I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user.

The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech.

The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs.

Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps".

The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.

When I first got into tech, it wasn't cool, it was nerd stuff (as a pajorative). I remember it first started being cool when the internet went commercial. It became really cool when the iPhone was released.

I think tech is currently undergoing a long overdue culling period. I recall one in 2001ish and in 2008ish. All the people who got into it because of the money and don't particularly care for it will move on. Some people who do care for it will also get culled. It's not pretty.

I got into it for the money and became very disillusioned with the tech industry long ago. I don't plan on going anywhere though, just gonna continue coasting in my high-pay+easy job and stay focused on family and hobbies.

One of the things that annoyed me about this field is the obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. Sometimes a job is just a job.

It flipped for me at 35. I went from obsessed with the grind/culture/career garbage and just had an aha moment where I said, "hey i have an easy job, with hours that are so flexible it feels illegal, and my pay is double what most of my friends' dual-incomes are". I started to just focus on hobbies and family and less on work.

I don't live to work anymore, I work to live.

I still get stellar marks at work, i know my shit and i'm good at it. But the illusion has worn off for me. It's just a job. I meet deadlines, but I also push back on deadlines that require crunch time or weekend work. I push back on weekend or late time work completely now. I'm not embarrassed anymore to say "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week".

My job is a means for providing for a comfortable retirement, and a comfortable life. I enjoy tech, but I enjoy my hobbies more. My hobbies keep me healthy and happy, work doesn't do either of those two things. Work is work, that's fine. But let's call it what it is. Let's not forget to live too.

> "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week"

Balls the size of spacehoppers. I love it.

Honestly, this is the sort I'm rooting to be culled out. I'm all for a healthy work-life balance but have no sympathy for the "rest and vest" folks - there are absolutely people getting paid in the top 1% who work ~25 hours a week and so absolutely nothing useful. Meanwhile, there are plenty of critical teams drowning in work that can't get additional headcount because of layoffs and the fact they don't have the right buzzword in their team name. If you're taking up a seat and coasting, someone else is paying the price.

Unfortunately FAANG rating systems aren't great and often reward vanity projects going nowhere over the work keeping the company afloat, so I entirely believe that's possible even while having good ratings.

Those all read like great reasons to cull and replace a great deal of tech management.

But for the person above, it's not like them working harder will help the teams that actually do need more people but aren't getting it.

Individually, perhaps not. In aggregate, there definitely could be more resources made available for critical services if you could make the org 20% more efficient just by getting rid of people who think they're entitled to a huge paycheck for chilling.

Agreed with the culling part. I write code for the job and also after hours as my hobby. I wait for the weekend to work on harder/more experimental stuff. I remember the days when I was surrounded by people like me. These days all I hear is 'it's just a job that provides for my hobbies'. And the decline in the work quality is so obvious. And the level of bullshittery and invented office language is through the roof.

There is no way these two things aren't connected.

Cool, the rest of us have other hobbies. You’re not better than us, you’re just one dimensional. That’s a drag on work quality in an entirely different way.

No. It's not a drag on work quality. Quite the opposite. The fact that people look down upon this kind of passion is exactly what I am talking about when saying that the quality of software is declining. People who view it as "just a job" don't get to high performance levels.

And since they are the majority they get to decide. And they decide to choose mediocrity. Consoling themselves that "good code isn't that important", "I'll do it next week", and other excuses.

It can be a drag on work quality. An engineer that dabbles in design hobbies on the side can provide valuable UX ideas that will make the whole product excellent whereas an engineer that nerds out on the latest code trend will pitch rewriting the whole product in Rust at the 11th hour as if any user gives a shit.

I’ve worked with plenty of people like you and some of them wouldn’t know a good product if it smacked them in the face. Most products don’t need more engineering capabilities, they need people involved with excellence in multiple skills.

Apple is an embodiment of this. None of their engineering is bleeding edge but they make categorically redefining products. People that nerd out over something like Linux wouldn’t get it.

I have yet to meet a software engineer who is highly competent and also suggests rewriting a working application in Rust at the 11th hour. In fact the people you are talking about are mostly juniors who read something in an article on a random webpage.

