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Ask HN: People who were laid off or quit recently, how are you doing?

104 points by automatoney ↗ HN
How did you feel then vs now? Are you doing alright?

Are you looking for/have you found work? How do pay/benefits (remote, etc.) compare?

How have your feelings about the industry changed?

131 comments

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gt565k
Somewhat related anecdote --

Executives at my company in a non-tech industry who are running a skeleton crew in the IT department are using the economy and tech industry layoffs to try and withhold bonuses and treating employees like disposable garbage.

They seem to think that the 2-3 people doing the work for 10 is OK and that somehow low key insinuating that current tech industry changes like chatGPT will replace our jobs, even though they don't know the difference between IT roles vs Software Engineer's roles and responsibilities.

I wonder if this is true for other non-tech company's IT departments where the execs are clueless in terms of how technology actually works.

If I had the financial stability to quit today and take a year off I would, hoping I can get there by end of year.

willcipriano
Become a software engineer, I was a sysadmin in my early career and I found it wasn't valued all that much by most organizations. The only place that was decent and gave me any autonomy, was the only one where I also wrote software for them.
robopsychology
Or DevOps?
bityard
I am primarily a system administrator (among other roles) and have been looking to make the jump into DevOps for a while. The main issue seems to be that almost no company hires for entry-level or intermediate DevOps positions, only senior with 5+ years experience of very specific tools. My guess is most of those get filled internally as lateral moves from regular developer roles.
toyg
Go for consulting/body shops, they're always hungry for people they can pay as juniors while they're sold as seniors.
shrimp_emoji
Some do hire entry level DevOps! There's a big demand for it, from where I'm standing.

Those roles indeed get filled internally by devs, but it's tough since I don't think most devs want them. :p

varjag
that's still sysadmin
surprisetalk
I was laid off in early Feb.

But I'm doing great!

Without asking, I received a few job offers from friends-of-friends in my network.

Instead of jumping back into the workforce, I'm building my own startup. Almost finished with my MVP, and then going to pursue funding :)

cpursley
Why not pursue customers first?
surprisetalk
Great question!

I really really wanted to bootstrap, but I have a family to support.

Funding means I will be able to provide myself a more reliable source of income while I get this thing off the ground.

toyg
Such a XX century mentality. In web 2.0, your customers are your investors: you take their money and deliver a business.
blueferret
Nice! Great position to be in. What's the startup tackling?
surprisetalk
It's an AI company (unrelated to LLM or stable diffusion).

I'm currently keeping the details secret because the tech is easy to weaponize...

miuramxciii
How did you feel then vs now? Still processing Are you doing alright? Yes. Still have some cushion. But it made me realize that you should never go the extra mile for a company. Working long nights, weekends, skipping vacation. JUST DON'T DO It for the company. I know "you" will be just like me and will not click until it happens to you ;-) Are you looking for/have you found work? No. It is hard you if you do not build/have a network. Lot's of "I saw your profile and would like you to apply for company x" Then you apply and never hear back. there are also lots of scams for fake jobs to to get as much info from you as they can. How have your feelings about the industry changed? I would love to change industry..perhaps go into farming.
Clubber
I remember during the dot bomb when I was out of work for 6 months, only a few years out of college with little to no cushion, it was scary. I was racking up credit card debt just to keep my head above water.

I remember a recruiter calling me about a job and having me come into the office in a downtown area for an interview, which I eagerly accepted. Come to find out, they were just back filling their contact list and there was no job. I swore off that recruiting firm forever and have never contacted them again. I would name the firm but I don't remember who they are, it's a big one in the 2000s.

Hold tight everybody, it'll get better. Take this time to get back into exercise and appreciate the free things in life: go to a park, the beach, go to a library.

UncleOxidant
> I remember during the dot bomb when I was out of work for 6 months

I decided to take a 6 month sabbatical in the summer of '01 just a few months before the dot bomb really hit figuring that, sure, there was going to be an industry recession coming, but it should be over in 6 months. I ended up being out of work for 9 months then got a 4 month contract gig. When that was over there was just nothing in sight so I went back to school to get my Masters. It wasn't until early '04 that I got a steady paying gig again so there were a couple of really lean years there in the early aughts.

> Hold tight everybody, it'll get better. Take this time to get back into exercise and appreciate the free things in life: go to a park, the beach, go to a library.

Yes, good advice. Also try to keep learning stuff. At least now we've got a lot of online courses, etc.

marpstar
Quit the company I had been with almost 13 years with nothing lined up on 12/31/2022. Did first interviews with ~10 places/recruiters. Got to second interview with 3. Secured an offer with one and started beginning of March.

