It seemed fairly obvious from the GP: How long they have before they get laid-off and struggle to find employment in the technology industry.

> i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine

I've lived on $0 a day, seeing as I've literally been homeless and dead broke in my life, but today I have a demanding career, a spouse, children, dogs, a home, etc., and all of them are massively dependent on me.

I don't think I'm personally at-risk of losing my job today but, like the GP, I also have to regularly engage with my brain to keep my anxiety about the future of the technology industry at bay.

edit/ And that's just me, I'm a US citizen and CBP can't come deport me because my Visa expired. There are other things at stake here for a lot of people beyond the simple act of earning an income.

Many people can relate to that.

On a more serious note, there is not much we can do about all this, really. We neither have the complete picture nor know what hides behind the corner. So relaxing a bit (while still taking the time to learn some new skills...) is not bad advice.

Future benefits of technology will primarily be enjoyed by the 1% with the other 99% becoming poorer and working (hours wise) more.

The history of technology & capitalism is quite the reverse.

A few years back, a steamboat from the 1850s was discovered buried in the muck in the Missisoupi. Archeologists rushed to dig it up and discover what it was carrying. They had the same notion you did. They were shocked that the steamboat was not carrying luxury items at all. It was loaded to the gills with manufactured stuff for ordinary folks. Things like factory made shoes, textiles, tools, pots, pans, dishes, bottled food, nails, hardware, etc.

Umm, what?

The iPhone is meant to be a status symbol, not "for everyone".

The next generation will have a lower quality of life than ours. They will have less wealth, they will work more, they will experience less.

Just looking back to 2003 compared to now and there’s so much more information and opportunity compared to 20 years ago. It’s not uniform and there are certainly some parts worse (housing) but I think that just the example of smart phones shows a huge leap of businesses and life improvements available now. I expect improvements to be available 20 years from now.

For who? Real wages have been falling for decades. 'Quality of life' is amorphous. Do we have a higher quality of life than people did 20 years ago? We're fatter, we have less wealth, we spend more time commuting, it's basically impossible to buy a house for most people.

I'd disagree with your assessment that we are better off than we were in 2003.

Somebody gets to pay for this:

https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per...

and it's gonna be you and me.

I appreciate that capitalism has been better than any of its competitors in every case to date in raising living standards. There's no question.

But I still think it isn't equipped to handle automation and AI on a very large scale. If I'm right it'll become painfully obvious as soon as something approaching or close-enough to AGI appears. And the trajectory we're on seems to make that appear to be something we'll see in the 2020s rather than the 2100s or beyond as I previously thought.

If by 2029 90% of the knowledge work humans do today can be done more cheaply by a LLM, that's a tremendous shock to the system. Especially if they'll be able to start to write code efficiently and create new AI models to solve problems, we could rapidly see easier problems like self-driving cars solved in a few years. Which leaves as available human jobs "politician" (presumably robots are banned from holding office) as well as any forms of skilled and unskilled manual labor that require walking around. If computer vision etc become good enough it's not hard to conceive of a bipedal android that can do tasks like build houses, deliver packages from a truck, etc.

In this situation, the vast majority of Americans would not have "jobs" in that no business wants their labor when a machine is cheaper and better. Capitalism dictates that those 90% starve. See the problem?

Note: I'm not saying the above will come true. Just that if the technology part does come through, I'm arguing capitalism as-is simply will not work anymore. And the breakdown would hurt everyone. The wealthy won't have any consumers to sell to when all consumers are unemployed.

Capitalism works imho because of scarcity. When 'labor' isn't really scarce anymore due to AI, that is a fundamental change that is bound to totally transform the game. It's like playing Mario Bros with gravity turned to 10000% so you can't jump. The game controls and level design then no longer make sense.

I'd encourage you to read up more on current affairs! Capitalism is global. How happy do you think impoverished people in Vietnam are? How about people exposed to toxic chemicals for their entire lives?

Your understanding of capitalism is based on a 50 year blip. You should read up on your history.

Capitalism is not why they are exposed to toxic chemicals as you say. It's the corruption...which won't be solved if we are using some other system.

I lived in Vietnam for a couple of years, very recently. I could drive around with no license and pay police officers some cash if I got caught. Sometimes they would shake people down when they were low on money, especially around Chinese new year. This was also in a big city.

I also wonder what your alternative would be? Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit. Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).

It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.