By the way you are talking, no, you have not worked with people like me. Most products are garbage because of poor planning, poor market research and bad/rushed engineering.

Tell me you don't know anything about Apple without telling me that you don't know anything about Apple. A lot of their engineering is absolutely bleeding edge. Right now I am working on improving/adding features to a real time ray tracing renderer that works at 30+ fps on the latest iPhones 14 Pro. Most people's desktop PCs cannot do real time ray tracing and yet Apple does it on a phone. But I guess that is not bleeding edge...

Any industry that can't sustain itself with a majority of workers who are "just doing it as a job" is doomed to fail.

I say this after doing SW development for a few decades. You can't count on "passion," "rockstars" or "10x developers." You can only count on the slogs who show up, do a good job and go home.

It was doing just fine before people with the "just a job" attitude showed up. Definitely not failing.

The "just a job" people have always been there. You don't notice them because they just get shit done and then go home without making a big deal about it.

>I got into it for the money

I got into it for the passion, but I don't have it as much as I did. I can't imagine doing something else like marketing or accounting though.

>obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects.

That's most corporate places, especially in sales. One of the funniest takes is Step Brothers, "it's the Catalina wine mixer!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9HcYuGVgU

Yeah I got into it for the passion and stayed for the money.

I really loved tech. For about a decade I truly loved every day of work. Then I got really worn out and it took me almost 5 years to work through it. Part of this low point was a point of terrible health (mostly caused by my job and stress). When I came back out of it, I considered leaving the field, but stayed in it for the money.

I was in a management position at this point. I could go into a different field and start over, but I'd probably end up working my way up to management eventually too and its really all the same at that point. You are managing people and processes. So I might as well do that with the tech spin on it.

The obsession with over-manufactured enthusiasm is one I really laugh at now that I look back on my career. I realized that most of us in tech will work on boring stuff. I can't even tell what I am working on anymore, to the point that it is almost comical. I could be building self-driving cars or cloud billing portals. At the end of the day, you are fixing bugs or improving performance or polishing my tiny grain of sand in the huge sculpture that these platforms have become. When you are working on large-scale complex platforms nobody really understands how it all works. There is no magic, even when working on "sexy" projects. I've worked on exciting projects and boring projects and the day-to-day experience is exactly the same.

Pro Tip: "Boring" projects tend to pay better, and since its the same work and same day-to-day experience, take the boring projects. You also tend to find fewer sensationalized colleagues on those projects.

You are probably right but man, isn't this so very disillusioning? I am a bit in such a hole you mentioned and thinking about how to get out of it best - one of my ideas/hopes was to find more "sexy" projects at some point. Oh well.

The flip (up)side of a boring job is that you don't get crises that you must deal with but have to do so at great cost or just impossible. Leave the sexy for stuff that you're allowed to fail in.

> You are probably right but man, isn't this so very disillusioning?

Look at it this way:

Your boring, cushy tech job only exists because the industry as a whole is grossly inefficient.

That's why so many people are doing nearly the same thing, over and over and over, day after day.

If it wasn't for that inefficiency you would need to find other work, and it would probably be a lot more difficult than your current job.

So, glass half full.

Definitely. I remember showing Google to a colleague at my first internship, when Altavista was the best search engine, and he discarded it automatically as some nerd thing. Oh well.

We could go even further back to the late 90's and the official launch of the Internet, where you see the more people believing in this. When Bill Gates was officially the richest man in the world. But, I think with every cycle, you got more believers. Google in 2003-06, along with Facebook. In 2007-09 with the iPhone disrupting the phone industry, that became a big thing. And early 2010's with the rise of the apps - Airbnb, Uber, etc.

I feel we hit a crescendo with the post pandemic bubble and fed pumping money, that's when tech usage globally was of course at it's highest, but also like the sheer number of people using it everyday was massive(maybe 50-75%+ of the world). And it arguably "ate" or saved the world during the pandemic. It's fascinating, and now we're entering another cycle maybe after a brief respite, with LLMs.

In my youth, console gamers were considered basement dwelling weirdos by normal people and PC gamers were considered weirdos by console gamers. Such was the hierarchy.

I think World of Warcraft change that somewhat. I joined one company and was shocked, discover that practically everyone and every department had an account and played at least casually.

