The software engineering industry in 2024: what changed in 2 years, why, and what is next

so good morning everyone finally sorted the screens it's great to be here I'm G thank you for the introduction Jose and I am most well known right now for writing the pragmatic engineer which is the newsletter that does dive into big Tech and startups and I do talk with people working at these companies and I also wrote the book the software Engineers guide book and before I started this newsletter I I worked at tech companies so I worked at Uber sky scner Skype I like to say Skype but it was actually Microsoft uh at the time I I got to work on the Xbox one which came out a bit more than 10 years ago now and and at JP Morgan and I was a software engineer for about 10 years engineering manager for another five and I kicked off uh this newsletter where where I'm now writing about the stuff that I've been doing but today we're going to talk about change and we're going to talk about we've seen a lot of change lately in the tech industry more than usual but we're going to talk about a specific type of change change that feels like it's a very new type of change but it's something that we actually might have seen before at least people who have been in the tech industry for a long enough time and let me give you one example to start with so these days we're starting to see small teams move faster build solutions kind of faster than they would have nor normally done in the past and this kind of makes sense right like we have better tools we have better knowhow more seniority an example is Blue Sky a Twitter competitor it's it's nice that we we mentioned Twitter you know like a lot lot of people I think heard about me the first time when Twitter was in turmoil and I managed to talk with people who are working there I no longer know anyone who's working there by the way even though I know a lot of people but blue sky is one of the The Challengers to Twitter these days and what they did is they started in 2022 so almost two years ago that's when the company was founded they had one CEO J uh and two developers uh they started to develop a mobile app 6 months later with two developers only one developer was developing an iOS and an Android app they did a soft launch one year ago in 6 months they got to million users and last month they were at 5.5 million users and they have 12 developers and this is kind of impressive in the sense how what a small team launches this kind of uh this kind of application usually most companies have way more Developers for for similar scale but we've seen this before haven't we this is not entirely new I mean here's an example from 2010 from a different startup they started mobile development they got to million users in the first year then to 5 million 10 million then 30 million and in 2 years they were at 13 developers and of course I'm talking about Instagram which which is one of these well-known stories and if we we compare the two together it's a very similar timeline in terms of when I just look at the number of developers and I mean Instagram got some more users but both of these companies built an IOS app an Android app and and a website and obviously the backend services and enough scale to handle those millions of users in the same time period but the interesting thing is it should have been a lot easier in 2022 I mean in 2010 building native house was really harded yeah so I guess we kind of have seen this before so what what else is familiar from from earlier times and I I reach out to uh a friend Kent Beck he's the one of the Azure Manifesto Founders um he's been very involved in tdd in the 2000s he's just published a book recently called tidy first and he works at a company called mechanical Orchard where they help companies migrate their cobal code using AI onto modern code which is which is really cool so anyway ask Kent Hey Kent like you've been around in the industry for like working in the software industry for 40 years you've seen a lot have you seen some changes in software engineering where you feel they've happened before and Kent is like oh yeah I I've seen plenty here here's one feedback loops are getting longer and I was like what do you mean what kind of feedback loops like deploying to production like responding to to like bug requests or something he's like no every imaginable feedback loop what I mean is and this is him saying it if if as a team we made a mistake we don't really want to know about it about it let it be someone else's problem it's not our teams I was like oh really that's what you're seeing he's like yeah there's a lot of excuses for it but it all seems like BS to me and he tells me like this was like this in the 2000s as well he's like I don't know why but it's just going back to where it used to be I was like huh that's interesting so seems we we're seeing a couple things that did happen before but today we'll start by talking about what is happening right now then we'll talk about the new reality of of things and then we we'll we'll go back to like where did we see this before and why so let's start with what is going on what is going on in tech industry and we we've seen change I'll I'll talk about a few different areas the job market VC funding IPOs and big Tech so on the job market in 2021 it was looking back it was the hottest Tech job market ever like probably in all of Tech History where if if you wanted to get a job that was the time to to get a raise to get a better opportunity and to give an example of how crazy this was here's a CTO at a scale in Germany back in the end of 2021 telling me this that our interview process is short but we're still seeing people drop out