Can the market absorb this? If feels like it’s already saturated plus we have the steady stream of new grads. I do not envy anyone who has to look for a job right now
depends.. i think it feels saturated if you are a poor performer. I've always said when times were good you had people in tech that shouldn't be in tech but they are able to some sort of bare min task, usually not good but good enough to get the job done. I think its hard on them but if you are somewhat good at your job, finding a new job in this market isn't hard
are you trying to get hired right now? How long have you been in the industry? I have a feeling that this sentiment is not coming from people who have been laid off. I know people that have left voluntarily who are not having an easy time either.
For me, it's been pretty rough. I have about 3 YOE at a very grown-up startup, looking for mid level positions. My specialty is frontend (plus some more niche tech, and of course full stack competency). I've been very slowly finding my way into interview loops, mostly through LinkedIn and occasionally HN. I've been completing them at a very high rate, and getting passed up for people with more experience, or at least that's what I've heard when I've actually gotten feedback.
The other early-career people I know are having trouble as well.
> depends.. i think it feels saturated if you are a poor performer.
There's a lot of luck involved in getting hired right now, even for high performers. There are a lot of other high performers competing for the same jobs.
I know some people who were laid off and found jobs in a few weeks, several others who were on the market for many months, and there was not a significant skill-based correlation.
Problem with getting rehired in a few weeks (technically -2 weeks) is that you may have chosen, for comp reasons, to go into consultancy. Which means temporary contracts ...
I think it really depends on the role. From a very non-scientific review of what I see on LinkedIn from former colleagues/friends that have now been unemployed for at least 3 months or more:
1. Software engineers and others with specific technical skills are still in high demand. During the boom years, many companies simply couldn't afford the tech talent they wanted/needed because there was so much competition. However, I think it's safe to say some folks who got laid off from FAANGs will literally never make those total comp numbers again.
2. The people I see really struggling are more in the "tech adjacent" roles: think HR, recruiting, some product managers, lots of non-tech marketing folks like social media managers, roles like "agile coaches", etc. In some cases I've seen people completely leave tech because they just couldn't find work.
3. Lots of demand for good salespeople. Good salespeople are kind of always in demand, though.
I'd also assume a non-zero amount of those folks are intentionally taking employment breaks. I took almost a year off, but to the average stranger it may have looked like I was unemployed and couldn't find a job.
Yeah, I tend to take 3 months between jobs, it's great for your mental and physical health. And I'm honestly said people in other fields don't have this opportunity.
Way to put "agile coach" in sneer quotes, when the whole purpose of that whole career path is to help make sure devs aren't wasting their time on bullshit from incompetent business folks, or being burned out, or re-inventing the wheel AGAIN, which in turn earns the shareholders more money and decreases turnover via not burning people out.
But then again, I guess we're back to "I'm an engineer, all these non-technical people are non-value-add because I can engineer everything." Even when some of them are, actually, technical themselves and just chose another path to use their skills.
Your post is downvoted, perhaps for tone, but I think it's a fair criticism of what I wrote.
FWIW, in many of those "technically adjacent" roles I mentioned, I've found that good ones can be worth their weight in gold, where "good" is usually defined as having a very strong attention to detail. Unfortunately, I've found a large number of folks in those roles are not good and that there are "more places to hide" in those roles than strictly technical ones.
For example, I think that stellar product managers are invaluable, and I also think that since product manager can span so many functions it's probably the hardest role there is in tech. But I've been extremely frustrated, as an engineer, with many, many product managers who lack an attention to detail of how their own product works, and see themselves more as meeting-scheduler and jira-ticket-updater.
So I don't mean to denigrate those professions, but I have found that, compared to software engineers, that bad ones seem to be able to stick around longer. With software engineers, if you can't code it becomes quickly apparent and these folks tend to be forced out or leave pretty fast on their own volition (of course, good coders can have a host of other problems...) But with non-technical/less-technical roles I've found that there is more "chaff per wheat", so to speak.
I don’t know how the ex faang employees are taking this but we’re picking up people at basically a 10-20% higher talent rate than before the faang layoffs and there seems to be a large hunger for this.