I made sure not to mention that I was in a top tier guild getting server firsts. I didn’t want to come off as to weird. I mean I have three computers and seven monitors on my desk, but one have to know when to draw the line.

I think WoW also significantly grew the female demographic in terms of gaming, but we saw that with RPGs even prior to WoW too, especially Final Fantasy.

“Apple probably made tech cool for normies”

It felt like that, but I suspect it’s not really true.

What do you feel the truth is? It was certainly well-marketed, and felt like there were way more normies with Apple stuff than nerds in the UK.

The 2008 financial crisis. Before that it was less FAANG, more Goldman and McKinsey.

People were saying this back in the dotcom crash days around 2001, and before that in the collapse of the 6501-based home computer market, to name just two.

I don't think much has changed in the attractiveness--it has been a high-paying field for fifty-years now. The sexiness comes and goes with the cycle.

And tech is cyclical on about 10-15 year cycles or so, and we have hit a downturn after a long upturn. Maybe AI will be the next uptick. Or maybe VR. Hard to predict. But I'm pretty sure it will happen.

I think it's partly that, but I think it's also partly that tech is just becoming just another job. Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating. There is also 80% that just needs to the role filled and could be done by someone decent enough to make CRUD react apps.

I think it's moving more towards how engineering (mechanical, ee, etc, not software) is seen. It's a skilled and respected job that pays decent, but at the end of the day it's just another job. There will always be mechanical engineers and software engineers who LOVE it and tinker all through the night after work, but that's becoming less and less then norm for software.

My old roommate was a mech engineer who designed lighting fixtures, didn't love his job, but it paid decent enough, and the company needed an ME to design them. There are plenty of "lighting fixtures" that need to be built in the software world.

> Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating

Try closer to 1%. The vast majority of us are just making software to make businesses chug along

I think it's also recalibrating the different types of jobs. The type that tech has accumulated in excess over the last 5 years especially and even longer in the biggest companies are the product and middle managers, Marketing/Strategy/HR/Sales folks.

I think the six months bootcamp hires certainly tilted the prestige part into tech being just another mass hiring industry. And mass hiring did happened during the pandemic on a very large scale.

Imo, tech is still a great place to be. But we all need to raise the bar for hires.

Tech became fashionable with the Netscape IPO.

There's nothing fashionable or prestigious about debugging and patching a security hole a 1am on a Friday in my underwear.

It is if you’re getting paid $300 000 a year to do that.

Nah, the money only goes so far. I've been doing SWE professionally since '07, and that wasn't in the US, so there was far, far, far less comp involved. The trend I see with new grads is that they're driven and drawn to the space for whatever reason (money, etc), but most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc) or just go back to complete a professional degree (law, MBA, etc) or PhD.

16 years isn't a whole lot of time in the field, but it's enough to have watched the expectations of SWE roles expand, and the demands of dumping ops ontop of an already complex job do take their tole. My original comment was tongue in cheek, but late night fixes, pages, opsing, ontop of day to day development is a recipe for burnout when you add partners and kids into the mix.

  > most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and
  > go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc)

SRE is a specialized subfield of programming. Someone has to write and debug all those low-level tools (runc, systemd, etcd) that sit "below" what most people consider to be the backend stack.

If someone becomes an SRE because they don't like programming, they're going to be in for a big surprise when they discover how much quality time they're about to share with the unshare(2) manpage.

The elites chase the money. It's definitional.

Rapidly emerging profitable technologies create fortunes and the elites chase the fortunes. There's no conceptual difference between the iPhone and the steam engine or steel mill in this regard.

Elites? I think our definitions vary widely here.

In the context of career choice, I mean the children of wealthy and powerful families and/or those graduating from our most prestigious preparatory institutions.

Is there some other definition?

You think this is only about powerful families’ kids? I think the article is clickbait personally, but that wasn’t my take at all.

This "trend" started over 25 years ago.

I'm mixed on this, I can definitely appreciate the 10x TC boost but it makes hiring unbearable: I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs.

None of the existing methods e.g. leetcode work well, so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.

One of the side-effects of the technology crowd becoming saturated with the straight-laced, standardized-test oriented, topper types is that LeetCode aligns neatly with how you prepare.

