...and the company says "fine, we'll replace you with AI / wanted a layoff anyway".
Large companies have made it abundantly clear that they are sociopathic entities that consider nothing but profit. They will put on a mask and smile and do the absolute minimum to appear to care about you and retain valuable employees but it's all a show.
It is within the best interests of individual engineers to do the same.
I think that it was pitched at sales, but maybe could be applied to ENG.
The thinking was - if you have X sized market, you price in Y for your staff and you take Z for the profit - as the price of your staff increase, if the size of the market, or your share of it, does not increase, your profit decreases.
So it makes sense (the article argued) to drop the senior staff, and bring in the lower paid, but almost as good, intermediates - the profit stays the same.
It never ceases to amaze me that the owner class is so continually shocked that the people who build the value that the owners leverage into growing their fortune might suddenly realize their value.
The entitlement is baked deep into the mindset that there are people who work and people who profit.
They all got 25% more after leaving. And this is in the Netherlands, where pay is already kind of low. What was even weirder was that this company is a F500 company and the people that left, they left for all kinds of organizations (small and large) and still got paid more.
That includes me by the way. I was doing 4 roles (data analyst, pentester, software engineer through web development, AI stuff + data engineering and project manager). It was a lot of fun though. But it paid decisively mediocre.
Currently going to a fun job that pays way better.
Likewise, if people on your team get better at their jobs and you don't want them to leave, you also have to pay them more.
You don't pay 2x untill you are forced to (eg plumber is the only game on town) not because you are so enlightened.
So the mistakes being made here are:
1. You think you're irreplaceable. You're not. "But--". "--Nope";
2. You think it's more expensive to replace you. Possibly but irrelvant. You see, if they give you a 40% raise, there now might be 10 or 100 other people who will demand a 40% raise. It's cheaper overall not to give you that raise.
This comes up all the time when landlords lose good tenants by raising rents $100-200/month. Tenants will rightly point out that they'll lose more with the vacancy period than they'll get from $100-200/month. Also irrelevant. The landlord will often have 10 or 100 or 1000 or 10,000 units. They give a $200 increase to all of them and not all of them are moving. The increased income from those who don't will exceed the losses from those who move.
Plus, the $200/month extra increases the property value. Someone may lend against that increased value to buy even more units;
3. Ultimately any enterprise can only increase profits by raising prices or lowering costs, particularly wages. Suppressing wages becomes the entire business of the company. That's what permanent layoffs culture is for (to get more unpaid work on those that remain and to stop them asking for raises). That's what AI is for. Supressing wages is THE product for AI.
Remember there's a fundamental imbalance here. If a company loses a particular employee, most likely they either won't notice (at least for awhile) or they'll simply be temporarily inconvenienced.
What happens if you don't have a job? You might lose your house, your car, your health insurance, your childrens' school and so on.
The stakes for you are so much higher so in any difficult hiring market, you will be squeezed.
https://www.legalandgeneral.com/insurance/business-protectio...
I don't know if you simply haven't worked with people who are unreplaceable or what, but I assure you with genuine confidence that there are people who cannot be replaced without massive disruption and undesirable risk.
Furthermore, if the source of your value and wealth is that you have an app, what does it mean when anyone can easily build an app?
One day we might see a UI toolkit (so many of our modern problems are because our UI toolkits suck; my hot take) with deep AI integration and then apps will just be some microservices on the backend and the AI UI on the front that responds to natural speech and can adjust its display however the user requests.
The remainder of the problems are caused by overly complex deployment/hosting setups. Compiling a binary from source looks like a breeze by comparison.
Except where I live there's a glut of people wanting any job they can find—for a variety of reasons ranging from high levels of immigration to layoffs in the last two years—and willing to accept discount rates because the alternative is being unemployed for another 3 months (New Zealand).
Both the employer and employee know this. So the employee is either foolish or risky enough for asking and gets turned down, or they do actually leave and the employer can hire a new senior engineer at below market rates to accommodate the specific learning they have to do for their new role.
End of story.
It sounds like what you're saying is actually that the last engineer was being paid above-market, because the price that employers are paying new employees is literally the market rate, seeing as it's the rate in the literal market.
Market rate for developers has either stagnated generally or depending on the role dropped as hundreds of applicants are willing to undercut each other on what constitutes an acceptable pay check.
But most employers don't go around reducing previously-hired people's salaries for a variety of reasons.
The main reason being that it's illegal in NZ. The employee would have to agree.
I want to drill this into anyone that throws the word "below market" or "above market" around.
If a company pays below-market, it won't be able to hire anyone. Either the role will remain unfilled, or the employer will have to compromise on experience.
If someone is claiming to be paid below-market but the company can hire their replacement, then they're not being truthful.
Money doesn't cleanly convert into time.
Having juniors and mid-levels is about being able to promote an existing mid-level that knows the team and the system, with zero downtime. It's much easier to replace a junior than a senior because of the lower expectations and risk.
Furthermore, a lot of companies are struggling to hire right now because the market conditions creates a flood of applications and its quite hard to discern who's a waste of time or not which leads to hiring processes taking longer.
Yeah but the point of this post is that it makes an assumption that your company doesn't have mid-levels or juniors.
I think I see the problem here.
Everyone who starts to code after AI has a problem: it's hard to believe you went through the pain and frustration that people often think is required to become a senior engineer. Even if you did, you are in a lemon market with quite a few people who took the shortcut in college. Much better to hire a guy who learned before they could cheat, and then give him the tools to replace the juniors.
Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?
Personally I rate them really really highly. They are always fascinating to talk to. But they also compete with newer cohorts who mature.
> Will new developers know/understand what they don't know, or will the new state of things simply become normalized?
Yes because a 32 year old guy with 10 years of experience who got given AI recently is going to be around for an awful long time reminding everyone that he has something the younger ones don't have.
Right... the alternative is to let the senior engineer go, some work gets reshuffled a bit between other senior engineers, and lowest-priority work is delayed until they hire a new senior engineer.
It's not that the company is held hostage by the senior engineer, sheesh.
> you don’t have options. You pay the 40%, or you lose the person and spend six months (and a recruiter’s fee) trying to find a replacement at market rate, which is probably even higher.
Huh? A replacement engineer is "probably" even more than 140% of what you're currently paying? Then your company has a whole other problem which is that it is criminally underpaying its engineers.
Nothing about this post makes any sense. It's not how companies, employees, or the labor market work.
And the AI that is making it easier for engineers to handle so much more engineering, also makes it easier for a new engineer to take over. They literally just sit down and prompt the AI to start explaining how the current system is set up.
1. Declare AI "the future" and mandate its use by all employees.
2. Hire college grads who have no idea how to code without AI.
3. Start PIPing problem seniors for not being "AI-first" enough. Great way to mask the ageism you are doubtless committing.
Certainly from a raw game theory kind of analysis, an engineer who can monopolize information and has gained authoritative understanding of the design can be crazy powerful, for better or for worse. If this agent optimizes for good salary, lowish effort and high stability... yes I can imagine a senior engineer who fits the name in rate of technical output, not only pecking order order.
magicstefanos•1h ago