Ask HN: How are the current layoffs affecting non-US developers?

Was laid off in August while working for a US-based company. My first layoff in a 10-year career. Still looking for a job. I'm broke. As in "can't pay my bills next month" broke. People are hiring but remote jobs are hard to find. (I have family responsibilities and cannot relocate)

I did find jobs. People who took 7 rounds of interviews then never released an offer letter. AFTER verbally confirming that I'd gotten the job. This has happened thrice now. I started with asking for $5000/mo (last drawn). But now, I'm willing to work for anything that pays the bills.

I'm in dire need and at my wit's end.

Let's start with that: the "need" to reduce costs. In another comment I used Google as an example so I'll do so here too. Google is specatacularly profitable on an overall basis and a per-employee basis.

Layoffs as a cost-cutting measure are largely virtue signaling than true cuts in costs, for several reasons:

1. Once you factor in severeance costs, it takes a long time to realize any of those savings;

2. Those layoffs assume those laid off were providing no value. It's hard to believe that 10K+ employees were providing no value. Whatever value they were providing is also lost, further defraying any supposed cost savings;

3. Mass layoffs tend to be hugely destructive to culture and have a long-lasting impact on those who remain; and

4. By the time any benefits are realized you're probably hiring again anyway.

The point of layoffs is to virtue signal to the market that they're "serious" about cutting costs and to depress compensation. These companies won't be getting inflation pay raises. They'll probably be getting minimal bonuses and 0-2% pay raises, if that. Refresh grants will be less.

But the real kicker comes from doing more work for the same pay. Whatever the laid off people were doing will become the additional responsibility of those who remain. Sundar Pichai has come out and said he's aiming for 20% increase in "productivity" (ie 20% more labor for no increase in compensation). Zuckerberg has said similar about Meta.

You see with inflation that there is fairly rampant profiteering: raising prices because prices are rising while reaping record profits. These mass layoffs are largely the other side of that coin. Wages are being suppressed due to some largely invented (to this point at least) "recession".

Now there are some other commpanies who truly do have to cut costs. They don't have a profitable business model and because of rising interest rates, the cheap VC money well is drying up. But all the FAANG companies are doing just fine but have seen (or arguably created) an opportunity to attack labor costs.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so all that I say here is my personal understanding, from working in Japan, but also from talking to lawyers about this.

Firing an employee due to lack of competence or bad performance is permitted by law, but practically unheard of in practice - the bar for proving this is quite high.

Firing an employee due to misconduct is possible, but the bar is quite high. Embezzlement, getting kickbacks or getting into trouble with the law (outside your job) are common causes for termination, but I've even heard of cases of embezzlement and kickbacks where the employee in question was demoted instead of being fired.

Firing an employee due to the company's financial situation is often referred to as Risutora (corporate restructuring). That's perfectly doable, but the bar again is high. If the company is taken to court, they will have to prove the economic necessity for reducing their workforce and that they tried anything they can before they resorted to firing people. This includes:

- Offering a voluntary resignation plan. This means the employee reigns and get some monetary compensation. - Cutting other unnecessary costs besides salaries (otherwise they cannot prove economic necessity) - Selecting the employees that will be fired based an objective and fair criteria, no random culling of 10% of your workforce.

Since the bar for all of these is quite high, employers in Japan will more often try to negotiate voluntary resignation plans or (unfortunately quite often) bully their employees into resignation. The bullying tactic involves demotion, changing the job's content or trying to harass the employee in various ways until they decide to quit. This can also be challenged in court, but this tactic apparently shifts more of the burden of proof to employees.

The most common tactic big companies use in Japan to avoid all this hassle is to just not hire all of their employees as full-time employees. A great chunk of the workforce in Japan nowadays are fixed term contract employees, part-time shift employees or outsourced employees of various types.

Edit: I also have to add that from my personal observation, IT salaries in Japan experienced major growth over the last 10 years. YMMV depending on the type of company and the industrial sector, but if we focus on Japanese tech-focused companies (Yahoo, Rakuten, LINE, Mercari etc.) the average yearly salary grew by a 30% or so, and on the high-end you can see international companies and some Japanese tech companies offering senior positions at 20-30 million JPY / year. That's significantly lower than US salary at tech hotspots, but seems quite in line with salaries in Europe.

https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja...