Ask HN: Who has been laid off?
There is a monthly “Who is hiring” post, but I thought it might be helpful to have a laid off post with unemployment rates rising.
Share your experience and what you’re looking for.
Share your experience and what you’re looking for.
20 minutes later all my accounts got disabled, not a chance to even say farewell to my nice co-workers.
It sucks. I don't have a ton of savings. Luckily my car is paid off, and I only have student loans left.
I was very tempted to inflate my lifestyle after I got a big raise.
I didn't do it, otherwise i'd be in a world of shit.
At least I can survive for a couple month or so.
Stay strong people
Yes I am in the US.I will start that application right now.
I panic paid off my car insurance just in case things get worse. I'll shop for a cheaper phone plan.
Gym memberships, online streaming and frivolous stuff will go.
Capitalism for the win.
Don't just cut everything out of your life cold turkey. Keep something that brings you joy.
May not apply to you, but if you're an Xfinity customer, their mobile service is a great value: runs on the Verizon network, and you only pay for data. I switched to it for a few months during a financial crisis I had. It wasn't good for tethering (that gets too expensive vs. a carrier like Verizon), but there were months my bill was only $12 or $24 due to minimal data use (I brought my iPhone from Verizon)
Also if you are not driving you can perhaps get a discount for the mileage reduction. You might also just let them know you are laid off.
Still shop as you will get a refund from your current insurer when you cancel. Just because you paid doesn't mean that money is gone!
Companies backed by finance guys are psychopaths. They only have one goal - to make as much money as possible. They will sacrifice the people on their teams to get there. This goes for VCs, public companies, private equity, debt finance companies etc.
I had to pause my repayments this month because of job-hunt.
(It was also a Haskell gig, which is a real rarity.)
Right now I'm just licking my wounds and waiting for the lockdown to end. I'm not sure if it makes sense to start a new job right now - the UK furlough scheme is essentially guaranteed income until June. Starting a new job would waive that, so unless you're actually losing money on furlough I think it's a bit unwise to jump companies.
Haskell is a demanding language, so you're almost certainly a pretty senior dev. If so, consider volunteering to help organizations during the downtime. Worst case, if you can't get that dream gig back it will certainly make your resume stand out when you're looking for your next thing. Best of luck.
It would be great if all devs could keep this in mind, but especially the ones that are about to get some time off (if life does not get too stressful for you).
This is aimed at scientists, but my wife is on the list and tells me that they are looking for UX designers and software developers.
I guess if they're also looking for UX designers, they aren't looking for just data analysis code?
See HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723098
What are y'all doing w/ Haskell? Is it regular ol' programming and someone just picked Haskell, or is it a use case where Haskell shines exceptionally well?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-for-wage-costs-through-the...
edd [at] theoryof [dot] pl
Also UK and I am losing money as it's 80% up to 2500 pre month if your employer doesn't top it up, so for me that's a large pay cut, that said given the way things are I'm happy to take that cut knowing I'll still have twice what I need to cover the next 3 months before I have to touch my savings.
Whether I'll have a job at the end of whatever the lockdown period ends up been I've no idea, I think most likely I will but we'll have to wait and see, fortunately I'd been saving so I have enough to cover me from June well into next year in my "can access this money right now" account.
I've been ready to change jobs, but I find job searches while I have a job frustrating. Each opportunity is a huge investment in time. Honestly, I find it easier to search for a job when I can give it my full and undivided attention.
To make a long story short, I dropped a hint that I was ready to leave voluntarily under the right circumstances, but I didn't anticipate the whole COVID-19 thing happening just as I was starting my job search. I never anticipated that, the exact week that I planned on looking for a job, daycare would close, and everyone else in the industry would join the job search.
So anyway, what am I looking for? Priorities:
0: You can pay me
1: You need someone with almost 20 years development experience
2a: Ideally, I'd like to join an early stage company that has a "bubblegum and duct tape" version of their product on the marketplace, and now needs someone to make it better
2b: Or, I'd like to join a company with demonstrated product-market fit and write the first version of their product
3: I'd like to work with some languages, frameworks, toolkits that I don't have experience with (But otherwise, I have about 18 years experience in C#)
4: I don't really care if it's web, mobile, desktop, full-stack, ect. (But the last 9 years was a desktop product.)
The most important thing is: Don't Panic!
What I generally observe in software is that it's super-hard to hire. Now a lot of companies that had difficult-to-fill openings will realize it's now or never: If you can't find someone to fill the role in this economy, you probably have unrealistic expectations. Otherwise, you're going to have plenty of great people walking through your door.
I think that hiring will pick up faster than we anticipate. Pay might be a little less than we want, but it'll be back by the beginning of 2022.
In case you want to get perspective of the huge US impact of unemployment, see this automated visualization.
http://lenkiefer.com/2020/04/03/us-labor-market-update-april...
Unemployment peaked at around 25% in the 1930s depression. Rough calcs suggest that could be surpassed: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/march/back-en...
So we don’t really know yet with precision, but it’s getting close to Great Recession levels.
I just got some equipment quoted with a 2 week delivery guarantee. A month ago there was a 10 week backorder due to Chinese supply chain issues.
The overall market is imploding. Once you see prices drop, that’s it.
That budget was going to end in a year anyway. They just shotgunned me in the knees in the goddam apocalypse and we are talking public sector. Things must be savage in "the real world", right now.
I got a phone call from a local politician telling me that "It's not your performance or your skills or you it's just a budgetary reason. If I see anything that fits your profile I 'll let you know" (like... letting me keep the job I have been doing for three years ?). My job is entirely supported by a higher federal entity, I cost them 0 bucks, and I am there to carry on missions for that entity. It's truly cronyism at its finest.
And total lack of humanity.
All my close coworkers are up in arms and letters to local politicians are being written this week-end.
Today is the first day of a two week vacation (I officially am out in three weeks but the lockdown won't be very productive considering) and I was still in 2 zoom meetings talking about branding and destination management strategies at a small country level and how we can best help and support our sector to rebound later in the year. It's mind blowing. Was sending technical thingie to a coworker at 1 in the morning. They haven't even told my n+1 that I was let go.
Good thing there is a social net in my country, I am looking for to rest, find myself back. It's going to hit me real hard next week when I realize I have no social support in lockdown and all the projects I was working on are just... poof... gone.
edit: not covid19 related
edit2: so, total loss of trust in our representatives/politicians for a while
edit3: sorry for that broken english, I am running on fumes, I somehow couldn't sleep more than 2 hours last night :D
At least we still have a job, and I'll take the pay cut if it means we don't have to make anyone else redundant, but I wish the employees had a seat at the negotiating table for any of this.
If the tech industry didn't seem to despise unionizing so much this could've been possible. Maybe that will change once the current disaster is behind us.
Instead of instantly laying off as many people as possible, the union could have brought other proposals to the table to try and help both the company and employees. Maybe you delay 401k matching until the end of the year instead of paying it every paycheck. Maybe cut employee salaries and hours instead. The union at least gives the employees the chance to voice ideas on how to help the company and themselves make it through instead of finding out that 400+ of your coworkers were let go over Zoom via a two minute prerecorded message.
That's harsh and cold. Wow.
Perspective from the other side of the table: I can't speak for every company, but we've worked day and night for weeks to figure out a plan that puts employees first and gives us a fighting chance to emerge from this crisis. It may not feel like it, but damn we fight for every single person's job. Paycuts w/o layoffs is a win.
Prospects aren’t too bleak - the local engineering scene is pretty sound and I’ve heard encouraging noises from a couple of companies I’d love to work for - however, while the country is in lockdown and everybody is burning through their cash pile, not much hiring gets done.
On the upside, I have a few weeks at a minimum to spend more time with my kids and bring my Russian and Portuguese skills back up to speed.
Considering the petroleum service industry had been struggling for years, I took the severance pay rather than fighting to keep a job which would in all likelihood disappear shortly anyway.
Took four business days from having a steady job to being unemployed.
Ouch, that is really rough. I hope your severance was enough to carry you through until you can find something new. My partner is in petro-adjacent company* and they have a full hiring freeze. We are wondering when the layoffs are coming. Good luck.
*technically, they have an industry agnostic service, but something like 90% of their customers are oil companies, so...
I hope we'll see a partial return to normal-ish after Easter - at least to the extent that the companies I've been in touch with start planning for the months and years ahead, rather than just trying to figure out how to survive until something resembling normalcy returns.
What I see locally (in the Sunnmøre maritime cluster) is that a lot of smaller companies have pivoted from being suppliers to the oil industry exclusively to catering to offshore wind, fisheries, aquaculture &c - whereas the larger corporations say they are doing the same, only spending years burning through cash trying to develop a strategy for the new reality.
With any luck, your partner's company will get business from this - for lack of a better phrase - 'greener' economy as it matures. Exciting times with lots of opportunities for entrepreneurs around here, at least - with lots (by rural Norwegian standards...) of skilled people, machinery and capital available for cheap.
It sucks to have graduated in 07, and feel like you've hit your stride in 20.
> a lot of people for whom strings were tight
There's a bad joke in there about tuning a little more flat, but I'll leave well enough alone and instead send my sympathies.
I have an acquaintance who was nominated for Juno[0], Canada's highest music award, and the entire award process is apparently dead now, no certainly no awards show. This should be her possibly hitting a new high point in her career- a big award can mean future opportunities- and instead it's all just on hold.
Unless people stop going to concerts/performances, well then the equipment goes to the basement.
But the unfortunate corollary is that you cannot just stack up the parts and have a successful production by magic. It takes a lot more than that. The institutions and structures currently doing it season after season have a kind of life of their own, and it's absolutely subject to decay and death. The ecological niche they occupy is extraordinarily harsh, so they're not easily replaced either.
Practically speaking: you need space and equipment. You need artistic direction with taste and vision to hire the right performers and designers and communicate it to them. You need skilled craftsmen to implement the designs, quick-thinking managers to wrangle the logistics, ambitious 2nd assistants to make the coffee. You'll need all this for months before you turn a dollar of revenue. Then you need marketers to bring in an audience, front of house staff to deal with it, professional schmoozers to pry open the rich ones' checkbooks (ticket sales are never enough).
If it turns out the creative vision was too safe, it'll be panned as boring and derivative. If you take a risk and fail, you'll also get eaten alive. So you have to take a real risk, and have it go your way, every time. At any point, one of the key people who held it all together by the seat of her pants could retire to take care of her sick mother. Or a crucial benefactor (public or private) could have a change of heart. Or Walgreens could snatch up the lease on your performance space. Or an influential critic could be in a bad mood. Any one of these things could be the end.
Please do not take performing arts organizations for granted. There are many once-grand theaters and concert halls in this country abandoned and rotting away. Even more that were simply erased. These things hang on to life by a thread in the best of times.
I feel like my company has done the best they can (given our industry has already been under a lot of pressure prior to COVID) under circumstances. We're in groups of rolling furloughs so folks have not been permanently laid off. While laid off, we still are receiving medical benefits, which is great.
As a remote worker prior to all this, I haven't had to change much of my day to day and our infrastructure has handled the influx of remote workers (thousands) very well.
However, it also makes the prospect of moving to another company daunting. I worked on-prem for years and developed relationships with co-workers prior to moving off-site. I have a lot of anxiety about not being able to create the same relationships at a new company or having to commute again to a city center for work (something I really can't see myself doing unless absolutely necessary). It's a scary prospect and one I think is absolutely possible given the precarious state of my industry and the economy on the whole.
Things are definitely uncertain at the moment. Our company was fairly small, and we were growing incredibly fast. COVID19 has cut our sales by 90%. As an industry with high fixed costs, this is devastating and I’ll most likely be laid-off in a coming weeks.
I spent years trying to get this company off the ground, and as soon as we picked up steam the market tanked.
I have my doubts about the long term recovery of the print market, so I think this is will be my exit from the industry.
I was sad. We have a big plan to roll out a big feature in May. Now everything I worked on in last 6 months will be put on hold. Probably it never push to production.
My latest joy of becoming a father was ultimately skewed. Now I have to find a new job in Australia while taking care of a newborn. Things become harder this time when many companies impose a hiring freeze.
I still keep my faith that one day I will escape from this unemployment. One day.
On the bright side it seems the tech job market is not too much affected here in Paris but we'll see how it goes.
Well at least I can now finish some freelance gig that was taking my free time, and it gives me more time to continue learning elixir, I even finally took the time to open-source and deploy a demo of a LiveView game I made initially at the company that let me go. https://every-weak-tapaculo.gigalixirapp.com/potus
So yeah it's entirely subjective and I guess it'll heavily depend on how many times the lockdown is extended ...
Follow up ASAP & push for action in days, not weeks.
Lot of employees at companies are in the dark about the extent. I know companies that are putting on a show saying they're hiring but internal management is only hiring the absolute top talent out of layoffs.
What are good websites to find positions for work in Paris? No problem if the website is in French, bien entendu :-)
I gave up on ChooseYourBoss, I don’t know how it is for candidates but the UX for recruiters is awful. Never tried Glassdoor, to be honest it never crossed my mind.
(PS: no open positions at the moment but we’re moving forward with the hires we made in the last 3 months)
I'd suggest a 20-25 second long timer.
They are hoping they can qualify for some of the $2 trillion stimulus and can recoup some of the losses (and if the economy recovers, they might be able to give us some of our reduced salaries back as bonuses at the end of the year), but we will just have to see.
Ultimately, I'm grateful that we aren't all getting laid off right now. I think more companies should offer salary cuts as an option instead of just blindly laying off people.
This situation sucks, but there's no way losing healthcare now would be 'more humane' than taking a pay cut.
I don't think people realise how common this is.
Sure, but founders also have magnitudes more equity than any employees.
It sucks for a founder of a company that isn’t profitable or has great growth but for a decent run company the equity is far more valuable than the salary.
Like Steve Jobs taking a $1/year salary and still being one of the richest folks on the planet.
As a founder you can still up your salary to a sustainable level and let your employees go. Employees don’t have that option.
One of the all-time smartest people I’ve ever met worked a bar in Bergen, Norway; autodidact in anything which caught his fancy, he could give you a lecture on what brought down the Scythians, serve a new guest and striking up a conversation on advances in semiconductor fabrication with him, picking up where he left off the lecture on the Scythians before heading out to see if any of the patrons outside wanted anything, having a quick word on the Poincaré conjecture with the math postgrad having a beer in the backyard...
He had studied for a while at the university before figuring out that he’d have more time to study if he didn’t have to concern himself with exams, quit, kept his uni library card and got down to it.
All these "non-developers" are priceless when discussions pop up which require domain expertise (which we developers usually lack)
[edit: they are also priceless generally speaking]
- Could be they have a hobby of computers
- Could be they are still in school
Not everyone who cares about tech news is working in the tech field.
Needless to say, I have little sympathy for those claiming a talent shortage.
I was at a customer site a few months ago installing some test hardware and the guy I was working with was their welder, having been an auto mechanic before and we got into a discussion about programming in Python!
The best interaction, however, would be the homeless guy I met who used to be a programmer.
Not programming but the other wacky transition was a Wall St guy who burnt out, started a subsistence farmstand in the country, married a hippie lady and sold vegetables, drove a school bus and plowed snow to get by. Really nice guy... when he died it turned out he owned a few buildings in NYC and was loaded to the tune of $20-30M, and his family had no clue.
(I guess that could kinda be a spoiler for an almost 100 year old film?)
I don't really have anything against Chollets book, but introduction to statistical learning is an absolutely fantastic introduction to the modelling part of data science.
Start there to get better intuitions, then practice practice practice.
It helps if you try to get data to answer your own questions, as there's a lot more motivation in doing that rather than Iris or MNIST.
4 months ago this wasn't a completely bad idea as tech was known as a seller's market and taking time off to learn new things was normal.
It's obviously not realistic for the next year or so at least.
Right now, taking the risk of jumping to a new company doesn't sound appealing. But, if this goes on too long, I'm sure we'll end up doing layoffs at some point. We're already on a hiring freeze, and there are a lot of cost counting and cost saving projects going on right now.
If layoffs do come, though I may be better off than my many coworkers on visas, a job search in the middle of a recession does not sound like any fun. And, layoffs can tend to come in waves, so, even if I make the first cut, there could very well be another round coming in a matter of weeks or months. In that case, I would rather not be around for the second wave of layoffs. I think this scenario is the only one in which taking the risk of switching companies makes any sense.
During the dot-com bust, I was very lucky. I had lunch with someone I knew just a few days after I was laid off for dot-com bust related reasons. And he ended up hiring me about a month later.
However, during the interim I was job hunting, including meeting with various other executives I knew and I don't think I had so much as a nibble. And, of course, at least at the moment, there aren't a lot of service sector jobs you can take just to keep some money rolling in.
https://www.californiaemploymentlawreport.com/2020/03/govern...
https://www.edd.ca.gov/about_edd/coronavirus-2019/faqs/WARN....
"The Executive Order does not suspend the California WARN Act in its entirety, nor does it suspend the law for all covered employers. The Executive Order only suspends the California WARN Act’s 60-day notice requirement for those employers that satisfy the Order’s specific conditions. "
https://airtable.com/shrpj2r4Kjc4YoMu4/tbl8m95GiuWehnIiT?blo...
Hope it helps!
*I don't know how to take the fact she hasn't taken me up on it :/ but I do adore the company ~ 13 years in service.
It's a bummer because I resigned from my previous position on 3/13 so I could have time in between jobs. Now I'm getting a lot more time than I planned and I'm hoping my new job doesn't evaporate. I'm excited to work with this company and team so I am keeping my fingers crossed for now.
If my new job does disappear, I would really like to find an opportunity working with Clojure(Script) and/or Kubernetes.
Essentially all revenue generating operations halted as of March 16th.
I was unfortunately leading the charge in a newly created division. We were not generating revenue yet, so the hammer fell for all of us.
Stay happy, stay safe, and keep hacking!
1. If you're looking to ramp-up your skills Pluralsight is giving away a free month of training this month: https://www.pluralsight.com/offer/2020/free-april-month
2. Large companies are still hiring I growth areas, I am not 100% sure but If I was a betting man anything at Google, Amazon or Microsoft that is cloud related is probably still booming to get people on board
3. If you wind up finding some work that is remote in this situation and don't have WFH experience check out this great set of tips for WFH by Scott Hanselman: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/LoveInATimeOfCoronaVirusTipsT...
But my company is hiring right now (though, most of the jobs require a clearance). The jobs aren't remote, well.. right now many of them sort of are, but they'll surely revert to on-site again eventually.
luckily my mother instilled in me the value of saving money, so I can survive for a while on my savings, but the double hit of the anxiety from the pandemic, and getting laid off has been quite stressing...
I'm open to any software development job, full-time, part-time, remote, I've been applying to several positions, but my first choice for applying cancelled all hires (a friend of mine who works there told me their CEO sent an email saying that), and most other companies are probably doing something similar
Looking for data engineering roles
email at alex at alexandarnarayan dot com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandarnarayan/
https://iohk.io/en/careers/fk0qqod/data-engineer/#main-conte...
(posted publicly in case others are in the same boat)
As the only IT guy in a company that does pretty much all its business online, and being the longest-serving employee in the company, my job is safer than anybody else's, but we have seen revenue plummet and we're having to let some people go - which is heartbreaking. Even though our society will make sure that they will not be in real trouble, and it ensures the survival of the company, these are valued coworkers and genuinely nice people and I'm sad to see them go.
I'm a 3D Artist with some software engineering cred, so I work pretty well with engineers in small teams that still need the asset pipeline figured out. Portfolio: https://penny-art.com/
LinkedIn still likes to send recruiters my way telling me about awesome C++ opportunities developer game dev keywords. Please no
My wife, on the other hand, was reduced to 3 days a week at her job for the next 90 days, with a reduced salary to reflect that, so 40% reduction in salary. At least she wasn't in the group at her office that was furloughed.
So things are still tighter for us, although we're still a lot better off than most people right now.
I work in tech for a media and publishing company. We're classified as an essential business in Ontario. We are all working remotely--editorial teams, production, tech, everyone save some of the press operators.
We have reduced to 4-days a week, and so we had to take a 20% pay cut for a 6 week term. I think they're hoping to buffer our collective coffers in case this is extended and ad revenue falls further.
On another note, our digital readership is setting internal records.
My partner works for a Canadian SaaS firm based out of Saskatoon. About 30% of them were laid off including her.
They had a heartfelt meeting with the founder but as soon as they got the official word the machine locked her out. She still meets over video for drinks with some of her coworkers.
Being that her company works closely with the restaurant industry we're hoping it won't be too hard for them to ramp up again, but that remains to be seen.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HvI7axSIXsQRQH0IJ2GG...
not sure what the source is.
amazon | 13
thumbtack | 10
student | 8
wework | 8
wayfair | 6
google | 6
uber | 5
cisco | 4
oracle | 4
adobe | 3
There was also an interesting row from a senior (VP level) at WeWork that would lead you to believe that they aren't in a good state ("f'ed"). Again, take it with a pinch of salt since we can't verify any of this data.
I was hired originally as a contractor but was converted to full-time as I had a competing offer, I was fired despite exemplary performance for a very "at will" reason. After getting some legal advice I may comment further but they're actively firing folks and not converting good contractors. If you're still at the company watch out.
A downturn provides great cover for the company, since they can get ride of a bunch of these people en masse with minimal legal fuss. HR and Legal can be prepared and do it as efficiently as possible. Plus, it will look good on the balance sheet for the next quarter (if that's important to the company).
That is a good summary of WeWork: "SoftBank, which is run by the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, announced on Thursday it was terminating a $3bn share tender rescue deal hammered out last October to save WeWork from collapse."
Combine that with a lot of long term and expensive real estate leases with nobody working in the buildings... f'ed.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/02/wework-foun...
though IIRC at least a couple of the FAAMNGOs try to keep C/C/Vs from portraying their jobs as being employed by the contracting company. Perhaps Google doesn't or perhaps it's more for linkedin than arbitrary spreadsheets or resumes.
I'm seeing a bunch of interns in there too which is kind of interesting.
https://candor.co/hiring-freezes
I'm curious as to why the redraw performance for the embedded Airtable is so terrible. Is that normal?
In my country if you have full employment you have a 2 month notice and they need to prove the need or cause for firing.
In some cases you may have severance pay defined by the terms of the employer, but that became pretty rare as something that would be promised after the 2008 recession. It still happens but not like it used to.
Generally speaking you are 'at will' in the United states, so you can be let go for any reason that is not explicitly illegal to do so for (i.e. race, old age, etc.) You could theoretically get let go because the owner decided 'I found a penny on the ground today and I decided it was a sign to fire you'.
On one hand this is because, inversely speaking, you, again, typically allowed to quit at any moment for any reason you want. Including getting another job. This does however handwave away the asymmetry in finding a replacement for an employee versus finding a new employer. It's also concerning in this modern age where some Sandwich shops try to get line workers to sign noncompetes.
The US doesn’t have much of a safety net. Covid-19 perhaps will take the toll of the most bankruptcies and preventable suicides in a wealthy nation.
We screwed this one up really bad.
I've been applying non-stop so if anyone has any refs for data science positions that would be quite helpful; it's a weird time transitioning from Academia to industry.
Here's my linkedin: https://bit.ly/2UYJbbf
That said, my heart goes out to those that are in a tough situation.
I’ve definitely gotten some companies saying they are freezing hiring and I’m worried as time goes on all of them will do this.
Thankfully I have home and will be fine; it is frustrating however.
At least I was fully paid to the end of March and now getting some form of supplemental $$$ till end of June. Then freakin' reality will hit as I will paying out for Cobra. This Covid issue is introducing the raw side of business, loyalty, connections, solitude and just watching bad news all day.
So, my advice is treat yourself better and be kind to yourself, your family and true friends.
I started looking actively for a job somewhere at the start of February and had several very promising leads and eventually, at the start of March, several pre-offer stages of the interviewing process with several companies.
And then the whole thing happened. Some companies told me they are freezing hiring, others didn't say anything, and my best lead had to leave me hanging even though it was clear (signs that I read during our real-life meetings) he wanted to hire me for two separate projects and a full-time job.
I waited for about 3 weeks, thinking to wait out the initial panic. But it became increasingly clear that is not going to die out anytime soon.
