I also noticed it takes way more time to index sites.
When I moved bitecode.substack.com to https://bitecode.dev, I submitted the sitemap to google and was surprised that it took almost a week to even show a single page as indexed.
This used to be a couple of hours to a coupled of days.
So something definitely changed, but as usual we can only speculate until a googler come in this thread.
Just more spam and scams than they can handle. 0.5% of all the shit on the Internet is real content. And that stat is from 2015.
Their own fault for monetizing every imaginable search query.
It has provided the incentive to ever spammer and scammer on the planet to mass produce copious amount fake interlinking pages massively larger than actual Internet.
Vernor Vinge was wrong about humanity's vile offspring being stock trading bots, and the sci-fi authors were wrong about Grey Goo being a nanobot scenario. We're awash in grey goo vile offspring right now, consuming resources at an increasing rate and turning everything bad - and it's information; SEO spam and content farms and LLM waffle.
Pretty soon the only way to live will be an Encyclopaedia, text books, and cookbooks from before 2010.
Its not a static world. Things are always changing. I have some faith Google(the ad tech part) will start crumbling. Chat GPT has given them a jolt. And there are more jolts to come. Not less. From the Regulators. From the advertisers who know most of the views they get are from bots or totally worthless. And that they don't need to be spending what they are spending.
I'm not sure this fixes anything. GPT/LLM will be able to produce monumental amounts of reasonable sounding bullshit. Google may crumble and fail, but all we'll be left with is small islands of sanctuary in an ocean of bullshit.
Google contributes to the bullshit explosion by incentivizing ppl to game the rankings and results. Same with Facebooks newsfeed. And everyone else that relies on Ads to provide their "free" services. Everyone is gaming these services cause there is money to be made if u end up at the top. Including HN. The failed assumption being whatever is in top = quality. These solutions haven't solved the Info Explosion problem. They have made it worse.
Ironically the free services like search ranking/news feed/like counting etc where the initial half thought out response to the info/content explosion that the early internet produced. They just forgot that was their goal and changed the goal post from getting a handle over info explosion to making everything about rewarding attention capture/maximising engagement and other useless shit in that contributes further info pollution.
So when google/fb etc start crumbling, incentives for the spammers and scammer will start dropping too.
This seems to be a naive point of view. Google is a giant piece of shit, but to think they are the only piece of shit is a failure of imagination at the highest order.
The billions google controlls don't disappear if google does. Instead every scammer starts looking for new markets to spread spam in. And this is just marketing, we're not even talking about politics and the firehose of falsehood.
The problem may not be solvable which is concerning as we are at risk of drowning in bullshit.
I not denying that or saying everything is going to change in an instant. I am saying we are past the point, where Google and the Attention Economy they raised, keeps running the way it did in the last 20 years. We are going to see flat revenues, more layoffs, less data centers getting built, less "free services", multiple large countries bringing out legislation on how personal data, algos can be used, more huge fines etc There is even a UN report released this year talking about how the Attention Economy should really work covering issues on the social, political, ethical and cal and economic front. On top of it the Telcos worldwide are all in huge debt. they have been trapped in a cycle building/upgrading the pipes on the belief that all the data flowing is oil. But if its all sewage then how long does the cycle run? Its going to break down.
The attention economy is the old news now... welcome to the intimacy economy brought to you by AI.
And data was the oil... it was saved in lakes and used build the electronic minds we have now created, and those electronic minds are going to work as nuclear reactors that will process the data we now create, and the data they will create as they are embodied and put into the world. It is going to break down, but not in the way we all go back to a disconnected world without surveillance capitalism, no, the future is going to be far worse than you can imagine when it comes to that.
>Telcos worldwide are all in huge debt.
This has nothing really do to with the economics of selling data, this has to do with companies taking out far larger loans than they needed and using it to enrich their shareholders.
This comment is now the top and only search result for "but as usual we can only speculate until a googler come in this thread." minutes after you posted it. I don't think freshness of the index is a criticism you can credibly use against Google.
And yet, France is the country with the most nuclear-generated energy, despite having a tons of state regulation and social push-back to prevent companies to privatize gains and socialize losses.
In fact, water, electricity, the road and internet have one of the best cost/quality ratio have ever seen in the entire world, and I traveled a lot.
France is not a great place to make business, but the quality of life is fantastic.
