Almost a 70% decline since peak. Looks worse than I anticipated
The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
41–50 of 120 posts
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#42Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#43Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
From what I've seen it's less pronounced in the EU. Recruiters I know say that things are slower than in 2022 but it's still healthy. And my direct vicinity still looks short on workers and high on demand.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#44Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.
Anecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that out. But so far, developers are untouchable.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#45Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
I work in government and government adjacent contracting. We need people badly right now.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do they calculate this rate? I simply left the country after layoff, and most likely not counted in the numbers.
The US BLS has 6 different unemployment measures. The one that's usually quoted is U-3 which means unemployed but seeking work. But if you left the country, I assume you're not counted in any unemployment measurement. (Though I also assume that's a sufficiently unusual edge case that it doesn't really move the needle on any of the statistics.)
Maybe I haven't been reading too closely and have missed the answer, but how many of the laid off employees were on work visas that are now also looking at having to leave the country? Since it's tech companies, I'd assume there's a decent percentage. How do those types of numbers affect the unemployment stats?
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#47This trues up with what I'm anecdotally seeing in my clients. RTO-3 days or even RTO-5 days is being pushed aggressively in some of them, and the general feeling amongst their rank and file is it is a stealth layoff (no severance for those leaving due to the policy switch is a big financial incentive for the companies). A big challenge I'm not seeing really addressed though is a lot of staff at my clients stepped up…
How are the big companies going to justify any effort they put against climate change? Sounds stupid but forced return to office will also do enormous damage to the environment
> How are the big companies going to justify any effort they put against climate change?
Watch what they do, not what they say, I guess. Maybe it's mostly greenwashing?
The pandemic lockdowns were probably as close as we're ever going to get to observing how much a drastically reduced transport-intensive footprint is capable of helping the environment. If a lot of tension arises out of increasing RTO and shrinking labor pools, it will be interesting to watch how it resolves out.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#48Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
I work in government and government adjacent contracting. We need people badly right now.
Money from the lavish contracts won't reach workers anyway, so why bother? https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-arrivecan-a...
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#49Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
At least in Germany, I'm not seeing any signs for a major downturn in IT. At least on the hiring side, it actually seems to be even harder to fill mid-to-senior technical roles than last year at this time, and it wasn't exactly easy then either. Hearing similar takes from several companies, all of them still on hiring sprees.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#50It would be interesting to see the results of your script running on the "Who wants to be hired?" threads [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983765
Not the author, but quickly ran a script over "Who wants to be hired?" from Jan-2021 to March-2023 and here is the resulting plot of the top-level comments (where indent="0"): https://www.arminbuilds.com/2021_01-2023_03_hired.png