I wrote a very short intro of my profile (with a link to a CV) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22752249
Not sure I will have enough savings to last me several months so not going to rely on that and will be looking to start a new job -- or consulting -- as early as possible.
Stay strong, people.
Edit... btw, 2-3x workload doesn't mean that i can actually complete 2-3x workload.
In any case, my email is in my profile. What is your project about?
My contract is due for May 31. I am not so confident about renewal. And my team has 70% contractors. There is a large contingent workforce in IT. You don't see them in the official layoff list; instead, they are employees of unknown staffing companies.
Many track
My thinking was “economy is mega booming, I can always land a job if things go south”.
I was very wrong, things have gone quite south. Savings I had in stock vanished 30% of their value. A lot of anxiety. I could ride a couple of months but then shit’s gonna really hit the fan.
I accepted a job offer at the highest salary I'd ever been offered late February. At the time some coworkers were stuck in China and I thought "there's a non-zero probability covid-19 f's everything up, but it'll be fine."
Started the new job on 3/16. The company didn't exist anymore after 3/27.
http://github.com/mvanveen https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanveenm/
If you think there's a good fit please reach out at hn22770643@mvv.email . Thank you!
It is comforting, personally, to read and share.
It can happen to anybody.
I was on track to have this paid service offering launched in the coming weeks, but the economic uncertainty brought on by COVID caused me to rethink the go to market plan.
I iterated quickly on something I could offer to those in need now and in the coming weeks. This is one way I can give back.
If you have been impacted and will be, or is already scheduled to, interviewing soon, I want to help. If you know someone for whom this would be helpful, please share.
https://www.interviewat.com/prep-service-special-offer
Any and all feedback welcome
I am looking natural language understanding / natural language generation and analytics tasks but can also do other things from voice technology pipeline (ASR, TTS, voice QA) as well as QA and technical support for webtech projects. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariya-heyshtor-164a35157/
She's looking for remote work in CRM operations, part-time. Or local to the Philadelphia suburbs.
linked below!
Fortunately I have a few other things to pay the bills (so far), and fortunately I have enough savings not to have any short-term worries, but that was my main source of income.
Current job - Auditor - no indication of slowdown. Entire firm has laptop/vpn/phone so essentially ready for this.
Bad time to be in the travel industry.
Based on various articles I've read here on HN, it would have been nice to have more transparency into the financials of the company versus all messaging completely devastating morale, and leaving an air of uncertainty. We know we're hemorrhaging cash right now; who isn't, though?
That being said, I would've furloughed everyone that isn't absolutely vital to maintaining bare minimum operations. Made one painfully large cut -- kinda like peeling a bandaid quickly instead of ripping out fifty individual hairs multiple times. I think this alone would've offered a much better sense of security for those that remained, as well as allowing them to stay at their normal salaries.
Next, I would proceed with identifying the clients that are most likely be unable to continue operations themselves, and proactively suspend services. After that, renegotiate quicker payments, and potentially rate increases on services with the remaining active clients.
That would enable the company to turn down anything that's deemed as nice-to-have in our service offerings (no room for luxuries right now), and evaluate all infrastructure costs. We would then have full insight into knowing how much we could scale down our IT infrastructure. We could then proceed to contact vendors, and renegotiate service agreements, further maximizing savings, and decreasing our burn rate.
I would've done everything possible to keep the remaining employees secure, and confident. By performing more drastic cuts initially, scaling back operations, and retaining core teams, everyone could have kept their pay at normal levels, and I think the burn rate would've been significantly less.
Like I said, though, I've never been in the captain's seat and right now may not be a great time to try to say what I'd do. Each day brings less inspiring news and being kept in the dark hasn't helped anyone be more productive.
Best of luck
I am thankful that people like you exist and are willing to take the plunge and then find out that it wasn't that bad. You're certainly doing a much better job than most managers I ever worked under.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NVzygGYTmF3g_VPAh4lX...
It quickly occurred to me that wasn't the wisest thing to tell a person whose job it is to find a long standing candidate. So I asked if my complaints were between us, she said of course.
Later that day, my other recruiter calls me saying he has to tell the company I was contracted at that I will not continue past my term. His justification how it would look bad on there part.
So now I'm without any job, still looking, but without luck.