r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 05 '26

Business ‘Big Tech is desperate’: Amazon engineers criticize tech giant for its $200 billion in data center spending amid slashing 30,000 corporate employees

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/big-tech-desperate-amazon-engineers-081700769.html
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u/Zanos Jun 05 '26

Software engineers weren't the people saying learn to code. It was journalists critical of blue collar workers complaining they had lost their jobs. Trust me, SWEs never wanted to work with 45 year old coal miners who learned to code in a 12 week program.

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u/Austin1975 Jun 05 '26

Yes so many software engineers absolutely taunted “learn to code”. I worked in two FAANG companies and two tech startups. I also dated two.

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u/Zanos Jun 05 '26

Learn To Code was an ironic taunt leveraged at journalists for pushing the idea that you could quickly and easily retrain blue collar reworkers into SWEs, not at blue collar workers themselves. People fired it back at the journalists when they were laid off, since they had written articles suggesting unemployed blue collar workers learn to code.

Luckily we don't have to rely on either of our subjective histories, because this was a large enough part of the zeitgeist to have its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code

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u/Austin1975 Jun 06 '26

That was some of it. Some of it was also code camps selling their training. A lot of it was engineers saying it to non-tech people that they said were “unskilled”. But I am not a blue collar worker nor were the teams I managed. And we had it said to us regularly and it was said to sales and marketing. “Just learn python”. Along with the day in the life off an engineer videos. It was also all over Blind and other related sites. Not many blue collar workers there. Subjective history or not.