It's the same reason many employers don't have meaningful programs for continuing education or conferences. The goal is to hire people who are perfectly suited for the role already (or the nearest approximation), not to train people into the job.
Not great. I have been to last rounds with several large companies and then just get ghosted. Honestly have been interviewing for like 9 months (7 months before getting laid off)
This is intriguing. Can you provide more details? Did you have customers prior to deciding to "no longer hunt for work"? Or do you plan to find customers/build a new product?
I actually have enough credits from "potential customers", who always ask me to build products for them. One of main reason is, i told them, cloud products are shit (due to pricing, customization, and quality of codebase they made), but got no time to actually focus on building the product. So this is the time i want to settle down and make the progress for them.
One example, they have no idea on how to build fast, secure and cheap websites!
I’d ask in a month. It’s still early since the layoffs. I’d guess that even for people who were laid off first, started looking immediately, and found plenty of hits, few have accepted jobs.
I’m much more curious in 4-5 months. I assume VC funding is harder to get now, for example, but I don’t think that’ll make a massive impact for a little while.
"I've found plenty of hits but haven't accepted an offer yet" seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the question of "how's the job hunt going?"
Sure, but I think the implicit question-behind-the-question-being-asked is "we're hearing about a recession and that the job market is a lot harder than it was, how are you finding it?"
Right, and that seems like a question that can be usefully answered right now by the victims of the early layoffs who might have had time to get a few offers by now. If the responses are all "it's been a month and 90% of the feedback I get is 'sorry we aren't hiring anymore'" then that paints a much more dire picture than "it's been a month and I have 4 viable offers that I need to pick between," both of which are potential responses we could be seeing by now.
I got connected to someone impacted at Twitter on Saturday, within 24 hours of them being notified they were impacted by the layoff.
I talked with them for an hour that next Monday AM about the opportunities my teams have open, one of which was highly relevant to their skills, and by the time we chatted, they had 3-4 interviews with other companies scheduled. Joined the dots to the hiring manager and recruiters. They introduced us to lots of other Twitter engineers too which was amazing and very helpful to me.
Our interviews happened with them 10 days later and we moved forward to make an offer; we are still working through offer details with them (and they have multiple companies making offers). We’ve also got several strong applicants for this role.
I’m glad to see many of the impacted folks are quickly finding places to land because the cruelty of Twitter’s next chapter under Elon is a stain on the industry and the world.
Curious if you don’t mind sharing, did this candidate have crazy comp due to Twitter RSUs before the implosion? And if so, are you all roughly matching that, or they’re settling for less?
Not particularly crazy. Doesn’t seem like the Total Compensation for this person will change dramatically, although it’s worth nothing that different companies have different philosophies on how the package is structured.
What’s salary, what’s a performance-based annual bonus in cash, what’s equity-based compensation and within that what’s granted upfront and what’s performance-based and granted annually, what’s the signing bonus, etc. Vesting schedules also can differ somewhat dramatically (the Amazon offers as one example are very backloaded), some companies have a history of pricing in assumed growth in equities, there are lots of moving parts (some of which are employee-favorable, like pricing on-hire awards on a Trailing 50d Average; some of which are more employer-favorable like assuming 15% annual appreciation in equity price).
Amazons assumed appreciation scheme is blasphemy IMO - are there even any other companies that do that?
Recently lots of companies have moved to quarterly vesting which is very employee friendly
I’m guessing you’re a startup meaning illiquid options - high risk with a tiny chance of a high reward after its all said and done, and the standard 90 day exercise window upon leaving is very employee unfriendly
Layoff is a layoff regardless of whether you get fired over email, text or a personal call from the CEO saying how great you are. It was the latter for me several years ago and didn't sting any less.
I recall the 'pandemic hiring spree' on my team did not start until Jan-Feb 2021. After that it took basically the whole year to complete. That company was famous for its speed and scale of pandemic hiring sprees.
To anyone who is job hunting now and finding a slow market: things will change, we will get through this.
I'm not laid off but actively looking to change after spending a couple of years at my current employer. Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews, 1-2 low ball offers, or radio silence. I cannot imagine how hard this must be for those laid-off, hopefully this storm passes soon.
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
I've not been laid off either. I'm currently taking a break from jobs. I'm starting to think that it's time to go back to full-time employment. But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months. Let all the companies that are going to do layoffs have their layoffs and then join a company still looking for new devs in a few months.
>But I'm looking at the job market and think it might be better to give it 4-6 months.
I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
Honestly, German unemployment money. I'm entitled to 2/3 of my original salary for 360 days. 2/3 of my salary is enough to live on while still saving a bit of money every month. I paid all the taxes for 7-years, so I figure I should take advantage of the unemployment money.
You can also only receive this for up to 12 months - afterwards you go into the much lower, somewhat notorious program nicknamed "Hartz 4". You receive funds around the poverty threshold, and they get withheld if you e.g. travel out of state unannounced of fail to attend interviews or seminars they book you for. If they think your apartment is too large for you, even if it's cheap enough, you are forced to move. Any savings you have, you are forced to spend. Unemployment life in Germany isn't as rosy as this post makes it sound. That said, the system is being replaced by a less controversial one called "citizen money" soon.
Personally, if I get laid off, I would probably also not jump on the _very_ first offer I get desperately, but try to land something good. That's what the higher amount you get for up to 12 months is quite useful for.
There are also some legal stuff preventing me from getting a job just now so I'm in an area where I legally can't even look for a job right now. Germans and their red tape :)
Not sure about the OP, but I could easily spend 3-5 months unemployed despite not being either wealthy or dependent. Up to a year if I had to and decided to budget more carefully.
Mostly comes to low cost of living in my country + being reasonably frugal + slowly building my savings over time.
(Though note that I don't have kids yet, if I had children my calculations would be totally different.)
Software development pays incredibly well by the standards of the average American. You can spend that money on lifestyle inflation, or you can save/invest it and buy yourself an enormous amount of financial freedom. Whether you call that "being independently wealthy" is a matter of semantics.
Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months" and "is independently wealthy, i.e. can live off interest of their own savings". Former is extremely easy to achieve if you can save significant portions of your salary. If you can save 30%, you can achieve it after 3 years. Latter takes a bit longer.
Good point, I've just calculated it and you'll need 2 years and 4 months to save one year's expenses that make up 70% of your salary, at a saving rate of 30%.
Yeah there is a lot of space between "has savings for 8-12 months"
I think there is a mentality difference here. I have savings that would easily last me 10 years of not working. But... that's kind of my plan. I will be retiring some day.
I don't want to use up even a dime of that money by not working in my prime earning years.
The other side of that coin is that saving for a post work life (particularly at normal retirement age) is a good way of spending all of your life working hard for a retirement which never comes. There is something to be said for spreading those retirement years across your lifetime rather than saving them all up for the end.
Different of course if you have a plan to retire at 45 or something.
A good friend of mine spent his life being pretty frugal. Saved up a nice chunk of change, too -- his wife is also a software developer, they both made good money. Got cancer early last year and was dead 10 months later. 55 years old. Ugh.
Not saying you should run out and spend your nest egg. On the other hand, I'd be reluctant to suffer too much during my prime working years scrimping and saving for a retirement that might actually not happen. I'd rather have jobs I really enjoy, and frankly, if I enjoy the work well enough why would I retire? Just take longer and longer vacations and work part time. So I'm willing to use a bit of my saved up funds when necessary to get out of a work environment that is unpleasant.
Sorry about your friend. My wife also had a friend in the same boat. Made it to 59 and heart attack. Statistically they are outliers, though. For every one of those cases there are probably 10 that make it long past a normal retirement age and 2 that make it beyond 90 years or so. Given the choice, I’d rather be prepared for a 30 year retirement and unluckily die early than be prepared for a 5 year retirement and live to see 90, eating dog food.
You can live a long time with a very low quality of life. It's not just dying that the concern. I don't think we're really talking here about not having enough money to survive in retirement, we're saving to have the dream retirement later.
Right, I wouldn't advocate spending it all. Just a bit of moderation. It does help that by the time you're within 10 or 15 years of retirement you should mostly not need big contributions to investments, the interest ought to be doing the heavy lifting. Doesn't always work out that way of course.
