Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again.
I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company.
Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space)
Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements."
With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.
A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade.
My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long.
It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.
I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you.
I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying.
But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow.
In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works.
Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
I bought a house a few years ago and got all electric yard tools (mower, trimmer, blower, and more - all Ego). They're a joy to use. Such a step up from the gas tools of my youth.
I am also one that doesn’t really enjoy total specialization but every single thing I can come up with, looks like a hobby compared to being a developer financially.
Agreed, I'm probably past the point where I could make a jump into the career area I wish I had gone into with hindsight (forest ranger, fisheries & wildlife, land management for land trusts, etc), but if I was <= 35 I would consider it. However at the age of 41 I've crossed into the 250k+ total comp territory and it's hard to imagine taking that significant pay decrease and making a move where I'm at the bottom of the ladder.
Maybe it depends how you view it (and your financial position, obviously high income doesn't necessarily mean any saved/significant assets) - one could think of it like early retirement, not a career change and pay cut, but something to occupy some time, do for interest/meet people/see things/be outdoors, etc.
(By the way, as an almost 30yo SE with a younger brother doing exactly what you describe... I'm not sure quite how to feel!)
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
How do you make money doing this?
I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The best way to do this would imo run for city council with the backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road improvements.
Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally can't remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal level.
Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm charging for, but don't yet have customers) is:
1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize scooter usage.
2. The scooter parking would make use of existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't take away existing car parking.
3. Work with the staff to find the staff that lives relatively close to the business, and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold through their scooter purchase, so when they're working, their scooter is parked outside.
4. Once there's staff using scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or two parked outside the building, which will start to normalize scooter usage for customers
5. Hand-hold early adapting customers through the same process.
6. Add signage and website and email campaigns to let interested customers learn more about the whole thing.
Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining the process until during busy hours, there is a number of scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the number of parking spots.
I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking, and helping more people start scooting.
I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago, and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from the effects of their decisions.
There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper class white people.
The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not helpful to directly target legal changes.
Okay, I commented below but you mean a MOPED type scooter not a lime / bird type e-push scooter.... I literally was imagining you out in the street marking lines on the pavement for lime scooters that are the size of... well the lines in the first place and was like "this dude is off his rocker"
I may indeed be off my rocker, but at least it's for slightly more sophisticated reasons than what would be implied by my choice to be hustling lime scooters!
'i went to Canada on a scooter' has such a a different implication...
revzilla, like revzilla.com, the motorcycle store, or magazine, as you say?
saw a dude yest cruising around on some type of etrike - i liked it, and i think the main reason was because it didn't seem as ugly and wide and low-quality as a typical non-e-trike.
i could see etrikes becoming a thing for older americans, and that matters because they have a ton of political power, relatively speaking.
i figure, all the hype around ebikes is great, but largely useless. all that really matters is infrastructure/policy -- i.e. bike tracks, bike sidewalks, cycletracks, protected bike lanes, whatever you want to call them.
i feel like the golf cart-oriented communities are a perfect example of re/designed infrastructure allowing people to get around by something other than cars. same might happen if a bunch of older, upper-income white people with tons of political power decide etriking might be something they might like to do occasionally. they wouldn't have to be older or white - it just so happens that's the demographic that is currently in charge and has been forever and prob will be for the foreseeable future, and so many of our policies are based on identity politics.
I think scooters could be great for older folks, too. Help them retain balance and stuff. Scooters are way more stable than bicycles, but can go fast and can ride as fast as a car, if needed.
Totally agree with old white people representing political power, so whatever they want is what happens.
Revzilla has a blog and paper magazine (yes, real high quality paper) and it's the some of the best writing on motorcycle culture anywhere right now. (Along with Zach Bowman at The Drive and Fortnine's YouTube.)
The pitch is that businesses can reduce parking congestion (is there a dollar value you can pin to this?) by paying you to act as a personal scooter consultant for their employees?
During research did you come across any mass-market applications of this sort of concierge service? It sounds very niche/upscale. I can’t think of any purchase I’ve made where I could have even found someone to hold my hand through it that wasn’t the person making the sale. The closest analogue I can think of is a travel agency.
A good (new) scooter costs $4500 out the door, and plan on another $600 for a jacket, gloves, a Snell-certified helmet, cell phone mount, and bluetooth headset so you can hear directions from your phone.
Take a motorcycle rider training course, and get the motorcycle endorsement on your drivers license.
Next would be skills-building around slow-speed turns on the scooter. It'll be pretty easy, but you'll have to practice it at least a little.
For that cash I can just have a motorcycle or an e-bike. Why would I want a scooter in this case? Not dissing on scooters, I don't get it though. Bikes and motorocyles are a lot more stable at speed than scooters.
OH YOU MEAN A MOPED... not a Lime Scooter. OK... we're on the same page.
Yeah I'll keep rocking my FJR but I'd do a e-moped if I had rides around my house, tho for that an e-bike is more compelling. FJR oddly gets 40+mpg.
Hah! I wonder how many other people have made the same mistake. There's really not a great word for this class of vehicle. I have been tempted to use the word 'moped', but got sternly corrected by the staff at sportique scooters when I was last there.
I think I might keep using the word moped though, motor scooter doesn't quite do it, and scooter is too confusing.
Or maybe I could say 'gas scooter' or '125cc scooter' or something.
I recently crossed paths with the the electric moped I met in the wild, and it was beautiful and quiet.
I'm not going to get rid of my 170cc scooter anytime soon, but I would totally consider adding an electric moped to the fleet.
There is indeed a dollar value one can pin to the extra parking availability. It's business dependent, but absolutely it can be tied to additional revenue.
And yeah, 'personal scooter consultant' is the pitch.
It's concierge and not traditional, but so am I.
As far as mass market application of this concierge service, I don't think there needs to be a mass market adaptation. Once there's some minimum buy-in, scooters will be normalized and more and more people will default into using them.
Its way more likely you would buy a scooter once you'd ridden on a friend's scooter from the gym to a local park for throwing a Frisbee. If, however, you didn't know anyone who owned a scooter, maybe you'd never own your own.
So... I'll hand-hold and concierge whatever is required to get critical mass.
I've already got two friends that have bought scooters, and they love it. I have four more friends now about to take the plunge. Scooters spread through friend groups, it seems.
Once you see how many problems they solve, and how much more fun and convenient they are, it's hard to unsee.
But it's damned hard to be the first person to make that choice.
I, too, don't know that I have seen this exact model before, but each scooter purchase saves a parking spot for another customer, so the businesses I work with will be invested in the results.
It's fun to work on, and everyone I've talked to has been super interested. Parking issues dominate the lives of general managers/directors/owners of Denver area businesses.
They'll try nearly anything to make those problems be less of an issue.
you sell the scooters and get a commission for the people re-doing the parking lots. the customer company is incentivized by green initiatives and they have budgets to spend.
Critically, no re-doing of the parking required. It'll just be adding scooter parking spots in existing nooks and crannys around the building/parking lot.
Company is incentivized by adding available vehicle parking spots.
Sportique scooters, the local scooter dealer to Denver, is down and happy to offer me some commission for scooter sales that I bring in, but that's not the main thing for me. I want corporate buy-in from the companies I'm courting, cuz I'll need their permission to access staff and customers.
(I'll be adding signage, and the companies will make some concession to scooter riders, to make it a bit more appealing. A free drink, $20/mo in free food, etc. It'll be a case-by-case decision, based on what they can offer that's easiest/most useful to the customer, etc)
Scooters are super cheap, and let you move through a city way fast, and can be parked nearly anywhere, regardless of how busy the area is, and it's literally $6 for a tank of gas. And they get 100 mpg.
I think a little progress will lead to a lot of progress.
I'm working on a model of charging the business for this service. A monthly fee, or project based fee.
This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks.
I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts.
It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out.
I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters…
> Working on going independent here in Denver … to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot
What will the scooter-users do when it snows? Don’t the parking lots still need to be scaled to the max likely number of cars?
when it snows, scooter-users probably won't scoot.
Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.
good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island.
So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites.
I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
I'm in the Philippines. Backend dev still working from home, but not making the kind of money I want to make and probably will not be able to make given the current state of tech. Maybe I need to think about a career change. Not getting any responses to applications at all.
I hear it's a hard world for engineering applications rn. That's part of why I didn't wanna go back into tech. We'll see. The world is in a strange way right now
'just' feels slightly de-dignifying, but overall this is not totally wrong.
I'd say there's a lot more to do there than sleep around, but there seemed to be plenty of that. (I'm white-passing, have done the nomad thing in the past, didn't go to sleep around, don't consider myself to be a terrible romantic partner, but am recently divorced, so you shouldn't take only my word on that).
I'm nearly autistic when it comes to land development regimes, and Indonesia is widely regarded as having some of the best land use regimes in the globe, and I wanted to go experience it.
Turns out... It does!
It hurts my soul to return to the USA, where urban planners are the land-use equivalent of flat earthers.
Interesting, I've gotten very interested in land use recently and had not heard this about Indonesia. Are you talking specifically about Bali here? Because I've been to Jakarta and I can't say I endorse the land use there based on the few business trips I've taken.
Where can I read more about what you're talking about?
Alain Bertaud wrote a book called "order without design". He's an urban economist, and... his book is all a city planner needs to do their job correctly.
I had long wanted to visit this sort of place, so in Bali, I walked into (and around) many, many, many kampungs, and sure enough, they were beautiful, affordable, and served the people that lived in and around them so well.
I believe all 'big' cities have adopted the 'american'/euclidean zoning version of land use policy, which was implemented by southerners in the 1920s to implement a regime of social control, allowing one ethnic group to use the political process to dominate another ethnic group. Jakarta follows the american land use policy, with the expected deleterious effects.
I'd strongly recommend getting a copy of Alain's book. It's the most concise take on land use policy I've encountered, and I've sorta 'read the canon' when it comes to these kinds of things.
