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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?

#191

Post by user_named »

beebmam wrote: post #48
kingnothing wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a point of contention among economists, as the current economic conditions are quite unlike most others seen. US/China decoupling is causing massive shocks across the world. The US Federal Reserve is responding to these economic conditions far stronger than any other central bank, and the US dollar has grown in strength accordingly. Weakening the labor market is one of the goals. That will mean lots of layoff…

Decoupling what? That is not the cause of recession and it isn't happening.

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

#193

Post by Hermitian909 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #173
davewritescode wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very hard prediction to make. The most expensive part of software is maintenance and it’s not decreasing over time.

Of course it's decreasing. The amount of people required to maintain an application of a given size continues to drop significantly over time. Something like Docusign, once built out, could be maintained by a handful of people using serverless components. Same thing with Twitter and pretty much every other application.

Interestingly, as a side effect of this, the marginal gains on the most skilled engineers continues to increase.

For certain classes of work it is very difficult to hire even at the top of the market. There are positions my company would happily pay a million/yr to fill and simply cannot find anyone who meets the requirements.

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

#194

Post by hanszarkov »

mywittyname wrote: post #72
oceanplexian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A lot of development jobs can be simplified into a web endpoint that hits a database.

This doesn't ring right. It might (maybe) be educational to do this, but I'd say that any "development job" that is about software development is not trivial like you say.

An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist [1] - I think you're making a simplification here and the real argument is if its educational.

[1] find a job description that says REST or GQL endpoint directly to database, and doesn't have a long wishlist of other skills, experience, or design - I'll gladly take 100 of those and be on my merry way (!)

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

#195

Post by ramesh31 »

Raydovsky wrote: post #134
andirk wrote: 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.

>I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs.

Someone told me early in my career that "my grandkids will be maintaining PHP applications". He was probably right. You might be seeing less on the job boards nowadays, but half the web still runs on PHP.

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

#196

Post by harlequinn77 »

RC_ITR wrote: post #41
kingnothing wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#197

Post by pishpash »

mywittyname wrote: post #55
danuker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, if you're going to stick to the two-consecutive quarters definition, then you would be saying that we were in a recession, and are now out of one. Third quarter GDP estimates stand at 1.9% growth.

That's too noisy given inflation is 6.6%.

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

#198

Post by pishpash »

RC_ITR wrote: post #56
danuker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, let's play your game. How much of the first quarter decline was due to the ports clearing and imports rising? Here, I'll give you a hint (More than 100%): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=UOxC Do you think that's a real recession indicator? EDIT: Said differently, if our imports were at 4Q:21 levels, we'd have 0 quarters of decline. So is this the first import-driven recession? Because no other r…

Doesn't matter the reason, net net less goods were produced. Imports couldn't stay at 4Q:21 levels forever, only the timing of the imports was shifted around.

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

#199

Post by lowercased »

Raydovsky wrote: post #134
andirk wrote: 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.

Fewer PHP jobs, or fewer job openings, or fewer postings? I don't know if "fewer PHP jobs" is true across the board, but might be regional or 'industrial'? It may just be because I try to stay plugged in, but I don't see a marked difference in PHP jobs.

I have a colleague who was at a place that had a decent PHP base. Several years old, but... it was mostly written by a couple of people, and it got... quite hairy. After 4-5 years, they brought in a very capable person, who began a lot of refactoring. But... he was still doing this primarily in isolation. The company was growing, but they kept treating the big monolith API ... as its own thing, and it kept getting harder to expand.

"We can't find good PHP people!". But... they weren't trying very hard. This was pre-pandemic, and they were requiring people to be onsite in most cases. Colleague pinged me last year - they started rebuilding in node "because it was easier to find people".

But... this was such a ... shifting of goal posts. The problem was not "PHP is bad", but letting one person write all your business logic in isolation from the rest of the company is bad. The node rebuild is a moderate size team, who have an existing API to code against, and they're all working, greenfield, with the latest/newest versions of everything. Somehow "node is better" is the lesson they're drawing from this.

My colleague had suggested "let's rebuild some portions of this monolith API as a group". "Nope, no time for that". Well... they made time, but decided that the language was the main root cause. I can guarantee if they'd let someone build large chunks of this on their own in isolation from everyone else for weeks/months at a time... they'd hit the same problems in the next year or so.

And so "PHP is dying" sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least in the eyes of some. Yet... I've been hearing it for 22 years. And it ain't going away. And yes, it's being used for new dev/projects. I'm scheduled to convert a java system over to PHP8 early next year.

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

#200

Post by lowercased »

ramesh31 wrote: post #195
Raydovsky wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs. Someone told me early in my career that "my grandkids will be maintaining PHP applications". He was probably right. You might be seeing less on the job boards nowadays, but half the web still runs on PHP.

Some of the jobs won't be posted - they'll just be in-network referrals. That's how much of my work comes to me.
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