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How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

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Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#31

Post by themagician »

lumost wrote: post #4
thwayunion wrote: post #2

The market is still extremely tight for good talent in-between Senior and Junior.

So the Senior market is saturated? this is an early sign companies are getting nervous about bloat. After the '08 recession many companies rushed to ditch Architect titles as they found that the role did not serve the interests of their productive engineers or the companies higher ups. Companies that had gone heavy on such talent might find themselves stuck. I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that…

More and more senior engineers are non-coding or practically so. I see it everywhere. As industries have matured, people have matured into higher level management roles and there hasn't been enough people to replace them. There's still plenty of fresh blood, software engineering actually looks a lot like the labor shortages do in the rest of the market—there's a lack of people who actually want to do the work. Everyone wants that $150k starting comp. Everyone wants a $500k director or VP role. But there is a shortage in that $200-300K range for people who are actually going to put in hours either writing code that makes it into production, or managing junior coders and their codebases. I'm talking SV salaries here. The scale is different elsewhere, but the problem is the same.

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#32

Post by ggm »

theteapot wrote: post #13

> At some point in the last 2.5 years, you’ve probably visited layoffs.fyi. I have?

They did say probably and for the post hoc case which knows they didn't it's hard to believe, but probably on balance, you're right: maybe they should have used maybe?

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#33

Post by monksy »

dominotw wrote: post #9
sarchertech wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Staff engineer is just title inflation for what used to be senior engineer. Senior engineers at most companies just means this isn’t your first job right out of college.

I have 15 yoe and have senior software engineer title so do people with 2 yrs experience. I might be doing same thing over and over. Time to make a radical change :/.

There are other organizations that are trying to deflate titles as well. (Demanding the work of a lead, staff, or principal in a Sr without the influence to do so)

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#34

Post by monksy »

oceanplexian wrote: post #29
thwayunion wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the Senior market is saturated? I am not sure I would say saturated, but yeah, the Sr. SWE market is definitely not as tight as it was a year ago for most role types. However, it does depend on qualifications and company type. Seniors for R&D positions (so, PhD with 5+ years in product-focused R&D) are still basically impossible to hire. Friends tell me that hiring seniors at mid-pay or low-pay companies is stil…

CS programs are overproducing but they are overproducing the wrong skills. Most don’t have the cloud skillset or experience with IaC, they are never thought how to solve problems within distributed systems. And their idea of systems design is a Flask app talking to a MySQL database on a laptop. It’s not the students fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times, and sometimes even teach bad engineeri…

> It’s not their fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times.

Yes/no/maybe. The schools got pressured by the bootcamps that were teaching the "flask app talking to a mysql db" .. they simplified their classes and stop teaching some things. It sucks, the people who come out of that don't have the theory/flexiblity/skills coming out that you would expect before.

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#35

Post by 01100011 »

We (large FANGish) are more or less in a hiring freeze but still grabbing a few new hires here and there. A friend just interviewed for SSE at AAPL and seemed to have the job only to be told they closed the req. I'm still getting lots of recruiter spam though so I think we're still fairly early in any sort of layoff cycle. The economy is still trucking. Despite many people trying to be first to declare it, we're not in a recession yet. All signs point to one next year though.

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#37

Post by JamesBarney »

theteapot wrote: post #19
outworlder wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles. That depends. If they are actively involved and the architectural decisions are sound, it's fine. If they are "drive-by architects", showing up, dropping a bunch of useless boxes they read on some book, and the…

Drive by architects don't read books. They read AWS's latest product brochure and think "yes".

Every architect i worked with read books.

The bad ones took what they read as gospel and the good ones took what they read in context.

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#38

Post by kingnothing »

01100011 wrote: post #35

We (large FANGish) are more or less in a hiring freeze but still grabbing a few new hires here and there. A friend just interviewed for SSE at AAPL and seemed to have the job only to be told they closed the req. I'm still getting lots of recruiter spam though so I think we're still fairly early in any sort of layoff cycle. The economy is still trucking. Despite many people trying to be first to declare it, we're not…

The US is in a recession. It has seen two quarters of negative economic growth.

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#39

Post by spamizbad »

lumost wrote: post #4
thwayunion wrote: post #2

The market is still extremely tight for good talent in-between Senior and Junior.

So the Senior market is saturated? this is an early sign companies are getting nervous about bloat. After the '08 recession many companies rushed to ditch Architect titles as they found that the role did not serve the interests of their productive engineers or the companies higher ups. Companies that had gone heavy on such talent might find themselves stuck. I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that…

What makes a "Staff Engineer" is largely a product of an orgs engineering culture. And you may have multiple people with "staff engineer" as a job title that fulfill different roles to varying degrees.

I've found those roles to be:

* Technical Leadership (driving major technical initiatives)

* Technical Contributor (shipping stuff, with technical mastery beyond what would normally be expected from senior engineer)

* Architect (planning stuff)

* Team Management (mentorship + taking load off an engineering manager's plate if the team is big)

Biggest mistake I see orgs make when hiring staff engineers is hiring someone whose strength is in mentorship and technical contributors and decide their new role is architecture and driving major technical initiatives at a high level. Some are best "in the weeds" and others are better planners. Know their strengths!

Re: How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

#40

Post by conqrr »

The so called 'bar' references doesn't make much sense. There is no way to measure the performance of an individual. Leetcode style questions don't indicate performance. And what cannot be measured in the first place in a 4 hour interview, cannot have a 'bar'.
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