The way it plays out between our engineering management and hr is that we are hiring people who would have been evaluated at the top end of whatever level N we filtered on at the bottom of the N+1 level.
We obviously aren’t getting the people who did things like invent completely new technologies but we’re are grabbing a ton of people for seats we needed filled anyway, at a higher skill level than expected
So, are you seeing a larger pool of say, L5s that are applying for L4 jobs?
Or does your company have generic openings, and you’re saying that people are now more comfortable with offers a lower level than they’d qualify for? (which puts them at the top of level N vs bottom of N+1).
In either case, it sounds very much like an employers market right now. The only exceptions would likely be individuals in high demand roles (like AI/ML).
The US job market is weird when you view it from the outside. Other countries are in the situation where they are missing pretty much every skill you can think of. Denmark probably have thousands of IT jobs available and pretty much zero people to fill them.
Given how little the tech giants seems to suffer from their layoffs, there's a pretty good chance that they where massively over-hiring for years, actively hurting other companies and inflating salaries in some areas of the country.
If I was an investor in Meta or Amazon, I'd start question if the company is actually well managed, when they apparently have had hundreds, if not thousands of people on payroll that isn't actually required to run the business.
The over-hiring was at least somewhat acknowledged tactic big tech companies use to starve future potential competitors. If all the good talent is taken even for only 5 years you can extend the time that you have an advantage without having to innovate
I expect meta will continue with layoffs. Threads appears to be a flop, their metaverse and AR initiatives don’t seem to be gaining much stream either.
I wouldn't write off Threads just yet. Twitter management is racing to convert the site into a smoking crater, and Threads has become the default respawn point for most people who eject. Most of us would love to have a flop that gets 100M users in just over 100 hours.
This is more a case of Meta and AMZN not being able to produce growth through new products anymore. It's hard doing that when you're multi-hundred billion dollar businesses. They're trying to grow profits by squeezing their margins now, and it's too expensive to park talent to prevent it from going to competitors.
Yes, and it’s still doing 10x the DAU of Bluesky. Every time Twitter does something boneheaded, as seen this week, there’s another exodus. The best way to predict the future is to examine the past, and the past for Twitter is unforced error after unforced error sending their userbase running into Threads’ open arms.
I'm not arguing for Twitter's viability, just against the idea that Threads is promising. If there were repeated exoduses from Twitter to Threads, we'd expect to see Threads' activity go up, not decay smoothly downward.
"it's now worth 1/10 what you paid for it" seems like death to me; I assume those fired Twitter engineers just thought that would be considered failure.
This is a fair point. I think there were also product people in the rif that might’ve been able to push back on the notion of incinerating the Twitter brand.
So far, a community made of people whose most common shared trait is hating Elon Musk seems like not a very nice place to be.
The only interesting thing about it as a user is if someone famous happens to post there for some reason they often get very little engagement, and as a result if you reply to them there's a higher chance they might read it and respond compared to other platforms.
Yes they are wrong, and you are wrong too. This isn't "Bezos' rocket vanity project" at all. This is Amazon's Kuiper satellites, planned to provide globally available fast internet access and some welcome competition for Musk's Starlink. This isn't space tourism for rich people, Bezos has less than a 10% stake in it (through his remaining, dwindling ownership of Amazon), and this launch is not even a Blue Origin rocket. Kuiper is a real business that should provide a lot of value to real people on Earth. Plus it will likely reduce Musk's chances of ever making a profit on Starlink which these people should cheer since they undoubtedly hate Musk too.
Besides that, the non-sequitur overwhelmingly hateful knee-jerk sentiment is way over the top. I want no part of a platform that is seemingly populated almost exclusively by people like that.
I enjoyed the civil honeymoon Threads enjoyed, but my feeling was always that we’d know Twitter was dead when the jerks migrated to Threads. The Bezos post comments marked that event.
I mean I get that and hooray competition I guess? Personally, I don’t want either of those men in charge of a utility like that. ~Elon has already shown that he’ll mess with Starlink out of spite~, and Bezos is a person who does not understand _anything_ about what being a person is.