because they have multiple offers we've lost a person that went to Twitter to work remotely this was when Twitter announced remote work forever before it was reversed a few years later and the competition has intensified with silicon valid companies allowing remote work and every single company this was a well-funded scale of they raised I think tens of millions of of Euros or dollars they were struggling to hire and big Tech was struggling to retain and everyone was struggling to hire and it was so good to be on the job market it it was it was really good to shop around and uh we we we've seen reports of this in just in in February 2022 the New York Times Al reported on tech companies facing this hiring crisis but then out of almost nowhere in just two months later we started to see some really unexpected layoffs seemingly out of nowhere first fast the oneclick checkout startup that raised $100 million a year ago they just went bankrupt pretty much overnight bolt one click checkout did layoffs Clara buy now pay later they also let go I think 5 or 10% of Staff instant delivery apps fex cyber security they all start to do like 5 or 10% layoffs and it didn't really stop in in the fall of 2022 there were just more startups and scals letting go I think stripe let go more than 10% uh we had lift we we we had a lot of startups but there was one thing that kind of connected all of these all of these companies were making a loss so I mean we could kind of put it together we're like well okay I guess it's not great to have layoffs but these companies are making a loss clearly not able to raise money I mean you know that kind of makes sense right like you know and the the thinking back then was like well maybe just beware if you're not working at a company that makes profit like working at a profitable company should be fine and then a month later this happens meta extremely profitable company they're posting close to record profits and they let 10% of Staff go 133% 11,000 employees and a few months later every single other profitable company publicly trade of Amazon mic Google they do the same so so and when we look at the the the actual layoffs by number on this website called layoffs.fyi there was a huge spike in 2023 so something was happening there and it wasn't just non-profitable companies but it wasn't just a job market VC funding up to 2021 it it was just going up it was going this is every year from 2011 to 2021 it was going up up up and a huge jump in 2021 and after 2021 there was just a draw downwards this is data from pitchbook who who gather who are one of the best sources for for this information and in 2000 in right now last quarter in 2024 we are at 2018 levels so it's kind of like we're seeing less Venture Capital less money going being able to go to startups and it's it's it's not just the job market and Venture Capital but IPOs companies going public like this is companies going public is a big exit opportunity for people who work there if you have shares they're going to worth be worth something and it's also a good big one for investors the more companies go public the more money they have to reinvest again in 2021 huge spiking companies going public this these are the the blue ones are the public listing again from from pitchbook and in 2023 this number dropped incredibly and and we only we saw Zero Tech IPOs in 2022 and only three in 2020 23 and now we're seeing a couple more but again it just really went up and down and finally for for big Tech some of the largest tech companies this is where it gets really puzzling they big Tech did large layoff in 2023 where where they let go a large amount of people and we could justify that saying that was the pandemic they over hired and they had to let people go but now just this January and February in this year they all posted record profits they were all doing very well financially and they still went around and did more cuts and Google specifically is a really good one to look at because it it just highlights the seemingly doesn't make sense so Google was founded in 1998 and I i' I've marked the layoffs with Reds whenever they had Mass layoffs in 2008 they with the financial crisis Google got worried and they let go of 2% of of of their staff about 300 people uh they had one layoff in 2013 where they bought motor and they let a lot of Motorola people go but not Google employees or the ones that were at Google and then nothing for 15 years there was no layup so if you looked at if in 2022 you looked at Google it it was the safest place to work they had one Mass layoff which was a very small one in the financial crisis but nothing else and then in 2023 they let go a 6% of staff and in 2024 they're now seem to be doing layoffs again and this is just very strange because Google has been the been awarded many times the best place to work in TCH why were they doing this it's it's it's pretty puzzling so to sum it up what we're seeing is less VC funding fewer IPOs big Tech having record profits and still laying off and the job market just getting tougher so why why is this all happening something clearly changed around 2022 and 2023 and yes the the pandemic was easing the lockdowns were were ending that is clearly one part but as I look through the data as as I talk with people as I talk with CTO and Founders on why they're doing this thing it was something else I I I found this article as as I kind of revers researching in the middle of 2022 the fed the Federal Reserve which is like the central back of Bank of the US if you will by by a small stretch they they did an interest rat that was the largest in 28 years and you know this is finance news we're we're we're Tech conference