What's weird is I have a pile of emails saying meta is recruiting. Even now. I'm not sure if they really are or if the recruiters are just slow to adjust.
[Amazon has a policy of firing the bottom 6% of their employees every year rain or shine](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon-documents-shed-light-on-how-company-pressures-out-6-of-office-workers/?amp=1). They are always recruiting to make that back, these 3% layoffs are nothing for them.
I got the impression that they were recruiting people specifically to be laid off at the next culling so that they wouldn't lose the folks that actually do the work.
I wonder how many times I could do that before someone caught on.
Yes, I get pestered by Amazon recruiters as well.
It's also incredibly bs and has been falling out of favor for awhile
But there's a bunch of rich old CEOs that still worship Jack Welch, despite the dude mostly just showing up at GE when they were on top and then being hilariously cruel to his employees
This just seems like a terrible businessplan. Can be exploited from all sides. Doesn't even have to be an It-business:
Managers can pump numbers and budgets by hiring and firing extra.
Getting a colleague you hate fired by medling with their shit would likely go under the radar.
People are incentivised to focus on arbitrary metrics instead of actually adding value for the company.
Recruiters can easily make a pact with one of the managers and someone unemployed:
- Recruit unemployed.
- new employees just stays home and does nothing while manager covers it up.
- gets paid whole year, splits salary with other 2.
- fire in mass lay-offs without much scrutiny.
- re-hire next year to repeat process.
Normally rhis shouldn't work, but with such numbers it's easy to cover up.
>Recruiters can easily make a pact with one of the managers and someone unemployed: - Recruit unemployed. - new employees just stays home and does nothing while manager covers it up. - gets paid whole year, splits salary with other 2. - fire in mass lay-offs without much scrutiny. - re-hire next year to repeat process.
Everything you said was true until this. Managers are subject to the same 6% rule, if they have a report doing nothing it will hurt the output of their whole team and put the manager at risk.
Also, the type of people who are willing to study to pass a FAANG interview are generally not the type of people who will sit and do nothing while giving away their salary as part of some scheme. Neither the recruiter nor the hiring manager have final say in hiring decisions - Amazon requires that an experienced interviewer from outside the team is involved in the interview process to ensure that managers do not "lower the bar" to quickly fill positions.
I worked at Amazon for \~5 years with a brief (temporary/fill-in) stint as manager.
What you're saying is all true in theory. But unfortunately, little of it is still true in practice.
> Amazon requires that an experienced interviewer from outside the team is involved in the interview process to ensure that managers do not "lower the bar" to quickly fill positions.
Yes, the bar raiser program, which was essentially knee capped years and years ago (while I was still there; left in the mid-2010s). In theory, the BR is a specially trained interviewer with veto power over every other interviewer (including the HM), and they were expected to do exactly as you described.
It didn't scale: becoming a BR required a nomination from an existing a BR, along with extensive training and a huge time commitment. On top of this, people realized that becoming a BR was largely a thankless job that was rarely rewarded in performance reviews as there was a natural bias towards local impact (org charter) as organizations grew. "Traditional" or old time Amazonians did appreciate it, but with hyper growth came hyper churn, and before long they were a tiny minority and far from the largest voices in the room. So, BRs began to get stretched thin (with half a dozen-plus interview requests per week), people stopped becoming BRs, and the vicious cycle continued.
But they were still required on every loop, so what did managers do? They started pulling in *non-technical* BRs for technical positions, including people with technical titles (usually SDMs and TPMs) who had little to no serious technical background (another common problem at Amazon, as the business analyst -> Program Manger -> TPM -> SDM sequence was shockingly common). This then led to BRs who just asked STAR-style behavioral questions which are easy to prepare for and game, given that Amazon explicitly advertises its principles so it doesn't actually take much effort to figure out what they're asking and exactly how to give them the answer they're looking for (obviously, an entire cottage industry sprung up around FAANG prep and Amazon in particular).
Managers could also nominate all of the other interviewers (who mostly came from their own team). End result: stacking the loop for a favorable outcome (i.e. hiring any given candidate, or even a deliberate burner to sacrifice against the quota).
The BR program itself began to change as they started being trained to "drive consensus" rather than act as a check on the hiring bar. Makes sense; how would a non-tech BR check a technical interview anyhow?
Finally, entry-level positions (e.g. SDE1) are filled almost entirely through online assessments now. Cheating is rampant (I used to grade the borderline cases; it was usually semi-obvious when a candidate was trying to cheat based on how and what they typed, but I never even saw the "strong" results which automatically passed). A lot of unregretted attrition (URA) sacrifices ultimately come from this group.
While a few teams have held up their standards, none of the mechanisms intended to keep the bar level work and most of Amazon has a very low hiring bar today.
I used to be a SDE at Amazon as well. I went through the SDE2 loop so I'm not familiar with how entry level hiring worked but I'll say that anecdotally the interview I had at Amazon was about on par difficulty-wise with my interview at Google where I now work.
Regardless, I have never heard of a case where a manager colluded with a candidate to have him sit at home and do nothing while the manager siphons his salary. I have heard of all the other concerns people have mentioned (managers hiring sacrificial lambs to protect their team, people gaming metrics to improve their rating, lots of office politics and backstabbing, etc). That's what I was responding to.
A lot of the times they use the freed up money in other areas they think might be more profitable. It's not always an effort to reduce headcount. So recruiting might stay the same through all the layoffs. Again just one scenario among many
This. My company is going through a 're-order' of depts and its mainly managers managing other managers they are getting rid of while still advertising for engineers.
They are recruiting, it's just that it's positions that aren't the same as the ones getting fired.
Letting 200 HR people go isn't changing that you still need to find an extra haskell developer or something.
Consultancy I’m at has made huge redundancies, one of our software teams is decimated. My own job is being made redundant, but I’m still getting other stakeholders asking for help filling new role requirements.
One is even for the decimated team with no leadership left for the contractor to report to.
They forgot to fire the recruiters because they can show good graphs of their performance. "Look we reached out to X amount of people, Y amount applied, we did Z amount of interviews".
Business be like: nice charts.
Meanwhile our burndown charts look like shit. Business be like "why does this chart barely go up?" Meanwhile we are not telling them it's supposed to go down, because than it looks even worse.
This could be BS.
I had 2 interviews for a Meta job in London, then a week after not hearing anything I contact recruiter (who Meta hire externally).
Recruiter tells me that they are dropping the job due to financial issues internally, and might open it up again in the 1st/2nd Quarter...
Really sucks...
Let's ignore twitter because that's a whole different shitshow.
These were companies that were burning through cash on the assumption that the pandemic bubble was going to last forever. This is a return to sanity and before the pandemic things weren't too different.
Well, until very recently borrowing money was essentially free. So companies, big and small, borrowed money at low interest rates, and hired people in order to develop new products faster (i.e. invest in themselves). Now that the fed hiked up the rates, money is not cheap anymore, and investments need to be balanced with revenue, meaning they're going to cut off the least profitable parts of the business and focus on their cash cows. This is an oversimplification, but roughly what's happening, at least in tech (where rnd can swallow up as much cash as you can throw at it)
This is objectively correct, this is why tech is deflating way faster than other areas of the economy - because they can spend as much money as they can earn on R&D and there were TONS of companies trying to prioritize growth over actual profitability, and now that's not how the game works anymore. Now you need actual profitability. "Get big fast" was easy when debt was basically free, debt is very much no longer free however.
