ok, many layoff numbers, but what about how many new roles have been filled or the total number of positions. As is, this is just a sensation piece for clicks, you will not learn much by reading this.
We're entering the AI era (or less charitably, bubble) where AI/ML skills are in demand. There are plenty of jobs available for people with 5 years experience in AI (there aren't many people with that kind of AI experience). If you're laid off and have no AI experience then it seems not so easy to find work - not impossible, but it takes some time.
You should ask your normie office worker friends about how much they're using ChatGPT in their day-to-day work. It is being used by just about everyone all the time now. Soon, everyone will need to have at least some skills that an "AI Engineer" has.
Yeah, but those office workers are not required to learn ML or AI engineering practises, because those office workers aren't data scientists or programmers. Using AI !== Making AI.
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that AI won't ever become a centrepiece of most companies, I'm simply saying that it isn't at this very moment yet. Half my digital agency clients haven't even heard of Copilot, let alone would they start building AI for their customers.
> He had a PhD in AI from MIT. Just to contextualize what that means in Silicon Valley, an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.
Wow, how cynical and yet Sam Bankman Fried was able to get a couple hundred million dressed in a hoodie while playing League of Legends in his investor meeting. Perhaps not cynical enough.
I'm a dev (SDET) who is considering taking a job at a grocery store or warehouse just to have some cash flow.
Yes, it really is that bad. A couple of years ago my LinkedIn inbox was flooded with recruiters. Now it's a ghost town.
I'm considering pivoting into full-stack dev, but it's slow going. And even if that works, I'd be a junior developer. The situation is grim to say the least.
My feeling is that the trend is largely reversing. People are investing in tech because they're excited about AI. I work at a very large company and we are finally hiring again. I have also heard that Meta is asking some people they laid off earlier in the year to come back. So... I am not sure what precipitated this whole layoff trend, but people seem bored with it and are back to wanting to make money instead of save it.
But all these companies doing layoffs have like 50 billion dollars in cash sitting in their treasuries. Are they routinely borrowing money at the multi-year timescale? My only thought is that they figure they can make more with low-risk investments than they can hiring employees. That CD will always yield 5%; who knows what hiring another person for the Foo team will yield.
But when companies have 50-to-infinity years of runway, does that even matter?
If anything, these massive companies will benefit when they can pick up struggling startups with great tech for a 1/1000th of their peak private valuation.
I totally get why startups would want to be lean during high interest rate times; the next round of funding is never assured, and when money costs 7% a year, it's almost assured to NOT happen. You have to fight for you life under those circumstances. (The startup I work at got bought at a very good price for the acquirer as a result of the wider economic situation. It's nice to have a job though, so I can't complain.)
But, Microsoft, Meta, Google, etc. are not raising money on the open market; they have treasuries and revenue. I really think there's a lot of complexity going on here; interest rates going up didn't cut consumer spending by that much, so discretionary purchases didn't decrease, which meant that people were still buying ads and funding these companies. (I guess Microsoft doesn't make any money off of ads, but Google and Meta do.) I am guessing that people didn't expect the discretionary purchases to remain steady; in the past, interest rate increase = unemployment increase = nobody buying anything, but that appears to not be happening this time. Additionally, on the tech side of things, hype about AI is giving investors a serious fear of missing out, so there is definitely a bit of investment happening.
So all in all, I think these are very weird times, and it's hard for anyone to plan. You can guess, you can hope, but at the end of the day, we don't really know. We know what caused recessions in the past, but we don't know what the 10 year horizon looks like for "there is a deadly disease, everyone work from home and buy as much stuff from China as possible, oops they are all sick so only the highest bidder gets their thing, and oh btw you don't have to pay off your student loans anymore so bid away!" It made the $ worth a lot less. That's about it.
> My only thought is that they figure they can make more with low-risk investments than they can hiring employees.
That is exactly what is going on. A lot of people don't understand that if your risky business can't make as much return as the "risk free return rate" (i.e. the rate of return on US Treasuries), the only logical thing to do (as a business owner) is close up shop, as all your hard work is earning LESS money than just dumping it in CDs.
When the risk-free rate was essentially zero, or in some cases negative, people would throw around money all over the place in hopes of getting some positive return. The bar has just been raised so that is no longer the case.
That doesn't make sense because tech companies are not sticking cash in ~4-5% annual return treasuries, it would make sense if this were the 70s with double digits interest rates.
