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

blog.interviewing.io

161–170 of 359 posts

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

#161

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…

Genuine question: what does FANGish mean?

Microsoft.

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

#162
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large backlash happening against blockchain right now in Europe, from your profile I would assume that that is the problem.

Actually it's the opposite. I am done with dapps and blockchain development and just looking for fullstack (preferring only backend when possible) typescript/golang positions. I am getting a good amount of recruiters contacting me for blockchain related positions but every single time I speak with them their projects are so ridiculously stupid I am flabbergasted that they got investors. "Normal web dev" recruiters? J…

How do you feel your blockchain/etc history is impacting potential recruiters?

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

#163
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…

> 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…

Yep, I'm probably going to have to accept yet another paycut if I want to keep working. Peak of earnings for me was at about 13 yoe. Now it's downhill until I'm better off working retail.

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

#165
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tell people that you are looking for _one_ position, not 10,000. There will always be a position somewhere that fits your needs. Its more difficult in down times to a degree. And if your industry is in a huge slump, find a new industry! There's more work to do than can ever be done.

I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs. Switching a stack won't help cos places want years of experience.

Most ads seem to be written for the unicorn engineer with 10+ years of experience in every part of the company's stack, but realistically any place you'd actually want to work for is going to be happy with a few years of dev experience in a similar domain + ability and willingness to learn new stuff.

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

#166

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…

> we're not in a recession yet.

Yes, yes we are.

> The Bureau of Economic Analysis, an independent federal agency that provides official macroeconomic and industry statistics, says "the often-cited identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not an official designation" and that instead, "The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession

Q2 2022 (3rd) -0.6%

Q1 2022 (3rd) -1.6%

https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product

To be clear, I’m saying the political apparatus of the government can’t dictate terms of a recession. The definition used in the industry for decades is two quarters of negative growth —- I’ll use the industry standards, not the politically appointed group.

Regardless, the UK pension funds just had to be rescued by the Bank of England. Bond interest is exploding and what’s about to happen is all the government debt is going to have high interest rates.

To the point, credit is about to become VERY expensive. Idk what’s about to happen, but it’s going to be painful.

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

#167
post #81
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a flimsy PR piece for interviewing.io submitted by the founder. It worked, front page of HN is great for backlink value

Founder here. This piece took my team and I months to research and tag and write. We spent hours counting individual layoffs in spreadsheets and on LinkedIn and running and rerunning the numbers. And the conclusion wasn't even what I wanted. When I started writing, I really thought that the layoffs were overblown and weren't affecting engineers. That's not what's happening at all. Now, you're right, why do we put eff…

Yeah I'd say it's a fairly sturdy PR piece. I appreciate the content.

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

#168

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".

May I also add the demi-god of arhcitecture juggernaut Martin Fowler.

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

#169

This is likely to be the recession that halts the rapid inflation in tech wages. Rising risk free rate has hit growth companies the hardest, and there are likely to be a large swath of layoffs right as we have tons of people bootcamping and switching into the industry. Supply and demand of labor in tech will enter balance for the first time since ~2010. The FFR is looking to have a reasonable chance to go to 5% at th…

I feel like this could be true in an environment where software adoption stagnates but I like to remain optimistic about the fact that there's still a lot of room for software to improve various industries. Lots of big and small problems yet to be solved.

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

#170
post #84
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both exist, but you're right. The majority of Architects I've brushed against in the last decade have been exclusively an additional marketing force for AWS with very little ability to objectively reason from first principles or assist with knowledge of anything outside of the AWS ecosystem.

Totally genuine question as someone coming from a background in mechanical engineering, who now does a lot of software-y things: what do you consider to be "first principles" in computing? Are you talking about first principles in terms of project development processes (i.e how information systems evolve) or code (i.e. bits and bytes, where microservices might not be the answer because the network connections are gua…

Not the parent but I will offer you my opinion after I laughed at their comment because it reminded me of many of the engineers at my current work:

"First principles" in this context is not just reaching for the nearest/newest AWS service that seems to do what you want. ie. if you want a webserver, don't just run magic lambdas that abstract everything away from you, go and provision a vps and install your dependencies on it so you fully understand and control how the stack works.

None of the 12 engineers at my current company had written a test that actually wrote rows to a database when I arrived, they didn't know how. In fact none of them knew anything about how to run our databases on their own dev machines at all, they all shared one RDS PG instance.

Again, "first principles" here is: running a process, connecting to a service, asserting the whole thing did what you expected. To do that effectively you have to actually control the whole system, and to do that you have to know how the whole system works together. A lot of developers now just delegate the provisioning and maintenance of everything to a provider, even in development setups.

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