Ask HN: How are the current layoffs affecting non-US developers?
I was looking at the data used for layoff tracker [1] and it seems that the current wave of layoffs are mostly focused on US companies (~70%) and employees (~60%). And it got me wondering, how is the current career climate for developers who aren't in the US? I still get my daily recruiter spam in my inbox for companies hiring in west-Europe, it hasn't stopped.
[1] https://airtable.com/shrclnXK0pfoGjtih/tblQ0U46nsYopm2CR?backgroundColor=gray&viewControls=on
142 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadDon't let yourself be fooled into a false sense of confidence, you'd really need to test out the process to see if it can produce a real job offer! Doubly so in the current climate..
I’m a senior eng in AI research though, which is obviously having a big moment right now.
I am a researcher in statistics and data science from university at Buffalo. Just reaching out to see if you have any potential opportunities that I might consider
Is it true that most employees of US tech companies in Canadian offices are immigrants who are parked there on their way to the US, or can't get into the US?
In Japan it doesn’t seem to have affected much, though our parent US company went through a significant round of layoffs.
Compared to the US, it may seem to be virtually impossible, but people are fired here too.
That’s even cheaper if you hire them as contractors
Not a developer but I exited the job market completely. Not worth it.
I’m now not actively looking but when I’ve had a quick browse on LinkedIn I’m seeing similar jobs now advertised at $140-150k. All now marked as “Hybrid” or must be in the office, remote has backtracked massively. Looking at the Hybrid definition a lot say 3-4 days in the office.
For senior / staff / principal roles I won’t look at them if less than $170k which is still a huge pay cut on my current role, admittedly I got lucky with.
> Don't want to jinx it
I think it's coming. Australia is always lagging behind. All indicators (RBA rates, etc) point that it will hit. Might be closer to winter.
Maybe one could call it accepting economic reality..
I don't recommend pure development as a career here for people who want to earn big money.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so all that I say here is my personal understanding, from working in Japan, but also from talking to lawyers about this.
Firing an employee due to lack of competence or bad performance is permitted by law, but practically unheard of in practice - the bar for proving this is quite high.
Firing an employee due to misconduct is possible, but the bar is quite high. Embezzlement, getting kickbacks or getting into trouble with the law (outside your job) are common causes for termination, but I've even heard of cases of embezzlement and kickbacks where the employee in question was demoted instead of being fired.
Firing an employee due to the company's financial situation is often referred to as Risutora (corporate restructuring). That's perfectly doable, but the bar again is high. If the company is taken to court, they will have to prove the economic necessity for reducing their workforce and that they tried anything they can before they resorted to firing people. This includes:
- Offering a voluntary resignation plan. This means the employee reigns and get some monetary compensation. - Cutting other unnecessary costs besides salaries (otherwise they cannot prove economic necessity) - Selecting the employees that will be fired based an objective and fair criteria, no random culling of 10% of your workforce.
Since the bar for all of these is quite high, employers in Japan will more often try to negotiate voluntary resignation plans or (unfortunately quite often) bully their employees into resignation. The bullying tactic involves demotion, changing the job's content or trying to harass the employee in various ways until they decide to quit. This can also be challenged in court, but this tactic apparently shifts more of the burden of proof to employees.
The most common tactic big companies use in Japan to avoid all this hassle is to just not hire all of their employees as full-time employees. A great chunk of the workforce in Japan nowadays are fixed term contract employees, part-time shift employees or outsourced employees of various types.
Edit: I also have to add that from my personal observation, IT salaries in Japan experienced major growth over the last 10 years. YMMV depending on the type of company and the industrial sector, but if we focus on Japanese tech-focused companies (Yahoo, Rakuten, LINE, Mercari etc.) the average yearly salary grew by a 30% or so, and on the high-end you can see international companies and some Japanese tech companies offering senior positions at 20-30 million JPY / year. That's significantly lower than US salary at tech hotspots, but seems quite in line with salaries in Europe.
https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja...
Speaking as a hiring manager it’s definitely been easier to find people since around mid 2022
I know someone who lost their job at gitlab and various others working remote for US companies are worried. Most NZ It jobs are at companies serving local users or smallish NZ companies serving global markets. Relatively few work for a big global company that could easily move their job elsewhere.
We closed our India office, 1/3 of our global offices.
Late last year, a lot of our engineering team was let go - somewhere between 20 and 30%.
This year, between 20 and 30% of the sales / marketing folks were let go.
In my opinion, these were reasonable decisions that were brought about by poor management. New management is doing a good job, and made the hard, necessary call.
Thus, it's hard to say how much an impact the economy has had. It certainly seems to have been a catalyst, but these internal changes were also a long time coming.
