If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually.
The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.
I don't know if it was "shot themselves in the foot" so much as "the unsustainable thing they were doing to prevent potential competition finally broke."
FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.
I just think the FAANGs got a little drunk on profits and hiring during covid. Now that things are normalizing they realized that they hired too many people and they are chopping heads. To me I just don't see the big deal, tech does mass purges every few years and for the most part everyone lands on their feet and the industry expands even more. Giving a few thousand really smart 20-somethings six months salary and sending them on their way is going to create hundreds of startups and passion projects and a couple of those projects might actually have some value (outside of SV).
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I know ByteDance has been slurping up some Meta talent, and you don't want someone you lay off to build the company that eventually kills you.
If you buy into the premise that Meta was holding talent just so that other companies couldn't hire them, no longer is, and ByteDance has since picked them up then it stands to reason that ByteDance would be ready to shed the no-so-talented stand-ins they were using previously.
Or maybe they just spawned a bunch of companies that they will eventually have the pick of to acquire when they decide they need to do "something" with their cash hoards and the founders are looking for a payout.
I am positive faang engineers are very sharp but would they be "expert at the latest technologies"? E.g. an engineer at Google likely has a whole host of bespoke systems vs. a mixture of vendor and open source solutions the rest of companies tend to use. E.g. Borg vs. Kubernetes and the like.
I imagine severance packages are a big factor here.
People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
I sympathize with anyone who's been recently laid off but I am also genuinely excited for what's going to come next. I feel like we've been in a startup rut over these past few years. At least for non-crypto startups, that is.
Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.
AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.
These are very specialised industries though, requiring some deeper and more formal knowledge than when a new platform appears and there's a sudden hunger for experiences on that platform.
The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.
Using pre-trained AI models only requires surface-level knowledge about AI. You need to know its limitations, but you don't need to know tensorflow or how transformer networks work to be able to use AI for consumer applications.
Disagree about AI. I think it's going to upend industry after industry, and the gold-rush is not going to be in making new advancements, but applying the startling new capabilities of the last year or so to more and more domains
In this way I think it's very similar to the web and then mobile booms
Look at websites like CivitAI. Its literally just a front-end + a S3 bucket backend that allows people to share and download large stable-diffusion models (100MB-8GB).
The website founder was not an AI guy, he was a web-dev background and former founder. The website is already a huge success, forcing the incumbent (Huggingface, backed by Amazon) to try and hurriedly copy its features.
Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).
Oh shit, nice. That's not COBRA, but a benefit on top of it (to be clear, for anyone who may one day be able to use COBRA and might not realize the company doesn't usually pay for it) but is pretty great for those who were laid off, in this case.
Cobra has this unique advantage that you can turn it on retroactively, so it's actually decently cheap for healthy individuals. You can just plan to not pay for it and then if things go wrong you can incur medical bills and send them to cobra after signing up. Of course you do have to backpay cobra if this happens.
Yep, that's true! Thanks for adding that, it is important. As long as you can put enough money aside to cover the entire COBRA period, this is indeed the best "play" when offered COBRA, unless you're sure you're gonna need it from the beginning (in which case you may as well just sign up to begin with—less hassle that way). If you don't end up needing it, you basically just got free health insurance for a few months.
it's 60 days to elect whether you'll be using COBRA. If employment is terminated early in the month usually coverage is still there through the end of the month, but if termination is at the very end of the month it can be exactly just 2 months, not few.
Yes, group rates. It probably varies by states, but basically all group plans—even ones that aren't that great—are more expensive than even our gold-tier HCA plans, let alone silver and bronze (because all our HCA plans are terrible by comparison to even the fairly-poor group plans). The group plans might actually be cheaper in other states, I dunno. (there are also literally zero providers of individual plans that aren't on the healthcare exchange, in this state—none—so the couple options on there are all you've got)
I'd imagine the way the stock market was prior to 2022 also plays a factor. I know plenty of senior+ level people in tech who made a killing off their RSU growth and could basically retire modestly in their 30s. There's lots of talented people with strong tech backgrounds and big safety nets right now.
As someone laid off from a company with no name recognition and two weeks of severance, I’m just hoping to find something before all the more impressive resumes come flooding back into the system.
Honestly, I have a few startup ideas I’d love to try, but this cycle has not put me in a place to try them.
Not every startup idea needs millions of dollars to get started. Folks with a lengthy severance period have a cushion to experiment with fun ideas while job hunting.
I've been seeing a few things like moonrepo crop up and have been curious about why these seem to be cropping up now when the target market (tech) is cutting costs (although maybe these products can be advertised as money-saving?).
This is what I've seen talking to startups. Lots of seed round companies needing to build up a team fast to try to secure a series A before it's too late. Most of them completely insane (with occasional good ones in there) with ideas that clearly have no reasonable profit model.
It's undoubtably a great time for startups to get talent, but startups as we know them today tend to be very hungry for VC money, which is drying up rapidly. I would be very hesitant to join one unless the match was really good.
If you can clearly articulate a path to profitability in the current economy, there's no shortage of investors willing to place 100K-1M bets on startups right now, contrary to the narrative perpetuated here. Ask how I know :)
I think the problem we have is a generation of people in the industry have been convinced hifalutin money making schemes are sustainable business ideas. I'm glad that nonsense has finally past.
Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hints of start ups rising to do this, like OpenAI challenging search and Shopify testing the waters of it's own fulfillment network).
It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.
99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server.
Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
This. Cloud is great when a startup hits an unexpected growth spurt and can scale infra without getting distracted from the core mission. It is not cheap, but it may be worth it.
But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box.
Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale.
I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup.
[0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
Gotta build the prototype on something eventually. It’s a solid OOTB tech stack. Lets you focus on building the business with peace of mind. Not fiddling with servers etc.
I've used Supabase for some production level projects, and it's seriously a very good starting point which you can scale up to mid-tier levels. Brand new ones with no customers can easily leverage their free tier.
> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less?
A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing.
If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.
So, say you're saving $2500 a year? That seems pretty cheap for an option to scale up without fundamentally changing your operational architecture.
The bigger question mark than the money, I think, is whether this scale up approach actually works, or whether you end up fundamentally changing everything anyway. In my experience it's a mixed bag. There are some advantages, but it also isn't a panacea, and certainly isn't as easy as turning that dynos knob on heroku was. But at the end of the day, I land on it being worth it for a business (though not for a hobby). But it isn't a no-brainer.
I don’t think cloud cost is anywhere near as much as the cost to build a semi-decent HA/DR system and the devops process around it. Every minute the site is down it’s real monetary loss for most startups. It also takes time and energy away from building features. I have done both bare metal and cloud in two different startups. (This assumes you can’t afford to lose data or be offline for extended periods of time).
Here’s what you’ll need to setup and run a single database :-
- Installation script and infra provisioning. You need a repeatable way to do this with as little manual intervention as possible and I can swear it never just works.
- Backup and recovery scripts and associated monitoring
- Replication setup, monitoring and debugging. It will break often.
- Monitoring for infra - CPU, memory, network. There’ll be unforeseen spikes and random slow downs and a whole bunch of slow queries you’ll debug on a regular basis.
- Security - users, permissions, auditing. Both machine and database. Regular password rotation and firewall rules. Ability to off-board users.
- If you survive all this, being able to scale up. And I mean just vertical scale up will take you far but you cross that limit, you now suddenly have to deal with sharding or partitioning.
So when I joined a new startup and we were building it all from scratch it was a very easy decision to go with the cloud. We spent $3500 a month. Not a lot but nothing compared to the salaries and marketing spend.
The hundreds of dollars a month was quoting the comment I was replying to.
The underlying point I made that is being ignored is that 99.9% of start ups never need any of the stuff you are talking about. And hundreds of dollars a month is a large amount of money for them.
I think of cloud platforms as less complex than managing your own systems. It's trivial to go from zero to functional product on GCP or AWS, and it's honestly not very expensive to get started either. GCP and AWS very clearly subsidize costs for early-stage startups in an effort to lock them in. A tiny startup might have a cloud hosting cost of 3 figures a year until they really take off.
And when your product does take off, scaling is often trivial.
Yes, scaling is trivial on AWS if you rewrite from scratch 3 times and rearchitect 4 times, but at least you don’t have to enter your credit card number twice.
His assumption is that you're familiar with cloud design patterns. So if you know what you're doing, costs are manageable and scaling is a breeze, that's what the cloud was literally designed for.
I just don't see this. Building what I am describing can be done in days sometimes hours. Where exactly is the time and complexity? I would be willing to bet given a true greenfield(e.g. I can't use an ansible script that stole from my last job) I can build an autoscaling flask app with CI/CD and local environment on ECS twice as fast as accomplishing a lesser facsimile with a bare metal server or a VPS. If I built on a VPS I would still have concerns like backups, High Availability, DNS, Networking, etc. etc. to deal with.
