| ▲ | samr71 2 days ago |
| Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave. Was path dependency for careers always this bad? |
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| ▲ | solarmist 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don’t feel like it was. Every role is hyper specific nowadays. And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience. |
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| ▲ | nickff 2 days ago | parent [-] | | >"And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience." This is often because the culture of job-hopping for better pay every 18 months has eroded the willingness to pay for training or adaptation. Why pay for someone to learn if they're just gonna leave soon; the pre-trained person is a better deal if you'll have to pay to retain anyway. | | |
| ▲ | solarmist 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Which was caused by cost cutting measures, MBA disease, in companies to begin with. We’re just seeing the end of the cat and mouse struggle that’s been going on since the 60s. And massively accelerated in the 80s. It’s unfortunate for companies though because they’re the ones that will lose out in the end when all the experienced people start retiring and they have no one to hire. It’s an untenable position to not train people, period. There is no schooling you could go through that would educated junior dev to the level of a senior dev. And it’s the same for any other role. Experience is not optional. | | |
| ▲ | nickff 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think the primary stimulus which creating the “job hopping culture” was actually the hot labor market for software developers. Other fields experienced real ‘cost-cutting’, without resulting in a lot of ‘job-hopping’. I agree that this situation is undesirable, but it seems to be stable, somewhat like the result of repeated play of the prisoner’s dilemma. | | |
| ▲ | solarmist 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That definitely massively accelerated it but you’re looking way too short term that’s only been in the last 10 to 15 years. I agree that other industries are not YET at the point where software is , but you’re not looking hard enough if you don’t see the short tenures compared to the 25-30 years they used to have. And yeah, it might be in an equilibrium now, but how long can it stay in an equilibrium? I’d guess at max 10 to 15 years. |
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| ▲ | ghaff 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's a more mature industry. I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond. |
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| ▲ | solarmist 2 days ago | parent [-] | | My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers. Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications. | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Plenty of server software being developed in the early 2000s. (Though minicomputers were mostly off the scene by then.) | |
| ▲ | swatcoder 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pretty much. Well, and mainframes. And trading and financial systems. And numerical/scientific computing. And network services. And web sites and e-commerce. And flash, java applets, and browser plugins. And control systems. And operating systems and tooling. And cell phone applications. And games. And video/image/audio/music processing. etc etc Oh, wait... maybe not! | | |
| ▲ | solarmist 2 days ago | parent [-] | | So you’re saying that none of those roles could be cross hired in the early 2000s between any of the other roles? That’s the point I was trying to make. Not that the software didn’t exist or people weren’t doing specialized applications. | | |
| ▲ | swatcoder 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It was probably about as hard to move between those domains now as it is today. Which is to say that it's pretty hard and needs some concerted, non-trivial effort in shaping your experience and how you present it before trying to make a transition, and often either some kind of inside reference to vouch for you or an employer that was especially hard up for candidates. Or else an employer that straddle multiple domains and actively supported internal transitions. Depending on what you could bring attention to in your prior experience and the size/needs of the new orgs you seeking to move to, certain transitions were more feasible than others, but you could easily spend decades working in mind-numbing enterprise applications while wishing for opportunities in game development or trading or whatever and never get your resume so much as looked at. (And vice versa, even, for those who dreamed to "retire" into the supposed quiet of enterprise apps or government IT or whatever) | |
| ▲ | ghaff 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I basically agree with your edit. There was a lot more fluidity among roles and even just moving into computer roles from other engineering (and even non-engineering) fields. But that's not really what you wrote initially. | | |
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