Zendesk (Melbourne) did layoffs last year, but this was small scale I think, and mostly driven by their company-specific troubles.
Some American companies like Google and twitter layed off etc. "Mark43, a US company that builds online platforms for public safety organisations like police, fire or other emergency services, made its entire Australian office redundant at the end of June. Former staff member Gary* estimates around 70 people were laid off, with most of them based in Sydney."
but also local companies
https://itbrief.com.au/story/one-in-five-young-aussies-in-te...
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/finder-staff-sh...
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/sydney-technolo...
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/me...
I'm a Tech Lead with a solid CV looking for a new gig. I'm finding it noticeably more difficult to get recruiter attention (let alone interviews) than I'd expected.
My gut feeling is that there are likely more candidates applying for any given job than there were late last year.
It looks like companies choose not increasing salary path nowadays. That means the only way is to switch jobs to get salary increase and I know several people who did that recently. Company I work at is looking for front end developers as well. I have direct invite to some companies and I know that in case I lose my job I will get new one next day. LinkedIn spam reduced from 2 offers per day to 2 per week but I still get them.
those companies know that investor money is directly related to FED rate. if its zero, they get invested, if its high, people will put money to work elsewhere.
they only lever they have to control fed rate is unemployment. they know they are hurting their business by laying off people they fought to acquire, but their incentives for investor money is higher than anything else.
so their plan is to increase unemployment in the USA so fed lower rates so investment money keeps flowing.
Rapacious capitalists acting in the interest of their class to their own detriment is certainly a take.
When many companies are juking the stats by lowering costs with layoffs then it puts pressure on all other companies to do the same because they are all competing for finite investment dollars.
2. Inflation is high the world over and central banks have hiked rates everywhere.
3. An individual company has a negligible impact on unemployment figures. If you're thesis was actually true, it makes no rational sense for a company to layoff workers.
CEO while shining his monocle: "what can we do to lower the fed interest rate?"
CFO: "We can fire a bunch of our employees"
CEO: "But Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 517,000 in January even with all the tech layoffs. We wont even make a blip "
CFO while twirling his mustache: "yes but us firing 10,000 will make us feel better at the country club and its sending a message that I'm positive the board of the Fed will listen to because we are very important"
CEO: "You're right, lets do it!"
Head of HR: "I'm asking this question while sitting on stolen land. How does firing 7% of the poors sound?"
Come on man.
- Local Latam companies are having an easier time retaining talent
- Devs in Latam have lowered their salary expectations and often are putting regular salary increases on pause
- There's less job hopping between firms now
What’s telling is that we haven’t seen those offers since.
In fact we’ve seen rates negotiated down unfortunately.
That aside, it is worth noting that a lot of other countries make it a lot more difficult to lay people off and when you do there are more protections, greater notice periods and so on. So it may just be that layoffs are happening overseas and we haven't really heard about them yet.
Also, most non-US offices of big tech companies tend to e a lot smaller. London is a bit of an outlier.
I can give my CFO perspective on this having been through it from that position. It's not that you had that plan, but often when faced with questionable shift in business strategy, you look for the "low hanging fruit" and often just start with a number in mind, Eg. need to trim $x million of cost. From there, there may be complete teams or products that get cut (business decides to cut loss and divest of that product/service/etc), and/or at some point you often do sort by cost and make cuts towards the top first. There's usually a lot of conversations amongst management about which folks are mission critical and who is expendable (there's usually a middle bucket of folks that are neutral, "keep if we can").
This allows you to get to $x million by cutting the least number of headcount. Obviously, with hindsight, it would make more sense to just hire from lower-cost-of-living regions to begin with, but that assumes a level of planning that's rarely in place. Most hiring is done optimistically. For this reason, tech follows a boom/bust cycle just like the oil industry.
Also, for more sales/ops-heavy companies, their sales teams are likely getting killed on reups, revenue/unit projections are cut, meaning that both their sales/ops teams are overbuilt purely because the customer base themselves is cutting costs.
This is how disinflation works really, and is what the Fed is trying to make us all do. The rate cuts increase a company's cost of capital (effectively the interest rate, fundraising environment, etc.) which then increases their "hurdle rate" - ie the ROI a project needs to have in order to be justified, and (in an explicit / implicit sense) the marginally low ROI projects, people, etc. are then not justified.
Let's start with that: the "need" to reduce costs. In another comment I used Google as an example so I'll do so here too. Google is specatacularly profitable on an overall basis and a per-employee basis.