Correction: Musk did not adhere to a request from the Ukrainian government to extend Starlink to parts of Crimea
> the Ukrainian government had asked him to activate Starlink "all the way to Sevastopol," the largest city in Crimea, and he [Musk] refused to do that to avoid escalating the conflict.
I still don’t agree with someone having the option to deny potentially critical communication services in a conflict when that person has zero military expertise.
> Elon has already shown that he’ll mess with Starlink out of spite
Are you referring to the supposed shutting down of Starlink over Crimea during a Ukrainian operation? That was misinformation and never happened. The US government has control over Starlink in several different ways and you can be sure that if they really needed it turned on or off in any specific area they could have it done immediately.
Anyway these concerns are totally irrelevant to the original point about negativity on Threads because nobody there even realized that a Starlink competitor was what they were talking about.
Thanks! I forgot that that part was from the book by Musk and Isaacson and is clarified shortly thereafter. I’ve updated my comment to reflect the actual impact (which I still don’t agree with)
Honestly the only interesting thing about that thread is the severe lack of engagement. Single digit likes and replies on the reply comments. Threads definitely didn't work out.
I'm truly sympathetic towards the people affected, especially visa holders. But speaking solely of the macro effects, I have to say, I'm happy this day, stretching from last year to now, has come. We as a community were a very annoying group of people when we were so damn rich and when we thought we were essentially untouchable. And count me in that as well! But a little awareness of layoffs here and (for some people) a little fear of ChatGPT replacement there... well that's a grounding experience. Not to mention the number of people who had sunk into so much ennui and depression over how boring and easy it was. Now a lot of us are jobless and can feel some fire in our bellies again, a time to fight or die.
> Now a lot of us are jobless and can feel some fire in our bellies again, a time to fight or die
I don't feel any confidence in my job lasting anymore. If I lose it I'm simply going to choose die, because I don't have any fight in me anymore. My job is the only thing that makes me worth anything as a human, if I lose it I am nothing.
Don’t know your situation, but you can break out of that. I did. First you have to decide you don’t want to think that way. No easy answer, but increasing my income and lowering my cost of living went a long way to giving myself more resources to figure it out. Hope you find a path worth walking to you. Feel free to email me if you want my story.
Do me a favor and read over your own comment again.
It's immediately evident that it is a false statement. Perhaps you are sad and lonely. That could very well be the case. A lot of people are in the same boat, I know I am. Perhaps you have other issues entirely.
But that doesn't mean that your job is the only thing that makes you "worth anything as a human". Your worth as a person is given to you when you were born.
Not by the state. Not by your community. But by the very fact that you are a living, conscious thing. Life might be hard, but that doesn't mean without your job you are nothing.
I'm only worth something if I can earn and support others. That is what makes a man valuable, without that he's nothing and I am a barely fictional man to begin with. Without my job I'm just a burden on others.
hey man, please shoot me an email, I've not quite been in your shoes but would love to talk it out anonymously if you like, or at least just listen if you want to vent more. It's (hidden behind icloud for obvious reasons) chokers_blatant0o@icloud.com
By that logic, babies, children, retired people, and folks too disabled to work are worthless. Do you really believe that? Please consider getting screened for depression if you haven’t been already.
Babies and children are being raised to work, old people are supposed to have saved enough to cover their own way once they can't. Disabled people? I won't touch that discussion point.
I've not been screened, that's kind of difficult when the waiting list is years.
You can talk to your primary care provider about depression, at least in the U.S. If you don’t have a PCP, it’s true that you may have to wait a few months, but make an appointment anyway. Find out if you can get on a waitlist if a sooner appointment becomes available. Odds are, something will pop up sooner. That’s been my experience.
My dad was laid off three times in his life, including after I was just born. It wasn’t easy, but it was pretty common and expected for blue-collar people in his generation (baby boomers). Don’t make it into a bigger deal than it is.
I'm not an American, the waiting list is indeed years long and in my personal experience the best you can get from a GP is zoloft which is borderline useless, if not actually harmful (in my case).
I'm not trying to make an excuse, I'm on the waiting list for public services. I was/am also on a private waiting list, but missed their one random call 13 months later and got bumped to the back of the list as a result. The system is needlessly cruel and difficult to access.
