[HN Gopher] Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?
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Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?
Author : rcarmo
Score : 163 points
Date : 2023-03-31 09:14 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| smm11 wrote:
| Part of me thinks new companies will sprout up and a few may
| disrupt.
|
| The other part of me sees that Gen Z are using dumb phones and
| don't own computers, so given AI I can see the WWW being
| computers talking to one another with the odd human checking in.
| turbobooster wrote:
| Most likely on welfare
| optimalsolver wrote:
| It's da first of tha month.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Side question, is the 3-4 months of severance pay cushioning a
| bit the impact to whatever micro-economy laid off workers would
| otherwise be affecting? We're not yet seeing the potentially
| worse effects yet until severance runs out? But I would hope that
| most laid off workers are able to find jobs in that time frame.
| gtop3 wrote:
| > https://layoffs.fyi/
|
| There's 120k US layoffs documented here in 2023, or 0.07% of
| the US workforce. We could imagine the ~50% reemployment rate
| for FANG is a fair estimate for the rest of the tech layoffs
| (fang employees might be easier to be rehired, but might have
| more savings and be less inclined to return). So 0.035% of the
| workforce would potentially be running out of severance.
|
| It probably will have an impact. This alone isn't a crisis
| level event. It's hard to determine regional data for the laid
| off workers because of WFH, but we could imagine tech heavy
| regions receiving a bigger share of the impact than national
| averages. The impact is probably more spread than it would have
| been if the layoffs happened in 2019.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Learning to code.
| nubela wrote:
| We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to
| understand the story behind the layoffs.
|
| Here's the summary:
|
| - 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their
| profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4
| months since November 2022.
|
| - Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
|
| - 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups.
|
| See the full blog post here: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-
| google-employees-in-15-bill...
| [deleted]
| sakex wrote:
| Google layoffs started in January 2023. How is the November
| date relevant?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Because you want to marginalize out non-layoff-related
| variables?
| purpleblue wrote:
| > We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to
| understand the story behind the layoffs.
|
| This is an extremely inaccurate statement and really makes me
| question the validity of your research. And after I read it,
| there's so many problems that I think nothing conclusive can be
| drawn at all from it.
| lucideer wrote:
| Do you have any data on accuracy/completeness of LinkedIn
| profiles to accompany this? I get that LinkedIn is the most
| used platform, but as someone who doesn't use / update it (I
| have a largely dormant profile), I got the impression my
| demographic, while a minority, is still a relatively large
| minority.
|
| Presumably the "total number of identified LinkedIn profiles" &
| the "total reported layoffs" figures don't match up: what
| happens to the data gap in your reporting?
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| > I got the impression my demographic, while a minority, is
| still a relatively large minority.
|
| Based on my anecdote experience, your not in the minority.
| robin_reala wrote:
| "every laid off individual" should be "every laid off
| individual with a LinkedIn account".
| JohnFen wrote:
| And only about half of the programmers I personally know have
| LinkedIn accounts in the first place.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I have one. Although it says I work at a place that shut
| down in 2017.
| Animats wrote:
| Mine says "see my Github".
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if most FAANG and similar tier
| companies require a linkedin account; mine did.
|
| HR sent policies, and would help you with a headshot, with
| the idea you'd use that w/ your email, Teams, etc. as well.
| pengaru wrote:
| HR can say a lot of things, and you can ignore them.
| robin_reala wrote:
| That sounds spicily illegal to my (admittedly EU-based)
| eyes, unless it's literally written into the contract.
| whitemary wrote:
| Spicily? What is that supposed to mean in this context?
| belter wrote:
| plobably because the user was tricked by spellcheck...
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I sort of like it, but I would bet it was supposed to be
| "suspiciously".
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I wouldn't be surprised if most FAANG and similar tier
| companies require a linkedin account; mine did.
|
| What?? Companies do this? Such a requirement is so crazy
| that I would drop the company as a prospect immediately
| even if I had a LinkedIn account.
| 300bps wrote:
| Is that requirement to aid in the prevention of double-
| working?
|
| That is, people who accept two full time jobs and do a
| half-assed job at both of them.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Usually those people do quarter-assed job at best -
| unless you literally have work that could be done on
| upwork.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Neither Facebook nor Google requires employees to have a
| LinkedIn account.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| Surprised any FAANG uses teams. I think the only headshot
| you might need is for your badge, can't imagine any serious
| company mandates LinkedIn (that would be your boss deciding
| that and not HR).
| arroz wrote:
| Actually even this is wrong. Every laid off employee with a
| LinkedIn account that changed their employer on LinkedIn. I
| typically am not in a hurry to change mine.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Waiting 2-3 months to see if new job is a good fit is
| usually a smart move.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I don't know if people are still doing the
| /r/overemployed thing, but I imagine you aren't in a
| hurry to change it if you are.
|
| It's also possible that the recently-laid off are
| settling for lower salaries but more employers to make up
| for it
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I guess now managers would be way less willing to accept
| underperformance though... and more picky on recruitment.
| aix1 wrote:
| The analysis is full of bad assumptions. For example, the
| section titled "Top Impacted Countries" is completely off:
| the article was written in Feb 2023 and in most countries
| the layoffs hadn't even begun back then (in a bunch of
| countries, including a couple "analysed" in the article,
| the layoffs are still to take place as I'm writing this).
| stevenzzzzzzz wrote:
| If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all
| the employees anonymized by title that were laid off in
| California (the only state with google warn filings that
| publicizes titles in their warn records):
| https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
| BXlnt2EachOther wrote:
| Does your dataset include names or personally-identifiable
| information (IMO being able to key by all those 1-person
| companies counts)? If so, that seems a little... scuzzy? Would
| you consider pulling the dataset or at least making it coarse
| and pseudonymous? I would guess many of the people included and
| monetized here wouldn't expect or wish to be.
|
| If the response is public scraping is legal, then I might
| suggest your company's framing of the product is making
| incorrect claims about this group. From your blog page:
|
| "[N] people indicated a change of employment in the last 4
| months (from the date of writing i.e. 14 February, yes
| Valentines' Day) - aka ex-Googlers that got laid off."
|
| That 'aka' doesn't necessarily follow, though? People leave
| companies for many reasons, and therefore this is not a valid
| "laid-off Googler" dataset.
|
| (Edit: I might be misunderstanding but Google's layoffs were
| announced less than a month before Feb 14. Why look at the
| three months before that? Edit 2: noting sibling comment
| already asked this, didn't mean to duplicate)
|
| Less important, while you do mention some biases inherent in
| the source (LinkedIn use by country, who has/updates a
| profile), please note that some of your blog article's headline
| claims are contradicted by publicly-available data available
| from press and WARN act filings.
| stevenzzzzzzz wrote:
| Re: WARN act filings, here's a list of all the titles that
| were laid off in california (the only state with google warn
| filings that publicizes titles in their warn records):
| https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
| [deleted]
| mfbx9da4 wrote:
| > We then used ChatGPT to clean up and categorize all
| 2-thousand and more roles into 9 main categories. Finally we
| did a quick manual comb-through to correct any discrepancy.
|
| Yet another example of how times are changing!
| 6510 wrote:
| ah the GPT combover, the future is here
| pkaye wrote:
| Hopefully ChatGPT didn't hallucinate during the combover.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company
|
| Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees
| were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum
| masters, sales, etc.)?
|
| If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing--in my experience,
| the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by
| non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a
| blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.
| dagw wrote:
| I've spent most of my career at places that most people here
| would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time
| there working with programming, statistics and data analysis
| and data science research.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off
| employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct}
| managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
|
| A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech
| recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI
| folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning
| to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
|
| [0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-
| other...
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-
| layo...
|
| [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-
| those-te...
|
| [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-
| releases/2023-03-0...
|
| [4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-
| ethics...
| c03 wrote:
| On point. It would be nice with insight into the roles of the
| lay-offs.
| looping__lui wrote:
| I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to
| understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on
| your own) might make your life easier.
|
| I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of
| "technology is the end and sales and product managers are the
| means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that
| these people struggled in environment focusing on "the
| customer".
|
| I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will
| become less "customer and product centric".
|
| A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to
| cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift
| attention more towards "money, customers and products" and
| away from "engineering pet projects".
|
| But, perhaps this is a good thing.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The most shocking thing to me I've observed during my
| career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I
| hazard it's because the same neurological structure that
| optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also
| what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly
| speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and
| practice (I've met those who do), it just doesn't seem to
| be that common of a hack.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361319883
| 5...
| gramie wrote:
| One of the programmers I used to work with took an online
| personality test, and told us that it reported him having
| "less empathy than Stalin". He was a good programmer,
| though!
| chasd00 wrote:
| many years ago i signed up for an online dating site
| where i had to take a very long (maybe 200 questions)
| personality test. I reach the end and it says "due to
| your personality our services cannot help you" or
| something like that. That was a blow to the old ego heh.
|
| /happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i
| guess my personality isn't _that_ toxic heh
| BirAdam wrote:
| I am not a psychological professional, and I should keep
| my mouth shut, but I don't believe this is terribly
| unique to the tech sector. I think this is more closely
| linked to institutionalized people. That is, people who
| spent long amounts of time in schools, the military,
| prison, and so on. These large organizations themselves
| lack empathy. A person formed by such a machine will
| begin to find that treatment normal and replicate that
| treatment. As many technologists are university
| graduates, they'd fall into this category of
| institutionalized people. It doesn't help that many then
| get hired by megacorps which are also institutions.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Empathy doesn't seem particularly valuable in a work
| context. Wether I empathize with a non technical manager
| who creates more problems than they solve or not doesn't
| change the impact that person has on the people around
| them. Is it empathy that keeps someone like this
| employed? We tolerate their meddling and chaos because we
| feel bad for them?