Meanwhile, the US as a terrible health care system, they have water and electricity scandals every years, your internet has awful value (especially in the silicon valley, talk about irony) and roads are hit or miss.
So yes, the USA are a great place to do business, but touting it has the only way to not be stuck on 1800s technology is a joke.
They are the ones having tasteless tomatoes and $800 insulin, things that were cheap and good less than a century ago.
They are the ones with power outages and polluted water.
We had a war at our border, cutting energy supplies, and last winter, my power wasn't cut even once.
They get a strong winter or summer and their grid dies, plus the public pays the bill.
>France is not a great place to make business, but the quality of life is fantastic.
France is a privileged country from the geopolitical point of view.
I am from Spain, and if you compare it with it has much more water flows, most of the country is plain and easy and cheap to transport things by rail or rivers(without so much mountains in the middle), the soil is rich and is irrigated, and it is in the centre of Europe. It have access to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. It has warn weather.
I also have traveled a lot. Could you compare France with Morocco or Lybia? China? Russia?
The only country that I personally know that is as privileged as France in the world geopolitically is Argentina. Argentina is richer than France, the political system has lots of similarities and it is an absolute mess.
Other things that you mention has not so much to do with the political system but with History. E.g French, Italian or Spanish people love to eat well, good food, as part of our culture, while anglo saxons in general do not consider eating healthy a priority.
IMHO the political system is France is sh^t, with other system they would be much wealthier. It is very centralised so Paris is very different from the rest of the country. Bureaucracy is so high (bureau is a French word).
What saves France is competition with other systems in Europe when they do crazy stuff like putting a 75% tax on the rich, people can move easily to neighbour countries and their politicians reconsider things.
> The only country that I personally know that is as privileged as France in the world geopolitically is Argentina. Argentina is richer than France, the political system has lots of similarities and it is an absolute mess.
What. Argentina has inflation >100% per year, their currency has a thriving black market to be useable at all, many people stockpile dollars in their homes because the banks won’t give it back, they block exports, etc.
They’re not more geopolitically privileged than the United States, for one, which has the global reserve currency.
> Bureaucracy is so high (bureau is a French word).
~30% of English has roots in French so I don’t think this is relevant. That includes words like legume, but they don’t hold a special place in the nut or vegetable markets. (For fun historical reasons, what English calls legumes is largely associated with nuts but the French word refers to vegetables. This is also true of prune/plum and grape/raisin.)
> The only country that I personally know that is as privileged as France in the world geopolitically is Argentina. Argentina is richer than France, the political system has lots of similarities and it is an absolute mess.
What. Argentina has inflation >100% per year, their currency has a thriving black market to be useable at all, many people stockpile dollars in their homes because the banks won’t give it back, they block exports, etc.
They’re not more geopolitically privileged than the United States, for one, which has the global reserve currency.
> Bureaucracy is so high (bureau is a French word).
~30% of English has roots in French so I don’t think this is relevant. That includes words like legume, but they don’t hold a special place in the nut or vegetable markets. (For fun historical reasons, what English calls legumes is largely associated with nuts but the French word refers to vegetables.)
Can't agree here, France has cca 2x GDP of Argentina, and TBH Argentina is a typical South America mess, could be worse than some neighbors, could be better (ie Chile).
As much as I like bashing France for some weird aspects of their mentality and correspondingly not reaching a fraction of the potential its population has (from somebody living in Switzerland this is painfully obvious anytime I visit, which I do constantly, but Spain doesn't fare better in my eyes in this, in contrary), it is a progressive nation, modern, labor force is smart and effective so they don't need to pull overtimes just to match expectations, relatively (or absolutely if considered globally) rich, stable, with astonishingly beautiful nature - no wonder its year after year the most visited country in the world by tourists. Poor don't just bow down and work endlessly barely surviving, destroying their lives to support rich classes, chasing some pipe dream of emerging as a winner of some absurd rat race if you work yourself to death, quality of life looks different to them (and I agree 100% here, life is too short for that crap).
But yes for opening business its outright horrible place, state is your enemy and if you are above median income, they go after your money without even trying to hide it or act fairly. Somebody has to sponsor that western Europe communism and its not going to be poor burning cars on barricades or blocking roads or city centers. But these are rather just very visible details, overall what I wrote above stands.
A bit unrelated since the article is more about stylistic repetition, but I had a hard time using repetition in my writings after decades of school drilling into my that it was a bad thing.
Yet in teaching, repetition is not just acceptable, it's necessary.
