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Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

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Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never apply through LinkedIn. It is so low-friction that the vast majority of applicants are nowhere near qualified, and hiring managers quickly learn to ignore anything that came in from LinkedIn.

OTOH, if you are job hunting, be sure to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date.

Counterpoint: I've been working in this industry for ~20 years by now and have deleted my LinkedIn around the halfway point. Turned out it was even more useless than that Facebook account I had axed around the same time (sadly had to go back there for access to the marketplace recently).

TL;DR don't bother with all that recruiter spam and general engagement tactics for yet another data hoarding, privacy violating "social network". If you are doing a good job and keep investing in yourself there will always be good jobs in this industry.

Build Trust and Carry On

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#282
post #12

I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs. I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants fo…

Last summer and also before that, when I applied, I would get ~90% response rate and would have at least a call from recruiter/HM. Last week I sent a bunch of applications and crickets... this is something that I've never experienced in +10 years being in the industry. I'm not in dire need for a job but I can imagine how much,much stressful is to be unemployed now vs even 3-5 years ago.

[dead]

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't LinkedIn basically social media? I will have no part in that.

You can basically port your resume to it and do nothing else and it can get you the occasional lead on a job. 3/4 of my last jobs were from LinkedIn recruiter outreach. One of the recruiter I told I wasn't ready, and then months later I pinged them and got right into the interview process and eventually got a new job.

I never let anyone else do the company vetting for me, not even for preselection. I also want to have the leverage of negotiating with my future employer / stakeholder directly, recruiter cut including. So from my POV and with all the spam that comes with it, a LinkedIn is not only useless but a major nuisance.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last summer and also before that, when I applied, I would get ~90% response rate and would have at least a call from recruiter/HM. Last week I sent a bunch of applications and crickets... this is something that I've never experienced in +10 years being in the industry. I'm not in dire need for a job but I can imagine how much,much stressful is to be unemployed now vs even 3-5 years ago.

I guess I don't exactly understand as my experience is quite different. I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs.

>>I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs. reply

A few of those jobs might even really exist!

I am of the opinion that the vast majority of inquiries I get from linked in (at least 5 a week) are from scammers and brand-new or desperate recruiters just looking to collect resumes to add to their database. I pretty much ignore all linkedin inquiries at this point - it has been taken over by scammer and hucksters.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#285
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was in a way. Having an old school style IT structure was a pain. Maintaining your severs, networking gear if needed, OS updates ... on and on. For very small teams (maybe not the well funded start ups) that could eat a lot of time and trouble.

You used to be able to scale up to millions of users in less time than you could memorize all the AWS acronyms, and with lower hardware and bandwidth costs to boot. It’s true that it would take a couple weeks to order all the hardware and a couple more to install and configure it, but that’s about the same amount of time you spend writing all the terraform and Kubernetes scripts and configuring cloudformation and VPC…

Yeah, but then you wouldn't have high availability to the same level, for example. I mean, you could, but then tack on another 100 non-AWS acronyms to your on-premise solution.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of cloud platforms as less complex than managing your own systems. It's trivial to go from zero to functional product on GCP or AWS, and it's honestly not very expensive to get started either. GCP and AWS very clearly subsidize costs for early-stage startups in an effort to lock them in. A tiny startup might have a cloud hosting cost of 3 figures a year until they really take off. And when your product does t…

Yes, scaling is trivial on AWS if you rewrite from scratch 3 times and rearchitect 4 times, but at least you don’t have to enter your credit card number twice.

His assumption is that you're familiar with cloud design patterns. So if you know what you're doing, costs are manageable and scaling is a breeze, that's what the cloud was literally designed for.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The stuff you’re saving time on, managing hosts, just isn’t that much compared to dealing with aws/terraform/etc. This is where I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. If we're comparing Terraform, it means we probably care about reproducibility (rather than an "AWS console vs SSH into pet hosts" scenario), so the like-for-like comparison involves bringing in something like Ansible. On top of that, you need to pick, ins…

Yea, I mostly agree. I feel like a lot of the negativity comes from hobbyists, where an extra hundred dollars does matter. I think one place that I disagree is while you could do that in a few hours, your average developer couldn’t. You’re now talking about everyone to learn lambda and terraform and whatnot, whereas with a “standard” web server, that people are familiar with, a lot of that is more easily centralized.…

Agreed that there is a learning curve, I guess I was assuming some competence with both stacks—not starting from scratch (although I think if you were starting from scratch it would still be easier to learn AWS than self-managed hosts).

Yeah, big companies don’t like giving devs raw Terraform. My company has sandbox environments where devs can do iteration with permissive Terraform access. That works pretty well for stuff like this.

Also, I use AWS for hobbyist stuff and you can easily use this serverless stack for <$5/month.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#288

How long do you guys anticipate current crisis to be over? I'm not expecting us to ever return to the Covid craziness of hiring but lets say to relative stability? I think we have another year in this and then things improve. Interest rate needs to go down first.

Interest rates are still going up. It needs to get worse better they will go down so we are still probably not close to the bottom.

All these layoffs need to play out and have an effect on the economy, most importantly house prices, before things can turn around.

Soft landings are very rare.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#289
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a ton of money parked into savings accounts due to the high interest rates and the fear of recession. As things improve all this money will look for employment.

As things improve big tech will start hiring again.

The talk is about new rounds of layoffs, not hiring right now.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more. Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I hav…

It seems like such a waste of time and complexity for a knob that only a tiny, tiny fraction of startups will ever have to turn.

I just don't see this. Building what I am describing can be done in days sometimes hours. Where exactly is the time and complexity? I would be willing to bet given a true greenfield(e.g. I can't use an ansible script that stole from my last job) I can build an autoscaling flask app with CI/CD and local environment on ECS twice as fast as accomplishing a lesser facsimile with a bare metal server or a VPS. If I built on a VPS I would still have concerns like backups, High Availability, DNS, Networking, etc. etc. to deal with.

I consider the latter to be far more complex.

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