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Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?

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

#291

Post by ilikehurdles »

Animats wrote: post #257

The big question - where will they be a year from now? Savings gone, "stealth startups" mostly failed, and the US deeper into a recession.

There’s a saying that goes something like, “Economists have predicted 9 of the last 2 recessions.”

I’ve been hearing about the real estate bubble popping any day now since at least 2013. How many people sat on the sidelines of a skyrocketing housing market waiting for that day, out of fear? How many have fallen into a doom and gloom cycle over the last few years hoping for some big “told-you-so” payoff that never came?

If you have a few decades of able working life ahead of you, capitalize on opportunities. Take risks. You’re not going to time the crash, whatever that means; and you’ll likely end up more resilient for it anyway.

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

#292

Post by sophacles »

Zetice wrote: post #168
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s I would kill to retire. All I want to do is make art, music, cook, hike, kayak, and travel on the cheap. I have about.... 1/20th of the savings needed.

I get the impulse, but why isn't this viewed as profoundly selfish?

Seriously, why don't more people work so the investors can get a chunk of their value for doing nothing? How dare they do something so utterly anti-social as spend more time doing things with people that aren't making investors money? Why must the rich investor class make-do with their own money pile when a chunk of your effort could make their pile bigger?

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

#293

Post by toomuchtodo »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #290
quelltext wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Federal Reserve is a tech provider in finance (ACH, FedWire, FedNow instant payments, etc).

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

#294

Post by ilikehurdles »

Exendroinients wrote: post #105

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

OpenAI is hiring software engineers in the $200-400k range. The startup I work for has me in that range as well.

Alphabet went from 119k employees in 2019 to 190k employees in 2022. Microsoft went from 144k to 221k.

The fact is there was a massive amount of hiring done in the last few years, and these layoffs have yet to come to close to rolling these numbers back. Have these layoffs made Amazon any less of a behemoth?

I respect the engineering professions, but software engineers are still separated by a huge gap in opportunities and compensation.

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

#295

Post by wincy »

hadlock wrote: post #211
DoughnutHole wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough. You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.

Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.

You mean like the amazing visionaries Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes?

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

#296

Post by wincy »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #50
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that an odd question. My initial take was that they went to non-tech companies that have substantial internal IT presence.

From the original post, the next biggest category after “tech” is “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment. With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence. The next larg…

I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.

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

#297

Post by jesse__ »

shams93 wrote: post #252

I turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k for my education.

I'm working on a team that's >50% 30+ year career engineers. It's the best team I've ever worked on by an enormous margin.

I don't know how many dollars any of them spent on education, but I know everyone I work with has spent many tens of thousands of hours of their time practicing, working on, and becoming extremely good at what they do.

I don't know anything about you, or your life, what field you work in, and I won't presume anything, but I would like to suggest that you may be encountering negativity due to an outlook that you 'have been basically turned back into a child', or were 'forced to spend 478k for [your] education'.

...

Moving in with your aging mother to help her during a global pandemic does not turn you back into a child. I'll likely live with my mother again before she dies because I wouldn't want to live in a long-term-care home, so I won't put her though that.

Similarly, having spent a small fortune on your education doesn't mean anything other than you're capable of, and have (or had) the means to, spend a bunch of money.

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

#298

Post by shagie »

user5678 wrote: post #265
Zetice wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the lead engineer at one of these and you nailed it. If I catch anyone "innovating" we have a talk about what it is they're working on to make sure it's part of our core business. It very rarely is. I probably suck to work for in that way, but the reality is this is not a job about pushing the envelope, it's a job about executing as cleanly as possible. You work at one of these if you love to implement simple tec…

Isn’t this basically just saying “the way we’ve always done things here is optimal”? That is very rarely the case. Improvements, optimizations (even of a radical nature) are almost always possible. But yes it sounds like a lot of folks here would not like to work with someone so set in their ways.

The SaaS shop that I worked in had two Java devs, two JavaScript devs, a python gluer, and a mobile developer.

Building the even a basic framework takes hundreds of hours of developer time... for no real competitive advantage.

It's fine to work on innovative things (there was a point were something about Java annotations clicked and the report writing part got rewritten in a week)... but building big things that give small gains aren't viable in small shops.

Doing innovation on "how can we compress this web page even more" makes no sense at a small shop - if it's an issue grab Minify off the shelf and use that. Don't spend half a year writing your own that you'll need to support.

The small company is best served by working on things that give the competitive advantage - not working on those big ideas (unless that big idea is the competitive advantage).

Big tech companies have the advantage that they've got thousands of developers some of whom have some free time or the competitive advantage is removing another 200 bytes from a web page.

That small tech shop had 4000 hours of Java dev time to "spend" a year.. and another 4000 hours of JavaScript, and 2000 hours of python, and 2000 hours of android/iOS. There's a stack of 5000 hours of bugs and features for each of those parts of the app. Spending 500 hours of anyones time on something that can be solved off the shelf for under 10 hours to integrate is far from an optimal use of time.

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

#299

Post by feoren »

ikiris wrote: post #130
jghn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This just shows how dumb it is to require specific knowledge of products of clearly qualified people.

100% agreed that it's dumb to require extremely specific knowledge of one product, and 100% disagree that a Googler is "clearly qualified" simply because they came from Google. I have absolutely no idea why we've all just accepted the narrative that any FAANG employee is automatically better than the rest of us, despite evidence that FAANGs are nothing more than code mills optimizing for exploitable ambition over actual intelligence or engineering ability.

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

#300

Post by bitcoinmoney »

mgkimsal wrote: post #227
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are. I find your tone concerning, considering there's something driving wages down (which if you're a wage worker should make you squirm regardless of how much you make). I feel some resentment against fellow workers (because it doesn't matter how much you make, if you MUST work to live, you're a worker), but it doesn't matter. Wages aren't tied to wor…

There's a degree of truth in that, but I think it applies for larger companies, especially very profitable ones. On the smaller side, I've noticed that I can build the same 'thing' for two organizations, A & B. Org A will struggle to get any value from it, and Org B will make a killing from it. From my standpoint, it was approximately the same tech, same effort, often even similar problem space. But some companies ar…

You are worth what the market will bear. That includes timing and luck.
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