I write about all of this stuff on my website (in my profile) and tiktok. I talk too much about zoning-as-ethnic-cleansing, according to some people, but i don't mind. https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists
i took a quick look at "Order Without Design" and am not digging what I've read so far.
to decide whether something might be worth a read, i usually try to get a quick feel for it from the title, subtitle, author, author's affiliations, the book's recommendations, etc.
in this case, it _seems_ like what I'm going to find as I cruise thru a couple articles and youtubes and possibly even the book itself as some point (tho, likely not), is just another bad justification for allowing markets (i.e. capital / investors / rich people / the right people) to shape cities -- or shape them more than they're typically allowed to.
if a book about... well, anything... mentions markets, it's probably going to be pro-markets -- that is, 'poor people must obey the markets', not 'markets are created by humans to _serve_ humans'.
couple of the recommendations come from City Journal (hard core conservative city planning, or non-planning), and Richard Florida (hard core liberal/monied city planning).
but, will check it out some more -- maybe i'll be surprised.
For what it's worth, those articles and reviews that you mentioned seem to come out of Western and capitalist mindsets, but the author of the book is very French and very much not of that genre.
I think it's likely enough that you might be surprised that it's worth getting the book and seeing what you think.
Of course you might not like it, but I am so starved for novelty that I will explore opportunities for that dopamine hit on principle even if they don't all pan out.
If you read it and find it novel and interesting, I would be honored if you let me know. My email is in my profile.
The author and his late wife are fascinating. Look up the 'order without design podcast', and you're bound to be entertained.
I'm already honored by the amount of due diligence you have done, so even if you don't get the book or get it and don't follow up with me, you've given me a lovely thing, kind internet stranger.
The zoning regime that was invented in the south went to the supreme Court as a result of it being implemented in the town of Euclid Ohio.
So you're right, Ohio isn't the south, but the regime that was approved by the supreme Court was invented by essentially the mayor of Atlanta.
It is just a re-implementation of Jim Crowe. The guy that invented it said:
> To maintain the harmonious relations between the races, care has been given to ensure adequate separation between them.
He was dscribing r1 verse r2 zoning. Pretty much every municipality in America still has r1, r2, r3 zoning on the books.
The guy that invented it said r1 zoning was for the white, r2 zoning was for the colored, r3 zoning was for the undecided.
When I bought a house in Golden, it was in an r2 neighborhood.
R1 is suburbia. It's genuinely horrifying that this travesty of a legal regime has not been ended yet, but most politically powerful white people can't be bothered to do a modicum of research, and they believe the propaganda they've been fed that says suburban neighborhoods, maintained by r1 zoning, are pleasant places to live.
Hmmmm, call me skeptical, but i'll check it out. From what I know off the top of my head, ton of people, bunch of islands -> requires concentrated land use like manhattan or hk or singapore or sf or choose your concentrated land mass -- not sure any would qualify as good or smart or sustainable or 'some of the best' land use, but will def check it out.
It's not about concentrated versus not concentrated, it talks about the origin of the decisions that lead to how the built environment environment is shaped by the needs and preferences of the people who inhabit it
The book is definitely worth reading. It gets a smidge academic at times, but a moderately interested high schooler could easily parse the entire thing, and it'll forever transform how you view land use issues throughout the world.
I know what you mean as far as skepticism. The modern /western world kind of resists at a philosophical level adopting norms coming from countries that it deems as second class.
Woah, while you might be right to some extent, it feels pretty harsh to judge someone else so superficially just on where they choose to travel, and what they do there, and at what age they do it.
The entire comment is judgmental and insecure. There are just as many women only there to do yoga and “find themselves”, and they have the nerve to be white too.
We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs.
Here's the summary:
- 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022.
- Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
> Unfortunately, the term “tech” has become diluted to the point of worthlessness.
Indeed. Nearly every so-called "tech" company is not actually in the business of selling technology products, so they aren't really tech companies.
Of course they create technology (sometimes very nice ones) internally in support of their actual business, but tech isn't the business the company board cares about.
Netflix is a movie production and distribution company. Google and Facebook are advertising companies. At least Apple is an actual tech company.
Wrong. Google and Facebook would be Ad Tech companies if they sold the ad tech. Instead they use the ad tech to sell ads. So I think it’s more accurate to call them ad companies.
The problem is that everything is technology. The wheel is technology.
But since there wasn't any good words to use to describe the practical application of computer science and other skills related to computers, we just used the term "information technology". Because, it's relatively descriptive. Computers are technology to leverage information. Everything related to getting computers to exchange information would be considered technology related to that.
But then it gets shortened to "IT" and just "tech". Networking is "tech", software is "tech", hardware is "tech".
I've come to disregard anything that bills itself as simply "tech". It's smoke and mirrors. You're looking to gussy up something that would otherwise be banal.
The linked blog post reads like the other 43.3% don't seem to have found any new jobs at all (if I'm reading it right). ("There could of course still be many that have found new jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a common practice on LinkedIn").
Zero of my friends laid off from google are even looking for a new job.
My wife was always asking me to retire, but after a year or so she’d say “it would be good for you to have a job”. Then repeat. Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s.
So I suspect a bunch of them will be back in the job market eventually.
Its actually not that unexpected, a big contributor is inflation.
If you've any experience with Argentina, or other hyper-inflationary events, there comes a point where your labor is more valuable to you than what others are willing to pay you for.
When the store of value is degrading rapidly, and wages in general always lag, those with options will do something else.
Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adjust their wages for inflation. When we were in a 2% inflationary environment, and that 2% could be counted on year after year as being stable, it was more reasonable.
With inflation in the double digits, with real inflation according to previous more accurate methods showing roughly a ~33% loss in value YOY, and the corresponding increase in taxes (as inflation increases your taxes increase as you enter higher tax brackets for the same value), it makes a lot more sense to use your efforts for yourself instead of being on the open market.
Factor markets and producers decide what they are willing to accept, and with a moving goal post in terms of a currency store, it makes more sense to wait in sheltered assets and produce goods you'll use.
People in general won't accept doing $1,000 in work and by the time they can spend it only having $700, or worse for example $1.
Do you think they will continue doing that work moving forward if they have no expectation of getting anything comparable in value in return?
This was actually my thought process to postpone job searching among many other things after my physics PhD graduation last year. I had managed to make substantial savings during the Covid period. I didn’t find ethical to invest them in stocks and the interest rates for government bonds were not close to match the inflation. So I took a time off to allocate time for spending/investing, learning new skills and working on an open source project full time.
So far managed to install 5kW solar panel arrays at two family properties connecting that to the grid and figuring out a way to get reimbursed by government and so lowering final costs around 2500 euro for each installation. Now I have an excess electricity so I invested in a sawmill and hopefully soon will slice a timber for a joy of doing so. Being able to build my own sauna and get some wood for roofing could potentially break it even.
Also investing time and attention into my open source project gives me the basic fulfilment for purpose and creativity urgently needed after experiencing academia. Learning a lot of new stuff - HTTP, onion architecture, QML, public key cryptography and zero knowledge proofs - among many other things. While also being able to express myself creatively in software development than I ever could be in academia. Does not matter much if the developed idea fails, I just really want to know how.
My dislike of investing in stocks comes from supporting the institution, which decouples owners and consequences. When shareholders make a profit at the hands of slave labour, they never get to experience the impact on their environment. Even if they do get some attribution of blame, it is diluted between multiple shareholders and pension funds. As long as CEO makes a profit, no shareholder remotely cares what practices the company uses. The remoteness of owners makes these things much worse than when a union can talk to the business owner.
Also, no small investment makes a difference in the trajectory of how the corporation proceeds. A vision can not emerge on the shareholder’s side when the voting power is highly distributed, and the knowledge of how the company operates is secondary to the stock owners. Thus only a profit-seeking motive survives, and with that, practices of maintaining monopoly power by buying out competitors, ridiculous patent lawfare and restraining the ability to fix things you buy. F** that.
> I didn't find it ethical to invest in the stock market.
Ethics are individual, but I can totally agree with this sentiment.
To effectively make money in up, down, or sideways markets you need to be able to trade options. Options are risky, but you can structure them in combinations to reduce risk, but those positions are handled differently depending on whether you are a primary dealer, or an individual investor.
When certain options are coupled in certain structures, they form synthetic shares at the broker dealer level which can exceed the amount of shares in the float, and the market maker assumes the risk because they delta hedge to facilitate selling and clearing contracts.
As a result, with sufficient capital you can manipulate the market price down since a synthetic share is counted indistinguishable from a real share and with sufficient capital this can be an arbitrary amount.
The basic mechanics of the market are when there are more sellers than buyers the price goes down, the opposite causes the market to go up.
Algorithmic trading capitalizes on volumes/churn, and can trigger intentional volatility halts with sufficient churn which almost seemed targeted when it might go against a short seller (i.e. moving up).
Overall the markets today from what I've seen are just a very clever way to fleece people's retirement money. For someone to gain, someone must lose. Ethically, its quite tainted, but other avenues for capital investment are generally not easily accessible to accounts less than 100k.
Additionally, while individual investors may be fined for breaking SEC laws, the fines for broker-dealers and hedgefunds almost never come close to the profits (fraud is baked in) at least in any action taken in the last two decades that I've seen.
You have dark pools also that don't have to register the sales with an exchange sometimes until end of day (which isn't reflected in the exchanges market price, at least afaik).
It is also possible to fix prices with two colluding parties through opposite ended contract legs for prices based on volume/active futures/contracts by creating a net zero position between those parties (spot price gold/silver; eligible vs registered), yes, its against the law but the SEC is toothless against the major players doing this, and they can't force the visibility needed to go after them. They lose in court(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Eyo0u4_sYI&ab_channel=ThePr...).
In short, its on their honor as broker dealers that their numbers at the COMEX are accurate, and there has never been an independent audit.
JPM manipulated the silver market for decades and got off free and clear with only a small fine, moved operations overseas and continued doing more of the same in the London Exchange (from what I've heard, though that's strictly rumor so take that for what it is).
Gamestop was another where they were testing gamma with contracts forcing the market maker to induce a short squeeze to cover, The regional bank FRC most recently with a well timed media package (inducing a bank run) after two other bank failures which were known well in advance. Was just criminal.
I saw a completely fake video show up on youtube about that time with people lined up outside a building on a Sunday to get their money with the video headline showing "FRC bank run in progress". Driving down the street filming a building where storefront windows with the reflected text in the wrong direction and a line outside (it was a sunday, banks aren't open).
What was done with the media coverage looked totally criminal for a bank that was on solid foundations and practices (as a model of good banking). With the exception of aggregated indebtedness requirements for a publicly traded company which was caused by the shorting and subsequent drop in share price which forces the bank to have liquidity issues.