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| A lot of people discover that they can get respect
| despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough.
|
| You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but
| in tech it seems that social skills are less important
| than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field,
| and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people
| who are assholes but are also _visionaries_ - Jobs
| /Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
| hadlock wrote:
| Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line
| item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind
| of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a
| whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be
| happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts
| on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.
| wincy wrote:
| You mean like the amazing visionaries Sam Bankman-Fried
| and Elizabeth Holmes?
| estebank wrote:
| I find that people that conform to the "asshole genius"
| trope are far outnumbered by the assholes that believe
| themselves to be geniuses.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm
| aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and
| engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support
| folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so
| I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I disagree with both sentiments that PMs etc are non-
| technical roles, and that they're not useful.
|
| I would say they're just as useful as developers - plenty of
| developers are bad at their job or are employed extraneously
| to begin with.
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| I find that an odd question. My initial take was that they
| went to non-tech companies that have substantial internal IT
| presence.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| From the original post, the next biggest category after
| "tech" is "Business & Professional Services" at 24.2% of
| total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting
| the top few industries - financial services, business
| consulting, advertising services and recruitment.
|
| With the exception of some financial services, these do not
| sound like industries whose companies have large internal
| IT presence.
|
| The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering,
| health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these
| fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
| wincy wrote:
| I work for a construction company and there's like 15,000
| employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers
| (we're outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously)
| It's still enough people to fill up a nice sized
| building.
| rmchugh wrote:
| Also possible that they joined a "non-tech" company that
| needs technical roles.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| [flagged]
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Hey, never said otherwise! Just wondering if non-devs are
| being laid off disproportionately.
|
| For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also
| be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to
| performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge
| underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have
| only managed to stick around because the process to PIP
| them is too onerous.
|
| Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion
| for laying people off at many companies.
| dickersnoodle wrote:
| >Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary
| criterion for laying people off at many companies.
|
| That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due
| to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're
| using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking
| for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for
| performance".
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That's not necessarily the case, especially at smaller
| companies.
|
| A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a
| midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late
| one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10%
| layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce
| their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a
| list of employees to lay off by next morning, using
| performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut.
| This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people
| can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In
| fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were
| ones they'd wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn't
| quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was
| actually a relief to be able to let them go.)
|
| At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such
| granularity (decisions come from several levels above
| managers familiar with each and every employee being laid
| off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| I'm calling BS on the "startups" number...I think this is a lot
| of people hacking around on side projects on their own dime
|
| No mention also of how many will permanently leave tech...this
| may come down to who has the most savings to fall back on...if
| you just have to get paid to pay off that BMW lease, you're
| going to find work wherever you have to
| rcarmo wrote:
| And if you're leaving Google and willing to relocate, you
| probably have "enough" savings.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| having worked at Google doesn't make you a good saver or
| dictate a sustainable lifestyle
| rcarmo wrote:
| Statistically, some folk will keep their wits about them
| regardless of the company they work for.
| lesuorac wrote:
| No but having a severance package that covers your
| expenses for at least 6 months means that the BMW lease
| is still covered in the near future even if you don't
| have savings.
| catmanjan wrote:
| What is a tech company? Is ford a tech company? Is Goldman
| Sacha a tech company?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Ford is probably more of a tech company these days than
| Google is.
| ducknalddon wrote:
| Google has been an advertising company for a long time now.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Yeah, that's a good question. Considering main revenue
| sources Google is a marketing/ad company and "tech" is simply
| an implementation detail.
|
| I think a good litmus test is - if the Internet would die
| then would a given company be killed off by that. Ford and GS
| can function without it (it would be much harder but still
| they did that for decades) but for Google that would be the
| end.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > if the Internet would die then would a given company be
| killed off by that
|
| That would select for Internet companies, not tech
| companies. And neither of the two is a strict subset of the
| other.
|
| > for Google that would be the end
|
| With no Internet, we'd still need comms, and mobile phones
| (and Android) would seem to be important there. And if that
| wasn't enough to keep them alive, they'd buy companies to
| do that.
| JohnFen wrote:
| According to PR and marketing departments the world over,
| _every_ company is a tech company.
| hgsgm wrote:
| > 56.7%
|
| Do you know what a sigfig is?
| oblio wrote:
| I don't get your comment, even after reading about
| significant figures.
| biggoodwolf wrote:
| For a number in the X00s the stuff after the period i.e.
| .xxx% is not significant
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Perhaps you could tell us.
| esafak wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures
| oblio wrote:
| Still doesn't clarify the relation to the topic.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Sorry to hijack this thread and be pessimistic, but whenever
| you get emails from recruiters about a startup that's got "ex-
| Google and ex-Facebook" on the "founding team" - keep in mind
| that it's 99% bs.
| gumby wrote:
| > Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
|
| There's a very good chance that their new jobs are similar to
| their former jobs.
|
| Unfortunately, the term "tech" has become diluted to the point
| of worthlessness. Every company of any size needs programming,
| statistics, and such.
|
| Conversely many companies swept under the "tech" term don't
| develop any technology at all.
|
| It's so bad that actual technology development is now referred
| to as "deep tech".
| stathibus wrote:
| In my head, "tech" refers to the segment of the labor market,
| not the product that the company produces.
|
| We can race to the bottom on the true definition of "tech" as
| far as actually producing new technology but in this context
| it doesn't matter.
| prerok wrote:
| Ok, but what is "tech" in this context?
|
| I can imagine those people being hired for infra stuff in
| other segments but the percentage seems high for
| programmer-level stuff.
| notJim wrote:
| Simple metric: if the office had a kombucha tap in 2021,
| it's a tech company.
| bena wrote:
| The problem is that _everything_ is technology. The wheel is
| technology.
|
| But since there wasn't any good words to use to describe the
| practical application of computer science and other skills
| related to computers, we just used the term "information
| technology". Because, it's relatively descriptive. Computers
| are technology to leverage information. Everything related to
| getting computers to exchange information would be considered
| technology related to that.
|
| But then it gets shortened to "IT" and just "tech".
| Networking is "tech", software is "tech", hardware is "tech".
|
| I've come to disregard anything that bills itself as simply
| "tech". It's smoke and mirrors. You're looking to gussy up
| something that would otherwise be banal.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the term "tech" has become diluted to the
| point of worthlessness. Every company of any size needs
| programming, statistics, and such.
|
| Reminds me of this:
|
| https://www.satellitetoday.com/innovation/2019/02/26/microso.
| ..
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > There's a very good chance that their new jobs
|
| The linked blog post reads like the other 43.3% don't seem to
| have found any new jobs at all (if I'm reading it right).
| ("There could of course still be many that have found new
| jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a
| common practice on LinkedIn").
| hadlock wrote:
| Not everyone needs to go get a job immediately after being
| laid off. Most people I know that when laid off from a tech
| company, take a minimum of 60 days off before starting a
| new job.
|
| If you're 22, saddled with student debt, just signed a
| lease on an apartment and just bought a fancy new car you
| might be in a different situation but there's a lot of
| engineers in their 30s and 40s where a 3-6 month break from
| employment ("sabbatical") is something they've been
| planning for, for a few years now anyways.
| gumby wrote:
| Zero of my friends laid off from google are even looking
| for a new job.
|
| My wife was always asking me to retire, but after a year or
| so she'd say "it would be good for you to have a job". Then
| repeat. Retiring isn't that fun when you're in your 30s.
|
| So I suspect a bunch of them will be back in the job market
| eventually.
| than3 wrote:
| Its actually not that unexpected, a big contributor is
| inflation.
|
| If you've any experience with Argentina, or other hyper-
| inflationary events, there comes a point where your labor
| is more valuable to you than what others are willing to
| pay you for.
|
| When the store of value is degrading rapidly, and wages
| in general always lag, those with options will do
| something else.
|
| Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adjust
| their wages for inflation. When we were in a 2%
| inflationary environment, and that 2% could be counted on
| year after year as being stable, it was more reasonable.
|
| With inflation in the double digits, with real inflation
| according to previous more accurate methods showing
| roughly a ~33% loss in value YOY, and the corresponding
| increase in taxes (as inflation increases your taxes
| increase as you enter higher tax brackets for the same
| value), it makes a lot more sense to use your efforts for
| yourself instead of being on the open market.
|
| Factor markets and producers decide what they are willing
| to accept, and with a moving goal post in terms of a
| currency store, it makes more sense to wait in sheltered
| assets and produce goods you'll use.
|
| People in general won't accept doing $1,000 in work and
| by the time they can spend it only having $700, or worse
| for example $1.
|
| Do you think they will continue doing that work moving
| forward if they have no expectation of getting anything
| comparable in value in return?
| QLazuli wrote:
| This is the best little nugget of wisdom I've come across
| in a while, thank you for sharing it. It was well written
| and concise, and I feel like I understand the world a
| little better
| moonchrome wrote:
| We are talking about people making above >150k/year here
| right ? At no point does 10-20% inflation mean they are
| better off growing their own food or some shit like that.
|
| Your point is probably applicable in less developed
| economies/low paid positions. For highly specialized well
| paid positions if this was the case you'd probably have a
| societal collapse.
| makerdiety wrote:
| Actually, increasing rates of inflation _do_ mean people
| are better off sustaining themselves and leaving the
| credit based economy that has a rising inflation rate
| with its credit based currency. The weak buying power of
| an individual currency unit, like a United States dollar,
| indicates a geopolitical state and economy that is
| beginning to lack the ability to sustain further revenue
| increases in a generalized shareholder account of wealth.
| And middle class or bourgeois laborers are those general
| shareholders in the hypothetical credit based economy and
| state I 'm talking about here. Basically, a credit bubble
| is naturally popping to combat real overpopulation and
| making a lot of money (like a billion dollars, actually)
| here might actually be a fool's game. So investing in
| outside assets, relative to the indicated failing state
| and the credit based assets its domestic production
| offers its domestic shareholders, is the rational move to
| make in this theoretical game.
|
| So the question now is: what can we do and invest in as
| part of our survival motivated escape from the failing
| society?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Retiring isn't that fun when you're in your 30s
|
| I would kill to retire. All I want to do is make art,
| music, cook, hike, kayak, and travel on the cheap. I have
| about.... 1/20th of the savings needed.
| [deleted]
| TheHappyOddish wrote:
| I retired in my 20s. It's a fun novelty, but it wore off
| quickly. Your friends and family aren't around in most of
| your free time, and those things you used to enjoy in
| your limited free time now can't stretch to fill the new
| 10+ hours a day you have.
|
| Like most things, the grass is greener on the other side.
| Zetice wrote:
| I get the impulse, but why isn't this viewed as
| profoundly selfish?