we're software industry why am I talking about interest rates are we really going to talk about interest rates right now yes we're really going to talk about interest rates right now so it's going to be important for us to understand why interest rates are import are are affecting Tech in the end in the start we need to understand what why interest rates impact inflation because the FED did a a raise in order to combat the high inflation in the US back then it was about 8% in the US and and they wanted to bring it down so why would raising interest rates help reduce inflation well I I took this quote from uh the BBC who talks about the UK Central Bank fighting inflation which applies to the US to Hungary with with with with M to to EU with the European Central Bank so this is from from the ABB quote the bank of England so and any Central Bank really moves rates up and down to control inflation in the country and inflation means the increase of prices as we know over time when inflation is high the bank may decide to raise rates as well but why would raising rates do anything with inflation well when you raise rates so when the Central Bank raises rates everything goes up the the price of taking out of mortgage goes up so fewer people are going to buy houses the price of credit goes up so interest on your credit card goes up so you might think about doing it as well and if you leave your money in the bank before you got nothing or like 0.25% now you might get three or four or 5% so you're probably going to leave it there to accumulate and spend less so demand in the economy will go down people will spend less and when people spend less prices will not go up as much because it's it's silly to raise prices at that time because no one's going to buy it and then the bank monitors this whether they hold rates or whether they raise it and it's a balance to to raise prices against risk of damaging the economy so with with this Finance I guess less than out of the way this is this is important to see because there is a big question why rates are so high globally so let's go back to rates so this is what it was like in the US the the the rates it was 0.25% and it went to 5% in less than a year this was a pretty big change but let's zoom out let's zoom out 15 years what what were the rates like in in the US and it was from 2009 it was almost zero all the way to like 2022 there there was a small raise you can see in steps it went up to like 2% in 2017 and then it dropped down again because Co started and they wanted the the bank again wanted to simulate the economy but let's zoom out even more let's zoom out 50 years or as long as we can as long as we have data in the US this is all the data we have from 1955 all the way to here so like I guess you know modern American interest rate history and something really interesting happens when we look at the only times there were low interest rates which means 1% or below in 1958 it was 2 months in 2003 after the Doom bus it was 2 months and then we had this 9 years straight from 2008 and then another two years so like for 15 years we've had very low interest rates and this has never happened before ever the rates have only been for a few months and now we were here for 15 years and it's not just the us if we look at Canada if we look at the EU if we look at the the UK it's all the same the rates went down globally everywhere so okay but why still why should we care like we're in Tech we're we're not in finance I mean this I'm sure you enjoyed this this interesting observation but now let's get to like how it affects Tech interest rates in startups are actually connected and this is not me saying it this is Matt LaVine uh Bloomberg analyst who writes the money stuff uh daily news that are in in Bloomberg and this is a quote from him he's saying startups are a low interest rate phenomenon when interest rates are low everywhere a dollar in 20 years is as good as a dollar today so and this this means that if you have a dollar and you put it in the bank in 20 years with the zero indust rate you will have a dollar in the bank and so Starbuck's business model is I will lose money for a decade building artificial intelligence and then make a lot of money in a far future in 10 or 20 years that sounds pretty good because what else are you going to do you're going to just put your money in the bank and you're not going to get an interest interest instead you put it in a startup and you're not going to see anything for 10 or 20 years and you might see a bigger turn or you might lose it all you do this with 100 startups you know you're a big fund you invest $100 million and over 10 years you're not going to see anything and then you might turn that 100 million to 150 or 200 or 250 million and that sounds pretty good because the alternative is make no interest so matth line continues if some charismatic Tech founder have come to you in 2021 I'm going to revolu Revolution the world via AI Robo taxis flying taxis flake taxes or blockchain it might have been unnatural to reply nah What If the Fed rais is raised by 0.25% and because Tech was supposed to be an industry with this radical vision of the future of humanity and not a bet on interest rates turns out it was a bet on interest rates all along and this when I read this I I read this I think maybe 6 months ago at first I was like no no way no way it can be but but it actually is so what happens when the rates go up like like like they have they go from 0 to 5% well what this means for VC funding you're just going to see less VC funding because VC is funded by Pension funds heed individuals and all of them are like huh I could just put up my money into the bank for 