It is largely mentality. Both for the initial plan and execution of saving up (and trying to do it fast, e.g. in 5-10 years) and then pulling the trigger and quitting. I pulled the trigger in late 2020 based on somewhat optimistic forecasting (more than the 4%/5% rule of thumb) that I might have enough for it to be indefinite at steady expense levels. TBH rocky markets this year have had me feeling like it'd be nice to have a steady income instead of only outcome (and I should have bought property/gotten a low interest mortgage on something before quitting) but the feeling hasn't been strong enough to make me actually take any steps towards that, and anyway dollar-wise I'm still overall above where I was when I quit. I don't really know if I'll "never work again" (unless forced, and there are several forcing functions I can imagine apart from the market performing much more poorly than expected) but I can easily see myself enjoying the rest of this decade not working, maybe dabbling in some side income gigs eventually, and only getting back into full time employment stuff if I really want to in my 40s. As a man in a knowledge field my "prime earning years" are probably in my 40s-50s anyway, while until aging is solved my physical body's not getting younger.
I wonder what sorts of things influence the mentality. I've been reading Walden here and there recently, I remember being forced to read some of it in I think junior high, I suspect at least a little influence lies there but there's no better trick to make kids dismiss a book's messaging than to force them to read it in chunks via some textbook and then be quizzed. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet." "Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode."
Of course by Thoreau's standards I'm positively roasting and happy about it, and I think 10 or even 20 years at a career is more than a fine tradeoff if that's all it takes to secure a retirement. As a teen I remember thinking I'd be happy enough to avoid having worked for 40-ish years straight like most of the adults around me had done/were doing (some of whom died right before or after their retirement age goal, too).
Regarding Walden and the "have to read it in high school" - I recently came across it again while playing Dear Reader ( https://www.dearreadergame.com )
If you've got an iDevice with Apple Arcade, it's something interesting to play.
It uses books that are now in the public domain that are twisted into games of word order, spelling, and passages that make you read the abridged version and to an extent, force/encourage you to become familiar with the words to better play the game.
Meaning it would have been easier to with a demonstrable income stream? Or just incidentally, due to macro stuff and time raising interest rates over that same period
Both, though the latter is a bit mixed up with more wishful thinking like "why didn't I invest everything in Apple in [early year]". Life's too full of those to really regret individual ones too much though.
I figured I'd be ok liquidating ~$300k max for a cash purchase and skipping the mortgage, though if needed it's possible to get a delayed financing loan after, and at least a HELOC. But spiking prices everywhere made that more difficult or impossible in certain areas. And even if something is 'affordable' at say $265k, I find it hard to stomach the idea of paying that much when I think it is (and 2019/2020 records show was) worth only about half that. (In 2014 I actually had legal control of a house but opted to get rid of it, it had been refinanced and it took months to find a buyer at $170k to zero that out. Earlier this year zillow estimated it could fetch $420k, which is absurd to me knowing all about it, but seeing actual sales in the area I believe it.)
never mind that anyone following mr money mustache advice to date, would be under water and strugling more than people that just saved in safer assets all that while.
Yup. I'm basically back to early 2021 levels, still up almost 60% since things bottomed out in March/April 2020. The big drops seem concerning in the short term, but if you look at it over the long term... well... I'm not too worried.
I've always had an extremely tenous grasp on consistently being employed, and know getting fired is just around the corner. Therefore, saving about 6-12 months of expenses is first step, then I'm allowed to start spending more than $100/m or whatever here and there on stuff. I usually end up needing that savings because getting a new job can easily take that long, and so by the beginning of age 30 this year I was back in the negative and almost homeless again with no real assets. That strategy keeps lifestyle inflation way down
Variety of reasons, burnout, management style changing or expectations changing in a way that I can't keep up, I guess those are the usual ones and they're closely related. Most companies also just arbitrarily pick 2 week agile sprints with daily stand-ups, often increasing the amount of meetings as time goes on, and this is usually where things start going downward for me. There also tends to be a decrease in autonomy to get my work done over time, which helps me feel like shit on a daily basis, and so it starts a negative spiral.
In one case I was doing reasonably well with my software dev tasks for a while, but then they assigned me to periodic customer support, and I said up front that's not something I'll be good at. At the same time, my manager tried to increase the oversight of my work, because I was getting slower at it. So I'd wake up every waiting for my manager to "check-in" on me like a child, eventually getting to the point where I couldn't bring myself to get anything done and just resented my existence.
I'm in an ok spot now, for now, but who's to say how it'll be by January. All I want is a place I can do good work for, for a reasonable salary, but it's been very difficult to find.
Damn, I’ve been there — at least in the situation where the manager concludes that micromanaging will somehow make the managee more effective, rather than in the very best case, hamstring it by bottlenecking on them and in the average case, deeply humiliate by trying to make the managee do things exactly the way they would (but be worse at it, because the managee is not them and could have their own different, personalized, effective work style).
Yes, it's both. Thankfully I'm in a completely different timezone, so have reasonable grounds to not be in every meeting or available between specific big blocks of time. I have no interest though in trying to reduce my own motivation toward the work, so I simply said more this amount of meetings will reduce my productivity. I'm ok with how things are, but anything additional will displace other work from my day.
There's a lot of range of what constitutes "independently wealthy, i.e. can live off interest of their own savings" when one gets there. Say, you may live a single life of relative leisure for the rest of your days, but if you plan to start a family and have kids (with all it implies) - nope, you'll still have to get back to work! Or want to live large and not have to worry that much about material side of life (i.e. when money is just for keeping score)? Well, you'd better find out ways to make most of your current financial independence to get there, which in itself is work (although just investment related kind, but still).
Sotware engineers in developing countries earn significantly more than the average person in their country. By living the same lifestyle as an average person, they can save a lot.
> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
Having low outgoings. While I would prefer to have income (I'm hoping to be able to buy a house at some point), I'm a single person with no dependents, and I probably spend around £1200/month in total (including rent). And that's in London - one of the most expensive cities in the world - and without putting any effort into living cheaply (I often buy groceries at the local store rather than the cheaper big supermarket for example). If I chose to live somewhere cheaper (even in the uk) that could probably be halved without completely destroying my quality of life.
This is very impressive and difficult to maintain in London. Rent for a "double" room - meaning a room in a flat/apartment or house that fits a US full or European double bed is like 900/month right now. Spending only 1200/month is very difficult to achieve. I have no idea how this is feasible. To add to rent, local stores are usually more expensive than the supermarkets.
Maybe you ought to make a masterclass on this topic.
If you took out mortgage when interest rates were really low, it’s possible to have your own place and spend about that much per month if you live frugally (well at least until you need to remortgage in few years and rates might be much higher). If you are renting though I also finding it difficult to believe. I was spending around 1600 pounds per month and I was living very modest live, spending little and trying to save as much of my income as I could.
Well my rent is only £600/month which helps a lot. It's in a less popular neighbourhood, but it's still in Zone 2 with good transport links and it's very nice.
> Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]:
> You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).
I picked Budapest for comparison, because as a European I don't know many large, safe, and affordable US cities that wouldn't require owning a car for comfortable living.
Budapest is a very weird place unless you live in an expat bubble in the 5th district downtown or in a villa in the 2nd. The city is basically a parody of itself, for example they didn't have money to keep up the mental hospital so they just released everyone on the street. Even a good few years after the fact, the city is still full of visibly mentally ill people, who act completely random. You never know when you'll get spat on or some abuse shouted at you just for existing. One time a guy walked up to me and put arms up like a boxer and tried to fight me. It's very unsafe too. We interviewed a dev in a downtown café in broad daylight in a crowded place and he was robbed at knifepoint just outside the café.
I agree with most of your points, even though I never felt unsafe in Budapest during the 3 months I spent there, including many many long walks after midnight.
I picked Budapest as an example because it's a well known international destination with very high level of walkability, great public transportation, and affordable prices.
Prague and Krakow are two other similar options in Central Europe, only much less "weird" (and, as a result, a little more "boring").
There are also plenty of pleasant and affordable cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia and Porto.
I make 180k and spend around 35k a year. Easy to save money when only providing for yourself and living with roommates. I live in a major American city and don’t feel like I’m penny pinching at all, but I’m not really into “classic” money spending activities like drinking and shopping. Saved well over 3 years of expenses this year alone.
Can I ask what industry and your seniority (And maybe whether you’re doing 80h weeks?) Been considering a move, trying to calibrate myself on what I’m actually worth.
It’s a data warehousing company and I’m an se2. Sorry but would prefer not to say anything else. I will say that I got this job at the height of the market froth and am not sure if they’re still offering this salary although we are hiring
I used levels.fyi to find comparable salaries and my friends in tech said it’s pretty accurate
I just recently took a year off to study, do side projects, and take care of family. It was a much-needed break following the many stressors of the covid era. Some things matter more than money.
