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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?

#71

Post by mapme »

themagician wrote: post #31
lumost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Everyo…

Interesting, anecdotally at a faang adjacent company, I do not know of any Seniors who do not have code as their primary output. Even a large majority of staff actively code IME.

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

#72

Post by mywittyname »

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…

A lot of development jobs can be simplified into a web endpoint that hits a database. So that seems like a completely fair project to have students work on in an applied course.

Also, universities do offer courses in cloud computing. I was helping our interns with their cloud computing courses back in like 2016, so it's not a recent addition either.

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

#73

Post by alephnerd »

avrionov wrote: post #69

The article doesn't answer the question. The list is also missing 2 of the big names which announced layoffs Oracle and Citrix. For more detailed and depressing discussion about layoffs check [1]. [1] https://www.thelayoff.com/

Well, I wouldn't neccessarily treat the Citrix layoff as directly macroeconomic related, as they are going through an M&A event right now with TIBCO to make the "Cloud Software Group" [0][1], and it's ex-Broadcom leadership (who are very dollar/efficiency oriented).

[0] - https://www.cloud.com/news/press-release.html

[1] - https://www.cloud.com/

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

#74

Post by imwillofficial »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #30
theteapot wrote: post #13

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

Never even knew it existed until just now. I feel like am not in the minority. Weird that the author assumes this is some well known site.

Its a very well known site

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

#75

Post by imwillofficial »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #70
conqrr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bar here is interview performance bar. There is no way to judge a person's performance in 4 hours. Anything you come up with can be hacked or imperfect. Therefore there is no way to set a bar.

You can't perfectly judge someone in an interview context, but you can get pretty good if you ask the right questions with the right structure. Where I work the final round interview we give the candidates a week to write a design doc for a recent project they have worked on and present it to us in a 45 minute meeting. We deep dive on their impact, the decisions they made, the tradeoffs etc. It has been an extremely…

I love this method.

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

#76

Post by humanwhosits »

no_wizard wrote: post #58
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…

I'm seeing a massive uptick in recruiting for contract roles compared to a year ago though. A year ago (and even, 3-4 months ago) it was all full time positions nearly exclusively, now it's all heavily weighted toward contract Lots of "18+ month" or "long term" contract verbiage, but contract none the less. Definitely a shift. Seeing more contract to hire too

I guess hiring for contracts routes around arbitrary headcount limits.

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

#78

Post by RivieraKid »

danuker wrote: post #45
RC_ITR wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a broken record but, the 'Two quarters' rule is an unofficial metric that does a bad job of representing recessions when you back-test it (no recessions from 1992-2008 in that case). In the US, a recession is defined by NBER after the fact.

Then the "two quarters" rule is stricter. We have fulfilled a stricter criterion for a recession. Whether the NBER contradicts us is irrelevant. Less value is going around in the economy.

No, it's not stricter. It's a rule of thumb, an approximation.

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

#79

Post by mywittyname »

Jensson wrote: post #68
colinmhayes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US gov uses a non-partisan third party think tank to officially declare recessions.

> a non-partisan third party think tank How can such a thing possibly be non-partisan? The people running surely vote in the elections and thus care about the outcome, I don't see how they couldn't be partisan when their statements can have huge effects on the outcome.

Non-partisan usually means people aren't directly influenced by political leadership. Pelosi has no recourse if NBER doesn't make the decision that she wants, whereas, she can punish/reward the junior Congresspeople in her party by withholding seats or funding for election campaigns. Thus, NBER is non-partisan while Democratic Congresspeople are partisan.

I would hope that every member of NBER votes. It's their civic duty.

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