Back when I learned to code in the early 1980’s people who knew how to code were, in terms of the general population, kinda rare.
About 70% of the class who tried a Computer Science Major washed out because of the math and science involved and ending up with a job that was worth about $24K (the equivalent of $66K today) was par or even below par for the course. We were considered a BFD and had a pretty high opinion of ourselves.
Well after a while I decided I’d rather do other things than code and so I did but while I stepped away from my college major people poured into the industry, computers shrank in size and increased in power exponentially.
When I was looking to get back in the industry it seemed that everyone and their mother knew how to code and had been doing it in languages I had never seen before to the point where old Fortran coders like me in their late 40’s or early 50’s weren’t worth the investment when you could get a kid with now wife and family attachments for less money right out of college with all the new stuff fresh in their heads.
And that in a round about way brings us to the current nonsense at Twitter.
All these kids at Twitter seem to have a really inflated sense of self, not all that surprising given the way public education took a turn in the last few decades but they have in effect forgotten the reality of things which is namely this:
The pool of competent programmers has grown even faster than the processing power of computers over the last 40 years and you don’t have to be one of the richest men in the world to be able to tap into that pool and find a few thousand programmers if you need them.
Furthermore when you are one of the world’s richest men you can easily tap into a pool that extends far beyond America, let alone the blue areas of America.
Put simply while the supposedly bright people at Twitter who are considering leaving may have forgotten the laws of supply and demand Elon Musk hasn’t and if they think Twitter is suddenly going to go black because a bunch of them, even the majority of them choose to leave, then frankly their too stupid to be working at any company Musk owns.
I suspect those who choose to come aboard Twitter to replace these narcissists will be well rewarded for working hard and I suspect those who stay and choose to work hard will be even better rewarded.
This is the chance of a lifetime for a young programmer and if I was younger I’d consider it myself.
As for those leaving given the layoffs going on around the nation in the Biden economy I wish you the best of luck, you’ll need it.
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data architecture is the name of the game a Twitter … coding is a distant second to keeping Twitter up and running … its huge database of messages with some interesting filters and permissions … its not rocket science and once it works, it KEEPS working …
As @dorsai mentions the real issue will be trying to interpret what I am going to guess is just krap code documentation and poor code version change management.
Don’t even start with the bloat code and holy error correction …..
Don’t care if the kid did grad top of stanford/CIT, xe prob spent more time on pronoun courses than algorithm review
“of them choose to leave, then frankly their too stupid to be”
^^^
They’re! smh
Any of these snowflakes can tell you that the economy is booming thanks to Biden’s leadership. Their futures are so bright they have to wear shades.
I wonder what the average coding contribution was of those who were let go. I will bet many of them never coded a line (not that coding is everything). So add how many test cases executed, how many code reviews executed etc.
I’m a systems/infrastructure engineer w/about 24 years in IT and I’ve worked “big iron” exclusively for the past 12 years. Here in S Florida we have a great market for IT-types; I get at least 4 calls from headhunters a week. But I’d be shaking in my boots if I worked in IT in SF; or even CA. Maybe these kids quitting Twitter know something I don’t know but from my perspective I think they are about to really get a lesson in algebra thanks to the “F around/ Find Out” curve.
Heh- to carry the analogy- setting a variable to 0 to solve a quadratic equation is a hell of a thing to do in a recession when the variable happens to be “i” for Income.
I don’t have any illwill towards them….but if I understand the reports most of those quitting aren’t fellow codemonkeys-they’re fuzzy-skills graduates. I have no idea what kind of job outside of woke-world you get with a degree in women’s studies or English lit after you’ve spent your twenties working as a “Director of Niceness” or a content censor- whatever value that degree may have had for a 22-yr old entering the job market ready to be trained has certainly evaporated after several years in a truly niche position in an extremely niche company.
A person with that flimsy a resume would never be invited for an interview in my engineering dept; unless we needed a receptionist or something.
And I’m not sure any receptionists earn 6 figures anywhere.
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