5% if I have $100 million and there's a 5% interest rate every year I make $5 million in 10 years I make $150 million in 10 years by doing nothing I I turned that 100 million into 150 million with zero risk or virtually zero risk so VCS are going to have a hard time convincing them to give us some dardos where in 10 years you're not going to see anything and when every year you're going to receive a return there's going to be fewer IPS initially because a lot of tech compan if you're Tech IPOs could because a lot of the tech companies are loss making and no one wants to give money to loss making companies in a in a a high interest rate world there's big Tech will have to generate more profits than before cuz everyone cares about more profits more profits cuz you can get more profits just by putting your money in the bank and then the job market will just be tougher because of all this but it's it's not just interest rates something else also happened in 20072 2008 in 2007 this came out the iPhone it's pretty interesting because that's also when the low interest ratees started almost at the same time I think maybe maybe a year after but in 2008 Android came out and then it wasn't just smartphones which we know revolutionize everything but in cloud computing a AWS launched in 2006 as your Google Cloud 2008 and the timing is pretty darn incredible I I just mapped it out together the smartphone key events and the cloud key events they almost all happened right as interest rates went to zero so not only did we have a low interest rate period where more Venture Capital will flow into startups we actually had more reason to invest in startups because suddenly the smartphone Revolution birthed so so many huge companies today Spotify was founded in 2006 but they really took off with the iPhone and an Android WhatsApp Instagram Uber snap they all exist because of smartphones if it wasn't for this Smartphone Revolution who knows if they would be around and there's thousands of more and Cloud Computing Made a lot of startups just a lot easier or more profitable Netflix so these are all large AWS customers Netflix Airbnb stripe twitch without cloud computing they would have had to build their own data centers it would have been slower more expensive they would have not been able to grow as fast and again thousands of more companies were enabled but it's been 15 years and I think it's fair to say that the smartphone cloud computing Revolution kind of maybe ran its course because now 15 years later building a mobile app or a cloud it's it's just not a huge Advantage I mean it is but it's what everyone does so to recap why all these changes happening now it's it's because mostly of the low interest rates but it's added interest it was really interesting that when low interest day started we had two massive technology revolutions kick off now these days we're seeing the AI Revolution kickoff so I I I I marked the Chad GPT launch in November 2022 we see AI is really hot and this could be a very interesting and promising Revolution but it's now happening in a high interest rate environment not a low interest rate one so this is what's happening but what is a new reality and I'll talk about what it means for software engineers and for engineering practices for software Engineers it's just tougher to get a job there are just fewer jobs postes so these graphs start from 2020 and they end in 2024 their job listing a hacker news on indeed in the US UK and Germany you can see that the job number of J job posting peaked in 2021 2022 and they're now kind of back to where they were in 2019 2020 so there are fewer jobs out there to apply to then just two years ago for example and there are more applicants for jobs so this is I talk with the startup a scaleup in the US called Supply Pike they're based in Arizona I think there are around 50 or 100 people uh they require people to work hybrid so you need to either move to Arizona to the to the the sorry there aranas uh you need to move there or or be willing to move there so you know it's not a full remote company but for one posting for every One open headcount they get 192 intern applications for software engineering 164 software and 37 senior engineer and their CTO shared some observations with me this January they said that intership applications doubled since last year software engineering applications tripled since last year more big Tech applicants from Facebook Google Etc senior Engineers are no longer kind of shopping around interviewing and then choosing the best one they're just taking the the first one and they're saying that from their perspective compensation after returning back to normal which is always gives pleasure to hiring manager it just means that it's more it's it's harder to negotiate a higher compensation package we also see fewer developers quitting so this this January uh with with the help of of of a of of of Dominic Jack Weston who's who's part of founder keeper CPO Forum he asked around how are you seeing basically people quitting at your company 50% of EU Founders said no change but another 50% said they see a lot fewer people quitting and with fear developers quitting there's just less hiring because you need to you know back fill fewer people another thing that we should expect as software Engineers is just slower career growth and this is just because when there's less hiring either because of back filling or compan is not growing as much there's just less need for for more more Senior Elite positions you don't really need if you have a team of 10 and you have a pretty good distribution of seniority you will not need that many more tech leads or staff Engineers from budget perspective