Best thing to happen to my career in a decade.

arthurcolle
I was laid off in October, started playing with AI stuff around then (SD in August, ChatGPT/GPT APIs around December or whenever it was released)

Got hired over the last week as Founding Prompt Engineer at an AI company! May 1st start date. Extremely excited to be playing with LLMs for money!!!

mcast
What exactly does a founding prompt engineer do?
simonw
I'm going to guess it involves engineering prompts.

Which requires a surprising amount of skill and experience!

I still haven't found a 100% reliable way of getting a LLM to always produce results in JSON for example. See https://twitter.com/genmon/status/1646194992761782278

    State of the art techniques to get GPT to return JSON

    - logic: Responses must match this JSON schema
    - demonstration: For example…
    - appeal to identity: You are a chatbot that speaks perfect JSON
    - cajoling: Remember always return JSON!
    - threat: if you don't I SWEAR I'm gonna–
I wrote more about why I think prompt engineering deserves more respect than it gets here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-e...
dpflan
A glaring problem is: Non-determinism of LLMs, creating different answers to the same prompt. I appreciate your blogging and analysis in this space, so I am I am interested in your responses. The non-determinism implies that prompt engineering is brittle, difficult, and prone to no formal evaluation techniques for correctness.
simonw
I agree with everything you've said there.
dpflan
It is certainly an interesting phenomenon, and I wonder what techniques from neuroscience for brain mapping could be used for model "brain mapping", which could lend itself more to prompt engineering as a science (latent space mapping).
jaredsohn
Set the temperature to zero to make it more deterministic.
AmazingTurtle
You can use vicuna-7b-1.1. No need for chat prompts. Just slam in your data and end it off like so

Generate a JSON with this and that {"this": "

Lower the temperature to minimum for deterministic results, fine tune the other parameters if needed. And have a stop token for JSON closing tag like so }.

That usually works perfectly fine for me in most scenarios. Best: that stuff runs on RTX 3080 with 15token/s (quite fast!). Also vicuna-7b is pretty much as good as gpt-3 when it came out.

arthurcolle
Vicuna-7b is much better than Gpt4All, but still struggles with math - I can't wait until my new work computer comes in, I will try to run the new StableLM models
williamcotton
Hey Simon! I've been digging your writings on LLMs lately.

I've been having some decent luck with some of the approaches that I've discussed in the following articles and projects:

From Prompt Alchemy to Prompt Engineering: An Introduction to Analytic Augmentation: https://github.com/williamcotton/empirical-philosophy/blob/m...

Writing Web Applications with LLMs: https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/writing-web-applicati...

https://github.com/williamcotton/transynthetical-engine

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter!

One of the techniques that I've found for reliably returning JSON is... ask for multiple responses and then use one of the responses that successfully parses!

arthurcolle
Hi Simon, your blog posts have been invaluable in my ongoing process of refining a document that covers major concepts in prompt engineering and LLM fine-tuning and I'd love to pick your brain over email or a call if you have any bandwidth!
gcr
why not just adjust the decoder / beam search to not emit any tokens that aren't semantically valid JSON?

ie. instead of using temperature to sample something from the top k most likely tokens, first exclude all the tokens that cause the output to be malformed. the model can only emit {, ", [, or a number for the first token, for example.

if someone would like a fun project to try this right away, one place to start would be to modify llama.cpp's chat example just before the line that samples tokens [1], going through `lctx.logits` to zero out invalid tokens (or these are logits, so i guess set them to -INFINITY). For smoketest, fix the first token of the model's output to "{" without any other changes and I bet you'd get something approaching JSON out.

[1]: here's the line to change: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/c4fe84fb0d28851a... see the bit on line 317-319 about how it ignores the end-of-sequence token by zeroing out the probability of sampling it? just like that!

i mean, the most principled approach probably requires some theoretic CS knowledge about regular expression derivatives or parsing machine derivatives, but i'm surprised it isn't more common to just hook into the decoder design a little, given how much we want structured data out of these models

i wish i knew how to voice my ignorant skepticism in a less disparaging way, sorry.... but i feel like a lot of this "legitimization of prompt engineering as a useful trade/practice" thinking assumes that we're trapped in the "magic circle" where the only input we have to the model is picking the prompt and the only possible output is the most likely token. but these are generative models! conditioned on their output, we have our choice about which token to accept, so why not just condition on the distribution of possible JSON output instead of the distribution of possible prose?

i suspect very quickly the most competitive prompt engineers will combine their solid understanding of theoretic machine learning and statistics with a solid understanding of computer science, perhaps even combined with a dash of persuasion / neurolinguistic programming experience. kinda worries me but it's how it is

chrispogeek
Anthropic?! Regardless of what it is, congrats!
arthurcolle
brainchain.ai

General idea is gaining insights into supply chains using LLMs and other machine learning models for specific applications.

germinalphrase
What was your general background prior to this position?
arthurcolle
Check out my resume on my LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/arthurcolle (pinned document) if you are interested
tracker1
Not quite as active in the search as I would like to be, but seeing about 1/30th the traffic I had seen just 6 months ago.