Having worked for 10ish years beforehand, it was financially easy. When I was ready to work again, I responded some recruiter emails and was hired again fairly quickly, at a position better than the one I left.
Living in a low cost-of-living area helps a great deal, as do the excellent salaries US devs make.
I don't earn a huge US salary, but my rent and bills are less than a third of my salary. I don't have a family. If you do that for 5 years, you have 10 years of savings where you could potentially not work!
Lots of financial ideas in this thread, but I feel this misses one point: achieving the comfort level. For me, it started with focusing on my mental health, finally getting to the realization that I'm worth taking care of, and that my non career dreams are valid and important. So jumping out of the rat race for a year to just exist as a human was an almost no brainier. I'm not getting any younger.
I think it was Scott Adams he presented this formula to me: "Happiness = Health + Freedom". This includes mental, physical and emotional health, while freedom is far more variable and personal in definition. The key is you need both.
> I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
In my case that'd be:
- living in a relatively affordable country (Latvia), where rent and other expenses aren't too high
- having an okay income by local standards, e.g. I make around 2000 Euros after taxes, which is in the upper 10% of salaries locally https://www.algas.lv/en/salaries-in-country (many earn more)
- saving and/or investing for many years now, I have about 37k Euros saved up, which isn't much for someone in US, but with monthly expenses between 500 to 1000 Euros, they might last me from 3 to 6 years (though less in practice, due to inflation)
- having additional factors that make things easier, such as sharing a residence or living with parents, having solar panels or one of those energy efficient homes if in the countryside, having reasonably affordable ways of heating if in the countryside (e.g. firewood with central heating), not having too many subscription services and so on
But then again, I live a fairly frugal lifestyle: don't use expensive cloud platforms for development (though I pay for JetBrains tools), only occasionally get video games (or other entertainment) on sale, don't have a car and routinely save about 50% of what I earn, if not more.
For people with higher living standards than mine: probably earning more than I do, even relative to their expenses.
Honestly i think most devs can do this. The difference is in the US our tolerance for seeing our savings go down is super low. I can live for 3 years with my current savings(just cash with invested but non retirement funds it would be about 8) but i still don’t feel like i can take any time off.
Also, the power of compounding interest over time. Take time off and eat away at your savings for a year when you are 25, and that probably adds 5 years to your retirement age. Better make that year really worth it!
I think there is an assumption hidden in your words, that years earlier in life are in some way more valuable/fun/important than years later in life. I get it, HN's demographics skew really young, and I bet a lot of people here believe that.
Even as I approach elderliness, I still feel that every year of my life has become much more joyful, exciting and enriching than the previous year. I would absolutely not trade away multiple retirement years for a single year of fucking around in my twenties.
Looking at my grandparents, they definitely had some good retirement years. Then some medical issue hits and it seems things go downhill very fast. Point is, you never know how many good years you'll get...
In '09, I had a "year off" after the Netapp layoff and the job market wasn't exactly hopping.
I had WARN and severance that would last me all summer, fall, and a bit into the winter before I ran out of that.
So, I spent all summer and fall and a bit into the winter (the thing that finally had me head to my parents' house was a snow storm from the Dakotas heading east in October) driving, hiking, and taking photographs.
There were some hikes that I did then (petroglyphs at Ozette, Ramona Falls on Mt. Hood) that would be much more challenging now that a decade and a half have passed. My endurance for driving has also gone down - I noticed this coming back from Dickinson, ND after the eclipse of 2017 (I really should have gotten a hotel room in Minneapolis) compared to the last leg of a trip from Twin Falls, ID to SF in '08. I can't do 10h drives anymore like I could when I was in my thirties.
And so while there's the "a year off when you're 25 vs retire earlier in your 60s" debate, I would tend to argue for the "when it's a question of experiences to be had, regrets are often the more costly side of the equation when looking back on it later in life."
Also note that not everyone has the same life trajectory of a family and kids and grand kids to look forward to in their later years. For me (single, no kids, on the far side of the half way point between 18 and 81), I am very glad that I had my great road trip when I was in my 30s rather than trying to do it when I was retired.
I wouldn't say being younger is necessarily more valuable, it's more that there are many reasons not to sacrifice yourself totally in your prime (in terms of health / fitness, sexual appeal etc) just to be wealthy and "more comfortable" in retirement.
We of course can't trade our older years with our younger years.
For me personally, I'd much rather have spent the time with family, travelled to the places I wanted, slept around and worked on things I found fun than to slave away, just to save for a greater comfort in a future that is uncertain.
Of course I still hope to be comfortable in retirement, but without a doubt I would regret having chosen a certain path that would lead to comfort than a slightly less predictable path where comfort is not guaranteed.
As a consultant (someone who takes short-/midterm contracts) you can make $1000/day (probably more in the Valley). Many more experienced developers go down that route instead of being in a full time position. You work for a few months, make the income of a year and then you holiday for the rest of the year.
How do I get those contracts? I'm a full-stack developer with 10 years of experience, also some data analytics experience. I got laid off almost two weeks ago. I would love to start my own contracting business. Do you have any insight?
I contracted for the better part of a decade and I wasn't extremely good, but I was solid technically and trusted as a problem solver, so I got my first contract from my personal network, and then built it from there. If I had to rely on being extremely good and going in cold I'd still be looking. Your best bet is to go with a third party and then eventually go independent once you have your own reputation and network.
Second this, I’m full-stack with experience on everything from embedded firmware to frontend. I’d really like to try this route, but I’m not sure how to get in the door.
I'm not the OP, but I'm in a similar boat: my contract ends next month and I'm told they're not going to be able to get it renewed due to budget cuts. I'm also planning to take 4-6 months between gigs (possibly a lot longer depending on what the job market looks like then).
> How does one do this?
In my case my wife has a job that provides the health insurance (so your "dependent on another" is partly right). In addition, our mortgage will be paid off in January, so that'll make it easier to live on one (smaller) income. We'll still be running a bit of a deficit each month (between $200 and $300/mo) but we've got a good 12 to 18 months of living expenses saved up in our emergency fund (that would be 12 to 18 months of living expenses if we both were to lose our jobs). After that there's a Roth IRA we could draw upon. So not too worried at this point.
I've taken a couple breaks between jobs; about 9 months each time. The key is to save money while you are working so that you have a buffer. Obviously, it can be tough to save money. I did it by never getting comfortable with how much money I made; I lived like I made a lot less. (Basically, stock was half my compensation, but even though I auto-sold it whenever it vested, I mentally valued it at $0, so that was free savings. I did all my planning and forecasting around base pay. That is less possible if you have a family to support, but it is also very low risk. Everything financial is a matter of how much risk you're comfortable with. If you take on more risk for expenses, you have less of a buffer for "I don't feel like working" or layoffs.)
A lot of your money is going to be for housing, and there are a lot of "conventions" that I think you should be careful with. Housing companies will tell you to spend 30% or more of your gross income on housing. You can do that if you want, but you'll have more savings if you aim for 10-15%. It's quite possible; I've lived in a nice neighborhood in NYC for 10 years and pay about 16% of my gross income on rent. (Rent stabilization is a powerful force, though, and you kind of had to be here 10 years ago to be paying 10 years ago's rents.)
Similar stabilizing forces apply if you have a mortgage as well. If you get a 30 year fixed, your monthly payment isn't going to go up over 30 years, but the value of that money is going to decrease, so it will be less of a burden over time because your income is likely to be adjusted to inflation over time. My advice to myself from 10 years ago would have been to buy and not rent; the dollar becomes worth less and less over time, but the roof over your head remains as useful as ever. If you have savings, the dollar decreasing in purchasing power just wipes out your savings. If you have debt, then the amount of time it takes to work off your debt decreases instead. Rent stabilization does give a lot of this advantage to renters, but it's rare throughout the US, NYC is kind of an anomaly.
Regardless, always be working on building that buffer. You want to be able to pay for housing for 1-2 years without working; once you have that buffer, then you can decide to use it to take time off, or you can keep it stashed away for "quirky billionaire buys my company and fires everyone". (Such things do apparently happen.) The lower your monthly expenses are, the easier that is, so keep your expenses low. The expense that I think is easiest to dig into is food; it can easily be $25-$30 to order a cheeseburger and fries for delivery (at least in NYC), but you will be hard-pressed to spend $30 on ingredients to make a single meal. If you have any free time whatsoever, there is a lot of savings at hand. If you have no free time, then hopefully you're being compensated for that.
