[DISCUSSION] Tariffs

Mid-level Software Engineer at Taro Community21 days ago

Been seeing a lot of discourse on tariffs. As anyone else i am afraid about job searching, security, and everything else

What are people's speculation on this year? what is expected? what is likely?

Are we going to go into another recession?

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Discussion

(4 comments)

11
Rahul Pandey
•Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
20 days ago
Bull case for the tech industry: Tariffs are imposed on physical goods, so companies that sell primarily digital goods will be less impacted.

Bear case for the tech industry: Tech doesn't live in a bubble, and the advertisers for the FAANG companies are largely non-tech. That's why we've seen steep losses for Meta, Google, Reddit, etc. And of course, companies like Nvidia will be heavily impacted on imports.

The fear of a bad economy is all that matters, and the fear will push companies to conduct layoffs or pause hiring.
- 1
  Alex Chiou
  •Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
  18 days ago
  The EU is also considering a digital tariff where if a EU company buys Google search ads for instance, there would be a tax placed on it.
11
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
16 days ago
Trump just announced a 90-day pause on the tariffs, so idk wtf is going on anymore...

Ugh, everything is so unpredictable now. One day it's this, one day it's that, another day it's potato.

This video perfectly sums up the economy right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hshkdneE8o

What I do know is that companies tend go conservative turtle-mode in times of economic uncertainty, so expect a lot more layoffs, stack ranking, PIPs, constrained hiring, etc. Be an engineer that does great work, has a deep network full of people willing to fight for them, and takes care of their loved ones.
4
Elliot Kang
•AI/ML Eng @ Series C startup
16 days ago
I have a pretty bearish take.

Tech Layoffs

This is probably the new normal for the tech industry. Its gone back to being ultra competitive, as it should be. $1M salaries don't come for free.

Eventually, this will just shake out all the developers who only thrive when the markets are good.

Job Searching

Branding oneself solely based on big company prestige will not help anyone. Why? Because ten thousand people branding themselves as "mid-level ex-FAANG SWE" are competing for the same jobs.

They'll need something extra, like side projects or open-source.

AI Coding Tools/Productivity

Eh. The issue with AI coding tools is that they're appealing to two distributions of SWEs:

mediocre engineers who just need really basic things done

amazingly productive engineers who can prompt the LLM to do exactly what they want

Mediocre engineers don't know the difference between quality and slop.

The top SWEs know what they want at such a granular level that the LLM has all the necessary context to output the right answer.

So eventually we'll end up with the mediocre engineers staying mediocre and the 10x engineers will become 100x.

Overall

Tech is becoming hyper-competitive and it's going to be really hard for people to compete. But if you're top-tier, then you'll make even more money.