Your father had a kid, a reason to continue fighting. I have nothing.
as many others now have said, you have great value (in my worldview, you have infinite value as a divinely created being, for that matter, not that I expect you to just believe me when I say that). Losing or never attaining success, money, and glamour does put people into disfavor with much of the world, but when you lose those things I really think it can be an opportunity to look within yourself and discover value that comes from a wholly different frame of reference. I’ve met enough people without great charisma, money, beauty, or power, who have still found contentment and joy (at times, at least; many still go through up and down seasons of mental struggle on a monthly or hourly cycle!) because they have found their own worth in the light of different schemas of valuation. And other people recognize these figures too! People know when they meet someone who is content to authentically be themselves without the esteem that comes from, say, a good job, or anything else. Don’t you sense it sometimes, when you meet someone like that? It’s not just charisma, it’s something better.
I'd much prefer to fight or die at things that matter to me, like my hobby of actuslly fighting instead of trying to play the pointless corporate game even more
Explain to me why I should feel bad about having a good (and/or easy) job when people like 1-2 levels above me in management make way more than I do and have no qualms about being bad at their job?
There is no point or value to this kind of guilt tripping and the perspective here is incredibly limited.
I don't think you should feel 'bad', but personally I feel extremely grateful and lucky to enjoy doing something that happens to be very marketable skill.
I often think about people in other professions who have to work harder in poorer conditions for less money.
For me, the best way to direct these feelings is to recognise I don't deserve this any more than those others in any meaningful sense, to try and live modestly and help out others to try and redress some of the imbalance.
The higher paid superiors are just more of a tiny fraction of the population who happen also to be in an extremely lucky position
GP's comment is absurd. I mean, if you're not following the grindset and working 3 different jobs at once, are you even really feeling the fire in your belly?
Perhaps C-levels should be better at their jobs and feel the "fire in their belly" (what an obnoxious phrase) to not harmfully impact so many people at once.
I'm not sure exactly who you're referring to, but your average tech worker is not "so damn rich." Even people at FAANGs in the Bay Area or NYC often have roommates until their 30s and only then can they take a huge loan out to purchase a home on a dual income.
Just because there's people that are in an even rougher spot doesn't make tech workers "annoying." Take a look at the income inequality, it may surprise you.
What is often left out from these layoffs, but actually kind of side-mentioned in this article, is that consulting firms are also often cut out as well. Since these can be small boutique firms, those subsequent layoffs don't make the headlines.
I wouldn't be surprised if the entire consulting industry gets affected too, regardless of company size.
One of my friends who works at MBB told me that because of startups withering off and tech consulting gigs drying up (except for some one-off headcount reduction projects like these), there has been a significant reduction in MBB hiring too. For example people hired in 2022 were asked to join in the 2023 cycle for instance.
My heart goes out to these people. Getting fired sucks and I am happy to look at any resumes for people who don’t live in America, Canada , China , Russia or any country where sanctions are common.
Being fired from Cloudera was the best thing that ever happened to my career. The company was going downhill but I would have never left because I was there so early and always viewed from the pov of someone surrounded by someone smarter than oneself.
My guess is these companies have no way of measuring overall output or productivity that doesn’t suffer from all sorts of stupid bias. Many of these people will do way better if they get another job quick.
Doom and gloom article leading to doom and gloom HN discussion, just digging a bit more into it:
The Meta layoffs [1] are hitting a 600 person department.
The Amazon (Twitch) layoffs [2] are "significantly smaller than the March round, which included more than 400 people."
Sucks for the people being let go, especially in this weird job market, but it doesn't yet seem like it's a repeat of those massive layoffs last winter.
I also wish layoffs.fyi or similar had more historical data, just to compare this to, but even in good times small layoffs do happen.
This sounds like it's part of the already announced layoff round, not a new round, at Meta?
> Meta declined to comment, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that completing the company’s roughly 21,000 job reductions “may take through the end of the year,” with some teams not affected for months “in a small number of cases.”
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadThe other early-career people I know are having trouble as well.
There's a lot of luck involved in getting hired right now, even for high performers. There are a lot of other high performers competing for the same jobs.