I suppose the elephant in the room is the disparity in pay between non-FAANG and FAANG (or whatever people call it these days; Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix seem to be facing hard times, Google definitely seems interested in reducing compensation across the board, Apple's still doing pretty well), and things like that. There are no doubt great software engineers making $70k a year doing the same work that Google is paying people $400k a year to do. Try and get that job, and everything will be a lot easier for you. HN hates this, but if leetcode is what's standing between you and 4x the pay, you should probably just practice the leetcode. Your safety net and quality of life will increase dramatically, even if you move to a high-cost-of-living area. I definitely did that when I was applying to Google 10 years ago, and it was probably the best investment I ever made. $50 worth of books and a few evenings trying the exercises, and I got a 3x pay increase and a free move to NYC. Would recommend considering it.
(BTW, it seems like every company in existence has min...
It's not just practicing leetcode though. It's also putting your considerable skills to work for an entity that will funnel the world's attention into advertising (Google), create platform lock-in and undermine repairability (Apple, Nvidia), successfully lobby governments against use of open standards (Microsoft), etc.
All companies pay you to put its interest before your own interest, but some companies are much worse and much more effective at working against the greater good than others. I'm not selling out to those just to add another few years to my already very achievable retirement.
Although I see a lot of sibling comments, their message is about managing the money obtained from previous burst of (one's specialty related) activity, so I'd add something different. There are also cases when one may have another source of income (passive or whatever alternative active type may be at hand, there always is) or means of supporting oneself (say, having the needs covered by enrollment in a volunteer program). It's not great, but bearable. In that state a return to employment could mean in fact just getting back to one's previous quality of life and regaining access to resource levels that allows one to plan/dream long term. The trick is to plan ahead for such situations and not get over-leveraged.
I did something similar. It worked out for me because I live in the midwest US, with a lifestyle that's not actively frugal but is definitely below the average cost of living, but I was working remotely for west coast salaries. That made it really easy to save up money.
I'm nearing the end of it now, and I've spent about $6000 over three months on things I'd categorize as normal living expenses (I took a couple of trips that added a few thousand to that). I'm not so well off that I can call this a trivial amount of money, but it wasn't the hardest decision ever, and I could make it work for much longer if I had to.
Don't mean to sound condescending but I am fascinated by this fascination.
If you move to SEA your cost of living might be as low as $500/m depending on the frugality and living standards. Its not for everyone obviously due to various life circumstances (caring for relatives, wife with kids, illness). But for the young, single and free there is a world out there that doesn't require you to have a 300k/y job to survive in upper Manhattan and service the car / house loans :)
I wish people explored the world a bit more. It really does give perspective in terms of how the rest of 99% live outside of our tech bubble.
Freelancer here; this time of year there is always a slowdown. Holiday vacation absences make scheduling all the right people to interview harder.
I set aside extra the rest of the year to smooth over the drop off in responses late-Oct/Jan period. By February I usually get swarmed with asks to tackle projects and can pick ones that are actually interesting.
Then it happens again in summer as people with enough money to not work take another 2-3 months off.
I can third this. Usually companies are busy making plans for the new year. Then somewhere near February is where they start looking for the people who can make it happen.
Big companies usually operate on a yearly / quarterly cycle when budgeting things (bookkeeping cycle). If they need someone in January you're probably hired in December. January is the new start of the year. If they decide to take on new people it takes a few weeks before all the meetings are done and those positions become available on the market. Then summer is usually a bit more quiet as well.
3-6. But I try to line up the next one in the last 3, or right away if it’s a 3 month gig.
Lately I’ve been “specialized” in cloud ops mentorship. Lots of businesses still run monoliths, have no CICD or secops. I don’t automatically nudge them to break the monolith up; some are well organized and documented and work for the biz. Mostly I help them establish a smoother “idea to deployment” pipeline.
Though after 4 years it’s become pretty repetitive. I’ve been tinkering with the Linux kernel internals again, thinking about looking for lower level gigs.
I’ve done an about 1 year stint contracting, all with a single client pretty much staff aug web dev, then went back to fulltime.
I’d love to find engagements where you’re not tied to their 9-5 hours, have to attend their daily stand ups etc. I think the only opportunities like that on a standard full stack engineer skill set is building MVPs for new startups, or companies with no in house dev team
I am looking for a senior manager at a top 5 retailer. We are not as shiny as big tech but pay well with great work life balance. Job security etc. let me know if anyone want to connect. I have 5 positions open for senior dev to lead dev. We are .net and Java shop. But all cloud based.
> Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers, and having a solid revenue stream tied to my current team - I've mostly gotten rejections without interviews
How do you expect the HR folks to validate (or even to have read what you wrote) these claims? A lot of people put the things you’re putting on their resumes.
They’re also getting resumes when from Meta, Amazon, Stripe, … engineers. Is it really surprising you’re not getting a call back?
HR don't validate resumes before you get a call back; that would be super-inefficient. As a hiring manager of course experience at the big co's catches my eye, but unless you're hiring there as well (and most of us are not) I actually figure I can't get them interested anyway, so don't pursue these people. Someone who claims deep technical or experience or people management though? I'm totally going to jump at the chance to talk to them asap, even if I've never heard of their current company.
> I actually figure I can't get them interested anyway, so don't pursue these people.
This seems self-fulfilling? People who have applied to your company are saying they are interested in working there. The lack of response is the reason they lose interest.
People assume it's easier for more senior people to get offers, but it's actually the opposite. The more senior you get, the longer it can take to get a new job.
You are much more expensive, so companies are extra cautious hiring you. And it's just common sense that there is an order of magnitude fewer managers than there are individual contributors. And many (most?) companies have a bias to promoting internally.
Also so much of management is personal. Upper management doesn’t have visibility into your day to day and needs to trust you’ll deliver by the deadlines they set for their bosses/customers. It’s hard to trust someone you don’t already know.
Something I try to instill in juniors is to make and keep relationships up. Depending on your industry, it’s a very small world.
I recall interviewing someone who had just a terrible technical interview, but honestly seemed like a good fit. In the interview it came out he had worked for and with two people who I knew fairly well (and respected and trusted.) Two phone calls later, and based on their experiences with him, he was on to the next round.
So if two candidates have a terrible technical interview, the person who knows the right people passes to the next round and the other one doesn't? Sounds a lot like nepotism.
Okay, maybe that's not a fair argument on my part because you're actually using the positive feedback that you got from the mutual acquiantances and they could have given negative feedback, but it's still the case that some candidates don't get that opportunity at all.
Yup. There’s also a heavy emphasis on relevant experience. I’ve found that only a subset of staff+ engineering roles are open to me because of this, whereas it was all open when I was in a junior role.
Sadly I think we've barely ventured into the choppy waters of the storm.
Considering that, minus the short period of COVID lockdowns, an entire generation has really only known a healthy economy (since ~2008): I think it's going to be a tough transition.
We usually have boom and bust cycles at least every decade. COVID lockdown era gave people the false sense that we had already weathered the storm.
>> Despite being a staff engineer, managing 12 engineers,
So this is actually a warning to me as a hiring manager. Good staff developers absolutely are technical leaders but if they have day-to-day people management skills I'm at best confused, at worst skeptical. Managing 12 engineers is a full time job before you even get to staff developer responsibilities.
I'm also confused. It's my understanding that staff engineers are responsible for taking the software into a certain technical direction. "Upper management" related to engineering. Wouldn't that automatically involve managing those engineers who are involved with the project(s)?
I have a fairly high level IC / lead engineer role with two other team members (1 junior and 1 medior). I need to keep an eye on their work. Provide direction on how things can be implemented. I'm not their official manager. We have chapter managers for that. But chapter managers are more HR type roles. They aren't managing the day to day work. I guess my role is more close to someone managing the daily work of the team?
(broad generalizations ahead) Technical management and people management are different jobs. People management involves a lot more focus on hiring, performance evaluation, and performance management. It also tends to have many more meetings, including 1:1 meetings with all of your reports weekly or biweekly. This generally does not leave time for significant individual contributor work.
Yes, I've had meetings with those people managers. I would consider them more HR type managers. After some reading it's my understanding that - from an HR perspective - the main difference between a manager and an "individual contributor" is that the IC doesn't have direct reports. Since those tasks would take up too much of their time. Those tasks are being transfered to the HR style managers. But the IC still performs many tasks which are traditionally considered "management responsibilities" with their day-to-day work.