If there was not some level of tacit approval for additional consolidation of an already consolidated business sector, where they mention the risks in the previous FOMC meeting for regional banks. Its pretty clear there should have been much more action taken after the third bank failed(Credit Suisse), which didn't happen.
Standard SEC Disclaimer, I hold a long position on FRC which will probably expire worthless at a loss.
I'm from Argentina, even now with 100% inflation YoY I wouldn't call it "hyper-inflationary". We had hyper-inflation in 1989 and that was 79% monthly.
People in general won't accept doing $1,000 in work and by the time they can spend it only having $700, or worse for example $1.
nobody is quitting their jobs because the currency is losing value. You cash your salary and just buy stocks, bonds, crypto, foreign currency and obviously groceries.
Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adjust their wages for inflation
With inflation in the double digits, with real inflation according to previous more accurate methods showing roughly a ~33% loss in value YOY, and the corresponding increase in taxes
yes, some real wisdom here. Here, anybody that's in demand becomes self employed and that brings two benefits: first you can raise your rate as often as you want. Second, your tax rate decreases and gets more predicable for the fiscal year.
We had close friends growing up who were originally from Argentina during that time period in the early 90s, they were clearly traumatized by it. They told stories of raising chickens for eggs, and goats for milk/cheese/food, and the father credited that as the only reason they made it. Their stories left a real impression on me growing up.
I ended up doing a lot of research during my college years. By definition hyper-inflationary is >50%/month, but it always lags and government isn't incentivized to keep it accurate.
Year over year stateside is relatively tame in comparison except its not going to taper off as long as they keep printing increasing amounts of money.
The Fed also broke banking when they departed from fractional banking in 2020 by setting the required deposits to 0% and went with capital requirements which use Basel III (counting capitalization on the stock market as backing deposits), which as we've seen with FRC, stock market exposure for banks in general is a bad idea.
We are talking about people making above >150k/year here right ? At no point does 10-20% inflation mean they are better off growing their own food or some shit like that.
Your point is probably applicable in less developed economies/low paid positions. For highly specialized well paid positions if this was the case you'd probably have a societal collapse.
Actually, increasing rates of inflation do mean people are better off sustaining themselves and leaving the credit based economy that has a rising inflation rate with its credit based currency. The weak buying power of an individual currency unit, like a United States dollar, indicates a geopolitical state and economy that is beginning to lack the ability to sustain further revenue increases in a generalized shareholder account of wealth. And middle class or bourgeois laborers are those general shareholders in the hypothetical credit based economy and state I'm talking about here. Basically, a credit bubble is naturally popping to combat real overpopulation and making a lot of money (like a billion dollars, actually) here might actually be a fool's game. So investing in outside assets, relative to the indicated failing state and the credit based assets its domestic production offers its domestic shareholders, is the rational move to make in this theoretical game.
So the question now is: what can we do and invest in as part of our survival motivated escape from the failing society?
Lets do some basic math, and then afterwards I think it will be clear how it might be better to grow your own food.
Also, not everyone makes that much, and you seem to think that's a lot but its really not, especially if inflation is eating away at your stores regularly (over a greater time period than a year).
So, here comes the basic math available from looking up some publicly available figures. I only say this because some people have past trauma associated with math in general, but its really critical to make any kind of rational comparison.
The Federal tax rate above 89K is $15,213.50 in taxes plus 24% of the amount over $89,075 for Federal up to ~170k, and then you also have State taxes which may be as high as 13.3%; more if you own property (% based on fixed value), plus its counted as ordinary income so social security and medicare take off another 15.3%. Anything you buy has sales tax so another ~7%, and fuel/vehicle taxes.
Overall, at 89K ordinary income, 15213 = ~17% +15.3%+13.3% = ~45.6%, nearly half of what you get paid on goes to the government. Now comes along 20% inflation, and this is a tax because they printed too much money and couldn't balance a budget.
So 65.6%, assuming inflation is at 20% and not much higher, then there's taxes on various goods you have to purchase such as fuel and general sales tax, property taxes, it varies, but we'll say 7% or more on any dollar you spend, and depending how much you have to drive, that could be about 3% (to make it round), since vehicle costs and taxes are non-deductible.
So factoring in all taxes on that income you receive, somewhere between 65 and 75.6% with 20% inflation goes to government. If you are self employed, you have more options to make certain costs deductible, and if you are not its about half of that 15.3% less so there's some leeway.
So, you can work 80 hour weeks, stressful job, making that 89K/year or more, and only take home ballpark around 30,616 after factoring in inflation, and taxes. If you don't reinvest in an asset that sheltered from inflation you lose that much or more of your surplus/stores the following year and each subsequent year thereafter whereas business simply passes it through to you in higher costs.
Alternatively, you can grow your own food, produce your own products, work less, and keep 100% of what you produce and use, and if you have surplus sell some of it if the price is right and they'll tax you on that small amount.
Should you trade 4160 hours of your life for 89K, when, by the time you get it and can spend it, you only take home about 30K and the prices may have risen just as quickly during that time to net 0 or negative.
That's part of the horror of hyper-inflation, and while it hasn't by definition hit 50%/month yet, nothing fundamentally has changed to stop inflation despite what the news may be saying.
Those that have lived through similar situations know they have to invest their efforts in producing their own goods such as raising chickens, goats, milk and cheese. Without food security and having people who have specialized labor that can help out, you are at the mercy of creditors and the producers you depend on for daily necessities and they will pass inflation costs on.
This is the best little nugget of wisdom I've come across in a while, thank you for sharing it. It was well written and concise, and I feel like I understand the world a little better
I would kill to retire. All I want to do is make art, music, cook, hike, kayak, and travel on the cheap. I have about.... 1/20th of the savings needed.
I retired in my 20s. It's a fun novelty, but it wore off quickly. Your friends and family aren't around in most of your free time, and those things you used to enjoy in your limited free time now can't stretch to fill the new 10+ hours a day you have.
Like most things, the grass is greener on the other side.
I think we need to redefine retirement as “financial independence and free to do what you want”. I could honestly fill several hundred years of retirement with things I want to do. The people who get bored really puzzle me.
I retired by starting businesses early (16, all failed) and learning the lessons early to run something more successful when the opportunity arose. Those who train for it seem to get the most luck.
I thought the same as you and as an avid game, tech enthusiasts, electronics enthusiast, outdoorser reader and social person, I thought I'd be fine.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I find these things hold no intrensic meaning beyond the enjoyment of the moment - which I love, but isn't enough to satiate. None of these things bring fulfillment or accomplish any goal beyond thr arbitrary ones I set myself.
I suppose all goals are arbitrary at some level, but in my years retired I'm yet to work out how to bring that sense of real accomplishment back in my passtimes.
As such, I moved back from retirement to semi retirement after about 3 years. I still live on my own schedule, but I run a number of small businesses designed to do but not take over my life. I also volunteer and raise a family. I can't imagine ever fully "retiring" again, and I can see why a lot of older people give up on life after they do.
Hey, I'd wager I'd love to be retired. If you want that true back-to-the-grind experience I'd be happy to hold on to that nest egg of yours until I get bored. You can have my job. Check back on me any time, I guarantee you I won't be bored of retirement.
That doesn't mean I won't be programming and doing work-y type things, but just doing the ones I want to do.
I hope you get there and you're right! There are positive aspects of course, but like anything it becomes normalised.
It amazes me when I travel the world how many people live in places with absolutely stunning backdrops they take for granted because they've lived there so long. They forget and seem confused at first when you mention it. Anything becomes normalised and less exciting when it's your day to day.
Buncha folx humble bragging and moralizing about retiring at 30 after building trivial CRUD for dubious ad tech as some apex achievement and we surely will mourn their departure into the sunset.
I realized not long ago that all I really want to do is walk all day maybe listening to audiobooks sometimes. That’s my retirement plan until I get bored with it.
> I get the impulse, but why isn't this viewed as profoundly selfish?
I get that impulse, but that is like saying that most of our current jobs are reasonable and for the greater good cause?
Most of the real value providing and necessary jobs are currently underpaid, while on the other spectrums end few people can reap automations fruits that actually should be shared by society, or somehow like that.. ( I know, opinionated can derail into endless discussion topic and other's may express better).
Also, why isn't seen making music and art as a contribution to society while some of the current jobs are hurting society?
Is your reasoning here that it is selfish, because not everyone can do that, and if everyone could/did, then society would collapse due to no food production, garbage collection, emergency services, law enforcement etc, as all those people would also be out painting/kayaking etc?
I ask because as I first read your comment I was unable to see the selfishness, since GP outlined that they lacked the financial means to support that lifestyle (also implying that taxes would still be paid and money would flow through the system all the same). It took me writing out a reply to you, asking how you thought it selfish, before my brain came up with the potential answer I outlined in the first paragraph.
Right, my thinking here is that the dream of running away from the very society that granted you the freedom to run away seems like you're not "paying it forward" enough, to enable others to have the freedom you'd be taking advantage of.
Rather, I would imagine the "not-selfish" version of this would be to spend your life doing those things, and finding ways to help others get to where you're lucky to be.
I just find the "I'll get mine and fuck off" attitude to be less than ideal.
> Right, my thinking here is that the dream of running away from the very society that granted you the freedom to run away seems like you're not "paying it forward" enough, to enable others to have the freedom you'd be taking advantage of.
I see it completely the opposite. If someone has already made all the millions they'll ever need, it's better for society to free up that job for someone else who needs the income instead of keeping amassing more and more millions to one single person. Paying it forward here is opening up the opportunity for the next person.
Not that you asked, but that's not the attitude I have, and not the impact of retirement. Retirement is the freedom to do what you care about without the fear of going hungry or homeless. It's a luxury and a privilege, to be sure. But it in no way is telling anyone to fuck off. If that were the case, every retiree at 65 is telling the world to fuck off. Or is there some arbitrary number at which you're not telling the world to fuck off? Is it ok to retire at 65 but not 55? Or 45? Should we work until we're dead?
A life of "leisure" still contributes to society. I would of course still pay bills and buy things, supporting business. I'd still pay my taxes, supporting the government. I'd still volunteer, like I do now outside my job. I'd like to teach, write, and create more (I like to sing, make music, art, furniture, etc). And I'd really like to start an informal class for underprivileged youth to learn computer skills and get a job without going to college, like I did.
