Book Club 8/2024: Labor

2 September 2024 4 Minutes History Industry

Using Labor Day as an excuse to wonder about some recent trends in the industry

Happy Labor Day to those in the US! This is the August Book Club but I'm sending it out a couple days late to coincide with Labor Day. I don't have a central thesis to focus on, but I want to take a look into how our industry is doing. This involves matters of labor, hence the connection.

The industry feels like it's in a very interesting state since COVID, and there's some data to support this. The overarching sentiment I get - what I think the bulk of the focus is on - is that the industry has contracted slightly after the pandemic. I think something of the sort would be inevitable, as the spending patterns that fueled the huge intake in personnel during the pandemic wouldn't have been sustainable. Another possible inevitability is the fall in demand in lower-skilled engineers - particularly with the pool of jobs contracting it seems obvious that corporations would want "the most bang for their buck" with the engineers they retain and later hire on.

This will reverse again at some point. It was true that before COVID we needed to add a huge number of software engineering jobs; the demand was very high. That demand has not disappeared. Rather, it's more likely that the spending patterns of the larger corporations have changed that we see this result. That said, I have a worry here. One way that so many engineers were hired during the pandemic was the onboarding of a record number of junior engineers, and it's this group which is disproportionately laid off. Are these folks landing on their feet within the industry or are they abandoning it? I have no data here.

Something else which has contracted, much to my disappointment, is conferences. I know plenty of us dislike conferences; I am not one. I have always seen a huge value in independent conferences, particularly local ones. Earlier this year I lamented the end of the Twin Cities Code Camp, and one year ago I attended the final Strange Loop. There are (some) others to fill the voids left by the closure of these and other conferences, but the landscape is lesser than it was a decade ago.

I'm a strong advocate for working from home and allowing flexible hours. I've worked from home for my entire career (well before the pandemic) and I've resolved that I always will. There's no doubt that working from home does reduce the amount of and opportunities for contact with others, so I also feel strongly that a healthy home work routine involves taking advantage of frequent opportunities like conferences and meetups.

To continue a somewhat bleak outlook, the recent StackOverflow developer survey reports that only 20% of us are "happy" at work. I do think this is the first time they measured this, so I'm skeptical to read into it too much, but my off-the-cuff reaction would be that this number is short of where I would hope we would all want it to be. I don't think that a 20% happy rate today portends a happy future in the industry.

This is all not in service of trying to paint a narrative that the industry is in a bad way. It certainly is in some respects, but that's not new and it's not unique to our industry. There are always better days ahead if we want there to be, and the progress that the industry has made to this point is incredible. Calling out the negative aspects and working to improve those is the best way to move forward.

Here's a dump of a bunch of Primeagen videos and some others: