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Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

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Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#981
post #773
post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. I do agree this is generous af. Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.

>I feel most decent engineers Get ready for the definition of 'decent' to get a lot more scary...

They are also saying that departments are affected disproportionately. It's likely much harder for recruiters to find a new job, especially when hiring is being frozen at most companies

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#982

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I was laid off at the beginning of October. I got three good offers, picked the best and signed the contract. I went through about 15 interviews and applied to maybe 50 positions.

I just want to state the obvious, interviewing is a different skill than developing. You get better at interviewing with practice and the more interviews you do, the better you get. Also, you got to be confident and toughen up before your interviews, because even if some would be interesting, constructive done in a pleasant way by nice people, many will be nasty. I got through many interviews were there were several…

Interviewing is a skill, but luck is obviously a huge factor. My current job for a relatively mediocre salary at a smaller startup took a year and a half to find.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#983
post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was laid off at the beginning of October and still can’t find anything. It’s definitely a buyer’s market for senior level engineering talent.

Me too. I was laid off at the beginning of October. I got three good offers, picked the best and signed the contract. I went through about 15 interviews and applied to maybe 50 positions.

I applied for around 30, interviewed with 5, got 2 offers accepted 1. I canceled 2 interviews and got only 1 rejection (they said I was too senior for the role even though it was a senior developer role).

The process is kind of random. I aced all the coding tests but ultimately I ended up accepting the offer from the only company which did not make me do a coding test.

IMO, the smartest engineers can identify talent without relying on the outcome of a coding test. Coding tests are shallow and misleading; they don't evaluate the skills that really count.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#984
post #899
post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were at 5-10 years experience, I'd probably have much better luck. That seems to be the sweet spot.

You think there’s a difference between 10 years and 15 years? Get better at interviewing. The years of experience you put on your resume isn’t what’s losing you the job. “Too senior but willing to work for just senior rates” certainly isn’t it.

Something else that tends to change around the 10 year mark is that if you prefer to continue your career with IC roles then the people interviewing and making hiring decisions will often be younger and less experienced than you. Obviously at good employers that makes no difference but ageism is certainly a factor in this industry. It's not the years of experience that are losing those jobs, it's just the years.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#985

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integrate Apple Pay and Google Pay and/or whatever Samsung is doing these days. Add PayPal, too. Have established policies about draining the processor funds into accounts, and work with your bank on how to set these up properly. There is really no reason to have a single payment provider these days.

Apple/Google/Samsung Pay are not payment processors.

How do they work then?

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#986
post #948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd rather stay at a dead-end position until a lack of money forces you to be laid off by a broke company that can't afford cushy terms? The alternative is being fired early, given several months of pay, months of free healthcare, early grants, help if you're an H1B holder, and help from your old company in getting a new job... There are bad layoffs and there are ok layoffs, I'd say this is an ok one.

I loathe to hint to you that 90% of jobs are 'dead end jobs'. There is no 'promotion' waiting for you arbitrarily. It's a steep hierarchy and most people don't want to perform to compete. Moreover, in a downturn, it's rare that people are going to just jump off to a promotion, and rolling the dice is quite risky. Responsibilities, family, mortgages, etc.. I think a lot of the posture here is coming from young people…

I have no idea how you can claim to understand risk... then decline a guaranteed X months of pay for an uncertain number of months of pay that might even be less than X.

And the whole diatribe about dead end jobs, while packed full to the gills with angst, is just misunderstanding: usually dead end job means the job continues without upward mobility. Here it means you get terminated once things go from "bad" to "really bad" for your employer and you have no idea when.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#987
post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT. If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants. We'll be back to the days of: Sure, you can…

Can we please retire this "sweet summer child" thing? It is annoying af, rude, and likely never written by anyone over 30.

It's a very apt phrase. Young people whose only experience of professional life has been in the "summer", e.g. the good times, and have no conception of what it's like to find employment in the proverbial winter.

ZIRP has created an entire generation with absolutely no clue about the very existence of, let alone the harshness of, cycles.

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#988

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to drop off equipment once towards the end of a contract while the usual people responsible for accepting the return were out of office. I found the head of IT, typed up a paper saying "Anonym29 returned their equipment to Mr. Head of IT on [date] at [time]", put my signature on it, got his signature on it, made a copy for him, and kept the original - I didn't want the risk of the chain of custody getting mixed…

That’s just a receipt, isn’t it? Always get a receipt.

"Never sign anything, but always get a receipt."

Love it!

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#989
post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan isn't the only other example of difference out there. Odd that you should have chosen such an extreme example.

I didn't choose Japan as an example. The person I was responding to did.

My bad.

Same question to them then!

Re: Stripe laying off around 14% of workforce

#990

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China. And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airbo…

>If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked. A 50% or 100% mortality rate would keep even the most pro-liberty people home. The issue is that COVID was nowhere near the civilization killer that is was made out to be. Some countries/states recognized this and rightly decided to not lock society down.

The problem is, COVID19 was essentially a zero-day, an exploit against human physiology we had never seen in the wild before, and didn't know how bad it would be in foresight.

Any response to a novel outbreak that spreads rapidly, like COVID, needs to err on the side of caution initially, until we have better knowledge of the short and long term effects.

And it wasn't a civilization killer, but US excess mortality rate during COVID exceeded total US deaths of WWII, among other great cullings. It was worth taking seriously and striving for a competent response.

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