But it does make sense in the broader tech context, especially for companies that need funding, which is a large portion of the companies that have conducted layoffs this year. VCs for example need to raise their own cash to invest, and investors are less likely to take a huge risk with VCs when the risk-free rate is so high.
> I just think there have been more layoffs than can be explained by a couple percent increase alone.
Sure, of course. There was also massive over-hiring during the pandemic in anticipation of some sort of "new normal" that didn't pan out.
My comment was more in response to the idea of "why should interest rates affect company hiring for companies that have a ton of cash on hand and are profitable?"
I think companies are. When I worked at Google, I put my bonuses in a deferred compensation plan which was managed by the internal treasury management team. That's the team that tries to make money off of cash that's just sitting around with nothing to spend it on. I think I got about 3% return on that, which was in the era of 0% savings accounts and 0 yield US treasuries. (With 20/20 hindsight, you would take all that money in Google stock and hold it, of course, but I had more than enough exposure to the share price at the time.)
If that were true, there would be no hyper low margin businesses, much less ones that thrived during the even worse 1970s / early 1980s. Nobody would start such businesses.
Witness: Walmart, Costco, Target and most of the retail sector. People have never stopped creating these low margin businesses.
You're not actually earning a return via US treasuries, you might get lucky and keep pace with inflation.
More broadly you've dropped the context, which is that the business in question can be growth positive even with high risk and tiny margins. US Treasuries are not growth positive, they don't grow and spit off new capital to reinvest into further expansion. Operating with a 2.3% operating income margin is a risky business, retail is extraordinarily difficult and is extraordinarily risky to start a business in due to the very low margins, and yet people will keep on doing it perpetually regardless of interest rates.
Earning a lower rate of return for eg five years on a business (vs treasuries), while re-investing into said business, can be the rational thing to do for a larger longer term payoff (which you'll never get out of treasuries). Your premise ignores pretty much all the very complex nuance to business. To say nothing of that the rational thing to do sometimes, is to do what you enjoy, which perhaps is operating a very low margin convenience store instead of sitting on a stack of treasuries. Businesses (more common in small to mid-size businesses) are frequently not run for maximum return, and that action can in fact be quite rational.
LinkedIn the company, sure, but that's a lagging indicator after the earlier layoffs and freezes hurt their numbers. As a user of linkedin, my inbox is the busiest it's been all year since q4 began.
Yeah, they got laid off today, because of historical slower performance, because other companies had hiring freezes from 1.5 years ago to 0.5 years ago.
As opposed to customers loudly signalling they're cutting back on hiring, and LinkedIn potentially cutting back in anticipation of leaner times.
Also as opposed to the idea that others in this thread seem to be suggesting that LinkedIn knows the future so is laying off to save costs in an anticipated tougher future, as opposed to looking at their recent history and laying off based on that to appease shareholders that they're taking corrective action.
Listings from Meta on Linkedin are a... significantly less exciting than 20 months ago. With lower pay and some 'AI monetization' roles. NVidia is very specific in what it wants. They want ready experts in their technologies. For exact fit experts it's not a problem. But getting into is harder than ever. Most position get more than 50 applications in 2 days and are regularly relisted. Because of luck of exact fits I suspect. Overall job market for AI engineering and related is depressing so far.
Nah, the AI bubble is still inflating. In fact some of this is probably skills shifting- laying off people with no AI experience so you can hire people with AI experience. The problem is that the supply of people with AI experience is still quite limited.
Quite the opposite. It seems, ChatGPT has convinced DoD that AI is within reach, and truckloads of money will be invested there in the next decade, perhaps at the expense of the rest of the industry.
The job market is still very strong right now. Don't be fooled by stories like this trying to convince you otherwise. The unemployment rate is back down to near-historic lows, under 4 percent.[0] Job openings are down slightly from the peak, but are still well higher than the two decades leading up to 2020.[1]
I like this narrative, but don't these charts include all non-farm jobs? From what I've read, seems like tech is being hit harder than other areas. I might be wrong about that and, at any rate, I prefer your approach over over-indexing on anecdotal data, but seems a bit rougher than necessary to depict the full picture.
Tech is being hit harder to the extent it depends more on capital financing for employee compensation. Going from 0 to 5.5% fed funds rate has enormous implications for the cost of capital and growth models. Corporate debt financing yield went from 2% to 6% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLC0A0CMEY). (Before the pandemic it was 3% for a decade, except for a small blip when the fed tried to raise the rates and the market sneezed.)
