Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#71

Post by mattgreenrocks » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

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.

Are you looking for a new job? If so, what are you looking for? Where are you at?

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#72

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:20 PM UTC

arbuge wrote: post #47

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…

> 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. The second statement does not follow from the first. What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all t…

Presumably "it's never been easier" means "the technology is no longer the bottleneck".

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#73

Post by mattgreenrocks » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:21 PM UTC

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #14

cameronfraser wrote: post #4

good luck getting funding

Bootstrap time.

Never been a better time: lots of disillusionment around the disproportionate amounts of leverage that capital has over even megacorps.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#74

Post by matwood » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:22 PM UTC

voisin wrote: post #23

This happened when BlackBerry laid off staff in Waterloo, Ontario. With a decade’s hindsight, it was exceptionally positive for the local economy.

It's said a similar thing happened when IBM laid off a bunch of people in the 90s.

It sucks for those laid off, but these big tech companies have had tons of talent effectively locked up for years.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#75

Post by swyx » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #59

Good. The best minds of a generation have wasted their talents figuring out how to best maximize media addiction and serve ads for Facebook and Google. Let’s hope a new generation engages in more socially productive endeavors.

those endeavors:

- Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking

- a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place

- a software design and development studio

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#76

Post by shen » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:23 PM UTC

Salgat wrote: post #58

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…

I don't understand why Google and Amazon would invest all this money in these employees building up their tech and tribal knowledge just to lay them off. Do these companies not expect to grow in the future? Seems like just freezing hiring for a year or two would save you more money in the long run rather than having to rehire and rebuild all this expertise.

Unfortunately the market does not work on a year or two timelines.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#77

Post by brundolf » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:26 PM UTC

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.

Disagree about AI. I think it's going to upend industry after industry, and the gold-rush is not going to be in making new advancements, but applying the startling new capabilities of the last year or so to more and more domains

In this way I think it's very similar to the web and then mobile booms

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#78

Post by 8ytecoder » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

greenthrow wrote: post #56

SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more. Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I hav…

You can get a VPS for like $5/month. So you can save near enough hundreds of dollars a month.

I don’t think cloud cost is anywhere near as much as the cost to build a semi-decent HA/DR system and the devops process around it. Every minute the site is down it’s real monetary loss for most startups. It also takes time and energy away from building features. I have done both bare metal and cloud in two different startups. (This assumes you can’t afford to lose data or be offline for extended periods of time).

Here’s what you’ll need to setup and run a single database :-

- Installation script and infra provisioning. You need a repeatable way to do this with as little manual intervention as possible and I can swear it never just works.

- Backup and recovery scripts and associated monitoring

- Replication setup, monitoring and debugging. It will break often.

- Monitoring for infra - CPU, memory, network. There’ll be unforeseen spikes and random slow downs and a whole bunch of slow queries you’ll debug on a regular basis.

- Security - users, permissions, auditing. Both machine and database. Regular password rotation and firewall rules. Ability to off-board users.

- If you survive all this, being able to scale up. And I mean just vertical scale up will take you far but you cross that limit, you now suddenly have to deal with sharding or partitioning.

So when I joined a new startup and we were building it all from scratch it was a very easy decision to go with the cloud. We spent $3500 a month. Not a lot but nothing compared to the salaries and marketing spend.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#79

Post by algem » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #70

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #59

Good. The best minds of a generation have wasted their talents figuring out how to best maximize media addiction and serve ads for Facebook and Google. Let’s hope a new generation engages in more socially productive endeavors.

Being good at leetcode is not equivalent to being one of "the best minds". Comments like this are why the general public feels like SWEs are stuck up elitist know-it-alls

I somehow envision working at some of the top tech companies in the world requires more than just being good at coding exercises. And more than just software engineers were let go at these companies…

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#80

Post by bluGill » Thu, Feb 23, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

almet wrote: post #45

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…

Aren't startup made to be bought by the tech giants? Until there is a shift in their goals, I can't see thé gafam losing here.

Some are, but a lot of them are also made to be successful long term companies. Small business is still a large employer overall. Some businesses need to be very big, and if you want to be "filthy rich" you have to be in one of those. However you can be nicely wealthy at a small company.