we never recognize this because until now those teams were growing this year was 10 next year 15 20 there was always room to get promoted but there might not be a business reason so there's going to be fewer promotions and here's the thing a few companies I think are kind of preparing for this new reality of fewer promotions and Shopify is a good example I I'll just talk you through I I I wrote this article just a few months ago asking is Shopify responding to higher interest rates by Chang changing their promotion process which sounds pretty cheeky but it's actually a legit question here's what Shopify did before they had levels from C1 to like C10 C6 was senior engineer I think C7 maybe staff engineer and you know you get promoted from C from C4 C5 C6 it's it's just a leveling framework that was the way the only way to get promote it they changed this they introduced a Mastery score from one to 50 from zero to 50 on each levels for like C6 C7 and now they're saying there's two ways to advance your career you can either uplevel in your Mastery so go from 30 points on on C7 to like 40 points because you're getting better at your craft and going higher by the way it means a pay rise it it does mean bonus it it means all those things or you can change your scope go from C7 team lead to C8 I think a discipline lead but then your Mastery drops and and they're emphasizing that's now a different job like and you know you should think about do you want to do that different job now what this is really preparing for I talked with I also thought about it and and my thinking was that I think they're kind of watering down the old meaning of promotions because they're probably expecting to see a lot for your promotions and I I talk with the manager at the company who actually agreed with this but at the same time I think what Shopify is doing is brilliant because I mean it's it's not great to work at a company and you know like until now you saw promotions every one or two or every like two or three years and now it's going to be you know four or five years with no promotion but the Shopify people are are going to advance every 6 months their Mastery will increase they will get small bonuses they'll get that recognition so I think it's really smart from what they're doing and I think more companies will will follow or companies that that look ahead and they see that are going to be be hiring L they should follow so Shopify I think will keep their their Engineers happier this way so this is the new reality for software engine it's tougher to get a job and promotions are harder and the career growth is slower what does this mean for this these change mean for software engineering practices clearly when we're we're looking at a at a time where there's less money more constraints more focus on efficiency we should be choosing more boring technology that get gets the job done right and I I made this comic to illustrate this point where you can choose either to you know choose the technology to solve the business problem it's proven and and good and it's working you know may that be Java or p HP or jQuery or you can just choose the really really cool technology right you could do Rust you could do nextjs you could do kubernetes although I'm I'm no longer sure where that goes and I I just wanted to make this funny point that this Choice should be obvious that you should press the business button but the more I looked at this photo the more I felt I don't really want to press the I actually want to I really want to press the the new technology because that's how we learn that's what's fun the new technologies are usually there for a reason they usually have better performance they they work around the limitations of of of the other stuff and they're the future so I mean I I want to say that we're going to see more people pressing this left button just to solve the business problem but I think most engers will just say let's let's just choose both let's let's press both at the same time we'll use this new technology in order to solve your business problems and you know this will still mean we'll we'll try to justify how to use a really cool new Tex but we'll also s we will be mindful of solving the business problem but the truth is we will have a lot more pressure of software Engineers coming from non uh especially from from the non-technical people the business leadership to choose the boring technology because that will be their preference it might not be our preference but it will be theirs and just to show the how different this used to be just a few years ago what technology choices during the zero interace periods look like I'm going to single out monzo here with a with a slack message that their founder and CEO sent to the team and and they actually put it on a conference it's not not some internal confence and this was in 2015 so in the middle of zero interace period he went step one go step two microservices step three who knows step four profit and this was actually shared on a microservices conference in I think 2016 as the explanation of why monzo shows microservices because after Uber I think they have the most microservices out there one of the most they have thousands of microservices with 500 Engineers so it's like a couple microservices per engineer they got it to work for themselves but I mean if this really was a reasoning that's that raises some questions but I am glad by the way that they shared this because a lot of this was not just them a lot of companies St like this right with CTO even the CEOs really got bought into this because what this meant don't forget this kind of made some sense back then it was really hard to hire software