Hacker News Reader

Comment by eBombzor | Hacker News Reader

As if the job market wasn't difficult enough... now about 5,400 highly qualified and experienced developers are looking for the same positions as I am... What do I even do now...

View on HN

Most of the laid-off positions, assuming these layoffs do take place, probably won't be developers. During temporary crises, companies prefer to lay off the workers whose positions will be easiest to hire back after the crisis has ended. Engineering positions tend to be hard to hire for, so engineers are usually hit less hard by these types of layoffs than other roles.

But your mileage may vary: companies also understand that one big cut is better for morale than lots of small ones. The current crisis is temporary but might last a long time, so a company that thinks they might have to fire engineers eventually, could plausibly pull forward that decision in an attempt to save the business.

Times are hard all around.

Historically Uber was using "death by thousand cuts" strategy - layoff a little below 500 employees at a time, probably because of WARN act.

Per a comment above, looks like 800 of their 3800 developers may get laid off. Do you feel that number is on the higher end?

The monthly "Who Is Hiring" and "Who Wants to Be Hired" threads will be coming out on Friday, so at least don't miss those.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring

YC also has a "Work at a Startup" offering, if that's the kind of job you'd like.

https://www.workatastartup.com/

Good luck!

For what it's worth, it's unlikely that all 5,400 employees would be engineers. Your odds might be better than you think!

Where do you get those numbers? I think a lot of companies are keeping engineering talent and laying off other types of employees (like recruiting, marketing, sales, etc.)

https://layoffs.fyi

That's very interesting web! I wonder where they are taking the data from?

Crowdsourcing news links and tips from the public.

For ages, I have argued that Google and Amazon owe much of their fortune to the Dot Com Bubble.

In a nutshell, the bubble put a TON of great engineers out of work. Those two companies were able to acquire talent that would have been impossible to find otherwise.

Same thing happened in 2008. This is also the reason shares of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple have steadily gone up the last couple of months. When things are tough, smaller companies (i.e. their competition) won't be able to survive, and they'll snap up their talent for pennies.

The ability to hire is a minuscule part of why these stocks do well in a downturn. The cash flow to weather the storm, entrenched positions, monopoly or near monopoly positions in their markets are all much higher on the list than picking up engineers who were applying to them for the high salary anyway.

Uber doesn't even have 5400 engineers overall. You'll be fine.

From what I'm seeing on Linkedin, it's the sales, support and marketing that are being laid off,

From the start of the article before the paywall:

"the 3,800-person Uber engineering group could be slashed by nearly 800 people in the coming weeks under the proposed job cuts."

That's certainly not most of the cuts, but it's not negligible either.

Last sentence before paywall reads: "Pham has notified managers who report to him of his plan to leave, which comes as the 3,800-person Uber engineering group could be slashed by nearly 800 people in the coming weeks under the proposed job cuts."

Move literally anywhere other than Silicon Valley and there's still plenty of jobs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com