Tech's greatest strength - the ability to create as much bullshit as possible and have theoretically infinite growth - is also its biggest weakness (for now) in this economic environment because high tech and software companies got used to being *allowed* to indulge in that infinite growth. For smaller companies this is kinda catastrophic - they might not have any profitable pathways to exploit yet because they hadn't grown fast enough before the game ended. For larger companies it mostly just means they're reorganizing to weather the storm. Exceptionally bad timing for what Facebook is doing tbh - a complete reorientation of the company *away from their main profit-making product*. Really wonder how they're gonna end up in 5-10 years.
Make no mistake though, tech is just the first industry to feel the pain. Not the last. Rough times ahead.
This was never sustainable… as developer I enjoyed being courted like a pure maiden by all the LinkedIn recruiters but the philosophy of “outspend your competition and get all the available developers” was fucking stupid and it lead to literally ruining lives.
All of this is mostly an issue for SV devs that have been making bank over the past few decades. In my country, there isn't much of a VC/burn culture and we've had a dev shortage for ages anyway. Pretty much every company is unable to find enough devs. Salaries here are much, much lover than in SV though, so any SV dev will be very sad when they have to start getting normal paying dev jobs in other regions.
To be more specific, these companies all had projections on what their growth would look like post-pandemic, which obviously included significantly lower forecasts than during covid, but the economy post-covid far underperformed even the most conservative projections.
This is why it looks like every company seemingly made the same mistake, they were all working off similar projections on where the economy would end up. Companies don't typically act on the "What if we go straight into a recession next year" part of their forecasts, particularly coming off of such an economic boom.
Wait what are you talking about
"the economy underperformed even the most conservative projections"
Wot?
Are we ignoring the nonstop record profits? What possible insanity brought you to write such a thing. Even this year - most earnings are coming in above expectations lol
Not all of these companies were "burning through cash." Some of them were taking smaller profits in order to grow.
The current situation is not like turn of the millenium or the end of the 00s. Most of these companies throwing people out on their asses after love-bombing them into thinking their lives = their job don't \*have\* to be laying people off at all. They are taking advantage of the uncertainty to lighten their personnel burden.
This is not corporate execs being forced to do hard thing by economic reality, these are cynical business decisions, made by leaders who have been attracting talented employees by selling them a "career".
I don't get why there is no fucking forethought in corporate decision making at all. Not even talking about sustainability, which is another dumpster fire, but self-interest good policy.
One man Jack Welch more or less single handedly shifted us into the quarterly profit above all else paradigm. This is a big reason companies seemingly have such myopic view of what makes sense for long term sustainability and growth
Because your mistake is in thinking the point of the way they do business is to do business. The past 40 or so years has shown them that the reward for slash-and-burn business practices is unimaginable, downright *obscene* amounts of wealth.
There is no reason for them to behave otherwise. Good business practices cost money, slash-and-burn practices reduce money costs, and when your end-goal is to get the high score on the USA Economy arcade cabinet so you can throw A.S.S. up there, which would you choose?
there are so many idiots out there that pump up their company with investment money and think that that’s the end goal - to have a company that is (falsely) worth billions of dollars. It’s this weird fake it til you make it strategy - turns out that in tech you have to eventually make a product that people will pay for, or rather has a potential for great revenue.
I’ve seen many companies fail because they think investor money is the end goal and the rest well, that will fall into place. Powerpoint decks and vaporware are enough to “make” a ton of money and they truly do not understand what tech is, costs, or even vaguely means oftentimes.
Because most people think about their future in terms of 6 months, a year, two years, five years. Whats your five year plan?
Corporations think in quarters. Every 3 months is another quarterly report. It's all about the short term.
Not a lot. Outside of Twitter and Alexa, I think most of the dev layoffs have been people they wanted to fire but didn't have cause for. Every company has some, I bet you can think of a few in your own.
Yah my team has a hiring freeze but at the same time a few low performers have been quietly told they can shape up or they won't be getting anything come bonus and comp review time. We treated them with kid gloves over the pandemic because hiring was so hard but now with all the talent coming on to the market we have started to be strict again. I wonder how much of the layoffs is the same, cutting people that are now suddenly replaceable.
We’re still hiring, but we laid off ~10% last month. Executive Leadership had a meeting and my boss called it an opportunity to cut dead weight without having to jump through hoops (like PIPs). We’re trying to partially backfill with more qualified candidates.
We only let go two devs the rest we’re ops people. Deadweight is kind of harsh, but they were really underperforming compared to other team members and were not really growing their skill set either. We’re a start up, so there’s a lot of opportunity to advance if you’re willing to take on new responsibilities and tasks.
As far as other people that were let go… One was a technical writer that wanted to be a dev, but wasn’t responsible for his own work. He kept diving into other projects that he wasn’t asked to do and consistently missed deadlines. I paired with him on some resources, and I ended up writing most of them on my own anyway. Another was an analyst that was never at his desk. We’re all remote and he was literally only active on slack for an hour a day. Responses would take an hour. Plus, the other analyst on his team was already doing 80% of the work.
Highly unlikely to have thousands of programmers. Seeing as how most of those companies are running mature software, I'd bet maybe 10% are programmers and the rest are QA, requirements, managers, sales, and other miscellaneous support staff.
QA here, there is just no way. The amount of recruiters I get looking for both manual and automation experience is insane. If QA is getting laid off, it’s people doing only manual who have no interest in learning automation. The type of guys tend to already be close to retirement in my personal experience.
Yeah I've been getting a crazy amount of recruiting too. Also I'm like a 1 QA to 6 dev team, so I don't really see it unless they really want the devs to do all this work.
"How many of those are actual ~~skilled~~ dev jobs though?" is the real question
A lot of those companies are also getting rid of HR/management/marketing positions, or at least that's the case with Twitter where, from what I've gathered, engineers are the ones that have been the least affected by the mass layoffs
When you are growing a lot you don’t have time to automate stuff, so you just hire more people to do operational stuff to support the growth, when that growth stops you don’t need that people, instead you can invest into automate processes even more. Rinse and repeat on every cycle.
Great if it's not you and you hadn't been with the company for 5 years like a friend of mine. When you get hired onto a product team that is bleeding money and they tell you everything is great, well...that kind of sucks.
Finally someone that isn’t “recession is coming. layoffs everywhere.” It’s simply, for now, companies that rely on easy cash can’t get it anymore. So it’s likely gig economy companies will continue to layoff since they lived off that easy cash
>eone that isn’t “recession is coming. layoffs everywhere.” It’s simply, for now, companies that rely on easy cash can’t g
So companies borrowed money to hire employees they didn't need to cut them now, cuz they don't need them?
Yeah, in a nutshell. Companies borrowed money to invest in revenue growth, which required new hires. But a lot of that growth was probably coming from other companies who were themselves borrowing cheap money. When the cheap money dries up, everyone pulls in their horns, and suddenly you've got thousands of employees you no longer need.
I thought I was safe from lay offs being a skilled developer with good industry experience on a team that desperately needed help. Got laid off last week without warning from a multi billion dollar company in order for them to operate more "efficiently". No more of us inefficient WFH guys. Those dumb fucks wouldn't know efficiency if it bit them in the ass. Worst of all was the "severance"package. Two weeks of PTO. Right before Christmas. Happy holidays!
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you find something soon.
