IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Neranja said:

I really like that he has built this world view in his head that we had luxurious, stable, six figure jobs without stress or overtime. The ones he saw in those Tiktok videos with "a day in the life of a ${TECH_STARTUP}" with the fruit bars and ping pong tables. If that is your world view of how jobs in IT are, then I can totally get that he's angry now that he perceives those people complaining about being replaced by AI.

Only that was a fucking fantasy, and those girls were the first to be fired once the startup money dried up.

Click to expand...

Plenty of high-pay professions are stressful. Surgeons are stressed. Pilots are stressed. Traders are stressed. None of them built an entire cultural posture around telling other workers their jobs deserved to disappear because "the market." Also, let's be honest: the complaint isn't "you had no stress." The complaint is that tech workers (as a class, culturally) spent years minimizing or mocking other people's instability while confidently asserting their own indispensability.

The "those girls were the first to be fired" line is doing exactly the same thing you're accusing others of - picking a convenient subset and pretending it represents the whole. Startup marketing staff getting axed early doesn't somehow prove the broader claim wrong. If anything, it reinforces the point: when capital tightens, the industry sheds roles aggressively and without sentiment, just like every other sector that was told to "adapt". And notice how the definition keeps shifting again. First it was "you imagined cushy jobs." Then it's "okay, some people had them, but they weren't real tech." Next it’ll be "those layoffs don't count because the company was mismanaged." The goalposts might as well be on wheels at this point.

So no, this isn't anger at a fantasy. It's criticism of a long-running narrative that said tech was "different", smarter, safer, etc. And that everyone else should stop whining, reskill, and stop being a lame part of the "unskilled" labor caste. Now that the same uncertainty has arrived for the "skilled", the demand is for exemption. That's the contradiction being pointed out.

Kirun said:

tech workers (as a class, culturally) spent years minimizing or mocking other people's instability

Click to expand...

Is this tech worker class in the room with you right now?

He thinks Silicon Valley was a documentary.

Khane said:

He thinks Silicon Valley was a documentary.

Click to expand...

Well... Some of it sure feels like it.

TJT said:

Are you willfully trying to conflate "project managers" that were useless 20 something cuties that happened to work at a tech company with people who were actually paid to write code and engineer products?

Marketing never gets axed first don't be ridiculous. What generally happens is non-revenue producing product teams are axed completely. If any good engineers happened to be on those teams they'll be hired back quickly. The administrative people there wont be though.

Click to expand...

No, this isn't some confused conflation of PMs, marketers, and engineers. It's pointing out how tech constantly redraws the boundary of legitimacy whenever pressure appears. First it's "anyone can learn to code." Then it's "okay, but only real engineers matter." Then it's "well, only revenue-adjacent engineers matter." Next it'll be "only senior staff with deep tribal knowledge matter." It's all just a new cope as the lines get redrawn.

"Marketing never gets axed first" is also just… demonstrably false. Entire growth, marketing, DX, trust & safety, QA, tooling, and internal platform teams have been wiped in the last few years. Calling them "non-revenue producing" doesn't make them useless, it just reveals how shallow the definition of value becomes under stress.

The "good engineers will be hired back quickly" claim is another comforting myth. Some are. Many aren't. Hiring freezes, down-leveling, visa constraints, location arbitrage, and now AI-assisted productivity all mean fewer seats overall. Reabsorption is not automatic, and pretending it is sounds exactly like manufacturing managers in the 90s insisting skilled workers would "just find something else."

Control said:

Is this tech worker class in the room with you right now?

Click to expand...

Nice deflection tactic. It's what people say when they don't want to engage with structural criticism, so they psychologize it instead. If the critic is "angry," then the critique can be dismissed without being answered. Very Reddit of you, congrats.

There's no imaginary tech worker haunting the room. What's actually present is a familiar historical moment - a profession that built its identity around being indispensable is now insisting that only some of its members were ever real, and that everyone else somehow deserved the floor dropping out. The story has been told before. By journalists. By factory foremen. By middle managers. By every group right before the safety net they assumed was permanent started shrinking.

I actually honestly have no idea what he's arguing for or against at this point. It's just verbal diarrhea

Kirun said:

Nice deflection tactic. It's what people say when they don't want to engage with structural criticism, so they psychologize it instead.

Click to expand...

I didn't mean to deflect; I meant to directly call the thing that you're criticizing imaginary. Can you actually point at anything that shows this happening? Maybe I legitimately missed decades of tech-bros laughing at construction working being fired or something, but I apparently did miss it. With maybe only a handful of exceptions, the tech people that I've known have been pretty humble towards people in other industries.