I'm often perplexed when I hear people complain about cloud costs. I can't tell if people just have really different workloads than I've experienced or if they just haven't considered cost when they pick their compute, databases, etc. If you use object storage, some serverless database, and some serverless compute a small company (by which I'm thinking "normally very low volume with occasional, very important, often large bursts") can keep their cloud spend to tens of dollars per month and save considerably by not having to manage all of the stuff that goes along with running VMs, database instances, or physical hosts.
Like, I assume I'm the one missing something because people swear up and down that it's the other way around, but I haven't found the happy path for managing hosts (virtual or physical) that delivers on the promise of simpler-than-cloud. There's a disconnect somewhere because I'm sure there are a lot of people who can't find the happy cloud path that delivers on the simpler-than-diy approach.
The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc. I’m at a few orders of magnitude more spend than that, and in absolute dollars is very much noticeable how much more expensive aws is. But as a percentage of costs it’s so little next to wages, as is your example, that cost is really the wrong thing to get hung up on. Most engineers I’ve worked with don’t get that, they see a value they can objectively minimize, without realizing that even dropping it to zero his little business effect.
> The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc.
This is where I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. If we're comparing Terraform, it means we probably care about reproducibility (rather than an "AWS console vs SSH into pet hosts" scenario), so the like-for-like comparison involves bringing in something like Ansible. On top of that, you need to pick, install, and configure logging exfiltrators, monitoring agents, process managers, etc and you need to operate systems that let you explore those logs and metrics. You also need to configure SSH access and manage keys. You may also need a custom base image, so maybe you're doing packer stuff as well? On top of that, you need to run some database which means managing backups and running replicas with failover (or maybe we/re a small business and we don't care that much about reliability?). And again, we care about reproducibility, so we need to encode all of this stuff in Ansible playbooks or similar. You probably also need something like security groups to restrict which things are allowed to talk to which other things, and encoding this in Ansible or similar is maybe impossible if you don't have software-defined-networks.
It seems like a lot to get to parity with what someone could throw together with API Gateway, Lambda, S3/DynamoDB in a couple reasonably-sized Terraform files in a few hours for a pretty marginal cloud spend (most small businesses would probably stay pretty close to the free tier--these services are extremely inexpensive).
Yea, I mostly agree. I feel like a lot of the negativity comes from hobbyists, where an extra hundred dollars does matter.
I think one place that I disagree is while you could do that in a few hours, your average developer couldn’t. You’re now talking about everyone to learn lambda and terraform and whatnot, whereas with a “standard” web server, that people are familiar with, a lot of that is more easily centralized. just throw some annotations and routes are done, vs the arcane api gateway config. The tools and frameworks for lambda just didn’t seem to be there yet.
Fwiw I’m all in on aws, cost was one of the easiest arguments to deflect. Ultimately we needed to show developer velocity increases as that’s the cost that mattered. And security isn’t compromised, which the bigger the company the more roadblocks I’ve seen to just give devs terraform.
Agreed that there is a learning curve, I guess I was assuming some competence with both stacks—not starting from scratch (although I think if you were starting from scratch it would still be easier to learn AWS than self-managed hosts).
Yeah, big companies don’t like giving devs raw Terraform. My company has sandbox environments where devs can do iteration with permissive Terraform access. That works pretty well for stuff like this.
Also, I use AWS for hobbyist stuff and you can easily use this serverless stack for <$5/month.
I would like to see some real numbers on this. I spend between $5 and $6 million a year on infrastructure. I have a physical datacenter in a Colo and two clouds AWS and Azure. I have detailed KPIs on my spend. One of the KPIs is total cost of ownership of an instance or server. My physical instances cost 3 times as much as the exact same compute in the cloud.
This is because I have to factor all the costs. This includes electricity, maintenance, incident response, networking, renting the cage, vendored software for backups, threat detection, fire suppression, equipment upgrades, licensing, alerting, and it goes on and on and on...
I'd challenge you to break down the full cost of owning a server as you see it. I bet you will miss 75% of the actual costs involved. I promise short of seizing a colo like its Nakatomi Plaza and running it at gunpoint you will never in a million years come close to the total ownership cost of cloud instance. You can't compete with the economies of scale and the caliber of the engineering.
37signals disagrees. They’re moving off the cloud and have published several blog entries about the process and the approx ~1mm/yr (fully loaded) they expect to save.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers.
The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here:
There was a recent article that made the HN in front page that broke down the savings they expected, but I’m on mobile and can’t find it now. Something about “two datacenter racks.”
Where are the numbers and how do they calculate them? This article lists their cloud spend in detail then "waves hands" at the Datacenter costs simply saying "it will be far far less". Ok why not break it down?
I don't understand how they are going to achieve that. Does it include routers, switches, IPS's? What about the costs associated with having a physically wired network instead of a software defined network.
Also they state they are region redundant which is probably way overboard. Will they be protected if they lose their entire datacenter? Will they flop over to another geo? If not then you must consider not their current spend but their spend if they were single region. That would further eat into proposed savings.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe you can achieve cost parity in a Datacenter but you need a certain level of scale. I am skeptical that it can be done at $3 million in spend.
I’ve done the modeling down to pulling actual quotes in my area and with a decent footprint (like couple hundred xxlarge instances) you break even after a year (including colo, remote hands and networking). Cost is decisively not the reason most orgs choose public cloud
>But this isn't just about cost. It's also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations.
Yep read that guys blog history and the agenda just pops right out. It's not just about cost for Basecamp its ideological. I can't help but imagine this bias leaks into the financial and operational calculations.
We had a similar situation. We had a team did not want to move to the cloud, the business forced them, so they built the system in a way that fought the cloud. Then the self fulfilling prophecy kicked into high gear. "See we told you it was a bad idea, look at all the problems we have!". The problems were created through half baked attempts to be "agnostic" to the cloud. Once we removed those elements we were able to reduce the cost of the system by over 90%. It was far cheaper than when it was running in the Colo. These folks had no interest in optimizing for cloud native execution they were already planning their move back into the Colo.
These complaints mostly seem to come from folks who are spinning up lots of VMs and architecting solutions the same way they would build in a data center. If you're running VMs 24/7 of course it's going to be expensive.
This feels right to me. If you build with lambda, api gateway, and s3/dynamo a small business can stay pretty close to the free tier. Obviously this doesn’t work for every single application, but I’d bet there are a lot of VM applications that it would suit just fine.
I have to disagree. There is an initial phase where a startup can simply use docker to provide their service. Having prepared that initial layer they can easily "scale up" and move parts to cloud services as they require.
I disagree, mostly because if your product takes off, that single day or few weeks where the adoption rate sky rockets may be your defining moment for your startup, and scaling up on the cloud is trivial in comparison. Remember, when you're that small, the expenses of the cloud vs dedicated hardware is tiny compared to your employee expenses anyways.
Twitter used to go down regularly in the early days. Reddit did too, even years after it became popular. Facebook I can't be certain now, but I think it would break in the early days.
And even right now today, ChatGPT regularly displays "too busy" messages.
i.e. this is absolute tosh.
And if you know what you're doing you can take something down overnight and put it on a dedicated server.
ChatGPT scaled from 0 users to 100 million in 2 months. Probably millions online at any given second.
Its too busy, because it literally exhausted all the GPUs Azure has as its disposal.
Without the Cloud, scaling ChatGPT would have been impossible. It would have been nowhere near its current success.
Remember that GPT3 was released to the public in Mid 2022, had no public reaction, because it was put behind a paywall. ChatGPT had to be free, and able to cope with the load, to be successful.
That's because ChatGPT was able to sustain service past the point of mass adoption. You're not going to scale to millions of users in a short timespan with dedicated hardware.
You used to be able to scale up to millions of users in less time than you could memorize all the AWS acronyms, and with lower hardware and bandwidth costs to boot.
It’s true that it would take a couple weeks to order all the hardware and a couple more to install and configure it, but that’s about the same amount of time you spend writing all the terraform and Kubernetes scripts and configuring cloudformation and VPCs and IAMs.
Yeah, but then you wouldn't have high availability to the same level, for example. I mean, you could, but then tack on another 100 non-AWS acronyms to your on-premise solution.
Looking back 20-30 years, it absolutely was a primary limiting factor. Massive capital outlays were required to serve the kind of traffic you can get with the free tier of modern cloud infra providers.
Some are, but a lot of them are also made to be successful long term companies. Small business is still a large employer overall. Some businesses need to be very big, and if you want to be "filthy rich" you have to be in one of those. However you can be nicely wealthy at a small company.
I still have a hard time understanding what's going on with startups : the power of money makes it too attractive to sell and "call it a life" I guess. That's why even if they don't plan on doing this, startup might actually accept being bought. I guess.
> Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product.
The second statement does not follow from the first.
What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all the noise and reaching millions of users is now arguably harder than it was previously.
The key word in the phrase is 'reach'. If by 'reach' you mean the equivalent of getting an email into someone's account, then the statement is true. You can easily spam millions of email addresses for pennies. You can get ad space on lots of browsers. You can cold call millions of people with automated systems.
On the other hand if by 'reach' you mean actually getting someone's physical and mental attention, then it can be harder than ever. Your message gets filtered out or swallowed up in the sea of other messages and ignored either by technology or by the users themselves.
It is like those pictures of NY Times Square (or any corner in Asia) where you have 10,000 billboards of all shapes and sizes all flashing some marketing message. It is easier than ever to buy a few seconds or minutes of ad time on one of them. It is harder than ever to get the passing crowd to take notice of your message when it is drowned out by all the others.
I don't understand why Google and Amazon would invest all this money in these employees building up their tech and tribal knowledge just to lay them off. Do these companies not expect to grow in the future? Seems like just freezing hiring for a year or two would save you more money in the long run rather than having to rehire and rebuild all this expertise.
There is a concept of internal layoff to invent, where a part of the workforce as to apply to a different teams, being fired from the previous one and hire by the next one.
For the anecdote, i know someone that was let go by IBM and hire by RedHat the same month two years ago.
> Do these companies not expect to grow in the future?
Yes and wages were outpacing that growth, so as soon as someone took the first step, all the big tech companies piled on in short order. And, low and beyond, offers appear to be down right now. Mission accomplished?
> Seems like just freezing hiring for a year or two would save you more money in the long run rather than having to rehire and rebuild all this expertise.
It took Google 6 years from 2012 to double headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $50B to $136B (almost triple). Profit from $10.7B to $30.7B (triple).
In 4 years from 2018 to 2022, Google more than doubled headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $136B to $279B (barely double). Profit from $30.7B to $50.9B (only up 65%).
Almost all these companies have similar stories.
They're still good companies. They just hired way too many people thinking that the pandemic trend would continue for a long period of time - rather than revert to the mean.
If Google continue to grow at it's more long-term average rate - without the layoffs, you're looking at being overstaffed for years.
Because the recruiting process can cost over a year's salary, and that's ignoring the time it takes to get up to the same productivity as other employees once they start.
A lot of people even at Google just do run-of-the-mill stuff. Not everyone is making deep learning artificial big table or some such.
A rule of thumb is at any organization roughly square root of employees are critical. So at Google that number would be < 500 people. So even when I consider that layoffs are totally random (unlikely), there would be 40 or so people laid off which could be considered important loss. This is bad but not going to hamper Google significantly where they are going.
I haven't heard the "square root of employees are critical" rule of thumb. I have previously heard of Price's Law - paraphrasing: "half of the output is created by a square root of the organization". But as I understand it, there's not a notion of criticality. What if 80% of your output is critical? What if the n-n^0.5 group is on critical output and your square root group is slinging schlock at high volume?
Sometimes, you'll hear pundits say that these kinds of layoffs are aimed at "the bottom 5%" or whatever, but who's been around for these cycles knows that lots of good people get cut alongside the actual underperformers. There's also a lot of "last to be hired, first to be fired" in big layoffs, so presumably with those people you aren't losing too much tribal knowledge.
In some cases, the layoffs were targeted at particular areas of the company, like Amazon targeting their devices group. If they don't anticipate growth in that area, it may not be worth it (to management, anyways) to reallocate those employees to other parts of the company.
All that being said, these things tend to be driven by short-term financial metrics rather than long-term ones. A hiring freeze wouldn't have as dramatic an impact on next quarter's earnings.
> by short-term financial metrics rather than long-term ones. A hiring freeze wouldn't have as dramatic an impact on next quarter's earnings.
In the most recent quarter, Google’s profit was down 34% and it was the fourth consecutive quarter with decrease in profits. How many quarters do you think they should wait out before trying to stem the tide of costs outpacing revenues?
I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.
I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool.
Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before.
Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings
Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.
Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved.
It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
That's true, however I've been seeing complaints for a little longer than that. Perhaps in FAANG they were hiring, but in general I remember seeing a lot of junior devs (not from elite colleges) commenting about how they applied for 50 positions sometimes during COVID. Something unthinkable in my time.
Tell me about it. I don't mind helping someone, but when they don't pay attention the first time and I have to have the same exact meeting again, it's kind of a bother.
Checked mine too and the difference is stark. However just setting Linkedin to "looking for a job" was enough to get a lot of attention in early February. I didn't want to wait for layoffs on my company, so, in advance, I got a much better paid job in about 2-3 weeks. Listings always suck, btw. Recruiters is where it's at.
I see experienced ones remaining calm, where rank-and-file is a bit desperate: too many calls, sending me nonsense jobs, badmouthing companies, pushing it too hard to accept offers. Unsurprisingly, there was a boom during COVID, and a lot of those new people started around that time.
I see a correlation with development positions. There is just too many candidates for junior positions, but if you're a company trying to hire senior, principal or leadership your chance of success without a recruiter is very slim.
Last summer and also before that, when I applied, I would get ~90% response rate and would have at least a call from recruiter/HM.
Last week I sent a bunch of applications and crickets... this is something that I've never experienced in +10 years being in the industry. I'm not in dire need for a job but I can imagine how much,much stressful is to be unemployed now vs even 3-5 years ago.
I was laid off in December and this has been by far the hardest search of the now four times (yes, really) I’ve been laid off in my career.
The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.
Never apply through LinkedIn. It is so low-friction that the vast majority of applicants are nowhere near qualified, and hiring managers quickly learn to ignore anything that came in from LinkedIn.
I used to keep my linkedin fresh just to see what feelers I get. I also funnel all recruiter emails into a folder. (It's a good ego boost sometimes, not gonna lie.) Last time I was looking for a job roughly four years ago, I just opened my email recruiter folder and started responding. Responded to four emails, (three faangs plus linkedin), and now I'm at a faang.
Now, there's no way to know for sure that keeping linkedin fresh actually helps. Also it was a special time where I had just finished an online masters in CS and I was really on a roll so I was taking a bunch of MOOCs afterwards as well. IMO keeping my linkedin updated with a degree in CS and mooc certificates helped. Normal day to day stuff I wouldn't update linkedin for.
When I was reviewing resumes I would generally also look at an interesting candidate’s LinkedIn as it often provided more detail than the resume itself.
For me, I was mostly looking for more detail on a candidate’s experience. Links to projects were good. I didn’t consciously look at anything else, but I’ll admit that I probably regarded more complete profiles better.
I would also check out candidate’s personal sites. Decent content (even not up to date) was generally a big bonus.
Despite the criticism from other people in this thread, pretty much every role I've received is through LinkedIn. I probably get 4 or 5 recruiters reach out a week regarding one role or another, of which 1 of those is worth my time. That increased over time as I've built my network of recruiters in my field.
In terms of prior experience, I simply state what I achieved at each role in a bullet list. Nothing fancy. My university education is a list of all the modules I took.
Forget the "social media gamifying" side of it. Likes and posts don't matter if your goal is just getting offers. Keeping the profile current, and have your skills section up to date as recruiters use that to filter applicants. Block any recruiters that send you insultingly low-ball offers. Connect with those that provide value.
My last 4 roles came out of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out.
Having detailed job descriptions with rich detail as to what you did and a good number of connections in the industry you’re looking in is what drives the algo
I got my current job in mid-2021 after a "cold" reachout from a recruiter who just happened to have a position that was perfect for me. I wasn't looking, but was open to suggestion.
My profile at that time probably hadn't been touched in about 5-6 years. After talking with her I cleaned it up a bit, but it's nothing more than a basic resume and a list of past positions going back about 10 years. IME, all they care about is that you provide enough context that they can compare against the openings they have. The "extra" skills, projects, etc., can come out when you have a pre-interview discussion.
I've been in industry 30 years and every position except my first has been through a recruiter. They're good at this (some of them anyway): make them do the hard work.
You can basically port your resume to it and do nothing else and it can get you the occasional lead on a job. 3/4 of my last jobs were from LinkedIn recruiter outreach. One of the recruiter I told I wasn't ready, and then months later I pinged them and got right into the interview process and eventually got a new job.
I never let anyone else do the company vetting for me, not even for preselection. I also want to have the leverage of negotiating with my future employer / stakeholder directly, recruiter cut including. So from my POV and with all the spam that comes with it, a LinkedIn is not only useless but a major nuisance.
Maybe that changed over the years, I only remember professional recruiters. But even so, this still mostly amounts to noise as to me the majority of companies are just not interesting to work for at all. I usually target 3 to 5 (max) interesting companies / openings which I thoroughly research on beforehand myself. That approach has never failed me so far, keeps me interested and motivated to go through interviewing plus an upper hand during negotiations. YMMV of course, that's just the approach that has consistently worked for me.