I've got a week left on my Contract that didn't get picked up. It's been relatively rough and really giving me 2001 (.com bubble bursting everywhere) vibes. I've been looking for a few weeks now, since I found out. Been looking at roughly a 10-20% pay drop to broaden the available jobs as literally only 3 have been at the pay I am currently at.

nelsoch
Semiconductor company laid me off after working there since 2018. I kept a lot of leaks quiet and helped save a lot of trouble/money. Went above and beyond the call of duty and even relocated my wife and kids to be closer so that I could be on-call(not in job description). I took leadership and management positions without compensation just to keep workflow going. Although I had clearly indicated I was interested in those positions, I was blocked from them because I was not going to be compensated for the additional responsibility.

Now I'm left with a mortgage, debt and other payments that Unemployment can't begin to cover.

I asked if I could keep my job or get relocated to another dept- 'No'.

Everything is frozen- everything is stagnate and people are afraid of more layoffs happening for both contract workers and direct-hires.

I tried for years beforehand- to get moving up, but told it wasn't possible(yet). I even tried playing the 'I have another offer elsewhere' lie card, with nothing to show for it.

What's additionally frustrating, is that many local retail places won't hire me.

My experience at the company has cut me off from other work- for fear that I may not stick around for the long-term.

DoorDash is no longer taking applications in my area(that was a shock). Retailers wont take me because of my accomplished work history. Lyft/Uber wont allow me to work for them because my car is too old.

I have applied to soo many Craiglist, HN, Dice, Linkedin, Indeed, Gov and GlassDoor jobs that I my feeling of self-worth had diminished what has felt like eons ago. It's not that I don't get decent offers- it's that I get turned down relatively quickly despite my time at Semiconductor Co.

I'm at the point where I just want any income- the desperation to feed and provide for my wife and kids is what's driving me right now.

tejinderss
Intel?
nelsoch
Professionally, I cannot confirm or deny.
klipklop
Really shows the power corporations have over people. You are too scared to tell people who laid you off...
krn
> Retailers wont take me because of my accomplished work history.

Can't you just remove it from your CV then? I thought that CV is like personal marketing material: you only list things there that help you to get a specific job – and skip everything else that doesn't.

EDIT: It's possible to list your previous employers without listing your work accomplishments.

fzzzy
Wouldn't they just have a big gap in employment then?
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HeyLaughingBoy
The question then becomes how to fill the gap that's left.
nelsoch
Having to explain the gap in employment from 2018-2023 would be hard. A requirement for many retail jobs(I don't remember it being this way 10+ years ago) is to list 5-10 years of work history and explain gaps.
paulcole
I don’t think it’s that tough. Lie about 2018-2020, then blame the pandemic, lie again about a short stint someplace 2021-2022, and then say you got laid off late last year.

If the options are lying or not getting a job, it shouldn’t be a hard decision. Get friends to be fake old bosses. Try to remember a local restaurant that shut down. Do whatever it takes.

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matrix_overload
Have you tried the consultant/contractor angle? Many companies that were forced to downsize will be looking into contracting out some of the workload they still want to be done.
nelsoch
I've reached out to contracting companies and vise-versa, but nothing's ever come out of such connections.
MangoCoffee
what's your skill set? did you lower your salary requirement and look in other industries?

i'm a software dev. i got layoff many times before. what i do is lower my salary requirement to get a job then start looking for a job with better pay within 6 months to a year so it doesn't look like i'm job hopping.

nelsoch
I have an intimate familiarity with a wide breadth of both hardware and software. Working on pre-production products and supporting post-production to customers has required us to be flexible to new requests, per contract.

My current salary is really low for the industry- I've been willing to take paycuts so that I can provide, so I've applied to such positions. But I still get turned down.

deely3
> I have an intimate familiarity with a wide breadth of both hardware and software.

Broadness of this statement force fear into my soul.

nelsoch
The ability to be a human swiss army knife has allowed me to survive all the waves of layoffs(publicly-noticed and otherwise) up till now. When I was a stand-in manager interviewing people a year ago- I was told afterwards that my questions were too intense for what they were _then_ looking for. At that point, it got me wondering why they were setting the bar so low when I was previously being grilled and nearly passed.
bm3719
> I even tried playing the 'I have another offer elsewhere' lie card, with nothing to show for it.