You need to say the same thing over and over again for it to stick.
And still, you'll note people will have missed half of it.
So it turns out repetition is like everything: whether it's good or bad is highly contextual.
> after decades of school drilling into my that it was a bad thing.
I'd argue that's just school teaching bad style. They're doing it because they are optimising for something else: exposing students to wider vocabulary.
To write well, call a spade a spade. To show off how many words you know, call it a spade the first time, shovel the next, digging device the third time, then earth moving tool, substrate projector, historic agricultural staple, etc. School optimises for the latter.
If you feel like your vocabulary is sufficient, forget everything school taught you. Write simply. A spade is a spade.
I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks, but I'm guessing most of them had never being involved in the hiring process.
In fact, if you sum up all the recommendations of people online about recruitment, you can't hire anybody, because every single move is something you should not do according to one of the self-proclaimed new expert.
Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. We are very lucky we are a hot commodity on the market, because I tell you, no other professionals get a pass for a tenth of the things we claim we are entitled too.
And yet developers go through the most ludicrous interviewing processes, having to prove time and time again that they have enough technical skills, while having 10 years of experience in their CV :^)
I regularly gets paid by my clients to help them filter out candidates because they don't feel they have the technical skill to do so or their team is too busy coding something to be available for anything else than than validating the last batch.
One thing that comes over and over again is how much most candidates suck at programming. There are a huge quantity of people that are terrible at coding that will apply to your senior dev $200k job offer.
They all have a great CV, and they cheat at everything: fake interviews with a look-alike, using chatgpt or indian services to solve programming tests are not uncommon.
Last year, I had one former trader applying for a python job with a perfect resume, a stellar homework result, and who was claiming he likes "putting some good 10 hours of coding". First, there are maybe a 100 people in my country that can focus 10 hours in a row on code, and they won't apply for those clients. Second, the live coding review showed that he struggled to even create a basic virtualenv.
Last month I created a test that I knew had one question that ChatGPT got wrong. 2 candidates gave me the GPT answer last week.
So companies are desperate and try sieves after sieves, hoping to separate gold from mud. And they have limited time and resources to do so.
Of course the hiring process sucks. Even if they knew what they were doing, and most of them are not, it would suck.
Now don't get me wrong, it's nice the power balance is shitfing toward the workers for once, but hoping the other side won't react is just naive.
If you enjoy technical stuff and you want a job doing it every day, what’s wrong with doing it during an interview? I’ve never quite understood the complaints about having to prove technical skills in an interview.
CVs don’t prove anything about skills, even when they’re 100% truthful, and your 10 years is definitely different from my 10 years. Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right? How else would you do that aside from testing?
I think the most common complaint is that the interviews don't test technical skills, they test things that look like they're adjacent to technical skills but aren't the kind of work that you'd actually be doing.
- Many interview coding problems are very unlike what we have had to do in our daily tasks, and very unlike what will be required if we get the job.
- If the company is trying to avoid that problem by making the coding part of the interview working on actual problems they're having, then that means the interviewee is giving the company work for free. (Unless the company pays for it, but that's vanishingly rare.)
- Even if they manage to thread the needle and have the coding part of the interview be relevant to the job, but not actually getting free work out of candidates, it's very hard to make it representative of the environment in which the candidates are used to or will be working. It's time-limited, very high pressure, with unfamiliar tools, often without the ability to consult online sources—or they make it a take-home assignment, and run the risk of having the candidates just get someone else to do it for them.
- Most other types of jobs don't require you to prove your skills. They read your resume, they take it at face value, they check your references, and if it turns out you lied on your resume and got the job, you get fired. ...Or they don't do their due diligence, and end up with terrible employees.
The first two items there contradict each other. What’s an employer to do? This list of problems only reflects the point of view of a relatively inexperienced candidate who doesn’t like interviews, it’s not a list of problems that companies have, or that people with strong skills and experience have.
It’s an assumption to expect interviews need to reflect the work on the job or match daily tasks. Interviews are the employer trying to select the best candidate for an uncertain future, not mimic the drudgery of a day in the life at work. If I’m interviewing, I don’t want to know if you can code a specific task today, I want to know how well you can adapt to changing roles, whether you’re more extroverted lead material, or introverted and wicked smart or prolific, whether you’re ambitious or happy laying low. I’m much more interested in broad potential more than ability to perform technical tasks.
