It also caused the "Golden Age of Programming". It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort. So if their needs change, obviously the industry changes. This article has nothing to say really.
Yeah I'm trying to figure out what exactly the author thinks is the "Golden Age of Programming" if even he recognizes it was just a bunch of high salary workers getting nothing done. Shouldn't this have been written during that time?
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
Yeah, it says these aren’t a result of the economy, but they’re obviously the result of the economy? I think the difference is just that big tech has bigger boom/bust cycles than most other industries(at least for now) but I wonder if other world-changing industries; like rail were the same, lots of rail companies went under, probably causing a glut of unemployment for certain types of skilled labor.
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
>It's only been a golden age because of high salaries for relatively low effort.
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
I’ve seen this claim that Google and others had some plan to over hire.
From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.
The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.
I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles
Every company and every team I've ever worked for has had somewhere between 3X and 10X the amount of work in the backlog that they were staffed to do. Entire projects that were seen as priorities, but never even started because there was just no staff available to do them. Hundreds of "P1 important" bugs not getting fixed (and never getting fixed) because the limited staff was working on "P0 emergencies" all the time.
For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.
In my experience, it felt that way from the outside. I got solicited by five different Amazon recruiters in 2022 alone. The one time I engaged, they didn't even have a specific role in mind. It definitely gave me the impression of blanket hiring with the primary (if not sole) purpose of increasing headcount.
This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two).
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it...
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.
> This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
Agreed. This article doesn't even touch on other factors like tax law changes that influenced corporate hiring (specifically for software development teams). That seems like a glaring omission.
TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one.
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that.
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
TFA is simplistic and combative, but not entirely incorrect. When companies are cash-rich, they hire generously but invest in vanity projects that do nothing for the careers of the people staffed in them. When they’re poor, they fire people and use the fear factor to extract even more work.
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
> It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition.
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
The time most see as being the "golden age" was in the 1990's, before many of these big tech companies existed. Or at the very least, before all of them truly got to be "big" tech.
Yeah I mean I have to thank Facebook, because I was at Google in 2011.
Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us
It’s a bit naïve—almost a textbook neo-western, ego-centric mindset—where everything is attributed to a brilliant personality, and all setbacks are blamed on some mysterious villains.
But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.”
It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled.
Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems.
The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.
I don't think the writer is aware how regular business cycle works.
It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring.
Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here.
The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.
>What happened wasn't just carelessness on the part of Big Tech. It was a power move. They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.
Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.
The title is "Big Tech killed the Golden Age of Programming"
But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming.
A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement"
What exactly is the author's concept of achievement
Perhaps it is financial (not programming)
For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans
Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates)
With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices
From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming
To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming"
Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks
More than anything, I miss hacking on cool stuff without quite so much "corporate" involved.
I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.
I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.
That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
Don't be naive, there was neither generosity nor support, it was always about business: talent was scarce and plenty of competition for it existed. Thus compensation kept going up.
The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
bigtech salaries are weird because all sides feel like they're getting away with something.
bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.
employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.
I wouldn't call it generosity - it's supply and demand like anything else. There is money to be made from tech products, whether that's software itself or anything (i.e. almost everything) containing software. There is a limited supply of good developers with the skill/experience to develop complex products and ones with high reliability requirements.
It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true.
Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.
These big tech companies are collectively hiring thousands of software engineers every week. Smaller companies and startups are hiring tens of thousands more. If you can't get a job, that's on you.
> They wanted to monopolize talent, burned billions doing it, and then discarded those people like they were nothing. They caused the problem, and now we developers are paying for it.
What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.
Times aren’t tight, the premise of this article is flawed. Big tech is insanely profitable and investors are loving it. The cuts are not a hard necessity but a choice made for a different reason.
In the last 30 years the frequency of layoffs from major tech firms has been accelerating. Starting back in 1997 with Apple, through the dot-com bubble, recession, real-estate crisis, pandemic, and post-pandemic the justifications have varied from boom-bust cycles, post acquisition restructurings, to not meeting market expectations. These layoffs have been intermixed with major hiring booms, the most recent around AI.
Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall.
I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
I wish I could like this post, but it unfortunately shows a lack of historical framing. So, as an elder millennial, I thought I'd backfill with some data from the 1990s onward. (I'm a bit of a management/tech history nerd as well and studied it in grad school)
TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.
1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.
1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant
2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust
2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.
2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.
2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.
2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.
If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
Around 1999, eBay code was c++ compiled into a "ebayisapi.dll". It became too large for x86. I'm guessing it had lots of COM+ and must have been a disaster, bodies everywhere.