If I didn't have to work, I'd have a hell of a lot more time to make the world a better place. In addition to the selfish kayaking, cooking, traveling, etc, that I already do with a job.
That society took from you before you were born, and "getting yours" is merely getting back to zero. You have assets and liabilities. Liabilities include a requirement for basic poverty-level food, shelter, and (if necessary) medical care. Your assets balance those liabilities around $1M. So in my view that's actually zero. In fact you're not even really a full legal person until you own property; otherwise you're on the hook to rent an apartment just to maintain a driver's license or a voter's registration.
So... noone should exercise this freedom, because doing it is selfish? Then what are you paying forward for? Freedom noone should ever exercise? It feels like a prison with transparent bars.
Not sure it's any more selfish than working for giant corporations for a fat paycheck. Both are selfish in their own ways, and both can also help people in their own ways. I wouldn't say there's something inherently wrong with being selfish on its own.
Selfish how? Like not contributing to society? Do we really want to have an introspective philosophical debate about the societal impact of working for a tech company?
Seriously, why don't more people work so the investors can get a chunk of their value for doing nothing? How dare they do something so utterly anti-social as spend more time doing things with people that aren't making investors money? Why must the rich investor class make-do with their own money pile when a chunk of your effort could make their pile bigger?
$20,000 a year income puts one in the top decile of income worldwide. At $50,000 you are richer than 98.5% of the global population. That’s less than the median American worker ($54K) or the mean ($74K).
A lit more than any investor class are rich by any historical or global standard.
Until you actually start equating cost of living and buying power. You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had. If you're willing to move to a rural Indian slum, you're sure to live the most regal life one can afford there, but you will lose out on a lot of the value that you get from living where and how you are today. Which is better? Shrugs, everyone has their place and I'm sure you'll find yours too.
> Until you actually start equating cost of living and buying power.
The picture does not change substantially if you look at measures of income adjusted for purchasing power parity. The West is far richer than the Rest and the latter much more populous.
> You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had.
I eat better, fresher, cleaner food than they did most of the year, have far more variety in it, have access to vastly more cultural artefacts, and I have access to modern healthcare. I’d be dead but for antibiotics. The same is probably true of one of my children. My housekeeper lost a sister to illness at 21. More than likely she’d have survived if she’d had access to even the level of care standard in Shanghai twenty years ago. Being rich is in fact better than being poor and living in a rich country better than living in a poor one for the large majority of people.
You are arguing that your standard of living would increase by living in a slum because you would have more purchasing power? What?
I think you much overlook how great it is to have (somewhat) functional law enforcement, infrastructure, and access to goods and services and healthcare. This is what makes us rich, not the ability to buy cheap things.
So, if someone has made enough to retire early, they shouldn't. Instead the should grow thier pile even bigger, because that wouldn't be selfish on account of all the other people in the world not being able to grow thier piles bigger?
Jobs are high paying because someone thinks they provide (a lot) more value than they are paid. “Freeing up a high paying job” means someone who is worse at the job, on the margin, does it and less value is provided to everyone, aka society.
Not everyone needs to go get a job immediately after being laid off. Most people I know that when laid off from a tech company, take a minimum of 60 days off before starting a new job.
If you're 22, saddled with student debt, just signed a lease on an apartment and just bought a fancy new car you might be in a different situation but there's a lot of engineers in their 30s and 40s where a 3-6 month break from employment ("sabbatical") is something they've been planning for, for a few years now anyways.
An "X" company tells you (and them -- that's why companies position themselves) how to think about what they do.
So WMX is "in the trash business": sure they have logistics, and surely some custom software, but what they do is pick up the rubbish and bring it to the dump. End of story.
So Google (the world's largest advertising company) is called a "tech" company because without continuous work on their advanced technology they'd lose almost all their revenue. (what the rest of the people employed there do -- who knows? Nothing else contributes meaningfully to revenue). FB the same. Companies as diverse as Rambus, Cisco, NVidia, Apple, Boom (if they still exist), WhatsApp, Twitter (once upon a time) Snowflake...etc: technology is the linchpin of their work. Even Tesla, but not, say, for their BIPV (the roof tiles), which are decades-old me-too technology with no R&D at all.
At the opposite extreme, why was WeWork considered a "tech" business?
Uber employs a lot of programmers but I don't think of them as a tech business: their competitive advantage is their business model and their moat is branding, and they are all about piece work in small scale transport. There are plenty of useful SaaS companies who connected some existing packages and came up with a good new business, but aren't in the technology business; if they dumped k8s or Airflow or whatever and changed their stack it wouldn't matter much (so they never will).
There was a time when one or two people could make a product and be a tech company (Visicalc, 1.2 programmers; Intuit, 1 programmer), but nowaday if you can get into revenue with one or two programmers I'd say it's not a tech business. Can be a great business, don't get me wrong, but value, like Uber's, will come from domain strength and marketing/branding.
And to be a bit ad hominem: there's a higher density of tech businesses in Silicon Valley and a much lower density in SF. You can tell because the nerds in boring suburbia worry about bits and bytes and the folks up north use phrases like "founder lifestyle".
Stripe. They are a payment processor and work in Finance. What significant contributions to tech have they produced? I'm not being snarky, I'm just not familiar with any off the top of my head like I know React came from FB/Meta, Google & Amazon produce all sorts of cloud computing stuff, Apple produces lots of libraries/frameworks (most likely for their own hardware/ecosystem), Bootstrap came out of Twitter, etc.
Providing an API abstracting over the complexity of payment processing is the technology.
Google's search engine is technology but you would probably say "isn't that just a researching documents"?
A bit weird how you only deem companies technological if they have released popular OSS or Apple because they produce libraries/frameworks they use internally. Pretty sure all software companies use internal libraries.
That just seems to feed the point to me. Google was competing with organizations particularly created for a new tech market that didn't exist before them. NYC library was maybe the largest player available to consumers? (Before the emergent search tech like alta vista and yahoo that Google disrupted.)
Stripe is a payment processor with the most disruptive automation, competing with other payment processors older than the web. Every industry will be shrinking in people per net work, few industries are new things (at least for the public) enabled by automation.
If we want to call all disruptors tech companies, why not also call the old companies that transform to compete with them tech companies too? Then every industry is tech. But really it is the opposite, tech as it ages becomes regular business that is more dependent on trademarks, relationships, etc, so some things we consider tech from recent decades are less so now and companies that stay primarily in them are more like old industry than tech companies that compete for the newly emerging fields.
U got be kidding me. I'm not from Stripe but fintech is insanely complex when you want to do the dirty work and untangle all kinds of legal and financial mess to provide services globally. They are not called aws for payment for no reason
Does that mean that any company doing finance is tech? If we, as a community, decide to tag every industry with "tech" like fintech, agritech, edtech, etc. to companies that are disrupting some industry it loses any meaning. Is every SaaS a tech company? Is disrupting the time tracking or invoice industry mean that is tech?
I think the qualifier is for companies that contribute something back, which many of those disruptor companies are using. Usually this contribution is some by-product since there are only a few companies who actually have main products as Tech.
Personally I avoid using the word "tech" and just say I do software stuff. Most people outside of computing just think its all the same anyhow ("can you help me with my wifi?" - In Laws, everywhere).
SaaS companies that are linking one business function to another where the entirety of the product is some software running on the cloud.
This isn't saying that they don't do development, but rather that they're not breaking new ground in tech. They aren't working on any cutting edge problems or developing frameworks to enable development at scale.
I worked at a company that did some logistics. There was an app for phones, some servers, and some software that did routing, provided ETAs to customers, and produced some reports.
I would lump it in the broad umbrella of "tech" but it isn't a company that's building the next big thing (or even small thing) that will change the world.
I'm the lead engineer at one of these and you nailed it. If I catch anyone "innovating" we have a talk about what it is they're working on to make sure it's part of our core business. It very rarely is.
I probably suck to work for in that way, but the reality is this is not a job about pushing the envelope, it's a job about executing as cleanly as possible. You work at one of these if you love to implement simple tech to solve non-tech problems, and I make that clear while hiring.
It's a moderately lucrative job, and can be very rewarding for certain types, but I totally understand if, coming from Google, it would be a system shock as it is decidedly not "tech" as most folks mean it.
Sometimes you have to NIH to understand why things the way they are. Granted, it's hard to justify on the company dime. From the perspective that 99% of software is awful and writing more is making things worse, I'm sympathetic to your position.
On the other hand, in my little corner of the world I've seen plenty of damage done by an "invent-nothing" mentality and an approach to software architecture that permits only plugging together popular open source components with fancy websites and corporate backing. For lack of a better term I call it "noun-driven development". You needed a disk reachable through an ssh server and an Apache directory listing, you ended up with Artifactory. You needed a library to replicate data with a Merkle tree, you ended up with someone's Kafka + etcd + memcached + redis + glusterfs Frankenstein monster, etc.
Isn’t this basically just saying “the way we’ve always done things here is optimal”? That is very rarely the case. Improvements, optimizations (even of a radical nature) are almost always possible. But yes it sounds like a lot of folks here would not like to work with someone so set in their ways.
The SaaS shop that I worked in had two Java devs, two JavaScript devs, a python gluer, and a mobile developer.
Building the even a basic framework takes hundreds of hours of developer time... for no real competitive advantage.
It's fine to work on innovative things (there was a point were something about Java annotations clicked and the report writing part got rewritten in a week)... but building big things that give small gains aren't viable in small shops.
Doing innovation on "how can we compress this web page even more" makes no sense at a small shop - if it's an issue grab Minify off the shelf and use that. Don't spend half a year writing your own that you'll need to support.
The small company is best served by working on things that give the competitive advantage - not working on those big ideas (unless that big idea is the competitive advantage).
Big tech companies have the advantage that they've got thousands of developers some of whom have some free time or the competitive advantage is removing another 200 bytes from a web page.
That small tech shop had 4000 hours of Java dev time to "spend" a year.. and another 4000 hours of JavaScript, and 2000 hours of python, and 2000 hours of android/iOS. There's a stack of 5000 hours of bugs and features for each of those parts of the app. Spending 500 hours of anyones time on something that can be solved off the shelf for under 10 hours to integrate is far from an optimal use of time.
Actually even this is wrong. Every laid off employee with a LinkedIn account that changed their employer on LinkedIn. I typically am not in a hurry to change mine.