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| > I get the impulse, but why isn't this viewed as
| profoundly selfish?
|
| I get that impulse, but that is like saying that most of
| our current jobs are reasonable and for the greater good
| cause?
|
| Most of the real value providing and necessary jobs are
| currently underpaid, while on the other spectrums end few
| people can reap automations fruits that actually should
| be shared by society, or somehow like that.. ( I know,
| opinionated can derail into endless discussion topic and
| other's may express better).
|
| Also, why isn't seen making music and art as a
| contribution to society while some of the current jobs
| are hurting society?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Because people are free to live their own lives. Being
| useful and helping others are superogatory not a matter
| of obligation.
| happysadpanda2 wrote:
| Is your reasoning here that it is selfish, because not
| everyone can do that, and if everyone could/did, then
| society would collapse due to no food production, garbage
| collection, emergency services, law enforcement etc, as
| all those people would also be out painting/kayaking etc?
|
| I ask because as I first read your comment I was unable
| to see the selfishness, since GP outlined that they
| lacked the financial means to support that lifestyle
| (also implying that taxes would still be paid and money
| would flow through the system all the same). It took me
| writing out a reply to you, asking how you thought it
| selfish, before my brain came up with the potential
| answer I outlined in the first paragraph.
| Zetice wrote:
| Right, my thinking here is that the dream of running away
| from the very society that granted you the freedom to run
| away seems like you're not "paying it forward" enough, to
| enable others to have the freedom you'd be taking
| advantage of.
|
| Rather, I would imagine the "not-selfish" version of this
| would be to spend your life doing those things, _and_
| finding ways to help others get to where you 're lucky to
| be.
|
| I just find the "I'll get mine and fuck off" attitude to
| be less than ideal.
| jjav wrote:
| > Right, my thinking here is that the dream of running
| away from the very society that granted you the freedom
| to run away seems like you're not "paying it forward"
| enough, to enable others to have the freedom you'd be
| taking advantage of.
|
| I see it completely the opposite. If someone has already
| made all the millions they'll ever need, it's better for
| society to free up that job for someone else who needs
| the income instead of keeping amassing more and more
| millions to one single person. Paying it forward here is
| opening up the opportunity for the next person.
| Zetice wrote:
| Job? I'm not sure why we're talking about a job here, I'm
| not suggesting you stay at your employer beyond the time
| it takes to become independent.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| [dead]
| yakubin wrote:
| So... noone should exercise this freedom, because doing
| it is selfish? Then what are you paying forward for?
| Freedom noone should ever exercise? It feels like a
| prison with transparent bars.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's freeing up a high paying job for someone else to
| take.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| a) What's wrong with being selfish?
|
| b) What about it is selfish?
| sophacles wrote:
| Seriously, why don't more people work so the investors
| can get a chunk of their value for doing nothing? How
| dare they do something so utterly anti-social as spend
| more time doing things with people that aren't making
| investors money? Why must the rich investor class make-do
| with their own money pile when a chunk of your effort
| could make their pile bigger?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| $20,000 a year income puts one in the top decile of
| income worldwide. At $50,000 you are richer than 98.5% of
| the global population. That's less than the median
| American worker ($54K) or the mean ($74K).
|
| A lit more than any investor class are rich by any
| historical or global standard.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| People tend not to spend too much time analyzing
| impossible dreams. Most "if I won the lottery" plans are
| also profoundly selfish.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Selfish how? Like not contributing to society? Do we
| really want to have an introspective philosophical debate
| about the societal impact of working for a tech company?
| drakonka wrote:
| Not sure it's any more selfish than working for giant
| corporations for a fat paycheck. Both are selfish in
| their own ways, and both can also help people in their
| own ways. I wouldn't say there's something inherently
| wrong with being selfish on its own.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I realized not long ago that all I really want to do is
| walk all day maybe listening to audiobooks sometimes.
| That's my retirement plan until I get bored with it.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Buncha folx humble bragging and moralizing about retiring
| at 30 after building trivial CRUD for dubious ad tech as
| some apex achievement and we surely will mourn their
| departure into the sunset.
| gumby wrote:
| > I would kill to retire.
|
| That is one strategy: you'll have a place to stay and
| three meals a day for the rest of your life!
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| A large chunk got >6 months severance, probably not a bad
| time to take a few months off and recharge.
| Teever wrote:
| Can you give some examples of companies that are commonly
| called 'tech' companies that you don't brief develop any tech
| at all?
| kreig wrote:
| Nearshoring companies that hires developers to be assigned
| to external clients, just acting as brokers.
| conanbatt wrote:
| Those are consulting companies, not tech companies.
| matt_s wrote:
| Stripe. They are a payment processor and work in Finance.
| What significant contributions to tech have they produced?
| I'm not being snarky, I'm just not familiar with any off
| the top of my head like I know React came from FB/Meta,
| Google & Amazon produce all sorts of cloud computing stuff,
| Apple produces lots of libraries/frameworks (most likely
| for their own hardware/ecosystem), Bootstrap came out of
| Twitter, etc.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Stripe made Sorbet for Ruby.
| PreachSoup wrote:
| U got be kidding me. I'm not from Stripe but fintech is
| insanely complex when you want to do the dirty work and
| untangle all kinds of legal and financial mess to provide
| services globally. They are not called aws for payment
| for no reason
| quelltext wrote:
| Providing an API abstracting over the complexity of
| payment processing _is_ the technology.
|
| Google's search engine is technology but you would
| probably say "isn't that just a researching documents"?
|
| A bit weird how you only deem companies technological if
| they have released popular OSS or Apple because they
| produce libraries/frameworks they use internally. Pretty
| sure all software companies use internal libraries.
| tester756 wrote:
| It sounds like: if they use computers, then they're tech,
| weird.
|
| I don't share the sentiment, I don't see Netflix in the
| same group as MSFT / OpenAI / AMD / TSMC.
| roundandround wrote:
| That just seems to feed the point to me. Google was
| competing with organizations particularly created for a
| new tech market that didn't exist before them. NYC
| library was maybe the largest player available to
| consumers? (Before the emergent search tech like alta
| vista and yahoo that Google disrupted.)
|
| Stripe is a payment processor with the most disruptive
| automation, competing with other payment processors older
| than the web. Every industry will be shrinking in people
| per net work, few industries are new things (at least for
| the public) enabled by automation.
|
| If we want to call all disruptors tech companies, why not
| also call the old companies that transform to compete
| with them tech companies too? Then every industry is
| tech. But really it is the opposite, tech as it ages
| becomes regular business that is more dependent on
| trademarks, relationships, etc, so some things we
| consider tech from recent decades are less so now and
| companies that stay primarily in them are more like old
| industry than tech companies that compete for the newly
| emerging fields.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Are visa and mastercard tech companies? Or wells fargo?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Federal Reserve is a tech provider in finance (ACH,
| FedWire, FedNow instant payments, etc).
| shagie wrote:
| SaaS companies that are linking one business function to
| another where the entirety of the product is some software
| running on the cloud.
|
| This isn't saying that they don't do development, but
| rather that they're not breaking new ground in tech. They
| aren't working on any cutting edge problems or developing
| frameworks to enable development at scale.
|
| I worked at a company that did some logistics. There was an
| app for phones, some servers, and some software that did
| routing, provided ETAs to customers, and produced some
| reports.
|
| I would lump it in the broad umbrella of "tech" but it
| isn't a company that's building the next big thing (or even
| small thing) that will change the world.
| Zetice wrote:
| I'm the lead engineer at one of these and you nailed it.
| If I catch anyone "innovating" we have a talk about what
| it is they're working on to make sure it's part of our
| core business. It _very_ rarely is.
|
| I probably suck to work for in that way, but the reality
| is this is not a job about pushing the envelope, it's a
| job about executing as cleanly as possible. You work at
| one of these if you love to _implement_ simple tech to
| solve non-tech problems, and I make that clear while
| hiring.
|
| It's a moderately lucrative job, and can be very
| rewarding for certain types, but I totally understand if,
| coming from Google, it would be a system shock as it is
| decidedly not "tech" as most folks mean it.
| swamp40 wrote:
| _> If I catch anyone "innovating"_
| Zetice wrote:
| It's in quotes because it's not actually innovative, in
| every case (so far) it's an NIH instance.
| ahefner wrote:
| Sometimes you have to NIH to understand why things the
| way they are. Granted, it's hard to justify on the
| company dime. From the perspective that 99% of software
| is awful and writing more is making things worse, I'm
| sympathetic to your position.
|
| On the other hand, in my little corner of the world I've
| seen plenty of damage done by an "invent-nothing"
| mentality and an approach to software architecture that
| permits only plugging together popular open source
| components with fancy websites and corporate backing. For
| lack of a better term I call it "noun-driven
| development". You needed a disk reachable through an ssh
| server and an Apache directory listing, you ended up with
| Artifactory. You needed a library to replicate data with
| a Merkle tree, you ended up with someone's Kafka + etcd +
| memcached + redis + glusterfs Frankenstein monster, etc.
|
| Don't mind me, I'm mostly talking to myself here.
| user5678 wrote:
| Isn't this basically just saying "the way we've always
| done things here is optimal"? That is very rarely the
| case. Improvements, optimizations (even of a radical
| nature) are almost always possible. But yes it sounds
| like a lot of folks here would not like to work with
| someone so set in their ways.
| shagie wrote:
| The SaaS shop that I worked in had two Java devs, two
| JavaScript devs, a python gluer, and a mobile developer.