Yep, it should be no surprise that things that ought to require no code or very little code but currently require tons of it are not safe long term careers for programmers.
If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
This seems to the case from what I've seen. The economy was doing great and federal interests rates were practically non-existant. It was the age of free money which big tech took advantage of to higher a lot of people and gave big salaries to keep the best of people. Perhaps just to prevent competition.
I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
Concentrated capital strikes again. Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.
> Why would I work on building websites in my local community if google is going to at least 3x the salary to build and cancel several products? We need to flatten the capital distribution curve and many of these problems will work themselves out.
It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore.
I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
If I get the contention of the article right, big tech was so greedy that they hired lots of people they didn't need, and paid them tonnes of money. I feel like I'm massively misunderstanding either the submission, or the definition of greed.
This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady.
But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.
The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20.
Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers.
Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
> Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer.
All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
The author doesn't appear to have any industry experience whatsoever, which might have contributed to the post being a series of baseless assertions, followed by a non sequitur.
From the main site it appears they've been working full-time since 2021, after graduating.
Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
The author seems to have some experience, but they are early career AND in Canada (which is a hard market to land a well paying tech job even at the best of times). Feeling despondent when facing such a double whammy seems unsurprising.
To me the golden age of programming was the 60’s and 70’s when gods walked the earth who thought up pretty much all of the stuff we use or do. Networking, operating systems, languages, …. Hackers, for the most part, did it because it scratched their itch or because it helped out a buddy. Or demonstrated their powers in the appropriate way.
Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
Still hiring every other months in my company. Hard to find real talented developers. My guest : most of them are already employed. This article does not reflect my reality at all.
Never before it's been so easy to contribute to open source.
A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software.
Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm.
There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer.
You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM.
We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming".
The golden age is NOW.
Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich?
In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.
What a lazy and worthless analysis. It argues, poorly, that big tech created the golden age of programming until the economy destroyed it while purportedly arguing the opposite.
The discussion here reminded me of a funny (but probably true) anecdote where all you had to do to actually get working answer from stackoverflow (RIP) is to create an answer that is blatantly wrong.
You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
I would argue that the "Golden Age of Programming" came about due to the existence of Javascript and the ubiquity of the web, introducing the masses to a simple, easy to use development and distribution environment. Also that brief time when free web hosts like Tripod offered CGI access and scripting.
The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age.
To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.
I’m not buying this at all. Good people always find job, and if you don’t you need to work on better network or better skills or both. Author by the picture looks young. Maybe passionate about programming but lacking fundamental life experience that could let him look beyond personalization and typical socialistic view of bad corporations intentionally damaging job markets as targeted goal.. that’s just nonsense
It is hard to get passed the first paragraph here. Even if I think "big tech" does terrible things, I think blaming them for a boom/bust cycle is idiotic.
Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.
I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.
When you pull a large portion of people that would normally be doing the following jobs:
* maintenance on buildings
* growing corn
* building homes
* making tacos at taco bell
* roll your own guess
And make them have job titles like "Head of Equity" or "People Partner Team Member" or "roll your own here too" and give them a 100k-200k+ salary, then everyone making Corn, Tacos, Homes are going to demand more money because why work at Taco Bell if you can literally get a job in Big Tech?
It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes.
We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control.
zwnow|7 months ago
hbn|7 months ago
It sucks that a lot of people in tech got the impression we'd be endlessly hireable, able to hop between 6 figure jobs and raises for our entire career before early retirement. But it seems to me these layoffs are bringing big tech companies down to sizes closer to what they should have been in the first place.
The real issue to me is the ever-worsening monopolization, and all the unchecked acquisitions of the past 15 years that kinda killed any hopes for competition. If that wasn't happening, there'd be a lot more jobs available. Maybe not at Google salaries, but at least there would be jobs.
techpineapple|7 months ago
On the flip side couldn’t you say too many people bought into the hype and got a software engineering degree / code school without thinking through if this was really the career for them?
rkozik1989|7 months ago
Money is how you define a Golden Age of Programming? I consider the late 1990s and early 2000s more of a Golden Age, and my reasons for it have nothing to do with making money. The time was of Golden Age because that's when programming became more accessible to the masses. Yes it wasn't without its fault, namely with regards to cyber security, but people all of the world suddenly were able to learn how to code and all the needed was an Internet connection.