It's not corruption. It's capitalism. Who do you think funds the corruption in Vietnam? Don't look to closely at Nike or Apple's connections in SE Asia.

Vietnam was just an example. Capitalism firms expose billions of people all over the world to unsafe conditions to maximize profit, even in the United States and Europe.

> Your post reads like you are in the antiwork subreddit.

Your post reads like every conservative in existance. It's not capitalism's fault! It's just everything that exists in a capitalist system!

>Most people have this romanticized view of communism and socialism that we will somehow have exactly what we have now, but you won't have to work (or you will be given a home by the government).

I'm not sure why you are rambling about communism or socialism. You understand that there are a lot of economic and societal theories in the world. You don't have to buy into binary narratives.

>It's funny how many people fight so hard to have someone else pay their bills.

It's funny how many privileged people refuse to acknowledge the huge amount of human suffering caused by capitalism.

If you look at Vietnam before capitalism and after. It's a big difference. But I don't think you care about this.

Why do you think children have to work in these countries? If not for companies like Nike, they would have nothing and no ability to feed their family because of the government in power.

You are the privileged one. Not understanding actual human suffering.

All systems contain human suffering. Capitalism allows for actual freedom.

You still haven't given me an example of a better system.

Fun fact: "The initial use of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense is attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labor")" [0]

Both Blanc and Proudhon were socialists.

Further more, I would argue that kindness and sexual intercourse have been responsible for more human happiness than our current economic system, although it's possible that by "everything else" you meant "any other economic system", in which case maybe you would have a point, with the caveat that perhaps more primitive economies (your stereotypical 'merry band of hunter gatherers') would have, on average, healthier and happier inhabitants.

Or that 'socialist' Danes tend to be much happier than 'capitalist' Americans.

Or that with the regulatory capture of most industries by big company lobbying, our current economic system would more correctly be described as corporatism, where the means of production are owned not by individuals but by corporations.

And you could also argue that the North Korea/USSR were less happy than Western countries due to democratic, liberal governments being nicer than authoritarian ones.

^_^

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

I think it’s a transitional economic force though. Like it works for getting super poor, super inefficient systems up to moderate and then starts scooping up and concentrating.

I feel like being able to complain about capitalism is a luxury created by capitalism and people who are too poor complain about other things (like starving to death). Similarly to the shift from dying from infectious disease to dying from chronic disease due to eliminating or reducing preventable disease. It’s not that vaccines cause cancer and diabetes, it’s that vaccines stop people dying earlier of vaccine preventable diseases.

> Amazon is undergoing the largest layoffs in company history after it went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.

This isn't to suggest there's no other factors, but monetary policy is a major driving force in the boom/bust cycle.

Why would a company entertain demands of Spoiled Tech Dudes Union, whose work can be performed by people overseas equipped with ChatGPT for a fraction of cost?

This could be not too distant the future, if IT workers decide to unionize

Here in the UK the unions are medium-strong and haven't prevented self checkouts, ticket sellers being replaced with machines, etc.

What you need is strong labor laws. A universal three or six month notice period in favour of the employee would do wonders to prevent overhiring and overfiring.

Tech workers are the most privileged class of workers in the whole world. No one will take you seriously when you say these things. Also the metaphor doesn’t make sense. I wish we could keep this Reddit style, front page politics off our tech website.

Which is why it only takes a layoff or threat of layoff for many of them to feel like the world is ending. Not to minimize the impact that a layoff can have on someone.

HN is not just a "tech website". Never has been. You seem to not understand what hacker means.

Having six months of outflows liquid in a special savings account goes a long way for peace of mind.

This is an unreasonable fear. If your job can be automated, you should be out of work. If you are delivering actual value, you will always have opportunities.

ICE has priorities, and this is very far from being one of them.

i know you're exaggerating but it doesn't change that dev is extremely saturated.

and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.

ask someone how 'typing in a textarea in hackernews' works, and you will be surprised (just an example because thats what i am doing right now haha)

> and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.

of course, who said its going to be easy, my point was, it will be bad for a bit, then good for a bit and so on, it just happens that the youngsters now have only seen the good bit, and are freaking out because they think their job is who they are.

How does it work (or rather, what answer are you expecting from this question, from an interviewer standpoint)? I'd say something like, your keyboard sends an input event for each key that's captured by the OS, then translated to a letter, then transmitted to the application, in this case the browser. Or I guess the browser might also capture the key event and translate it itself rather than the letter (which would be how key rebindings work in online IDEs).

