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.

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?

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.

Big Tech Killed the Golden Age of Programming by *checks notes* creating it in the first place?

My first programming job in SF paid $60k/year 10 years ago. I'd like to thank big tech for driving salaries up.

It's supply and demand.

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...

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.

Big Tech is not the root cause.

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

Starts with "It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy." Goes on to describe a classic business cycle.

As a mostly fraudulent software developer, I've always considered it a privilege to earn copious amounts of money sitting in my bedroom.

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.

Dead internet theory in full effect.

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

But opinions may differ

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.

Big tech g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ lavishly supported programmers for a whole generation. This is something to be happy about.

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.

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.

No it did not.

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.

No it was venture capital and low interest rates

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.

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.

Also... 82% went to Indian visa recipients. The rest have been offshored as quickly as possible.

This is cyclical to a certain extent.

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.

Has the author heard of "outsourcing" before?

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.

They didn't hire people to control labor. They were enabled to hire people for R&D because it gave them a tax loophole.

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.

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.

And what's that core business again? Collecting as much data as you can on your users and then using that to sell ads, or possibly the data itself.

This article is meaningless because there's not a single number to distinguish the claims being made.

My bank account doesn’t remember the part where non-big tech salaries went up.

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.

Author admits that this was AI generated slop: https://www.taylor.gl/blog/30

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.

Meh.

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.

citation needed

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

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.