Oh yeah there's definitely a lot of noise. I have a niche that is very SEO'd on LinkedIn (Haskell), so that helps. I do just ignore people inquiring about generic software jobs though. But every so often a Haskell company finds me and then I keep in touch.
Counterpoint: I've been working in this industry for ~20 years by now and have deleted my LinkedIn around the halfway point. Turned out it was even more useless than that Facebook account I had axed around the same time (sadly had to go back there for access to the marketplace recently).
TL;DR don't bother with all that recruiter spam and general engagement tactics for yet another data hoarding, privacy violating "social network". If you are doing a good job and keep investing in yourself there will always be good jobs in this industry.
I’ve actually found LI to be good for leads for generic companies as an alternative “resume drop” - any time the company paid to distribute the job you know they’re actively recruiting for it.
Find someone in the company that’s a second order connection and ask for a warm intro. Most companies still have a recruitment bonus for internal employees and after a short conversation most will tell you they’ll tell the internal hiring manager to look at your resume.
The higher up on the career ladder you are, the better this works and more important it is if you’re not getting in via recruiter.
I have had very similar experience to this and everything said here is 100% accurate. It is extremely taxing on my mental health. Fortunately, my hobbies have really helped.
> we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.
That doesn't mean they get 200 highly qualified candidates ;)
In my experience, before you would get 150 applicants and not a single one qualified for the job (could actually program or have any relevant experience). Now you get 3 qualified ones and 200 applicants.
I guess I don't exactly understand as my experience is quite different. I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs.
> I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs
Some companies (not many) are still recruiting, and there's now a massive amount of laid off people fighting for those jobs. Just because some recruited spammed you doesn't mean it would have been easy to get an offer...
>>I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs.
reply
A few of those jobs might even really exist!
I am of the opinion that the vast majority of inquiries I get from linked in (at least 5 a week) are from scammers and brand-new or desperate recruiters just looking to collect resumes to add to their database. I pretty much ignore all linkedin inquiries at this point - it has been taken over by scammer and hucksters.
Hm you might just not have a well filled out LinkedIn, because my experience has not been like yours at all. Most of my jobs have been from LinkedIn recruiters.
I got laid off in November (not faang). I was going to wait until the right position came around, but as the lay offs kept coming in January I jumped on the first non-terrible opportunity. If the music stops I don't want to be without a chair.
good choice - you definitely don't want to be caught without a chair when the music stops.
Whether one likes musk or not, and whether or not you agree with how he is running twitter or not - he let go like 80% of the company and it is still more or less running (with some bumps) - I don't think other companies will go to quite that extreme, but I'd bank that some executives right now in some companies are asking themselves "can we at least cut 33% of the staff and still keep things (more or less) running"?
Tesla is also making money hand over fist so following Musk makes sense. He just acquired twitter which was a money loser. Going to take time to turn it around
Excellent choice. If/when things improve you can make the switch, for now you've got steady income and a non terrible position. That's better than a lot of people.
It’s not mutually exclusive. Applying for jobs takes a few hours a week. Maybe a little more if you get a hit. You have a lot of bandwidth to work on an mvp and do bootstrapped startup stuff.
IDK about you, but applying, recruiting calls, company research, HM call, leetcoding, practicing system design interviews, scheduling coding/arch interviews, practicing with arch diagramming tool, telling recruiter it was good and no i still wont show my hand with comp, followups because layoffs hit recruiting and coodrinators (they're short handed now), more scheduling conflicts, interviewing, and then telling the recruiter "no you offer first, then I'll tell you what i think", "Ok I'll talk to your VP finance about how valuable you think the options are", more scheduling...
> I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.
Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.
1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal
Its sad seeing the students coming into the field trying to find work right now. They don't understand why there's no responses or why the corps are not showing up to job events.
The industry has perpetuated the lie that stem means employment, so now we have a surplus of workers in an economic downturn, they're competing for the jobs because there is less capitol to create them.
When the market goes down the corps pull back. All the taxes we pay in infra and education are not returned by them.
Same thing with the collapse of Nortel in Ottawa around 2001. Painful in the short term for those affected but long term it created a much more robust tech ecosystem.
This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece -
He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place.
So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?
Or this -
Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking.
From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross.
I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers.
The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address.
> So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?
The dumbest dismissals of business ideas always start with this phrase. Moats aren't like some obvious thing where you pull up a ladder and no one can follow you. Usually just having a slightly better UX (or a UX that people are used to) is enough to be a moat. Users latch onto things they have good experiences with.
Of course, if you want to benefit from anticompetitive business practices (outprice competition, drive them out of business, hike prices), rather than value creation, you need a big pull-up-ladder-type moat, but not every company needs to be Uber/Lyft getting in winner-take-all funding wars.
And what writing is on the wall, exactly, for Amazon? AWS powers the internet. Apple uses it for cloud services, for cryin' out loud -- the largest AWS customer in fact. AWS has more market share than all of its competitors combined. Where is this writing you're speaking of?
But where is AWSs moat? It's not enough to have all of the customers. Customers are fleeting and will leave if they get a BBO (bigger, better offer). If you scrap together an AWS migration tool that can pull databases, instances, and lambdas off of AWS and mirror them in your cloud, for less money, you'll probably attract a lot of customers.
I think the trick you are missing is that AWS competitors do not need to replicate their infrastructure.
The model you are wed to is "one service-provider per niche." Yeah, that requires scaling to an absolutely ridiculous extent.
…but for those of us not in favor of soviet-style centralism, and there are a couple of us, well we'd love hosting providers that can let us serve a sufficiently profitable percentage of the market.
Down with monopolist capitalism and oligopolist communism! All hail the vibrant marketplace!
And yet no one else (yes, not even Azure) has come close to holding a candle against AWS after all these years and billions of dollars invested. There is a moat. You just don't see it.
> If you scrap together an AWS migration tool that can pull databases, instances, and lambdas
Ah yes, I’ll just throw a quick script together. Never mind that there are entire consulting firms dedicated to doing exactly this and each of their projects takes months to years and hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Easier said that done. Migrations are hard. AWS can really lock you in to their proprietary services, "serverless" stuff like Dynamo, Lambda, SQS, etc. It's easy to get in, hard to get out once you have a lot of data. If you stick with more standard infrastructure (RDS, EC2, containers on ECS, etc.) you'll have an easier time.
Good. The best minds of a generation have wasted their talents figuring out how to best maximize media addiction and serve ads for Facebook and Google. Let’s hope a new generation engages in more socially productive endeavors.
I somehow envision working at some of the top tech companies in the world requires more than just being good at coding exercises. And more than just software engineers were let go at these companies…
I find this line of thinking interesting, but the sentiment in my social circles is not against SWEs at all. Is there a campaign going to make software engineers the facto scape goat of the current downturn ( and ads, and layoffs and ai taking everyone's job )? If so, it may be worthwhile to nip it in the bud.
Somebody in a garage today is working on a business that will be worth billions within 5 years, and we'll all kick ourselves with "why didn't we think of that!"
Anecdotally, of the five-ten people I knew throughout the years who ended up at Facebook, all had a very specific personality-trait.
Those that I knew who went to Google/Amazon/etc. were more diverse personalities: ambitious, interested in hard problems, wanting a good life, etc.
Those going to Facebook though, I'm not sure I can put it in a polite way. Let me just say, in different times and different places I could imagine them joining a certain type of organization.
Sorry for sounding cryptic, it is hard to pin down exactly, but I somehow see Zuckerberg himself kind of like that; maybe someone who likes technical problems, but sees human relations in a kind of formulaic way, and oblivious to ethical consequences of technical work, not interested in the classics or humanities.
I don’t think anyone realized the full extent of the consequences until very recently. Even now, we’re still learning just how pervasive the mental health consequences of social media have been. See the recently released CDC data on teen mental health.
The trajectory for Facebook has been consistently bad. Not knowing the "full extent" is not absolution.
The CDC study is a lagging indicator; it describes the trendline of a mental health crisis that's self-evident to practitioners. On the research side, there have been many studies in the last 10 years associating Facebook use with poor mental health outcomes.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out 5 years ago.
Of course, because layoffs don't magically avoid hitting good people. What matters is what part of the org you are in. If it's a part that is not in favor, you are gone, whether you are good or not.
Sad that when I open a thread the first comment I see is cheap cynicism that comes close to trolling, and the replies are even worse.
Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
The big tech companies have delivered results to our economy like the space program did — most of the technology that smaller companies and startups depend on was developed by big tech and either turned into a line of business open to others (like AWS) or was open sourced (like Kubernetes, most of the major app frameworks, multiple programming languages, distributed consensus, distributed tracing, modern CI/CD…) The industry as a whole would be a lot worse off if that hadn’t happened. So what if some of it was used to sell ads?