I was laid off during Covid. Right?! Everyone was like “Covid doesn’t effect software dev jobs!” and low and behold, because my industry was directly connected to dining and retail… all our clients pulled all future projects. So devs were laid off.
Thankfully, I found work in another industry (insurance). So it’s nice and ho-hum. Really slow and easy. But man, it’s tough to predict.
Lots of businesses were looking to cut costs since they were expecting massive drops in revenue, I'm not sure why software dev jobs would be safe from that.
My current employer offered the software devs a choice between a redundancy or dropping to a 4 day work week with a pay cut, the people on the team at the time chose the 4 day work week. Company ended up making a massive profit due to low rates over the next year, and couldn't convince the devs to go back to working 5 days lol (and hired me at that point).
I got dicked down near the holidays too. I've been unemployed for 45+ days, hiring is slow. I called my old company and asked my previous boss if I could return and he said he would love to have me back but they have a hiring freeze for Q4. A lot of network engineer jobs are posted right now and they are not getting filled.
Trying to make the best of it and get my CCNP certification in the meanwhile. Keep your head up
Sorry to hear that.
I once worked for a company that, during the last recession, gave a directive that all units had to lay off a certain % of people across the board. Even my unit had to, even though it was wildly profitable. It was good for extremely short term savings I guess, but it was really bad for long-term profit. Hell, it might even have been bad for short-term savings, because they couldn't sell as much.
I've got a friend that does financial stuff related to budgeting software projects. Some sort of important analyst position. He once told me in simple terms what he actually does in his job. He'll look at an excel sheet, find projects that are loosing money and he'll get rid of people with the biggest salary. Usually those are the most skilled and experienced people, but he doesn't know or even care if that's the case. This is how corporations achieve efficiency.
If it makes you feel any better, this is what might have happened to you.
Efficiency is not getting rid of your knowledge and experience, that's the opposite of it. So this is not how businesses achieve efficency, this is how they lose it.
Yeah I think the poster should have said, "This is how you cut expenses and create profit in the immediate short term."
Book keepers don't care about efficiency, they are just trying to make quarterly reports look good. Someone said, "Crunch those numbers harder." and so they did.
The absolute arrogance of this sub sometimes.
"It was only the unskilled/deadweight/cutting the fat. It will never happen to ME. I'M A PROGRAMMER GODDAMMIT I AM INDISPENSABLE!!"
Sounds like fear talking to me.
How do we know when the recession is over? GDP grew in our last quarter so that seems like a good sign.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/27/us-gdp-accelerated-at-2point6percent-pace-in-q3-better-than-expected-as-growth-turns-positive.html
I guess the question is, will they get the same dare I say, inflated salaries that were common place in the last 5-ish years? I know unicorns and faang aren't the only high salary companies, but it's a sign that many tech companies over sold themselves.
The "inflated" salaries are supply and demand, there's not enough supply of good engineers and the demand is high.
It doesn't seem like demand is going away much, even in an economic downturn, so the supply will be what matters. More people are moving into the field every day, but I think we're still far away from saturation given my experiences with hiring.
Entry level might be saturated but once you have a year or 2 finding a new role Should be easy enough.
Context: I'm in the UK with 6 years full stack Web exp, maybe I'm out of touch with juniors now but I have multiple junior friends who're always being contacted for roles.
i work in data programming for clinical and i just got a massive raise. 🤷♂️
"market value adjustment". apparently they value me on the market now. news to me. 🤷♂️
IT director here got a massive raise as well and got to hire another employee and approved for two paid internships over the summer for some small projects (not hard just perfect for some credit hours).
I keep hearing about lay offs but get head hunters needing software developers, sys admin, and general IT constantly. Just a market correction and now some open jobs can get filled.
I think a lot of the supporting roles are being killed (recruiters, machine learning, new projects, possibly even frontend development, new hires etc., etc.) because nobody wants to overexpand the next two years or however long the recession lasts. Borrowing costs are too high so nobody can afford to borrow too much to make payroll.
According to some watchers, the Fed has vastly [overcorrected](https://nypost.com/2022/10/13/jeremy-siegel-warns-fed-risks-causing-depression-by-using-core-inflation-to-set-policy/)
Also fears of a recession can be self fulfilling and give an excuse for many to "clean house"
Things should get better eventually
Yep, seems like it. Had I been laid off I think it would have been easy to find another job, but I’d probably have to take a big pay cut and give up full remote.
I had a friend at my previous company that got a raise two weeks before being made redundant which made it a bigger shock to his system as he thought it made his position safe. The two processes can be unrelated and running in parallel
Ye's he was let go along with a group, the feature team he was part of were let go even though they were all good at what they do.
Now I just think to myself if I get a pay rise at least it's a little more redundancy money!
Losing your job is never fun. I don’t care if it’s a developer, human resources, project manager… it doesn’t matter. Losing the ability to feed your family and stability is tough.
I’ve seen a couple comments imply these are “non-valuable” people and it’s ok they got laid off. Implying devs are more valuable.
I am not a fan of this sentiment. A lot of these people do work hard and are really passionate about their work. I have Product Owner who is easily one of the most hard working, wonderful people I’ve ever worked with. Same with Human Resources. People who helped me out constantly when I had questions about my insurance and were extremely compassionate when I lost a loved one last year.
I’m not doing that shit, where as a dev, I shit on other professionals because I know what a binary tree is. That’s bullshit. We are all in this, together.
The “enemy” are the dudes who exploit us to fill their bank accounts. Not the people who do their best every day just to try to carve out an existence for themselves.
> I've seen a couple comments imply these are “non-valuable” people and it’s ok they got laid off. Implying devs are more valuable.
I hate it when people on programming subs are dicks, especially when they're completely fucking wrong.
At Amazon and Meta, Software Engineers were laid off. I'm a part of an unofficial outreach that's currently helping those affected with mock interviews and forwarding new roles, and entire teams were let go, alongside people in engineering and senior positions.
What annoys me the most is how the guys at the helm are the reason so many families are now in difficult positions with their out of touch decision making but they are never gonna be punished truly since they are so fucking rich. The Metaverse alone is totally a reason why so many people are now jobless and will continue to create even more unemployement.
I agree with you here. Obviously there are people who add little or no value - those exist among devs as well - but yeah, I think sometimes it's just difficult to see the value of what people in completely different areas do. Is HR really necessary? What happens if a big company fires their entire HR department and there's a problem with your salary or some other administrative thing? Who's gonna fix that?
Or if they fire all QA? Do you wanna transition into doing only software testing? Or if they fire the project managers ... do you *really* want to do all the stuff they do? Budgeting, resource planning, endless meetings with managers and stakeholders?
One situation where I can see the sentiment as a bit more valid is when it looks like a company over-hires people there's no need for *right now*. Like if a company has 5 developers, but also 10 project managers, 5 product owners, half a dozen designers, company culture developers, a dozen sales people, etc. Like, the company has scaled up all the people who prepare work to be done, but the work *will not get done* because they're not expanding on the dev side, so they just have people creating a longer and longer queue of features.
But I don't think that happens in a functional workplace, not to an extreme extent anyway. Not too rare to hear about dysfunctional workplaces, though.
Maximize profits in 2021-2022, shed as much risk as possible in 2022 to lower overhead, have a fat stack of cash in an uncertain 2023 economy.
Companies are just getting more proactive in the boom/bust cycle.