The hurdle rate went up accordingly. A lot of business models that worked over the past decade are on borrowed time right now. Every company and employee's situation is different and talent is still rewarded, but many pre-revenue companies are facing a very different financial reality and can sustain a much smaller workforce.
Do these datasets discriminate between job levels/types/incomes, or would two new ditch digger jobs count as a net gain over a lost senior sysadmin job?
Yep, and for some reason there is an abundance of economic shills on here and Reddit.
This economy is not healthy and there's a zero percent chance we get out unscathed. Good luck, stay diverse and don't lock yourself into some crazy mortgage or other debt
It seems like the amount of layoffs in engineering (so far) have been highly disproportionate.
I.E. - you have companies that are 70% product-engineering by employees doing a 10% cut - and only 10% of the cut is coming from product-engineering.
If it was proportionate - you'd see 70% of laid off employees being product-engineering - instead of 90% coming from recruiting, sales, and marketing - which only makes up like 20% of the company in the first place...
The rest of the economy seems to be doing fine. If recruiters and marketers and salespeople are going from "tech companies" to other companies and keeping similar wages - that doesn't at all seem doom-worthy.
Just like they say "all real estate is local", so is it true that "all employment is industry-specific."
It's almost irrelevant what the broader economy unemployment rate is. For example, where I live there was actually pretty strong tech employment growth in 2008 despite it being a bloodbath for the broader economy.
Now, I happen to agree with you that there is still a strong need for tech workers (previous comment on this topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881705), but most of those jobs are at significantly lower salary for a lot of people. The fact is there is a glut of recently laid off tech people looking for jobs, and saying "ignore your own eyes and experience" is not helpful.
There are several reasons, some of which are mathematically equivalent to each other, but basically tech is an industry in which large expenditures are being paid in the present in the hopes of producing revenue growth farther down the road in the future.
Even in a profitable company like Google, which has existing revenue streams, some of the headcount is there to keep the systems running, but much of it is still investment in future growth. In an unprofitable company like (Uber? I haven't checked), they're losing money in the present in the hopes of earning more in the future.
Contrast with, say, Kellogg's, where most of the headcount is there to sustain existing revenues and production, and only a little is being invested into new product lines, cost-saving optimization, and future growth.
As interest rates rise, it makes today's revenue more preferable and future revenues less important. That has a strong impact on the valuation of companies like Uber and Google, and a weaker impact on the valuation of companies like Kellogg's.
A company that is still pre-profit but has a bit of revenue might need to cut its expenses to become profitable, even at the expense of future growth. A company that is pre-profit with no revenue might want to keep its employees to launch products ASAP, but with investment drying up it could go bankrupt first.
And at a company like Google, the shareholders may be interested in pivoting towards the Kellogg's model to keep the share price high. So they lay off a bunch of cost-adding developers, and focus more on stretching today's advertising revenue as far as possible. The only future development being pursued will be the ones where payoff is so big that it's worth it even at a high discount rate, so perhaps AI.
Contrast with the market for "jobs" paid from investment rounds where the "work" is playing with computers and the objective is "growth" instead of profits.
If the output of such activity was the production of actual, sustainable businesses (cf. short-term investment opportunities for small sets of sophisticated investors), then these employees would still be needed.
One nice thing about tech is that you learn how to think, or least that's how I look at it. Worst case scenario, you're equipped to deal with it and hack your way out. Heck, you might even find your next opportunity is not in tech, but something else. Make it work!
Although, I feel like most people I've met in tech recently are not exactly "hacker" types, but just people chasing a check. SWE is one of the easiest, low-effort industries to break into. People like that might have a harder time.
Nope. We still have one of the most privileged jobs around with plenty of demand for our foreseeable life times. Just don’t let yourself become obsolete.
No. We had a short lived tech bubble and it's deflating now. The people who seem to be panicking the most are the people who are currently in college or only have a year or two of experience. What those people need to realize is that their only experience with the tech industry was during an abnormal time. When all you're used to is the abnormal, returning to normal feels scary, but that's all that is happening.
If you're panicked, you need to take a hard look at our industry and realize how insane our industry was for the past few years. My company isn't even one of the FAANGs and we were paying interns 6 figures. I know people in other industries who have over a decade of experience who are paid less than the FAANGs pay entry level hires. That's not normal and that's not sustainable.
