Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

news.ycombinator.com

291–300 of 315 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It turns out that compared to the dedicated nerds of the previous generation, most new people just don't care that much about tech and don't want to go deeper than the bare minimum required by their job. The average day-to-day work is menial, for example investigating a production issue. That isn't something that people get into as a hobby, that's work in a very unromantic sense. Maybe having good systems backgroun…

I'd never heard of that novel or these laws, but as an American it would be unthinkable to consider them anything other than Kafkaesque dark satire. The idea that they've moved from that to some sort of positive model for egalitarian society is downright creepy. Specifically, because they all contain the hypocrisy of saying explicitly as a group the very thing they're telling the individual not to say. Taking the sid…

Scandinavians know there is some truth to it. But it has more to do with what you say and do. You can DO amazing things but you are not allowed to brag about it. This is better than bragging but not doing which is very common in certain places.

But this mentality has basically vanished from the main cities in the last three decades because marketing is a competitive field, and you need all the tools in the toolbox to not get eaten alive.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#292
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A quick review of people on LinkedIn with Open to Work badges seems to paint a different picture than any claim of people being let go are of lower quality. Come on, LinkedIn (CVs) tell nothing. Having been somewhere is often made up as great experience even if did not yield much experience, or one wasn't as involved as claimed, and even been somewhere is a lie. It is usually the opposite if I check known colleague…

> It is usually the opposite if I check known colleagues: null performers and phonies have outstanding profiles, the good or super programmer somtimes an awkward or does-not-care profile. I don't think you're interpreting these things right, and I'll tell you why. I know superb software engineers who don't update their online presence and didn't even bothered to update their LinkedIn profile to change their profile p…

I didn't interpret, just said as it is for people who I definitely know how good they are; yours is exactly one explanation why that is so also for fresh vs settled ones that way that I wouldn't (and didn't?) exclude, thr list of details is endless, didn't bring them all. Just wanted to say: evaluating experience and skills of people by LinkedIn profiles is pointless - you cannot compare objectively there.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. I find it odd that everyone thinks Uber’s end game is automated cars, but no one seems to be talking about how tech companies end game is automated coders. LLMs are not even close, but what’s to say internally, they don’t have something that works. Or they have enough data to show they need fewer workers since they can leverage AI now.

I work at a FAANG, I can't speak for all companies divisions but I can pretty comfortably say that I have seen next to no evidence that AI tooling has become so productive that we "need" less engineers. Actually it's somehow kind of the inverse, any AI related code has been subpar which has been putting a lot of stress on the core systems in terms of reviews and performance. From my personal perspective, things overa…

> Actually it's somehow kind of the inverse, any AI related code has been subpar which has been putting a lot of stress on the core systems in terms of reviews and performance.

My experience is that AI tooling just means engineers can do more, which means product managers want more… resulting in more work with the same engineering team…

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#294

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

As a tech worker of current generation, I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment that I suck.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#296
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, the engineering interviews still typically revolve around Leetcode algorithms instead of the messy but hardly CS-intensive day to day work that engineering typically involves.

That's (very charitably) because those are weed-out questions for early-stage engineers. Lots of companies feel they need weed-out questions because they're swamped with applicants. How does applicant approach a problem? Does applicant describe their thought process figuring it out? Can applicant figure it out? Did that tell anyone how good the applicant is at the job? No. It just provided some gates for the intervie…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#297
post #162

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years I find this opinion hilarious: Almost 30 years ago the second most popular software product was Windows 95 (Doom was the #1), which couldn't run for a few hours without BSODing. Almost 20 years ago the average tech worker was building atrocities with Visual Basic, MS Access and PHP. Meanwhile today it was announced that Google…

I saw the same influx of salary-seekers during the dot com boom. Generally people that don't have a native curiosity and love of computing just don't pan out well. I'm not gatekeeping or against them trying, would love it if people were more honest about it but honesty isn't part of the hiring culture ("why do you want to work here?" "money" is frowned upon as an answer.)

It would be like if there was a housing boom and residential house framing ramped up base hourly pay to $100/hour with lunches provided and relaxation chambers onsite. You would see a huge influx of people going to it for the money rather than someone who is really into construction, knows load bearing tolerances, code for hurricanes or earthquakes, how to properly frame stairs, etc.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#298

I've seen these answers: - excess hiring during the pandemic; - interest rates raised; - salaries too high; - cut in remote work (to ease return to office later); - some weird thing coming; - AI; (I could replace all those semi-colons with question marks.) (Edit: formatting)

Add section 174

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#300
Lack of vc investment at the bottom means lack of seed through series c companies suddenly flush with money willing to buy B2b software so they can grow and sell their software to B2b businesses who sell software to B2b businesses who sell their software to end users.

Cut the bottom out, it trickles.

Post reply on HN