Right secondary school grades + near perfect exams -> Right Undergraduate

Right undergraduate + LeetCode (basically an exam) -> Big Tech job " + Case interview prep -> High paying entry level management consulting job " + Right connections -> High paying entry level wall-st job " + High LSAT -> Right Law School -> High-paying BigLaw job " + High MCAT -> Right Med School -> Right Residency -> High Paying Physician Job

If you notice, tech (Googles of the World and elite startups) have now fallen inline with the path for other white-shoe industries.

FWIW, I know at least a few people from memory that had non-technical undergraduates (usually economics) but are excellent at studying for exams. Sure enough, they did enough LeetCode they could get a job at Meta or similar. Ask them what actually happens in a CPU or similar technical question and you get a blank stare.

> I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs.

> so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend

There are too many good candidates so you're having to... flog them harder?

God, tech hiring is weird. People in other sectors of the economy look at me like I've just announced that I have cancer, when I explain what the tech interview world looks like.

Yup. My wife finds it extremely odd that my interviews go more rounds and more hours for a job to write a simple CRUD app than for her interviewing for an ICU job as an RN.

Oh well you see writing a CRUD app is so much more important and serious and difficult than saving human lives. And bad programmer hires are uniquely damaging in a way that bad hires aren't in any industry with normal interview processes (which is nearly all of them) and there's just no way to mitigate those effects until they're nearly gone by applying common-sense best-practices to your processes, that you ought to be doing anyway. Nope, only solution's to put every candidate through the wringer, at enormous time & monetary expense to all concerned!

Programmers catch a lot of shit for being immature or unprofessional, but I think tech management deserves a harder look, when it comes to those things.

Medicine and adjacent has pretty well-defined schooling pathways, afaik a nurse cannot claim to have picked up their skills 'extracurricularly' in the same manner that a future 10x SWE can - as a result we have a diverse pool that contains both CS grads from top schools who may be unsuitable, (plenty of incredible ones too, of course), alongside random 'uneducated' hackers who may be a good fit.

Thus, in lieu of a standardized framework we have to invent our own.

I very much agree though, the avg. CRUD shop could probably just ask Fizzbuzz and have the same outcome as these gauntlets.

> Thus, in lieu of a standardized framework we have to invent our own.

The FAANGs and similar could easily have created such a thing, and driven wide adoption of it. They find some other value in their very-expensive process, or they'd have gotten rid of it with the snap of their fingers, if that were the only reason.

I suspect it's mainly to do with reducing turnover and, therefore, suppressing wages among their workers. Yes, despite those wages already being quite high. Wouldn't be the first time they've done it. "Solving" the problem would be trivial and relatively cheap, compared to the current processes, but it'd come at the cost of making it easier for employees to jump ship for more $$$, and none of them want that.

Why do the rest do it? Cargo-culting, mostly.

Also the typical hazing dynamics common to all cults.

For sure, its a management problem. I feel pretty confident, as just another engineer, I could sit down and shoot the wind about programming with someone for 30-45 minutes and know if they are worth their salt. No crazy assessments, no multiple rounds, just a conversation about the software industry and the process and tech.

> write a simple device driver from scratch ... exposed to in CS102

Where the hell did you go to school? When I did CS102, they were talking about linked lists and recursion. I would love to have seen device drivers, but when I was in school, everything was way more academic and impractical than that.

Mine was even more basic. There were students struggling to understand what a variable is.

Were you an Electrical Engineering major, too?

Computer Science.

That is not an effective or realistic approach to hiring. Introductory CS courses seldom cover low-level device drivers. And you don't really need a particular type of "hacker" (whatever that means). Just hire someone with the right aptitude and send them to a technical training course.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1142662.1142667

> so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.

I am really curious to know what school has a cs 102 level class that teaches you writing a device driver?

I could perhaps see this as part of Operating systems class, where you just learned about how kernels works using a minimal OS (like xv6).

but that example you gave based on the expectation you mentioned are very extreme. This is why its hard to find talnet to hire.

I can confirm. When I graduated in the early 2010s, one of the professors I was close to mentioned that the cohorts where turning away from the typical hacker types and to the high-achieving money and prestige seekers who did not really care about the field. The last time it had happened was leading into the year 2000 and the EECS department got an entire building out of it as a result. Once the dotcom bubble crashed, enrollment was down to third of its 1999 levels and the building was mostly empty.