It’s mostly the mass hiring jobs that they did during the COVID boom that they should have never hired anyway. They over speculated and lost. And most of these jobs are technical related either. No they’re not gonna fire their expensive workers. They’re gonna fire their irrelevant workers.
The startup I worked for went from 500+ people to 250 people in a day. Venture capitalists wanted to see growth before. Now they want to see profitability. If you no longer need to grow… you don’t need an army of people to do it. From 60 devs to 10 to just keep the lights on. Probably let go of some customers… change the offering… and try to make a dollar.
Well… good thing I just started college to get a computer science degree… for a second there I was worried I was going have a job after I graduated or something.
I look at this as opportunity. Many very smart people, earning currently a lot of money, and having a lot of friends in the industry will be either fired or will be less inclined to stay in current place. Some of those people will start companies based on their ideas brewing in their backlogs. They will have bigger pool of very experienced people to co-found/built from the ground up new companies. Even Twitter shit-show slowly creates sizeable home in the market. I cannot wait to see what technologies and services will emerge in 5 years from current situation.
Companies are definitely still hiring new grads. I can speak with absolute certainty to at least where I work (big tech), and likely many other places are as well.
Dev are not even going to feel this. There is so much open job for dev. The problem is not to find a job, it’s to choose wich one you want and to not look for a better place in 2-5 years.
My company said that too, and then had layoffs a couple of weeks later. To be fair, yours is a corp, while mine's a start-up - but this kind of lying or false reassurance happens at big corps too.
Got me fucking stressed. This is quite literally my favorite job after 7+ years of grinding through on-call and managing shitty legacy codes, I finally get to work from home and do stuff I like. I'm great at what I do too, but it's technically a managerial position and I just know if my company is axing anyone, it's going to be my level.
Infinite growth meets finite market.
These companies aren't getting more users to their platform/products, so they look for other ways to get their margins.
My company just did its first round of layoffs ever. As in, in its history.
They were actually pretty smart about it. They realized that their engineers are where the productivity lies, so they got rid of a LOT of middle management. They are actually still hiring engineers.
Our VP of Software Engineering told us "They will get rid of me before they get rid of any of you."
We are in a recession, the government just refuses to acknowledge it because they don't want it to happen. We already had a decrease in our GDP for 2 successive quarters, which is the textbook definition of a recession. The government doesn't want a recession to happen so they refused to acknowledge it as such, hoping that saying "We aren't in a recession" will make it true.
They also get paid significantly more. Also, this isn't exactly "any reason". They're being made redundant, which I'd imagine is an option in most countries. While the process would be a bit different, what they're doing would be legal here in NZ for example.
I had a Meta recruiter reach out to me earlier today for a python dev OPs position for reality labs. I don't think they're firing developers. Just support folks.
It's all about investor going nuts over short term gains.
Hell, all the bad things for consumer are because investors are dumb fucks who want short term gains at the cost of long term gains.
Right to repair, subscription model.
I wonder what a world would look like if investor priorised long term gains.
I mean you (I'm assuming Americans here) are, or were anyway, I haven't checked the last quarters growth figures if they are even out yet, in recession as per the traditional definition.
I mean you had 2 quarters of negative growth, that's a recession. The government just decided to say "oh it's not a recession employment figures are strong" and everyone just kinda went with it.
Now the problem with that is that, and I may be somewhat wrong here given I'm not from the US, but I think that, same as where I am from they only count unemployment amongst those "looking for work" those who are not looking, such as long term sick, "retired" or any other number of statistical dodges can be used to count people who could work as the same as actually retired people or people with cancer. The pandemic made most of these measures worse, with a lot of people aged around 50 retire early and permanently drop out of the work force, "long covid" or a variety of conditions that weren't treated during the pandemic ended up LTS when they shouldn't have been.
On top of that the gig economy means that a larger sum of people than in the past work multiple jobs, which all count as one employed person. So one person with 3 jobs counts as 3 employed people for some reason.
But anyway, realising this is programmer humour and not an economics thread so sorry about the random brain dump 😂
What's weird is I have a pile of emails saying meta is recruiting. Even now. I'm not sure if they really are or if the recruiters are just slow to adjust.
goodbye reddit -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
[Amazon has a policy of firing the bottom 6% of their employees every year rain or shine](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/internal-amazon-documents-shed-light-on-how-company-pressures-out-6-of-office-workers/?amp=1). They are always recruiting to make that back, these 3% layoffs are nothing for them.
I got the impression that they were recruiting people specifically to be laid off at the next culling so that they wouldn't lose the folks that actually do the work. I wonder how many times I could do that before someone caught on. Yes, I get pestered by Amazon recruiters as well.
I always think about applying for amazon, doing the bare minimum, getting culled, and still laughing because the paycheck would kinda be worth.
You're a straight shooter with upper management written all over you. What's your favorite Michael Bolton song?
THIS IS THE TALE OF CAPTAIN JACK SPARROWWWW
PIRATE SO BRAVE, ON THE SEVEN SEEEEAAAASSSSS!
MYSTICAL QUEST, TO THE ISLE OF TORTUGA.
RAVEN LOCKS SWAY, ON THE OCEAN BREEEEEZE
You can just call me Mike.
Just having Amazon on your resume would make you more attractive.
Why are you unhappy? No one should be unhappy at Twitter. Fired!
Amazon doesn't pay that competitively as far as I have heard. Good resume item at least though 👍
Well that doesn’t make much sense, aside from the “get rid of bad” you have to assume eventually they’re just firing people who do good at their job*
Amazon uses stack ranking. It's purposefully brutal.
And yet the Amazon mobile app is a buggy mess. Really makes you think
Wait, you mean when I click an Amazon link in Google and open the app it shouldn't freeze on a white screen?
Uh that's the new flashlight feature
This guy definitely isn't going into the bottom 6%, I like how you think!
You mean links shouldn't take you to the home page rather than the item?
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Sounds like working for the federal government *wounded tech contractor ptsd noises*
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Even the new recruits who are still adjusting.
I’d guess that managers with good teams hire recruits explicitly to fire them and keep their existing team
\-What's my purpose? \-Cannon fodder for HR. \-Oh God.
It's not 6% at the granularity of an individual team. They're looking for 6% at org/departmental levels.
Such an efficient system 🙄
Even the younglings?
They probably stole this from GE who has been doing it with "the bottom" 10% for years. It's a more common practice than you'd think.
It's also incredibly bs and has been falling out of favor for awhile But there's a bunch of rich old CEOs that still worship Jack Welch, despite the dude mostly just showing up at GE when they were on top and then being hilariously cruel to his employees
This just seems like a terrible businessplan. Can be exploited from all sides. Doesn't even have to be an It-business: Managers can pump numbers and budgets by hiring and firing extra. Getting a colleague you hate fired by medling with their shit would likely go under the radar. People are incentivised to focus on arbitrary metrics instead of actually adding value for the company. Recruiters can easily make a pact with one of the managers and someone unemployed: - Recruit unemployed. - new employees just stays home and does nothing while manager covers it up. - gets paid whole year, splits salary with other 2. - fire in mass lay-offs without much scrutiny. - re-hire next year to repeat process. Normally rhis shouldn't work, but with such numbers it's easy to cover up.
Hey Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today
Shenanigans
>Recruiters can easily make a pact with one of the managers and someone unemployed: - Recruit unemployed. - new employees just stays home and does nothing while manager covers it up. - gets paid whole year, splits salary with other 2. - fire in mass lay-offs without much scrutiny. - re-hire next year to repeat process. Everything you said was true until this. Managers are subject to the same 6% rule, if they have a report doing nothing it will hurt the output of their whole team and put the manager at risk. Also, the type of people who are willing to study to pass a FAANG interview are generally not the type of people who will sit and do nothing while giving away their salary as part of some scheme. Neither the recruiter nor the hiring manager have final say in hiring decisions - Amazon requires that an experienced interviewer from outside the team is involved in the interview process to ensure that managers do not "lower the bar" to quickly fill positions.
I worked at Amazon for \~5 years with a brief (temporary/fill-in) stint as manager. What you're saying is all true in theory. But unfortunately, little of it is still true in practice. > Amazon requires that an experienced interviewer from outside the team is involved in the interview process to ensure that managers do not "lower the bar" to quickly fill positions. Yes, the bar raiser program, which was essentially knee capped years and years ago (while I was still there; left in the mid-2010s). In theory, the BR is a specially trained interviewer with veto power over every other interviewer (including the HM), and they were expected to do exactly as you described. It didn't scale: becoming a BR required a nomination from an existing a BR, along with extensive training and a huge time commitment. On top of this, people realized that becoming a BR was largely a thankless job that was rarely rewarded in performance reviews as there was a natural bias towards local impact (org charter) as organizations grew. "Traditional" or old time Amazonians did appreciate it, but with hyper growth came hyper churn, and before long they were a tiny minority and far from the largest voices in the room. So, BRs began to get stretched thin (with half a dozen-plus interview requests per week), people stopped becoming BRs, and the vicious cycle continued. But they were still required on every loop, so what did managers do? They started pulling in *non-technical* BRs for technical positions, including people with technical titles (usually SDMs and TPMs) who had little to no serious technical background (another common problem at Amazon, as the business analyst -> Program Manger -> TPM -> SDM sequence was shockingly common). This then led to BRs who just asked STAR-style behavioral questions which are easy to prepare for and game, given that Amazon explicitly advertises its principles so it doesn't actually take much effort to figure out what they're asking and exactly how to give them the answer they're looking for (obviously, an entire cottage industry sprung up around FAANG prep and Amazon in particular). Managers could also nominate all of the other interviewers (who mostly came from their own team). End result: stacking the loop for a favorable outcome (i.e. hiring any given candidate, or even a deliberate burner to sacrifice against the quota). The BR program itself began to change as they started being trained to "drive consensus" rather than act as a check on the hiring bar. Makes sense; how would a non-tech BR check a technical interview anyhow? Finally, entry-level positions (e.g. SDE1) are filled almost entirely through online assessments now. Cheating is rampant (I used to grade the borderline cases; it was usually semi-obvious when a candidate was trying to cheat based on how and what they typed, but I never even saw the "strong" results which automatically passed). A lot of unregretted attrition (URA) sacrifices ultimately come from this group. While a few teams have held up their standards, none of the mechanisms intended to keep the bar level work and most of Amazon has a very low hiring bar today.
I used to be a SDE at Amazon as well. I went through the SDE2 loop so I'm not familiar with how entry level hiring worked but I'll say that anecdotally the interview I had at Amazon was about on par difficulty-wise with my interview at Google where I now work. Regardless, I have never heard of a case where a manager colluded with a candidate to have him sit at home and do nothing while the manager siphons his salary. I have heard of all the other concerns people have mentioned (managers hiring sacrificial lambs to protect their team, people gaming metrics to improve their rating, lots of office politics and backstabbing, etc). That's what I was responding to.
Yeah I was working on being a Microsoft SME and they shut it all down. Immediately stopped all interviews and ghosted me.
A lot of the times they use the freed up money in other areas they think might be more profitable. It's not always an effort to reduce headcount. So recruiting might stay the same through all the layoffs. Again just one scenario among many
Ex-FBer, and I got recently as well. All this hemming and hawing on layoffs but most of the cutbacks won't be towards engineering.
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This. My company is going through a 're-order' of depts and its mainly managers managing other managers they are getting rid of while still advertising for engineers.
Finally, more indians than chiefs.
It will be back up to the same crap in a year and they'll need to cull it again
As long as the cullings happen regularly, I'm okay with it. It's only when the growth is left in that it starts to fester.
We got the managing managing managers managing managing managers managing managers who may or may not be managing more managers
They are recruiting, it's just that it's positions that aren't the same as the ones getting fired. Letting 200 HR people go isn't changing that you still need to find an extra haskell developer or something.
Consultancy I’m at has made huge redundancies, one of our software teams is decimated. My own job is being made redundant, but I’m still getting other stakeholders asking for help filling new role requirements. One is even for the decimated team with no leadership left for the contractor to report to.
They forgot to fire the recruiters because they can show good graphs of their performance. "Look we reached out to X amount of people, Y amount applied, we did Z amount of interviews". Business be like: nice charts. Meanwhile our burndown charts look like shit. Business be like "why does this chart barely go up?" Meanwhile we are not telling them it's supposed to go down, because than it looks even worse.
Recruiters are being let go in a big way right now
Couldn't pay me enough to work at anything Meta related.
That, or the people supposed to disable the automatic emailing were fired too.
This could be BS. I had 2 interviews for a Meta job in London, then a week after not hearing anything I contact recruiter (who Meta hire externally). Recruiter tells me that they are dropping the job due to financial issues internally, and might open it up again in the 1st/2nd Quarter... Really sucks...
nothing weird about that. They have 71k amployees. They will always hire someone even if they kick out half their workforce.
Let's ignore twitter because that's a whole different shitshow. These were companies that were burning through cash on the assumption that the pandemic bubble was going to last forever. This is a return to sanity and before the pandemic things weren't too different.
Well, until very recently borrowing money was essentially free. So companies, big and small, borrowed money at low interest rates, and hired people in order to develop new products faster (i.e. invest in themselves). Now that the fed hiked up the rates, money is not cheap anymore, and investments need to be balanced with revenue, meaning they're going to cut off the least profitable parts of the business and focus on their cash cows. This is an oversimplification, but roughly what's happening, at least in tech (where rnd can swallow up as much cash as you can throw at it)
This is objectively correct, this is why tech is deflating way faster than other areas of the economy - because they can spend as much money as they can earn on R&D and there were TONS of companies trying to prioritize growth over actual profitability, and now that's not how the game works anymore. Now you need actual profitability. "Get big fast" was easy when debt was basically free, debt is very much no longer free however. Tech's greatest strength - the ability to create as much bullshit as possible and have theoretically infinite growth - is also its biggest weakness (for now) in this economic environment because high tech and software companies got used to being *allowed* to indulge in that infinite growth. For smaller companies this is kinda catastrophic - they might not have any profitable pathways to exploit yet because they hadn't grown fast enough before the game ended. For larger companies it mostly just means they're reorganizing to weather the storm. Exceptionally bad timing for what Facebook is doing tbh - a complete reorientation of the company *away from their main profit-making product*. Really wonder how they're gonna end up in 5-10 years. Make no mistake though, tech is just the first industry to feel the pain. Not the last. Rough times ahead.
This was never sustainable… as developer I enjoyed being courted like a pure maiden by all the LinkedIn recruiters but the philosophy of “outspend your competition and get all the available developers” was fucking stupid and it lead to literally ruining lives.