The analysis is full of bad assumptions. For example, the section titled "Top Impacted Countries" is completely off: the article was written in Feb 2023 and in most countries the layoffs hadn't even begun back then (in a bunch of countries, including a couple "analysed" in the article, the layoffs are still to take place as I'm writing this).
If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the employees anonymized by title that were laid off in California (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
Surprised any FAANG uses teams. I think the only headshot you might need is for your badge, can't imagine any serious company mandates LinkedIn (that would be your boss deciding that and not HR).
Do you have any data on accuracy/completeness of LinkedIn profiles to accompany this? I get that LinkedIn is the most used platform, but as someone who doesn't use / update it (I have a largely dormant profile), I got the impression my demographic, while a minority, is still a relatively large minority.
Presumably the "total number of identified LinkedIn profiles" & the "total reported layoffs" figures don't match up: what happens to the data gap in your reporting?
Does your dataset include names or personally-identifiable information (IMO being able to key by all those 1-person companies counts)? If so, that seems a little... scuzzy? Would you consider pulling the dataset or at least making it coarse and pseudonymous? I would guess many of the people included and monetized here wouldn't expect or wish to be.
If the response is public scraping is legal, then I might suggest your company's framing of the product is making incorrect claims about this group. From your blog page:
"[N] people indicated a change of employment in the last 4 months (from the date of writing i.e. 14 February, yes Valentines’ Day) - aka ex-Googlers that got laid off."
That 'aka' doesn't necessarily follow, though? People leave companies for many reasons, and therefore this is not a valid "laid-off Googler" dataset.
(Edit: I might be misunderstanding but Google's layoffs were announced less than a month before Feb 14. Why look at the three months before that? Edit 2: noting sibling comment already asked this, didn't mean to duplicate)
Less important, while you do mention some biases inherent in the source (LinkedIn use by country, who has/updates a profile), please note that some of your blog article's headline claims are contradicted by publicly-available data available from press and WARN act filings.
Re: WARN act filings, here's a list of all the titles that were laid off in california (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
> We then used ChatGPT to clean up and categorize all 2-thousand and more roles into 9 main categories. Finally we did a quick manual comb-through to correct any discrepancy.
Yeah, that's a good question. Considering main revenue sources Google is a marketing/ad company and "tech" is simply an implementation detail.
I think a good litmus test is - if the Internet would die then would a given company be killed off by that. Ford and GS can function without it (it would be much harder but still they did that for decades) but for Google that would be the end.
> if the Internet would die then would a given company be killed off by that
That would select for Internet companies, not tech companies. And neither of the two is a strict subset of the other.
> for Google that would be the end
With no Internet, we'd still need comms, and mobile phones (and Android) would seem to be important there. And if that wasn't enough to keep them alive, they'd buy companies to do that.
> We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs.
This is an extremely inaccurate statement and really makes me question the validity of your research. And after I read it, there's so many problems that I think nothing conclusive can be drawn at all from it.
Equating "Everyone who changed their employer on LinkedIn from Google to somewhere else between these dates" and "laid off from Google." is embarrassingly bad methodology.
Even in a time of layoffs, hundreds, if not thousands, of people leave Google every month for their own reasons.
If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the titles that were laid off in california (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.
I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier.
I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer".
I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric".
A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects".
The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack.
A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough.
You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.
I am not a psychological professional, and I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t believe this is terribly unique to the tech sector. I think this is more closely linked to institutionalized people. That is, people who spent long amounts of time in schools, the military, prison, and so on. These large organizations themselves lack empathy. A person formed by such a machine will begin to find that treatment normal and replicate that treatment. As many technologists are university graduates, they’d fall into this category of institutionalized people. It doesn’t help that many then get hired by megacorps which are also institutions.
Empathy doesn't seem particularly valuable in a work context. Wether I empathize with a non technical manager who creates more problems than they solve or not doesn't change the impact that person has on the people around them. Is it empathy that keeps someone like this employed? We tolerate their meddling and chaos because we feel bad for them?
Off the cuff, I observe people who have social skills also find social commercing and social power pleasurable in itself and desire the activity for that end as well, far more pleasurable than sitting around solving logic puzzles and factoring the solutions; maybe on the side, like someone who plays Sudoku, but not as something occupying their day.
Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating.
I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.
One of the programmers I used to work with took an online personality test, and told us that it reported him having "less empathy than Stalin". He was a good programmer, though!
many years ago i signed up for an online dating site where i had to take a very long (maybe 200 questions) personality test. I reach the end and it says "due to your personality our services cannot help you" or something like that. That was a blow to the old ego heh.
/happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i guess my personality isn't that toxic heh
> Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.
From the original post, the next biggest category after “tech” is “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment.
With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence.
The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering, health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.
I've spent most of my career at places that most people here would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time there working with programming, statistics and data analysis and data science research.
Hey, never said otherwise! Just wondering if non-devs are being laid off disproportionately.
For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have only managed to stick around because the process to PIP them is too onerous.
Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
>Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for performance".
That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies.
A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.)
At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
I'm calling BS on the "startups" number...I think this is a lot of people hacking around on side projects on their own dime
No mention also of how many will permanently leave tech...this may come down to who has the most savings to fall back on...if you just have to get paid to pay off that BMW lease, you're going to find work wherever you have to
No but having a severance package that covers your expenses for at least 6 months means that the BMW lease is still covered in the near future even if you don't have savings.
Sorry to hijack this thread and be pessimistic, but whenever you get emails from recruiters about a startup that's got "ex-Google and ex-Facebook" on the "founding team" - keep in mind that it's 99% bs.
One thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off from a very big company during a recession is that you need to adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them.
I have always been very very conservative with my expenses, I don't expect the situation where I make hundreds of thousands of dollars an year as a developer something that will go on forever. They are out there to get you, you are not a business guy with connections, probably you came from a working class family, if they can, they will take the rug out of your feet. So, don't get too excited thinking that making 300k an year (or even 400, 500, whatever) by itself means you're rich now. Income by itself is not wealth if you don't save it. You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
>You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you must sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades. Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on, but frivolous stuff is much easier.
This dynamic is an important reason for the "perpetual childhood" people complain about in the educated urban classes. Because real estate is so expensive, it is legitimately much easier to access "fun" stuff than to have the kind of security needed to pay a mortgage for 30 years. The two don't even trade off against each other that meaningfully. $9-12k/mo mortgage and property tax payments buy a lot of toys, travel, and fancy dinners!
I have a friend who works at Meta working on the Metaverse as a TPM and they just sold their house and bought one twice as large (and expensive). I've warned them it's a risky situation but they didn't agree. They remain employed but if I were in that situation I'd be pulling my hair out.
On the other hand my house is 1/3 the size and I could pay the mortgage working retail if I had to. I'm worried about a bunch of friends who bought big houses that required faang incomes for 30 years if the tech market turns and doesn't return for long periods of time.
Absolutely! Committing to an ongoing expense based on your earning power in the peak of a cycle is crazy. The only way to justify something like that is if you're paying for (almost) all of it upfront. But even then the upside potentially is probably higher in stocks than in Bay Area real estate at this point.
Buying a 2M house is absurdly different than a peloton bike. Esp if you use the bike. Hell buying new cars every few years and a peloton are worlds of difference. you're not buying a new peleton every 5 years, and even if you did it'd be $10k at the outside not $30k every 5 years per car.
This is like trying not to have a starbucks every day to save cash but not shopping on your mortgage to save .5%.
I used this just as a symbol. The problem is that expenses have the nasty habit to compound over time and get bigger and bigger. If you don't watch yourself, you'll end up doing things like buying an over-sized home, then a boat, an expensive german car, a very expensive private school for the kids, the family expectation of expensive trips now and then.
And when things get tight, all those "small-ticket" itens and their maintainance come back to bit you if you have insanely high mortage payments like lots of my colleagues.
Last year I took a $15.000 a year pay cut, for a job I really wanted, and that's more aligned with my ideals. It didn't effect our home economy in any meaningful way and I wasn't making anything close to the salaries I've seen people on HN expect (closer to $100K).
If we get to a point, and I'm not sure we're quite there yet, where the big tech companies, startups and other VC funded ventures can't absorb the layoff, then yes, you're absolutely correct. People need to adjust their expectations. $100K - 150K is a pretty comfortable salary in most areas. If you expect $300K to maintain your current lifestyle, you really need to think about scaling back. It may never be an issue, but if it does, you're better prepared and will have a sizable saving for those rainy days.
HN is such a bubble sometimes. Hearing the problems of 250k/yr+ programmers is so completely strange.
I know there are a lot of us programmers and tech workers working in non profits, government, education, or in small but sustainable businesses.
I'm resigned to making well under what HN would consider a junior level salary, but in exchange I get to work at a place with a mission I can believe in, and I still have a comfortable lifestyle.
Maybe we're doing it wrong? I could probably double my salary at some VC funded company, after all. But in threads like this I do wonder if mo money means mo problems.
I don't think we're in a recession. At least not yet. I think your point about salary expectations is kind of interesting though. In my industry (restaurant disposables), we're going through a big price "reset" right now. Almost all of our pricing is trending towards where it was before everything started going crazy in 2021. Maybe tech salaries are heading the same way?
> You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
This kind of just general bashing on tech people is so conceited. You're acting like a $2,000 stationary bike is really worth fussing over when you're making $400-500k/yr.
Very few people at these incomes in tech are living month to month. They're overall saving a fuckload even if they own a 911.
It is not bashing man. As I explained elsewhere this is just a symbol. I am not that young anymore, and I've seen this play have been played a few times now: boom and bust, boom and bust, and to make things worse, now it looks like our wheater supercharged by global warming: faster and more violent swings.
You'd get surprised how fast people can spend money while looking financially healthy. More so when they live in places with insanely high Cost of Living, like London, NYC or the Bay Area.
The Peloton is just a symbol of overconsumption, maybe unfair, maybe inexact, but an useful symbol anyway. It usually comes along with the multi-million mortgage, a lot of the wealth in papers that can get marked to zero overnight. Then you have all the expenses that come with an expensive lifestyle: lavish trips, expensive restaurants, maybe a boat, maybe a couple of very expensive to maintain german cars. And did I mention the multi-million 30 years mortgage that could also become underwater?
I've been there in the past, done that, get some sleepless night thinking not about the next month, but about the next year, and they year after that one. By sheer luck I've avoided the worse, but I got the lesson that you need to respect your money, as much as you have of it, it is not infinite. Buying something just because it looks inexpensive compared to your income is not a good idea.