I know some people who were laid off and found jobs in a few weeks, several others who were on the market for many months, and there was not a significant skill-based correlation.
1. Software engineers and others with specific technical skills are still in high demand. During the boom years, many companies simply couldn't afford the tech talent they wanted/needed because there was so much competition. However, I think it's safe to say some folks who got laid off from FAANGs will literally never make those total comp numbers again.
2. The people I see really struggling are more in the "tech adjacent" roles: think HR, recruiting, some product managers, lots of non-tech marketing folks like social media managers, roles like "agile coaches", etc. In some cases I've seen people completely leave tech because they just couldn't find work.
3. Lots of demand for good salespeople. Good salespeople are kind of always in demand, though.
But then again, I guess we're back to "I'm an engineer, all these non-technical people are non-value-add because I can engineer everything." Even when some of them are, actually, technical themselves and just chose another path to use their skills.
I've met some excellent ones that actually do what you claim as their purpose. But vast majority add zero value and many negative value.
But I admit it's very coupled with companies' cultures.
FWIW, in many of those "technically adjacent" roles I mentioned, I've found that good ones can be worth their weight in gold, where "good" is usually defined as having a very strong attention to detail. Unfortunately, I've found a large number of folks in those roles are not good and that there are "more places to hide" in those roles than strictly technical ones.
For example, I think that stellar product managers are invaluable, and I also think that since product manager can span so many functions it's probably the hardest role there is in tech. But I've been extremely frustrated, as an engineer, with many, many product managers who lack an attention to detail of how their own product works, and see themselves more as meeting-scheduler and jira-ticket-updater.
So I don't mean to denigrate those professions, but I have found that, compared to software engineers, that bad ones seem to be able to stick around longer. With software engineers, if you can't code it becomes quickly apparent and these folks tend to be forced out or leave pretty fast on their own volition (of course, good coders can have a host of other problems...) But with non-technical/less-technical roles I've found that there is more "chaff per wheat", so to speak.
The way it plays out between our engineering management and hr is that we are hiring people who would have been evaluated at the top end of whatever level N we filtered on at the bottom of the N+1 level.
We obviously aren’t getting the people who did things like invent completely new technologies but we’re are grabbing a ton of people for seats we needed filled anyway, at a higher skill level than expected
Or does your company have generic openings, and you’re saying that people are now more comfortable with offers a lower level than they’d qualify for? (which puts them at the top of level N vs bottom of N+1).
In either case, it sounds very much like an employers market right now. The only exceptions would likely be individuals in high demand roles (like AI/ML).
Given how little the tech giants seems to suffer from their layoffs, there's a pretty good chance that they where massively over-hiring for years, actively hurting other companies and inflating salaries in some areas of the country.
If I was an investor in Meta or Amazon, I'd start question if the company is actually well managed, when they apparently have had hundreds, if not thousands of people on payroll that isn't actually required to run the business.
This is more a case of Meta and AMZN not being able to produce growth through new products anymore. It's hard doing that when you're multi-hundred billion dollar businesses. They're trying to grow profits by squeezing their margins now, and it's too expensive to park talent to prevent it from going to competitors.
Vast majority of those users have stopped using the service. Activity is down at least 85%.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/31/threads-web-launch-did-lit...
https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/t...
Add to that the kind of person Musk is and Twitter is on a nosedive, it just has an absurdly long way to fall.
So far, a community made of people whose most common shared trait is hating Elon Musk seems like not a very nice place to be.
The only interesting thing about it as a user is if someone famous happens to post there for some reason they often get very little engagement, and as a result if you reply to them there's a higher chance they might read it and respond compared to other platforms.
Besides that, the non-sequitur overwhelmingly hateful knee-jerk sentiment is way over the top. I want no part of a platform that is seemingly populated almost exclusively by people like that.
Correction: Musk did not adhere to a request from the Ukrainian government to extend Starlink to parts of Crimea
> the Ukrainian government had asked him to activate Starlink "all the way to Sevastopol," the largest city in Crimea, and he [Musk] refused to do that to avoid escalating the conflict.
I still don’t agree with someone having the option to deny potentially critical communication services in a conflict when that person has zero military expertise.
