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Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

economist.com

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Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#281

Post by wonder_er »

bradlys wrote: post #196
sjf wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?

It's just a popular place for remote people. The usual white digital nomad bro who goes there to sleep around. (Plenty of women doing this too btw) It's a nice spot but it's just for fucking around in your 20's. (Or 30's if you live an alternative lifestyle or are a terrible romantic partner)

'just' feels slightly de-dignifying, but overall this is not totally wrong.

I'd say there's a lot more to do there than sleep around, but there seemed to be plenty of that. (I'm white-passing, have done the nomad thing in the past, didn't go to sleep around, don't consider myself to be a terrible romantic partner, but am recently divorced, so you shouldn't take only my word on that).

I'm nearly autistic when it comes to land development regimes, and Indonesia is widely regarded as having some of the best land use regimes in the globe, and I wanted to go experience it.

Turns out... It does!

It hurts my soul to return to the USA, where urban planners are the land-use equivalent of flat earthers.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#282

Post by operatingthetan »

closeparen wrote: post #272
elzbardico wrote: post #41

One thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off from a very big company during a recession is that you need to adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them. I have always been very very conservative wit…

>You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs. It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you must sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades. Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on,…

I have a friend who works at Meta working on the Metaverse as a TPM and they just sold their house and bought one twice as large (and expensive). I've warned them it's a risky situation but they didn't agree. They remain employed but if I were in that situation I'd be pulling my hair out.

On the other hand my house is 1/3 the size and I could pay the mortgage working retail if I had to. I'm worried about a bunch of friends who bought big houses that required faang incomes for 30 years if the tech market turns and doesn't return for long periods of time.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#283

Post by closeparen »

operatingthetan wrote: post #282
closeparen wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs. It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you must sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades. Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on,…

I have a friend who works at Meta working on the Metaverse as a TPM and they just sold their house and bought one twice as large (and expensive). I've warned them it's a risky situation but they didn't agree. They remain employed but if I were in that situation I'd be pulling my hair out. On the other hand my house is 1/3 the size and I could pay the mortgage working retail if I had to. I'm worried about a bunch of f…

Absolutely! Committing to an ongoing expense based on your earning power in the peak of a cycle is crazy. The only way to justify something like that is if you're paying for (almost) all of it upfront. But even then the upside potentially is probably higher in stocks than in Bay Area real estate at this point.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#284

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

bradlys wrote: post #196
sjf wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?

It's just a popular place for remote people. The usual white digital nomad bro who goes there to sleep around. (Plenty of women doing this too btw) It's a nice spot but it's just for fucking around in your 20's. (Or 30's if you live an alternative lifestyle or are a terrible romantic partner)

>or are a terrible romantic partner

Woah, while you might be right to some extent, it feels pretty harsh to judge someone else so superficially just on where they choose to travel, and what they do there, and at what age they do it.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#285

Post by paulddraper »

jjav wrote: post #266
gumby wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company. There’s a very good chance that their new jobs are similar to their former jobs. Unfortunately, the term “tech” has become diluted to the point of worthlessness. Every company of any size needs programming, statistics, and such. Conversely many companies swept under the “tech” term don’t develop any technology at all. It’s so bad that actual technology development i…

> Unfortunately, the term “tech” has become diluted to the point of worthlessness. Indeed. Nearly every so-called "tech" company is not actually in the business of selling technology products, so they aren't really tech companies. Of course they create technology (sometimes very nice ones) internally in support of their actual business, but tech isn't the business the company board cares about. Netflix is a movie pro…

Google and Facebook are Ad Tech.

I can sort of see your point with Netflix moving into content creation, but only sort of.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#286

Post by Apocryphon »

eftychis wrote: post #278
Exendroinients wrote: post #105

Finally the market is correcting themself. Software engineers aren't worth more than any other engineers.

I disagree. Companies make way more money of what they offer. Otherwise they would go bankrupt. They are not a charity. From my experience, from colleagues and friends, equity is worth 100x that of salary, if you know where to "bet" yourself. You can add the option to retire really early with equity as an engineer. One can't with salary before one's 60s. That other engineering fields might be extremely underpriced is…

> equity is worth 100x that of salary, if you know where to "bet" yourself

Yes, and the odds are not all that much better than in Vegas.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#287

Post by sangnoir »

jghn wrote: post #94
taude wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think an elevated salary at a FAANG implies over-qualified, though. I phone-screened someone from a FAANG, and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. Any of the big-branded commercial apps, they weren't familiar with, and I can hire someone for a lot less with the required working knowledge AND know that they won't be resentful about it. I think it's going to ta…

> and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. I had an eye opening experience several years ago. My group was partnering with a group at Google. Their developers were sharp, as one would expect. But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't fami…

> But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X

Occasionally X is an open source implementation of a Google paper, published after Google decided its proprietary tech no longer provides a competitive advantage and/or has moved onto a better architecture internally.

There's an astounding number of Google publications that spawned Billion-dollar industries.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#288

Post by [deleted] »

nubela wrote: post #18

We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs. Here's the summary: - 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022. - Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company. - 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups. See the full blog post here: https://nubela…

[deleted]

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#289

Post by thih9 »

elzbardico wrote: post #41

One thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off from a very big company during a recession is that you need to adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them. I have always been very very conservative wit…

> Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them.

Not reading history books sounds like a good excuse in this scenario.

Re: Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

#290

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

quelltext wrote: post #146
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe. They are a payment processor and work in Finance. What significant contributions to tech have they produced? I'm not being snarky, I'm just not familiar with any off the top of my head like I know React came from FB/Meta, Google & Amazon produce all sorts of cloud computing stuff, Apple produces lots of libraries/frameworks (most likely for their own hardware/ecosystem), Bootstrap came out of Twitter, etc.

Providing an API abstracting over the complexity of payment processing is the technology. Google's search engine is technology but you would probably say "isn't that just a researching documents"? A bit weird how you only deem companies technological if they have released popular OSS or Apple because they produce libraries/frameworks they use internally. Pretty sure all software companies use internal libraries.

Are visa and mastercard tech companies? Or wells fargo?
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