You probably should've actually gotten an offer elsewhere, maybe even had it in hand and quoted the number for them to meet/exceed. Not actually having one can backfire. It's really an ultimatum, and one you should probably follow through on if called. Maybe it's not a factor in your case, but this can result in souring a relationship with your employer.

nelsoch
There was never an actual offer- and when presented with the notion, I was told that I may get something out of sticking around.
bythckr
nelsoch (OP), please don't be offended by what I am about to say, I don't intent to offend you. I am just sharing a valuable advice I received for everyone in this boat.

When I was at my first job, I too went way beyond my scope of job descriptions and did many things. Everyone appriciated me and I felt I was a vital part of the company. That is when my new manager gave this advice. Though that the time, I was annoyed by him and felt he was a pain in the ass. I was too young and stupid to understand what he was telling, so he just forced me to comply. Which, in the end, helped me a lot.

I had to fill an excel sheet of all the things I did and forward to my supervisor. I only filled what was my job and didn't put in the extra things. The manager asked why I was not informing the company of what I was actually doing in the company. The manager said that I was not giving enough focus on the work I was hired to do and doing other things. Though, my supervisor was very happy with my job.

Then I started begrudgingly (curing my manager) filling everything I did in the company. Again I was called by the manager for not fully reporting what I was doing. When I showed, that filled everything. It turned out my supervisor was deleting the extra stuff I was putting in. That is when I realized that my supervisor was just praising me. But didn't report this to the manager.

So, I just stopped doing other things and just did my work and avoided anything that was beyond my description. Then I started getting official email asking me to do extra things and started getting "certificate of appreciation". That lead me to getting extra pay and bonus. My increments were also higher, and I got promoted too.

Then, when I moved to other companies, I just stuck to my job description and didn't do anything more. I set the tone from my interview. Whenever I was asked to do anything extra, I always bargained for what I was going to get for the extra work. I made sure that extra expenses (like petrol,road toll & parking charges for travel) were compensated, and I got extra time off.

Basically, I understood that only when the company was paying for my extra services, did they appreciate it.

Management always value you based on how much they are paying you for your services. They are not going to asking around and see how much you contribute.

stevev
Well said. This is the way, unless you work for yourself or with something you're passionate about. Sometimes, just meeting the bare minimum is all that's required or should be done. Anyone can be let go at anytime; we’re expendable.
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RoyGBivCap
>I tried for years beforehand- to get moving up, but told it wasn't possible(yet). I even tried playing the 'I have another offer elsewhere' lie card, with nothing to show for it.

This is why you don't lie about it. Get the other offer first, and if they don't offer any remedy, you actually leave.

Hendrikto
> Went above and beyond the call of duty and even relocated my wife and kids to be closer so that I could be on-call(not in job description). I took leadership and management positions without compensation just to keep workflow going.

Why?

_nhynes
I quit my job of five years three weeks ago to work on building what I'm calling autonomous computing [0].

I'd always been hoping to do a startup, having read all of the varying experiences here. The opportunity arose during the EthDenver hackathon where I hacked up a winning proof of concept. The decision to set off was easy since I felt if I didn't at least try to make secure serverless for web3 work, I'd regret never taking the opportunity.

So far, with ChatGPT as my legal and marketing assistant, things are progressing and I remain optimistic about controversial things like trusted hardware, blockchain, and human-AI interaction. Actually, what I would really love is an AutoGPT for bizdev if anyone has that...

[0]: https://enshrine.substack.com/p/enshrine-computing

stevev
Are Polkadot’s parachains an equivalent centralized approach? I’m trying to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Sorry it’s a bit over my head atm. The blockchain space truly has lots of opportunities and work to be done.
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stairlane
Got let go a month ago. I had gotten to my frustration limit and wasn't managing it well. Basically have been focusing on mental health in the meantime while applying to some roles here and there. Very grateful for the support I have from my family and loved ones - I need it now.

Thinking about changing careers and becoming a psychotherapist myself.

UncleOxidant
> Thinking about changing careers and becoming a psychotherapist myself.

I actually think there could be a pretty good niche for therapists who understand the tech world. I know when I've considered going to a therapist I've thought "how would I explain this situation to someone outside of tech?"

atemerev
Brain fog. Nearly zero productivity. Trying to figure out what’s wrong with me. Have about three weeks to do this, until the money is out.

No feelings about the industry, that’s commerce. They have no obligation to pay me if I can’t perform.

