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This is how the text adventure/interactive fiction community started. Some hackers reverse engineered the Infocom z-machine then built new languages and compilers so new games could be created.

This is hilarious. It’s like they took my usage pattern and made it native. Love it.


The level of uncertainty in the job market says otherwise. This is the worst tech job market in my entire 40 year career.


We’re coming off of nearly 20 years of growth, years of free money, and the COVID boom that caused massive over-hiring.

Then you add the millions and millions tech companies spent promoting coding as a career, and the organic attraction from high salaries that caused CS to became the most popular major at many schools, and pushed droves up people into coding bootcamps.

The free money stopped, and without that subsidy we probably have 50% more programmers than we really need.


I'll keep saying it everytime: don't call it "overhiring". This was intentional and layoffs are a feature, not a consequence. Moreover, look at the hiring numbers in earnings calls. These companies did not slow down hiring. They slowed down hiring in North America. THey clearly didn't "overhire", they want to cheap out on wages and use AI as the scapegoat to impress shareholders.


The last 2 companies I worked at since 2020 100% overtired. Both of than had way more developers than they knew what to do with.

That’s a big part of where things like micro services come from.

>Moreover, look at the hiring numbers in earnings calls. These companies did not slow down hiring. They slowed down hiring in North America.

I don’t think this is true. IT jobs in India are down 10%.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...


This is a naive explanation. Tech companies increased headcount by more than 2x since 2018. Was this intentional? Did they intentionally double the headcount? To what gain?

Why would they deliberately give up their profits by doubling headcount just to layoff around 10% in aggregate? They still have to pay the rest 90%… so they just did that so that the 10% could be laid off?


> Was this intentional? Did they intentionally double the headcount?

Yes

>To what gain?

- reporting explosive growth

- launching a lot of initiatives, of which more than half of are probably shelved c. 2025. Seriously, peek into any company and see all the odd products they were announcing back then.

- to gain more of a global foothold. If you want to operate in a new country, you'll need to hire a lot of staff to manage compliance, run offices, work with local companies, etc.

- to have a lot of bodies to throw at a problem should they need it. Since hiring was basically "free" is was convinent to have talent on hold just in case.

- to poach, be it from competitors or from potential future competition. There's been reports of skilled hires who'd proceed to be on standby for quite a while. But paid very well. That's not something you do normally.

>Why would they deliberately give up their profits by doubling headcount just to layoff around 10% in aggregate?

That's the oversimplification of S174. They weren't losing much revenue because those labor costs would be balanced out from the taxes they didn't have to pay. It just cancels out.

Layoffs started quick once that ended. Remeber, they don't see layoffs as a "bad thing" as a business. The stock even bumps up a tiny bit back on 2022/2023 over layoff news. Something about "being responsible" or some drek.

S174 will be back next year, but I think there's multiple other issues that mean the market won't quickly bounce back.


So the companies reacted rationally to the tax laws? Seems like a much better way to put rather than “use AI as a scapegoat” which is not substantiated.


There were a lot of things in 2022 happening all at once, so while S178 is a highly underreported issue in the tech sector,it wasn't the only catalyst.

Fed rates increased, ad yields plummeted, and a cooling off of the COVID tech boom meant that companies quickly left "growth mode". The transition to maintenance mode also caused a new wave of outsourcing to cut the cost of "no longer free money" North American devs.

That's why hiring actually isn't down as much in earning calls. They are still hiring, just not from here.


The longest was 20 months last year. In this market with GenAI and an uncertain U.S. administration, it’s not likely to improve for years.

I would recommend everyone hunker down and do what you need to survive, including selling things and moving to lower cost locations and combining assets with family where possible.


Good advice.

Stay lean and prepare for tough(er) times.


This will only drive jobs offshore and reduce the H1B population. It doesn’t solve any problems.

This is literally the dumbest administration this country has ever seen. Between tariffs and immigration and now this, it’s like they don’t even know what the consequences of their actions are.


>This will only drive jobs offshore

This was true before and after today.

Put another way, if all the H-1B jobs really can be offshored quickly and easily the way so many Indians and anti-Trump people here and elsewhere confidently predict, *that would have happened already*.


There’s a fundamental difference in talent. H1b talent is often upper class scions from India or China. Offshore talent has always been leveraged for support or staff aug.

It’s entirely possible some H1b’s would happily pay the $100k if they had a guaranteed visa for 5-10+ years, but the vast majority will simply go home and work remotely.

But I believe the effect of this extortion will be a brain drain on U.S. fortune 1000 companies and that will push those same companies to build off shore offices, completely avoiding the administration’s goofiness.


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The H1B path has always been harder than hiring remotely/offshoring


And now making it even harder will encourage more of the latter. Which of course you can try tariffing.



I sent my application in a week ago. So what you’re saying is I still have a chance?


I liked the presentation (right or wrong), but wanted to point out I’ve been in IT as a coder and architect for 40 years and never once needed to know big O notation.

Which I think is the complaint here. The article author might have made an effort to connect it’s significance to Internet solutions like Search.

I assume he didn’t because that’s already been done.


fwiw I’ve been writing code for 2 years and I have occasionally benefitted from half-remembering the concepts that big O notation describes (even though my memory of the proper terminology is pretty shoddy, it’s been a long time since we covered it in college)

When new releases of website features have resulted in notably poor performance, and profiling has revealed a particular function taking time on the order of seconds to complete (seconds are an eternity in UI land) it’s important to be able to reach into code that processes big chunks of data, and identify loops-within-loops-within-loops that could be rearchitected to play out more efficiently.

Knowing that you’re going from O(n^2) to O(2n) is really just a matter of jargon - knowing that your list of results now displays in 1/10th the time, and why, is still pretty important. The underlying logic/math is the important bit to have a concept of, imo, big O is just a fun way to talking about it.


Every engineer should be familiar with at least the basics of computational complexity.

If you're stacking loops, you ought to know what that does.

You also really ought to also what your core data structures are, how they work under the hood, and how the different operations on them consume space and time.

If you don't familiarize yourself with at least those bare basics, you're doing yourself and your customers (and your future maintainers) a disservice.


I’ve always done load tests, cured bad code, re-tested. Static analysis can discover most of these kinds of problems. It’s entirely possible I’ve been resolving big O problems intuitively over the years.


No one has invented Asimov’s positronic brain or anything like it.

We don’t even know how.


I’ve taught all five of my kids how to play poker, and if they ever sit down at a cash game consider their stack gone and play the cards (remove the dopamine chaos). Learn the math, betting strategies, and look for villain patterns.

These all directly relate to real life.

I believe in it so much that I have a tournament training app startup: https://mach9poker.com/.

There’s a company in Chicago that teaches women poker in relation to business: https://pokerpower.com/.

Bankroll management is a critical skill regardless of the use case.


I attended his high school. The foyer had a panoramic display of the Apollo 13 story. He spoke at our 1982 graduation.


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