One kind of messed up thing some companies did during covid/wfh was suspend performance reviews; prevented people who were performing under the bar from getting feedback that their performance was not acceptable. Now the economy is dramatically slowing and pips are happening again, so people are going to get fired into a horrible job market. Really sucks.
Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
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Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#12I remember 2008.
Workplaces get increasingly cutthroat when layoffs start looming. Coworkers sabotaging each other, whole teams trying to make other teams look bad, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#13I don't know your personal situation, but the way I interpret things is kind of like this: - FAANG got bloated during the bubble and anticipated growth that isn't materializing as fast, so they're cutting headcount. Similar for other big non-FAANG public companies. - Down stock market means that public companies can't get as much capital for new investment by selling shares. - High interest rates increase cost of deb…
For software engineering 2001 especially post 9/11 was brutal. Much more so than 2008 unless you worked for a financial company.
2008/2009 was lean times but good people were able to find work. After the dotcom bust however, things were so bad I had a friend who is a very good developer who spent a couple of years gluing shoes for a living. In Canada.
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#14Here's the conventional wisdom:
Normally, at this point in the economic cycle, the big companies cut headcount to appease the stock market. Startups tend to have a few years of runway. All of a sudden, that runway buys much better talent than normal.
Fast forward three years: The incumbent players have been dithering around for a few years, while the startups were built assuming the incumbents were executing better than average. As products go to general availability, they end up knocking out a bunch of giants that seemed unassailable at the beginning of the downturn.
Data to back this up: https://web.archive.org/web/20190907043749/https://mattermar...
(Note there is no dip corresponding to the 2008 downturn.)
tl;dr: Look for a financially stable startup that's still paying for top talent, and try to get a job (perhaps as a junior dev, assuming that's where you are in your career).
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#15Maybe fintech is out, but manufacturing is in?
Fintech is sensitive to interest rates.
Manufacturing and anyone with fixed capacity get fatter profit margins from inflation (energy, etc).
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#16It'll be harder, not going to bullshit you. It might take longer for you to find something, you may have to interview at more places to get an offer (especially one that's appealing), and when you do get an offer it won't be at a 2021 price. But there definitely are open roles to be had, the industry isn't broadly in a hiring freeze, and it's possible to get a job. You will just need to put more effort into it than you would have in previous years.
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#17> If this were a year ago, I'd feel good; grind some leetcode, get hired at a big tech company for a good salary.
This dynamic is one of the reasons we're seeing such large layoffs right now. Even many of the companies that are rolling in cash simply got too aggressive with hiring in recent years. Anyone who knew the drill could grind leetcode, study interview guides, apply to enough FAANG companies and get a job eventually.
I've heard more stories about in-progress FAANG interviews being cancelled than I could possibly count. Most FAANG companies are still hiring, albeit very selectively. They're also trimming staff through large layoffs and also smaller, less publicized team cuts.
I suspect many of these are soft landing cuts, as I've seen a sudden increase in the number of ex-FAANG resumes landing in my inbox. A lot of stories about how people are just "looking for a change of pace", but I suspect they see the writing on the wall.
> I used to be a software engineer. Then I went to law school, and now work in biglaw. I am a year out of law school, and have been working on a legal tech startup with a friend. If we cannot raise in the next couple months, I wish (almost need, really) to bail on the biglaw job and go back to being a dev.
In your case, "used to be a software engineer" is already going to put you at a massive disadvantage relative to all of the experienced engineers who were recently forced into the job market by layoffs. You could try to lean on the startup experience, but keep in mind that hiring managers won't be eager to hire someone who admits to working on an entire side startup while having a dayjob. That could mean the employee wants to continue working on their startup while collecting paychecks, which is a lot of risk to take in a job market that is crowded with applicants.
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#18I am hearing a lot about layoffs at "FAANG", Intel, Twitter and a few other employers that are notoriously bloated. (e.g I wouldn't take layoffs at Intel as an economic indicator because Intel seems to lay 10,000 engineers off every few years because of its own perversity) More normal sorts of employers are still reporting extreme problems hiring people. For instance I was late for work this morning because the bus w…
I had a friend who would say that 10% of the workforce keeps the company running, while another 10% support them; whereas, the remainder role-play giving presentations to each other.
Yeah, that matches the Pareto principle and lines up with anecdotes collected by Graeber in his essay and his book "Bullshit Jobs" [1]
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#19I think you're in the U.S.A.? Can't speak for there, but here in Europe, nothing has changed, and we're still being headhunted.
Re: Ask HN: How bad is hiring going to be within the next year?
#20I am hearing a lot about layoffs at "FAANG", Intel, Twitter and a few other employers that are notoriously bloated. (e.g I wouldn't take layoffs at Intel as an economic indicator because Intel seems to lay 10,000 engineers off every few years because of its own perversity) More normal sorts of employers are still reporting extreme problems hiring people. For instance I was late for work this morning because the bus w…
I had a friend who would say that 10% of the workforce keeps the company running, while another 10% support them; whereas, the remainder role-play giving presentations to each other.
The numbers probably aren't that bad, but real need depends not just on the quiet moments where station keeping people keep things running smoothly. It also depends on the capability during incidents and outages. Institutional knowledge in playbooks people are too panicked to read or never ran what if disaster drills to write may as well not exist.