See my other comment. One thing AI can’t do is talk to people and deal with XYProblems, organizational complexity, egos, turf wars, teasing out the “what”
(Yes I know the trend I’m about to talk about was different in BigTech and adjacent. I did an almost 4 year stint at a FAANG 2 years ago and have no need or desire to go back at 51. That’s not where most developers work)
Back around 2013-2014 well before AI, I saw the trend that it wasn’t going to take much to be a “good enough” enterprise “full stack” developer meaning the market was going to be commoditized and if i was just a “I codez good and pull tickets off the board” developer, it was going to be hard to stand out from the crowd.
I was prescient, when companies reach out to me now for standard enterprise dev jobs in Atlanta (no longer live there but a large part of my network is still there) I see the same salaries I saw in 2016.
I worked over the next six years to move “up the stack”. I learned soft skills, learned AWS and how to treat it more than just a glorified Colo, learned how to lead projects, talk to the “business”, focused on business value, started getting closer to sales and how they operate etc.
Out of everything I said, the take away should not be to “learn cloud”. Everyone and their dog knows AWS (except for one niche that has opened a few doors to me).
The take away is to incease the “scope and impact” of your work beyond just being a code monkey. Also learn how to work at an increased level of ambiguity.
AI is just another part of the commoditization and devaluation of the generic developer. There is no “moat” around being a generic full stack/mobile/web developer.
As of 2020, I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. I have been working full time for consulting departments (the internal one at AWS) and after being Amazoned in late 2023, it took me all of three weeks to have three offers. After I made a bad choice between the three in 2023, it again took me two weeks to have an offer.
I haven’t had to do a coding interview in over a decade because I know how to communicate my value and experience and I don’t try to compete on “I codez real gud”. I’m not a super special snowflake
You’re arguing something different than @latexr did, and picking a VC as your example makes sense here but fails to counter the fact that most startups aren’t VC funded. Still, you’re also like GP confusing VC motivation with founder motivation. It’s possible for founders to care deeply about the problems they’re solving, and for the company’s primary goal to be an exit, at the same time. Both can be true, contrary to what GP claimed.
There are an infinitesimal number of tech based startups that are “lifestyle companies” that were bootstrapped and use revenues to grow without taking investor money.
There are even fewer that are “successful” - ie where everyone involved wouldn’t be better off just working as a LOB CRUD developer.
The goal of the founders don’t matter even if they do “care” about the customer. The customer is at the whim of the strategies of the investors of the company and if an acquired, the customer will probably get an email about “our amazing journey” when the company is shut down
These smaller companies are doing well, they just aren’t incentivised to tell you about it. The VC backed companies are, either targeting you as a consumer or an investor and n an eventual IPO.
You’re not debating me, you’re contradicting @latexr.
> infinitesimal
You invented a narrow niche to knock down there, but as I said, I actually looked it up and the majority of startup companies that form are seed or self funded, not VC funded. I was responding to @latexr’s claims that “most” founders don’t care about product at all, which I believe is just false. You’re arguing with me about something else, and I don’t know what your point is yet. Mine is that caring about customers and caring about money aren’t exclusive things, a successful business must do both.
> Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.
And if they don’t make money, they fail and lose the opportunity to care about customers. It’s a boring tautology to say that companies care about money. The point is that @latexr is wrong about assuming that caring about money means they don’t care about product or customers.
It’s not at all a tautology. A company that cares about its customers can balance its need to make money and leave money on the table because it’s not in the best interest of the customers.
Agreed, that’s what I’ve been saying from the top. Again, you’re disagreeing with @latexr, and agreeing with me.
The tautology is that all companies care about money. Companies care about money by definition. Many companies and many people in companies also care about customers and product quality. However, there is an absolute limit to how much money a company can leave on the table, regardless of what the customer wants, and serving the customer’s best interest becomes a ‘bad decision’ and threatens the ability for the company to do anything for the customer the moment it’s unprofitable, as soon as costs exceed income. This effectively means that at some level, companies must prioritize profit over service, otherwise service will cease to exist. The balance must lean in favor of the company on average over time.
These startups were not created to solve a problem, some didn’t even have a technical person. These startups were created to be VC bait and hopefully sell out to the bigger fool
That’s a whole lot of ifs. At the end of this long road filled with if’s, what are the chances that he can have a profit large enough to overcome the opportunity cost of not just working as an enterprise dev in a 2nd tier city and have continuing profits or have a meaningful exit?
There was never a statistical “advantage”, you just never heard about the 9/10 outright failures or even the parts of the 1/10 where people are toiling in obscurity and would have been better off financially “grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG” ((c) r/cscareerquestions) or even being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
Tangential to the question, but this is me and one of my top three regrets in life is not having been a founding engineer. For people without generational wealth or a safety net it takes a particular combination of executive function and youthful ignorance of the opportunity cost (a steady paycheck and obvious career trajectory) to be a founder. As soon as I grew enough of the former the latter evaporated as I realized how close I'd come to financial ruin and how I didn't want to ever again.
OP, if you're even thinking about it, you should just do it before wisdom sets in and you know better. Or maybe I'm romanticizing the startup experience too much - anybody with actual expertise care to comment?
I can’t think of any reason for someone statistically to start a company unless they had an “unfair advantage” post 2012 instead of working toward getting a job at BigTech and easily make 1 million+ over 4 years as a mid level developer who should get promoted to a senior by year 3
Same here - did the grind for a few years then went straight to big tech. I got offers from the full set of FAANG. I still have a disdain for code monkey work as a job (I really think its practically unskilled labour). I had studied ML to a fairly high level, so landing gigs was easy. Not to mention the money is so much better.
One that really gets me that most professional get wrong is jive/jibe.
The last time someone used “jive” when not in relation to music was George Jefferson and other Black folks up to the very early 80s (I am Black before the pearl clutching starts)
reply