Layoffs as a cost-cutting measure are largely virtue signaling than true cuts in costs, for several reasons:
1. Once you factor in severeance costs, it takes a long time to realize any of those savings;
2. Those layoffs assume those laid off were providing no value. It's hard to believe that 10K+ employees were providing no value. Whatever value they were providing is also lost, further defraying any supposed cost savings;
3. Mass layoffs tend to be hugely destructive to culture and have a long-lasting impact on those who remain; and
4. By the time any benefits are realized you're probably hiring again anyway.
The point of layoffs is to virtue signal to the market that they're "serious" about cutting costs and to depress compensation. These companies won't be getting inflation pay raises. They'll probably be getting minimal bonuses and 0-2% pay raises, if that. Refresh grants will be less.
But the real kicker comes from doing more work for the same pay. Whatever the laid off people were doing will become the additional responsibility of those who remain. Sundar Pichai has come out and said he's aiming for 20% increase in "productivity" (ie 20% more labor for no increase in compensation). Zuckerberg has said similar about Meta.
You see with inflation that there is fairly rampant profiteering: raising prices because prices are rising while reaping record profits. These mass layoffs are largely the other side of that coin. Wages are being suppressed due to some largely invented (to this point at least) "recession".
Now there are some other commpanies who truly do have to cut costs. They don't have a profitable business model and because of rising interest rates, the cheap VC money well is drying up. But all the FAANG companies are doing just fine but have seen (or arguably created) an opportunity to attack labor costs.
You are right that “need” isn’t always a financial need. It’s doesn’t make it less of a need though. If the board told Sundar to trim $x million, and X is significantly large, he can’t do it without trimming headcount.
If you were working on some small product, your job was never guaranteed and likely highly reliant on the success of that product. If they decided to shut down the product, you’re likely laid off. Likewise, if their core/go forward products has reached a “maintenance mode” it makes sense to reduce headcount - Profitability isn’t even part of the equation, sure it’s a secondary effect.
Furthermore, the trend to remote/WFH was always going to accelerate the shift of labor to lower cost. It often makes no sense to pay someone 2-20x more to do the same job as another person in another region. The main reason was because the norm was meetings/collaboration that occurred in person.
Just pointing out how much armchair quarterbacking is being done. We know nothing about these things and their future strategies. But there are a lot of scenarios where these cuts make good and obvious business sense and the management team gets judged on that just like anything else.
I hear a lot of what sounds like rent seeking behavior on this topic. Like because they can afford it they should perpetually employ all these people forever. It’s hard for me to support. I’m aware capitalism isn’t perfect but nobody was complaining when they were making the Google compensation, which were/are inflated like a roughneck’s usually are (to use the oil industry analogy again).
According to [1] the median employee compensation in 2021 was $296k. Now that's not a mean and it also isn't speific about what's included (eg perks, health insurance, retirement savings, food, etc). Once you factor in office space an average of $350k/employee as a baseline cost probably isn't too far off the mark.
At 190,000 employees times $350,000 that's a cost of $66.5B/year, which is more than half of the cost of revenue.
Labor is the biggest expense.
It also echoes "investor" concerns about how the cost of revenue is rising faster than revenue is increasing (ie lower profit margins).
Or what are you arguing is a bigger cost?
[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
Local companies seemly are willing to hire but because the flood of fired workers they are offering really bad wages. I got offered work as embedded C dev for 300 USD month... I didn't accept back then because I was still working in my old job. I regret not taking that job now. 300 USD at least is more than 0 USD.
I'm in Australia and don't expect big ticket US paychecks myself, but that does seem low for embedded C dev work - there's some skill required there.
I guess it's all relative to whatever economy you're embedded in though.
Good luck and best wishes going forward.
In Canada their end of year report listed some cities with median salaries of 100-130K USD, but I think most Canadian devs aren't on levels, and earning a bit less.
For example, the Canadian government pretty much pays software engineers between 40K-80K USD (even for 20 YoE). They're surely a massive employer, but they're not listed on Levels
Not that working for big tech or U.S. companies is that much more desireable, but it does pay a lot more, and those people are more likely to be reporting on Levels
On one hand it’s a bit slower on the other Google here hiring like crazy, Netflix opening up an office, Shopify acquiring whole companies…
To me it seems like big tech fires in the US then look for cheaper workforce elsewhere. Or maybe just a coincidence?
Since the everything bubble crested, Canada has gotten pretty high up there in salary so it's not necessarily boosting our salaries too much more, but I don't think hiring is slowing down here either
Engineers love showing themselves the door from their work lol.
[1] https://ecommurz.com/layoff/
I think it really depends on what you're looking for. There's stuff around still, but it seems salaries are generally lower and interesting jobs are harder to come by. Then when you do find something there seems to be more competition and it's harder to secure an interview.