I seriously doubt that. Might be true for younger people who were laid off by the "LIFO rule" (i.e., cheaper severance), but anyone with a 10y+ career would at least think twice before joining a startup... Especially in Europe, but these kinds of stories are never about Europe.
What, if you were laid off with 10+ years of savings from a bigtech salary and 30-40 weeks of severance and continuing benefits, you wouldn't (after a few weeks to process and recover) begin hammering out a prototype to that idea that's been in the back of your head for the last 5-10 years? You could burn half a year and still have ten weeks to do a job search.
10 years gives you 36 weeks of severance, plus 6 months of healthcare.
If you have a family, you're never going to have a better opportunity to spend several months working on your side project without measurably impacting your family's stability.
Plus, when you do need to resume your job search, your resume is now "I spent ten years doing these things at BigCo using their proprietary tooling, plus here's the demo of the thing I tried to startup the last six months using off the shelf frameworks, which I am now already proficient in."
I saw a quote (I think from HackerNews) talking about how during good times, there’s lots of startups getting money. In tough times, there’s lots of money going to a handful of good startups. Just work hard to find yourself a promising startup!
That’s fair. While there’s obviously a limited number of positions, how hard is it to get a remote job with an American company? My American company currently employs one guy from Europe, but I’m not sure how common that actually is.
I wouldn't bet on it. Innovation takes hard work, sacrifice, low pay, etc. - exactly the opposite of what one does in big tech. They might try out of hubris until they burn through that nest egg and retreat.
the next wave of innovation will be things like battery tech, deep AI
in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together in their kitchen
realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as part of his online coding degree (really)
It's great your pool guy is furthering his education and going into tech but there is a skill gap between experienced ex-FAANG and those jumping into software for the pay check. Bootcamp/College grads are not competing at the same level as those who have 5+ years of good experience and a passion for tech (as most of us have, being on HN on a Friday evening/workday).
And make long rants about how they only make $200k/year.
Poolboy will be happy to make anything significantly higher than what they make cleaning pools and won’t know about the good old days when you could call up the on staff chef and have food delivered to your cubicle. He’d be like “what’s a cubicle?”
1. It’s not zero sum
2. You don’t need to innovate like that to create a successful startup
3. There is a very, very aggressive skill curve for developers and being ex-Google will have an advantage over the pool boy
I turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k for my education.
I'm working on a team that's >50% 30+ year career engineers. It's the best team I've ever worked on by an enormous margin.
I don't know how many dollars any of them spent on education, but I know everyone I work with has spent many tens of thousands of hours of their time practicing, working on, and becoming extremely good at what they do.
I don't know anything about you, or your life, what field you work in, and I won't presume anything, but I would like to suggest that you may be encountering negativity due to an outlook that you 'have been basically turned back into a child', or were 'forced to spend 478k for [your] education'.
...
Moving in with your aging mother to help her during a global pandemic does not turn you back into a child. I'll likely live with my mother again before she dies because I wouldn't want to live in a long-term-care home, so I won't put her though that.
Similarly, having spent a small fortune on your education doesn't mean anything other than you're capable of, and have (or had) the means to, spend a bunch of money.
I'm in my 50s, I got 6 job offers in the last round of job interviews I had last year. I haven't felt the age discrimination yet, maybe at some point but hopefully I can retire before that.
No way, since any such degree wouldn't cost any money, instead it would pay you.
Spending 500k on a degree is absolutely insane and indicates that there's a lot more to the story than what's being told. The only exception I can think of is if this person attended a top 10 university, like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, in which case they likely have nothing to worry about.
Not even that. Someone who is 50 now would have gone to MIT/Harvard/Stanford in the early-mid '90's. Tuition was not that high in those times, maybe $25k/year.
Here's a quote from MIT [1]
>Nine months' tuition for 1994-95 is $20,100. In addition, undergraduate room and board ranges from $4,530 to $6,075, with a standard of $5,975; actual costs depend on the student's housing and dining arrangements. Books, materials and personal expenses (including clothes, laundry, recreation and optional medical insurance, but excluding travel) are approximately $2,325.
That's true, but the opportunity cost of a PhD can easily reach 500k. The average PhD takes about 5 years, and is paid ~30k during that time. Most are talented enough to land a job a FAANG, so... do the math.
Are you expecting a salary similar to the one you were getting at a FAANG though? Because that seems to be the main issue - FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are.
> FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are.
I find your tone concerning, considering there's something driving wages down (which if you're a wage worker should make you squirm regardless of how much you make). I feel some resentment against fellow workers (because it doesn't matter how much you make, if you MUST work to live, you're a worker), but it doesn't matter.
Wages aren't tied to worth, or the value added to the business. If this was true, extrapolating from the sheer amount of money FAANG companies make, these compensation ranges should actually be higher.
Wages are tied to the 'market', basically what companies are willing to pay. If they cartelize (like they did with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) they can drive wages down. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the future that something similar is happening today, but I'm not wearing my tin foil hat yet..
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't work in a FAANG company.
There's a degree of truth in that, but I think it applies for larger companies, especially very profitable ones.
On the smaller side, I've noticed that I can build the same 'thing' for two organizations, A & B. Org A will struggle to get any value from it, and Org B will make a killing from it. From my standpoint, it was approximately the same tech, same effort, often even similar problem space. But some companies are better at extracting value. You able to take software X and get $3M in sales from it? You'll have no problem paying me $150k. Someone else with same software X struggling to operate their company to make a profit... they won't be able to pay anything.
This idea that someone is 'worth', say, $300k/year because of their skills or experience just doesn't seem all that productive. Or... perhaps what I've been hearing is people conflating what they 'should' get in the marketplace because of past experiences. Finding the companies and industries that can extract value from what you provide isn't always easy.
Not a FAANG engineer but the whole idea of “worth” is a two sided affair and very subjective. You can decide your own worth and the other side can decide what they think you are worth. Neither side needs to be correct, but that’s how economies are structured.
It’s totally fine to demand more for yourself because the companies will always try to pay you less. Are all engineers at banks less skilled than all engineers at say Facebook? Definitely not. But does that mean engineers at Facebook are worth less? Again, definitely not. It’s the engineers at banks who need to demand more.
Personally as a non FAANG engineer I have my minimum for what I will work for. And I would rather be unemployed and do something of your own than work for less.
Honestly after living under the pervasive narrative that you're a failure of a software developer unless you work for either a FAANG or a unicorn SV startup, I'm not sad to see arrogant FAANG developers get cut down to size a little and learn they're not actually God's gifts to the discipline. For over a decade, it's been automatically assumed that everyone else was a failure who just "couldn't cut it" at a FAANG.
> Wages aren't tied to worth
Of course they are. Nothing in the history of humanity has ever been more clearly tied to "this number means how much worth you have as a human being" as income in the United States does today; a close 2nd being the number of serfs you had in medieval France. There's literally an income below which people will cheer for you dying in the streets if you get sick. Yes, they cheer. They cheered when Ron Paul suggested letting poor people die in the streets when they get sick. Being poor is becoming illegal. They'll throw you in jail for it. They add spikes to the sides of highways to make life even more miserable for the homeless. Of course your income is tied to your worth as a human being. What world are you living in?
> Of course they are. Nothing in the history of humanity has ever been more clearly tied to "this number means how much worth you have as a human being" as income in the United States does today
We're talking about different things here. Worth as in 'how much value you add to the company/industry ie are you worth paying this much' (which is what we're talking about here) != worth as in 'how American society sees you based on your income and what privileges you have because you're making money'. I agree with your assessment of worth wrt to American society. That is my perception as well.
> I'm not sad to see arrogant FAANG developers get cut down to size a little and learn they're not actually God's gifts to the discipline. For over a decade, it's been automatically assumed that everyone else was a failure who just "couldn't cut it" at a FAANG.
Everyone is responsible for their own assumptions; I don't share the same thoughts as you. Not everyone who got laid off is an arrogant FAANG developer and not everyone working at FAANG thinks they're God's gift to the craft (honestly, anecdotally, I have never seen more instances of imposter syndrome than in FAANG). Do you by any chance frequent the Blind forums?
In the end, I would remind everyone that wage workers hating each other because of how much they make is a God send for the people who actually own the economy. It's non-productive and mistargeted. You need to hate your boss/company if you're not happy with how much you make.
> I'm not sad to see arrogant FAANG developers get cut down to size a little and learn they're not actually God's gifts to the discipline.
Where do you come to the conclusion that FAANG developers are like this?
> For over a decade, it's been automatically assumed that everyone else was a failure who just "couldn't cut it" at a FAANG.
Assumed by who?
The amount of judgment coming from your comment is rather shocking. I'll just say that it definitely doesn't reflect the perspectives of tech workers I know.
I'm sorry that you seem to find yourself in a circle that you have come to those conclusions.
A large portion of this community has had resentment towards FAANG and FAANG engineers for a long time.
Whiteboard interviews, high pay, not invented here syndrome, memes about coasting in big co, stereotyping people based off which FAANG they came off of, trivializing the work, saying it’s detrimental to a new engineer’s career to join FAANG etc.
All of this is fine. But let’s be real, part of the community resents another part and has for a while. It is part of some people’s identity to hate on FAANG engineers. And they let you know.
“Moving down” can be more difficult than it looks. Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire “overqualified” people (indicated by a high previous salary), because they believe these people will jump ship at the earliest higher paying opportunity elsewhere.
I don't think an elevated salary at a FAANG implies over-qualified, though.
I phone-screened someone from a FAANG, and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. Any of the big-branded commercial apps, they weren't familiar with, and I can hire someone for a lot less with the required working knowledge AND know that they won't be resentful about it.
I think it's going to take a year for some of the young engineers to level-set their careers in some places.
I'm trying to remember how long it took after dot-com bubble busting, and back then I know a lot who went back for their MBAs, Law degrees, etc. during a softening market. And I know personally how long it took for me to recover to the same economic level.
Also, I get emails a few times a week from recruiters saying something like "Ex-Meta Employee/ex-Faang available for employment", leads....
> and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day.
I had an eye opening experience several years ago. My group was partnering with a group at Google. Their developers were sharp, as one would expect. But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X. The one that really hit it home was that we had to teach them how to use Google Cloud, because at least at the time, internally Google folks didn't use GCP but instead used their own internal versions of things.
