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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

#291

Post by parthianshotgun »

seattle_spring wrote: post #97

How does someone currently unemployed by choice with a good financial cushion take advantage of this if I don't have any startup ideas I'm deeply passionate about? I've kept an eye on the startup market and all I see are exceedingly boring ideas with mind numbing pitches around them. "Democratizing shipping!" "Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market!" Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.

Hey you and me are on the same boat. Feels like putting on the glasses from "They Live", but maybe I'm not that misanthropic about it..I've found that it's exceedingly hard for me to not look at the big machine around me as I'm 'doing my job' of cranking the lever.

In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, being bored being a crucial part of this.

In the market I'm seeing things that fail common sense checks. AI powered X that is trying to 'solve' things that we barely have a grip on as humans, assemblages of startups that exist solely to manage self created problems, and a whole host of deathcult crypto stuff. Even the progenitors seem to not buy into the stuff they pitch; the zeal, to me, is often just an affectation ("we're going to completely revolutionize..."), maybe the charm is wearing off as decades of consumption and greed are slowly deflating our collective ego.

Anyways how are you faring?

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#292

Post by SassyGrapefruit »

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…

I would like to see some real numbers on this. I spend between $5 and $6 million a year on infrastructure. I have a physical datacenter in a Colo and two clouds AWS and Azure. I have detailed KPIs on my spend. One of the KPIs is total cost of ownership of an instance or server. My physical instances cost 3 times as much as the exact same compute in the cloud.

This is because I have to factor all the costs. This includes electricity, maintenance, incident response, networking, renting the cage, vendored software for backups, threat detection, fire suppression, equipment upgrades, licensing, alerting, and it goes on and on and on...

I'd challenge you to break down the full cost of owning a server as you see it. I bet you will miss 75% of the actual costs involved. I promise short of seizing a colo like its Nakatomi Plaza and running it at gunpoint you will never in a million years come close to the total ownership cost of cloud instance. You can't compete with the economies of scale and the caliber of the engineering.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#293

Post by whateveracct »

musha68k wrote: post #283
whateveracct wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can basically port your resume to it and do nothing else and it can get you the occasional lead on a job. 3/4 of my last jobs were from LinkedIn recruiter outreach. One of the recruiter I told I wasn't ready, and then months later I pinged them and got right into the interview process and eventually got a new job.

I never let anyone else do the company vetting for me, not even for preselection. I also want to have the leverage of negotiating with my future employer / stakeholder directly, recruiter cut including. So from my POV and with all the spam that comes with it, a LinkedIn is not only useless but a major nuisance.

Every recruiter who I connected with via LinkedIn was a salaried employee of the company fwiw. Going around them wouldn't have given me more leverage.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#294

Post by goodpoint »

nrb wrote: post #54
jejeyyy77 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cloud infrastructure was never the limiting factor.

Looking back 20-30 years, it absolutely was a primary limiting factor. Massive capital outlays were required to serve the kind of traffic you can get with the free tier of modern cloud infra providers.

Absolutely not.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#295

Post by musha68k »

whateveracct wrote: post #293
musha68k wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never let anyone else do the company vetting for me, not even for preselection. I also want to have the leverage of negotiating with my future employer / stakeholder directly, recruiter cut including. So from my POV and with all the spam that comes with it, a LinkedIn is not only useless but a major nuisance.

Every recruiter who I connected with via LinkedIn was a salaried employee of the company fwiw. Going around them wouldn't have given me more leverage.

Maybe that changed over the years, I only remember professional recruiters. But even so, this still mostly amounts to noise as to me the majority of companies are just not interesting to work for at all. I usually target 3 to 5 (max) interesting companies / openings which I thoroughly research on beforehand myself. That approach has never failed me so far, keeps me interested and motivated to go through interviewing plus an upper hand during negotiations. YMMV of course, that's just the approach that has consistently worked for me.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#296

Post by 908B64B197 »

mortenjorck wrote: post #119
myth_drannon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last summer and also before that, when I applied, I would get ~90% response rate and would have at least a call from recruiter/HM. Last week I sent a bunch of applications and crickets... this is something that I've never experienced in +10 years being in the industry. I'm not in dire need for a job but I can imagine how much,much stressful is to be unemployed now vs even 3-5 years ago.

I was laid off in December and this has been by far the hardest search of the now four times (yes, really) I’ve been laid off in my career. The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.

> we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.

That doesn't mean they get 200 highly qualified candidates ;)

In my experience, before you would get 150 applicants and not a single one qualified for the job (could actually program or have any relevant experience). Now you get 3 qualified ones and 200 applicants.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#298

Post by jejeyyy77 »

nrb wrote: post #54
jejeyyy77 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cloud infrastructure was never the limiting factor.

Looking back 20-30 years, it absolutely was a primary limiting factor. Massive capital outlays were required to serve the kind of traffic you can get with the free tier of modern cloud infra providers.

not really, i built websites w hundreds of thousands/millions of users on a VPS that cost me like $30/mo.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#299

Post by iLoveOncall »

nubela wrote: post #269

I can confirm that the title is true. To be even more specific, we found that 19 startups were founded by ex-googlers after the recent layoffs. Even better, 1 in 3 of the ex-Googlers that were laid off, joined startups valued at 15M. Relevant: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...

19 startups for 12,000 people is nothing at all.

For the third of ex-Google employees that went to startups, it's way too early to tell if it's a long term change. What is likely is that those people get ANY job to keep some income and are applying to other positions that are more suitable to their past experience.

I am in a FAANG, and I would definitely do that if I was laid off.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#300

Post by whateveracct »

musha68k wrote: post #295
whateveracct wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every recruiter who I connected with via LinkedIn was a salaried employee of the company fwiw. Going around them wouldn't have given me more leverage.

Maybe that changed over the years, I only remember professional recruiters. But even so, this still mostly amounts to noise as to me the majority of companies are just not interesting to work for at all. I usually target 3 to 5 (max) interesting companies / openings which I thoroughly research on beforehand myself. That approach has never failed me so far, keeps me interested and motivated to go through interviewing…

Oh yeah there's definitely a lot of noise. I have a niche that is very SEO'd on LinkedIn (Haskell), so that helps. I do just ignore people inquiring about generic software jobs though. But every so often a Haskell company finds me and then I keep in touch.
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