Non-profits closing means there is a financial reason; were there grants monies that ran out? Did another "women in STEM" non-profit get corporate sponsorship instead? The article doesn't say.
Given the layoffs of 2022-ongoing, labor costs in tech are dropping enough that interested parties aren't incentivized to increase the supply of labor further.
wut? Any one creating anything is DELIBERATELY driving price of that thing down for you I guess.
Unless they’re a union.
If you could breathe on a keyboard, you could land a high-paying job.
Demand was that high.
That era of tech minted way, way, way more millionaires on average.
To the managerial class, tech people used to be literal wizards conjuring the impossible and now we're regular commoditized office labor like any other.
Tech and people versed in it were not common (to people outside tech) and so the high salaries would reflect that. Now is not the case. It was always going to be temporary. As people become acquainted with tech people, the magic vanishes, you see the code behind the pixels. At the same time, tech people themselves did cause this by making tech easier to understand and manipulate.
It's like a magician, the first few times, it is enticing and mysterious but after a while it becomes ordinary. Tech wizards are just like that.
Todays SWEs tend to know far less about how computers operate and how protocols work than in the old days.
The same kind of "I just love to code" tech wizard that builds an amazing service/library/product, overworks itself while letting big companies extract max value out of it and contribute nothing or extremely little to the open source world.
Every day I think of the Homebrew creator who got rejected by the company that uses his software daily. This should be in the mind of every dev imo.
Tech wizards wrote their fate on code, compiled it and served it to the market. This is the result
To be fair, he does not come across as the kind of person you would want to work with, no matter what kind of software he is able to produce. Once hired, others actually have to work with him in such companies. In fact, Apple did end up hiring him soon after said rejection but quickly determined he wasn't a good fit there either. No wizard is worth having by your side if they make your life miserable.
Sure, there is a slim chance that Google could have found the right fit for him in the end with the right accommodations[1], but why take the risk[2] when there are others lined up that are far less risky?
Of course there are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds...
[1] That would have to be invented. Now you are also relying on the implementer at Google, which brings great risk on the employer getting things right even if the worker somehow magically came risk-free.
[2] Especially when the tests designed to try and estimate that risk raised red flags.
Why does this surprise you? Google didn’t even employ the chefs that made the food consumed by the employees daily either.
Just because you made a thing that was useful doesn’t mean you have the skills that Google is looking for.
Homebrew was very useful because Mac osx didn’t have a good package ecosystem for one-liner installs. The tech behind it though wasn’t particularly unique or groundbreaking. So the author’s skill here was finding a market with unmet demand for a free package manager. That’s not what Google was looking for.
In a really condensed and simplified version: Big money was placing $50-100MM bets everywhere because the house was lending for basically free, and you only need a few hits to come out on top.
But now that money is expensive again, they game has been crashing down.
Throwing water out of boats do not make it more buoyant.
The people running it are getting paid to run it. It's a job. There are few people who do charity for charity but for most people I met working for non-profits, it was just a job for them. Doesn't mean they didn't love their work or did their best but at the end of the day they need a pay check like everybody else.
It's good when a profit-driven industry decides to stop trying to cut expenses.
I don't think that's the reason (it is a side effect though). What makes you think that?
This is 100% true in practice, so you're absolutely correct here. I just hope that we're in agreement that this is a bad state of affairs if businesses have completely written off doing the right thing in favor of profit 100% of the time.
As a community of entrepreneurs, we should aim higher. If this is the only reason that tech companies invest in gender equality, then we need to find better advocates, or at least come prepared to counter the exploitation the current advocates have in mind.
> > That there are no altruistic actions by a business [...] This is 100% true
Maybe 99% of the time. But sure, the altruistic businesses are usually the first to shutter. Reality is cruel and very few entrepreneurs are so well off they can bleed money for their cause. Those kinds of people lobby policy instead of being customer facing.
>As a community of entrepreneurs, we should aim higher. If this is the only reason that tech companies invest in gender equality, then we need to find better advocates,
best of luck. The mix of having the massive funds for scale, incentive and/or empathy for interest, and altruism to keep the company honest for such an initiative seems to be a unicorn these days.
If things play out the way I expect, I hope these businesses learn the hard way that doing the wrong thing isn't always profitable, or survivable if you side with Nazis.
If he gets re-elected, it might not be only 4 years.
Right now, with 6% interest rates? Nobody wants to make money that badly. But it won't be that way forever.
However, if you can create 10 new engineers that didn't exist before, then they will be incentivized to fall in line with $Y as well, lowering the unit cost of labour and making adding 10 more engineers to achieve $2X in return much more appealing. The keeping of the price of labour down is exactly why businesses were willing to make such investments.
Anyway, the way we increase efficiency is by automating more things. 50 years ago, you had to have a person come to your house to collect letters from you, then they would be mailed across the country, and another person would deliver it to the recipient. Now we have email, and you can just send someone a letter with no other humans in the loop. That's the efficiency increase that engineering brings, and even if we can't envision what we're going to do tomorrow, it will continue. What that means is that we will always need more engineers, and the scope of our role will increase faster than we make more humans to be engineers.
c. 2010's, there's many reasons but the relevant one here is the DEI initaitves. You get tax breaks for diversity, you will hire the right people even if they just sit there. very dishonest, but at least they compensate well. Same logic, if 2x engineers only operate at 0.8x capacity but you save almost half your revenue from not paying taxes, the decision is obvious.
But as you said, we're in the 20's, market is captured, and free money is gone. That era of hoarding technical talent like trading cards is over