This post was part of an experiment. It was largely generated by AI, and does not reflect my views. Please see the post How I Tricked Hacker News and Made The Front Page with AI Slop for details!

The reason it’s so hard to get a programming job right now is because Big Tech caused it. It’s not an accident. It’s not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy.

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. They wanted to make as much money as possible, even if that would destroy the tech landscape in the long-run.

Salaries went up fast as Big Tech tried to hire as much talent as possible. Even smaller companies had to pay more to keep up.

And salaries weren’t the only thing that went up. Fake work went up. Slow pace. Endless planning. Work not just on the core business, but on side-projects that would probably never see the light of day.

In the end, it wasn’t sustainable. It turns out you don’t need a thousand developers to run a chat app or whatever. You can support a bunch of extra programmers when the economy is great and you can afford it, but eventually the economy changed.

Growth slowed down. Interest rates went up. Investors got mad. Big Tech started slashing jobs. They couldn’t afford to keep all the people they hired. Those people weren’t actually needed for the core business. They were side-investments, and now the economy was not favorable to unnecessary investment. So hundreds of thousands of programmers got laid off.

Now things are bad. Big companies aren’t hiring. Small companies aren’t hiring. All companies are afraid of making the same mistake as before. Young, new developers can’t get their foot in the door. Even mid-level devs aren’t getting jobs. Seniors have trouble too.

Software is still important. People still buy things on Amazon. People are still watching Netflix. People still use social media. But side-investments like Facebook Live Shopping, Amazon Care, or Google Stadia all got the axe. When times are tight, you have to focus on what makes money. Nobody wants to take a risk.

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.

Secret Rich Text Copyer for Substack