Tell HN: IBM and SAP are cutting thousands of jobs

It's funny to write "IBM (IBM)" and "SAP (SAP)".

Following the trend :-( Time to get rid of people they don’t want, without them look bad since everybody is doing it, and also they’ll have an excuse if financial results aren’t very good. IMHO it’s the retaliation of big companies to what remote working brought to all of us (freedom, better wages, quality time, escape from bad environments…).

I can well imagine there are lots of upset people having lost their jobs.

However it never seems to be a priority or even on radar for jobseekers to consider how a a company handles layoffs or handled layoffs in the past as a proxy for their own treatment should that time come again.

I wonder if this is partially because jobs seekers have over optimized for salary or total comp relative to other things like job security and working conditions.

I must have seen 00s of "Top 10 lists" listing places according to intern pay or grad pay with big companies like Meta and Snapchat always at the helm getting thrown around social media. I have never once seen places advertise that they haven't had to let an employee go.

Maybe it's too difficult to measure or just rare enough that it can be largely ignored while things like salary simply can't be ignored. I don't know -- just trying to look at the other side of the coin as it were.

That number is for quarter

Personally I'd focus more on making a layoff less of a traumatic event than playing ultra safe with a low salary in a low risk company.

For most software engineers it's not hard to build up a significant emergency fund. I'd advocate for 6 figures. Feel free to invest 80% of that as well in something liquid. Keep at least 3 months in cash.