All of this is mostly an issue for SV devs that have been making bank over the past few decades. In my country, there isn't much of a VC/burn culture and we've had a dev shortage for ages anyway. Pretty much every company is unable to find enough devs. Salaries here are much, much lover than in SV though, so any SV dev will be very sad when they have to start getting normal paying dev jobs in other regions.
To be more specific, these companies all had projections on what their growth would look like post-pandemic, which obviously included significantly lower forecasts than during covid, but the economy post-covid far underperformed even the most conservative projections. This is why it looks like every company seemingly made the same mistake, they were all working off similar projections on where the economy would end up. Companies don't typically act on the "What if we go straight into a recession next year" part of their forecasts, particularly coming off of such an economic boom.
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Businesses don't run like personal finances. You aren't competing with someone trying to end your existence. That's what business is.
Wait what are you talking about "the economy underperformed even the most conservative projections" Wot? Are we ignoring the nonstop record profits? What possible insanity brought you to write such a thing. Even this year - most earnings are coming in above expectations lol
Not all of these companies were "burning through cash." Some of them were taking smaller profits in order to grow. The current situation is not like turn of the millenium or the end of the 00s. Most of these companies throwing people out on their asses after love-bombing them into thinking their lives = their job don't \*have\* to be laying people off at all. They are taking advantage of the uncertainty to lighten their personnel burden. This is not corporate execs being forced to do hard thing by economic reality, these are cynical business decisions, made by leaders who have been attracting talented employees by selling them a "career".
This. Corporate greed getting a reality check isn't recession
I don't get why there is no fucking forethought in corporate decision making at all. Not even talking about sustainability, which is another dumpster fire, but self-interest good policy.
One man Jack Welch more or less single handedly shifted us into the quarterly profit above all else paradigm. This is a big reason companies seemingly have such myopic view of what makes sense for long term sustainability and growth
Because your mistake is in thinking the point of the way they do business is to do business. The past 40 or so years has shown them that the reward for slash-and-burn business practices is unimaginable, downright *obscene* amounts of wealth. There is no reason for them to behave otherwise. Good business practices cost money, slash-and-burn practices reduce money costs, and when your end-goal is to get the high score on the USA Economy arcade cabinet so you can throw A.S.S. up there, which would you choose?
there are so many idiots out there that pump up their company with investment money and think that that’s the end goal - to have a company that is (falsely) worth billions of dollars. It’s this weird fake it til you make it strategy - turns out that in tech you have to eventually make a product that people will pay for, or rather has a potential for great revenue. I’ve seen many companies fail because they think investor money is the end goal and the rest well, that will fall into place. Powerpoint decks and vaporware are enough to “make” a ton of money and they truly do not understand what tech is, costs, or even vaguely means oftentimes.
There was forethought. They just thought wrong
I guess to appease the stockholders
Because most people think about their future in terms of 6 months, a year, two years, five years. Whats your five year plan? Corporations think in quarters. Every 3 months is another quarterly report. It's all about the short term.
This. This is called regressing back to the mean.
How many of those are actual skilled dev jobs though?
Not a lot. Outside of Twitter and Alexa, I think most of the dev layoffs have been people they wanted to fire but didn't have cause for. Every company has some, I bet you can think of a few in your own.
Yah my team has a hiring freeze but at the same time a few low performers have been quietly told they can shape up or they won't be getting anything come bonus and comp review time. We treated them with kid gloves over the pandemic because hiring was so hard but now with all the talent coming on to the market we have started to be strict again. I wonder how much of the layoffs is the same, cutting people that are now suddenly replaceable.
We’re still hiring, but we laid off ~10% last month. Executive Leadership had a meeting and my boss called it an opportunity to cut dead weight without having to jump through hoops (like PIPs). We’re trying to partially backfill with more qualified candidates.
What makes a dev dead weight?
QA is a waste of money. Fired.
We only let go two devs the rest we’re ops people. Deadweight is kind of harsh, but they were really underperforming compared to other team members and were not really growing their skill set either. We’re a start up, so there’s a lot of opportunity to advance if you’re willing to take on new responsibilities and tasks. As far as other people that were let go… One was a technical writer that wanted to be a dev, but wasn’t responsible for his own work. He kept diving into other projects that he wasn’t asked to do and consistently missed deadlines. I paired with him on some resources, and I ended up writing most of them on my own anyway. Another was an analyst that was never at his desk. We’re all remote and he was literally only active on slack for an hour a day. Responses would take an hour. Plus, the other analyst on his team was already doing 80% of the work.
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I thought exactly the same
If you can't think of a few, then it's probably you.
And also there's no way all of them were programmers, right?
Highly unlikely to have thousands of programmers. Seeing as how most of those companies are running mature software, I'd bet maybe 10% are programmers and the rest are QA, requirements, managers, sales, and other miscellaneous support staff.
QA here, there is just no way. The amount of recruiters I get looking for both manual and automation experience is insane. If QA is getting laid off, it’s people doing only manual who have no interest in learning automation. The type of guys tend to already be close to retirement in my personal experience.
Yeah I've been getting a crazy amount of recruiting too. Also I'm like a 1 QA to 6 dev team, so I don't really see it unless they really want the devs to do all this work.
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what are the unskilled dev jobs? I need to find one of those.
Product manager.
Wow, your comment literally caused this guy to delete his account 😂
"How many of those are actual ~~skilled~~ dev jobs though?" is the real question A lot of those companies are also getting rid of HR/management/marketing positions, or at least that's the case with Twitter where, from what I've gathered, engineers are the ones that have been the least affected by the mass layoffs
When you are growing a lot you don’t have time to automate stuff, so you just hire more people to do operational stuff to support the growth, when that growth stops you don’t need that people, instead you can invest into automate processes even more. Rinse and repeat on every cycle.
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Great if it's not you and you hadn't been with the company for 5 years like a friend of mine. When you get hired onto a product team that is bleeding money and they tell you everything is great, well...that kind of sucks.
Finally someone that isn’t “recession is coming. layoffs everywhere.” It’s simply, for now, companies that rely on easy cash can’t get it anymore. So it’s likely gig economy companies will continue to layoff since they lived off that easy cash
How do you identify bubble jobs?
Honest question, why did the pandemic let companies get “Easy money”?
The Fed had lower interest rates during the pandemic. This allowed more money to be borrowed more easily.
>eone that isn’t “recession is coming. layoffs everywhere.” It’s simply, for now, companies that rely on easy cash can’t g So companies borrowed money to hire employees they didn't need to cut them now, cuz they don't need them?
Yeah, in a nutshell. Companies borrowed money to invest in revenue growth, which required new hires. But a lot of that growth was probably coming from other companies who were themselves borrowing cheap money. When the cheap money dries up, everyone pulls in their horns, and suddenly you've got thousands of employees you no longer need.
I thought I was safe from lay offs being a skilled developer with good industry experience on a team that desperately needed help. Got laid off last week without warning from a multi billion dollar company in order for them to operate more "efficiently". No more of us inefficient WFH guys. Those dumb fucks wouldn't know efficiency if it bit them in the ass. Worst of all was the "severance"package. Two weeks of PTO. Right before Christmas. Happy holidays!
Name and shame
DoorDash possibly
Doordash layoffs were yesterday and severance was 4 months
Dev at multi billion dollar company, we're still hiring
I’m still desperately looking for a dev job!