Isn't this a responsibility of a an engineering manager and core competence? I believe Staff engineers work across squads and tribes to help solve various technical and architectural challenges.
Red flag for me immediately re: your current company is a staff engineer (no offense meant at all, but staff is not a people leadership role typically) managing 12 people (which is far too many for any individual to manage).
Disclaimer: This is 100% a plug (for a friend, no financial interest on my part).
A good friend have mine who has been focusing on career coaching has started to put together a few articles [1, 2] targeted more at folks impacted by recent layoffs. Like so many of these articles, the intent isn't to have deep, novel ideas -- instead, it's to pull together things that you probably already know, think about them clearly, and get some comfort in the next steps of job search. If a small number of readers have just one thing "click", it has some value, in my mind.
This is one of the rougher markets we've seen for engineers in a while, but in my opinion it's still a worker's market -- in almost every niche I interact with, hiring has slowed but we are still having a hard time filling the open positions we do have, and we're always looking!
I wasn't laid off but spent Jan-Aug taking time off and then interviewing for a while. Even before the layoffs started things were getting tricky. I was mid-process with multiple companies between June and August that pulled out because they were having freezes, or no longer hiring for the west coast due to budget constraints, etc.
I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.
If you are job searching and reading the comments on this post, there’s a >90% chance that "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm" may help you:
I keep getting the same amount of emails from recruiters as before, mostly startups.
Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus.
I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.
What do you mean? I had a job the entire time, and I interviewed at MSFT and NFLX in the meantime. Otherwise i would just periodically check in with my G recruiter trying to balance some urgency with politeness.
I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met.
Pretty sure it wasn't to impress anyone, but to save keystrokes. In both cases the stock ticker is shorter than the company name, and everyone instantly knows what you're talking about.
MS and Netflix is only 1 character longer than MSFT and NFLX while being more understandable on HN, and compared to the rest of the comment and its length, those savings are irrelevant.
Not making a judgement call on the use of the stock markers, just doubting it's done for the efficiency.
>I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met.
The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!
Maybe the complacency combined with the large organization side?
It feels like MSFT would be 'safer' if less exciting.
A friend of mine has had a similar experience. They started the process in July, did onsites in August, were told they weren't filling roles for a couple of months, and recently started team matching; but it is slow going.
Not laid off, but company was recently affected by one. I got recruiter interest, but that died down pretty quickly (My theory is that I got marked as "not laid off"). It was reminiscent of recruiter spam during start of covid. Looks like startups without talent now have the ability to get some engineers.
I wasn't laid off, but am unemployed. I've found it very difficult to land any interviews, or even get a response from companies. Even what I thought were safe bets (like a job at a bank, writing CRUD apps) do not respond.
I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.
Looking at GP's profile, lots of NES programming and general gaming work. I can totally see how HR in banks would prefer somebody with 10 years of Java or C# experience, familiar with {Vendor}SQL and an employment history in a related banking/finance sector (and screen out everyone else).
At least FAANG don't really care about those things. On the other hand if you know your way around assembly on esoteric hardware, the stereotypical FAANG whiteboarding questions like "reverse a linked list" shouldn't be a problem.
For those who did get laid off from F(/M)AANG, are you considering "lower" end positions or looking for comparable total comp at comparably sized, tech-focused companies?
Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.
There are a lot of FAANG-adjacent companies that offer competitive comp, Stripe, AirBNB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. I left Amazon a year ago to work for one, most of my peers are AWS or Google engineers and the quality of life is much better.
I interviewed at smaller companies but the main problem was they were out of touch with TC and unwilling to offer equity, and at least one place was kind of rude about it when I asked. Unless you’re desperate, no one from FAANG is going to work below market for a place that doesn’t give employees a stake in the business. Unless you’re Netflix and you offer dump-trucks worth of cash, equity is where the upside is.
Definitely interesting to see the perspective from the other side - thank you. It really is a different world. I am a (by all accounts decent) architect and a 23 year old junior (admittedly exceptionally talented) got higher TC at Amazon when he jumped ship after 3 months with us (his first job out of college).
He did ask if he could come back within a week, stating that the work env was horrible, and we told him he is welcome to if he wants, but at the end he decided to stay at Amazon. It's also not like we have a chill team - I just try to make sure people don't work OT unless it's strictly necessary (about once or twice a year). Other than that though, we do expect people to put in their 8 hours on a semi-flexible schedule.
We will see, but I think there’s a real chance the former FAANG “market rate” due to their high flying RSUs might be gone for good for Engineering ICs, unless you’re well known in your area
I know what you were trying to say, but calling a smaller company "out of touch" due to not getting close to FAANG compensation in itself seemed a bit "out of touch" to me regarding the business realities of small companies.
One thing people tend to miss here is that 2021 was a massive hiring year across the board. The layoffs in 2022, while regrettable, are something of a correction from that. The number of ICs just at Google alone is still massive.
Yes. But that is where non-Faangs are hosed. IMHO Small companies see a Faang on a resume and toss the other ones out. Even though the Faang company tossed these people first layoff.
Quit voluntarily in April, have been working on my own project since then, if it doesn't work I will start interviewing in Jan/Feb/Mar based on how the job market is looking. I find it hard to believe there wont be some recovery and would rather apply during a time where job seekers have a bit more leverage.
For those of you feeling down about being ignored, keep in mind this is the slowest hiring time of the year, with holidays and vacations, and end of year budgets.
Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office.
This is true but sort of different. Most of them are hiring out of next year's budgets with start dates in May/June. The last time we had a pull-back in tech, a lot of those offers ended up getting rescinded, so if you're in that boat, don't start spending the money until you actually start...
Having hired hundreds of engineers, it's the same feeling on the other side as well: The recruiters will tell you that nobody wants to switch jobs around the holidays, so you shouldn't even try. Odd.
But you didn't switch in December. People don't want to have zero seniority or PTO this time of year, they want their time off to spend with family if they can.
What are you hiring for? Just wondering what kinds of companies are hiring juniors right now (I've got a little under a year of industry experience so I'd fall into that category)
I know this may not be the correct thread for this, and hope it doesn't come across as not being empathetic:
I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund.
We're building a cloud-based AI film and music production suite.
In any case, I'm sorry to anyone impacted by this down tech cycle. The world will get back to its senses, and tech will continue to eat everything else not-tech.
Edit: I broke the contact form. Email me directly. echelon@gmail.com
Pretty cool product. I don't have any of the skills you listed or anything, just wanted to say this looks neat. Also looks like something built by people very familiar with the space they're in, which is always a huge plus in my book when evaluating startups.
We do real time signal processing, 3D graphics, and other systems-y stuff, so we just decided to use Rust up and down the stack. It works well for us.
Actix/sqlx isn't Rails, but it's 90% of the way there. The rich type system is liberating, and form validation is far easier with Actix/serde than rspec.
Hi, your product looks great! I currently have 2 years of experience as a fullstack developer, mainly using React on the frontend side.
I am not ready for your Rust/Actix webdev position at the moment, but, if I wanted to prepare for it in the next months, what advice would you give me?
What would be the requirements to pass the interview?
I was laid off from an over leveraged startup-type company you haven’t heard of.
The search so far has been pretty bad. Probably in part because of the timing (a week before thanksgiving, but it’s the same story every time. Any job I want I won’t get and any job I don’t want I can get.
I expect things to maybe pick up a little in early December, but I’m honestly kinda defeated. My last job was far from perfect, but I was planning on using to save up the industry afterwards which ofc won’t happen now, at least not in the timeframe I envisioned. Worst case I have to accept a pay cut that will nip those plans very quickly.
Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.
I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.
I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt"
I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times
I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place.
This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut.
You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
You are making sure your passions align with your work.
If you can find motivation beyond a paycheck and do it then you're more confident you'll enjoy it for the long haul.
Jobs are easy. Satisfaction is the hard thing.
Strictly speaking yes this is uncompensated labor but if that's all you see, let me help a bit.
What if the target is NASA, Wikimedia foundation, maybe some software for Doctors without borders? They all have salaried positions and volunteering is probably a solid way to know if it's a good fit
It doesn’t have to, but there is a good overlap of the vent diagram of engineers who open source their work with engineers who have a passion directly related to that work.
I can see both sides of the argument, some people want to just do their stuff and leave, whereas others might wholly devote themselves to the problem.
If you need to practice leetcode like things for interviews, aren’t you also doing free ‘work’? Only in that case it’s more proof-of-work than something actually useful. Perhaps one could point at the openly viewable results when talking to other companies.
The strategy strikes me as a little weird but not crazy. If you like open source already, it might make a lot of sense.
> If you need to practice leetcode like things for interviews, aren’t you also doing free ‘work’? Only in that case it’s more proof-of-work than something actually useful.
This might be true, but at least the skills are easy to show off on a resume and will help you with other interviews. Open-source contributions might vary drastically in nature and might be harder to leverage as experience/proof of skill
I have started using dapr by Microsoft which has a very active small community and increasing adoption. Becoming proficient in using a tool like this and also becoming a contributor is an example of being in demand for the companies that might be using it if it doesn't mean working specifically for MSFT or one of the other corporate sponsors.
Another strategy for getting intro to users of OSS software is to join discord and start offering help and then possibly leveraging that to mention the help could be more permanent.
Do be careful though not to be explicitly soliciting since that is usually against the community policies so a little bit of a needle to thread.
Im not sure why you are getting so many negative comments. For those that are interested in open source, and would be contributing to projects regardless, I think this is a great idea. Also, it sounds like a good way to distract oneself from the normal expectations/disappointment cycle of interviewing
"Doing work for free", as some others have pointed out in a negative light, is fundamental to how modern software works. If you're not contributing then you're profiting off of the minority that does...
Yup can confirm, after a decent contribution to a known apache project, had three well known companies reach out, two of which the engineering manager was the one reaching out.
I contributed because the company I worked for needed new functionality, then I decided it was interesting to make it generic enough to release to everyone. I did it a little bit as something to throw on the resume, but no idea if it helped to get my current job.
This is exactly what my gardener did. One day someone went to my home and started mowing it. I watched. After 4 months of free mowing, he started doing my hedges. I started to talk to other people in my house: "hey we should hire this guy". My wife said "wtf for, he is free? right?" Eventually, I was worried he would start doing free work somewhere else so we hired him - but not for much. He is a great gardener. /s
Real world example: my company has our react UI library open sourced. I don’t think outside the org uses it, but it’s an open source project “owned” by a company. Another example would be something like React.
I would also look for projects that are being majorly run by a number of large organizations, and see how you could be of help. Look at the CNCF project list and take your pick!
Please don’t do this. We don’t need workers to do our work for free. It will make it harder for the rest of us to find jobs (or even getting paid for our current one).
If you want to contribute to open source, do so with the mind that you are helping a shared community (or maybe just for fun). Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
>Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
As a hiring manager, the open source projects and blogs people sell on their CVs is impressive if it looks like self-motivated interest, and annoying if it looks thinly self-promotive. The two inherently intersect but when it skews to the extreme of self-selling it isn't taken as seriously from what I observe.
This is definitely one way to get job, but in my experience watching others do it, a "couple of weeks" is more on the timeframe of a "couple of years" when someone else leaves to make a position available.
TLDR: the job market (for senior talent) is much better than you'd think, from my observation. But if coming from FAANG expect compensation cut (and that's probably ok!)
I didn't get laid off, but. Quit Google at the height of the frenzy last December. Coasted for a while doing my own thing and entertaining a job offer that fell through. After that through the spring and summer it was actually slow and difficult finding work. I signed a contract that was initially very exciting and promising but then found there was a crypto/eth association I was not comfortable with, so started looking immediately and was very worried because of the layoffs that were starting to blow up.
But in the end I actually found it not bad and I had the choice of basically two excellent and exciting jobs. I'm still not 100% certain I picked the right one, but here goes! And holy crap am I tired of interviews.
Similarly I have a friend who got laid off from Meta in the latest round, and she's already interviewing in boatloads of places.
I think the key thing is that compensation that's out there won't match what is made at a FAANG, esp with the latest round of layoffs. But I'm personally fine with that. In exchange for getting my soul back.
I have been laid off since August, the options I have in front of me are not positive (things have slowed to a trickle where I am in the US), and I hope the New Year will be better, but...
Otherwise I will look into non-tech related work to meet expenses.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadAgain, software engineering is such a great career, when you can create valuable things for others in case of crisis.
One example, they have no idea on how to build fast, secure and cheap websites!
Trying to fit in ideation between leetcode prep and applying for jobs
Firstly, build your connection based on quality software. Find the first customer is the most difficult task!
One way, is through friend connection. If a friend's friend is a boss at a company, then it's first good step.
The most important thing, is you need to deliver usable software!
I’m much more curious in 4-5 months. I assume VC funding is harder to get now, for example, but I don’t think that’ll make a massive impact for a little while.
I talked with them for an hour that next Monday AM about the opportunities my teams have open, one of which was highly relevant to their skills, and by the time we chatted, they had 3-4 interviews with other companies scheduled. Joined the dots to the hiring manager and recruiters. They introduced us to lots of other Twitter engineers too which was amazing and very helpful to me.
Our interviews happened with them 10 days later and we moved forward to make an offer; we are still working through offer details with them (and they have multiple companies making offers). We’ve also got several strong applicants for this role.
I’m glad to see many of the impacted folks are quickly finding places to land because the cruelty of Twitter’s next chapter under Elon is a stain on the industry and the world.
What’s salary, what’s a performance-based annual bonus in cash, what’s equity-based compensation and within that what’s granted upfront and what’s performance-based and granted annually, what’s the signing bonus, etc. Vesting schedules also can differ somewhat dramatically (the Amazon offers as one example are very backloaded), some companies have a history of pricing in assumed growth in equities, there are lots of moving parts (some of which are employee-favorable, like pricing on-hire awards on a Trailing 50d Average; some of which are more employer-favorable like assuming 15% annual appreciation in equity price).
Recently lots of companies have moved to quarterly vesting which is very employee friendly
I’m guessing you’re a startup meaning illiquid options - high risk with a tiny chance of a high reward after its all said and done, and the standard 90 day exercise window upon leaving is very employee unfriendly
But thanks for sharing!
Layoff is a layoff regardless of whether you get fired over email, text or a personal call from the CEO saying how great you are. It was the latter for me several years ago and didn't sting any less.
To anyone who is job hunting now and finding a slow market: things will change, we will get through this.
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
Personally, if I get laid off, I would probably also not jump on the _very_ first offer I get desperately, but try to land something good. That's what the higher amount you get for up to 12 months is quite useful for.
Mostly comes to low cost of living in my country + being reasonably frugal + slowly building my savings over time.
(Though note that I don't have kids yet, if I had children my calculations would be totally different.)
I think there is a mentality difference here. I have savings that would easily last me 10 years of not working. But... that's kind of my plan. I will be retiring some day.
I don't want to use up even a dime of that money by not working in my prime earning years.
Different of course if you have a plan to retire at 45 or something.
Not saying you should run out and spend your nest egg. On the other hand, I'd be reluctant to suffer too much during my prime working years scrimping and saving for a retirement that might actually not happen. I'd rather have jobs I really enjoy, and frankly, if I enjoy the work well enough why would I retire? Just take longer and longer vacations and work part time. So I'm willing to use a bit of my saved up funds when necessary to get out of a work environment that is unpleasant.
My sister's landlord always told her how he planned to live in the house she's in once he was a bit older.
He ended up dying in a motorbike accident a few months ago, right after a house inspection...
I wonder what sorts of things influence the mentality. I've been reading Walden here and there recently, I remember being forced to read some of it in I think junior high, I suspect at least a little influence lies there but there's no better trick to make kids dismiss a book's messaging than to force them to read it in chunks via some textbook and then be quizzed. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet." "Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode."
Of course by Thoreau's standards I'm positively roasting and happy about it, and I think 10 or even 20 years at a career is more than a fine tradeoff if that's all it takes to secure a retirement. As a teen I remember thinking I'd be happy enough to avoid having worked for 40-ish years straight like most of the adults around me had done/were doing (some of whom died right before or after their retirement age goal, too).
If you've got an iDevice with Apple Arcade, it's something interesting to play.
It uses books that are now in the public domain that are twisted into games of word order, spelling, and passages that make you read the abridged version and to an extent, force/encourage you to become familiar with the words to better play the game.
Meaning it would have been easier to with a demonstrable income stream? Or just incidentally, due to macro stuff and time raising interest rates over that same period
I figured I'd be ok liquidating ~$300k max for a cash purchase and skipping the mortgage, though if needed it's possible to get a delayed financing loan after, and at least a HELOC. But spiking prices everywhere made that more difficult or impossible in certain areas. And even if something is 'affordable' at say $265k, I find it hard to stomach the idea of paying that much when I think it is (and 2019/2020 records show was) worth only about half that. (In 2014 I actually had legal control of a house but opted to get rid of it, it had been refinanced and it took months to find a buyer at $170k to zero that out. Earlier this year zillow estimated it could fetch $420k, which is absurd to me knowing all about it, but seeing actual sales in the area I believe it.)