I've honestly interviewed developer candidates that didn't know what an operating system was. I asked this person what their favorite OS was and they answered "MS Excel". I politely asked them if that was an operating system and they declined to change their answer. Sure, at some point you might consider Excel an "OS" but I don't think they were thinking that deeply. Yes, the pool is that shallow, or at least it was back in the late 90's.

It is wonderful that we now live in a world of highly portable development where you don’t need to get into the nitty gritty to do basic things, but you’re missing out too much detail here.

You know when you write a web app, when you start it, you need to bind to a port? Guess what provides that port? What does it mean to “provide a port”? How does it physically work? How does this differ on Linux vs BSD vs Windows? Are there reasons you should care?

You know when you write a mobile app you need to use public apis to do things like draw to the screen or get user input? Guess what provides those apis? How do these APIs differ from OS to OS? What’s missing that you always reach for? How does local storage work? Or a remote API call work?

And then arguably the internet itself - and I mean it in the sense of the RFCs that define the behaviour - is an OS in itself. When you type something into your browser location bar and hit enter you start a chain of processes that involve DNS resolvers, root servers and registries, multiple routing algorithms (at different levels of the stack from Ethernet or wifi up to BGP), get invoked as your packets try to find their way to their destination, and the replies try to move their way back. Way, way below the HTML and CSS is this monster of dependencies. How does all that work? Why is it built that way? What are the failure modes and can you mitigate them?

These questions are rhetorical but they are meant to provoke a little nudge of curiosity: there is a rich, deep vein of thought that has gone into every corner of that experience, and knowing a little more about it will allow you to develop better software higher up the stack.

And honestly, even though I have worked mostly in the web app sphere for 20 years, if somebody just hand waves it all away in an interview, I know there is a lot of training we will need to do to get them to a level where they can successfully debug 100% of the issues we will see in production (and therefore reduce the chances of me getting paged).

It’s not a red flag, but if somebody walks in just as good everywhere else and is locked and loaded on this, I’m inclined to hiring them instead.

It would take a curious person a few weeks at a couple of hours a day to learn enough about this stuff to be able to talk to it and apply that knowledge. Meeting candidates who have never even thought about it is frustrating.

I have also never had an interviewer seem to want that level of detail. It probably depends on the job and the interviewer.

I am a little skeptical that there is a large enough pool of people out there who can meaningfully compare Linux vs a closed source OS like Windows, other than maybe current or former Microsoft employees. But I agree with your overall point that comparative knowledge is good.

I still struggle to find an accurate and complete single sentence definition, for if I were asked "what is an OS" in an interview though. Maybe I am being too pedantic and the best answer is just to start listing the parts or functions of an OS.

I had this vision when I got into computers that I'd be working with a lot of people who like and regularly use computers. No. I work with a bunch of people that heard computers were a good gig that paid well and got a degree that makes them useful in one very very specific area or at least seem useful in that area while they frustrate everyone around them until we get the email about how great it's been "accomplishing so much with" us but they've accepted a management role somewhere else.

There are some solid folks out there, but the ratio is indeed bad.

I've known maybe a dozen engineers who could describe the entire boot sequence all the way to the server being ready to receive a request, at a level where they could debug each stage and independently fill in the gaps. Same for the "enter text in hackernews textbox" or any of the other widely known full stack tasks.

I could tell you how I might build one of those but I'll inevitably be missing some associated detail.

I got a new position about 9 months ago, at a company that's not taking the current economic environment with much grace. Over the past 9 months the workplace has changed pretty drastically from what originally drew me here, so I'm looking for something new. (Which pains me, because I generally do not "job hop" like this, but most jobs also don't bait-and-switch like this)

I've gotten zero replies so far. There's a striking lack of "interesting" jobs to do on the market right now, and I'm shocked at the lack of interest I'm getting when I find them given my skillet, if I may be so bold. I think it's just a REALLY bad market out there.

To be fair, a lot of this may be due to lack of organizational knowledge transfer. I might be able to map a network drive at home, but I'd need someone to tell me what the location and stuff is if it's a pretty-existing drive at work.

But then again, maybe I'm one of the shitty developers you're talking about. I know I'm a low performer.