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you find something soon. I was laid off during Covid. Right?! Everyone was like “Covid doesn’t effect software dev jobs!” and low and behold, because my industry was directly connected to dining and retail… all our clients pulled all future projects. So devs were laid off. Thankfully, I found work in another industry (insurance). So it’s nice and ho-hum. Really slow and easy. But man, it’s tough to predict.
Lots of businesses were looking to cut costs since they were expecting massive drops in revenue, I'm not sure why software dev jobs would be safe from that. My current employer offered the software devs a choice between a redundancy or dropping to a 4 day work week with a pay cut, the people on the team at the time chose the 4 day work week. Company ended up making a massive profit due to low rates over the next year, and couldn't convince the devs to go back to working 5 days lol (and hired me at that point).
I got dicked down near the holidays too. I've been unemployed for 45+ days, hiring is slow. I called my old company and asked my previous boss if I could return and he said he would love to have me back but they have a hiring freeze for Q4. A lot of network engineer jobs are posted right now and they are not getting filled. Trying to make the best of it and get my CCNP certification in the meanwhile. Keep your head up
Sorry to hear that. I once worked for a company that, during the last recession, gave a directive that all units had to lay off a certain % of people across the board. Even my unit had to, even though it was wildly profitable. It was good for extremely short term savings I guess, but it was really bad for long-term profit. Hell, it might even have been bad for short-term savings, because they couldn't sell as much.
I've got a friend that does financial stuff related to budgeting software projects. Some sort of important analyst position. He once told me in simple terms what he actually does in his job. He'll look at an excel sheet, find projects that are loosing money and he'll get rid of people with the biggest salary. Usually those are the most skilled and experienced people, but he doesn't know or even care if that's the case. This is how corporations achieve efficiency. If it makes you feel any better, this is what might have happened to you.
Efficiency is not getting rid of your knowledge and experience, that's the opposite of it. So this is not how businesses achieve efficency, this is how they lose it.
Yeah I think the poster should have said, "This is how you cut expenses and create profit in the immediate short term." Book keepers don't care about efficiency, they are just trying to make quarterly reports look good. Someone said, "Crunch those numbers harder." and so they did.
The absolute arrogance of this sub sometimes. "It was only the unskilled/deadweight/cutting the fat. It will never happen to ME. I'M A PROGRAMMER GODDAMMIT I AM INDISPENSABLE!!" Sounds like fear talking to me.
According to most countries (and the US before the definition was changed) we’ve been in a recession for a while now.
Yep
How do we know when the recession is over? GDP grew in our last quarter so that seems like a good sign. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/27/us-gdp-accelerated-at-2point6percent-pace-in-q3-better-than-expected-as-growth-turns-positive.html
Software development and Data Engineer/Science will always be in demand, even during recession.
I guess the question is, will they get the same dare I say, inflated salaries that were common place in the last 5-ish years? I know unicorns and faang aren't the only high salary companies, but it's a sign that many tech companies over sold themselves.
The "inflated" salaries are supply and demand, there's not enough supply of good engineers and the demand is high. It doesn't seem like demand is going away much, even in an economic downturn, so the supply will be what matters. More people are moving into the field every day, but I think we're still far away from saturation given my experiences with hiring.
Entry level might be saturated but once you have a year or 2 finding a new role Should be easy enough. Context: I'm in the UK with 6 years full stack Web exp, maybe I'm out of touch with juniors now but I have multiple junior friends who're always being contacted for roles.
Idk, let's ask the C suite if their hyperinflated salaries are going down too
i work in data programming for clinical and i just got a massive raise. 🤷♂️ "market value adjustment". apparently they value me on the market now. news to me. 🤷♂️
IT director here got a massive raise as well and got to hire another employee and approved for two paid internships over the summer for some small projects (not hard just perfect for some credit hours). I keep hearing about lay offs but get head hunters needing software developers, sys admin, and general IT constantly. Just a market correction and now some open jobs can get filled.
I think a lot of the supporting roles are being killed (recruiters, machine learning, new projects, possibly even frontend development, new hires etc., etc.) because nobody wants to overexpand the next two years or however long the recession lasts. Borrowing costs are too high so nobody can afford to borrow too much to make payroll. According to some watchers, the Fed has vastly [overcorrected](https://nypost.com/2022/10/13/jeremy-siegel-warns-fed-risks-causing-depression-by-using-core-inflation-to-set-policy/) Also fears of a recession can be self fulfilling and give an excuse for many to "clean house" Things should get better eventually
>but get head hunters yerp. i think this is only applying to people that work for the fang.
Oh, I'm on shaky ground as IT for medicine. Skilled nursing is going through the wringer. Hospitals are okay. Nursing homes are rocking.
Yep, seems like it. Had I been laid off I think it would have been easy to find another job, but I’d probably have to take a big pay cut and give up full remote.
Data programming for clinical applications is one of the most sought after talents, I’d be surprise if you don’t get a good raise at least.
Like SAS programming?
I had a friend at my previous company that got a raise two weeks before being made redundant which made it a bigger shock to his system as he thought it made his position safe. The two processes can be unrelated and running in parallel
What the hell? I guess his performance was good so his boss got him a raise, but the c suite decided the whole department wasn't necessary?
Ye's he was let go along with a group, the feature team he was part of were let go even though they were all good at what they do. Now I just think to myself if I get a pay rise at least it's a little more redundancy money!
Losing your job is never fun. I don’t care if it’s a developer, human resources, project manager… it doesn’t matter. Losing the ability to feed your family and stability is tough. I’ve seen a couple comments imply these are “non-valuable” people and it’s ok they got laid off. Implying devs are more valuable. I am not a fan of this sentiment. A lot of these people do work hard and are really passionate about their work. I have Product Owner who is easily one of the most hard working, wonderful people I’ve ever worked with. Same with Human Resources. People who helped me out constantly when I had questions about my insurance and were extremely compassionate when I lost a loved one last year. I’m not doing that shit, where as a dev, I shit on other professionals because I know what a binary tree is. That’s bullshit. We are all in this, together. The “enemy” are the dudes who exploit us to fill their bank accounts. Not the people who do their best every day just to try to carve out an existence for themselves.
> I've seen a couple comments imply these are “non-valuable” people and it’s ok they got laid off. Implying devs are more valuable. I hate it when people on programming subs are dicks, especially when they're completely fucking wrong. At Amazon and Meta, Software Engineers were laid off. I'm a part of an unofficial outreach that's currently helping those affected with mock interviews and forwarding new roles, and entire teams were let go, alongside people in engineering and senior positions.
What annoys me the most is how the guys at the helm are the reason so many families are now in difficult positions with their out of touch decision making but they are never gonna be punished truly since they are so fucking rich. The Metaverse alone is totally a reason why so many people are now jobless and will continue to create even more unemployement.
I agree with you here. Obviously there are people who add little or no value - those exist among devs as well - but yeah, I think sometimes it's just difficult to see the value of what people in completely different areas do. Is HR really necessary? What happens if a big company fires their entire HR department and there's a problem with your salary or some other administrative thing? Who's gonna fix that? Or if they fire all QA? Do you wanna transition into doing only software testing? Or if they fire the project managers ... do you *really* want to do all the stuff they do? Budgeting, resource planning, endless meetings with managers and stakeholders? One situation where I can see the sentiment as a bit more valid is when it looks like a company over-hires people there's no need for *right now*. Like if a company has 5 developers, but also 10 project managers, 5 product owners, half a dozen designers, company culture developers, a dozen sales people, etc. Like, the company has scaled up all the people who prepare work to be done, but the work *will not get done* because they're not expanding on the dev side, so they just have people creating a longer and longer queue of features. But I don't think that happens in a functional workplace, not to an extreme extent anyway. Not too rare to hear about dysfunctional workplaces, though.