Salaries will depress a bit, but SWEs will likely still make far above average. If you're worried about jobs, just look at the stock market. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta are all in the top 6 biggest companies in the US (by market cap). Those companies aren't going anywhere and they have a massive amount of code to maintain. Developers aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
The dot com bubble and the great recession were both way worse than what we are experiencing, but tech continued to grow.
This paints a rosy picture. In 2010, those 6 figures would buy you a decent house. Today a 100k salary buys as much as maybe 50k ten years ago: a decent car, an ok rent and some food.
Cut the woe is me bullshit. It's totally fine to be focused on your salary or think that things could be better, but to acting like you're barely scraping by on a 100k a year is so fucking tone deaf it's borderline offensive. Maybe it's just because all my closest friends work non-tech jobs and I see their struggles compared to mine, but it really irks me when tech workers act slighted about their salaries.
Responding to your points, first, inflation calculators exist. 100k today is a little over 75k 10 years ago. Coincidentally, that's exactly how much I was making in 2014 living in a HCOL city, so I'm well aware exactly how far that goes. I definitely had money to save up for a house, but it still would have taken years of budgeting for me to get a down payment together for a starter home. Similar to 100k now, it was more than I needed to live a decent day to day life, but I still needed to plan for longer term financial goals.
Second, the average US salary is something like 55k. Even today a 100k salary would put your salary in the top 25% for US workers. I know plenty of junior developers with 1-2 years of experience making a good bit more than that. Even the low end of developer salaries puts you well above what most people in the US make. Obviously where you live matters, but in pretty much every region most non-tech employees will make less than your average developer at the same level of experience.
Tech (in the US) pays very well and I don't any other industry pays better compared to the amount of work needed to get your foot in the door. We've had it very, very good for a long time and even if things cool off a little bit, we're still going to have it far better than most. All this makes me think of is "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression"
Top 25% among agriculture workers in Kansas? The newgrad earning those 100k will have to live sonewhere in Northern California, where rent alone will claw 25k back for a crappy apartment. After IRS takes another 25k and food expenses another 25k, our new grad is left with just 25k to save for a 200k downpayment and 7.5k/month (is this the current rate?) mortgage payment.
Every comment you make just shows how disconnected from reality you are.
> Top 25% among agriculture workers in Kansas?
Top 25 across all us workers
> The newgrad earning those 100k will have to live sonewhere in Northern California, where rent alone will claw 25k back for a crappy apartment
Yes, I know. I lived as a new grad making 75k in a major city (Los Angeles, not bay area though). Rent is expensive and will likely take 1/3 of your paycheck or more. It's been like that for years though and that's not something that's changed recently. It also doesn't negate the fact that our industry still pays far better than most.
> food expenses another 25k
The fuck are you eating? If you're spending 2k a month on food you don't get to complain about money. I hate cooking and love good food and regularly spend $1500 a month on dining, but I'm well aware that if I needed to I could drop that by $1000. Spending $2k a month on food is choice you're making.
> save for a 200k downpayment and 7.5k/month (is this the current rate?) mortgage payment.
Who is saving 200k for a down payment? The days of 20% down are long gone and pretty much everyone gets PMI. Especially for your first home you can cut that in half.
Also, why are you as a new grad buying a million dollar home? Where did you get this idea that a new grad's salary should allow you to purchase a long term home in a major city without making some financial trade offs? That has never been the case. Your expectations are completely disconnected from reality and you're comparing your situation to a reality that never existed.
You can either wait until you're further along in your career and your salary is higher to buy, buy something cheaper (don't say this isn't possible, I know for a fact it is in), or move to an area with a lower cost of living.
It's not even the case that all of us (programmers) are riding so high on the hog.
I've been in tech for decades and make now what would be an entry level salary at a tech giant or VC funded startup. Why? Because I work in the education sector and didn't hop jobs during the pandemic.
This stuff has to level off. Everything is really distorted due to the money printing and the tech hiring bonanza during the pandemic days. People can't expect to go to a boot camp and then immediately make as much as doctors and lawyers who trained for years, it is totally unsustainable.
Children were learning to program when I was young (and before), yet we still have a shortage of tech workers. We teach children math, but that doesn't mean we're going to end up with an glut of actuaries.