If you're hiring for a specific skill set it might be because you have a target you're trying to hit. In my experience purse strings typically open because the company has a new project they want to complete in N time, and need X additional headcount to accomplish the goal in the time required. If it takes 3-6 months to onboard someone, you might not get your new headcount fully onboarded before v1 of the project ships.
It doesn’t take 3 months to do this even at wholly internal faang environments except in some special cases.
Most of what people are talking about can be learned in days because they’re 90% the same as other products. Sometimes it's hours as someone else said because they're just generic databases or a pubsub system.
And then you get an edge case bug with the new platform and the new guy takes N times longer to find the root cause because it's his first time using the platform.
Or the design is wonky because the new platform isn't a 1:1 match to the proprietary solution.
100% agreed that it's dumb to require extremely specific knowledge of one product, and 100% disagree that a Googler is "clearly qualified" simply because they came from Google. I have absolutely no idea why we've all just accepted the narrative that any FAANG employee is automatically better than the rest of us, despite evidence that FAANGs are nothing more than code mills optimizing for exploitable ambition over actual intelligence or engineering ability.
I'm running into this with increasing frequency, particularly people coming from Amazon. For example, they know nothing about something like Kafka because they've been using some Amazonified version of something similar instead. They of course we'll never be able to match what they used to make and it would be more risk than I want to take to have them use us as a stepping stone while they try to get back to that level.
You can learn everything most devs need to know about Kafka in a couple hours. I can't imagine why companies would ever hire based on current knowledge rather than problem solving skills and ability to learn.
We might be unique, but here's no situation we're using Kafka where someone unfamiliar with it would be able to design and support production level systems to the standards we do after a couple hours. That would result in a time bomb for someone else to clean up later when all the stuff you weren't aware you didn't know becomes a problem. These skills are common, some would say table stakes, so it's not hard finding them as long as you look outside the proprietary tech shops like FAANG, which is why I have no reason to prefer people that don't already have them.
My initial reaction reading this is that you really screwed up somewhere with your infrastructure. A pretty large company needs a Kafka team, a smaller company needs their infrastructure team to have a decent understanding with maybe one person / consultant with deeper knowledge.
Kafka for 99% of developers in the company should be "Can I use our internal library to read/write some topic".
My preferred size of company would not have the resources for a team dedicated to infrastructure. In companies this size, there would be multiple developers skilled enough with the tech to support it fully from installation, configuration, optimization, backup, DR, upgrades, troubleshooting, designing and implementing solutions, etc. Everything. I've worked at several companies of this size and much prefer the broader scope of responsibility and experience to what you get somewhere like you described.
We don't train people on or write our own documentation for any widely used open source tools. We use them as they're provided and don't expect any unique knowledge beyond that. That's a large part of the value in choosing tech like this instead of proprietary solutions we'd have to document and train people on. It's also why a developer with those skills can take them with them from job to job over the course of their career and they're still valuable or start at a new company and make valuable contributions from day one before they learn the proprietary bits of the company.
Outside of FAANG, roles aren't guaranteed to be this specialized. If you can't adjust and expect it to be done like they did it at your FAANG, you're going to have a tough time being productive.
I found my roles in FAANG were more general than my roles in medium/small companies. And typically I have seen one or two people in small companies become the defacto expert in X. Please tell me more about how my life experience is a lie.
Each company is different.
> But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X
Occasionally X is an open source implementation of a Google paper, published after Google decided its proprietary tech no longer provides a competitive advantage and/or has moved onto a better architecture internally.
There's an astounding number of Google publications that spawned Billion-dollar industries.
> they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day
Day-to-day tools are things that really takes no time to learn on the job imo. They take more time to get up to speed from scratch but when dropped into an environment using them I expect experienced folks to get up to speed very quickly.
If they resent not having the awesome dev tools though, like you mention, that's another thing entirely.
Sure, but an ex-FAANGer probably has a better shot at actually getting hired at another FAANG (when the job market improves) than someone who's only worked at no-name shops or local governments.
The implied logic behind that is "I know my company is a worse option than many of the other ones out there, so I'm going to only hire people who those other companies would not do business with." It's inherently a low self-esteem attitude.
People leave, sometimes suddenly and without warning. The high self-esteem way to deal with it is to do your best to provide an attractive working environment, accept that some people will leave, and try to learn from each departure. That way you have the option of profiting from the talented employee who totally could make more at a FAANG but happens to like your company because you provide good management, a worthwhile purpose, or the actual ability to write code rather than deal with company politics.
Reminds me of this chestnut: "We don't train our people! What if we do, and they leave?"
"What if you don't, and they stay?"
Heck, having someone sharp with a new perspective even for a year could significantly improve things for the better. If you get out of their way of course.
If you were a Senior SWE at Google for 5 years, how do you imagine that a new employer won't realize that you were making a lot more than the $150K/yr they're proposing to stretch their budget to offer you?
A kinder way to say this is "the talent entering the market is pushing wages down" or something like that. It's pretty rare that wages reflect worth. They reflect what employers have to / are willing to pay.
It will be painful to get a 50%+ paycut but I'm willing to accept any job - but like others guessed small companies instantly reject me. I only get interviews with other companies similar to FAANG, only for them to tell me they have a hiring feeeze. Or very early stage startups, like seed or series A, which I'm not comfortable joining.
The biggest reason I've seen FAANG candidates (mostly Google, FB, and Amazon) get rejected is too much experience with proprietary technology, esp. if they've been there a long time, like 5+ years. I've even spoke to some FAANG candidates who think their internal proprietary tech is widely known or commercial products.
For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite. Not just because of differences in people, time and money resources but also due to scale.
Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5 years. And due to the small number of time and human resources the actual cost can easily be much higher.
You can see this in some of the design decisions around open source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations being important."
But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very small number at the same time on the same component. Most micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a catastrophe for the company."
For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any migration complications.
Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small company which might only provide one or two services such a mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not.
Or for example in a small company having a repo where you define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to generate glue code to bind all your services together in a "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many people but many teams might work on code interacting with the same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
I spent a long, long time in startups before moving to larger companies, and eventually a FAANG. The folks I worked with at the FAANG were incredibly smart, motivated, and collaborative, but a huge percentage of them had no experience outside of the FAANG. They were able to use the in-house systems for build, deploy, data storage, etc. but had never actually had to design and/or build or even think too much about how such things work. It's a great luxury that lets them focus on the product they're building vs. foundational infra, but it's a huge detriment when looking to go outside of those things.
It's ironic, because the System Design interview is a major delineator between lower and higher level Engineers when they interview at these companies, yet many of the tenured people would do very poorly because many of the questions and considerations of the problems presented in such interviews are effectively solved problems in their daily work that they've never had to think about.
Yup, this. I found many ex-Googlers who just don't know how to count up. In the past, "we don't know how to count that low" was a valid joke, but, these days, it seems like a lot of young engineers don't really understand how things work beneath their feet. Every level from 1 to 1k to 1m to 1b is a unique problem, but these kids only learnt how to float above the clouds.
Yeup. I had a similar comment above. I tried phone screening someone, and they had no working knowledge of the commercial apps that we integrate with, the databases we use, etc. And I can hire literally for half the price someone with working knowlege AND know they won't be resentful about the job....
FWIW, I've been trying to make the jump from FAANG to a smaller, stable company for the past few years. I started off in the smaller companies and miss it terribly. I made a bunch of extra money in the FAANG space, but I'm unhappy. Resentful is the last thing I'd ever be, but the lack of working knowledge is a huge issue. I work weekends on building knowledge, but the lack of direct experience running something at scale means I'll never get the chance to make the jump back to the environment I want and thrive in. I honestly wish I never made the jump for the money in the first place.
Exactly. I'm also seeing this trend among new grads/early career SWEs. AWS, MongoDB, and all sorts of cloud first product companies have been plugging their software to the university system, and these kids come out of college w/o understanding of the computing layer below these products. Like they don't know what a server is, what a data center is, how storage works. Is that not being taught in CS programs?
Ugh. I've been interviewing Ops/Sec candidates lately, and I'm genuinely confused every time an experienced candidate struggles with their chosen shell.
> they don't know what a server is, what a data center is, how storage works. Is that not being taught in CS programs?
Not what CS is. (Although I did take a chip-level architecture and asm class, that's the closest it gets to hardware.) If you want a Network/Storage Engineer, hire one.
I hope you don't mind me poking into your history, but didn't you make a post a few months ago saying that you quit your job and wanted out of tech?
Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.
Yes, I quit, wasn't laid off. But now I'm in the same pool as the tens of thousands of other very qualified people. How do you think that affects my job hunt?
Could also be why you can't find a job. You may be too expensive, and they're looking for engineers in the sweet spot of cheap/can keep the machine running.
FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, especially smaller companies, so it's not that uncommon for small companies to hesitate to hire someone directly coming from FANG.
Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people.
Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG.
Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
> FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other,
As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had way too many conversations of the form, "Yes, that is objectively better. But at our scale, the value add does not warrant the effort involved". Or "there's no need for these 15 layers of indirection because there's 5 of us, not 5000".
Obviously this is a stereotype and doesn't apply to everyone. But that's no different than how people have a positive stereotype of ex-BigTech employees being sharp.
i got into an argument with a bigtech employee (outside of work, in a social setting) that senior engineers should spend 25% of their time mentoring junior hires.
he literally could not understand that a small company can't afford to do this.
not only that, he also could not understand that small companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody to mentor!
and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whatever that is.
If you can’t afford ~25% of your week educating junior hires, then you shouldn’t have junior hires.
It is a sin of the industry to not train new folks, and I would argue that many “senior engineers” do not know how to mentor juniors because they don’t see it as a priority.
I was heavily mentored during my time in small businesses with limited resources and profit. I hope others get that experience too.
I know people on HN seem to think it is, but the people here are a tiny subset of the people in the real world, even in the tech area of California. I really doubt it's a representitive view.
There is always an element of "let's see how low we can get" in mainstream IT, since people outside tech view tech as a cost center and not a profit center, which devalues candidates.
You FAANG background doesn't impress me. I need colleagues I can count on, who make themselves an expert in what's needed in the moment. If you can demonstrate that from your projects, wherever you did them, I look forward to working with you.