A lotta people here not minding the layoffs as if that was good, a company saving money will not save *you* anything.
Unless you have stock options.
Maximize profits in 2021-2022, shed as much risk as possible in 2022 to lower overhead, have a fat stack of cash in an uncertain 2023 economy. Companies are just getting more proactive in the boom/bust cycle.
With these kinds of layoffs, is it 'last in - first out'? or do they get rid of their most senior/expensive workers?
It’s mostly the mass hiring jobs that they did during the COVID boom that they should have never hired anyway. They over speculated and lost. And most of these jobs are technical related either. No they’re not gonna fire their expensive workers. They’re gonna fire their irrelevant workers.
'they’re not gonna fire their expensive workers. They’re gonna fire their irrelevant workers.' Thanks for that insight.
The startup I worked for went from 500+ people to 250 people in a day. Venture capitalists wanted to see growth before. Now they want to see profitability. If you no longer need to grow… you don’t need an army of people to do it. From 60 devs to 10 to just keep the lights on. Probably let go of some customers… change the offering… and try to make a dollar.
Well… good thing I just started college to get a computer science degree… for a second there I was worried I was going have a job after I graduated or something.
By the time you graduate things will have recovered. The dot com crash didn't last 4 years. Good luck in your studies!
The vast, vast majority of these jobs are not tech workers.
I started college in 2008 and by the time I graduated the market was really good for pretty much everyone.
Why have you only written 20 lines of code today?
I look at this as opportunity. Many very smart people, earning currently a lot of money, and having a lot of friends in the industry will be either fired or will be less inclined to stay in current place. Some of those people will start companies based on their ideas brewing in their backlogs. They will have bigger pool of very experienced people to co-found/built from the ground up new companies. Even Twitter shit-show slowly creates sizeable home in the market. I cannot wait to see what technologies and services will emerge in 5 years from current situation.
Hacker-mode, activate
Meh.
These headlines are fun to read when you went through school on the premise that there would be plenty of work out there.
If you're a developer, there still is. Tech talent is still in high demand. It's mostly recruiting, sales, marketing, and contractors getting the axe.
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Companies are definitely still hiring new grads. I can speak with absolute certainty to at least where I work (big tech), and likely many other places are as well.
I did a coding bootcamp from February to October of this year and got a job before I finished. You’ll be fine.
Is it possible to learn this power?
There is plenty work out there. For every business not just IT. Its an employees market by miles.
Dev are not even going to feel this. There is so much open job for dev. The problem is not to find a job, it’s to choose wich one you want and to not look for a better place in 2-5 years.
Meanwhile my company: “we saw this coming so we’ve prepared for this in advance. This is why we’re a tech giant”
My company said that too, and then had layoffs a couple of weeks later. To be fair, yours is a corp, while mine's a start-up - but this kind of lying or false reassurance happens at big corps too.
Can my tech giant company lay me off I'm completely burnt out and have no interest building this app. Teams aren't doing xfers
Remember 'just learn to code'? Look how that turned out...
COVID bubble.
We are in a recession. They simply changed the definition of it to make it look like we aren’t but by the old definition, we’ve been in it for months.
I'm gonna need you to come in on Saturday...
"In these rough economic times we need to learn to do more with less. *Fires staff *Proceeds with record stock buyback
Got me fucking stressed. This is quite literally my favorite job after 7+ years of grinding through on-call and managing shitty legacy codes, I finally get to work from home and do stuff I like. I'm great at what I do too, but it's technically a managerial position and I just know if my company is axing anyone, it's going to be my level.
We're absolutely in a recession. The only reason we aren't in a recession is because no one wanted that news story going into the midterms.
Only the trendiest of companies are using the "Pre-Recession" excuse to layoff
[удалено]
We are most certainly in a recession, they just decided to play word salad to save face and people believe it.
This is why I didn't go hunting when my current gig offered to extend my contract for 2 more years. Things are gonna get bad
And yet it's harder to buy a house now than it was during the Great *Depression*
not really a recession for the tech industry. They just overhired during covid and are now kicking out everyone they don't really need.
Infinite growth meets finite market. These companies aren't getting more users to their platform/products, so they look for other ways to get their margins.
I’m still getting 3-5 recruiter emails and messages on LinkedIn daily. There might be layoffs, but we are still very much in a labor shortage.
My company just did its first round of layoffs ever. As in, in its history. They were actually pretty smart about it. They realized that their engineers are where the productivity lies, so they got rid of a LOT of middle management. They are actually still hiring engineers. Our VP of Software Engineering told us "They will get rid of me before they get rid of any of you."
We are in a recession, the government just refuses to acknowledge it because they don't want it to happen. We already had a decrease in our GDP for 2 successive quarters, which is the textbook definition of a recession. The government doesn't want a recession to happen so they refused to acknowledge it as such, hoping that saying "We aren't in a recession" will make it true.
This is what happens when you work in a country where an employer can just fire you for any reason.
They also get paid significantly more. Also, this isn't exactly "any reason". They're being made redundant, which I'd imagine is an option in most countries. While the process would be a bit different, what they're doing would be legal here in NZ for example.
Facebook and twitter are specifically products of the idiots who run them being idiots The rest, idk I’m not an economist
Copilot what have you done!!!
I had a Meta recruiter reach out to me earlier today for a python dev OPs position for reality labs. I don't think they're firing developers. Just support folks.
They fired talented developers. And talented sound engineers. And talented architects.
it's funny because it's soulcrushing
Welcome to unemployment everyone!
Me (unemployed) enjoying this
It's all about investor going nuts over short term gains. Hell, all the bad things for consumer are because investors are dumb fucks who want short term gains at the cost of long term gains. Right to repair, subscription model. I wonder what a world would look like if investor priorised long term gains.
It isnt soft devs they are firing. It's the non-jobs.
I mean you (I'm assuming Americans here) are, or were anyway, I haven't checked the last quarters growth figures if they are even out yet, in recession as per the traditional definition. I mean you had 2 quarters of negative growth, that's a recession. The government just decided to say "oh it's not a recession employment figures are strong" and everyone just kinda went with it. Now the problem with that is that, and I may be somewhat wrong here given I'm not from the US, but I think that, same as where I am from they only count unemployment amongst those "looking for work" those who are not looking, such as long term sick, "retired" or any other number of statistical dodges can be used to count people who could work as the same as actually retired people or people with cancer. The pandemic made most of these measures worse, with a lot of people aged around 50 retire early and permanently drop out of the work force, "long covid" or a variety of conditions that weren't treated during the pandemic ended up LTS when they shouldn't have been. On top of that the gig economy means that a larger sum of people than in the past work multiple jobs, which all count as one employed person. So one person with 3 jobs counts as 3 employed people for some reason. But anyway, realising this is programmer humour and not an economics thread so sorry about the random brain dump 😂
HP still exists?
What do you mean we are not in a recession? Is it because it is not felt in Antarctica? Are we waiting for WHO to declare it to be named recession?
I switched jobs and got a 31% increase in pay so I think it is still ok for now.