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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

#171

Post by layoff_payoff »

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…

> I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.

Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.

1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#172

Post by throwaway894345 »

idunno246 wrote: post #142
throwaway894345 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm often perplexed when I hear people complain about cloud costs. I can't tell if people just have really different workloads than I've experienced or if they just haven't considered cost when they pick their compute, databases, etc. If you use object storage, some serverless database, and some serverless compute a small company (by which I'm thinking "normally very low volume with occasional, very important, often…

The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc. I’m at a few orders of magnitude more spend than that, and in absolute dollars is very much noticeable how much more expensive aws is. But as a percentage of costs it’s so little next to wages, as is your example, that cost is really the wrong thing to get hung up on. Most engineers I’ve worked with don’t…

> The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc.

This is where I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. If we're comparing Terraform, it means we probably care about reproducibility (rather than an "AWS console vs SSH into pet hosts" scenario), so the like-for-like comparison involves bringing in something like Ansible. On top of that, you need to pick, install, and configure logging exfiltrators, monitoring agents, process managers, etc and you need to operate systems that let you explore those logs and metrics. You also need to configure SSH access and manage keys. You may also need a custom base image, so maybe you're doing packer stuff as well? On top of that, you need to run some database which means managing backups and running replicas with failover (or maybe we/re a small business and we don't care that much about reliability?). And again, we care about reproducibility, so we need to encode all of this stuff in Ansible playbooks or similar. You probably also need something like security groups to restrict which things are allowed to talk to which other things, and encoding this in Ansible or similar is maybe impossible if you don't have software-defined-networks.

It seems like a lot to get to parity with what someone could throw together with API Gateway, Lambda, S3/DynamoDB in a couple reasonably-sized Terraform files in a few hours for a pretty marginal cloud spend (most small businesses would probably stay pretty close to the free tier--these services are extremely inexpensive).

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#173

Post by twblalock »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #168
twblalock wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you actually did was post a cynical dismissal of the efforts of an entire generation of tech workers by focusing on one contentious aspect of the industry’s output. You said they wasted their talents. It’s pretty clear that they didn’t, and they actually produced a huge amount of good things, and I listed only a subset of the major achievements we’ve seen recently.

[flagged]

Google also builds the world’s most popular web browser and the world’s most popular mobile phone OS and the world’s most popular email service and the world’s most popular streaming video platform. Most people prefer to see the ads and get those things free of charge. Oh, and they make thermostats, and funny-looking self driving cars.

Facebook runs the world’s largest social network and during the pandemic it was one of the few ways (along with things like Zoom) that people could see the faces of their friends and family during lockdown. Facebook are also VR pioneers via Oculus. The metaverse is pretty dumb though.

Reducing these gigantic companies that do many things to just “advertising” and implying that the many people who work there are wasting their talents is cynical and cheap.

You know what would really suck? Having to pay a few cents every time you do a search, or paying a subscription to watch Youtube or use Gmail or see your friends Facebook posts. Ads are a totally reasonable alternative and all they do is sit there — you can ignore them and get all of these products for free.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#174

Post by orangesite »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #112
snickerbockers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best minds of a generation that's debatable.

I think GP was paraphrasing a catchy line from a poem. Were Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. really the best minds of their generation?

Yup, they were up there if you let go - even for a moment - that STEM is the be-all and end-all. Please feel free to disagree.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#175

Post by orangesite »

patientplatypus wrote: post #38

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…

What is that y'all can only perceive success in terms of cornering some market?

Adam Smith be rolling in his grave!

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#176

Post by roncesvalles »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #94
tomcam wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you took a job like that, were you really one of the best minds of your generation?

Anecdotally, of the five-ten people I knew throughout the years who ended up at Facebook, all had a very specific personality-trait. Those that I knew who went to Google/Amazon/etc. were more diverse personalities: ambitious, interested in hard problems, wanting a good life, etc. Those going to Facebook though, I'm not sure I can put it in a polite way. Let me just say, in different times and different places I could…

I've noticed this as well. There is a "type" to the people from my peer cohort who joined Facebook.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#177

Post by runamok »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #2

No shit Sherlock. If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually. The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.

I am positive faang engineers are very sharp but would they be "expert at the latest technologies"? E.g. an engineer at Google likely has a whole host of bespoke systems vs. a mixture of vendor and open source solutions the rest of companies tend to use. E.g. Borg vs. Kubernetes and the like.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#178

Post by ornornor »

shen wrote: post #76
Salgat wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“1 or 2 years?? Are you planning on living for ever??? That’s like 4 to 8 quarters!”

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#179

Post by orangesite »

jb1991 wrote: post #155
phendrenad2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But where is AWSs moat? It's not enough to have all of the customers. Customers are fleeting and will leave if they get a BBO (bigger, better offer). If you scrap together an AWS migration tool that can pull databases, instances, and lambdas off of AWS and mirror them in your cloud, for less money, you'll probably attract a lot of customers.

That sounds like just basic guesswork on your part. Replicating their infrastructure is not the trivial challenge you suggest.

I think the trick you are missing is that AWS competitors do not need to replicate their infrastructure.

The model you are wed to is "one service-provider per niche." Yeah, that requires scaling to an absolutely ridiculous extent.

…but for those of us not in favor of soviet-style centralism, and there are a couple of us, well we'd love hosting providers that can let us serve a sufficiently profitable percentage of the market.

Down with monopolist capitalism and oligopolist communism! All hail the vibrant marketplace!

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