It depends where you are in your career, but I definitely think that we're headed into a recession that will be tough for early-career folks. The amount of value that experienced ops and appdev hands can provide isn't going down, so their salaries shouldn't.
BUT I think we're looking at a downward trend in the amount of value a new CS grad can provide to most businesses (besides maybe bargain-basement body shop type operations like CapGemini and friends). I think (IOW no data to support this, but I'd be interested in seeing it if anyone has some) this trend has been ongoing for a while now but was kind of papered over by overhiring (some say "talent hoarding") caused by low interest rates.
This is all speculation of course, but I think things will be harder for a new CS grad today -- at least for a while -- but it will still probably be a fulfilling, not-impoverishing career if you can get started.
Unfortunately, I think the ship has sailed on nontraditional entrants to the tech job market (folks like me who never got a CS degree at all).
Established professionals are probably in a pretty good spot and, with a pipeline issue (fewer young people able to enter the field), their value may even increase.
Somewhat misleading headline. The only reason 2023 is higher is that companies didn't want to do layoffs in Nov/Dec and held until Jan. Better to just look at the graph: https://layoffs.fyi/ The trend is definitely down.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadNow, to be clear, I'm not saying that AI won't ever become a centrepiece of most companies, I'm simply saying that it isn't at this very moment yet. Half my digital agency clients haven't even heard of Copilot, let alone would they start building AI for their customers.
> He had a PhD in AI from MIT. Just to contextualize what that means in Silicon Valley, an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7643902
If this piece is representative of the site, I would not use it for the basis of arguments
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/07/tech-jobs-are-still-the-most...
BLS jobs data is available to the public, go read it and you will confirm what I already told you
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
It also claims that IT job growth outpaces most other industries
Yes, it really is that bad. A couple of years ago my LinkedIn inbox was flooded with recruiters. Now it's a ghost town.
I'm considering pivoting into full-stack dev, but it's slow going. And even if that works, I'd be a junior developer. The situation is grim to say the least.
Money no longer being almost-free to borrow.
If anything, these massive companies will benefit when they can pick up struggling startups with great tech for a 1/1000th of their peak private valuation.
But, Microsoft, Meta, Google, etc. are not raising money on the open market; they have treasuries and revenue. I really think there's a lot of complexity going on here; interest rates going up didn't cut consumer spending by that much, so discretionary purchases didn't decrease, which meant that people were still buying ads and funding these companies. (I guess Microsoft doesn't make any money off of ads, but Google and Meta do.) I am guessing that people didn't expect the discretionary purchases to remain steady; in the past, interest rate increase = unemployment increase = nobody buying anything, but that appears to not be happening this time. Additionally, on the tech side of things, hype about AI is giving investors a serious fear of missing out, so there is definitely a bit of investment happening.
So all in all, I think these are very weird times, and it's hard for anyone to plan. You can guess, you can hope, but at the end of the day, we don't really know. We know what caused recessions in the past, but we don't know what the 10 year horizon looks like for "there is a deadly disease, everyone work from home and buy as much stuff from China as possible, oops they are all sick so only the highest bidder gets their thing, and oh btw you don't have to pay off your student loans anymore so bid away!" It made the $ worth a lot less. That's about it.
That is exactly what is going on. A lot of people don't understand that if your risky business can't make as much return as the "risk free return rate" (i.e. the rate of return on US Treasuries), the only logical thing to do (as a business owner) is close up shop, as all your hard work is earning LESS money than just dumping it in CDs.
When the risk-free rate was essentially zero, or in some cases negative, people would throw around money all over the place in hopes of getting some positive return. The bar has just been raised so that is no longer the case.
Sure, of course. There was also massive over-hiring during the pandemic in anticipation of some sort of "new normal" that didn't pan out.
My comment was more in response to the idea of "why should interest rates affect company hiring for companies that have a ton of cash on hand and are profitable?"
Witness: Walmart, Costco, Target and most of the retail sector. People have never stopped creating these low margin businesses.
You're not actually earning a return via US treasuries, you might get lucky and keep pace with inflation.
More broadly you've dropped the context, which is that the business in question can be growth positive even with high risk and tiny margins. US Treasuries are not growth positive, they don't grow and spit off new capital to reinvest into further expansion. Operating with a 2.3% operating income margin is a risky business, retail is extraordinarily difficult and is extraordinarily risky to start a business in due to the very low margins, and yet people will keep on doing it perpetually regardless of interest rates.