Isn’t the last item on your list a good reason to do some due diligence by checking whether people can code in practice before going through the expensive process of hiring them and having them fail and then having to try again with someone else? I haven’t seen a lot of outright lying on resumes, but I’ve seen a ton of overconfidence in one’s relative skill, I’ve seen people who are great on paper but duds in practice, but more than those I’ve see a lot of people who don’t communicate well, don’t get along well on a team, have bad attitudes, cover up mistakes instead of learning or admitting skill gaps, etc.
I don’t know what it means to claim most jobs don’t require proving skills. Most jobs are entry-level minimum-wage jobs. Anyone in the arts is used to constantly proving their skills via auditions, critiques, performances, etc. Doctors have it way worse with low paid grueling residency. We’re talking about high paid programmers where hiring the wrong person is an expensive mistake and can damage team productivity.
Yes, correct. You and I both left out nearly all job types. You’re making sweeping generic claims about all jobs without any specific evidence. And I still don’t really see a clear problem or any suggestion for an alternative. The point you didn’t address here is that programmers are paid more than accountants, museum curators, and much more than burger-flippers. If you want a high paying job coding, and it typically requires doing just a tiny bit of live coding, why not spend time practicing instead of complaining? Another thing you haven’t addressed is that there are a lot of stories of programmers faking their way through job interviews. I don’t know how often it actually happens, but kids trying to game the system to get high paying jobs seems to be an actual problem, whereas statistically nobody is trying to fake their way into a museum curating job.
Do you consider certifications and qualifications to be a pre-hiring demonstration of skills? Many many jobs require these. Programming jobs sometimes require them, and those jobs are less likely to ask for on-the-spot programming during interviews. Not all programming jobs ask for live-coding, you shouldn’t assume they all do. Do you consider an interview to be a demonstration of skill? All the jobs you listed require interviews where you have to talk in technical detail about what you’ve done.
Speaking of outliers, there are almost no museum curating jobs, and they have to typically do a master’s degree and then spend years doing intern style work, perhaps similar to a doctor’s residency. Then after all that, the median salary is less than half of the median programmer’s salary. Accountants and Baskin Robbins managers also make less than programmers on average, and the sum total of jobs available in all three jobs you just listed is relatively small compared to doctors and artists - in the US (for example) there are ~1.5M accountants, less than 10k curators, and just over 2k Baskin Robbins, while artist jobs alone are double that of accountants and including doctors is around ~4M jobs. The number of programming jobs in the US is around 4.5M. Between artists and programmers, the number of jobs that requires on-the-spot skills demonstrations is definitely much larger than all jobs you just listed so far, even when I give you the benefit of the doubt and include all fast food managers in the US and not just Baskin Robbins.
Above you illustrated some reasons why asking for a skill demonstration is a good idea, so I’m not sure why it matters whether or not it’s common for other job types. Maybe programming interviews have better outcomes than accounting interviews (fewer firings or bad employees per capita), in addition to higher average pay?
The answer to almost every technical question are "it depends" and "let me look that up for you."
> Interviewers need a way to compare candidates so they can pick the best ones, right?
For the "best" candidates they need a way of deciding which interviewers are worth their time to speak to, and overhead of the hiring process is a fantastic filter.
And somehow you still get very many people who claim to be experienced developers in $LANG and are unable to write or explain even basic things.
Usually engineers can spot the CVs talking around the fact they can't actually do what they claim well before it even comes to interview, but HR often can't and the recruiters will try it on anyway to get paid!
Isn’t it a total assumption to jump to the conclusion that being asked to write code in an interview means people think you’re lying? Try thinking about this from the interviewer’s perspective. They need to find out how good you are, and they need to know if your self-assessment is even using the same units as the next candidate’s self-assessment. Spoiler alert: they are different scales. Your idea of you having experience and doing well is very different from my idea of me having experience and doing well.
BTW don’t forget that some of the candidates you’re competing against are actually lying, and they’re claiming things on their resume that if taken at face value will get them the job over you. Do you really want employers believing and hiring based on what people can say rather than what they can do? Be careful what you wish for, because if that came true, getting hired would be harder than it is now.
I mean, I have never done or assigned a take-home or standardised test and never willingly will.
But at the first line, either CVs of unvouched-for engineers are pretty ruthlessly culled by active engineers based on "I don't think these skills are even genuine" or its done by others like HR or management based on some kind of universal system everyone takes. I don't agree with the second method, but I can see why it's done because I know people who give too much credit in the first way and waste days interviewing people for senior roles who think C# and C are "basically the same thing anyway" (that's a quote, by the way).