History is a flat circle.

My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech?

It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.

If I remember correctly, there were 600 CS freshmen in 2000 at Virginia Tech, only ~60 of us were left by graduation, I think largely because of people evaluating their prospects after the crash (and computer science is hard).

That’s some bullshit. I applied for CS at tech and they butchered my admission and put me in general engineering. When I called to correct this obvious mistake they said the CS program was full.

I blamed it on Virginia tech’s football team making it to championships that year (1999). Oh well, still got to work with famous professors and got a very good head start on my career through my Alma mater

I was totally surprised how many people I had met in those first classes, who had no programming experience whatsoever and were surprised by the amount of math in the curriculum - they were for sure chasing a trend.

I think my class was the last to graduate from arts/sciences, the CS dept was moved into the engineering college.

> About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years

I'm always kind of curious about these folks. Do they not communicate amongst themselves? It would seem that 50% aspiring to be product managers could not be statistically possible.

I feel like if I walked into a service bay of a dealership and asked the mechanics working on vehicles, there is no way 1/2 of them would try and claim they expect to be service advisor in 2 years.

In finance most people aren't going to end up as an MD (Managing Director, not doctor) but that's probably a goal for most people entering investment banking. I don't think it's unreasonable to have becoming a PM a goal, maybe you'll fail but there's lots of things you can do to swing the odds more in your favor.

If you start as an analyst in Investment Banking at bulge bracket bank (the same hiring pool as for Google APM program and similar), you fall into one of two categories.

1. The coat-rider who sees everyone doing and how can the consensus be wrong. If you read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, the first few chapters document his experience at Princeton in the early 80s. It's just the fashionable thing to do.

2. The ones that hope to pivot somewhere in year 2-3 to Private Equity or the Hedge fund space. After a few more years, your hours and stress dramatically improve and you earn life-changing amounts of money (1M+ USD) on a yearly basis if you are good. Very few make it this far though. Many burn out and end up in other corporate finance roles.

Group 1 moved to tech and will slowly move back to high-finance.

Back in 1997 when I joined college for computer Science in California, in any class there was maybe 1, occasionally 2 people that were in the class because they loved technology, and wanted to be in due to passion.

Everyone else was in it because computers paid well.

Not to say that people didn’t work hard or eventually become skilled. Just that money was the driving force more than anything.

previously the only socially acceptable legitimate career paths for new grads from top colleges were finance, consulting, medical+law+business school, PhD (for nerds), and maybe working for Congress or a policy think tank. anything else and other people's parents would pity your parents at graduation.

probably about 10 years ago big tech got added to this list. not sure exactly why. maybe they just got big enough to start doing serious campus recruiting.

Different people will say it happened at different times.

I noticed it around 25 years ago.

But I understand there have been phases of go-to prestige job that a certain class went through. Techbro didn't immediately displace, say, investment banking bro, or management consulting bro.

> I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job

This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools.

A trajectory question that always puzzles me is how fast can we really supply software engineers. Is software engineering like other ordinary white-collar jobs where supply is as elastic as it can be, or software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent? I draw this question from personal observation, so it's definitely not scientific: China has been big on math education. Math whiz kids are honed like superheroes in China. Teachers and parents put great pressure on students to excel at maths. Yet in the end, only a small percentage of students can truly learn high-school math or entry-level college math. If software engineering is like math, then the supply will stay tight until the demand drops, and techies will continue enjoying good pay after the recession.

I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times.

But this is also a byproduct of many tech companies valuing plumbing over good engineering and accepting or ignoring the cost.

But yes, I've met so many boot campers easily outperform their ivy college senior because the second one didn't care, barely worked and completed his daily tasks in one hour.

But in the end the first one churned more code, learned more about the business and people and was miles ahead in efficiency.

> I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times.

I don't think I've ever seen it. Maybe it's a location/caliber thing, where in some "best cost locales" there's a big brain drain to the valley. We just flat out stopped interviewing bootcamp grads at some point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low.

