Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.
I just think that companies like Facebook are a special case. Here it can be very true, and Meta certainly might consolidate their product lineup. High stakes and generous compensation, but these developments can mean that your position gets cancelled.
If it weren't for TikTok and some other competitors, they probably would have kept their jobs. But the market changes quickly. Facebook is now a network for parents and their children will look elsewhere naturally.
We worked mostly with lingering start-ups who failed to launch, mid-tier companies, and small companies. It all dried up, or the requirements shifted a tier (before mid-level was 3-5 years, now 5-7. Senior positions are basically looking for people with Principle / Staff engineering credentials). Of course, YMMV, we were navigating very specific situations which worked out well for people who are otherwise discriminated against / out of luck for finding work.
Also, anecdotally, the salaries attached to the stream of recruiter spam I receive in my personal e-mail have plummeted. Maybe this is good, smaller companies will be able to hire more staff since salary expectations are lower?
At the same time, I think there’s growing awareness of the “quality” of a lot of tech giants. Once the market gets flooded with people who are too bad to even be retained at companies like Facebook or Google, it may merely end up being a black mark on your résumé.
Similar to how some people choose to leave the specifics of their degree or some unscrupulous jobs off their history when looking for jobs, people may minimize time at a FAANG if thousands of them are entering the market all at once.
When you’ve got 5 applicants who twiddled their thumbs at Facebook for 5 years and all with similarly overinflated work history, someone with a decent GitHub profile and a visibly launched product from a tiny Midwest shop doesn’t look bad.
Like no really, we don't need to argue about a 5 page git branch management and deployment policy for 4 developers. We don't need datadog or whatever for 100KB of text files. Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time. etc.
What we do need is something that generates revenue and an engineering philosophy that mainly comes from the rest-and-vest crowd isn't it.
Definitely worth fixing this one.
We can't possibly do things the wrong way, no matter how dumb our current practice is.
Not because they are bad employees, but because they to used/focused/conditioned on Big Tech work. Which has often very different requirements and processes. Or in other words for such employees it can be especially challenging to onboard them. Which historically seem often is combined with an increased risk of them leaving your company not to long after on-boarding, weather that is for a different startup which now takes them or for founding their own company because they have the money reserves to risk it.
Or in other words, it's in general a risk you don't want to take when hiring.
Exceptions include: You have problems to hire anyone qualified. The person can somehow show through other qualifications that this isn't really a risk (pre "big tech" work, sometimes open source contributions but not always, etc).
Person with 1000 GitHub stars likely gets wrecked in leetcode style interviews. Just ask the creator of homebrew (yes, THAT homebrew) about what happened to him when he got an interview with Google
Even if 12k are out in the market, there's still a massive shortage for software developers and even though we are training an insane amount of new ones per year the vacant spots are still growing.
Software has eaten the world, there's no industry today that don't depend on software to increase efficiency. There are more and more devices requiring software, in all levels of products from infrastructure to consumer goods.
I really don't understand where do you think we have enough developers so that even "average" developers would suffer. They have experience, they will end up where other "rockstars" (side-note: I absolutely hate this terminology) have left for greener pastures.
I think you should really look at the landscape before writing such a haphazard take, or at least bring some sources on why you think that this will affect in any way the job prospects of new developers for the next 5 years. There's absolutely nothing to sustain your argument more than "I think this".
I don't think that's really true. Having a FAANG on your resume increases your chance of getting an interview, but very few companies will employ someone simply because they've come from a FAANG. It will always come down to how well you interview and what your tech test is like. Experience counts for a lot but most companies just don't need the sort of experience working at Facebook gives you.
Mostly off of books bought on amazon.
None of that provides for creative thinking, or real world problem solving. Nor demonstrates it.
Do these candidates interview well with normal corps? I wonder.
I’ve not found other companies interviews to be particularly good either. Non-leetcode interviews get biased a lot towards personality, resume, and ability to BS.
Most companies don't need "rockstars". There's a lot of good tech produced outside of the FAANG bubble.
> The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers.
A junior or mid-level developer is not the same as an average developer. There are plenty of senior "average" developers, and junior "rockstars". All of this is fine.
(I am not making any claim this is true, but it's the view I encounter)
Personally, having worked in very small orgs (8 people) and moderately large ones (800), there is definitely a culture shock moving down an order of magnitude. You have to be more generalist and keep a very goal-oriented view. Small company work tends to be much higher ambiguity; you have to think about delivering something that may change within a few months, and where outages are seen as 'a good problem to have'. Scaling is less important than agility.
People should not use Facebook as some kind of canary in the coal mine for tech companies overall. Facebook's star is no longer rising due to recent privacy changes on the Apple platform, but the software sector overall will continue to grow. I don't believe Facebook's decline is some kind of harbinger for the entire industry, since most of the industry is not dependent on violating user privacy to the extent that Facebook has over the last 15 years or so.
And even if the core of what you say is true and the industry overall is headed for contraction, I don't believe the pain will last anywhere near 5 years. Even in the present "crisis" state, anybody with any talent should be able to find a new position in a few months. Looking back to the 2008 crisis, most people were back on track well before the 5-year anniversary.
TLDR: Don't listen to the doomsayers. Even with recent headwinds, I believe tech is still the highest value play for most young people entering the industry today. Unless you've got the chops and the prestige resume to be top of the class at a top law or business program, this is your best shot so you should commit mentally to doing whatever is necessary to maintain your place here. Even if there are a couple lean years, you're going to come out ahead in the long run as one of the people who knows how to control the machines.
1. Failing to justify valuations that were reached during the pandemic. Which come crashing down when interest rates starts rising. So many got caught with unsustainable budgets and commitments
2. Mass quitting that happened during the pandemic which was plugged frivolously by mass^2 hiring.
I don't think tech companies are going anywhere before getting their lost employees back. My thesis is, layoffs will impact new/young hires and newly created units/departments
Trainee staff are not efficient (by definition) and provide a low ratio of productivity to investment. However, so long as your new hires have net positive impact, it's worth having them if gross velocity can expand your share of a growing market.
The market has been ripe for about a decade now, thanks to quantitative easing and cheap capital propping up consumer spend. In addition those low interest rates make it inexpensive to borrow money and hire that army of developers.
Coming into a more cautious market, however, where things are more expensive, the balance shifts more towards spend control and getting value for money. Which is why I think junior hiring will slow down for a few years: more experienced staff are more productive relative to their incomes, and they probably won't be promoted out of IC as quickly as they used to due to businesses slowing down.
I think the age of retraining in tech as a no-brainer is behind us now. To be honest I think that was happening already as the junior market became saturated. New entrants might have to spend more cycles applying for jobs; coding bootcamps may shutter.
I could also imagine the brand signalling not working in the favor of anyone leaving there around now.
Normally, people sometimes leave there because they've decided they want a different kind of work, or a different environment.
But, for the near future, there might be a large number of people forced out of there, ostensibly for poor performance.
When you're sifting through resumes, as much as "got into X" can look like a positive, "possibly spat back out by X" might cancel that out.
Unless you’re were an early employee, in which case you’re probably going for co-founder roles anyway, that’s if you haven’t retired already.
and what would that be? In the US at least #LearnToCode was used because we were off shoring every non-tech job, and now those are going away so what is left?
...like what? What other career exists with such a high average and median income?