|
| Building the even a basic framework takes hundreds of
| hours of developer time... for no real competitive
| advantage.
|
| It's fine to work on innovative things (there was a point
| were something about Java annotations clicked and the
| report writing part got rewritten in a week)... but
| building big things that give small gains aren't viable
| in small shops.
|
| Doing innovation on "how can we compress this web page
| even more" makes no sense at a small shop - if it's an
| issue grab Minify off the shelf and use that. Don't spend
| half a year writing your own that you'll need to support.
|
| The small company is best served by working on things
| that give the competitive advantage - not working on
| those big ideas (unless that big idea _is_ the
| competitive advantage).
|
| Big tech companies have the advantage that they've got
| thousands of developers some of whom have some free time
| or the competitive advantage is removing another 200
| bytes from a web page.
|
| That small tech shop had 4000 hours of Java dev time to
| "spend" a year.. and another 4000 hours of JavaScript,
| and 2000 hours of python, and 2000 hours of android/iOS.
| There's a stack of 5000 hours of bugs and features for
| each of those parts of the app. Spending 500 hours of
| anyones time on something that can be solved off the
| shelf for under 10 hours to integrate is far from an
| optimal use of time.
| jjav wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the term "tech" has become diluted to the
| point of worthlessness.
|
| Indeed. Nearly every so-called "tech" company is not actually
| in the business of selling technology products, so they
| aren't really tech companies.
|
| Of course they create technology (sometimes very nice ones)
| internally in support of their actual business, but tech
| isn't the business the company board cares about.
|
| Netflix is a movie production and distribution company.
| Google and Facebook are advertising companies. At least Apple
| is an actual tech company.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Google and Facebook are Ad Tech.
|
| I can _sort of_ see your point with Netflix moving into
| content creation, but only sort of.
| stevenzzzzzzz wrote:
| If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the
| titles that were laid off in california (the only state with
| google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn
| records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
| quesera wrote:
| Three identical comments is two too many.
| Animats wrote:
| The big question - where will they be a year from now? Savings
| gone, "stealth startups" mostly failed, and the US deeper into a
| recession.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| There's a saying that goes something like, "Economists have
| predicted 9 of the last 2 recessions."
|
| I've been hearing about the real estate bubble popping any day
| now since at least 2013. How many people sat on the sidelines
| of a skyrocketing housing market waiting for that day, out of
| fear? How many have fallen into a doom and gloom cycle over the
| last few years hoping for some big "told-you-so" payoff that
| never came?
|
| If you have a few decades of able working life ahead of you,
| capitalize on opportunities. Take risks. You're not going to
| time the crash, whatever that means; and you'll likely end up
| more resilient for it anyway.
| kkoste wrote:
| Probably back home to their original country since they only have
| 60 days to find a new job. I imagine that is extremely hard when
| you are in competition with a lot of your former colleagues.
| fundad wrote:
| The last thing this nation needs is to depopulate further.
| taude wrote:
| What makes you think US Population is receding? By all census
| counts, we're still growing, a lot.
|
| Numbers for 2022 are something like 900K immigrants living in
| the U.S. became U.S. citizens. 2 Million more migrants came
| with about @ 150K documented boarder crossings per month for
| 18 months straight. The only time there was a huge drop-off
| was during Covid, for obvious reasons. "The Build Back Better
| Act included a a $1.75 trillion framework that called for a
| path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and a
| recapture of visas that were not issued in previous years"
|
| US is the third largest populated country at 335M.
|
| Trying to understand your "depopulate further" statement.
| justanorherhack wrote:
| He is likely citing birth rates are less than death rates
| in most of the developed world. There is a bit of a lag
| effect in pop count because boomers and extensions of end
| of life. Japan is at the forefront of this and has more
| elderly in diapers than children. Another aside that's
| Interesting is their societys professional landscape is
| very ageist against youth. I don't know anything about how
| immigration impacts things.
| taude wrote:
| Right, but even with lagging birth rights, US is still
| growing Yoy. It's not growing at the 2%/year it was a few
| years ago, but it's still net positive.
| [deleted]
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| What suggests that the majority of laid off employees were
| H1Bs?
| m00dy wrote:
| yes, he is. But, I think most of the laid-offs are non-
| technical positions. I have also no data to support my
| statement.
| jarsin wrote:
| interviewing.io has a blog post. Only like 5% of laid off
| were engineers.
| ftxbro wrote:
| Pivoted to their next journey of radical nomadism and quantified
| self neurohacking by DIY intravenous synaptic inhibitors.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up
| fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery.
|
| Oh yay. Who wants to work for a company that is actively
| antagonistic against its own customer base?
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Most FAANG tech workers have a lot experience with that
| already...
| colonelpopcorn wrote:
| The same people that wanted to work for Meta and Amazon?
| euroderf wrote:
| They could all become mall cops and do a lot less harm.
| jesse__ wrote:
| HAHAHAHAHAHA
|
| The accuracy of this statement just tickles me
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Yeah, any of FAANG is well-qualified to work at John Deere,
| from that angle.
| s1k3 wrote:
| Do you see the irony in your question yet? =P
| wonder_er wrote:
| Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer,
| ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not
| ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times
| in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again.
|
| I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong
| people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of
| commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym,
| customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B
| SaaS company.
|
| Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads,
| streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that
| occupy that space)
|
| Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker'
| between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-
| occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional
| number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
|
| Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks
| in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
|
| If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move
| sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make
| the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable
| and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
|
| Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves
| the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct
| beneficiaries of those improvements."
|
| With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to
| help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's
| plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful
| contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of
| time _not_ behind a laptop.
| [deleted]
| worldmerge wrote:
| Sounds interesting! Any way to follow your progress?
| wonder_er wrote:
| Ummm good question. Maybe pop your email into the email sign
| up form on my website (check my profile)
|
| I write to that list about random things, which is inclusive
| of more than scooters.
|
| Currently, the next thing I'll be emailing about is about my
| journey out of evangelicalism, so... Consider yourself
| warned. ;)
| sjf wrote:
| How many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?
| bradlys wrote:
| It's just a popular place for remote people. The usual white
| digital nomad bro who goes there to sleep around. (Plenty of
| women doing this too btw)
|
| It's a nice spot but it's just for fucking around in your
| 20's. (Or 30's if you live an alternative lifestyle or are a
| terrible romantic partner)
| wonder_er wrote:
| 'just' feels slightly de-dignifying, but overall this is
| not totally wrong.
|
| I'd say there's a lot more to do there than sleep around,
| but there seemed to be plenty of that. (I'm white-passing,
| have done the nomad thing in the past, didn't go to sleep
| around, don't consider myself to be a terrible romantic
| partner, but _am_ recently divorced, so you shouldn 't take
| only my word on that).
|
| I'm nearly autistic when it comes to land development
| regimes, and Indonesia is widely regarded as having some of
| the best land use regimes in the globe, and I wanted to go
| experience it.
|
| Turns out... It does!
|
| It hurts my soul to return to the USA, where urban planners
| are the land-use equivalent of flat earthers.
| zhivota wrote:
| Interesting, I've gotten very interested in land use
| recently and had not heard this about Indonesia. Are you
| talking specifically about Bali here? Because I've been
| to Jakarta and I can't say I endorse the land use there
| based on the few business trips I've taken.
|
| Where can I read more about what you're talking about?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> or are a terrible romantic partner_
|
| Woah, while you might be right to some extent, it feels
| pretty harsh to judge someone else so superficially just on
| where they choose to travel, and what they do there, and at
| what age they do it.
| wonder_er wrote:
| good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a
| laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved
| there a decade ago, and scootering around the island.
|
| So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read
| books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites.
|
| I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter
| norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
| sjf wrote:
| You're not first one I have heard from.
| wonder_er wrote:
| Tech workers in Bali? Yeah, no doubt. There's lots of
| tech people there, but I was kinda trying to avoid
| them/us.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| How does a business like this make money? It sounds almost like
| it could be a nonprofit.
| wonder_er wrote:
| I'm working on a model of charging the business for this
| service. A monthly fee, or project based fee.
|
| This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've
| talked to many people that are super interested, working my
| way to the people that sign checks.
|
| I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per
| company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months
| of my efforts.
|
| It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k
| for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that
| "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more
| importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're
| otherwise maxed out.
|
| I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at
| the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their
| customers and staff not being able to find parking.
| [deleted]
| ecshafer wrote:
| > Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a
| 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to
| convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase
| the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot
| by 10% or more.
|
| How do you make money doing this?
|
| I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The
| best way to do this would imo run for city council with the
| backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road
| improvements.
|
| Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally
| _can 't_ remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal
| level.
| inconceivable wrote:
| you sell the scooters and get a commission for the people re-
| doing the parking lots. the customer company is incentivized
| by green initiatives and they have budgets to spend.
| wonder_er wrote:
| Critically, no re-doing of the parking required. It'll just
| be _adding_ scooter parking spots in existing nooks and
| crannys around the building /parking lot.
|
| Company is incentivized by adding available vehicle parking
| spots.
|
| Sportique scooters, the local scooter dealer to Denver, is
| down and happy to offer me some commission for scooter
| sales that I bring in, but that's not the main thing for
| me. I want corporate buy-in from the companies I'm
| courting, cuz I'll need their permission to access staff
| and customers.
|
| (I'll be adding signage, and the companies will make some
| concession to scooter riders, to make it a bit more
| appealing. A free drink, $20/mo in free food, etc. It'll be
| a case-by-case decision, based on what they can offer
| that's easiest/most useful to the customer, etc)
|
| Scooters are super cheap, and let you move through a city
| way fast, and can be parked nearly anywhere, regardless of
| how busy the area is, and it's literally $6 for a tank of
| gas. And they get 100 mpg.
|
| I think a little progress will lead to a lot of progress.