At one point, the most notorious bootcamp, Lambda (or Bloom Tech, they had to change names a few times to avoid litigation), was desperate enough they would "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And this was pre-pandemic when hiring was at it's peak.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610

My main point was that the overwhelming majority of tech job is pretty simple repetitive mostly web-dev stuff where companies and their engineering organizations don't care that much about quality.

In such an environments education doesn't really make much of a difference when you're gluing APIs together. The biggest difference between workers productivity really becomes just straight up dependent on focus and professionalism.

People that are too skilled and educated for the job often go lazy mode and do their tasks quickly and then mind their own business and their motivation goes to hell. It is very simple for bootcampers to be more productive just by being focused and professional. In the long run bootcampers also tend to learn more about the business and have a higher impact.

Point is, in most jobs your skills are in the long run secondary to your willingness to learn and do stuff. The fact that people have done tons of algo exercises or system design is quite irrelevant when your job is writing forms, lists or connecting services to databases. It's no rocket science.

In my experience, it's been tough to find bootcampers who can actually code.

> secondary to your willingness to learn and do stuff. The fact that people have done tons of algo exercises or system design is quite irrelevant when your job is writing forms, lists or connecting services to databases. It's no rocket science.

Isn't that a good demonstration that someone can learn (mastering algorithms and data structures) more than rote-learning a framework?

Ok since it's anecdotal I will be more specific.

My previous company was involved in 3 to 6 months bootcamps and had the option to be the first to make offers to the best students. This put us in an advantageous position.

2 of the 5 we hired I think were already leaning to write software before starting the bootcamp (as in genuinely being interested in the field and having programmed some hobbyist stuff), 3 did not have such an experience.

All but one turned to be great additions, that one kept struggling but we knew he was weak since the beginning. The two hobbyists both turned great. But by far the best was a girl with no previous experience.

I was able to help her grow and push her to be curious all time to understand the whys. This combined with her huge drive, focus, and professionalism turned her in 18 months since starting to be one of the best devs in the entire org made of 100 devs. She just churned code (quality one), reviews and solved problems one after the other all day. I have been trying to convince her to join my current company 24/7 for a long time.

On the other hand many better programmers just didn't care. They spent days playing console or pc games, and just did subpar work enough to close their daily tasks asap. Hard to fire these people under Italian law, but they represented the overwhelming majority of devs.

Now, I understand this is anecdotak, the pool of talent was like a pyramid in the bootcamp, and the weakest or average ones weren't great, but the top and most motivated where better coworkers and juniors than most engineers I've met.

Hope this gives my opinion a context.

Out of a class of... 40 you got 4 good hires. Meaning the rest of the class was probably unemployable (and 10% would be pretty good for a bootcamp).

> On the other hand many better programmers just didn't care. They spent days playing console or pc games, and just did subpar work enough to close their daily tasks asap. Hard to fire these people under Italian law, but they represented the overwhelming majority of devs.

What's interesting here to consider is Italy's market for engineers.

I've met a lot of talented Italian engineers here in the valley, so the local market might already have suffered significant brain drain.

I think software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent. However, there's actually a massive pool of these candidates who allocate themselves between different industries as demand ebbs and flows.

They end up in medicine, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, academic research, Wall Street, etc and often switch whole industries mid-career too.

But scarcity also adds prestige.

Frankly I think its much simpler. Its a high income to effort career.

But even if we do think this is good because it weeds out people worried about prestige, why stop at 200k layoffs. Why not more? You probably don’t really want that.

The swing towards tech as a default prestige career over finance and banking started after the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent aftermath. The iPhone was released in 2009, Facebook had already been growing for 6 years, and google was already big and the cool place to work.

It started in the mid 1990s. The common thought was, why join an investment bank and underwrite some random dude's IPO when I can start my own company and by 28 it'll be MY company going public?

iPhone was released in 2007

I agree with you to some extent, however, the skillset you can build working for a financial institution motivates young adults beyond prestige. The knowledge you accumulate in these roles (info on investment strategies, financing options and strategic thinking surrounding exit opportunities or inorganic growth pathways) can be applicable in many industries and is useful no matter what you choose to do since money is moving the world. People prefer these careers for more than the high status and tech graduates could benefit from expanding their horizons.