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?

> 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.

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...

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 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For a brief period of time, the company I worked for "overhired" which allowed them to move that multiple down to maybe 2X-5X instead of 3X-10X. We went from severely shortstaffed to very shortstaffed, but we could at least get one or two more projects done than we could before. Well, that's over now, and we're back to being severely shortstaffed.

> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever

It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.

> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?

They explained their argument.

> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?

It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?

They explained their argument in the article

> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.

If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.

That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.

That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.

The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.

It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?

Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.

Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.

When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.

When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.

The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.

This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).

This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.

Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.

In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.

There. FTFY.

I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.

I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.

That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.

"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?

This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.

I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.