Zaskoda
Best advice I received when going through parts of life where I was overwhelmed with brain fog: "slow motion is better than no motion."
kyleyeats
Get your iron checked. I had iron overload and the food at Google nearly killed me.
HeyLaughingBoy
COVID aftereffects? Brain fog seems to come up frequently.
atemerev
Maybe. I am vaccinated and boosted, of course, but long COVID can still happen. That would be a shame, I would hope for something more treatable, or at least recognizable by employers/authorities.
mortenjorck
Laid off in December. It wasn’t my first layoff, but I was expecting this one to be considerably harder given the market at the time.

Somehow, things have gone even worse than I imagined. Four months later, there’s still no end in sight. Referrals from people enthusiastic about working with me again have ended either after the recruiter screen or with ghosting. I’ve had founders reach out to me after HN posts, but I’ve either failed to advance or been ghosted altogether.

And of course, the usual stream of cold applications has led to the predictable stream of “thank you for your interest” emails, some after a recruiter call, most without one.

As to “am I doing all right” – not really, to be honest. Financially I’m holding on despite the unpleasant hit to savings, but the hit to self-confidence has been pretty severe. I’ve really enjoyed my career in product design up to this point, and now I have this terrible, creeping worry that I’ve somehow hit my expiration date.

the_only_law
I’m seriously considering “giving up” and starting over. Luckily I’m still young and have no real ties, so if things to don’t start looking up soon, I might sell/give away all my stuff, reduce my living expenses significantly, take some low-wage low-skill job to cover bills and the money I still have left and take some time to figure something else out.
DamnInteresting
I have been in the webdev industry for 20+ years, always in high demand. I am reliable and good at what I do. I have never had trouble finding gainful employment...until 2022. I have been applying for jobs every day--jobs I am quite qualified for--and most of the potential employers don't respond at all. Those few that do respond mostly say "we are looking at other candidates, thanks anyway."

I have had a few companies reply to my applications with an "email interview" questionnaire, but after I reply I usually hear nothing back. One actually scheduled a video interview, but the day before it was to occur, they emailed to say nevermind, the position was filled.

It's so odd. Some of these job descriptions are an exact match for my skill set. I suspect that ageism is a major contributor given that I am over 40. I am starting to look into other industries, but it feels like such a waste to abandon my cultivated experience.

matrix_overload
A common mistake people over 40 make is list too much experience. This simultaneously sparks ageism, raises the "overqualified" flag and creates concerns about your ability to scope out irrelevant info.

Try removing the graduation year and limiting the experience to the last 5 years or so - you'll get much more replies off "cold" channels.

That said, using cold applications being 40+ is generally a bad idea. You need to be actively working on your network and relying on people that know you're good in order to get the foot in the door.

Brusco_RF
This is fantastic advice. One thing I worry about as someone who has switched lanes in their career is not building that network. I found my current job through cold approaches. I SHOULD find my next job through my personal network, but I don't event want to be in the same city so who knows
Zaskoda
This is similar to what I went through over the last few months. I did land an offer, but it took over 70 applications. The only other time I had this much trouble was in 01 after the dotcom crash. I do think ageism plays a role. There was one interview in particular where I think the only reason I didn't get an offer was my age. However, I also think it's the economy contracting combined with too many devs on the market. Folks are still graduating from colleges and bootcamps and trying to enter the work force while hundreds of thousands of existing roles are disappearing. Unless a white swan event happens, a lot of people are going to have to consider a career change. I feel deep gratitude for having landed a position at a time like this and am buckling up for the next couple of years. I hope you land somewhere soon.
throw_away1525
Have you thought about removing the date you graduated from your degree and removing a few of your early jobs from your resume? You have 20+ years of experience... can you make it look like you have 10? Just to get an interview?

It is absolutely awful that you should have to do this. Starting a new career in web dev at 35 it is something that's on my mind quite often.

pacomerh
From my experience (technical interview specifically) fortunately we've never cared about that, and more about how the person approaches problem solving and how relevant their knowledge is related to the stack we're using. If this person is bringing valuable skills and it's not a jerk, I don't see why we should even care about their age. I think it really depends on what companies you're applying for, but the way I see it now, remote work is very beneficial because when working at an office people care more about who their gonna be hanging out with, and you know how that goes.
afpx
I’m mid-40s. 40 is such a mystical number. Almost immediately after I hit 40, interest in me dropped 95%.

I’ve interviewed at 4 places since, but I’m 0-4. That’s mostly my fault. I never adapted to the new style interviews. I still expect to show my experience and successes and walk out with an offer.

barakathecat
What are the new style interviews?
afpx
interviews you have to study for. Before the 2010s, every interview I went to took 2 hours. You had a meeting with the manager and one with the team. They’d decide pretty quickly and give an offer. simpler times. No hazing
kerblang
Don't stew and get bitter over things that you can't control. Corollary: Don't assume it's ageism when you don't have proof and can't do anything about it anyhow.

