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Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#451
Sad to read about some of these stories of hardship that people find themselves in. If you are based in Melbourne, Victoria we currently have an opening for a web developer to help with our frontend as well as a business development role based in the states. You can check the job description on our careers page:

https://mod.io/careers

Remote work is potentially possible for the SE role depending on the candidate, but on-site is preferred.. that being said we are all working remotely for the meantime given the current situation.

If you are interested please drop me an email at pat[at]mod.io

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#452
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit my job in mid January because of burnout, left London for a couple of weeks and came back this Sunday. I’m looking for remote roles exclusively. Now I’m not sure if the timing is perfect or just plain terrible:) Also, I stopped reading the news. I just don’t think refreshing Twitter every 10 min whilst self isolating can be good to your mental health.

I need to stop reading the news too, I’m in pretty deep now...

Hold together, baby, hold together.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#453
post #441
post #391

All: a user emailed with the brilliant suggestion that HN do a "Who Is Hiring Right Now?" thread. We'll do that soon; maybe tomorrow. This will specifically be for jobs that are ready to hire, and able to onboard, quickly. If any of you have suggestions for how to make this most helpful under current conditions, please share them. I'll check this thread later tonight.

As the owner of a fully remote, revenue-funded, and profitable startup that wants to hire, my concern is one that won't be particularly well received. I don't want to hire people, yet , because they're still thinking that https://levels.fyi is realistic. I'd rather wait a few rough months, have the pool of talent grow rapidly and people will start realizing that maybe paying $350k to a green React dev isn't very sust…

IMO, if you are fully remote, you might look at it the other way around. The ridiculous salaries are mostly in California and one or two other places.

Those places might realize that they can get react devs for a dime a dozen out of bootcamps all over the country for a third of that in a few months once they have let people do fully remote work for a while.

The smart thing would seem to be to hire them now before the companies with bigger pockets start driving remote salaries up in the other 45 states.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#454

My predictions: DISCLAIMER: I'm not a expert wrt. any of this. Don't listen to me ;=). It's all just speculation. Companies which plan to downsize since a will will do it now, using COVID19 as a excuse. Companies who have shifted some "bad consequences" into the future might now book them using COVID19 as a excuse for why they exist. Companies who are already on the last straw will end now, (Such which without COVID1…

I spent most of the last 4 years running a startup that has proven to be the steepest or uphill battles. Struggling to find investors willing to take a chance in our space vs the trendier ones, struggling to convert slow moving clients, struggling to find engineers willing to work in our very unglamorous niche. We’re a platform for designing and managing digital government processes for permitting and licensing. Afte…

I wish you well, and wish I had money to invest. When you grow enough to be looking for devops engineers, or sooner for just software engineers, look me up?

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was doing drone control software (RPi based) for a startup that ran out of funding last November. They told me that they were going to keep looking for investors/funding and if they got money they'd call me back to work immediately. And there were some promising signs in December/January that they might get some funding. So, since I liked them, they liked me, and the gig was fun I figured I'd put off looking for ot…

Name of startup? This sounds fun.

It was fun. But it pretty much doesn't exist in any economically viable way at this point.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#456
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect time to test an alternate way to conduct interviews too. Give several of the second round candidates paid work on something you actually need to have done (perhaps pick tasks that are a sprint away). It should be a great test of both who can produce working code with tests (production code is way different than white-board pseudocode) as well as who can stay on task remotely. I can't imagine paying three peop…

This isn’t new. It’s called contract-to-hire and it’s great.

It’s now I got my last three role too. I always ask if I can do it that way to prove myself because I don’t have a traditional background (entirely self taught). I’ve had jobs say no, but I’ve had enough say yes that it got my career to a place where I’ve been very happy.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#457
post #416
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interest in a variant that's looking for non-fulltime. It's getting tougher as a freelancer too

Have you looked at the freelancer threads that the whoishiring account posts monthly? They don't get as much frontpage time but they're there. Edit: if anybody has an idea about how to let more people know about those, as well as the "Who Wants To Be Hired" threads, I'd like to hear it. The problem is that frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN, and it's hard to justify using 3 of those slots for whoishiring…

Thank you! I hadn't seen

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#458
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the owner of a fully remote, revenue-funded, and profitable startup that wants to hire, my concern is one that won't be particularly well received. I don't want to hire people, yet , because they're still thinking that https://levels.fyi is realistic. I'd rather wait a few rough months, have the pool of talent grow rapidly and people will start realizing that maybe paying $350k to a green React dev isn't very sust…

IMO, if you are fully remote, you might look at it the other way around. The ridiculous salaries are mostly in California and one or two other places. Those places might realize that they can get react devs for a dime a dozen out of bootcamps all over the country for a third of that in a few months once they have let people do fully remote work for a while. The smart thing would seem to be to hire them now before the…

My bet: remote-only for most companies won't last. If there's one thing I've learned over the past 8 years running this company, is most people really struggle at remote. They don't have the dedicated work space, they lack the necessary self-discipline, and many people really start to falter without face time and social interaction. I suspect once this virus is solved, we'll see a flood back to in-person jobs.

React was just a glib example anyway, I purposefully stay far away from anything trendy. I'm hiring people who are data smart, can think in SQL, and fully understand that AI/ML/NLP is smoke and mirrors bullshit in the vast majority of contemporary applications.

Anyway, I guess my broader point is: When every single PE/VC is battening down the hatches, firms are preemptively laying off people by the thousands before their clients even start missing payments, and a large number tech employees are in mortgages/leases they cannot sustain without those aforementioned salaries? We're about to see a tech bust and housing crash far worse than dot-com. Things are going to get really bad. Programmers are about to be competing head-to-head with front-of-house restaurant employees for gig-economy jobs. Thus, I can afford to wait a bit to find the right people.

Re: Ask HN: Have you been laid off?

#460
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump had no backup plan for when, not if, a case went undetected in the US. He didn't start stockpiling masks and ventilators until much later.

I agree. He didn't move far enough fast enough. The public's awareness and preparation was slowed by the media (NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, others) screaming "it's just the flu!" until just a couple weeks ago so most weren't prepared. :( My comment was in response to people not realizing this was a thing a month ago.

I think it was other news organizations than the ones you listed that were the primary culprits in screaming "it's just the flu"
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