- very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow
- the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff.
So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO.
That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs).
And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet.
I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
I only want to point out that evidence of less hiring is not evidence for AI-anything.
As others have pointed out, here and previously, things like outsourcing to India, or for Europe Eastern Europe, is also going strong. That's another explanation for less jobs "here", but they are not gone, they just moved to cheaper places. As has been going on for decades, it just continues unevenly.
eg: If you think NVDA is overvalued relative to the overall tech sector, you could short NVDA, go long QQQ.
And if you have a more opinionated trade in the same currency, eg: you think AAPL will be fine if the AI trade pops, you can do short NVDA, long AAPL.
Finally, an even more advanced version would be to go long on something else in the same sector, but which is less overvalued in your opinion. eg: Short ORCL, long NVDA.
Yes, you can still do that directly (I did that just the other day).
I can't entirely understand Google's announcement, but it almost sounded to me like they will forbid sideloading if you're not an "official" dev (gone through their hoops). I also saw something in their statement about wanting to support hobbyists. It sounded like an afterthought.
The only reason I use Windows is for playing some old games (primarily Age of Empires II: DE) that only work well on Windows. In the AoE2 case, I also need CaptureAge that only works on Windows.
The point is that even though I have 95% de-Microsoftized my life for the past 2 decades, I still need to run Windows for a few specific flows, and I run into the same issues as the article author here.
This was the first year of Trump's new term and most of the anti-immigration executive orders happened in the last few months. By August, most international students had already accepted offers, made travel and stay plans, and likely paid some part of their tuition already, and just continued due to sunk costs and hope that things will stabilize.
However, at this point, I think a lot more people will not even apply to US schools for next year.
On iPhones, you need to pay Apple $99/yr+taxes to do even personal development.
Yes, technically they have a free tier, but it supports a max of 3 devices, which you can't change, ever. It's so painful that it might not as well exist.
Is Android doing the same?
Do you have to pay them money to install your own, or open source apps?
That's what it looks like. You pay $25 and give your ID (yay more exposure from data breaches wooooo) and then you become verified. That lets your apps get installed. But if you're just installing on your own devices (with ADB), such as for development, you're fine. I see no upside to this
[I have no personal involvement to this project, but I'll defend it anyway. And I am sure you knew what they meant, but still chose to write a pedantic comment]
If you use Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube etc, you already share a lot with Google; this spreadsheet is unlikely to make any different. If have managed to de-Google your life, good for you. Don't use this product either.
Other finance apps (I used to use mint.com before they shut down) require direct connections with your bank and investment accounts, generally via Plaid or Yodlee, and sometimes directly. This product avoids all that.
Now I personally don't think it's useful to me, since there are just too many expenses to keep track of, and doing it manually is too much work for me to even attempt. But privacy to Google would be pretty low on my list of concerns when using a spreadsheet.
How many expenses do you really have on a daily basis that they are too much to track? I don't like a spreadsheet for this since they have bad input UX on phones. I use a custom app I built and even though it is manual I don't really feel it since I have optimized the UX for n=1 and it just becomes a habit. I tried all these other automatic tracking apps like monarch money,mint,YNAB et al but they are just not real-time enough for me and don't keep me in touch as much, also the obvious data lock. Maybe I'll make it public someday but I haven't mostly because the common sentiment online is 'manual tracking is too much work' when it really isn't if you do it as you go vs all at once at the end of month etc.
Any meals/coffee/drinks outside, streaming subscriptions, gaming purchases, shopping, groceries, child activities, home services, mobile, gas + ev charging, home utilities, occasional cleaners, charity, hotels/flights, ubers....and there are probably things that I am missing.
Feels like a lot of work to me to track everything. And it's impossible to ask my partner to do the same.
So according to you: they should give up their paid seat so that you don't have to pay for assigned seats, even when you know way in advance that you are traveling with a 3 yr old?
Let's ignore special cases where you didn't have a chance to buy assigned seats, and focus on the vastly more common scenario where parents can easily pay to ensure seats of their choice.
Yes, it's nickel and diming by the airlines to make all seat assignments paid. And hating airlines is completely justified.
But I find the entitlement of parents, that other passengers should accommodate their parsimonious preferences, just amazing.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.
I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.
I attribute 3 reasons to this change:
- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)
- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.
- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)
AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).
Serious question: Why don't you pay for YouTube premium?
Isn't it hypocritical to want YouTube to offer you its content for free? If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it. If not, just stop watching YouTube.
It's not only hypocritical, it's nonsensical in this discussion.
