The last big place that I worked could easily cut tech headcount in half and hardly notice. A decade from now they can probably reduce headcount 80% in IT and 75% in the business.
The impact of global growth won’t impact jobs directly for awhile. When Chinese companies start pumping out superior product that westerners cannot even read the manuals for, that will be the big crack.
That's a definitive statement that is more nuanced than that. There are definitely people (myself included) who have been directly impacted by global tech outsourcing.
I won't get into the specifics but I can tell you that there are an increasing number of dev shops outside of the US that are specializing in solid communication. That's been one of the biggest problems and hesitations from US businesses. You need a manager in the other country, who is good. These companies are specializing in providing a excellent teams that at a fraction of the cost of a US team.
The perspective I was coming from was a little more meta. To date we’ve seen outsourcing of business functions and consolidation of job functions where technology advancements have reduced labor needs. VMWare eliminated datacenter hardware teams. AWS eliminated data centers. Modern clients eliminate all of the bullshit associated with Windows PCs.
We are getting to a point where business functions will go down the same path. This is an age of giants.
This is sometimes true, but you have to be careful about myths about occupied capacity (of people and machines). If 100% of the people are occupied, it's very likely that the company is very understaffed and can easily get into trouble too. When xx% of the people are idle, you might look next week, or the next phase of a project and a different slice will be idle, and this may be the fastest, most efficient way to get the work done for large or complex work.
And sure, people typically don't run on 100% capacity. What however seems to happen in many bigger orgs with vague performance metrics (as much of IT work is), some people do solid 60-80% productive work throughout the day, while some barely hover over 0%. So you have a kernel of workers pushing the cart and a bigger cohort of watercooler crowd. When peak load time comes the latter don't ramp up their productivity to 100%, but instead it's expected the employer should expand the staff.
Nothing short of impending layoff rounds seem to affect this dynamic.
Obviously it's still smart to save and plan for a period of unemployment though.
You are the lucky beneficiary of restrictive immigration and employment policies.
The supply of decent programmers is just not enough to cover demand.
2. Even for non-EU citizens, it's way way easier to get a software job (the company can get a visa for you). There is no H1B style cap. If you get an offer, you get the visa & job. True, for the first few years the visa might be tied to the job, but this just means that you need to have a new offer before leaving the previous job.
Much less so than in the US, though. To be honest I think that's more an effect of different cultural values ("novelty" and "bootstrapping" here are not as celebrated as in the US), but there is definitely a difference.
So one company can stagnate a whole sector- basically killing off any innovation for the duration of its existance. No innovation - no coders really needed.
Why not codify that bargaining power into a series of employee-owned organizations that are able to negotiate for salaries in line with that cost of living?
There might be some growing pains, but it would certainly be better than the current trend of a few CEOs, VCs, and upper managers hoarding capital for little more than artificially expensive Bay Area real estate.
This really resonated with me, for a number of reasons. Primarily, it's because I am hyper aware of how delicate this "tech boom" really is. The good times will end, and I believe they will end sooner than most believe. I was layed off once before because the company I worked for outsourced their entire engineering department. That was a quick lesson for me early in my career that you are EASILY replaced. There are people in India, China, the Ukraine, you name it... who will do your job for half the cost.
There is an enormous, GLOBAL, influx of software engineers that is rapidly diluting the worker pool and is quickly reducing the implicit bargaining power that we've enjoyed for the last 10 years. Big "thanks" to all the initiatives by well meaning, but naïve, individuals and organizations who want to "spread the wealth" without realizing that the wealth is already spread very thin, and is being spread thinner, and thinner, every day by mechanisms outside of our control (cost of living, housing, taxes, etc.).
I am trying my best to save, but somehow the cost of merely existing seems to increase month over month. I don't have kids, can't afford them. I don't have a car payment, I bought a junker. I have minimized my expenses down to the bare necessity and even then coming up with the down payment for a home is going to take years. At my age, my parents were already on to their second home. My wife has enormous student loans that cripple her ability to save so even our dual income seems weak in this environment.
So what can you do? I'm starting a business in my after-hours and weekends, desperately trying to establish a source of low-overhead income. I'm specializing within my field, attempting to learn new skills in a niché programming field that can't be easily learned by bootcamps and YouTube videos. Above all, I'm remembering that right now things are good. This is the calm before the storm.