Tech firms were fighting a war for talent. Now they are waging war on talent

  "In the years immediately following the dot-com meltdown, there was more tech labor than there were tech jobs. That didn’t last long. By 2005, the tech economy had bounced back on its own. After that, the emergence of mobile (a new and lucrative category of tech) plus low interest rate policy by central banks fueled demand for tech. Before the first decade of the century was out, “tech labor scarcity” became an accepted norm."

I'll just add if you lived through that time it did NOT feel like a short amount of time. It felt like a really, reallllly lonnng time.

>For years, tech firms were fighting a war for talent. Now they are waging war on talent.

I this this could be better translated into "For years, tech firms were fighting a war on wages. Now they are waging war on talent because good talent costs more.".

>When labor is difficult to replace, management is hostage to labor

Fully true, salaries went up a lot during COVID and management had to do something. So they get rid of people.

This is kind of similar to what IBM did in the early 80s. Programmers at the time could demand and get any wage if they became individual contractors. IBM lobbied Congress and got a law pass making that illegal just for programmers. That law is still on the books. I was just starting to look into that based upon what people at work where telling me, but the law was passed.

People with better memories from that era could expand or correct me :)

> Standardizing roles, skills and training makes the individual laborer interchangeable. Every employee can be assessed uniformly against a cohort, where the retention calculus is relative performance versus salary. This takes all uncertainty out of future restructuring decisions

When someone wonders why the company creates BS levels with arbitrary requirements that don't map to the way engineering works - it is because of this reason. They want an easy way to stack rank and restructure in perpetuity.

As an example, even though a lot of engineering work is collaborative aka work together else it won't happen, corporate decision-makers detest thinking about employees like this. They want to think that EVERY individual can be stacked against others at a similar role - and they can just pull the bottom x% for their margins and FCF. And that this will have ZERO impact on the production. They sincerely believe this and consultants make out like bandits peddling this exact model.

If this is still difficult to wrap your head around, imagine a basketball team where every player has a different role and they all work together to achieve the mission. Except the CEO has ordered the HR department to stack rank all the players based on points scored - which obviously is going to be different in different positions. It has also suddenly set up the team to not pass the ball even if passing the ball would yield a better outcome for the team.

This is quite a pessimistic article with some sweeping generalizations across tech… it may be true in some places but I disagree that software engineering is at its core fungible (yet)

> Standardizing roles, skills and training makes the individual laborer interchangeable. Every employee can be assessed uniformly against a cohort, where the retention calculus is relative performance versus salary.

The article frames this as a bad thing, but a shift towards standardizing and commoditizing roles isn't necessarily anti-labor—this is one of the major things that unions do, after all.

A workforce where every employee is a snowflake who falls or prospers based on subjective 'feel' of their superiors is one where divide and conquer tactics work well for employers and one where nepotism thrives and meritocracy is effectively impossible.

If roles are defined and standardized and salary bands are known and predictable, that can actually create an environment that is as much easier for employees to navigate as it is for employers. What starts out to benefit one party can actually level the field for everyone.

Very interesting. I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that measures like "return to work" and things like that are basically methods of "soft layoffs" where they basically put up a giant filter that they know will ensure a certain percentage of people will have to quit, or will quit for some convenience reason.

This has a good side. Tech companies were taking most of the talented people from other jobs, making it very hard for those fields. I have taught about six people from different jobs how to do software development. Now I hear about software developers moving into construction or other work. In the past, this would have been hard to imagine.

It’ll be weird to see what happens to all these companies that are mandating returning to office during the next round of lockdowns. I imagine a lot of these companies won’t exist by then.