It's obvious that if advertising was made illegal, we would need to pay for all those services that we want to use. YouTube premium is the best example of how that would actually work.
> If the content is valuable to you, you should be willing to pay for it
But I do, by supporting those creators through Patreon. Paying for YouTube Premium sounds like a bad deal since I'm not directly supporting the creators for which I go to YouTube in the first place.
The creators you’re paying on Patreon aren’t hosting their own videos though, YouTube is. Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
I get that YouTube doesn’t give enough of a percentage of profits to the creator, but the alternative should be a different video hosting platform that does give more profits to creators. Not patreon, which offers nothing in return. (It’s a glorified payment processor and doesn’t actually do any video hosting.)
That there are vanishingly few alternatives to YouTube in terms of actually hosting videos (I know of Vimeo and, I guess nebula? Only because it gets continually pushed on me by creators) maybe tells you that the act of hosting videos at scale is kinda hard to do profitably. Or else there’d be tons of alternative options.
I don't really care where the videos are hosted, though. I watch on YouTube because that's where my beloved creators choose host their vids. If they started to host their videos on Vimeo or even archive.org, I would watch them there since I only care about the content.
> Hosting videos isn’t cheap, who should cover that cost?
The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.
> The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.
You're changing the context of the discussion here. snailmailman had said:
> Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content [...] On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.
Saying they're unwilling to tolerate ads in YouTube. When asked why not just pay for YouTube premium, you came and said why you don't pay for YouTube premium. When pressed, you say "because YouTube's ad model will make them the money they need to host the videos."
Since you haven't said whether you block ads, there's two ways of interpreting this:
1. You don't block ads, you're ok watching YouTube ads, and you pay the creators directly through patreon. Great! But that makes your reply -- to why snailmailman doesn't pay for YT premium -- a little off-topic, because we were discussing ad-blocking.
2. OR, you're not ok watching YouTube ads, you block them, and then pay creators on patreon directly, meaning you don't care about covering the costs of hosting videos, because you don't believe YouTube should be showing you ads, and you don't want to pay them for the service. In which case we're back to "who should cover the costs." Maybe your answer is "other suckers, but not me", which is quite hypocritical.
I do block ads on YouTube, but I also block ads everywhere else without exception. I think that ads suck and that everybody should refuse to consume them. Not everybody is bothered by them, though, and they are not "suckers" for thinking so.
If YouTube were to offer me a service that I think is worth paying for, then I would. I think that YouTube Premium is not a product worth paying for based on what they're offering, and also I noticed that I watch YouTube videos less and less over the years. Nebula and Curiosity Stream convinced me to pay for their services, so perhaps YouTube just has to step up?
YouTube Premium dishes out your revenue to creators based on how much you watch. See Linus Tech Tips’ video on their income streams (skip to 4:40): https://youtu.be/GeCP-0nuziE?si=xH5gTvzglaPlQyJ4
Sure, YouTube probably takes more off the top than Patreon. But YouTube also splits it up based on who you’re watching. I probably watch 30+ YouTube channels per week, some of which I find on the explore page and don’t even know the name of. I would never subscribe to 30+ Patreons. I think YouTube Premium is a good compromise.
Maybe its hypocritical. But I have no issues with blocking ads on youtube on my PC, since 95%+ of the ads I see on youtube mobile are blatantly breaking Youtube's own TOS, if not breaking actual laws. I shouldn't be seeing these advertisements anyway if Youtube actually enforced their own policies. But I assume they'd rather advertise scams than miss out on a single empty ad spot.
I'm surprised Youtube hasn't faced any legal consequences for all the scams they allow to advertise on their platform. As far as I could tell, the ad I saw for a gun that was "easy to sneak past security" and "no license required" was up for well over a month, and I'm not convinced Youtube actually took it down. I saved that one, and as far as I can tell, the video ad url is still up, but now requires a sign in to view the video.
- very few teams have headcount, or expecting to grow - the number of interview requests get has dropped off a cliff.
So BigTech is definitely hiring less IMHO.
That said, I am not sure if it's only or even primarily due to replacement by AI. I think there's generally a lot of uncertainty about the future, and the AI investment bubble popping, and hence companies are being extra cautious about costs that repeat (employees) vs costs that can be stopped whenever they want (buying more GPUs).
And in parallel, they are hoping that "agents" will reduce some of the junior hiring need, but this hasn't happened at scale in practice, yet.
I would expect junior SWE hiring to slowly rebound, but likely stabilize at a slower pace than in the pre-layoff years.
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