| wonder_er wrote:
| How to make money:
|
| Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm
| charging for, but don't _yet_ have customers) is:
|
| 1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and
| add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize
| scooter usage. 2. The scooter parking would make use of
| existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't
| take away existing car parking. 3. Work with the staff to
| find the staff that lives relatively close to the business,
| and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold
| through their scooter purchase, so when they're working,
| their scooter is parked outside. 4. Once there's staff using
| scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or
| two parked outside the building, which will start to
| normalize scooter usage for customers 5. Hand-hold early
| adapting customers through the same process. 6. Add signage
| and website and email campaigns to let interested customers
| learn more about the whole thing.
|
| Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a
| business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining
| the process until during busy hours, there is a number of
| scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the
| number of parking spots.
|
| I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking,
| and helping more people start scooting.
|
| I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago,
| and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City
| councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the
| ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from
| the effects of their decisions.
|
| There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a
| lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper
| class white people.
|
| The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not
| helpful to directly target legal changes.
| dharmab wrote:
| I bet Revzilla's magazine would love to write about this if
| its successful.
| ericmcer wrote:
| A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary
| expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and
| assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they
| are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with
| equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade.
|
| My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company,
| electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost
| silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you
| will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons
| and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so
| long.
|
| It would just require a large initial investment followed by a
| huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into
| something larger :P.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to
| be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO,
| Board, C-Suite generally, SVP).
|
| It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior
| manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in
| this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit
| margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why?
| You'll be fired if you're not. Once you're past Sr. Manager
| you'll be challenged on whether you side with your employees or
| the stock price. We all know who chooses which.
|
| Want to start a high tech company or even a company with high
| CAPEX or OPEX entry points? Better get a ton of capital, and
| guess what, that capital wants ownership because the theory is
| "they deserve it." The reality is money required to do anything
| (duh!) and you have no choice, because your broke friends can't
| afford the 500k you need to hire all those well paid FAANG
| engineers away.
|
| Fine you say, those are the spoils of victory. Well so here's the
| problem...if all that money only cares about maintaining the
| power structures and whitewashing their Rand inspired business
| sins via "charity" or perhaps "running for president" and that
| group gets smaller and smaller, what's the rest of folks to do?
|
| I ended up writing about this [1] and now I'm doing everything I
| can to build or support syndicalist organizations crowding out
| for-profit investor driven companies.
|
| At this point, tech is just an extension of finance. There's no
| counter-culture here, it's maximum capitalism and we're ubering
| humanity off a cliff.
|
| I've stopped trying to be in tech and founded a non-stock
| democratic cooperative that does residential waste hauling [2,3]
| and hopefully we'll be picking up trash by July.
|
| I'm about to send out our first mailer to two major residential
| groups. I'm open to anyone who wants to give us a loan or be
| hired eventually. andrew@seegull.co
|
| [1]https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
|
| [2]https://www.seegull.co/
|
| [3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873099
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way
| to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels
| (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP).
|
| Relevant quote:
|
| > Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the
| church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that
| no institution could ever achieve the morality of the
| individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when
| confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that
| ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the
| strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of
| death.
|
| Also:
|
| > A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never
| admit, "We made a mistake," because a group that tries to
| change its mind falls apart. I'm hard pressed to find examples
| in history of large groups that said, "We thought A, but the
| answer's actually B." - https://nav.al/failure
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yeah I think part of the challenge is keeping things very
| distributed and not centralizing outside of the core
| management of the structure only.
|
| So for example, structurally I think we can nudge the
| organization such that any of our individual seegull
| "communities" can stay smaller than about 200 co-
| owner/operators/employees. That is to say perhaps each has
| their own specific bylaws (like states) treasury etc...IDK
| how to make it last 1000 years I'm just hoping for 100
| Ancalagon wrote:
| this really resonates with my observations as well. thanks for
| sharing this, taking a look at your website rn
| fnimick wrote:
| I suspect you'll never be able to compete, is the problem. You
| might not be a profit maximizer, but everyone you interact with
| is a cost minimizer, and ethical solutions will inevitably be
| more expensive.
|
| This is not to rain on your parade (I agree with you!) but I
| see the only solution as political via vastly higher taxes on
| higher incomes to support social services. The only place we
| are remotely close to having any influence is in the political
| realm, in the economic world, we are completely irrelevant.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Can't know if we don't try friend.
|
| Thanks! (I think?)
| nerddadnear40 wrote:
| "be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs"
|
| Bingo.
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| 734129837261 wrote:
| Many of the ones I know end up at other companies that had
| troubles finding good employees before. And a bunch of others
| started their own companies, and they are/will hire their own
| employees, too.
|
| I wonder if there are statistics about this kind of trend. How
| many new companies spawn for ever 100 tech layoffs? How many more
| jobs are created in 1, 2, 4, and 8 years after the layoffs?
| ekianjo wrote:
| Man this is such an empty article basically answering no
| questions at all
| clircle wrote:
| I suggest lowering your expectations about how many questions
| the news can answer for you!
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It answers plenty. That it's happening (for folks outside our
| industry), it's small (relative to the industry), and where
| they're going.
| mrweasel wrote:
| A bit bland sure, but it's in there. They are going exactly
| where I expected them to: Companies that aren't considered tech
| companies, but have a need for software developers and
| engineers. From the article: Farming equipment, car industry,
| banking, insurers and retail.
|
| These places have been struggling to hire for years, now they
| can finally fill those positions, or at least some of them.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I mean, the article does list those places but doesn't
| provide any sort of numbers at all.
|
| Who knows if John Deere hired 10k people before the layoffs
| and 3k afterwards. Sure some of the laid off people in this
| scenario could have gone to John Deere but it's more likely
| they've displaced other candidates JD would've hired as
| opposed to JD sponging up laid off people.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| [flagged]
| haasted wrote:
| Also discussed a couple of days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35337326
| testplzignore wrote:
| They've gone to plant-based meat substitute companies. Such a
| high-growth industry has a lot of rolls - err, I mean roles! - to
| fill.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Answer: "Working somewhere else mostly, but some started their
| own company."
| DrBazza wrote:
| And probably leading to the next wave of innovation and/or
| unicorns.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/tech-layoffs-are-feeding-a-new-s...
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| the next wave of innovation will be things like battery tech,
| deep AI
|
| in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together
| in their kitchen
|
| realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the
| ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and
| bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as
| part of his online coding degree (really)
| robopsychology wrote:
| It's great your pool guy is furthering his education and
| going into tech but there is a skill gap between
| experienced ex-FAANG and those jumping into software for
| the pay check. Bootcamp/College grads are not competing at
| the same level as those who have 5+ years of good
| experience and a passion for tech (as most of us have,
| being on HN on a Friday evening/workday).
| fshr wrote:
| 1. It's not zero sum 2. You don't need to innovate like
| that to create a successful startup 3. There is a very,
| very aggressive skill curve for developers and being ex-
| Google will have an advantage over the pool boy
| stcroixx wrote:
| I wouldn't bet on it. Innovation takes hard work, sacrifice,
| low pay, etc. - exactly the opposite of what one does in big
| tech. They might try out of hubris until they burn through
| that nest egg and retreat.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I seriously doubt that. Might be true for younger people who
| were laid off by the "LIFO rule" (i.e., cheaper severance),
| but anyone with a 10y+ career would at least think twice
| before joining a startup... Especially in Europe, but these
| kinds of stories are never about Europe.
| saalweachter wrote:
| What, if you were laid off with 10+ years of savings from a
| bigtech salary and 30-40 weeks of severance and continuing
| benefits, you wouldn't (after a few weeks to process and
| recover) begin hammering out a prototype to that idea
| that's been in the back of your head for the last 5-10
| years? You could burn half a year and still have ten weeks
| to do a job search.
| rcarmo wrote:
| You assume too much regarding parting terms, and I don't
| see any mention of family responsibilities in that rosy
| scenario of yours.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Those are the terms from Google's announcement:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/inside-
| google/messa...
|
| 10 years gives you 36 weeks of severance, plus 6 months
| of healthcare.
|
| If you have a family, you're never going to have a better
| opportunity to spend several months working on your side
| project without measurably impacting your family's
| stability.
|
| Plus, when you do need to resume your job search, your
| resume is now "I spent ten years doing these things at
| BigCo using their proprietary tooling, plus here's the
| demo of the thing I tried to startup the last six months
| using off the shelf frameworks, which I am now already
| proficient in."
| rcarmo wrote:
| Those are the US terms. There is an entire planet beyond,
| you know.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Most startup founders are over 40.
| rcarmo wrote:
| And independently wealthy to a degree.
| tnel77 wrote:
| I saw a quote (I think from HackerNews) talking about how
| during good times, there's lots of startups getting money.
| In tough times, there's lots of money going to a handful of
| good startups. Just work hard to find yourself a promising
| startup!
| rcarmo wrote:
| One word: Europe.
| varjag wrote:
| Little money to any startup.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > Especially in Europe, but these kinds of stories are
| never about Europe
|
| I think SV is a joke compared to what it was, but it's
| still easier to do a startup thing there than anywhere.
| [deleted]
| afro88 wrote:
| What a scoop! Time to write an article behind a paywall
| passwordoops wrote:
| With ChatGPT!
| skrebbel wrote:
| This is the Economist, they don't really go for scoops much.
| (And I think that makes them the only somewhat decent
| newspaper)
| construct0 wrote:
| At home, enjoying their severance package. :-)
| rvz wrote:
| They are simply 'Gone'.
| rationalfaith wrote:
| [dead]
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Cool Buzzfeed article. The only thing "new" it's the confirmation
| of the obvious regarding who is getting the axe at big tech,
| which is mostly sales and paper pushing people.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Not really. It's an even mix from where I'm standing.
| torunar wrote:
| https://archive.is/UopZ0
| tzs wrote:
| Someone should write a song about this, to the tune of "Where
| Have All the Flowers Gone" by Pete Seeger [1].