Frankly, all this nonsense about money, total compensation, etc. is the cancer that killed programming.
deadbabe|7 months ago
It’s high salary for highly leveraged effort: meaning that software engineers have maximized how to achieve big results by applying a small effort through chains of force multipliers. LLMs are now one of the latest tools in that chain.
If you do not pay the high salaries, you will end up hiring people who don’t know how to build those chains or what effort to apply to begin the output.
lokar|7 months ago
From my time there that was not the case. There was the natural demand for more people on existing projects and lots of (often good) ideas for new projects.
The money just poured in. We could never actually hire close to the approved levels. Internal “fights” were over actual people, not headcount, everyone had tons of open headcount.
I think there was just so much money, revenue growth and margin that management (which was dominated by engineers) just did not care. Fund everything and see what happens, why not?
blehn|7 months ago
ryandrake|7 months ago
For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.
castwide|7 months ago
freedomben|7 months ago
> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.
Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.
ecb_penguin|7 months ago
> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever
It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.
> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?
They explained their argument.
> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?
They explained their argument in the article
> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?
It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.
netcan|7 months ago
Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.
So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.
If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.
That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.
That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.
bigbuppo|7 months ago
sugarpimpdorsey|7 months ago
The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.
It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?
Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.
graemep|7 months ago
Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.
When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.
When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.
danesparza|7 months ago
benreesman|7 months ago
The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.
This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).
This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.
Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.
In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.
There. FTFY.
ManlyBread|7 months ago
I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.
at-fates-hands|7 months ago
ponector|7 months ago
I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.
rozap|7 months ago
That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.
j45|7 months ago
johnfn|7 months ago
"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?
neuroplots|7 months ago
This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.
nullc|7 months ago
I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.
wiseowise|7 months ago
DaSHacka|7 months ago
nosefrog|7 months ago
chubot|7 months ago
Anyone remember when Google raised the entire company's salary, maybe 30K or 60K people at that point, something like 20-25% all at once? Eric Schmidt and Laszlo Block got on stage and told the whole company how great we are, so they want to keep us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
We learned later that was because Facebook didn't participate in the Steve Jobs-initiated cartel of Google-Apple-Pixar-Adobe-Intuit-LucasFilm-eBay
Eric and Laszlo of course made no mention of the collusion that turned out be illegal
dehrmann|7 months ago
nsxwolf|7 months ago
mathattack|7 months ago
It could also be a 4X increase in grads for Computer and Information Sciences degrees since the 90s.
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/Search?query=computer%20science&qu...
Aperocky|7 months ago
bogdan|7 months ago
maxdo|7 months ago
But in reality, market forces explain it more cleanly—think corporate priorities and shifting strategies, not just “evil managers.”
It’s simpler than it seems. In the past, growing a tech company meant building more products and features, which required more people. That’s how you scaled.
Now, in the AI era, growth often means more GPUs and a smaller, highly skilled team solving business problems.
The pattern of investment has shifted. It’s not about corporate greed—it’s about evolving models of efficiency.
throwaw12|7 months ago
Big Tech and empire builders there followed the classic business rules, additionally highly encouraged by Wall Street.
When its cheap, grow fast, when its expensive shield the bottom line, don't make risky moves and cut the fat.
People are same everywhere, you can't just put the blame on Big Tech. Other industries would do same when given opportunity
gooch|7 months ago
xlbuttplug2|7 months ago
thisisit|7 months ago
It starts off with some companies in a particular industry generating great margins. Slowly more companies start joining the industry and there are still great margins. The early employees see huge jump in salaries. But with time everyone wants to pile in - both companies and people. You start seeing hype that this industry is the next big thing and you can't survive without being part of the industry. Once the industry becomes too saturated companies start exiting, people are laid off, industry services become worse etc etc. Nearly every industry goes through this boom and bust, spring and winters. Most destruction leads to a new spring.
Software has seen two springs though. First, the dotcom boom. During the dotcom boom lots of OPEX was spent on undersea cable because everyone was going to use these new fangled "websites". But after the 2000s crash the data prices crashed and it led to the 2013-2020/21 boom. We have to see where things go from here.
The same thing is happening in AI. It is started off with some companies making good margins, there are huge salaries being doled out to early AI experts and give it enough time the market will be chockful of AI related stuff and also going down. That time we can see similar commentaries about how golden age of AI was killed due to greed.
abixb|7 months ago
Gives me "content written by a LLM" vibes -- the short sentence structure, the phrasing, etc., makes it appear to me that this is a bot generated or at least bot assisted content.
Dead internet theory in full effect.
1vuio0pswjnm7|7 months ago
But the author spends zero time explaining why he thinks internet-based data collection and surveillance is the "Golden Age" of programming.
