This is, and the article points it out, the direct result of an excess number of managers and the explosion of management after the pandemic.<p>Silicon Valley was amazing because you could actually DO things and make an impact, but too much hiring added useless layers to the system. American management theory always tries to do this every tech cycle. That doesn’t work well with technical craft.
Ftfa “I have been looking for over a year now. 25 years in IT. Sent out more than 900 applications. …”<p>Just some advice to those starting a career. You need to build a professional network. After 25 years a new job should be a phone call or cup of coffee away. You should never even have to think about applications after two decades in the industry.
Is it just me or are there a lot of "Old Man Yells at Cloud" type stories and comments on HN?<p>I've lived in the SV bubble for most of my life (my ABCs were Altavista, Brocade, and Compaq) and based on my memory looking at my parent's career experiences, it almost always was a corporate experience.<p>I vaguely remember older neckbeards at my dad's office complaining about how the 70s and 80s in tech were amazing, and I'm sure their mentors in turn rued for the days of Bell Labs and National Labs in turn.<p>In 2023, the 90s and 2000s are roughly the same distance that Reagan and Carter were back then.
My 2c: I would feel a lot more free to explore more interesting roles (ie startups, and anything other than “big corporate” roles) if the Housing Sword of Damocles weren’t hanging over my head<p>Rent and housing prices only go up. To work at a startup I would expect a 30-50% liquid compensation hit. There goes my dream of raising my children in a decent house.<p>Edit: that said, I don’t think this sufficiently explains why around the pandemic specifically, my job satisfaction took a hit (like with many others)
Anybody else feeling the only way to have any measure of freedom in your life these days is to run your own business? I would rather be a the whim of customers than some manager.
At my place some ennui was caused by a flood of terrible candidates, with huge demands, some of which managed to get hired! Couple that with product telling data science to "do what we're asking for" when all signs point to the idea having zero signal in the data. Fun!<p>We had a reckoning when we laid off half of middle management and got back to work, restructured product to be a little less aggressive and more involved in feedback loops.<p>Much of the adversarial stuff went away when we removed the two people driving it. The culture was essentially reset, and as an org we are doing much better.<p>As for the hires that don't read logs, I guess we're stuck with them until they learn or leave. It's tough on your coworkers when you've new people that "have some experience" but clearly zero skill or intuition.
It seems to me that almost all upper management, and even many working as a manager inside the technology or I.T. departments, simply treat their tech workers and departments as arms of the finance department proper. Over time, every management decision is eventually made to only support the prime finance goals which is HIGHLY RISK AVERSE so decisions are made to avoid all risk at all costs -- at the expense of more "human-based" decisions like employee satisfaction, process improvements, experimentation or innovation. When this happens to highly-technical people like doctors or engineers, it tends to impact overall job satisfaction because training, experimentation, and innovation goes away usually because management starts saying "No" way too much.<p>"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy."
"No that costs too much."<p>"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do."
"Nope, there is no budget."<p>The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss.
So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.<p>I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.
Unpopular opinion: Elon did the right thing wrt the reorganization of Twitter/X.<p>The valley became (and still is) an echo chamber of fringe and often anti-western ideals. NYC had a little of this too, but the valley was especially egregious. When employees started needing safe spaces and HR department size was disproportionate to engineering staff size in every other domain the valley jumped the shark. It became less about building things and more about coddling employees. They invited all that corporate overhead in. Then there's the forever present techno-elitism that came from SV. So, they can cry me a river.
Working for a startup is more fun than working for a financial instrument. Startups take risks, fund wild ideas, and gleefully embrace failure. Financial instruments need to hit their numbers, avoid risks, and only pursue projects with a thoroughly analyzed business case.