It's been almost 3 years since the post-covid tech layoffs began. And the tech job market has steadily gotten worse since then. So now is a good time to check in on the state of out-of-work devs. Specifically, if you have left tech as your main job, what do you do now? And do you work on personal projects or a tech-related side hustle? Are you looking to jump back into tech when things improve, or have you found something better?
Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#2Our tech sector in general is in hot water, but gamedevs are getting massacred [0].
The stories I hear is they're taking on contracting work to survive, risking it all as an indie, or going into manufacturing (typically as quality assurance managers.) That last one seems surprising, but it's more common than you'd think.
Source: I run a community full of gamedevs.
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#3I was ready to go into construction (which I actually enjoy) but I just got an offer today for a lower pay remote tech job. The only reason I got this job is because the company can only hire US citizens.
I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of devs have gone hard nationalist after Biden's tech layoffs. (Zirp ending + S174 left to wither during Biden)
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#4Our tech sector in general is in hot water, but gamedevs are getting massacred [0]. The stories I hear is they're taking on contracting work to survive, risking it all as an indie, or going into manufacturing (typically as quality assurance managers.) That last one seems surprising, but it's more common than you'd think. Source: I run a community full of gamedevs. [0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs
I would like to know one thing about the games industry - are one reason AAA game releases dropped off a cliff is remote work?
Reason I say is that as soon as Covid hit, it seems like the triple As just stopped - which makes no sense because all they did was hire. I have to assume it's like the companies I worked at: All of a sudden people's individual life at home was more important than work - EVEN during work hours.
No one was able to get the missile shooting animation done for 8 days because their wife had tons of appointments and the dogs need walking and grocery trips... non-stop excuses. And then eventually no one wanted to work because no one else was. Hence the year of "quiet quitting".
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#5Our tech sector in general is in hot water, but gamedevs are getting massacred [0]. The stories I hear is they're taking on contracting work to survive, risking it all as an indie, or going into manufacturing (typically as quality assurance managers.) That last one seems surprising, but it's more common than you'd think. Source: I run a community full of gamedevs. [0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs
I would like to know one thing about the games industry - are one reason AAA game releases dropped off a cliff is remote work? Reason I say is that as soon as Covid hit, it seems like the triple As just stopped - which makes no sense because all they did was hire. I have to assume it's like the companies I worked at: All of a sudden people's individual life at home was more important than work - EVEN during work hour…
Hiring lots of people and setting grander goals (because you have lots of money and just hired tons of people) is an excellent way of slowing development down for a while, it doesn't make things go faster.
Bigger projects take longer, and many studios chased bigger and better, instead of aiming smaller. Which then meant that these things had to be standout hits to be considered successful, which puts more pressure on perfecting everything, which takes more time, ...
Then many studios have stories of either deep direction changes or large projects being cancelled as the money wasn't as available anymore and trends shifted. E.g. Sony alone has probably spent over a billion and multiple years of work of several studios on live-service games that they then scrapped, Dragon Age Veilguard pivoted a few times (and ended up a mess as a result), ... stories like that across the AAA space.
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#6The layoffs affected mostly the US market. In EU, there never has been an excess of salaries or hiring, so it's almost just bad as usual. You don't see much "funding" and "VC"s here. If you wanna stay on the market, you better have positive cash flow. In Italy, salaries are about 1/4 of what's overseas, it is very hard to job hop, those who do are seen as opportunistic people. So, you feel this slightly less.
All this AI marketing thing is another thing that is specific about Silicon Valley and investments, and "growth". In EU, you don't have much growth, and that's all.
I guess the US tech market has been drugged on free cash for too long, to even have an idea of what the real world is.
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#7The layoffs affected mostly the US market. In EU, there never has been an excess of salaries or hiring, so it's almost just bad as usual. You don't see much "funding" and "VC"s here. If you wanna stay on the market, you better have positive cash flow. In Italy, salaries are about 1/4 of what's overseas, it is very hard to job hop, those who do are seen as opportunistic people. So, you feel this slightly less. All thi…
P.S. No moral judgement intended. Just different context, different bubbles and conditions.
