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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

What is the tech industry feeling like right now? Have all the layoffs cooled off the job market? Has startup fundraising dried up?

Or is the bearishness specific to Google and Meta?

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In my circle; its still as strong as its ever been. Local VC-backed companies are still looking for people. Local VCs are still investing in tech companies (maybe at a slower rate, but its not obvious to me this is the case). My company (publicly listed Big Tech) froze hiring in engineering throughout Q3, but our org just got approval for 100+ engineering hires (around 10% org growth) for Q1.

Doesn’t feel like any real change. If the intention was to scare away VC money, it isn’t working. There is no real fear yet.

For one, no one believes that they’ll keep raising the rates. Strong belief that the Fed will “pivot” soon. Even the Fed keeps whispering about it.

Honestly, the economy just can’t work anymore without QE. Investors know this. The Fed knows this. It’s completely unsustainable, but they’re all fine as long as they don’t have to clear the mess.

Recruiting activity seems as strong as ever but the pipeline is clogged, apparently from FOHI (Fear Of Hiring Incorrectly), so everyone is churning through tons of candidates looking for unicorns. Perhaps this is due to worries that hiring freezes are coming and if you hire wrong, you'll be stuck with a worthless resource that can't be replaced with a good one. Then again, if they wait too long, the freeze might come anyway before they have someone in place.

A lot of "hiring freeze" and some "lay offs". It's getting ugly.

Depends on the field; crypto is gone, ML is still strong.

Is the a cost benefit decision to be made by businesses regarding use and/or scale of ML during a recession?

ML is where the significant future growth is very likely to be, so cutting it now is basically eating the seed corn.

Cognitive automation allows "increased efficiency" by firing staff whose tasks could be automated away using ML (imagine QA folks manually checking output of some industrial process which could be replaced by a bunch of cameras and a ML model). Companies that were reluctant to do that while they had plenty of money might be more willing to do it during recession.

> crypto is gone

Yeah, about a 1-1.5 years ago, I was getting recruiter emails that were approaching straight-up scams (like, we comp you only in our monopoly money crypto tokens). Those have vanished completely in the last six months.

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