In one case I was doing reasonably well with my software dev tasks for a while, but then they assigned me to periodic customer support, and I said up front that's not something I'll be good at. At the same time, my manager tried to increase the oversight of my work, because I was getting slower at it. So I'd wake up every waiting for my manager to "check-in" on me like a child, eventually getting to the point where I couldn't bring myself to get anything done and just resented my existence.
I'm in an ok spot now, for now, but who's to say how it'll be by January. All I want is a place I can do good work for, for a reasonable salary, but it's been very difficult to find.
Software engineers still have a much harder time justifying having a low savings rate when you compare them to the rest of the population.
Generally, there's some degree of frivolous spending going on.
Actually, software engineers in 2nd and 3rd world countries can afford to save a lot.
Having low outgoings. While I would prefer to have income (I'm hoping to be able to buy a house at some point), I'm a single person with no dependents, and I probably spend around £1200/month in total (including rent). And that's in London - one of the most expensive cities in the world - and without putting any effort into living cheaply (I often buy groceries at the local store rather than the cheaper big supermarket for example). If I chose to live somewhere cheaper (even in the uk) that could probably be halved without completely destroying my quality of life.
Maybe you ought to make a masterclass on this topic.
It's pretty easy to save money on a software developer salary in the United States.
It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]:
> You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Just about anywhere in the United States will be a lot cheaper than SF, too, without the huge inconvenience of moving internationally.
I picked Budapest as an example because it's a well known international destination with very high level of walkability, great public transportation, and affordable prices.
Prague and Krakow are two other similar options in Central Europe, only much less "weird" (and, as a result, a little more "boring").
There are also plenty of pleasant and affordable cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia and Porto.
Actually, that makes Budapest a fair comparison to how SV and surroundings also deal with their homeless..
I used levels.fyi to find comparable salaries and my friends in tech said it’s pretty accurate
Having worked for 10ish years beforehand, it was financially easy. When I was ready to work again, I responded some recruiter emails and was hired again fairly quickly, at a position better than the one I left.
Living in a low cost-of-living area helps a great deal, as do the excellent salaries US devs make.
If yes, then...yes this is easily done.
- encouraged people and myself to hold on to about 6 months of runway because the future is unknown.
- encouraged myself and others to never have a single source of income.
- always be sharpening your skills. They get dull, redundant, and obsolete within ~5 years.
Live by these mantras, if one has the luxury to do so, and being laid off is nothing more than a disappointment.
In my case that'd be:
But then again, I live a fairly frugal lifestyle: don't use expensive cloud platforms for development (though I pay for JetBrains tools), only occasionally get video games (or other entertainment) on sale, don't have a car and routinely save about 50% of what I earn, if not more.For people with higher living standards than mine: probably earning more than I do, even relative to their expenses.
And that's assuming you even live long enough to get to retirement...
Even as I approach elderliness, I still feel that every year of my life has become much more joyful, exciting and enriching than the previous year. I would absolutely not trade away multiple retirement years for a single year of fucking around in my twenties.
I had WARN and severance that would last me all summer, fall, and a bit into the winter before I ran out of that.
So, I spent all summer and fall and a bit into the winter (the thing that finally had me head to my parents' house was a snow storm from the Dakotas heading east in October) driving, hiking, and taking photographs.
There were some hikes that I did then (petroglyphs at Ozette, Ramona Falls on Mt. Hood) that would be much more challenging now that a decade and a half have passed. My endurance for driving has also gone down - I noticed this coming back from Dickinson, ND after the eclipse of 2017 (I really should have gotten a hotel room in Minneapolis) compared to the last leg of a trip from Twin Falls, ID to SF in '08. I can't do 10h drives anymore like I could when I was in my thirties.
And so while there's the "a year off when you're 25 vs retire earlier in your 60s" debate, I would tend to argue for the "when it's a question of experiences to be had, regrets are often the more costly side of the equation when looking back on it later in life."
Also note that not everyone has the same life trajectory of a family and kids and grand kids to look forward to in their later years. For me (single, no kids, on the far side of the half way point between 18 and 81), I am very glad that I had my great road trip when I was in my 30s rather than trying to do it when I was retired.
We of course can't trade our older years with our younger years.
For me personally, I'd much rather have spent the time with family, travelled to the places I wanted, slept around and worked on things I found fun than to slave away, just to save for a greater comfort in a future that is uncertain.
Of course I still hope to be comfortable in retirement, but without a doubt I would regret having chosen a certain path that would lead to comfort than a slightly less predictable path where comfort is not guaranteed.
Like - have a unique skillset, have multiple certifications, recommendations, proven B2B experience as a consultant.
Then getting contracts is easy. Probably less easy now tho.
> How does one do this?
In my case my wife has a job that provides the health insurance (so your "dependent on another" is partly right). In addition, our mortgage will be paid off in January, so that'll make it easier to live on one (smaller) income. We'll still be running a bit of a deficit each month (between $200 and $300/mo) but we've got a good 12 to 18 months of living expenses saved up in our emergency fund (that would be 12 to 18 months of living expenses if we both were to lose our jobs). After that there's a Roth IRA we could draw upon. So not too worried at this point.
A lot of your money is going to be for housing, and there are a lot of "conventions" that I think you should be careful with. Housing companies will tell you to spend 30% or more of your gross income on housing. You can do that if you want, but you'll have more savings if you aim for 10-15%. It's quite possible; I've lived in a nice neighborhood in NYC for 10 years and pay about 16% of my gross income on rent. (Rent stabilization is a powerful force, though, and you kind of had to be here 10 years ago to be paying 10 years ago's rents.)
Similar stabilizing forces apply if you have a mortgage as well. If you get a 30 year fixed, your monthly payment isn't going to go up over 30 years, but the value of that money is going to decrease, so it will be less of a burden over time because your income is likely to be adjusted to inflation over time. My advice to myself from 10 years ago would have been to buy and not rent; the dollar becomes worth less and less over time, but the roof over your head remains as useful as ever. If you have savings, the dollar decreasing in purchasing power just wipes out your savings. If you have debt, then the amount of time it takes to work off your debt decreases instead. Rent stabilization does give a lot of this advantage to renters, but it's rare throughout the US, NYC is kind of an anomaly.
Regardless, always be working on building that buffer. You want to be able to pay for housing for 1-2 years without working; once you have that buffer, then you can decide to use it to take time off, or you can keep it stashed away for "quirky billionaire buys my company and fires everyone". (Such things do apparently happen.) The lower your monthly expenses are, the easier that is, so keep your expenses low. The expense that I think is easiest to dig into is food; it can easily be $25-$30 to order a cheeseburger and fries for delivery (at least in NYC), but you will be hard-pressed to spend $30 on ingredients to make a single meal. If you have any free time whatsoever, there is a lot of savings at hand. If you have no free time, then hopefully you're being compensated for that.
I suppose the elephant in the room is the disparity in pay between non-FAANG and FAANG (or whatever people call it these days; Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix seem to be facing hard times, Google definitely seems interested in reducing compensation across the board, Apple's still doing pretty well), and things like that. There are no doubt great software engineers making $70k a year doing the same work that Google is paying people $400k a year to do. Try and get that job, and everything will be a lot easier for you. HN hates this, but if leetcode is what's standing between you and 4x the pay, you should probably just practice the leetcode. Your safety net and quality of life will increase dramatically, even if you move to a high-cost-of-living area. I definitely did that when I was applying to Google 10 years ago, and it was probably the best investment I ever made. $50 worth of books and a few evenings trying the exercises, and I got a 3x pay increase and a free move to NYC. Would recommend considering it.
(BTW, it seems like every company in existence has min...
All companies pay you to put its interest before your own interest, but some companies are much worse and much more effective at working against the greater good than others. I'm not selling out to those just to add another few years to my already very achievable retirement.
I'm nearing the end of it now, and I've spent about $6000 over three months on things I'd categorize as normal living expenses (I took a couple of trips that added a few thousand to that). I'm not so well off that I can call this a trivial amount of money, but it wasn't the hardest decision ever, and I could make it work for much longer if I had to.