Nah, I think the good and bad aspects should be judged separately, we shouldn't be giving these companies a free pass for the infrastructure contributions they made -- you know which bad regime was also good at building motorways -- I'm grateful for google search and for maps, Facebook and some of the other stuff not so much.
The Holocaust absurdly outweighs the Autobahn, the Nazis were the worst people in history. The net result of big tech has been relatively good (for the average person’s material conditions, the jury’s still out on psychological effects but regardless of anything, it’s not even comparable to the Nazis).
No, just stop responding to or encouraging this kind of behavior. It probably seems funny to you in the context of a thread but it pollutes the discourse and gradually wears down the standards on this site.
The signal to noise ratio needs to be good, or there will be no point to reading the comments.
Wow, you just made me realize why HN is so much better than Reddit. There’s no useless comments full of in-jokes and sarcastic one liners; comments are actually thoughtful and generate discourse rather than being one-line low-wit witticisms.
Interesting. Romans built roads, killed a whole bunch of people in the name of the empire and had no problem with slavery. And yet, sufficient amount of time have passed to allow for a detached look to what they did and how it was accomplished. Were Romans so much better than Nazis or just so far back in the past that their relative badness does not register?
What you actually did was post a cynical dismissal of the efforts of an entire generation of tech workers by focusing on one contentious aspect of the industry’s output.
You said they wasted their talents.
It’s pretty clear that they didn’t, and they actually produced a huge amount of good things, and I listed only a subset of the major achievements we’ve seen recently.
Google also builds the world’s most popular web browser and the world’s most popular mobile phone OS and the world’s most popular email service and the world’s most popular streaming video platform. Most people prefer to see the ads and get those things free of charge. Oh, and they make thermostats, and funny-looking self driving cars.
Facebook runs the world’s largest social network and during the pandemic it was one of the few ways (along with things like Zoom) that people could see the faces of their friends and family during lockdown. Facebook are also VR pioneers via Oculus. The metaverse is pretty dumb though.
Reducing these gigantic companies that do many things to just “advertising” and implying that the many people who work there are wasting their talents is cynical and cheap.
You know what would really suck? Having to pay a few cents every time you do a search, or paying a subscription to watch Youtube or use Gmail or see your friends Facebook posts. Ads are a totally reasonable alternative and all they do is sit there — you can ignore them and get all of these products for free.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and other ad/attention companies are just the modern day Philip Morris. Sure they do nice things on the side, but they finance those things by selling addiction. Make your own ethical and moral judgments on those facts, but they are the facts
>Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…
The number of people working on these is insignificantly irrelevant compared to the number of people working on the bad stuff.
It's good that the people you highlight exist because they maintain my faith in humanity, but for every engineer that worked on Webb, there are a thousand working on privacy-destroying addiction engines.
My employer can't find people to work on space-based synthetic aperture radar that will be used to monitor and potentially combat global climate change through detecting sea level rise, coastal erosion, and foliage cover (and health) because you can make more money working on an app. We can't pay more because we're funded through grants and apps are funded either through VCs or intrusive ad revenue and intrusive ads generate more revenue than university partnerships and piecemeal contracts from various international departments of the environment.
It's ridiculous because I make so much that I am the cause of gentrification, i.e. "Enough".
But it's not as much as an engineer at Facebook.
Even your comment focuses on the financial incentives....
> Even your comment focuses on the financial incentives....
I also mentioned the Renaissance of access to knowledge in our pockets, the way mobile payments help people, the access to maps, the ability of remote work to scale to a large portion of the population...
Personally as a senior developer with a family, I wouldn’t stake my stability on a startup. Does that reservation generalize? Do startups end up lacking wiser devs?
Wages from a volatile source is better than no wages, and what you previously thought to be a stable source has proven otherwise - you’ve just unexpectedly been laid off.
Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
During the last few years some start ups were offering solid base salaries in addition to RSUs, so the risk wasn’t horrible. Not sure what it’s like now.
As a senior looking for FTE? Probably not. As a senior looking for a semi-retired interesting place to work? Definitely. We've hired the latter for shorter term but not really contract worthy work in the past that was beneficial for both parties.
Ideally if you are a senior big tech employee you are not living paycheck to paycheck any more, so you could endure a few months of not being employed. And even then, if you are good and have a network, you would find employment very quickly if a startup fails, unless there is some event that causes all startups to not look for new employees.
The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.
What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months?
Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself and a few other people.
Realistically, if you're starting a startup and not currently working, plan on having at least 12 months of expenses saved (not a few months).
You don't need to be close to it if you are willing to give up saving like you used to. If you can prove any traction I be you can raise a little money from FFF for a few months more.
A few months is 2. For the sake of this hypothetical let’s say it’s 3.
You’re saying that someone can build a product that’s capable of having investor level revenue within a few months? Or not even revenue, but more than 5 companies using it? This one person is not only building a fully functioning software product that’s capable of being useful to companies, but also doing high levels of networking to find those customers and users. They’re doing this all within 3 months? I just don’t see how that’s possible. The fastest moving early stage teams I’ve ever seen have gone to market in no less than 4 months, and that was with multiple people working on the problem.
I think at a minimum you can expect it to take 6 months if you’re going at it alone. Certainly less if you have other co-founders.
I've built stuff in 2 months that was production ready indeed (3D apparel designer webapp) or I've built a video recording service that synced a PDF to your webcam over a weekend.
Long story short, you can start sooner than quitting with research, prototyping. The key is to get the scope right.
But I agree that "few" has a different meaning for us. I did suffer with sales, but that's another story.
I think the context is about joining startups as employees, where the startup pays you a wage from the first day. Of course startups where you don't receive wages in cash are different.
Not all startups are terrible.
In general yes the workload is higher but big tech is now a stressful place as well (layoffs, performance reviews etc). I'm positive many people in big tech started working harder, unless they wanna get fired.
A startup with a good runway (say 2-3 years) and faith from investors is an OK place to be in. And there are many parents in such companies.
I would think the other way around: Public markets are correcting to a higher interest rate (i.e. liquidity being removed from the system) but for startups and scale-ups this correction did not start yet with all force (e.g. valuation slashing, 50% layoffs, acquisition and liquidation by PE firms, etc).
I have talked to a lot of people in the last few months who have AI-related startups that are pre-funding. I am hearing that the big VC funds are pulling back, I don't know what is going in terms of angel investing and how (and if) these startups are going to get on the funding train.
How does someone currently unemployed by choice with a good financial cushion take advantage of this if I don't have any startup ideas I'm deeply passionate about? I've kept an eye on the startup market and all I see are exceedingly boring ideas with mind numbing pitches around them. "Democratizing shipping!" "Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market!"
Have you considered a startup studio? Assuming your handle indicates location, Pioneer Square Labs[1] and the Allen Institute[2] both have incubators to connect skilled people with promising ideas for startups.
> “Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market”
Im currently working on something like this. Yes it’s boring but it does have potential. you’re exact opinion is why I’m having a hard time looking for a cofounder!
Hey you and me are on the same boat. Feels like putting on the glasses from "They Live", but maybe I'm not that misanthropic about it..I've found that it's exceedingly hard for me to not look at the big machine around me as I'm 'doing my job' of cranking the lever.
In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, being bored being a crucial part of this.
In the market I'm seeing things that fail common sense checks. AI powered X that is trying to 'solve' things that we barely have a grip on as humans, assemblages of startups that exist solely to manage self created problems, and a whole host of deathcult crypto stuff. Even the progenitors seem to not buy into the stuff they pitch; the zeal, to me, is often just an affectation ("we're going to completely revolutionize..."), maybe the charm is wearing off as decades of consumption and greed are slowly deflating our collective ego.
Hey thanks so much for sharing your experience. How am I faring? I’m faring OK. Since leaving my job I’ve drastically changed my environment, moving from a rural cottage to a bigger city with more going on, tech and otherwise. I’ve identified some volunteer opportunities I’m interested in but haven’t taken any steps to capture them beyond creating online accounts to see upcoming events. I’ve setup my environment to enable creative endeavors like writing, weight lifting, and playing some instruments, but similarly haven’t taken the steps of actually utilizing these spaces.
As is probably apparent, I’ve been dealing with depression for years. Despite the description, things are better lately but I’m still having a hard time finding an identity beyond what was wrapped up in work over the last decade.
Anyway, probably more than you asked for! I’ve always had a passion for 3d and gaming, and I feel like there’s some opportunity out there related to this that’d be perfect for me, but I can’t get around the exploitative nature of the industry. I’d make my own but wrestle with what I mentioned above: I just can’t find any ideas that I’m excited enough to work on.
