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Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

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Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#31

Post by ericmcer »

jonnycoder wrote: post #20
ejb999 wrote: post #12

I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs. I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants fo…

Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.

The market for junior dev is even worse, imagine being fresh out of college in a market with 100,000 freshly laid off mid-staff level engineers

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#32

Post by ptero »

greenthrow wrote: post #29
qqtt wrote: post #8

Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hi…

99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server. Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.

This. Cloud is great when a startup hits an unexpected growth spurt and can scale infra without getting distracted from the core mission. It is not cheap, but it may be worth it.

But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#34

Post by whstl »

jonnycoder wrote: post #20
ejb999 wrote: post #12

I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs. I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants fo…

Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.

Checked mine too and the difference is stark. However just setting Linkedin to "looking for a job" was enough to get a lot of attention in early February. I didn't want to wait for layoffs on my company, so, in advance, I got a much better paid job in about 2-3 weeks. Listings always suck, btw. Recruiters is where it's at.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#35

Post by whstl »

ericmcer wrote: post #31
jonnycoder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.

The market for junior dev is even worse, imagine being fresh out of college in a market with 100,000 freshly laid off mid-staff level engineers

That's true, however I've been seeing complaints for a little longer than that. Perhaps in FAANG they were hiring, but in general I remember seeing a lot of junior devs (not from elite colleges) commenting about how they applied for 50 positions sometimes during COVID. Something unthinkable in my time.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#36

Post by no_wizard »

greenthrow wrote: post #29
qqtt wrote: post #8

Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hi…

99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server. Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.

Depends on the cloud.

Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box.

Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale.

I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup.

[0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#37

Post by yunwal »

piva00 wrote: post #26
peterlk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.

These are very specialised industries though, requiring some deeper and more formal knowledge than when a new platform appears and there's a sudden hunger for experiences on that platform. The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.

Using pre-trained AI models only requires surface-level knowledge about AI. You need to know its limitations, but you don't need to know tensorflow or how transformer networks work to be able to use AI for consumer applications.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#38

Post by patientplatypus »

This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece -

He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place.

So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?

Or this -

Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking.

From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross.

I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers.

The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address.

So what?

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#39

Post by claytongulick »

peterlk wrote: post #22
afavour wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.

AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.

I don't think I agree with this right now.

The tech and business mindset of 15 years ago is remarkably similar to that of 15 years before that, and 15 years before that, even.

Businesses need technical functionality that enables the core mission of the company, and they need accurate operational insights.

This means "boring" technology. It means reliable systems and processes. It means accurate reports who's methodology can be understood clearly.

I prefer to solve real problems with boring technology, than to solve imaginary problems with exciting technology.

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