This was posted on Monday by the author and didn't manage to cut through the noise on a busy day. Thought I would give it one more chance.
It's a post by the founder/CEO of an edtech company offering courses on software development (where I also work), on the problem of connecting the dots between the software careers that people are looking to get into and the job openings that actually exist in the current market.
A few points that I found noteworthy:
- AI/ML has obviously been the growth field of the decade, but job-seekers' interest in getting into it seems to swamp the available roles.
- The point about fullstack devs getting low-ish compensation was new to me: it's probably because they tend to be jacks-of-all-trades at smaller companies that just pay less.
- Backend dev (the original focus of this company) still pencils out nicely, given what seems to be low interest from job-seekers relative to available roles, which also often pay well.
- It's unclear how or when the tech job market is supposed to correct. We can all feel that it's a broken market, on a fundamental level and to a severe degree; but diagnosing the specific problems is difficult, let alone suggesting fixes.
“If AI doesn’t literally take all the white-collar jobs over the next few years, we won’t just have a stock market bubble to deal with. We’ll have a drought of educated workers.”
Indeed. For me this feels like an “I saw the best minds of my generation” moment.
Perhaps the new "Green Tea" GC will help? It's described as "a parallel marking algorithm that, if not memory-centric, is at least memory-aware, in that it endeavors to process objects close to one another together."
I saw that! I’m definitely interested in trying it out to see if it helps for our use case. Of course, at this point we’ve reduced allocations so much the GC doesn’t have a ton of work to do, unless we slip up somewhere (which has happened). I’ll probably have to intentionally add some allocations in a hot path as a stress test.
What I would absolutely love is a compacting garbage collector, but my understanding is Go can’t add that without breaking backwards compatibility, and so likely will never do that.
Indeed, many such cases. Our society is full of institutions that functioned only because "no one in a position to participate would be shameless enough to abuse it." Then that assumption breaks, and it's ruined for everyone.
It is relevant, though awkward to discuss, that a large share of NIH and NSF funding proposals (and indeed funded projects) are led by researchers who didn't grow up in the US. I wonder if it's in fact a majority.
It’s to pull eyeballs for jobs at YC portfolio companies and to attempt to convince founders to apply to batches. It is their marketing and talent sourcing. It is, arguably, the most valuable contributor of forward looking potential returns (considering most VC investment decisions are statistics and gambling).
I'm always skeptical about "eyeballs" type arguments. If we were talking about millions of people for an advert sure, but most folks here aren't YC participants / won't be and heck most talk about joining a startup as an IC on here is NOT POSITIVE ;)
It's the car commercial dilemma. No one is going to spend 30,60,100k on a whim because a commercial told them too. But the long term idea is to implant that idea of wanting X brand once you are in the market for a car. You can't know what you don't know.
But such effects need to be measured over years, not weeks. So a company won't know until it's too late.
At least Slashdot's participation in modern late stage capitalism was restricted to like, selling banner ads to RedHat, and selling mugs and t-shirts. YC is a whole other ball game.
> modern late stage capitalism ... selling banner ads to RedHat, and selling mugs and t-shirts
If these are the supposed sins of modern late stage capitalism I say let's have more of it and less of the various types of socialism which the entitled always seem to be pushing as a replacement. I'd rather ignore annoying banner ads and refrain from buying merchandising than stand in a line in a street to a shop selling something, anything, no idea what but there's a shop which has something to sell so people stand in line like they used to do in the worker's and farmer's paradise which was to lead the world revolution to the glorious victory of socialism.
I'll even take the entitled brats kvetching about the sins of the economical order which allows them both the means as well as the free time and freedom to do so. They'd be standing in some line to a shop somewhere, no fruitPhone in their pockets and no way to use it even if they had without having the state come down on them for their sins against the glorious revolution if their purported ideal order were to come to pass because the revolution always eats its own.
BTW, I don't consider slavery to be a form of modern late stage capitalism, it is more related to the primitive origins from which the different *-isms arose. Slavery used to be the norm rather than the exception and in some places in the world it still thrives. It is in the much-maligned West where the strongest movements to abolish it were and are to be found.
Wondering is just a visceral reaction to the possible harms that come with all technologies. As with most gut feelings, it’ll soon be forgotten once that cool new shiny doohickey is announced, with a price point of $599.
An interesting bit, on not making it too easy for people to circumvent the borrow checker:
> First, we use a C++ compiler to build gccrs, disabling the borrow-checking pass of the compiler. It is important to ensure borrow-checking cannot be disabled at runtime using a command line flag, as this could have a negative impact on the Rust ecosystem – however, building gccrs without borrow-checking to use it as an intermediate compiler in our bootstrapping process is okay.
In context, those are not shockingly high sums. The real problem seems to be what Woit summarizes in this 2004 (!!) comment on his blog:
> It takes a non-trivial amount of time and effort to absorb new mathematical ideas and by so dominating the mathematical end of particle theory for twenty years, string theory has monopolized the time of the mathematically sophisticated members of the community. It has also quite literally driven out of the field a lot of people who were interested in other sorts of ideas about how to apply mathematics to questions in particle theory.
Well, its not true that people only worked on string theory during these last 20 years: notably Woit himself didn't. That there's loads of people in Brazil, Russia (or frankly any place except Princeton and IAS) trying weird approaches sums up to nothing in his telling.
Honestly, I get the impression that what Woit is really upset about is that people like his idol Witten didn't switch to work on his ideas, because only the genius of "towering intellects" like Witten's could solve this very hard problem. 0
Let’s wait and see what the vulnerability is. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the pitfalls of C. But if it does, expect to read a lot more comments like this.
This was posted on Monday by the author and didn't manage to cut through the noise on a busy day. Thought I would give it one more chance.
It's a post by the founder/CEO of an edtech company offering courses on software development (where I also work), on the problem of connecting the dots between the software careers that people are looking to get into and the job openings that actually exist in the current market.
A few points that I found noteworthy:
- AI/ML has obviously been the growth field of the decade, but job-seekers' interest in getting into it seems to swamp the available roles.
- The point about fullstack devs getting low-ish compensation was new to me: it's probably because they tend to be jacks-of-all-trades at smaller companies that just pay less.
- Backend dev (the original focus of this company) still pencils out nicely, given what seems to be low interest from job-seekers relative to available roles, which also often pay well.
- It's unclear how or when the tech job market is supposed to correct. We can all feel that it's a broken market, on a fundamental level and to a severe degree; but diagnosing the specific problems is difficult, let alone suggesting fixes.
Direct link to the GitHub repo with the data that was gathered and analyzed for the post: https://github.com/bootdotdev/jobdata-november-2025