A golden age, according to one definition, is a period of "peak achievement"
What exactly is the author's concept of achievement
Perhaps it is financial (not programming)
For example, the period may have been noteworthy for the so-called "tech" industry's ability to pay so many salaries from zero interest loans
Historically, data shows that interest rates fluctuate over time (Can we blame Big Tech for an increase in interest rates)
With respect to _programming_ some agree that innovation, improvement, progress, was actually stalled during this period (and still is) due to Big Tech's anti-competitive practices
From this end user's perspective the software created during this period, what the author calls a period of "fake jobs", is not the pinnacle of achievement in programming
To me, software quality is at an all-time low, and this "Big Tech" period does not stand as a "Golden Age of Programming"
Compared to the software I am using originally created in the 1970s it stinks
But opinions may differ
davidw|7 months ago
I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.
I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.
That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
esafak|7 months ago
epolanski|7 months ago
The "generous" overlords didn't think twice about cutting tens of thousands of developers to please wall street, even if financially there wasn't the smallest need for it.
parpfish|7 months ago
bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.
employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.
HarHarVeryFunny|7 months ago
It'll be interesting to see how the use of AI-based software development tools plays out, and affects the job market, but so far - together with offshoring - it seems to be mainly a matter of limiting entry level opportunities. Whether this persists or not remains to be seen - companies seem to be hoping/expecting that AI will let them cope with fewer entry level developers, but given that currently you need a human to use the tool it's not clear to what extent that is actually true.
Trump has recently, somewhat unexpectedly, been making noises about offshoring and H1B developers - saying that US companies need to be more patriotic in their hiring practices. It remains to be seen if this will progress from bullying to actual policy/law changes, but a reversal of offshoring would do a lot to improve the US job market for developers, especially entry level.
paxys|7 months ago
falcor84|7 months ago
What's the actual issue here? Is anyone really worse off by having worked at FAANG for a few years and then being given a generous severance package? The alternative explicitly presented by the article is that if they hadn't been hired by FAANG, they would have been working at a smaller company for lower pay, or worse yet, they wouldn't have been able to get a coding job at all.
overstood|7 months ago
cptskippy|7 months ago
Many folks are aware of these cycles, but having worked for a non-profit I can say we're always the first to feel and last to recover from any fiscal belt tightening. Right now we're starting the fiscal belt tightening phase and anticipating we'll have to do layoffs in the fall.
I'm not sure when this golden age occurred exactly...
donatj|7 months ago
waldopat|7 months ago
TL:DR; The precarity of knowledge workers is not new and it happens every 3-5 years, though it sure feels like it's getting more common.
1991-1993: IBM laid off 120,000 white collar workers, the largest in history. AT&T and DEC also restructured.
1995-1996: Telecom and PC layoffs as labor shifted abroad and JIT management becomes dominant
2000–2002: Perhaps the first example of over hiring at the end of the 1990s (echoing the ZIRP era) and then massive layoffs with the Dot-com bust
2008–2010: Widespread layoffs across Big Tech and startups with the Great Recession.
2012–2015: Companies like Microsoft, HP, and IBM shed tens of thousands with post-mobile restructuring.
2020: Travel/service tech (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) were hit hard due to COVID shock.
2022–2024: The current wave we’re living through with Post-ZIRP and AI pivots.
If you're looking for books or articles, Gina Neff, Stephen Barley or Gideon Kunda have some of the oldest. In short, there is no real difference between then and now: Instability is hitting workers who genuinely thought they had made it.
rvz|7 months ago
It killed the golden age of mediocre software developers, which includes the over inflated role of web development which that can be safely done by LLMs.
Hilift|7 months ago
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs330/2007fa/slides/eBayS...
barnabee|7 months ago
If we can make self driving taxis, we can also make putting documents on the internet not require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript.
mikert89|7 months ago
izzydata|7 months ago
I think it is not accurate to say big tech was being generous or that it is their fault it stopped. This is capitalism doing what capitalism does. Taking advantage of the economy at any given moment.
Kapura|7 months ago
gishglish|7 months ago
It’s all good. The local community doesn’t need you to build out sites anymore.
I quit doing that when small business owners started expressing that they didn’t need a website, it wasn’t very valuable to them. What they wanted was a nice Facebook page. If they did need a website, it seems Squarespace, Shopify, etc. provides a sufficient offering for them. Cheaper too.
llm_nerd|7 months ago
This industry is cyclical -- I mean, most industries outside of the absolute core like healthcare are cyclical -- and there are booms and busts. Everyone hires when everyone else is hiring. Every holds steady when everyone else is holding steady.