|
| That song has 5 or 6 versus, each of which asks "where have all
| the X gone?" for some X and then answers that. The X for the next
| verse is based on what happened to the X of the previous verses.
|
| The first verse X is flowers, and what happens to them is "Young
| girls have picked them every one": Where have all
| the flowers gone? Long time passing. Where have all
| the flowers gone? Long time ago. Where have all the
| flowers gone? Young girls have picked them every one.
| Oh, When will they ever learn? Oh, When will they ever
| learn?
|
| Verse 2 it is "young girls" and "gone for husbands every one".
|
| Verse 3 it is "husbands" and "gone for soldiers every one".
|
| Verse 4 it is "soldiers" and "gone to graveyards every one".
|
| Verse 5 it is "graveyards" and "gone to flowers every one".
|
| Verse 6 if present is a repeat of verse 1.
|
| Any ideas on how to change that to be about tech work?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Have_All_the_Flowers_Gon...
| [deleted]
| tsol wrote:
| I know an AI with a knack for poetry and possibly even some
| real creativity
| Beaver117 wrote:
| I can't find another job even with a FAANG background. The market
| is brutal. Maybe my only choice is to start a startup.
| joenot443 wrote:
| I hope you don't mind me poking into your history, but didn't
| you make a post a few months ago saying that you quit your job
| and wanted out of tech?
|
| Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job
| hunt might be a little different from those of the recently
| laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters
| are wondering what's up.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Yes, I quit, wasn't laid off. But now I'm in the same pool as
| the tens of thousands of other very qualified people. How do
| you think that affects my job hunt?
| thaufeki wrote:
| Could also be why you can't find a job. You may be too
| expensive, and they're looking for engineers in the sweet spot
| of cheap/can keep the machine running.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| It's funny because for 10 years people were saying "get this
| big company on your resume and you can just walk into any
| job!"
|
| Clearly not the case anymore
| lesuorac wrote:
| I mean severance was basically a year's wage. I doubt any
| of them are in a rush to be re-hired.
| varjag wrote:
| Well we're now half a year in to the first rounds of
| layoffs. Time flies.
| TheHappyOddish wrote:
| You can, just not jobs at the price level you're expecting.
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of jobs in your field you can get
| with your resume, assuming you're willing to face reality.
| rcarmo wrote:
| There is always an element of "let's see how low we can get"
| in mainstream IT, since people outside tech view tech as a
| cost center and not a profit center, which devalues
| candidates.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| There is IT and there is Dev, and much of the latter drives
| profits.
|
| Most of IT is there to support business ops, and is
| basically there to do what a secretary pool did 60 years
| ago.
| dathinab wrote:
| FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then
| most other, especially smaller companies, so it's not that
| uncommon for small companies to hesitate to hire someone
| directly coming from FANG.
|
| Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to
| hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship
| the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people.
|
| Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid
| hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g.
| from FANG.
|
| Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be
| happy with a less well paying job which you also might be
| perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG
| employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a
| good thing...
| jghn wrote:
| > FANG like companies also do a lot of things different
| then most other,
|
| As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily
| in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers
| has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything
| to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't
| have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern
| at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had way
| too many conversations of the form, "Yes, that is
| objectively better. But at our scale, the value add does
| not warrant the effort involved". Or "there's no need for
| these 15 layers of indirection because there's 5 of us, not
| 5000".
|
| Obviously this is a stereotype and doesn't apply to
| everyone. But that's no different than how people have a
| positive stereotype of ex-BigTech employees being sharp.
| inconceivable wrote:
| i got into an argument with a bigtech employee (outside
| of work, in a social setting) that senior engineers
| should spend 25% of their time mentoring junior hires.
|
| he literally could not understand that a small company
| can't afford to do this.
|
| not only that, he also could not understand that small
| companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody
| to mentor!
|
| and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whatever
| that is.
| dathinab wrote:
| IMHO the whole Software Enginer training pipeline is
| fully broken for a lot of overlapping reasons and I have
| no idea how to fix it.
| esskay wrote:
| Are you expecting a salary similar to the one you were getting
| at a FAANG though? Because that seems to be the main issue -
| FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually
| are.
| dayvid wrote:
| You're worth as much as you get paid. This applies to
| business owners negotiating business contracts and employees
| negotiating salaries.
|
| Don't understand the hate on FAANG salaries as it sets a
| precedent for higher tech salaries.
| [deleted]
| Beaver117 wrote:
| It will be painful to get a 50%+ paycut but I'm willing to
| accept any job - but like others guessed small companies
| instantly reject me. I only get interviews with other
| companies similar to FAANG, only for them to tell me they
| have a hiring feeeze. Or very early stage startups, like seed
| or series A, which I'm not comfortable joining.
| endorphine wrote:
| > It will be painful to get a 50%+ paycut
|
| Technically speaking, it's not a "paycut" if you're not
| currently getting paid.
| htrp wrote:
| > but I'm willing to accept any job
|
| > Or very early stage startups, like seed or series A,
| which I'm not comfortable joining.
|
| Pick one of these two statements please.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| He said any job, not any company
| em500 wrote:
| "Moving down" can be more difficult than it looks.
| Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire
| "overqualified" people (indicated by a high previous salary),
| because they believe these people will jump ship at the
| earliest higher paying opportunity elsewhere.
| hgsgm wrote:
| New employer has no reason to know previous pay.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Unless they're small they have HR, and HR has the time to
| do the research.
|
| Which is logging into Glassdoor or levels.fyi and
| checking. Shit you can do that right now and get some
| rough ballparks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you were a Senior SWE at Google for 5 years, how do
| you imagine that a new employer won't realize that you
| were making a lot more than the $150K/yr they're
| proposing to stretch their budget to offer you?
| maxilevi wrote:
| They can infer it from the employer name or just buy
| salary market data
| taude wrote:
| I don't think an elevated salary at a FAANG implies over-
| qualified, though.
|
| I phone-screened someone from a FAANG, and they knew very
| little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a
| day-to-day. Any of the big-branded commercial apps, they
| weren't familiar with, and I can hire someone for a lot
| less with the required working knowledge AND know that they
| won't be resentful about it.
|
| I think it's going to take a year for some of the young
| engineers to level-set their careers in some places.
|
| I'm trying to remember how long it took after dot-com
| bubble busting, and back then I know a lot who went back
| for their MBAs, Law degrees, etc. during a softening
| market. And I know personally how long it took for me to
| recover to the same economic level.
|
| Also, I get emails a few times a week from recruiters
| saying something like "Ex-Meta Employee/ex-Faang available
| for employment", leads....
| furyofantares wrote:
| > they knew very little about non-proprietary
| technologies that we used on a day-to-day
|
| Day-to-day tools are things that really takes no time to
| learn on the job imo. They take more time to get up to
| speed from scratch but when dropped into an environment
| using them I expect experienced folks to get up to speed
| very quickly.
|
| If they resent not having the awesome dev tools though,
| like you mention, that's another thing entirely.
| taude wrote:
| I think they resent the fact that they'll make 175K/year
| for senior level work.
| jghn wrote:
| > and they knew very little about non-proprietary
| technologies that we used on a day-to-day.
|
| I had an eye opening experience several years ago. My
| group was partnering with a group at Google. Their
| developers were sharp, as one would expect. But were very
| lacking in what would otherwise be considered table
| stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a
| proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't
| familiar with X. The one that really hit it home was that
| we had to teach them how to use Google Cloud, because at
| least at the time, internally Google folks didn't use GCP
| but instead used their own internal versions of things.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > But were very lacking in what would otherwise be
| considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to
| they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus
| they weren't familiar with X
|
| Occasionally X is an open source implementation of a
| Google paper, published after Google decided its
| proprietary tech no longer provides a competitive
| advantage and/or has moved onto a better architecture
| internally.
|
| There's an astounding number of Google publications that
| spawned Billion-dollar industries.
| ikiris wrote:
| This just shows how dumb it is to require specific
| knowledge of products of clearly qualified people.
| feoren wrote:
| 100% agreed that it's dumb to require extremely specific
| knowledge of one product, and 100% disagree that a
| Googler is "clearly qualified" simply because they came
| from Google. I have absolutely no idea why we've all just
| accepted the narrative that any FAANG employee is
| automatically better than the rest of us, despite
| evidence that FAANGs are nothing more than code mills
| optimizing for exploitable ambition over actual
| intelligence or engineering ability.
| [deleted]
| hadlock wrote:
| If you're hiring for a specific skill set it might be
| because you have a target you're trying to hit. In my
| experience purse strings typically open because the
| company has a new project they want to complete in N
| time, and need X additional headcount to accomplish the
| goal in the time required. If it takes 3-6 months to
| onboard someone, you might not get your new headcount
| fully onboarded before v1 of the project ships.
| ikiris wrote:
| It doesn't take 3 months to do this even at wholly
| internal faang environments except in some special cases.
|
| Most of what people are talking about can be learned in
| days because they're 90% the same as other products.
| Sometimes it's _hours_ as someone else said because they
| 're just generic databases or a pubsub system.
| oblio wrote:
| And then you get an edge case bug with the new platform
| and the new guy takes N times longer to find the root
| cause because it's his first time using the platform.
|
| Or the design is wonky because the new platform isn't a
| 1:1 match to the proprietary solution.
| stcroixx wrote:
| I'm running into this with increasing frequency,
| particularly people coming from Amazon. For example, they
| know nothing about something like Kafka because they've
| been using some Amazonified version of something similar
| instead. They of course we'll never be able to match what
| they used to make and it would be more risk than I want
| to take to have them use us as a stepping stone while
| they try to get back to that level.
| QIYGT wrote:
| You can learn everything most devs need to know about
| Kafka in a couple hours. I can't imagine why companies
| would ever hire based on current knowledge rather than
| problem solving skills and ability to learn.
