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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?

#321

Post by barry-cotter »

sophacles wrote: post #292
Zetice wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

$20,000 a year income puts one in the top decile of income worldwide. At $50,000 you are richer than 98.5% of the global population. That’s less than the median American worker ($54K) or the mean ($74K).

A lit more than any investor class are rich by any historical or global standard.

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

#322

Post by ericmcer »

wonder_er wrote: post #150

Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, cust…

A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade.

My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long.

It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.

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

#323

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

Sorry to hijack this thread and be pessimistic, but whenever you get emails from recruiters about a startup that's got "ex-Google and ex-Facebook" on the "founding team" - keep in mind that it's 99% bs.

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

#324

Post by Beaver117 »

joenot443 wrote: post #139
Beaver117 wrote: post #13

I can't find another job even with a FAANG background. The market is brutal. Maybe my only choice is to start a startup.

I hope you don't mind me poking into your history, but didn't you make a post a few months ago saying that you quit your job and wanted out of tech? Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.

Yes, I quit, wasn't laid off. But now I'm in the same pool as the tens of thousands of other very qualified people. How do you think that affects my job hunt?

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

#325

Post by gumby »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #159
gumby wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero of my friends laid off from google are even looking for a new job. My wife was always asking me to retire, but after a year or so she’d say “it would be good for you to have a job”. Then repeat. Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s. So I suspect a bunch of them will be back in the job market eventually.

> 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 would kill to retire.

That is one strategy: you'll have a place to stay and three meals a day for the rest of your life!

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

#326

Post by Kranar »

darth_avocado wrote: post #255
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.

Wow that’s a lot of money. Did you have master’s/post doc degrees?

No way, since any such degree wouldn't cost any money, instead it would pay you.

Spending 500k on a degree is absolutely insane and indicates that there's a lot more to the story than what's being told. The only exception I can think of is if this person attended a top 10 university, like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, in which case they likely have nothing to worry about.

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

#327

Post by barry-cotter »

mywittyname wrote: post #186
Zetice wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's freeing up a high paying job for someone else to take.

Jobs are high paying because someone thinks they provide (a lot) more value than they are paid. “Freeing up a high paying job” means someone who is worse at the job, on the margin, does it and less value is provided to everyone, aka society.

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

#328

Post by imbnwa »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #82
looping__lui wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier. I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer". I doubt, that "cu…

The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack. ht…

Off the cuff, I observe people who have social skills also find social commercing and social power pleasurable in itself and desire the activity for that end as well, far more pleasurable than sitting around solving logic puzzles and factoring the solutions; maybe on the side, like someone who plays Sudoku, but not as something occupying their day.

Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating.

I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.

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

#329

Post by adra »

barry-cotter wrote: post #321
sophacles wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

$20,000 a year income puts one in the top decile of income worldwide. At $50,000 you are richer than 98.5% of the global population. That’s less than the median American worker ($54K) or the mean ($74K). A lit more than any investor class are rich by any historical or global standard.

Until you actually start equating cost of living and buying power. You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had. If you're willing to move to a rural Indian slum, you're sure to live the most regal life one can afford there, but you will lose out on a lot of the value that you get from living where and how you are today. Which is better? Shrugs, everyone has their place and I'm sure you'll find yours too.

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

#330

Post by gumby »

Teever wrote: post #113
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…

Can you give some examples of companies that are commonly called 'tech' companies that you don't brief develop any tech at all?

Most of them.

An "X" company tells you (and them -- that's why companies position themselves) how to think about what they do.

So WMX is "in the trash business": sure they have logistics, and surely some custom software, but what they do is pick up the rubbish and bring it to the dump. End of story.

So Google (the world's largest advertising company) is called a "tech" company because without continuous work on their advanced technology they'd lose almost all their revenue. (what the rest of the people employed there do -- who knows? Nothing else contributes meaningfully to revenue). FB the same. Companies as diverse as Rambus, Cisco, NVidia, Apple, Boom (if they still exist), WhatsApp, Twitter (once upon a time) Snowflake...etc: technology is the linchpin of their work. Even Tesla, but not, say, for their BIPV (the roof tiles), which are decades-old me-too technology with no R&D at all.

At the opposite extreme, why was WeWork considered a "tech" business?

Uber employs a lot of programmers but I don't think of them as a tech business: their competitive advantage is their business model and their moat is branding, and they are all about piece work in small scale transport. There are plenty of useful SaaS companies who connected some existing packages and came up with a good new business, but aren't in the technology business; if they dumped k8s or Airflow or whatever and changed their stack it wouldn't matter much (so they never will).

There was a time when one or two people could make a product and be a tech company (Visicalc, 1.2 programmers; Intuit, 1 programmer), but nowaday if you can get into revenue with one or two programmers I'd say it's not a tech business. Can be a great business, don't get me wrong, but value, like Uber's, will come from domain strength and marketing/branding.

And to be a bit ad hominem: there's a higher density of tech businesses in Silicon Valley and a much lower density in SF. You can tell because the nerds in boring suburbia worry about bits and bytes and the folks up north use phrases like "founder lifestyle".

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