The industry has brought in a ton of soulless goons and uninterested/stupid workers for a decade and it’s destroyed the industry.
I’m not saying there aren’t good people, but I have interviewed hundreds of people over 10+ years for jobs in tech, and the quality bar dropped a lot.
This started well before AI. I met people from Apple/Amazon/Google/etc. who functionally could not do their job, contributed nothing to projects, and were highly paid. Only a few big companies were the exception.
I’ve met a ton of people with phds and advanced degrees from prestigious schools that were total crap too.
We shovelled so many people into the system because the jobs sounded amazing and they’d pay stupid prices for a degree. We fully industrialized low performance hiring, so yeah, no surprise packages are dropping.
Plus, I used to get time to teach interns and new grads too. The staff we taught grew into way better workers than the job hoppers with 6 jobs at fancy companies over 3 years who had never completed a real project beyond the shiny prototype.
The last 3-4 years I had been constantly threatened about looming layoffs, and that we needed to meet targets at all costs. I’ve been perennially told “if we’re just heads down and all out until [6 months from now/project completion] it’ll all be good again”. Only for the cycle to repeat again and again and again.
The big tech machine destroyed my mental health and I’m out, and I’m much much happier and healthier. I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again.
How do you find such companies, in my experience small startups want to own all your time and expect you to be working constantly to meet their crazy deadlines, so that’s a no go for me, slightly older medium sized companies are a coin toss, the one I worked at had abusive people entrenched into top positions who just want to whip you for their ego, while the company itself is running in shambles because no one working there gives a shit about the job and the product. How do I find a small company with a healthy work life balance and decent colleagues and managers, I don’t need to much salary either, just the standard wage that matches the cost of living
The industry has brought in a ton of soulless goons and uninterested/stupid workers for a decade and it’s destroyed the industry.
I’m not saying there aren’t good people, but I have interviewed hundreds of people over 10+ years for jobs in tech, and the quality bar dropped a lot.
This started well before AI. I met people from Apple/Amazon/Google/etc. who functionally could not do their job, contributed nothing to projects, and were highly paid. Only a few big companies were the exception.
I’ve met a ton of people with phds and advanced degrees from prestigious schools that were total crap too.
We shovelled so many people into the system because the jobs sounded amazing and they’d pay stupid prices for a degree. We fully industrialized low performance hiring, so yeah, no surprise packages are dropping.
Plus, I used to get time to teach interns and new grads too. The staff we taught grew into way better workers than the job hoppers with 6 jobs at fancy companies over 3 years who had never completed a real project beyond the shiny prototype.
The last 3-4 years I had been constantly threatened about looming layoffs, and that we needed to meet targets at all costs. I’ve been perennially told “if we’re just heads down and all out until [6 months from now/project completion] it’ll all be good again”. Only for the cycle to repeat again and again and again.
The big tech machine destroyed my mental health and I’m out, and I’m much much happier and healthier. I still work in tech, but I’m incredibly selective about the jobs I take, and I’ll never work in corporate tech again.
What exactly do you mean by this? I’ve also wanted to get out of tech but have zero experience in anything else so idk what to do
I will only work for small companies now. And only when my personal views match and I honestly feel what I’m working on is worthwhile to society.
I like the experience a lot more this way.
I’m lucky to be able to make that choice, but the work is much more rewarding.
How do you find such companies, in my experience small startups want to own all your time and expect you to be working constantly to meet their crazy deadlines, so that’s a no go for me, slightly older medium sized companies are a coin toss, the one I worked at had abusive people entrenched into top positions who just want to whip you for their ego, while the company itself is running in shambles because no one working there gives a shit about the job and the product. How do I find a small company with a healthy work life balance and decent colleagues and managers, I don’t need to much salary either, just the standard wage that matches the cost of living