For those of us who have weathered previous recessions, we know the world moves on. Things will be rough, for a while, we will rebound, and hopefully we will thrive again.
I feel the current situation is more representative of the long term job market than the last few exuberant years.
I really hope they squirreled away some of those $$ and then moved to a low cost of living area during the pandemic.
I have some sympathy, but it made the tech universe warp around their stock prices. It was very hard to recruit when all the best and above average talent just got sucked up into the giant companies that build advertising machines in SV.
> It was very hard to recruit when all the best and above average talent just got sucked up into the giant companies that build advertising machines in SV.
The talent crunch has been getting worse for the past couple of decades. Don't expect this bear market to be some sort of cataclysmic change that would reverse the trend permanently, not anymore than 2008 was. Even 2001 only lasted for a fairly short while, and demand for top tech talent back then was a tiny fraction of what it is now.
That, essentially, is why this crunch exists: the number of highly talented engineers has remained about the same for decades, while demand skyrocketed.
Also, what other companies stand ready to receive all this "above average" talent? Small companies, which in this market, are having an even tougher time? BigN by and large haven't gone through massive layoffs, while small and medium-sized companies are getting massacred. Like Snap which lost 90% of its value.
Startups are in an even worse spot. Funding is going to be very tough for the next couple of years, and startups have been extremely stingy with their equity. That's why they're having trouble recruiting: BigN are paying far better, while startup are much riskier, and if they do succeed, there's very little upside for engineers who are granted ridiculously small amounts of equity.
I wouldn't hold my breath for all these "above average" talents being desperate enough to accept bad deals from startups that don't want to give out equity, nor is that a desirable outcome of this situation. Startups should either start granting more equity, or start gasp targeting less talented people.
I hear similar stories about 2001. The folks who get laid off are mostly the lower performing engineers, who clear the lower hiring bars typical of frothy economic times.
Assuming layoffs are both primarily designed to and effective at retaining general talent, both statements need more corroboration. Will they keep the ones who are "indispensable" in the short term, like an engineer who maintains a specific system? Often yes. Are they the best? Often no, and over-specialized knowledge is particularly irrelevant to another company. Even so, anecdotally Big Co layoffs seemingly affect all levels and all talent, almost indiscriminate. That's probably because there are many other factors before an individual-against-individual comparison is ever made. From a C-level perspective teams and even orgs are more likely to be top-of-mind.
However, the typical way layoffs happen is that managers are ordered to submit the names of their most dispensable reports, and typically these are the lower performers.
Of course, some of these will be high performers that the manager personally dislikes, and some of those spared will be low performers who just happen to be indispensable due to various irrelevant factors, such as specialized knowledge, or great politicians.
My point was more that if you're smugly waiting for the best and brightest to lose their jobs at BigN and come to work for you for the same bad pay and terms they rejected last year, you're going to be disappointed. The layoffs are going to be limited, and mostly affect lower performers, while any high-performer laid off is going to get multiple competitive offers and remain quite picky.
I agree that many talented folks will be laid off, but not nearly in the numbers that will make a dent in the overall talent crunch. See my response to klabb3 above.
I have seen this work in the B2B startup world. Hire ambitious ppl with some dev experience, but definitely not from top CS programs, and have them grind to implement custom solutions that steal enough paying customers from some larger co, who will acquire you to force you to stop, even though it is clear that there is no scalable "product" there.
Well-designed and scalable solutions take time to build, even by the best, and sometimes they are simply not necessary. Aggressive and customer-centric ENG-OPS can do wonders.