Engineers even if you had the funding you you struggled you needed to give them something else like cool technology so I think what this really said is we don't we know this way we're going to hire software engineers and they want to conferences to talk about it and to hire more software engineers and and they succeeded but seriously uh one thing that's going to change looking forward I I've been talking to a lot of startups I think monoliths are making their way back yet again it's it's just starting to become trendy to start with a monolith and then stick with the monolith I mean there's one company that's been doing this for a long time Shopify you turn into module or monolith obviously but there is there is some sense in this in the sense that when you know you're going to hire a lot of people for the next two or three years you're going to double your team every time microservices solves an organizational problem if that's not going to happen you don't really have an organizational problem to solve so monolith should be good enough but I suspect that in a few years we'll be going back but for now monoliths are might just be the the new microservices who knows full stack is in full swing we've been hearing full stack a lot but I'm hearing it way more everywhere and and here's a simple explanation why here's a typical small team that that's building iOS Android web and backend two backend Engineers one web engineer one iOS and one Android how does this look like when you change your text tack a little bit to something like react native or or flutter or or or something else well you can just actually have like I guess three types of engine all who are full stack one with a backend Focus one with a web plusus backend one with a mobile Focus I know I know there's KS on this but you can produce a similar output you can produce those iOS Android and web applications and they'll functionality wise they'll be similar and now you'll have a smaller team less communication from a manager perspective that's a lower budget and one thing that's helping this transition so if we compare it to it's pretty obvious it's it's a different number of people and again smaller do move faster right but typescript is is helping make this transition I'm seeing so many startups that have been started the past few years who talk about how typescript makes all of this possible Blue Sky the company we talked about one of their I guess Secrets was they use typescript almost all the way the back end is in typescript the front end in in typescript the mobile apps are in typescript it's using react native and Expo and so all of their Engineers can modify any part of it well I mean you still need to know the domain but all of their 12 Engineers modify the the back end the mobile and the web this is pretty incredible and it's not just it's not just a blue sky a linear um the popular product management solution founded by Thomas arkman a former colleague of mine at Uber he told me this in in October I get remind me daily how awesome it is to have just one language types for the entire SE from back end to front end it's safe to say that our Tech sa is serving us well and this is I'm not I'm not I don't want to single out typescript but like having a technology where your engineers can contribute to the the whole sack is is a good one what one more thing that's changing is developer responsibilities are shifting left you're going to probably hear shift left a lot on on on conferences in the coming years and what this mean is before a few years ago or even a decade ago we had developers write code and I guess we had QA tested and we had Ops deployed to production obviously this has already changed at a lot of companies where developers do all of this thing so they write test and and they they deploy it you might have some platform teams that help with this but we're now also starting to see more things shifting left on developers security some Sr tasks uh and and from from the other side as well there's a little bit of of project management so like I don't think Developer jobs are at any risk of you know like there's this question of will AI replace software Engineers which is see seems like a very POS one test but I don't think that's happening what is happening as a software engineer we're going to be doing a lot more of this work and there will still be some specializ roles in company security Engineers exist but there will be fewer of these specialized roles per 50 or 100 software engineers and finally I think we're just going to less Reinventing the wheel we're going to see companies instead of building your own platform solution that we've seen so many companies do like there there's this there's this there's this like Open Secret pretty much that in the tech industry every single large company reinvents react native internally and we I've seen it we we've done it at Uber it was kind of built because you know react native wouldn't scale or do or whatever we wanted to do and then it was built for a couple years rolled out internally quietly retire but it happens everywhere and I think this Reinventing will just stop will see a lot more buying softwares or adapting open source Solutions so this is the think the new reality for software engineer practices more push for barding technology monoliths becoming more popular full stack becoming more popular more shift left and L Reinventing the wheel I mean and all of these are kind of I guess practical or sensible so like they don't seem too drastic I think the only one you know we could get into argument is like monoliths versus microservices but but outside of that not not that much and so for the last part have we not