More often than not, companies are not serious about hiring, or they are simply fulfilling an interview-to-hire ratio. They are going to behave badly throughout the interview process and sabotage themselves and you over dumb things - even dumber things than ageism. Hiring is absolutely the worst aspect of the tech business, rife with incompetence and lies.

You have to move on and keep hammering away anyhow. Hang in there.

dutchCourage
Front end developer here.

Been looking for a new role since February, and I have to say it's more difficult than I expected.

Compared to 2019, last time I switched jobs, I'm getting fewer interviews and fewer proposals from recruiters. I wouldn't entirely put it on the market changes though. My salary expectations went up and with that companies are more shy and want more assurance that I'll be a good fit. I'm also more picky with who I apply for.

I've been ramping up the time spent on selling myself, writing descriptions of my work and trying to build a portfolio. I hope it pays off because I'd much rather be working on pet projects and developing my product building skills than spending time on personal branding.

the_only_law
Laid off around 6 months ago. Small SaaS company, funded by established private equity firm. During Covid they doubled headcount, didn’t see the platform adoption they expected, and a little later halved the company by laying all the newer people off.

> How did you feel then vs now? Are you doing alright?

At the time, I wasn’t worried. I was a little relieved in fact. I didn’t care for the job all that much it just paid well enough. I wasn’t aware of how the job market was going to be. Since then it’s not been great. It would cost a ton of money and effort to move right now, and of the 4 interviews of done, only one position has been remote.

> Are you looking for/have you found work? How do pay/benefits (remote, etc.) compare?

Yes, but not nearly like I should. I’m burnt out on the job search. The leads I get fizzle out. As I mentioned, I’ve had about 4 interviews, only one of them was a job I would actually want, and only one of them made it to the next round (ironically it was the most antagonistic interview I’ve had recently). Recruiter reach out is really low, maybe around 5 per month and job applications are just a void, assuming LinkedIn doesn’t just show me the same “Promoted” jobs it did 6 months ago that already rejected me. As far as pay, it seems remote roles are paying a less than a couple years ago.

> How have your feelings about the industry changed?

Sort of, I never wanted to really be in this industry, but the intertidal required to do anything else non totally miserable was too high. I was planning on leaving eventually once I put enough money together to survive for a while, but I’m spending all that on bills and a seriously of events that happened right after the layoff. I did admittedly commit the industry mortal sin of letting myself stagnate (in terms of keeping up with trends, hype, and framework/language/whatever of the week) over the years. I still learn a lot, it’s just mostly “useless” stuff.

Honestly, I expected I was either going to burn out or get sized out of the industry eventually, and had started to work on plans for that, but I thought I had a few more years at least.

claytonjy
I was laid off in early January, 7 months into a job I hoped to keep for some time. I was in the second round of layoffs, the first came 2 weeks into my employment, so it was a rocky road but I was looking forward to 2023.

I spent the first month or two only half-heartedly looking for work. I sent out enough cold applications to meet UI work search requirements, and I was applying to jobs I was truly interested in and would have accepted, but I've never had good luck with cold apps and didn't expect any different this time.

Updating my LinkedIn is what turned the tide. The week before I accepted a new job, I was interviewing at 9 places. Two turned me down, I ended two others midway through, and ended up with 5 offers, the most I've ever had.

Three months after being laid off I started a job I'm really excited about and it's going well so far. Managed to get a slight pay bump over my last job, but I also turned down a much larger potential increase.I think this market might be the best it's ever been for a specific kind of engineer: 10+ yrs experience, ML-adjacent, looking for all-remote at early startups.

My big lesson is that cold apps aren't even worth the time to send. I got 1 positive responses out of dozens of apps (mostly no response, a few no's), including on YC's Work At A Startup.

As for the industry, I'm very excited about the general industry, especially the ML ecosystem, but I expect tough times ahead for all the companies that peaked before 2023.

mixmastamyk
So, “don’t call us, we’ll call you?” Like Hollywood?
claytonjy
Something like that. With all the layoffs I think inbound channels are flooded so it's hard to sift through applicants effectively. I've been on the hiring side and seen 1000 applications in a week, so I know that sucks and likely pales in comparison to what any somewhat well-known company is seeing right now. So I can't really blame the companies here, but I feel particularly bad for junior engineers right now.
jacknews
"ML-adjacent"

Sure, no doubt anything ML is in high demand right now. Any tiips for getting into the space, before the crowd? (I'm quite sure everyone and their dog with some spare time are right now genning up on openAI prompts, API, langchain, running Llama locally and finetuning it, working with data prep tools etc).

slackfan
Laid off in october, founded a company in december. The bootstrapping path is a long and lonely one, but better this than go back to slinging code and being an underpaid middle manager.
elforce002
I wish you success with your company. Good luck.
ChumpGPT
I’m just going to throw this out there but the DoD hires a lot of civilians for IT work and if you look online you will find it’s very well organized and there were quite a few jobs last I looked. Good luck
the_only_law
I applied to one government job and the process was just onerous. It wasn’t a crazy job, mostly doing typical .NET web stuff in the context of a much more interesting non-tech domain. Didn’t pay well, but the work and location made it interesting enough to consider.