Earning a lower rate of return for eg five years on a business (vs treasuries), while re-investing into said business, can be the rational thing to do for a larger longer term payoff (which you'll never get out of treasuries). Your premise ignores pretty much all the very complex nuance to business. To say nothing of that the rational thing to do sometimes, is to do what you enjoy, which perhaps is operating a very low margin convenience store instead of sitting on a stack of treasuries. Businesses (more common in small to mid-size businesses) are frequently not run for maximum return, and that action can in fact be quite rational.
not at linkedin it ain't
Also as opposed to the idea that others in this thread seem to be suggesting that LinkedIn knows the future so is laying off to save costs in an anticipated tougher future, as opposed to looking at their recent history and laying off based on that to appease shareholders that they're taking corrective action.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
The hurdle rate went up accordingly. A lot of business models that worked over the past decade are on borrowed time right now. Every company and employee's situation is different and talent is still rewarded, but many pre-revenue companies are facing a very different financial reality and can sustain a much smaller workforce.
a job at Chipotle is on par with a job at OpenAI
This economy is not healthy and there's a zero percent chance we get out unscathed. Good luck, stay diverse and don't lock yourself into some crazy mortgage or other debt
I.E. - you have companies that are 70% product-engineering by employees doing a 10% cut - and only 10% of the cut is coming from product-engineering.
If it was proportionate - you'd see 70% of laid off employees being product-engineering - instead of 90% coming from recruiting, sales, and marketing - which only makes up like 20% of the company in the first place...
The rest of the economy seems to be doing fine. If recruiters and marketers and salespeople are going from "tech companies" to other companies and keeping similar wages - that doesn't at all seem doom-worthy.
Full-time workers: -22K
Part-time workers: +151K
Indicative of the overall trend, which is net of jobs added since the pandemic is part-time workers. The quality of jobs gained is deteriorating
It's almost irrelevant what the broader economy unemployment rate is. For example, where I live there was actually pretty strong tech employment growth in 2008 despite it being a bloodbath for the broader economy.
Now, I happen to agree with you that there is still a strong need for tech workers (previous comment on this topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881705), but most of those jobs are at significantly lower salary for a lot of people. The fact is there is a glut of recently laid off tech people looking for jobs, and saying "ignore your own eyes and experience" is not helpful.
why? funding?
Even in a profitable company like Google, which has existing revenue streams, some of the headcount is there to keep the systems running, but much of it is still investment in future growth. In an unprofitable company like (Uber? I haven't checked), they're losing money in the present in the hopes of earning more in the future.
Contrast with, say, Kellogg's, where most of the headcount is there to sustain existing revenues and production, and only a little is being invested into new product lines, cost-saving optimization, and future growth.
As interest rates rise, it makes today's revenue more preferable and future revenues less important. That has a strong impact on the valuation of companies like Uber and Google, and a weaker impact on the valuation of companies like Kellogg's.
A company that is still pre-profit but has a bit of revenue might need to cut its expenses to become profitable, even at the expense of future growth. A company that is pre-profit with no revenue might want to keep its employees to launch products ASAP, but with investment drying up it could go bankrupt first.
And at a company like Google, the shareholders may be interested in pivoting towards the Kellogg's model to keep the share price high. So they lay off a bunch of cost-adding developers, and focus more on stretching today's advertising revenue as far as possible. The only future development being pursued will be the ones where payoff is so big that it's worth it even at a high discount rate, so perhaps AI.
Contrast with the market for "jobs" paid from investment rounds where the "work" is playing with computers and the objective is "growth" instead of profits. If the output of such activity was the production of actual, sustainable businesses (cf. short-term investment opportunities for small sets of sophisticated investors), then these employees would still be needed.
> complex backend, large-scale distributed systems
you mean AWS/cloud then you are gonna be juuuuuuuust fine for a while
Although, I feel like most people I've met in tech recently are not exactly "hacker" types, but just people chasing a check. SWE is one of the easiest, low-effort industries to break into. People like that might have a harder time.
I guess it works
https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/572952707788505088
"enjoy the party, but dance close to the door"
If tech could survive the dot-com bubble, it can survive higher interest and inflation.