Side question, is the 3-4 months of severance pay cushioning a bit the impact to whatever micro-economy laid off workers would otherwise be affecting? We're not yet seeing the potentially worse effects yet until severance runs out? But I would hope that most laid off workers are able to find jobs in that time frame.
There's 120k US layoffs documented here in 2023, or 0.07% of the US workforce. We could imagine the ~50% reemployment rate for FANG is a fair estimate for the rest of the tech layoffs (fang employees might be easier to be rehired, but might have more savings and be less inclined to return). So 0.035% of the workforce would potentially be running out of severance.
It probably will have an impact. This alone isn't a crisis level event. It's hard to determine regional data for the laid off workers because of WFH, but we could imagine tech heavy regions receiving a bigger share of the impact than national averages. The impact is probably more spread than it would have been if the layoffs happened in 2019.
A bit bland sure, but it's in there. They are going exactly where I expected them to: Companies that aren't considered tech companies, but have a need for software developers and engineers. From the article: Farming equipment, car industry, banking, insurers and retail.
These places have been struggling to hire for years, now they can finally fill those positions, or at least some of them.
I mean, the article does list those places but doesn't provide any sort of numbers at all.
Who knows if John Deere hired 10k people before the layoffs and 3k afterwards. Sure some of the laid off people in this scenario could have gone to John Deere but it's more likely they've displaced other candidates JD would've hired as opposed to JD sponging up laid off people.
I have like 2 years of experience as a SE and I didn't get laid off but I quit to try entrepreneurship. Currently, I've built a website where people can look up an address and see what tenants are paying there. The site relies on user submitted data, like a Glassdoor for Rents. Site is called rentzed.com. I'd appreciate if anyone contributed their rent data and/or shared it with people they know. I have years before I run out of money so I'll just try a couple other ideas I have or join a startup to pay my bills if I need to. I think they'd be interested in having someone join them who has tried building a Startup.
Probably back home to their original country since they only have 60 days to find a new job. I imagine that is extremely hard when you are in competition with a lot of your former colleagues.
What makes you think US Population is receding? By all census counts, we're still growing, a lot.
Numbers for 2022 are something like 900K immigrants living in the U.S. became U.S. citizens. 2 Million more migrants came with about @ 150K documented boarder crossings per month for 18 months straight. The only time there was a huge drop-off was during Covid, for obvious reasons. "The Build Back Better Act included a a $1.75 trillion framework that called for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and a recapture of visas that were not issued in previous years"
US is the third largest populated country at 335M.
Trying to understand your "depopulate further" statement.
He is likely citing birth rates are less than death rates in most of the developed world. There is a bit of a lag effect in pop count because boomers and extensions of end of life. Japan is at the forefront of this and has more elderly in diapers than children. Another aside that's Interesting is their societys professional landscape is very ageist against youth. I don't know anything about how immigration impacts things.
Right, but even with lagging birth rights, US is still growing Yoy. It's not growing at the 2%/year it was a few years ago, but it's still net positive.
Cool Buzzfeed article. The only thing “new” it’s the confirmation of the obvious regarding who is getting the axe at big tech, which is mostly sales and paper pushing people.
We all saw the charts showing the number of employees if the past few years and that they just laid off the over hiring... No one remember during that time how we were lacking employees too? I know at my job which is not a sexy one, we were struggling to find new hire. We are still hiring... just as much as before.
That's where they are going. To the place that wanted them in the first place. All theses peoples didn't appear out of thin air (though for sure the amazing pay did pushed some to go to "bootcamp" or whatever, but that's been true for the past decade). It's the normal amount of workers that would have been hired otherwise.
In any other field, sure maybe there could be more workers than demands, but in tech, placement has been good and it won't change in a few years (as it takes a few years of school).
The only thing that may change is the pay expectation of theses workers, as the one that did the laid off are the one that were paying a pretty penny for theses jobs.
I was recruited by two different google people in the last six months and both of them are unemployed now according to LinkedIn. The only tech dudes I know there are on visas and they haven't been axed.
> On March 14th Meta, the tech giant Mr Zuckerberg runs, announced it would fire 10,000 staff—on top of the 11,000 it laid off last November.
i think the 'fire' vs. 'laid-off' language is interesting - just because of the stigma associated with being fired as opposed to being laid-off, which doesn't have as much of a stigma.
Part of me thinks new companies will sprout up and a few may disrupt.
The other part of me sees that Gen Z are using dumb phones and don't own computers, so given AI I can see the WWW being computers talking to one another with the odd human checking in.
There’s a saying that goes something like, “Economists have predicted 9 of the last 2 recessions.”
I’ve been hearing about the real estate bubble popping any day now since at least 2013. How many people sat on the sidelines of a skyrocketing housing market waiting for that day, out of fear? How many have fallen into a doom and gloom cycle over the last few years hoping for some big “told-you-so” payoff that never came?
If you have a few decades of able working life ahead of you, capitalize on opportunities. Take risks. You’re not going to time the crash, whatever that means; and you’ll likely end up more resilient for it anyway.
> I’ve been hearing about the real estate bubble popping any day now since at least 2013.
That's the market timing problem. You look at the graph of median house price vs median family income, and you can see that at some point things will crack. But you can't tell when. Few people have shown success at market timing. James Dines, of the Dines Letter well known to investors, died last year at age 91. He was one of the very few people to have correctly called several recessions in advance, in his 70 years of publishing a newsletter.
Many of the ones I know end up at other companies that had troubles finding good employees before. And a bunch of others started their own companies, and they are/will hire their own employees, too.
I wonder if there are statistics about this kind of trend. How many new companies spawn for ever 100 tech layoffs? How many more jobs are created in 1, 2, 4, and 8 years after the layoffs?
I kinda agree with this sentiment, I've certainly known plenty of software engineers who weren't half what they were getting paid, mostly juniors but also a few seniors. But I've also known plenty of software engineers who were worth every cent. However, I'd argue the bigger problem is other engineers are underpaid, especially considering many types of engineering require a strong grasp of advanced mathematics and physics. Then again, most professions in this world are woefully underpaid.
1. How differentiated is engineer output in a measurable way?
2. How much profit is unlocked by the engineers work at market rates?
(2) tells you how much room there is for an engineer's share of the profits to grow. In traditional engineering fields there often isn't as much profit to share everything comes from margin off a physical product).
Physical constraints also mean that it's difficult to differentiate in traditional engineering. The problems my EE friends solve are harder mathematically but they're almost all using design patterns and even components created decades ago, it's unusual to have a chance to do work that's "different" in a way the market might care about.
I disagree. Companies make way more money of what they offer. Otherwise they would go bankrupt. They are not a charity.
From my experience, from colleagues and friends, equity is worth 100x that of salary, if you know where to "bet" yourself. You can add the option to retire really early with equity as an engineer. One can't with salary before one's 60s.
That other engineering fields might be extremely underpriced is a different topic. But that is not true either. But again I am not seeing the salary data that support that argument.
Companies either pay for an "average web developer" perhaps with some experience, which is maybe what you are hinting? Or they pay for a specialist or strong generalist that will design a system to ensure they don't lose millions to billions if it goes down.
You need to calculate your Shapley value. And that usually in the Bay area says you are vastly underpaid if the stock doesn't pay out. The cash is nothing compared to the value a good engineer could add.
Again depends on the specialty. If you are one of the 10-20 people in the world that can build a particular system in production -- my case say -- you are valued differently.
OpenAI is hiring software engineers in the $200-400k range. The startup I work for has me in that range as well.
Alphabet went from 119k employees in 2019 to 190k employees in 2022. Microsoft went from 144k to 221k.
The fact is there was a massive amount of hiring done in the last few years, and these layoffs have yet to come to close to rolling these numbers back. Have these layoffs made Amazon any less of a behemoth?
I respect the engineering professions, but software engineers are still separated by a huge gap in opportunities and compensation.
This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP).
It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be fired if you're not. Once you're past Sr. Manager you'll be challenged on whether you side with your employees or the stock price. We all know who chooses which.
Want to start a high tech company or even a company with high CAPEX or OPEX entry points? Better get a ton of capital, and guess what, that capital wants ownership because the theory is "they deserve it." The reality is money required to do anything (duh!) and you have no choice, because your broke friends can't afford the 500k you need to hire all those well paid FAANG engineers away.
Fine you say, those are the spoils of victory. Well so here's the problem...if all that money only cares about maintaining the power structures and whitewashing their Rand inspired business sins via "charity" or perhaps "running for president" and that group gets smaller and smaller, what's the rest of folks to do?
I ended up writing about this [1] and now I'm doing everything I can to build or support syndicalist organizations crowding out for-profit investor driven companies.
At this point, tech is just an extension of finance. There's no counter-culture here, it's maximum capitalism and we're ubering humanity off a cliff.
I've stopped trying to be in tech and founded a non-stock democratic cooperative that does residential waste hauling [2,3] and hopefully we'll be picking up trash by July.
I'm about to send out our first mailer to two major residential groups. I'm open to anyone who wants to give us a loan or be hired eventually. andrew@seegull.co
I suspect you'll never be able to compete, is the problem. You might not be a profit maximizer, but everyone you interact with is a cost minimizer, and ethical solutions will inevitably be more expensive.
This is not to rain on your parade (I agree with you!) but I see the only solution as political via vastly higher taxes on higher incomes to support social services. The only place we are remotely close to having any influence is in the political realm, in the economic world, we are completely irrelevant.
> This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP).
Relevant quote:
> Paul Tillich wrote that all institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that no institution could ever achieve the morality of the individual. Institutions, he warned, to extend their lives when confronted with collapse, will swiftly betray the stances that ostensibly define them. Only individual men and women have the strength to hold fast to virtue when faced with the threat of death.
Also:
> A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”
- https://nav.al/failure
Yeah I think part of the challenge is keeping things very distributed and not centralizing outside of the core management of the structure only.
So for example, structurally I think we can nudge the organization such that any of our individual seegull "communities" can stay smaller than about 200 co-owner/operators/employees. That is to say perhaps each has their own specific bylaws (like states) treasury etc...IDK how to make it last 1000 years I'm just hoping for 100
I really wish people would stop posting ChatGPT output onto Hacker News like this. If I wanted to know what ChatGPT thought I would go ask ChatGPT myself.
You know - good point, I thought it was fun but it’s just noise, I’ll remove it, the title of this post reminded me of the song by Peter Paul and Mary. But who cares.