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#8I was ready to go into construction (which I actually enjoy) but I just got an offer today for a lower pay remote tech job. The only reason I got this job is because the company can only hire US citizens. I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of devs have gone hard nationalist after Biden's tech layoffs. (Zirp ending + S174 left to wither during Biden)
I don't think people are really going hard nationalist. But it does seem like the offshoring has increased over the past 5 years. Im probably going to lose my job in part because offshore has essentially eliminated the internal job moves available to me so I can't get off a shitty team.
Everything keeps getting automated or shipped overseas. It's hard to be optimistic for my kids to have good job opportunities when they grow up.
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#9Our tech sector in general is in hot water, but gamedevs are getting massacred [0]. The stories I hear is they're taking on contracting work to survive, risking it all as an indie, or going into manufacturing (typically as quality assurance managers.) That last one seems surprising, but it's more common than you'd think. Source: I run a community full of gamedevs. [0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs
I would like to know one thing about the games industry - are one reason AAA game releases dropped off a cliff is remote work? Reason I say is that as soon as Covid hit, it seems like the triple As just stopped - which makes no sense because all they did was hire. I have to assume it's like the companies I worked at: All of a sudden people's individual life at home was more important than work - EVEN during work hour…
(edit: reading again, this is sort of besides the point of the parent comment, but whatever)
I've been wondering about this as well, here are some of my hypotheses...
Business related
* Covid did it: we are currently experiencing a delayed effect. AAA games take roughly 5 years to develop (I think?), Covid generated a lot of uncertainty and chaos and thus less games got started during this period. Supply chains and finance were in disarray and we didn't know how long the pandemic would last. To make matters worse, this coincided with the release of the new console generation, which is typically a big moment of reorganizing and new ip, so we had a double whammy in that regard. How much new consoles would get sold in this new environment of chip shortages? How long would the shortages last? Is crypto here to stay and will they keep buying up al GPUs?
* Lending has gotten more expensive and this is driving up risk perception and lowering profitability. In the aggregate this leads to less games being released.
* There's been a lot of mergers between industry behemoths, so internal strategies and reorgs might have something to do with it. There is more vertical integration. There is less competition between AAA publishers because there are simply less of them.
* Outsourcing has changed due to internal and geopolitics. Chinese game market development and government restrictions, etc.
* There's been a switch to mobile and PC gaming, the home console market has been shrinking in relative terms.
* Online game libraries on consoles keep expanding, resulting in lower demand for new games that we saw in previous generations.
Game trends related
* All AAA devs were making their variation on open world games, but there has been an increasing fatigue with the formula. I see something similar happening roughly once every decade where the AAA industry grapples to find new mechanics and a corresponding production pipeline. Like in the 2000-2010 period games became highly linear because that way you could slice the units of work in time. Then in 2010-2020 people got sick of that and the new production pipeline became one of open world freedom alongside editors and workflows that allowed the entire team to populate a single giant world. Gameplay changed from highly scripted cinematic experiences into 'immersive' gameplay systems. Player now are getting tired of this trend but we haven't figured out a new one yet. Before the 2000s this was less of an issue because dev teams were more nimble, asset creation was less of a bottleneck and technical innovations were a bigger driver in popularity and length of development.
* There's been a switch to "forever" games in AAA. Where a studio just builds one big game they keep supporting and funneling players into. These are typically multiplayer, but that leads to issues of network effects. There's been a lot of new multiplayer games over the past decade but the player pool hasn't kept the same pace, so only the popular ones and first movers survive.
* Indie games glut + higher quality indie 'AA' games causing the AAA sector to having to differentiate themselves more, which they suck at because they're all about return on investment.
Re: Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to know one thing about the games industry - are one reason AAA game releases dropped off a cliff is remote work? Reason I say is that as soon as Covid hit, it seems like the triple As just stopped - which makes no sense because all they did was hire. I have to assume it's like the companies I worked at: All of a sudden people's individual life at home was more important than work - EVEN during work hour…
(edit: reading again, this is sort of besides the point of the parent comment, but whatever) I've been wondering about this as well, here are some of my hypotheses... Business related * Covid did it: we are currently experiencing a delayed effect. AAA games take roughly 5 years to develop (I think?), Covid generated a lot of uncertainty and chaos and thus less games got started during this period. Supply chains and f…
You’re leaving off one important thing. It’s a lot easier to create a mobile game cheaply using a pre-existing engine that is free to play and monetized via ads and in-app purchases of loot boxes and power ups