I can't express how much I related to this. Actualizing/praxis is the big blocker here and it's so hard to break out of my programming. I think art has a liberating effect here, but I'm still 'going through the motions' of feigning 'work' without necessarily introspection since..
Im not working for anyone but myself at this point. I saw a comment on HN along the lines of, I don't need to be maximally efficient because the cause (corporate profits) won't ever justify the means.
Hopefully we both find a way out but I'm beginning to suspect that out in just another way back in, without a drastic reframing I fear I've grown too complacent on the usual. Maybe reading Nagel might help, or maybe Tolstoy :p
I've been thinking about this recently and I think the answer (for me) is to get a non-tech job/full-time-hobby for a bit. It makes sense that all the ideas in the "corporate office/tech infra" space are all used up. Every single person capable of building tech products encounters problems in these spaces, very few encounter problems that can be solved in, say, medical spaces, or commercial kitchens, or whatever. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to have original ideas.
I have a few ideas. None are really monetizable, but I want to do them, so I am. Once I get them out of my system I'll probably go back to being an employee.
I think if you are interested in making something, you should make it. If you are interested in making money, then look for a job.
Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding.
Depends on the measure of success. Might have been able to shrink the timelines on everything if I had a sounding board and people on my side with prior experience. They just didn't think I was worth the time.
It is an interesting approach to developing services. The company did not survive though, found this in a blog:
> Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
Yup company is defunct but I left the product running while I push it toward something else. Basically why does every saas service need to be backed by a corporation. Why can't we have something community led. We have open source which many people can contribute to but not running services. So it's an experiment.
Happy to see you here, i love the idea of your app, but on my tests i had a poor experience, with latency, speed of execution and with your responses. it seem unmaintaned, what is tha state of the company today?
Product is on autopilot, company ran out of money and couldn't raise further funding. I'm not offering help to find product/market fit and not showing these things to sell the product. Just offering help to fellow founders trying to get something off the ground. I managed to do that part.
Btw sorry for your issues with the product. We were a small team, we raised $2m in 2019, but didn't launch that product until 2021. We just didn't have enough time to execute on it effectively.
Not a problem, it's a good idea and a good product, i hope you find a way to continue this adventure, but if you want to sell it you can reach me throug any social media platform that is on my profile
The only data cited is the increase in YCombinator applications. But they only have data for the last year, because YCombinator didn't publish how many applications they received in previous years.
(Also, if you're looking for it: archive.is slash WE4WH)
> However, new founders may find it harder to tap than those who went before them. A spate of founder scandals at unicorns like WeWork and Theranos have caused investors to dig deeper into a company before throwing money at the latest shiny promise. Market uncertainty only adds to that scrutiny.
These examples made me laugh because they notably didn't increase scrutiny during the last few years. Otherwise, we wouldn't have more recent examples (FTX, among others).
At the end of last year I decided I would look for a new job at the beginning of this year, but I think I have to put it off for a while. The big companies, who just laid off thousands, probably aren't to eager to hire me right now and the rest of the market is flooded with people with better CVs than me (because theirs say Google or Microsoft or something like that). Is that correct? Should I wait half a year or so?
Depends on how you’d like to use your time. Applying is quick and easy. And a company will probably progress anywhere from 5-15 applicants to an initial round. So while your chance of getting a 1st round interview are much smaller than last year, once you’re in it’s probably only moderately lower odds of landing the job.
I was employee #2 at Airship (was Urban Airship) which was started by laid off tech workers after the 2008 housing crash. Oregon, where we were all located, had an unemployment incentive for starting a new business… and it worked! Airship has employed hundreds of Oregonians (and others) over more than a decade.
Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadIf FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually.
The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.
FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150
People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.
In this way I think it's very similar to the web and then mobile booms
Look at websites like CivitAI. Its literally just a front-end + a S3 bucket backend that allows people to share and download large stable-diffusion models (100MB-8GB).
The website founder was not an AI guy, he was a web-dev background and former founder. The website is already a huge success, forcing the incumbent (Huggingface, backed by Amazon) to try and hurriedly copy its features.
The tech and business mindset of 15 years ago is remarkably similar to that of 15 years before that, and 15 years before that, even.
Businesses need technical functionality that enables the core mission of the company, and they need accurate operational insights.
This means "boring" technology. It means reliable systems and processes. It means accurate reports who's methodology can be understood clearly.
I prefer to solve real problems with boring technology, than to solve imaginary problems with exciting technology.
Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).
Honestly, I have a few startup ideas I’d love to try, but this cycle has not put me in a place to try them.
That statement doesn’t make sense. Companies become large (your “megacorp“) because they’re very good at attracting, growing, and applying capital.
As things improve all this money will look for employment.
It's undoubtably a great time for startups to get talent, but startups as we know them today tend to be very hungry for VC money, which is drying up rapidly. I would be very hesitant to join one unless the match was really good.
it's a double whammy
For anybody willing to start their own thing, it's never been easier.
And for anybody else who's smart and wants to do big things, message me.
I think the problem we have is a generation of people in the industry have been convinced hifalutin money making schemes are sustainable business ideas. I'm glad that nonsense has finally past.
The realignment is good for humanity.
I’ll bite. How?
I’m working a startup and would give 50% of my company to an investor just so I could work on this thing full time.
It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.
Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box.
Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale.
I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup.
[0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less?
A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing.
If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.
The bigger question mark than the money, I think, is whether this scale up approach actually works, or whether you end up fundamentally changing everything anyway. In my experience it's a mixed bag. There are some advantages, but it also isn't a panacea, and certainly isn't as easy as turning that dynos knob on heroku was. But at the end of the day, I land on it being worth it for a business (though not for a hobby). But it isn't a no-brainer.
Here’s what you’ll need to setup and run a single database :-
- Installation script and infra provisioning. You need a repeatable way to do this with as little manual intervention as possible and I can swear it never just works.
- Backup and recovery scripts and associated monitoring
- Replication setup, monitoring and debugging. It will break often.
- Monitoring for infra - CPU, memory, network. There’ll be unforeseen spikes and random slow downs and a whole bunch of slow queries you’ll debug on a regular basis.
- Security - users, permissions, auditing. Both machine and database. Regular password rotation and firewall rules. Ability to off-board users.
- If you survive all this, being able to scale up. And I mean just vertical scale up will take you far but you cross that limit, you now suddenly have to deal with sharding or partitioning.
So when I joined a new startup and we were building it all from scratch it was a very easy decision to go with the cloud. We spent $3500 a month. Not a lot but nothing compared to the salaries and marketing spend.
The underlying point I made that is being ignored is that 99.9% of start ups never need any of the stuff you are talking about. And hundreds of dollars a month is a large amount of money for them.
And when your product does take off, scaling is often trivial.
I consider the latter to be far more complex.
Thanks for sharing that.
> object storage
Is this like S3 or more like DynamoDB, or something else?
Like, I assume I'm the one missing something because people swear up and down that it's the other way around, but I haven't found the happy path for managing hosts (virtual or physical) that delivers on the promise of simpler-than-cloud. There's a disconnect somewhere because I'm sure there are a lot of people who can't find the happy cloud path that delivers on the simpler-than-diy approach.
This is where I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. If we're comparing Terraform, it means we probably care about reproducibility (rather than an "AWS console vs SSH into pet hosts" scenario), so the like-for-like comparison involves bringing in something like Ansible. On top of that, you need to pick, install, and configure logging exfiltrators, monitoring agents, process managers, etc and you need to operate systems that let you explore those logs and metrics. You also need to configure SSH access and manage keys. You may also need a custom base image, so maybe you're doing packer stuff as well? On top of that, you need to run some database which means managing backups and running replicas with failover (or maybe we/re a small business and we don't care that much about reliability?). And again, we care about reproducibility, so we need to encode all of this stuff in Ansible playbooks or similar. You probably also need something like security groups to restrict which things are allowed to talk to which other things, and encoding this in Ansible or similar is maybe impossible if you don't have software-defined-networks.
It seems like a lot to get to parity with what someone could throw together with API Gateway, Lambda, S3/DynamoDB in a couple reasonably-sized Terraform files in a few hours for a pretty marginal cloud spend (most small businesses would probably stay pretty close to the free tier--these services are extremely inexpensive).
I think one place that I disagree is while you could do that in a few hours, your average developer couldn’t. You’re now talking about everyone to learn lambda and terraform and whatnot, whereas with a “standard” web server, that people are familiar with, a lot of that is more easily centralized. just throw some annotations and routes are done, vs the arcane api gateway config. The tools and frameworks for lambda just didn’t seem to be there yet.
Fwiw I’m all in on aws, cost was one of the easiest arguments to deflect. Ultimately we needed to show developer velocity increases as that’s the cost that mattered. And security isn’t compromised, which the bigger the company the more roadblocks I’ve seen to just give devs terraform.