My initial issue was during the application, there were required fields for all sorts of data including making me enter Name/Phone Number for every boss I’ve had. Unfortunately I don’t have everyone’s phone number. There was warning about how knowingly putting in incorrect information would get your application thrown out. I figured though, that I wouldn’t get knocked for not knowing the Phone number of some guy I worked under years ago so I just entered a placeholder number.

My other issue is how inflexible and bureaucratic it felt. Before submitting the application it asked a series of yes or no questions. Usually along the lines of “do you have X years of experience in Y” most of which I could answer with “Yes”, except the last one which was a really explicit “do you have experience writing this specific type of web application in this specific industry”. I suppose I could have lied and said “Yes”, but then I’d just look like an idiot when it came to an interview. I answered “No”. Of course I can’t be sure, but given the rejection reason I received, I can imagine that that “No” got my application tossed out. Outside of that it seemed at least on paper that I was completely qualified.

I’m not sure how they’re going to fill that role. I can’t imagine the poll of people that have the exact intersection of domain skills they want is very large.

That experience really put me off on federal government work. With some of the salary ranges they have, compared to the sort of people they want, they seem to be choosing beggars. Maybe different agencies are better than others, but it seemed like the application process for federal civilian jobs was pretty well centralized. I’ll add a surprising number of the jobs I saw were not open to the general public.

jesse__
I quit my last job in Jan 2022. Thankfully, I had about a year worth of savings, so I decided I'd do what I had never done before; take up the job search with the goal of finding a position that was:

0) remote

1) highly technically challenging

2) supported by an extremely competent team

3) payed great

I interviewed at every company I could find that seemed to fulfill those requirements. I averaged 0-3 interviews per month for just over a year. If I'm remembering correctly, I typically did between 0 and 5 applications per month.

In the end, I found a position on the software team with a company bringing up new silicon for accelerating deep learning inference. It fulfills (1) and (2) in spades; I've never done hardware before (let alone TFLOP scale semiconductors), and the team is largely 30 year+ career engineers. I had to cave on (3) .. I took about a 50% pay cut from my last position, which was hard to swallow, but I still make a very comfortable living. I'd do it again, without even pausing to think about it.

I had multiple offers over the year I was looking, but didn't get one that fulfilled (0) through (3). I had more trouble than usual getting offers, but I was also much more stringent in sticking to my 'morals', which I think was the major contributor. In terms of comp, the offer I accepted was the worst, by a lot. Most offers I got were for >200k USD, with options, and generally mediocre ancillary benefits (which I mostly don't care about).

To keep myself busy during my job search I have a few long-running side projects, which I payed significant attention to. I also traveled a fair bit, and spent ~8 months in Central America where I learned to surf, and speak very broken Spanish.

> How have your feelings about the industry changed?

From what I can tell, the demand for folks who are highly motivated to do interesting and challenging work has not waned.

UncleOxidant
> In the end, I found a position on the software team with a company bringing up new silicon for accelerating deep learning inference.

I've done a bit of this and adjacent things in the past... any idea if they're still hiring?

> I took about a 50% pay cut from my last position

Yeah, it's crazy. Hardware adjacent work is quite technically challenging, but tends to not pay well. You've gotta know hardware and software but the pay does not reflect this. Similar for embedded work.

jesse__
> any idea if they're still hiring?

Yup, aggressively. Drop me a line; personal email is on my profile.

> Hardware adjacent work is quite technically challenging, but tends to not pay well.

Yeah, the explanation I got is that, specifically for a semiconductor company, it's so bloody expensive to tape out chips that a huge portion of the capital in the company gets allocated to that. Checks out, but it's still a little lame.

blueridge
Some thoughts:

1) Some companies have had the same job ads open for well over a year. Did they forget to close the role? Do they even have a People team reviewing applications? My guess is they're not actually hiring, and that the roles are listed to make it seem like the company is healthy and growing.

2) Every now and then I'll receive almost an instant decline from the ATS—my guess is that the application didn't pass a filter, or they're not able to hire in a specific state, so it's an automatic no. I try to hone in on the "this role is available in these states" sentence before I bother with an application. Often times it's not listed.

