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The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

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Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

#81

Post by friskydingo77 »

tb_technical wrote: post #45
totetsu wrote: post #38

Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..

I work in government and government adjacent contracting. We need people badly right now.

I was seriously considering government work, but they all seem to want TS clearances. I’m simply not interested in the process. Do you have any recommendations for anywhere that doesn’t have this requirement?

Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

#84

Post by topherpalmtree »

rootusrootus wrote: post #44
JohnFen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.

Anecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that…

Do you get the sense it’s for profit padding or is there a downturn in business? If there is a downturn in business, is that downturn related to Covid measures at the consumer or business level?

Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

#86

Post by vineyardmike »

shmatt wrote: post #67
monero-xmr wrote: post #5

We have an expected attrition rate at my company across all departments. We normally lose about 10 people per quarter. This quarter the number of people leaving - zero.

This is my unpopular take on the layoffs at extremely profitable companies Hiring rates skyrocketed during covid, but so did attrition rates (well, the same people joining Google left some other company) After big tech started freezing hiring in summer 2022, attrition rates most likely tanked, people wanted to stay put. 6-8 months later, companies ended up with way more employees than they planned, even though they w…

This isn’t very unpopular. Most tech companies demonstrably hired at the same rate but as the base number grew, each new quarter brought in more people. And yes, attrition crashed when they announced hiring freezes. At companies like Google, the layoff count was similar to expected attrition.

Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

#87

Post by klardotsh »

friskydingo77 wrote: post #81
tb_technical wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in government and government adjacent contracting. We need people badly right now.

I was seriously considering government work, but they all seem to want TS clearances. I’m simply not interested in the process. Do you have any recommendations for anywhere that doesn’t have this requirement?

Yep, same. Somewhere relatively stable and doing a public good sounds great, but I'm not bothering with security clearances or the myriad other red tape required at almost all of those roles, especially for almost always significantly less comp than the private sector :\

Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

#89

Post by zX41ZdbW »

elif wrote: post #76

I wonder if it correlates with a /general/ loss of traffic. Personally I find the comments section to be less accepting of more classes of opinions each year.

The number of comments per month continues to grow linearly, while the number of stories remains roughly constant for several years:

https://sql.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRvU3Rhcn...

Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments

#90

Post by oofta-boofta »

shmatt wrote: post #67
monero-xmr wrote: post #5

We have an expected attrition rate at my company across all departments. We normally lose about 10 people per quarter. This quarter the number of people leaving - zero.

This is my unpopular take on the layoffs at extremely profitable companies Hiring rates skyrocketed during covid, but so did attrition rates (well, the same people joining Google left some other company) After big tech started freezing hiring in summer 2022, attrition rates most likely tanked, people wanted to stay put. 6-8 months later, companies ended up with way more employees than they planned, even though they w…

> People will crap on Google or Salesforce "why did you hire so much?" - but during the great resignation - what were they supposed to do?

Gee, I dunno, maybe NOT double in size like Salesforce did?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/num...

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