If you're panicked, you need to take a hard look at our industry and realize how insane our industry was for the past few years. My company isn't even one of the FAANGs and we were paying interns 6 figures. I know people in other industries who have over a decade of experience who are paid less than the FAANGs pay entry level hires. That's not normal and that's not sustainable.
Salaries will depress a bit, but SWEs will likely still make far above average. If you're worried about jobs, just look at the stock market. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta are all in the top 6 biggest companies in the US (by market cap). Those companies aren't going anywhere and they have a massive amount of code to maintain. Developers aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
The dot com bubble and the great recession were both way worse than what we are experiencing, but tech continued to grow.
Responding to your points, first, inflation calculators exist. 100k today is a little over 75k 10 years ago. Coincidentally, that's exactly how much I was making in 2014 living in a HCOL city, so I'm well aware exactly how far that goes. I definitely had money to save up for a house, but it still would have taken years of budgeting for me to get a down payment together for a starter home. Similar to 100k now, it was more than I needed to live a decent day to day life, but I still needed to plan for longer term financial goals.
Second, the average US salary is something like 55k. Even today a 100k salary would put your salary in the top 25% for US workers. I know plenty of junior developers with 1-2 years of experience making a good bit more than that. Even the low end of developer salaries puts you well above what most people in the US make. Obviously where you live matters, but in pretty much every region most non-tech employees will make less than your average developer at the same level of experience.
Tech (in the US) pays very well and I don't any other industry pays better compared to the amount of work needed to get your foot in the door. We've had it very, very good for a long time and even if things cool off a little bit, we're still going to have it far better than most. All this makes me think of is "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression"
> Top 25% among agriculture workers in Kansas?
Top 25 across all us workers
> The newgrad earning those 100k will have to live sonewhere in Northern California, where rent alone will claw 25k back for a crappy apartment
Yes, I know. I lived as a new grad making 75k in a major city (Los Angeles, not bay area though). Rent is expensive and will likely take 1/3 of your paycheck or more. It's been like that for years though and that's not something that's changed recently. It also doesn't negate the fact that our industry still pays far better than most.
> food expenses another 25k
The fuck are you eating? If you're spending 2k a month on food you don't get to complain about money. I hate cooking and love good food and regularly spend $1500 a month on dining, but I'm well aware that if I needed to I could drop that by $1000. Spending $2k a month on food is choice you're making.
> save for a 200k downpayment and 7.5k/month (is this the current rate?) mortgage payment.
Who is saving 200k for a down payment? The days of 20% down are long gone and pretty much everyone gets PMI. Especially for your first home you can cut that in half.
Also, why are you as a new grad buying a million dollar home? Where did you get this idea that a new grad's salary should allow you to purchase a long term home in a major city without making some financial trade offs? That has never been the case. Your expectations are completely disconnected from reality and you're comparing your situation to a reality that never existed.
You can either wait until you're further along in your career and your salary is higher to buy, buy something cheaper (don't say this isn't possible, I know for a fact it is in), or move to an area with a lower cost of living.
I've been in tech for decades and make now what would be an entry level salary at a tech giant or VC funded startup. Why? Because I work in the education sector and didn't hop jobs during the pandemic.
This stuff has to level off. Everything is really distorted due to the money printing and the tech hiring bonanza during the pandemic days. People can't expect to go to a boot camp and then immediately make as much as doctors and lawyers who trained for years, it is totally unsustainable.
Lots of people hate working in tech.
BUT I think we're looking at a downward trend in the amount of value a new CS grad can provide to most businesses (besides maybe bargain-basement body shop type operations like CapGemini and friends). I think (IOW no data to support this, but I'd be interested in seeing it if anyone has some) this trend has been ongoing for a while now but was kind of papered over by overhiring (some say "talent hoarding") caused by low interest rates.
This is all speculation of course, but I think things will be harder for a new CS grad today -- at least for a while -- but it will still probably be a fulfilling, not-impoverishing career if you can get started.
Unfortunately, I think the ship has sailed on nontraditional entrants to the tech job market (folks like me who never got a CS degree at all).
Established professionals are probably in a pretty good spot and, with a pipeline issue (fewer young people able to enter the field), their value may even increase.
We're into Q4. Does this imply that the downward trend of the past few months will lead to another January spike?
(taken from a 3rd grade math exam, in a better timeline)
That's 200k+-40k, or +-20%. If you are representing the difference between 160k and 240k as 50% and not as 20%, then that is a problem.