometimes it just can't combine 2 key details. Sometimes you get a lot of dead-ends. This mostly makes up for Google not being as good as it was 10 years ago, but my productivity boost is probably less than 10%. With Google, you probably click into 2-10 websites which almost all them missing a key keyword (you know a keyword that was key...). Some of the Google quick information boxes copy information from a website and phrase it in the form of a response to your question, but sometimes that specific data point had nothing to do with your question. An example would be a random date in the webpage was picked by Google's LLM to answer my question, but the date I was looking for was not even in the webpage. ChatGPT usually does well if you ask it 101 stuff or questions about well documented non-obscure facts or starting-from-scratch stuff or "write a function that does X". Anything else, you can almost safely assume a miss on first attempt, and a dead-end (no further conversing reaches viable solution) very likely.
this has nothing to do with AI - see my explanation here
This specifically applies to the big companies in the US.
Companies are still desperate for coders in Sweden. I got my current job first week of searching months before graduating.
I absolutely agree that "learn to code" is obnoxious of course. Just saying that coders are still in high demand even if the tech giants are laying off.
learn to pull espresso shots, nerds
CS = Coffee Specialist
Excuse me I'm actually going to be a Chief Coffee Experience Architect.
As long as I could remember I just wanted to make contraptions. I was always ripping apart my toys and connecting wires. I always resented the "I'm going into engineering for the money" crowd, like damn, leave some room for the people who actually want to do this.
Thankfully I know about more than making web pages, but I'm sorta worried elite tier web devs who have been living in the most convoluted systems ever designed by man are going to realize its actually easier to learn electrical engineering.
I always resented the "I'm going into engineering for the money" crowd, like damn, leave some room for the people who actually want to do this.
I always resented the people who thought this way, because I went into engineering for the money, and the people who vocally thought this tended to be upper middle class with big safety nets. Not saying this is where you’re coming from, btw. But it always felt like some people thought I didn’t belong there or couldn’t be a good engineer because my motives weren’t “pure” enough, like I should feel bad for wanting to live a more comfortable life than my parents and I did when I was growing up.
Oh sorry I guess I could be more specific, the people who I had in mind saying that, were very wealthy upper middle class people.
At least they were the ones loud enough to say "I'm in it for the money". Folks who had more difficult economic backgrounds just, didn't talk like that I suppose.
Yeah I feel the same way. Sorry my passion, playing music, doesnt pay anything more and i had to get a CS degree to survive, you know?
it's funny. I've ended up here because it's what I'm good at doing. but slowly I've come to learn is that what I'm better at and what I really like to do is solving the sociotechnical problems that make working in a particular workplace miserable. so I've adjusted over time. it's not really a position you can interview for, so my resume is all normal technical engineering, but there's a narrow slice I target because doing that particular job means solving the social problems I really want to get at. and my dream is that I stay at one place long enough so that I can make it obvious that the root of all these problems is the fucking executives so it's time to form a union!! (tech types will never go for it without the upfront work that gets them to see you as a friend and ally in their struggles, personally, and without the plank by plank evidence that the owners are genuinely to blame).
in other words, my life became politics even before I became a leftist
Ironically I'm not even that good at it but I can't imagine doing anything else. I seem to lack the ability to disconnect the idea of "work" and my mental health. Its incredibly unhealthy but I basically shut down when given a long, monotonous task so I've optimized my life to avoid that, if that makes sense. If I'm not doing this, I think my only other option is construction or some other manual labor.
It's honestly crazy how tech people can be so abused but are so trained to hate unions. They just hope there's someone high enough with sway to have their interests at heart, and if not, go "oh well"
I thought you were saying you were into making contraception and kinda confused
After seeing the DIY electrolysis posts on here, I'm sure there's another user who has done that.
people are underestimating the severity of the situation, a lot of furry artists and coffee shops are gonna go bust as well.
furry artists... are gonna... bust
😳
I don't have any other skills and my company is insistent on doing more layoffs, while telling us everything is great. The previous layoffs are showing since we're having more impactful bugs with nobody to fix it. I want to unionize but other techies at my office think on the individual level when it comes to their career. I can't blame them I guess since any of us can be decided to go whenever. But that's more the reason we're stronger together so I'll still tell them about how much more power we have and hope it sticks
Techies here.. why aren’t we unionizing via hexbear?
Because the capitalists are winning. Techies in generally skew a bit individualistic and libertarian, and the communist ones are generally pussies content to live high on the hog because if I made a communist ruckus I’m sure they would be happy to kick me out.
But in general, we’re paid off as petit bourgeois and often we do the job of the middle managers anyway: tracking and compiling metrics and anything else the shareholders can use to lay us off or keep us in check. Yes if we had class solidarity we could weaponize our labor power, we are the doers of the most profitable companies in the world. It doesn’t happen for the same reason restaurant workers haven’t unionized broadly in the US: the capitalists are winning, they’re good at keeping us down, and they put a great deal of effort into propaganda to keep the game running.
I learned to code and I honestly kinda hate it. Started having an existential crisis in my 30s, learned enough to get me hired, do the same shit every day, I'm kinda going nuts. I miss doing manual labor honestly.
Idk how long I'll stay in this industry. I guess until I get fired for being bad at my job. Maybe I'll go back to school and get an English degree and just teach overseas or something
The thing about mental labor (or worse, simultaneous mental and physical labor) versus physical labor that really sucks is... You don't have time for your own thoughts. Can't listen to a podcast. You can't even listen to music with lyrics. You're stuck thinking only about some goddamn bullshit for 8 hours a day every day.
Some kinds of mental labor use different parts of the brain and that doesn't apply as much... But anything heavily word-based takes up your full attention
That’s a fucking amazing idea
Hey look I get the celebration, lots of people are real assholes in the industry but I'm stressed and drinking all the time
Aye... well, I guess computer engineering is another alternative, as one commenter said...
honestly if all web dev jobs collapse in like 10 years, it'd still be worth it for me due to just how incredibly relaxed my remote work job is.
Really though this probably has more to do with the high interest rates than AI at this point
LMAO, and I was just about to gear up to finish my CS degree.
Perhaps I can try my more OG plan in marine biology?
Take a cheap course in humanities for a year and just chill a bit until the economy recovers / it won’t matter anyway.
This only applies to some gigantic international mostly american cooperations. Don't act like the IT market isn't demanding more people than society supplies.
as techie i feel awful but as a leftist im with all of you