Windows, Linux, macOS? NFS, Samba, etc…? Simple folder share or are there AD credentials involved. We haven’t touched on what’s available in the cloud like efs.

There is so much now, that’s it’s hard to know it all. What they should be able to do is have some idea on what to google for.

It's not, 100's "applied" on LinkedIn's job ad mean nothing when the most applicants can't even explain a for loop.

I'm seeing mid-level backend devs making 350k who e.g. don't know what SQL indexes are. These people are going to get cut, I'm a lot less worried for people who know what they're doing.

Yo where is this? I am not making anywhere near that and am pretty confident in those kind of skills.

Maybe big tech / FAANG, but not at all the other companies that still struggle to fill positions. I can find front end people with some work, native mobile is impossible, backend is hit and miss.

Generally if you want gov assistance in the US, you pretty much need to be poor for a full calendar year, plus about 4 months.

Also, in CA, you can make an "urgent" application and be enrolled within 2 days. I requires some pressing medical problem, but that doesn't have to be life or death.

It's really not. Also no asset test so you can have a nice house and $100,000 and you still qualify as if you were utterly broke.

I learned this because it almost happened to me. I learned about it after a lot of phone calls to the insurance company piecing together this rarely talked about possibility.

What leads you to believe that fizzbuzz is a relevant litmus test for competent software developers?

It weeds out people who can't write code at all.

Yes, tons of them do apply for dev jobs.

Wrong. Fizzbuzz is the epitome of a hiring test that is gamed by rote learning and adds absolutely nothing in terms of decisive info on wether s candidate is competent or not.

Your argument is like arguing in favour of using hello word in as many languages as possible and then claim that there is no need to memorize them because that's the point of the question.

that said i would only want to do it on a terminal, not on a whiteboard. i'd probably fuck that up somehow.

The concept of FizzBuzz? If you are a programmer you should be able to write a simple program with arithmetic and string manipulation. There's no reason an interviewer needs to ask exactly the FizzBuzz - but just something a bit like it. Asking the exact question from the blog is pretty lazy anyway.

For the love of god, please Google what fizzbuzz is.

People who need to memorize a solution to that have no business coding.

Yes, please do google what fizzbuzz is. You'll eventually stumble upon resources on how to memorize fizzbuzz, which is such a Hallmark of the test that it's even explicitly mentioned in the C2 wiki on fizzbuzz.

Fizzbuzz basically just tests you know how to use a conditional, do division/mod, and print to console.

I'd argue someone who cannot do those three things has no business applying for a dev job, regardless of how many times one actually needs to fizzbuzz in 'the real world.'

No, fizzbuzz test rote learning and it mainly serves to game the hiring system.

Its so far from anything useful I've done.

By now surely there's a Python module for it anyway!

Either you're really, really crappy at filtering resumes and other pre-interview signalling - or you're exaggerating.

No doubt they exist - but they aren't 99 percent of all resume-screened applicants. Let alone co-workers.

For some, it's the boot sequence of a PC. For others, it's the Liskov Substitution Principle. For others, it might precise definitions of all the database transaction or normalization levels.

That is - pieces of genuinely useful knowledge, to be sure. Stuff we probably should have been exposed to at least once. But also stuff that, once we've gotten the basic point - is easy to slip out of our muscle memory over the years.

Especially as we end up doing, you know, real work for real people. And we start to develop genuine technical horse sense that goes beyond the ability to memorize (and retain for years and years) zillions of verbal definitions for things.

That's what worries me. There was a time when I could write low level C and even some assembly. Similarly there was a time when I could explain the ins and outs of IP packets and routing. However, none of that is what the market wanted and I don't remember any of that anymore.

Heck, with most of my work involving running around trying to hold understaffed systems together and juggle the unreasonable demands of management; I don't even have the programming/web development skills that I used to.

This is very reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. If you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a relatively high paying tech job.

The quality of tech talent has dropped significantly in recent years, even (maybe especially?) among the leetcode grinding crowd. Software engineers have already replaced themselves with AI by turning into interviewing machines that know how to survive in a large tech company but if asked to build and ship a product from nothing would be completely frozen.

I really miss programming in the post-dotcom shadow. Most people in tech where in it because they loved writing code and solving hard technical problems. TC was literally not a term at that point, virtually nobody had RSUs, comp was fine but nothing amazing. There were plenty of jobs that paid better than writing software so all the people looking for a quick buck fled there and left coders alone.