seen some of this before all this change and there is a bit of a Deja with a do com bust I talked with people who were working during the Doom bus during 2001 so there was a huge investment Splurge from like 1998 to like 2000 into all these companies like web van which promised a 5-minute grocery delivery and I guess you know they went bankrupt but like 20 years later we have instacart which promises maybe a 30 minute or hour St delivery but and and then there was a big big big bust especially in Silicon Valley people lost their job and it was really really hard to get jobs and here's quotes from two people who were in The that time so here's quote from someone who graduated in 201 saying I was laid off by the time I graduated my most of my friends startups failed and we were all desperately looking for work this she's a computer science major in the US we were competing with experienced Engineers who were also laid off and Who start S every day we heard a big startup collapse it was really depressing and she said we accepted anything part-time unpaid internship just under the premise to build a resumes and she pivoted from software engineering to Consulting as a website developer and then into a technical pm and this is niia Henry she's now director rangering at at Spotify in New York and she told me that I think for like five or six years she worked at these like non-technical roles as a software engineer cuz that was the only way she could get that job and she she went back into software engineering later on and here's one learning from the Doom but from someone who graduated there uh Google s um and and this this person said that the his learning was 20 years later always be on the revenue side of whatever company you work for make sure sure that they sell software and don't use software to sell for something else I mean this is this is a way to say that if you work in a profit Center your jobs jobs are are more safe during u a time where there's a focus on efficiency and going back to kenbeck I I asked kenbeck what similarity he sees in the 2000s where he already was working for 20 years and now and he listed a couple of things he's saying very interesting things fixed specification and upfront design are back and iterating conly are just happening less he's seeing that there's more handoffs between like developers handing off to QA or someone else it's a bit more like oh we did our job we did it perfectly it's you know like it's not our problem now we don't want to be responsible apparently he's saying seeing more documentation people just document more again potentially to like say you know we've done our jobs perfectly like you know don't don't don't bug us with this and let's frequent deployments to prod and just longer feedback loops and we were kind of talking about why this is happen happening and my theory is that there might be this thing like when you're working in an environment where it's kind of stressful and you're kind of fearing for your job and your manager not really but you know you know you could be let go any time if the company does does well you want to do a great job you want to show that you're you're busy you're doing the best job so you're you know you're going to document it you'll hand it over and just's a bit of less incentive to take risk to like you know take that bug that is not your stuff that you might not be able to fix even though the customers want it to fix because if you fail it might make you look bad I'm not sure but it it seems Ken Beck said that after do humas the same thing happened like things slowed down it went more into silos and it took a while for it to ease up so this I just want want to share because it's so interesting and and this is what I think I I I think there's a push to kind of become focused or utiliz or or or to make sure you look busy and then there's just no time for like I guess slack to do what when you're not as busy you actually have time to step in and do all these things but what is different in 2024 versus in in 200 a few things are differently in in 2000 the internet was growing rapidly today Ai and and large language models are growing rapidly and here's the investment the percentage of investment in all venture capital going into AI uh by the middle of 2023 $1 in4 so 25% of all of VC investment went into AI so clearly you know this is whatever the internet was it looks like the a like in terms of investment looks like it's AI so it's different but in 2000 the tech industry was much much smaller let me show you the seven largest publicly traded tech companies in in 2003 uh uh and on on this list the ones that are boldest so like Google was number four Microsoft and and apple number six and seven the others were non- te companies and in 2024 the top four are tech companies and actually five out of the seven are tech companies and they're they're way larger by the way if we compare the Microsoft size back then even in just a dollars they tech industry has become massive it's everywhere and I think the only question is how much larger will it become it's still growing but at some point that growth will slow so as as as takeaways what happened in the 2000s after a big boom and then and then bust it's probably going to happen now to some extent we will probably have we're already seeing the more doers for planners when companies are are cutting are doing layoffs and software engineering engineering managers are often targeted a lot more because teams are being flattened I I know some startups that let go a lot of their middle management or director of engineering but they they didn't touch software Engineers because they know what they're the doers and so for