There’s a lot of scuttlebutt in online tech communities about the current programming industry right now. Techies are arguing with each other about the current state-of-art of LLMs and AGI in general. We’re even arguing over nomenclature. While we’re online discussing the finer points of Chat GPT 4 vs. community-sourced models, bitching about OpenAI not being open and Mistral going that way, and transformer architectures, the industry is not-so-quietly laying programmers off.
In the hundreds of thousands over the last 3 years.
Although this isn’t the first time the tech industry has experienced tough times, this one seems tougher than 2008 at the very least. Programmers with double-digit years of experience are finding it hard to secure a job interview, let alone a new job. We went from our e-mails filling with recruiter spam to nary a peep almost overnight. Over the last 3 years, I’ve had the “opportunity” to need to find a job 3 times and each time got a little harder than the last.
I’ll be one of the first to say that the last 10 or so years as a programmer has been very comfortable. I watched friends in other industries struggle to keep their pay in line with the cost of living, worry over the pool of available jobs where they live and tolerate all kinds of shitty rules and behavior just to maintain a living. I type letters into a text editor and sit in an air conditioned office and never had to worry about job stability or if my salary will cover my living expenses.
Then COVID 19 hit, and work-from-home (WFH) became a thing.
The pandemic and the associated work-place changes that occurred in response were like a trojan horse. Programmers have long complained over businesses seemingly irrational desire for asses in seats. Our work outputs are digital and usually hosted in a nebulous “cloud”. So when the lock-downs arrived and basically the entire population of the world were told to stay home, business had to adapt. Most adapted by allowing their white collar workforce to work-from-home and the programmers all cried out “SEE! We told you we could do our job from anywhere, and now we get to prove it”. Prove it we did.
Life during those lock-down years was not terribly different from normal, at least for me. I still got to write code for money, I still spent that money on groceries, bills, and paying down debt, and now I had a decent excuse for not attending that awful wedding that I never wanted to attend in the first place. I… just stopped commuting to an office. When lock-downs ended and the powers-that-be announced that we were allowed to gather in public again, the programmers expected to be able to continue working from home. Why shouldn’t we? We knew that all we needed to do our jobs was a computer an an internet connection. We proved that was the case - the software still got written even though we were at home and often we produced more during those WFH years than before (or after).
While the programmers were smug in their proof that they were right, business learned a similar but significantly different lesson. They learned that yes, a programmer doesn’t need to be in your office to be productive. They also learned that they could also employ programmers overseas for a fraction of the cost of a local developer. Now, that was true before the pandemic too and plenty of companies had an off-shore development team. The difference is how much money the local developers were asking for.
I grew up in Australia, a country as enamored by it’s local resources as the US is it’s tech industry. Programming was never a gateway to wealth and getting significantly ahead. It was a niche industry that paid “OK” that you went into mostly because you enjoyed the work. My first job out of university was as a “programmer” for cash registers and point-of-sales (POS) systems and I was paid a princely sum of $24,000 per year to do that. Programming was never about money when I entered the industry.
That is not so true for the late 2010’s/early 2020’s in the US. Googles and Netflixes and Facebooks started up, raised buckets of cash and either grew into multinational conglomerates or were sold for eye watering amounts to multinational conglomerates. Suddenly the tech industry was the place to be, and programmers started making salaries that used to be restricted to the realms of surgeons and lawyers.
This of course attracted the attention of people who were looking to make a lot of money. People who normally would have gone into medicine or law were instead deciding to study computer science. Netflix is famous for it’s $200k - $800k salary range. Google and Netflix were offering new graduates of top-tier schools starting salaries that were more than my highest salary watermark. A cottage industry of bootcamps and programs designed to fast track people into a tech career popped up. It wasn’t unusual or even eye-brow raising for a programmer with a handful of years of experience to reasonably expect a $400k yearly salary with the right resume.
Ever since the 2017 “Attention is All You Need” paper, various tech companies and start ups have been working on AI, and in 2024 it seems to be finally gaining some traction. A few days ago, a company called Cognition Labs announced Devin AI - an AI software engineer that supposedly can do my job entirely. DHH himself as said we’ve probably seen the high water mark on manual programming. Chat GPT has been able to code for a while now, and I’d be surprised if most programmers haven’t tried Github Copilot yet.
Which brings us back to 2024. The ZIRP of the pandemic years are gone, the US federal interest rate is at 5.5%. Capital for risky endeavors is drying up and companies are being more conservative with the cash that they do have. FAANG’s decided that they could no longer afford to pay a bunch of 20-somethings with a handful of years experience large sums of money to watch Youtube videos at home, so they instituted a return-to-office (RTO) policy and laid a bunch of them off.
Why pay $400k per developer when you can get someone 1/4 as good for 1/10th the price? Just hire 4 of ‘em. Do you really need that kid with a PHD who graduated from MIT at 15 to build your cat photo sharing app? That $400k kid wasn’t even in the office anyway.
To be clear, we did this to ourselves.
We told them they could hire globally, and we wrote the software that’s encroaching on our livelihoods. They listened, and they’re using it.
The 2024 programmer is more of a commodity now than it ever used to be. There’s more of us than ever, and we’re as heterogeneous as we’ve ever been. Welcome to the software assembly line, where your little 20 person startup can treat you like the same replaceable widget that the big 100k person companies have for decades. Don’t make too many waves or you’ll be fired and replaced by a developer half a world away who’s making the most they ever have at 1/2 your asking salary.
Some of us will leave the profession. There will be the ones who age out, who transition to a different role (entrepreneurship, management/C-level, etc), but the cohort that leaves the career for a new one will be larger than during previous down markets. The money is gone - we now live in a world where programming is something that pays “OK” and you mostly do it because you enjoy the work. Because if you’re too fussy, your boss will give your job to a computer.
What this means for Programmers
You can’t graduate college, get a job and retire 5 years later anymore. Sorry, you have to network, get promoted and build a career the same as the rest of us now. Your employer no longer thinks of you as the magical goose that shits golden eggs. You’re just another line item that can eventually be replaced with software.
Working conditions will get worse. They’re taking away our WFH right now, they’ll take away:
Our relative flexibility with working hours
Our relative flexibility with deadlines
Our generous perks/vacation/comp packages
The tolerance of disruptive personality quirks
Work is going to get more… work-y.
What this means for Employers
Programmers are more affordable and accessible than ever. If you’ve been contemplating an expansion into custom software, or if you have a particularly thorny problem that off the shelf solutions don’t seem to be solving - now is a good time to start planning and hiring for those.
Yes, they’re still expensive but they go a long way. In this kind of job market, you could pick up a senior developer with 10+ years of experience for less than $150k/yr in the right market, less if you’re willing to go offshore and hire from Europe, Australia, Asia, etc. Anywhere that isn’t the US, really.
You will never get more bang for your buck than now, so start hiring.