Yeah, big companies don’t like giving devs raw Terraform. My company has sandbox environments where devs can do iteration with permissive Terraform access. That works pretty well for stuff like this.
Also, I use AWS for hobbyist stuff and you can easily use this serverless stack for <$5/month.
This is because I have to factor all the costs. This includes electricity, maintenance, incident response, networking, renting the cage, vendored software for backups, threat detection, fire suppression, equipment upgrades, licensing, alerting, and it goes on and on and on...
I'd challenge you to break down the full cost of owning a server as you see it. I bet you will miss 75% of the actual costs involved. I promise short of seizing a colo like its Nakatomi Plaza and running it at gunpoint you will never in a million years come close to the total ownership cost of cloud instance. You can't compete with the economies of scale and the caliber of the engineering.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers.
The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here:
https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
There was a recent article that made the HN in front page that broke down the savings they expected, but I’m on mobile and can’t find it now. Something about “two datacenter racks.”
I don't understand how they are going to achieve that. Does it include routers, switches, IPS's? What about the costs associated with having a physically wired network instead of a software defined network.
Also they state they are region redundant which is probably way overboard. Will they be protected if they lose their entire datacenter? Will they flop over to another geo? If not then you must consider not their current spend but their spend if they were single region. That would further eat into proposed savings.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe you can achieve cost parity in a Datacenter but you need a certain level of scale. I am skeptical that it can be done at $3 million in spend.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-stand-to-save-7m-over-five-year...
Yep read that guys blog history and the agenda just pops right out. It's not just about cost for Basecamp its ideological. I can't help but imagine this bias leaks into the financial and operational calculations.
We had a similar situation. We had a team did not want to move to the cloud, the business forced them, so they built the system in a way that fought the cloud. Then the self fulfilling prophecy kicked into high gear. "See we told you it was a bad idea, look at all the problems we have!". The problems were created through half baked attempts to be "agnostic" to the cloud. Once we removed those elements we were able to reduce the cost of the system by over 90%. It was far cheaper than when it was running in the Colo. These folks had no interest in optimizing for cloud native execution they were already planning their move back into the Colo.
And even right now today, ChatGPT regularly displays "too busy" messages.
i.e. this is absolute tosh.
And if you know what you're doing you can take something down overnight and put it on a dedicated server.
ChatGPT scaled from 0 users to 100 million in 2 months. Probably millions online at any given second.
Its too busy, because it literally exhausted all the GPUs Azure has as its disposal.
Without the Cloud, scaling ChatGPT would have been impossible. It would have been nowhere near its current success. Remember that GPT3 was released to the public in Mid 2022, had no public reaction, because it was put behind a paywall. ChatGPT had to be free, and able to cope with the load, to be successful.
Therefore, it did not have to be able to cope with the load to be successful.
All you did is illustrate my point.
Having an old school style IT structure was a pain. Maintaining your severs, networking gear if needed, OS updates ... on and on.
For very small teams (maybe not the well funded start ups) that could eat a lot of time and trouble.
It’s true that it would take a couple weeks to order all the hardware and a couple more to install and configure it, but that’s about the same amount of time you spend writing all the terraform and Kubernetes scripts and configuring cloudformation and VPCs and IAMs.
The second statement does not follow from the first.
What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all the noise and reaching millions of users is now arguably harder than it was previously.
On the other hand if by 'reach' you mean actually getting someone's physical and mental attention, then it can be harder than ever. Your message gets filtered out or swallowed up in the sea of other messages and ignored either by technology or by the users themselves.
It is like those pictures of NY Times Square (or any corner in Asia) where you have 10,000 billboards of all shapes and sizes all flashing some marketing message. It is easier than ever to buy a few seconds or minutes of ad time on one of them. It is harder than ever to get the passing crowd to take notice of your message when it is drowned out by all the others.
For the anecdote, i know someone that was let go by IBM and hire by RedHat the same month two years ago.
Yes and wages were outpacing that growth, so as soon as someone took the first step, all the big tech companies piled on in short order. And, low and beyond, offers appear to be down right now. Mission accomplished?
COVID era was a hiring boom. Most of the companies I saw doing layoffs still have significantly larger employment numbers than pre-COVID.
It took Google 6 years from 2012 to double headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $50B to $136B (almost triple). Profit from $10.7B to $30.7B (triple).
In 4 years from 2018 to 2022, Google more than doubled headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $136B to $279B (barely double). Profit from $30.7B to $50.9B (only up 65%).
Almost all these companies have similar stories.
They're still good companies. They just hired way too many people thinking that the pandemic trend would continue for a long period of time - rather than revert to the mean.
If Google continue to grow at it's more long-term average rate - without the layoffs, you're looking at being overstaffed for years.
Why?
A rule of thumb is at any organization roughly square root of employees are critical. So at Google that number would be < 500 people. So even when I consider that layoffs are totally random (unlikely), there would be 40 or so people laid off which could be considered important loss. This is bad but not going to hamper Google significantly where they are going.
In some cases, the layoffs were targeted at particular areas of the company, like Amazon targeting their devices group. If they don't anticipate growth in that area, it may not be worth it (to management, anyways) to reallocate those employees to other parts of the company.
All that being said, these things tend to be driven by short-term financial metrics rather than long-term ones. A hiring freeze wouldn't have as dramatic an impact on next quarter's earnings.
In the most recent quarter, Google’s profit was down 34% and it was the fourth consecutive quarter with decrease in profits. How many quarters do you think they should wait out before trying to stem the tide of costs outpacing revenues?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/technology/alphabet-earni...
Not even close.
I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool.
Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before.
Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings
It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
I see a correlation with development positions. There is just too many candidates for junior positions, but if you're a company trying to hire senior, principal or leadership your chance of success without a recruiter is very slim.
The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.
Also what matters? Artful descriptions of past positions? Activity on timeline? Upvotes on skills? Links to projects?
Now, there's no way to know for sure that keeping linkedin fresh actually helps. Also it was a special time where I had just finished an online masters in CS and I was really on a roll so I was taking a bunch of MOOCs afterwards as well. IMO keeping my linkedin updated with a degree in CS and mooc certificates helped. Normal day to day stuff I wouldn't update linkedin for.
For me, I was mostly looking for more detail on a candidate’s experience. Links to projects were good. I didn’t consciously look at anything else, but I’ll admit that I probably regarded more complete profiles better.
I would also check out candidate’s personal sites. Decent content (even not up to date) was generally a big bonus.
In terms of prior experience, I simply state what I achieved at each role in a bullet list. Nothing fancy. My university education is a list of all the modules I took.
Forget the "social media gamifying" side of it. Likes and posts don't matter if your goal is just getting offers. Keeping the profile current, and have your skills section up to date as recruiters use that to filter applicants. Block any recruiters that send you insultingly low-ball offers. Connect with those that provide value.
Although some of them are also good, and might help you to at least skip directly to the interview on site.
Having detailed job descriptions with rich detail as to what you did and a good number of connections in the industry you’re looking in is what drives the algo
My profile at that time probably hadn't been touched in about 5-6 years. After talking with her I cleaned it up a bit, but it's nothing more than a basic resume and a list of past positions going back about 10 years. IME, all they care about is that you provide enough context that they can compare against the openings they have. The "extra" skills, projects, etc., can come out when you have a pre-interview discussion.
I've been in industry 30 years and every position except my first has been through a recruiter. They're good at this (some of them anyway): make them do the hard work.
TL;DR don't bother with all that recruiter spam and general engagement tactics for yet another data hoarding, privacy violating "social network". If you are doing a good job and keep investing in yourself there will always be good jobs in this industry.
Build Trust and Carry On
The higher up on the career ladder you are, the better this works and more important it is if you’re not getting in via recruiter.
That doesn't mean they get 200 highly qualified candidates ;)
In my experience, before you would get 150 applicants and not a single one qualified for the job (could actually program or have any relevant experience). Now you get 3 qualified ones and 200 applicants.
Some companies (not many) are still recruiting, and there's now a massive amount of laid off people fighting for those jobs. Just because some recruited spammed you doesn't mean it would have been easy to get an offer...
A few of those jobs might even really exist!
I am of the opinion that the vast majority of inquiries I get from linked in (at least 5 a week) are from scammers and brand-new or desperate recruiters just looking to collect resumes to add to their database. I pretty much ignore all linkedin inquiries at this point - it has been taken over by scammer and hucksters.
Whether one likes musk or not, and whether or not you agree with how he is running twitter or not - he let go like 80% of the company and it is still more or less running (with some bumps) - I don't think other companies will go to quite that extreme, but I'd bank that some executives right now in some companies are asking themselves "can we at least cut 33% of the staff and still keep things (more or less) running"?
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valua...