| stcroixx wrote:
| We might be unique, but here's no situation we're using
| Kafka where someone unfamiliar with it would be able to
| design and support production level systems to the
| standards we do after a couple hours. That would result
| in a time bomb for someone else to clean up later when
| all the stuff you weren't aware you didn't know becomes a
| problem. These skills are common, some would say table
| stakes, so it's not hard finding them as long as you look
| outside the proprietary tech shops like FAANG, which is
| why I have no reason to prefer people that don't already
| have them.
| ikiris wrote:
| You aren't unique, you're just really bad at training and
| documentation.
| stcroixx wrote:
| We don't train people on or write our own documentation
| for any widely used open source tools. We use them as
| they're provided and don't expect any unique knowledge
| beyond that. That's a large part of the value in choosing
| tech like this instead of proprietary solutions we'd have
| to document and train people on. It's also why a
| developer with those skills can take them with them from
| job to job over the course of their career and they're
| still valuable or start at a new company and make
| valuable contributions from day one before they learn the
| proprietary bits of the company.
| ecshafer wrote:
| My initial reaction reading this is that you really
| screwed up somewhere with your infrastructure. A pretty
| large company needs a Kafka team, a smaller company needs
| their infrastructure team to have a decent understanding
| with maybe one person / consultant with deeper knowledge.
|
| Kafka for 99% of developers in the company should be "Can
| I use our internal library to read/write some topic".
| stcroixx wrote:
| My preferred size of company would not have the resources
| for a team dedicated to infrastructure. In companies this
| size, there would be multiple developers skilled enough
| with the tech to support it fully from installation,
| configuration, optimization, backup, DR, upgrades,
| troubleshooting, designing and implementing solutions,
| etc. Everything. I've worked at several companies of this
| size and much prefer the broader scope of responsibility
| and experience to what you get somewhere like you
| described.
| chasd00 wrote:
| you sound like a kafka system implementor. why would you
| hire software devs to implement kafka instead of kafka
| system implementors?
| stcroixx wrote:
| Outside of FAANG, roles aren't guaranteed to be this
| specialized. If you can't adjust and expect it to be done
| like they did it at your FAANG, you're going to have a
| tough time being productive.
| [deleted]
| pklausler wrote:
| Wouldn't anybody jump ship for a better job, though?
| em500 wrote:
| Sure, but an ex-FAANGer probably has a better shot at
| actually getting hired at another FAANG (when the job
| market improves) than someone who's only worked at no-
| name shops or local governments.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The implied logic behind that is "I know my company is a
| worse option than many of the other ones out there, so
| I'm going to only hire people who those other companies
| would not do business with." It's inherently a low self-
| esteem attitude.
|
| People leave, sometimes suddenly and without warning. The
| high self-esteem way to deal with it is to do your best
| to provide an attractive working environment, accept that
| some people will leave, and try to learn from each
| departure. That way you have the option of profiting from
| the talented employee who totally could make more at a
| FAANG but happens to like your company because you
| provide good management, a worthwhile purpose, or the
| actual ability to write code rather than deal with
| company politics.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they
| actually are.
|
| I find your tone concerning, considering there's something
| driving wages down (which if you're a wage worker should make
| you squirm regardless of how much you make). I feel some
| resentment against fellow workers (because it doesn't matter
| how much you make, if you MUST work to live, you're a
| worker), but it doesn't matter. Wages aren't tied to worth,
| or the value added to the business. If this was true,
| extrapolating from the sheer amount of money FAANG companies
| make, these compensation ranges should actually be higher.
|
| Wages are tied to the 'market', basically what companies are
| willing to pay. If they cartelize (like they did with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) they can drive wages down. I
| wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the future that
| something similar is happening today, but I'm not wearing my
| tin foil hat yet..
|
| Edit: Just to be clear, I don't work in a FAANG company.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| There's a degree of truth in that, but I think it applies
| for larger companies, especially very profitable ones.
|
| On the smaller side, I've noticed that I can build the same
| 'thing' for two organizations, A & B. Org A will struggle
| to get any value from it, and Org B will make a killing
| from it. From my standpoint, it was approximately the same
| tech, same effort, often even similar problem space. But
| some companies are better at extracting value. You able to
| take software X and get $3M in sales from it? You'll have
| no problem paying me $150k. Someone else with same software
| X struggling to operate their company to make a profit...
| they won't be able to pay anything.
|
| This idea that someone is 'worth', say, $300k/year because
| of their skills or experience just doesn't seem all that
| productive. Or... perhaps what I've been hearing is people
| conflating what they 'should' get in the marketplace
| because of past experiences. Finding the companies and
| industries that can extract value from what you provide
| isn't always easy.
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| You are worth what the market will bear. That includes
| timing and luck.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Not a FAANG engineer but the whole idea of "worth" is a
| two sided affair and very subjective. You can decide your
| own worth and the other side can decide what they think
| you are worth. Neither side needs to be correct, but
| that's how economies are structured.
|
| It's totally fine to demand more for yourself because the
| companies will always try to pay you less. Are all
| engineers at banks less skilled than all engineers at say
| Facebook? Definitely not. But does that mean engineers at
| Facebook are worth less? Again, definitely not. It's the
| engineers at banks who need to demand more.
|
| Personally as a non FAANG engineer I have my minimum for
| what I will work for. And I would rather be unemployed
| and do something of your own than work for less.
| feoren wrote:
| Honestly after living under the pervasive narrative that
| you're a failure of a software developer unless you work
| for either a FAANG or a unicorn SV startup, I'm not sad to
| see arrogant FAANG developers get cut down to size a little
| and learn they're not actually God's gifts to the
| discipline. For over a decade, it's been automatically
| assumed that everyone else was a failure who just "couldn't
| cut it" at a FAANG.
|
| > Wages aren't tied to worth
|
| Of _course_ they are. Nothing in the history of humanity
| has ever been more clearly tied to "this number means how
| much worth you have as a human being" as income in the
| United States does today; a close 2nd being the number of
| serfs you had in medieval France. There's literally an
| income below which people will cheer for you dying in the
| streets if you get sick. Yes, they cheer. They cheered when
| Ron Paul suggested letting poor people die in the streets
| when they get sick. Being poor is becoming _illegal_. They
| 'll throw you in jail for it. They add spikes to the sides
| of highways to make life even more miserable for the
| homeless. Of _course_ your income is tied to your worth as
| a human being. What world are you living in?
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > Of course they are. Nothing in the history of humanity
| has ever been more clearly tied to "this number means how
| much worth you have as a human being" as income in the
| United States does today
|
| We're talking about different things here. Worth as in
| 'how much value you add to the company/industry ie are
| you worth paying this much' (which is what we're talking
| about here) != worth as in 'how American society sees you
| based on your income and what privileges you have because
| you're making money'. I agree with your assessment of
| worth wrt to American society. That is my perception as
| well.
|
| > I'm not sad to see arrogant FAANG developers get cut
| down to size a little and learn they're not actually
| God's gifts to the discipline. For over a decade, it's
| been automatically assumed that everyone else was a
| failure who just "couldn't cut it" at a FAANG.
|
| Everyone is responsible for their own assumptions; I
| don't share the same thought as you. Not everyone who got
| laid off is an arrogant FAANG developer and not everyone
| working at FAANG thinks they're God's gift to the craft.
| Do you by any chance frequent the Blind forums?
|
| In the end, I would remind everyone that wage workers
| hating each other because of how much they make is a God
| send for the people who actually own the economy. It's
| non-productive and mistargeted. You need to hate your
| boss/company if you're not happy with how much you make.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I imagine most places wouldn't turn their nose up at, like,
| and ex-Apple or ex-Google person. Facebook might not be as
| impressive.
| msandford wrote:
| A kinder way to say this is "the talent entering the market
| is pushing wages down" or something like that. It's pretty
| rare that wages reflect worth. They reflect what employers
| have to / are willing to pay.
| jacknews wrote:
| Of course, in general, employers are making way more from
| the work the employee does than they pay, otherwise why
| bother?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| You FAANG background doesn't impress me. I need colleagues I
| can count on, who make themselves an expert in what's needed in
| the moment. If you can demonstrate that from your projects,
| wherever you did them, I look forward to working with you.
| Eumenes wrote:
| The biggest reason I've seen FAANG candidates (mostly Google,
| FB, and Amazon) get rejected is too much experience with
| proprietary technology, esp. if they've been there a long time,
| like 5+ years. I've even spoke to some FAANG candidates who
| think their internal proprietary tech is widely known or
| commercial products.
| dathinab wrote:
| It's more complicated then that.
|
| For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG
| is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite.
| Not just because of differences in people, time and money
| resources but also due to scale.
|
| Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to
| be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on
| the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of
| spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5
| years. And due to the small number of time and human
| resources the actual cost can easily be much higher.
|
| You can see this in some of the design decisions around open
| source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed
| for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at
| the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations
| being important."
|
| But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very
| mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very
| small number at the same time on the same component. Most
| micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly
| chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a
| catastrophe for the company."
|
| For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal
| APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can
| often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any
| migration complications.
|
| Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often
| worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small
| company which might only provide one or two services such a
| mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not.
|
| Or for example in a small company having a repo where you
| define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to
| generate glue code to bind all your services together in a
| "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have
| the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many
| people but many teams might work on code interacting with the
| same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
| taude wrote:
| Yeup. I had a similar comment above. I tried phone screening
| someone, and they had no working knowledge of the commercial
| apps that we integrate with, the databases we use, etc. And I
| can hire literally for half the price someone with working
| knowlege AND know they won't be resentful about the job....
| Eumenes wrote:
| Exactly. I'm also seeing this trend among new grads/early
| career SWEs. AWS, MongoDB, and all sorts of cloud first
| product companies have been plugging their software to the
| university system, and these kids come out of college w/o
| understanding of the computing layer below these products.
| Like they don't know what a server is, what a data center
| is, how storage works. Is that not being taught in CS
| programs?
| quesera wrote:
| Ugh. I've been interviewing Ops/Sec candidates lately,
| and I'm genuinely confused every time an experienced
| candidate _struggles_ with their chosen shell.
| klooney wrote:
| Lol- "switched to fish but can't use it"?