for engineering managers becoming Hands-On and a lot of engine managers moving back to Tech lead positions to be you know more doers and planners be seen less as an overhead We Know by the way there's a reason for the overhead but in in this scenario a lot of companies are kind of ignoring it there's a lot of doing more more with less and and uh and and a lot of full stack uh push and just using boring technology so getting a job is more of effort so you just need to plan for it and here's some advice your network is becoming a lot more important whether you have it or not if you have it it's good to rely on if not it's good to try to build it referrals are more important applying early is becoming important because there's so many applications coming in that sometimes only the the first I don't know 50 or so are being looked at investing unpaid time in interviews like take homes it's going to be just the norm uh and it's becoming a bit of a numbers game you need to apply to a lot of players placees a he back one big change I think one one thing that will help greatly is becoming more I guess business or product minded which which means just understand the business model of your company how are they making money or or are they even making money or can they can they be become profitable at some point build a relationship with your product manager who should be really good at understanding it and figuring out how you know we can transform that and then you know just just talk with people outside of engineering customer support research come up with ideas on how you can help the company the software Engineers who can help company make more money or spend less money are really really valuable and I think you most companies are going to be looking for for those kind of people I wrote an article about this called the product mining software engineer just Google this and I I share a couple of more advice there insights and my final takeaway is just in this environment I think you we should all aim for career security not job security and this is a quote from someone thank you for the clap and and and there this is for from here's a quote from someone who on under one of my posts commented uh her name is alen May she said it's always we're preparing for the possib job Cuts I was part this CH saying part of layoffs in 2001 and two where there were four rounds one for quarter and it took our organization from 180 people to 35 people and from that experience from laid off she well also laid off I learned that there's no such thing as job security I can either promise it as a manager cuz now she's a manager or expect it as an employee what I can do what all of us can do is have a career security keep learning keep working on challenging projects at your company and keep working with great people and this is the most you can do and she said that after she she got let go she did find different positions again hopefully this will not happen with most of us but it's good to keep in mind for this time so what happened what happened in 200 like to happen now getting a job is more difficult becoming product minded is a good strategy and aiming for career security as well and to close with I just want to mention the elephant in the room and by the elephant in the room obviously I mean AI I mean I like to I'm I'm liking this term less and less artificial intelligence because it suggests that this int I just like to say what it is it's large language models that's what we under Ai and I don't think that AI will replace developers there there's this question going around it's really popular it gets it gets trending on social media but I do see that it makes developers using tools more productive it makes me more productive when when I get a co-pilot or I use Chad GPT for some of my brainstorming some of my my patterning picking up technologies that I I'm not as familiar with it really makes a big difference so my suggestion just make these tools your ally understand how how they work there's a you you can uh Google an article from Steven wol from called how does chat GPT work in in a few pages he he explains this really well it's a very simple underlying technology using a lot of data try other tools co-pilot Codi any other thing that you can get your hands on just get your own opinion on it improve your own workflows because there it's just an assistant it's it's just like uh your ID autocomplete is an assistant these tools will be an assistant and with these tools you probably can pick up new Frameworks faster I certainly do and just avoid the hype so like see it for yourself see what works there's way too much hype out there most from people who who don't write code with these tools and don't know where it's helpful and where it's not make them your Ally and finally as as closing don't forget like there's a lot of change right now but this change even though for for many of us who have not been working professionally in 2000 it's not happening before it has happened in Industry before and work and even though it feels like there's some downward spiral actually what's happening is we're going back to what it was like before in 2018 or 2019 or even the 2000s and you know the tech world was pretty awesome even then so I believe the tech world will continue to be a great in interesting industry to work in and even though it's it's way less predictable but this is what makes it part of the fun and part of the challenge so thank you for your time [Applause]

Channel: The Pragmatic Engineer

Views: 26,589

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Id: VpPPHDxR9aM

Length: 44min 51sec (2691 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 09 2024