Personally, I'd rather just not proceed to interview rather then insult everyone's intelligence with game-able and non-representative tests like leetcode. Usually you can decide if a full interview is a good idea or not out of a phone call where you ask a few unstructured technical questions that are specifically appropriate for the role and/or based on previous experience.
So you have one job offer, 200 candidates, 170 sucks at coding but you don't know which ones, and you have 15000 euros (including man-hours and marketings) and 3 months to figure out the right one, convince to join, negociate and sign.
Oh, and your dev team is on a dead line and can spare very little time validating candidates, one is sick and you just hired an intern that needs baby sitting.
Fun hypothetical, but where I work we don't have that many candidates for any position, so it's, so far, never been an issue. I didn't think I'd need to say that "YMMV" but in case it's not obvious, YMMV!
Usually there's about a CV passed by me or others per week, an interview maybe every 8 weeks and a hire every 6-12 months.
Advantages of not being in a country or industry that offers SF FAANG/MAGMA/whatever salaries, perhaps.
It's not personal, it's a natural and inevitable result of the fact that there are a ton of scammers out there. If you maintain that attitude you will be selecting for naive and/or slow-to-adapt companies.
There are, but I (and many seniors) am easy to verify. If you know who I am and talked to previous employers (probably friends or at least people you met at conferences or fairs) or know me already from meet-ups but the rigidity of the hiring process has me do some dance, then please, find some other stooge.
> I am easy to verify. If you know who I am an talked to previous employers
Wasn’t parent complaining about being verified, because he assumes that implies he’s lying? If your problem with the process is whether your word is believed without verification, or verified, then what’s the difference between a code test in an interview and talking to a previous employer? (BTW there’s a lot of reasons I might prefer the code test to having people discuss me, even when I have a good reputation. You can’t control what people say or think about you.)
> the hiring process has me do some dance
You’re upset by having to do a little bit of the thing that you want the job doing? I have to audition if I want to dance or act or play music. Why shouldn’t we audition to write code, or do anything? If you walk into an interview expecting to demonstrate your skills on the spot, which is what interviews are for and always have been, then it’s no surprise and you’ll be prepared. I’ve watched people get upset in interviews because they were asked technical questions and expected their 20 years of experience or whatever should somehow exempt them from talking about code. That attitude is a huge red flag TBH, and I’ve seen people get rejected for it.
BTW something to keep in mind is that a ton of people complain about interviews that don’t involve coding. Many would-be programmers are quite frustrated by the focus on soft-skills or experience, and very much prefer to be judged strictly on coding skills.
I don’t mind talking about code and in depth tech discussions; what I do mind is getting a calendar invite with 6 weeks of interviews and take home work. I have no issues getting jobs without any interviewing, but sometimes I get these weird things. I hire myself at the current company (and many previous) and I know within 15 minutes if someone is ok or not. Haven’t been wrong so far and the past 25 or so years. But I do have the luxury of only having ever have to pick senior devs; juniors I would not really know how to do.
Interviews that don’t involve code are usually fine but not 6-12 of them. I usually start with (and we do not look for Haskell, ocaml, idris or prolog devs); do you know what Haskell is, what are some of the differences between Haskell, Idris and Ocaml. What’s the difference between prolog and Haskell. If they throw huge ‘i have no idea about any of this’ then I know they are going to be people we cannot use. What do lisp and prolog have in common. You cannot really fake knowing any of these and not having had hands on experience. It takes 15 minutes to filter out people who wouldn’t fit our team. But again: I hire seniors only and we work with very specialised financial software. I do apply for similar jobs where this applies as well and then I get a calendar invite with 12 interviews etc. No thanks.
I wish there were no detector guarding supermarket doors and google would not make me go through shenanigans every time I use a different device to login as well.
But we can't have nice things because of the proverbial bad apples.
You are free to reject the job offer, but thinking it will make any difference and that employers won't keep trying to protect themselves against being scammed is wishful thinking.
If you have no standing (as a junior) then sure, but as a senior, you can simply ask previous employers. If that’s not enough then indeed, I will refuse. I am not going to solve some crappy leethcode crap just because they are paranoid.
Lots of employers will not answer to that request for various reasons. So you may get a phone number of a buddy of the candidate that will tell you he was stellar.
