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A comment on US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft. Parent comment

Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft by ghshephard on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:23PM (#50008800)
Based on the last 5+ years at working at FAANG adjacent companies - less than 5% of a SWEs time is dedicated to coding (Exceptions of course for crazy things like porting massive code bases to Rust...) - If anything - now that "coding has been solved" - it significantly reduces the need for body-shops, because now you require strategic product decision making - much harder skill to hire for/develop than yet another LeetCoder.

So - definitely agree with your general thesis.

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Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft by cyberax on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:19PM (#50009749)
And that's also why the quality of FAANG products has been going down for the last 5+ years.

It's really palpable, developers in these orgs just stopped caring about the quality of their work.

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Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft by gregglain on Friday October 09, 2026 @05:04AM (#50017958)
The developers do care, but we are judged on other metrics, and sometimes working crap code meets the need. Caring takes time we sometime don't want to give up from family or life. So crap we ship.
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Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft by ghshephard on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @05:24PM (#50095536)
The developers would love to spend their time coding and crafting elite and elegant systems - but management at these companies has other things that they want them to do. Endless meetings, Alignment, Training, Constant Interviews, Quarterly Project Planning, Performance review...

Each one of these distractions can blow the mental context of a developer for hours as well - so not only do they get very, very little time to actually "program" - but the time they do get, is now mostly trying to get back into "flow" , re-establish a full mental context of the project, etc... So - that 5% is likely a huge over-estimate of the amount of "productive" time a developer has, as a good chunk of that is just recovering from the bullshit that the company inflicts on them so they can go heads down and actually start doing "work" - realistically I bet if you watched your average developer at a big FAANG - they spend substantially less than 2% of their time actually heads down coding productively.

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