Is the Tech field getting saturated?
Curious as to what you guys think? Is the field getting too saturated now? What does it mean for the future? Edit: as a follow up if the field is saturated why the high TC? TC: 100k
It’s getting there. High TC is encouraging people to pick software development as a career path more often which will eventually drive down labor prices. It’ll get way worse once AI is capable of development on its own, but by then there will be a lot more to worry about from a broader standpoint.
Adding to that, software and IT jobs can easily be outsourced. And with the flood of new grads, and H1Bs, will drive down labor prices. Companies don't even need a degree these days, anyone with any background can become a programmer, which will further drive salaries down.
^ that's not true at all. In my experience, when it's time to integrate math with software development, there are zero options to out source it. Many self taught programmers, sure. Zero self taught mathematicians that can predict the future.
nah supply not even close to matching demand. and regardless of how many people try to enter, most don’t make it (check out drop-off rates from CS101 class sizes to graduating CS classes)
I don’t disagree but there has probably been a shift. 20 years ago and more, regular Engineering, pre-med, law, and finance were the way to go. CS has opened up another channel that is frankly easier to make it in because the supply of jobs is higher than any of the others. That will lead (probably already has) more undergrads toward CS. More of them will succeed because there is a higher volume of attempts than before even if the quality bar remains the same.
yeah you’re not wrong that supply is increasing, but I think demand is keeping pace
Nope!
There are ample mediocre engineers but not enough high performance engineers who can design and build things. Try to do this: 1) Take a business problem and break it down to technical concepts you need to know to solve it. 2) Taking those concepts and focusing on an effective system design. Thinking about scale and also resource usage. 3) Estimating how many people you will need to work on each of the parts of the system and seeing hiccups and problems you may see along the way. 4) Then coming back out and seeing the big picture and constantly self-checking yourself and seeing if the project is in the right direction. 5) Knowing who to hire and knowing where you need help. You can't operate with a mentality of throwing resources at a problem to solve it. You need to know how to effectively resolve it. 6) Diving deep into the issue and looking and code reviews of code you never worte but pointing out dependency issues that you sense may happen. 7) At some point you develop that internal hunch and have a sense of direction of how to develop something in a specific area. An engineer who sees all of these things and can be a productive collaborative member of a large team is worth 10x than your normal engineer.
Good point. How do hiring managers identify the high performance engineers for the attributes you described by asking leetcode questions only?
The key is to phrase leetcode questions as a business problem and see if the engineer can atleast take the 'business wrapper' off and see the technical side behind it. Then ask them how they see other parts of the system (not code it). Then ask then to write the funtions and sketch overall what they see the inputs and outputs coming in and going out specifically for the problem and not the other parts of the system. Implementation can change based on language and I am usually not worried about implementation down to every line of code and minor mistakes are okay if they see the whole picture.
Don't know if that's strictly true. I've built all those abilities and I wouldn't call myself anywhere near a 10x eng. Maybe 1x at best. I think you more or red described the baseline expectations
You're humble then. Great engineers have good design and system skills, not just coding skills. Systems can only be designed based on a business problem. Then work backwards from there. You have no clue how many people will just stare at the board and don't know how to do it. Some new grads and young engineers have impressed me and how much they see.
System design is same as coding just one abstraction level up. The problem is that if you have never done it then you don't know the available building blocks.
Nope. Not SWE or DevOps. Can’t find any in the Bay Area.
If you are a decent programmer and you keep upgrading your skills, then you can easily have a good 30-year career in tech. Think about it: what aspects of our lives are digitized yet? The tech industry is going to thrive well into the future. The only question is, are you one of the people who is going to ride it?
Also Automation happens for most manual non-creative tasks first, swe is not one of those tasks generally. Fast food workers etc need to be more worried
What’s the field?
Just updated
No not at the moment. There are still many jobs open with very less people to fill.