I agree that some of the hiring processes out there are pretty nuts! On the other hand, there are people out there that have a CV that looks good on paper but are incompetent. One of my colleagues used the phrase one year of experience ten times.
I've worked with a few of these folks over the years. No one wanted them on the team and they contributed nothing, but somehow they managed to retain their job. These types were the first ones to go whenever there were staff cuts.
I've come across this interviewing too. We had a guy say "I can't do this.". I said, it's OK if you can solve it...let's just start it and work through it together. It's more important that we see how you approach problems and work through them. "No...I don't think I can."
Hmm. I have majors in CS and electronic engineering and minors in maths and physics. In EE I had jobs without any interviewing at all; just sending my diploma and resume. The CS interviewing system is highly broken compared to anything else I have been in touch with. I have been a software engineer, electronics engineer, ceo, cto, pre-sales and some more things. Software engineer interviews are sad shitty affairs; it’s easier to land a cto job than a developer job for me. It’s just dumb and companies who do it deserve to get told to stick that job somewhere.
> I see a lot of geeks giving advice on how to hire other geeks,
Is it out of place for a chef to critique the hiring process for a head chef position with a restaurant owner that's largely clueless about what happens in the kitchen? Most people would say that the chef might have a better clue about ovens and quiche recipes than the restaurant owner, right?
> Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become. We are very lucky we are a hot commodity on the market, because I tell you, no other professional gets a pass for a tenth of the things we claim we are entitled too.
Providing some advice about being a bit humble is always valuable. There's a fine line between being confident and knowing your worth and being cocky and a rude jerk.
That said, if you're a software developer, you have a skill that's in demand that most people on Earth have no capacity to perform even if given years of free training. It's reasonable for developers that might provide millions of dollars of value to a company to demand better treatment than people who provide a fraction of that value to a company.
Of course, and we were badly treated in the 90, so over-compensating is fair.
But I find that all those posts and articles about hiring usually come from the beautiful world of fairy-tales in the head of the authors, as they never had to solve the problem themselves.
There is no doubt that hiring suck, and you can't want capitalism and suddenly be surprised the market balances out in favor of the other side when demands of devs exceed supplies.
But the arrogance of my colleagues, many of them never having taken a professional risk in their entire life, is still astonishing me.
I won't give any advice, but the story strongly resonated with me.
Spoiler alert: Anand got hired.
I didn't. After a thorough technical interview with the guy that would have been my boss, the VP had a five minutes talk with me, asking about my hobbies, what I looked for in a company and similar platitudes. His added value was deciding he didn't trust me, for no reason, except the magic Excel sheet he was entering my answers in. The first guy did call me to apologize.
The weird thing is the same company reached to me a couple of times years later. The most recent, I learned that the VP was instantly fired as soon as the company was bought by a french conglomerate and the whole infrastructure replaced. It was a mess, so I guess I dodged a bullet.
Once again, as a developer, I can only notice how much of a diva my peers have become.
I totally agree with that. We need to live with the rest of the employees every day, so it's better not to be a jerk.
A lot of the advice is bad because many companies have terrible hiring processes and candidates have to work around that. Questions irrelevant to the actual job are a bad sign, unless they are asked early as part of the screening process or to assess the level of seniority and experience of the developer.
Ultimately you should treat the interviewer as you would a customer, try to understand quickly what they are looking for without asking too many questions, and demonstrate those qualities, assuming you are interested in doing so, of course.
I've read the article from DHH he makes some decent arguments, but as I see it that article is mostly notable because most people don't self-host. At least in my corner of the tech scene (ie EU startups) there are probably hundreds of companies hosting in the cloud for every company choosing to self-host and I haven't seen a shift in that trend yet. If anything it seems to be shifting more towards the cloud.
True, the wake up call is mostly in articles and social medias, not in the trend, in the same way most people use Windows despite most technical writers using Mac or Linux.
Personally I've been self-hosting forever, and that's the only reason I could stay afloat. There is a whole category of business that is simply not profitable if you use the cloud.
I may be wrong, but I feel like “startup” no longer means “bootstrapped for the lowest amount possible” (the model that created sv) and now means “vc-backed for the lowest amount of dev-effort possible”.
This sweet spot may give a large gap for reducing the margins, while the consumer budget may not allow for raising the prices.
All in all, companies will work hard to find a way to stay profitable, and your tax will benefit from that.