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| FWIW, I've been trying to make the jump from FAANG to a
| smaller, stable company for the past few years. I started
| off in the smaller companies and miss it terribly. I made a
| bunch of extra money in the FAANG space, but I'm unhappy.
| Resentful is the last thing I'd ever be, but the lack of
| working knowledge is a huge issue. I work weekends on
| building knowledge, but the lack of direct experience
| running something at scale means I'll never get the chance
| to make the jump back to the environment I want and thrive
| in. I honestly wish I never made the jump for the money in
| the first place.
| fatnoah wrote:
| I spent a long, long time in startups before moving to larger
| companies, and eventually a FAANG. The folks I worked with at
| the FAANG were incredibly smart, motivated, and
| collaborative, but a huge percentage of them had no
| experience outside of the FAANG. They were able to use the
| in-house systems for build, deploy, data storage, etc. but
| had never actually had to design and/or build or even think
| too much about how such things work. It's a great luxury that
| lets them focus on the product they're building vs.
| foundational infra, but it's a huge detriment when looking to
| go outside of those things.
|
| It's ironic, because the System Design interview is a major
| delineator between lower and higher level Engineers when they
| interview at these companies, yet many of the tenured people
| would do very poorly because many of the questions and
| considerations of the problems presented in such interviews
| are effectively solved problems in their daily work that
| they've never had to think about.
| [deleted]
| esjeon wrote:
| Yup, this. I found many ex-Googlers who just don't know how
| to count _up_. In the past, "we don't know how to count that
| low" was a valid joke, but, these days, it seems like a lot
| of young engineers don't really understand how things work
| beneath their feet. Every level from 1 to 1k to 1m to 1b is a
| unique problem, but these kids only learnt how to float above
| the clouds.
| steponlego wrote:
| You can pretend to check ESG check boxes. I know several people
| who do this.
| sh4rks wrote:
| Are you failing at the CV screen?
| elzbardico wrote:
| One thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off
| from a very big company during a recession is that you need to
| adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the
| other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a
| long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all
| history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them.
|
| I have always been very very conservative with my expenses, I
| don't expect the situation where I make hundreds of thousands of
| dollars an year as a developer something that will go on forever.
| They are out there to get you, you are not a business guy with
| connections, probably you came from a working class family, if
| they can, they will take the rug out of your feet. So, don't get
| too excited thinking that making 300k an year (or even 400, 500,
| whatever) by itself means you're rich now. Income by itself is
| not wealth if you don't save it. You really don't need a Peloton
| bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Last year I took a $15.000 a year pay cut, for a job I really
| wanted, and that's more aligned with my ideals. It didn't
| effect our home economy in any meaningful way and I wasn't
| making anything close to the salaries I've seen people on HN
| expect (closer to $100K).
|
| If we get to a point, and I'm not sure we're quite there yet,
| where the big tech companies, startups and other VC funded
| ventures can't absorb the layoff, then yes, you're absolutely
| correct. People need to adjust their expectations. $100K - 150K
| is a pretty comfortable salary in most areas. If you expect
| $300K to maintain your current lifestyle, you really need to
| think about scaling back. It may never be an issue, but if it
| does, you're better prepared and will have a sizable saving for
| those rainy days.
| closeparen wrote:
| >You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous
| consumption signs.
|
| It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a
| problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out
| for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not
| only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you _must_
| sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades.
| Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on, but frivolous stuff
| is much easier.
|
| This dynamic is an important reason for the "perpetual
| childhood" people complain about in the educated urban classes.
| Because real estate is so expensive, it is legitimately much
| easier to access "fun" stuff than to have the kind of security
| needed to pay a mortgage for 30 years. The two don't even trade
| off against each other that meaningfully. $9-12k/mo mortgage
| and property tax payments buy a _lot_ of toys, travel, and
| fancy dinners!
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I have a friend who works at Meta working on the Metaverse as
| a TPM and they just sold their house and bought one twice as
| large (and expensive). I've warned them it's a risky
| situation but they didn't agree. They remain employed but if
| I were in that situation I'd be pulling my hair out.
|
| On the other hand my house is 1/3 the size and I could pay
| the mortgage working retail if I had to. I'm worried about a
| bunch of friends who bought big houses that required faang
| incomes for 30 years if the tech market turns and doesn't
| return for long periods of time.
| closeparen wrote:
| Absolutely! Committing to an ongoing expense based on your
| earning power in the peak of a cycle is crazy. The only way
| to justify something like that is if you're paying for
| (almost) all of it upfront. But even then the upside
| potentially is probably higher in stocks than in Bay Area
| real estate at this point.
| bradlys wrote:
| > You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous
| consumption signs.
|
| This kind of just general bashing on tech people is so
| conceited. You're acting like a $2,000 stationary bike is
| really worth fussing over when you're making $400-500k/yr.
|
| Very few people at these incomes in tech are living month to
| month. They're overall saving a fuckload even if they own a
| 911.
| p0pcult wrote:
| Go to the local gym and work on _actual_ social networking.
| Peloton is just goofy.
| standardUser wrote:
| Don't talk to me at the gym. People don't generally like
| that.
| tester756 wrote:
| What makes you think he needs to work on his social
| networking?
| thih9 wrote:
| > Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books,
| there's no excuse for not being aware of them.
|
| Not reading history books sounds like a good excuse in this
| scenario.
| pcorsaro wrote:
| I don't think we're in a recession. At least not yet. I think
| your point about salary expectations is kind of interesting
| though. In my industry (restaurant disposables), we're going
| through a big price "reset" right now. Almost all of our
| pricing is trending towards where it was before everything
| started going crazy in 2021. Maybe tech salaries are heading
| the same way?
| x3iv130f wrote:
| I couldn't agree more.
|
| Actual wealth comes from having ownership in wealth generating
| assets.
|
| You can act rich for a season off of a big paycheck but you'll
| soon be back to poverty if your money isn't converted into
| value generating assets.
| squalo wrote:
| I was recruited by two different google people in the last six
| months and both of them are unemployed now according to LinkedIn.
| The only tech dudes I know there are on visas and they haven't
| been axed.
| Exendroinients wrote:
| Finally the market is correcting themself. Software engineers
| aren't worth more than any other engineers.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| OpenAI is hiring software engineers in the $200-400k range. The
| startup I work for has me in that range as well.
|
| Alphabet went from 119k employees in 2019 to 190k employees in
| 2022. Microsoft went from 144k to 221k.
|
| The fact is there was a massive amount of hiring done in the
| last few years, and these layoffs have yet to come to close to
| rolling these numbers back. Have these layoffs made Amazon any
| less of a behemoth?
|
| I respect the engineering professions, but software engineers
| are still separated by a huge gap in opportunities and
| compensation.
| waselighis wrote:
| I kinda agree with this sentiment, I've certainly known plenty
| of software engineers who weren't half what they were getting
| paid, mostly juniors but also a few seniors. But I've also
| known plenty of software engineers who were worth every cent.
| However, I'd argue the bigger problem is other engineers are
| underpaid, especially considering many types of engineering
| require a strong grasp of advanced mathematics and physics.
| Then again, most professions in this world are woefully
| underpaid.
| ducknalddon wrote:
| It's all just supply and demand, it has little to do with
| worth. Yet another reason not to link your self esteem to
| your job.
| eftychis wrote:
| I disagree. Companies make way more money of what they offer.
| Otherwise they would go bankrupt. They are not a charity.
|
| From my experience, from colleagues and friends, equity is
| worth 100x that of salary, if you know where to "bet" yourself.
| You can add the option to retire really early with equity as an
| engineer. One can't with salary before one's 60s.
|
| That other engineering fields might be extremely underpriced is
| a different topic. But that is not true either. But again I am
| not seeing the salary data that support that argument.
|
| Companies either pay for an "average web developer" perhaps
| with some experience, which is maybe what you are hinting? Or
| they pay for a specialist or strong generalist that will design
| a system to ensure they don't lose millions to billions if it
| goes down.
|
| You need to calculate your Shapley value. And that usually in
| the Bay area says you are vastly underpaid if the stock doesn't
| pay out. The cash is _nothing_ compared to the value a good
| engineer could add.
|
| Again depends on the specialty. If you are one of the 10-20
| people in the world that can build a particular system in
| production -- my case say -- you are valued differently.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > equity is worth 100x that of salary, if you know where to
| "bet" yourself
|
| Yes, and the odds are not all that much better than in Vegas.
| rcme wrote:
| Per-employee, software companies like Google are much more
| profitable than "other" engineering companies.
| shams93 wrote:
| I turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative
| wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been
| unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved
| in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically
| turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k
| for my education.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Wow that's a lot of money. Did you have master's/post doc
| degrees?
| patrickthebold wrote:
| > having been forced to spend 478k for my education
|
| Go on...
| jesse__ wrote:
| I'm working on a team that's >50% 30+ year career engineers.
| It's the best team I've ever worked on by an enormous margin.
|
| I don't know how many dollars any of them spent on education,
| but I know everyone I work with has spent many tens of
| thousands of hours of their time practicing, working on, and
| becoming extremely good at what they do.
|
| I don't know anything about you, or your life, what field you
| work in, and I won't presume anything, but I would like to
| suggest that you may be encountering negativity due to an
| outlook that you 'have been basically turned back into a
| child', or were 'forced to spend 478k for [your] education'.
|
| ...
|
| Moving in with your aging mother to help her during a global
| pandemic does not turn you back into a child. I'll likely live
| with my mother again before she dies because I wouldn't want to
| live in a long-term-care home, so I won't put her though that.
|
| Similarly, having spent a small fortune on your education
| doesn't mean anything other than you're capable of, and have
| (or had) the means to, spend a bunch of money.
| blindriver wrote:
| I'm in my 50s, I got 6 job offers in the last round of job
| interviews I had last year. I haven't felt the age
| discrimination yet, maybe at some point but hopefully I can
| retire before that.
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