If you move to SEA your cost of living might be as low as $500/m depending on the frugality and living standards. Its not for everyone obviously due to various life circumstances (caring for relatives, wife with kids, illness). But for the young, single and free there is a world out there that doesn't require you to have a 300k/y job to survive in upper Manhattan and service the car / house loans :)
I wish people explored the world a bit more. It really does give perspective in terms of how the rest of 99% live outside of our tech bubble.
I set aside extra the rest of the year to smooth over the drop off in responses late-Oct/Jan period. By February I usually get swarmed with asks to tackle projects and can pick ones that are actually interesting.
Then it happens again in summer as people with enough money to not work take another 2-3 months off.
Lately I’ve been “specialized” in cloud ops mentorship. Lots of businesses still run monoliths, have no CICD or secops. I don’t automatically nudge them to break the monolith up; some are well organized and documented and work for the biz. Mostly I help them establish a smoother “idea to deployment” pipeline.
Though after 4 years it’s become pretty repetitive. I’ve been tinkering with the Linux kernel internals again, thinking about looking for lower level gigs.
I’ve done an about 1 year stint contracting, all with a single client pretty much staff aug web dev, then went back to fulltime.
I’d love to find engagements where you’re not tied to their 9-5 hours, have to attend their daily stand ups etc. I think the only opportunities like that on a standard full stack engineer skill set is building MVPs for new startups, or companies with no in house dev team
How do you expect the HR folks to validate (or even to have read what you wrote) these claims? A lot of people put the things you’re putting on their resumes.
They’re also getting resumes when from Meta, Amazon, Stripe, … engineers. Is it really surprising you’re not getting a call back?
This seems self-fulfilling? People who have applied to your company are saying they are interested in working there. The lack of response is the reason they lose interest.
You are much more expensive, so companies are extra cautious hiring you. And it's just common sense that there is an order of magnitude fewer managers than there are individual contributors. And many (most?) companies have a bias to promoting internally.
I recall interviewing someone who had just a terrible technical interview, but honestly seemed like a good fit. In the interview it came out he had worked for and with two people who I knew fairly well (and respected and trusted.) Two phone calls later, and based on their experiences with him, he was on to the next round.
Okay, maybe that's not a fair argument on my part because you're actually using the positive feedback that you got from the mutual acquiantances and they could have given negative feedback, but it's still the case that some candidates don't get that opportunity at all.
In this case it was a benefit both to me and to the candidate.
Does knowing people in a field give someone an advantage
Considering that, minus the short period of COVID lockdowns, an entire generation has really only known a healthy economy (since ~2008): I think it's going to be a tough transition.
We usually have boom and bust cycles at least every decade. COVID lockdown era gave people the false sense that we had already weathered the storm.
So this is actually a warning to me as a hiring manager. Good staff developers absolutely are technical leaders but if they have day-to-day people management skills I'm at best confused, at worst skeptical. Managing 12 engineers is a full time job before you even get to staff developer responsibilities.
A good friend have mine who has been focusing on career coaching has started to put together a few articles [1, 2] targeted more at folks impacted by recent layoffs. Like so many of these articles, the intent isn't to have deep, novel ideas -- instead, it's to pull together things that you probably already know, think about them clearly, and get some comfort in the next steps of job search. If a small number of readers have just one thing "click", it has some value, in my mind.
This is one of the rougher markets we've seen for engineers in a while, but in my opinion it's still a worker's market -- in almost every niche I interact with, hiring has slowed but we are still having a hard time filling the open positions we do have, and we're always looking!
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201... [2] https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume...
I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs...
Good luck!
Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus.
I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.
I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met.
The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!
Not making a judgement call on the use of the stock markers, just doubting it's done for the efficiency.
Maybe the complacency combined with the large organization side?
It feels like MSFT would be 'safer' if less exciting.
I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.
I've only had two software interviews in my life, so I don't have much to compare it to.
At least FAANG don't really care about those things. On the other hand if you know your way around assembly on esoteric hardware, the stereotypical FAANG whiteboarding questions like "reverse a linked list" shouldn't be a problem.
Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.
I interviewed at smaller companies but the main problem was they were out of touch with TC and unwilling to offer equity, and at least one place was kind of rude about it when I asked. Unless you’re desperate, no one from FAANG is going to work below market for a place that doesn’t give employees a stake in the business. Unless you’re Netflix and you offer dump-trucks worth of cash, equity is where the upside is.
He did ask if he could come back within a week, stating that the work env was horrible, and we told him he is welcome to if he wants, but at the end he decided to stay at Amazon. It's also not like we have a chill team - I just try to make sure people don't work OT unless it's strictly necessary (about once or twice a year). Other than that though, we do expect people to put in their 8 hours on a semi-flexible schedule.
Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office.
Hang in there!
I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund.
We're building a cloud-based AI film and music production suite.
https://storyteller.io
In any case, I'm sorry to anyone impacted by this down tech cycle. The world will get back to its senses, and tech will continue to eat everything else not-tech.
Edit: I broke the contact form. Email me directly. echelon@gmail.com
Actix/sqlx isn't Rails, but it's 90% of the way there. The rich type system is liberating, and form validation is far easier with Actix/serde than rspec.
The search so far has been pretty bad. Probably in part because of the timing (a week before thanksgiving, but it’s the same story every time. Any job I want I won’t get and any job I don’t want I can get.
I expect things to maybe pick up a little in early December, but I’m honestly kinda defeated. My last job was far from perfect, but I was planning on using to save up the industry afterwards which ofc won’t happen now, at least not in the timeframe I envisioned. Worst case I have to accept a pay cut that will nip those plans very quickly.
Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.
I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.
In this modality you are test driving each other.
I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt"
I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times
I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place.
This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut.
You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
You are making sure your passions align with your work.
If you can find motivation beyond a paycheck and do it then you're more confident you'll enjoy it for the long haul.
Jobs are easy. Satisfaction is the hard thing.
Strictly speaking yes this is uncompensated labor but if that's all you see, let me help a bit.
What if the target is NASA, Wikimedia foundation, maybe some software for Doctors without borders? They all have salaried positions and volunteering is probably a solid way to know if it's a good fit
Some people have passions that are not monetizable.
I can see both sides of the argument, some people want to just do their stuff and leave, whereas others might wholly devote themselves to the problem.
> … you are test driving each other.
Unless you think the way they run their open source projects is the way their entire company works, you’re really not.
The strategy strikes me as a little weird but not crazy. If you like open source already, it might make a lot of sense.
This might be true, but at least the skills are easy to show off on a resume and will help you with other interviews. Open-source contributions might vary drastically in nature and might be harder to leverage as experience/proof of skill
There's no guarantees anywhere in this strategy. But there's nice correlations
Another strategy for getting intro to users of OSS software is to join discord and start offering help and then possibly leveraging that to mention the help could be more permanent.
Do be careful though not to be explicitly soliciting since that is usually against the community policies so a little bit of a needle to thread.
"Doing work for free", as some others have pointed out in a negative light, is fundamental to how modern software works. If you're not contributing then you're profiting off of the minority that does...
Real world example: my company has our react UI library open sourced. I don’t think outside the org uses it, but it’s an open source project “owned” by a company. Another example would be something like React.
If you want to contribute to open source, do so with the mind that you are helping a shared community (or maybe just for fun). Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
As a hiring manager, the open source projects and blogs people sell on their CVs is impressive if it looks like self-motivated interest, and annoying if it looks thinly self-promotive. The two inherently intersect but when it skews to the extreme of self-selling it isn't taken as seriously from what I observe.
Mostly joking but I don't think such a bonus is a crazy idea
I totally love this suggestion btw, but I think it serves when you are doing this continuously rather than when you are pressed for the job asap.
I didn't get laid off, but. Quit Google at the height of the frenzy last December. Coasted for a while doing my own thing and entertaining a job offer that fell through. After that through the spring and summer it was actually slow and difficult finding work. I signed a contract that was initially very exciting and promising but then found there was a crypto/eth association I was not comfortable with, so started looking immediately and was very worried because of the layoffs that were starting to blow up.
But in the end I actually found it not bad and I had the choice of basically two excellent and exciting jobs. I'm still not 100% certain I picked the right one, but here goes! And holy crap am I tired of interviews.
Similarly I have a friend who got laid off from Meta in the latest round, and she's already interviewing in boatloads of places.
I think the key thing is that compensation that's out there won't match what is made at a FAANG, esp with the latest round of layoffs. But I'm personally fine with that. In exchange for getting my soul back.
Otherwise I will look into non-tech related work to meet expenses.