3) Recruiters who I chatted with three months ago, who were new to the company at the time, have now moved on to another company. These conversations are always difficult, because it's clear the recruiter doesn't know anything about the work to be done, or the company, nor do they posses the language to ask good and relevant questions. And now, these people aren't even at the company. Had the hiring manager or team lead handled the first interview, things might have gone differently. We miss out on a lot of great roles and opportunities due to recruiting stupidity.

4) I'm "getting older" and I'm finding it difficult to chat with some of the younger folks in the interview process. They've all bought in to the same VC rule book for hiring and team building and it just doesn't resonate with me at this point in my career. And, I've seen a lot of weird camera setups that make it challenging to have a conversation. I had a video call recently where the recruiters camera was pointing at the side of the his face—full on side view—and he was looking at my video on his screen positioned directly in front of him for the whole meeting. He never once looked at or in the direction of his camera. Bizarre.

5) I was using my HEY.com email address for applications, wasn't getting any traction, switched back to my Gmail address and got a few first-replies almost right away. My sense is that HEY is still seen as a "novelty" address, or similar to seeing a Yahoo or AOL address on an application—you make a quick judgement about someone based on their email address.

6) I had been linking off to my website that has an expanded profile and work history, but almost no one clicked through to read. It has had minimal visits, only one person has referenced the site during an interview, so I've stopped including it on applications. And in general, I think it's possible to "share too much" ahead of a first interview. The website might do more harm than good.

7) I've got a lot of work experience, so my résumé has always been a neat two pages. I switched back to a one-pager and seem to get more hits with the one page format.

the_only_law
I briefly mentioned something related to 1) in my post earlier, but I want to add a bit.

When the recruiters stopped coming, and I started putting out more applications, I saw a nmuber of jobs. 6 months later, I open the job board, and I’m seeing the exact same crap.

I haven’t put out many applications recently, because I’m not seeing many new jobs to apply to that I’m reasonably qualified for.

Earlier in the year, I used uBlock Origin to try and cut out some of low quality “promoted” roles that seem to be a major part in making the job market seem so static. After filtering out those, there were about four non-promoted listings per page, sometimes zero.

Another issue, though it seems less common than a few years ago when remote blew up, are companies that instead of postings job that just says “Remote(US)”. They flood the job boards with an individual job posting for what seems like every goddamn MSA in the US. This particularly pisses me off when I try to sort by date posted and have to sift through pages of the same job.

Other job boards, Glassdoor in particular seem to be filled with jobs at companies with bizarre names that sound fake. I imagine some of these are crappy recruiting firms, but others seem to be written more like a direct company listing.

UncleOxidant
I was let go in December from a contract gig at a startup after they lost their funding from a large semiconductor company that was/is cutting costs in a big way. I think we were doing interesting stuff and if we'd had another 6 months or so of funding our corporate patron could've benefited from the tech we were creating. Now, AFAICT the startup has been entirely mothballed.

> How did you feel then vs now? Are you doing alright?

At the time they cut us I felt like it was all futility. We were working on something that could save save power by making certain workloads run much more efficiently, seemed like something worthwhile, but there was no money for it anymore.

Doing OK, just feel kind of 'meh' about looking for work... interviewing in tech really is the worst and TBH I have a lot of what I call "interviewing PTSD".

> Are you looking for/have you found work?

I have been sort of half-heartedly looking for work - basically just doing the minimum 5 contacts/week to keep my unemployment coming in. We paid off our house at the end of last year so not feeling really particularly worried as my wife is still working and we get our health insurance from her job.

I've had 3 interviews in the last 4 months. In two of them I ended up saying "I think this is not going to be a good fit for either of us".

> How do pay/benefits (remote, etc.) compare?

Not sure, haven't gotten to any salary negotiation stage.

> How have your feelings about the industry changed?

I've been in the "industry" for over 30 years, I'd say my feelings about the industry changed about 10 years ago when "tech" became synonymous with "social media". Silicon Valley hasn't been about silicon for quite a while now. When I was younger I was really excited about new tech developments, but now I'm just not sure that we're doing good for the world anymore, in fact it seems like there's more bad than good coming from our industry in that last several years.

I'm lucky to be in a financial position to be very picky about what I work on - I have to find it interesting and it needs to seem beneficial somehow. I'll probably just consider myself semi-retired if I don't find something that fits my criteria in about 6 months.

wcfields
Kinda a trickle down:

A handful of us were laid off in Feb from a global advertising agency's SF office. They had a lot of notable SF clients including a well known bank in the area that made some headlines, so ya know... A few other tech clients really tightened up their retainers as well.