But by far the hugest influence right now is AI, and it is having a calamitous impact on everything. There is this broad industry feeling right now that such massive shifts are not only coming, they're already underway, that there is a wait and see sense all over the place.
hazek112|7 months ago
alephnerd|7 months ago
The same thing happened during Dot Bomb, the Great Recession, and even 2018-20.
Paul G's early blogposts on "ramen profitability" and entrepreneurship hold credence in these kinds of times, as these rightsizing moments do open opportunities to build challengers.
Behemoths like FB, PANW, SNOW, and SFDC were founded during the aftermath of the dot bomb and behemoths like Coinbase, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe during the Great Recession.
Now that the barrier to building products and companies is much lower than it has been for years, we will see the next generations of rocket ships.
gishglish|7 months ago
Oh great! I can’t wait for the next generation of unnecessary luxury apps that just provide another lazier way to be a good consoomer.
All while the few necessities that matter, housing, food, etc. become increasingly more expensive and less accessible.
constantcrying|7 months ago
As it turns out programming being lucrative, led to lots of programs teaching it all over the world, which in turn led to a situation, where the labor market for programmers collapsed. Hiring too many programmers is not something you do out of greed, basic economics tells you that this move increased salaries for programmers. Companies hired because they anticipated competition around talent and new projects where these developers could work profitably for the company.
jeffbee|7 months ago
mjr00|7 months ago
Which is, from their perspective, pretty brutal. Imagine spending 4-5 years at university watching people slightly older than you getting $250k TC offers at BigTech right out of school, then as soon as you graduate the rug is pulled, hiring freezes up and you're stuck at a no-name dev shop getting paid a much more modest salary. I can understand their frustration.
alephnerd|7 months ago
brianjlogan|7 months ago
https://www.techspot.com/news/108230-how-little-known-tax-ch...
And it was removed so tech CFOs are realigning their hiring/retainment to save money on taxes.
jleyank|7 months ago
Nobody counted money and it was funded by the government mostly. But it created the basis of where the HN readership lives. And I’m always frustrated that I missed participating in it.
bigbuppo|7 months ago
unknown|7 months ago
[deleted]
jollyllama|7 months ago
nsxwolf|7 months ago
sylvainr65|7 months ago
gchamonlive|7 months ago
A dirt cheap notebook has 16gb of ram today. We are used to it now but that's an insane amount of ram for software.
Processors with 8-16 threads are the norm.
There are countless options for you to deploy your stack and run your software regardless of database or persistent storage layer.
You have so much, just sooo much free content to make you a better programmer in virtually any language, that for those you don't you can just... ask an LLM.
We have LLMs, Linux is stronger than ever, there is just so much stuff going on, I don't know what you guys are talking about with "the end of golden age for programming".
The golden age is NOW.
Maybe it's just the end of the golden age for capitalism for those seeking to become filthy rich?
In any case, if you buy into this crap talk about how the golden age is over all you are going to do is being left behind.
AndyKelley|7 months ago
Aperocky|7 months ago
You'll have people of knowledge descending on that question in no time to refute your heresy.
krapp|7 months ago
The rise and fall of programming as a job in Silicon Valley is a separate but related phenomenon. A gold rush, but not a golden age.
To that end, when corporate interests commoditized the web and everything became too complex and javascript got treated as bytecode and required a package manager and toolchain, the golden age was absolutely killed by big tech.
laacz|7 months ago
hollowonepl|7 months ago
taeric|7 months ago
Could their behavior be a big part of what we should study in knowing how to control things better in the future? Almost certainly. Does it help to frame them as a villain? I'm far less sold on that. Especially if you don't offer any sort of path on how things could have been run better.
lbrito|7 months ago
I thought the Golden Age would be something pre web 2.0, and big tech killing it meaning walled gardens and then LLMs. The short rant in the article is really nearsighted.
rozza|7 months ago
djdjnm|7 months ago
[deleted]
throwmeaway222|7 months ago
It really fucked up our system, our expectations for salary, the cost of all goods really. We actually need deflation so that people can afford homes. We need to bankrupt companies that just buy up all the homes.
We also need to get our heads on straight about work. We should expect to all being doing hard fucking work. There shouldn't be a lot of meetings. That's something that really surprised me about 2020-2024 - the meetings were out of fucking control.
Done. Now get off HN and get to work.
wiseowise|7 months ago
Yeah, no, lol.