It's easily a full time job.
Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.
1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal
The industry has perpetuated the lie that stem means employment, so now we have a surplus of workers in an economic downturn, they're competing for the jobs because there is less capitol to create them.
When the market goes down the corps pull back. All the taxes we pay in infra and education are not returned by them.
It sucks for those laid off, but these big tech companies have had tons of talent effectively locked up for years.
He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place.
So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?
Or this -
Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking.
From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross.
I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers.
The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address.
So what?
Adam Smith be rolling in his grave!
The dumbest dismissals of business ideas always start with this phrase. Moats aren't like some obvious thing where you pull up a ladder and no one can follow you. Usually just having a slightly better UX (or a UX that people are used to) is enough to be a moat. Users latch onto things they have good experiences with.
Of course, if you want to benefit from anticompetitive business practices (outprice competition, drive them out of business, hike prices), rather than value creation, you need a big pull-up-ladder-type moat, but not every company needs to be Uber/Lyft getting in winner-take-all funding wars.
The model you are wed to is "one service-provider per niche." Yeah, that requires scaling to an absolutely ridiculous extent.
…but for those of us not in favor of soviet-style centralism, and there are a couple of us, well we'd love hosting providers that can let us serve a sufficiently profitable percentage of the market.
Down with monopolist capitalism and oligopolist communism! All hail the vibrant marketplace!
Sure, if you have TB-scale data it is still doable, but once you reach PB-scale it's better to negotiate an EDP rather than move out.
Ah yes, I’ll just throw a quick script together. Never mind that there are entire consulting firms dedicated to doing exactly this and each of their projects takes months to years and hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Comments like this are why the general public feels like SWEs are stuck up elitist know-it-alls
- Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking
- a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place
- a software design and development studio
If you win the lottery starting a company at the right time, are you really the best mind of the generation or just lucky?
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing or neither.
But I think the "why didn't I think of that guy" is mostly luck.
Lots of people are smart and work hard and don't really get anywhere.
Those that I knew who went to Google/Amazon/etc. were more diverse personalities: ambitious, interested in hard problems, wanting a good life, etc.
Those going to Facebook though, I'm not sure I can put it in a polite way. Let me just say, in different times and different places I could imagine them joining a certain type of organization.
I have also noticed FBers have a certain kind of personality. Vaguely utopian but removed from reality with a heavy emphasis on hedonism.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”.
Italian philosopher & Minister of Public Education under Mussolini Giovanni Gentile, who was arguably the architect of 1930's Italian fascism.
He was told about the consequences pretty much from day 1. I don't think anyone at Facebook (especially not Zuckerberg) gets to be oblivious.
The CDC study is a lagging indicator; it describes the trendline of a mental health crisis that's self-evident to practitioners. On the research side, there have been many studies in the last 10 years associating Facebook use with poor mental health outcomes.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out 5 years ago.
Smart, Fun and Nice: there are LOTS of people who have all three; don't settle for less!
FAANG unquestionably soaked up a lot of highly intelligent people, and built a lot of clever stuff and solved a lot of challenging technical problems.
To a worthwhile end, maybe not so much.
that's debatable.
Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
The big tech companies have delivered results to our economy like the space program did — most of the technology that smaller companies and startups depend on was developed by big tech and either turned into a line of business open to others (like AWS) or was open sourced (like Kubernetes, most of the major app frameworks, multiple programming languages, distributed consensus, distributed tracing, modern CI/CD…) The industry as a whole would be a lot worse off if that hadn’t happened. So what if some of it was used to sell ads?
The signal to noise ratio needs to be good, or there will be no point to reading the comments.
You said they wasted their talents.
It’s pretty clear that they didn’t, and they actually produced a huge amount of good things, and I listed only a subset of the major achievements we’ve seen recently.
Facebook runs the world’s largest social network and during the pandemic it was one of the few ways (along with things like Zoom) that people could see the faces of their friends and family during lockdown. Facebook are also VR pioneers via Oculus. The metaverse is pretty dumb though.
Reducing these gigantic companies that do many things to just “advertising” and implying that the many people who work there are wasting their talents is cynical and cheap.
You know what would really suck? Having to pay a few cents every time you do a search, or paying a subscription to watch Youtube or use Gmail or see your friends Facebook posts. Ads are a totally reasonable alternative and all they do is sit there — you can ignore them and get all of these products for free.
The number of people working on these is insignificantly irrelevant compared to the number of people working on the bad stuff.
It's good that the people you highlight exist because they maintain my faith in humanity, but for every engineer that worked on Webb, there are a thousand working on privacy-destroying addiction engines.
My employer can't find people to work on space-based synthetic aperture radar that will be used to monitor and potentially combat global climate change through detecting sea level rise, coastal erosion, and foliage cover (and health) because you can make more money working on an app. We can't pay more because we're funded through grants and apps are funded either through VCs or intrusive ad revenue and intrusive ads generate more revenue than university partnerships and piecemeal contracts from various international departments of the environment.
It's ridiculous because I make so much that I am the cause of gentrification, i.e. "Enough".
But it's not as much as an engineer at Facebook.
Even your comment focuses on the financial incentives....
I also mentioned the Renaissance of access to knowledge in our pockets, the way mobile payments help people, the access to maps, the ability of remote work to scale to a large portion of the population...
<new start-ups are all focused on AI art and LLMs that put hundreds of thousands if not millions out of jobs>
HN: "wait, not like that!"
Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.
Senior dev != big tech
What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months?
Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself and a few other people.
Realistically, if you're starting a startup and not currently working, plan on having at least 12 months of expenses saved (not a few months).
A few months is 2. For the sake of this hypothetical let’s say it’s 3.
You’re saying that someone can build a product that’s capable of having investor level revenue within a few months? Or not even revenue, but more than 5 companies using it? This one person is not only building a fully functioning software product that’s capable of being useful to companies, but also doing high levels of networking to find those customers and users. They’re doing this all within 3 months? I just don’t see how that’s possible. The fastest moving early stage teams I’ve ever seen have gone to market in no less than 4 months, and that was with multiple people working on the problem.
I think at a minimum you can expect it to take 6 months if you’re going at it alone. Certainly less if you have other co-founders.
Long story short, you can start sooner than quitting with research, prototyping. The key is to get the scope right.
But I agree that "few" has a different meaning for us. I did suffer with sales, but that's another story.
A startup with a good runway (say 2-3 years) and faith from investors is an OK place to be in. And there are many parents in such companies.
Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.
dm if you want to hire an ex-Google linguist-engineer with search ranking experience
[1]: https://www.psl.com/jobs/job?gh_jid=4418268002
[2]: https://jobs.ai2incubator.com/jobs
Im currently working on something like this. Yes it’s boring but it does have potential. you’re exact opinion is why I’m having a hard time looking for a cofounder!
In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, being bored being a crucial part of this.
In the market I'm seeing things that fail common sense checks. AI powered X that is trying to 'solve' things that we barely have a grip on as humans, assemblages of startups that exist solely to manage self created problems, and a whole host of deathcult crypto stuff. Even the progenitors seem to not buy into the stuff they pitch; the zeal, to me, is often just an affectation ("we're going to completely revolutionize..."), maybe the charm is wearing off as decades of consumption and greed are slowly deflating our collective ego.
Anyways how are you faring?
As is probably apparent, I’ve been dealing with depression for years. Despite the description, things are better lately but I’m still having a hard time finding an identity beyond what was wrapped up in work over the last decade.
Anyway, probably more than you asked for! I’ve always had a passion for 3d and gaming, and I feel like there’s some opportunity out there related to this that’d be perfect for me, but I can’t get around the exploitative nature of the industry. I’d make my own but wrestle with what I mentioned above: I just can’t find any ideas that I’m excited enough to work on.
Im not working for anyone but myself at this point. I saw a comment on HN along the lines of, I don't need to be maximally efficient because the cause (corporate profits) won't ever justify the means.
Hopefully we both find a way out but I'm beginning to suspect that out in just another way back in, without a drastic reframing I fear I've grown too complacent on the usual. Maybe reading Nagel might help, or maybe Tolstoy :p
I have a few ideas. None are really monetizable, but I want to do them, so I am. Once I get them out of my system I'll probably go back to being an employee.
I think if you are interested in making something, you should make it. If you are interested in making money, then look for a job.
We built this https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro
Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.
Sounds like you were successful without giving up 7+% of your company.
> Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
Btw sorry for your issues with the product. We were a small team, we raised $2m in 2019, but didn't launch that product until 2021. We just didn't have enough time to execute on it effectively.
Heroku is good example for such time.
(Also, if you're looking for it: archive.is slash WE4WH)
People are weird.
These examples made me laugh because they notably didn't increase scrutiny during the last few years. Otherwise, we wouldn't have more recent examples (FTX, among others).
Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.