Are you referring to the supposed shutting down of Starlink over Crimea during a Ukrainian operation? That was misinformation and never happened. The US government has control over Starlink in several different ways and you can be sure that if they really needed it turned on or off in any specific area they could have it done immediately.
Anyway these concerns are totally irrelevant to the original point about negativity on Threads because nobody there even realized that a Starlink competitor was what they were talking about.
I don't feel any confidence in my job lasting anymore. If I lose it I'm simply going to choose die, because I don't have any fight in me anymore. My job is the only thing that makes me worth anything as a human, if I lose it I am nothing.
It's immediately evident that it is a false statement. Perhaps you are sad and lonely. That could very well be the case. A lot of people are in the same boat, I know I am. Perhaps you have other issues entirely.
But that doesn't mean that your job is the only thing that makes you "worth anything as a human". Your worth as a person is given to you when you were born.
Not by the state. Not by your community. But by the very fact that you are a living, conscious thing. Life might be hard, but that doesn't mean without your job you are nothing.
What makes you worth anything is who you are as a person. That’s what makes you everything.
At least to me it seems like you have an unhealthy relationship with your job or just work in general.
Why would I be a burden on others? I’ve never perceived this.
I support myself and that’s all I need. Doesn’t take much at all to support myself, at least in my experience.
I've not been screened, that's kind of difficult when the waiting list is years.
My dad was laid off three times in his life, including after I was just born. It wasn’t easy, but it was pretty common and expected for blue-collar people in his generation (baby boomers). Don’t make it into a bigger deal than it is.
Good luck.
I'm not trying to make an excuse, I'm on the waiting list for public services. I was/am also on a private waiting list, but missed their one random call 13 months later and got bumped to the back of the list as a result. The system is needlessly cruel and difficult to access.
Your father had a kid, a reason to continue fighting. I have nothing.
Thank you for the well wishes though.
There is no point or value to this kind of guilt tripping and the perspective here is incredibly limited.
I often think about people in other professions who have to work harder in poorer conditions for less money.
For me, the best way to direct these feelings is to recognise I don't deserve this any more than those others in any meaningful sense, to try and live modestly and help out others to try and redress some of the imbalance.
The higher paid superiors are just more of a tiny fraction of the population who happen also to be in an extremely lucky position
Perhaps C-levels should be better at their jobs and feel the "fire in their belly" (what an obnoxious phrase) to not harmfully impact so many people at once.
From that frame of reference, it's so good the plebs have to continue their gladiatorial combat.
Just because there's people that are in an even rougher spot doesn't make tech workers "annoying." Take a look at the income inequality, it may surprise you.
One of my friends who works at MBB told me that because of startups withering off and tech consulting gigs drying up (except for some one-off headcount reduction projects like these), there has been a significant reduction in MBB hiring too. For example people hired in 2022 were asked to join in the 2023 cycle for instance.
layoffs freezes
etc are basically weekly lifecycles
like, there is no article about freezes being lifted or hiring restarted
but reality is closer to ebbs and flows that are quite quick
Being fired from Cloudera was the best thing that ever happened to my career. The company was going downhill but I would have never left because I was there so early and always viewed from the pov of someone surrounded by someone smarter than oneself.
My guess is these companies have no way of measuring overall output or productivity that doesn’t suffer from all sorts of stupid bias. Many of these people will do way better if they get another job quick.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...
The Meta layoffs [1] are hitting a 600 person department.
The Amazon (Twitch) layoffs [2] are "significantly smaller than the March round, which included more than 400 people."
Sucks for the people being let go, especially in this weird job market, but it doesn't yet seem like it's a repeat of those massive layoffs last winter.
I also wish layoffs.fyi or similar had more historical data, just to compare this to, but even in good times small layoffs do happen.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-lay-off-employees-me...
[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/twitch-makes-another-round-of-...
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-beats-expec...
> Meta declined to comment, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March that completing the company’s roughly 21,000 job reductions “may take through the end of the year,” with some teams not affected for months “in a small number of cases.”
Edit: example of newly open position https://www.metacareers.com/jobs/298738792749406/