Skilled tech workers snapped up despite downturn
bbc.com
bbc.com
Am a Senior PM laid off from a Big-N tech company who has launched multiple 9 figure revenue generating products.
The market, despite the economy and the time of year isn’t great, but it’s not terrible.
I’ve had lots of first and second interviews and a surprising amount of final rounds given all of the above.
That said most all of those came from recruiters reaching out as opposed to applying directly.
Unlike a month ago, my LinkedIn is EMPTY in terms of recruiter messages.
It’s been over a week since anyone’s reached out but I figure that’s a function of the time of year.
To compare to Spring of this year when I was interviewing (while still employed) I had many, many, more recruiters reaching out than anything I’ve seen in the last 3 months, and the caliber of jobs was higher quality.
It sucks being unemployed during the holidays and not getting the reach I had before. It’s a little scary, but I keep reminding myself that it’s that time of year with holidays, no budget, etc and it’ll get better in January (hopefully).
I’m no 100x rockstar coder, but I’ve added real, quantifiable value at companies where it’s a real challenge to launch anything quickly and successfully. It’s not nearly as rosy a picture as the BBC presents. I hope it gets better soon.
A lot of in-house recruiters may have been laid off during that time, so might not directly correlate with new job postings volume/quality (obviously still related though).
On the upside, wherever you land, they are more likely to be investing thoughtfully rather than tacking on headcount.
[1]: probably because parents don't like big changes while their kids are on a schedule and because new grads, and possibly (on a more evolutionary-biological level) because people are more active after winter as they begin foraging/farming/building, venturing out, etc.
>It’s been over a week since anyone’s reached out but I figure that’s a function of the time of year.
Funnily enough, for me in the UK my Linkedin inbox is fuller than it's been all year. I've had multiple messages and connection requests from recruiters today alone, and it's not even half 9 yet.
Not claiming that this will happen, but many economists agree that it is fairly likely. So even if you are in a very enviable position in a skilled tech role and are inundated with recruiter calls I would prep: take stock of your finances, determine your personal runway (how long can you maintain current quality of life should your paychecks stop tomorrow) and plan accordingly. My 2c.
Unlike the crash in '08 and '01, the economy now has a hard dependency on tech. There is no "going back" to the world of the past. Smartphones aren't going to be "un-invented". People aren't going to give up online shopping. Businesses aren't going to give up targeted advertising and start buying ads on AM Radio or something. If you look at the big picture, and barring any wild developments like general intelligence AI, the demand for skilled tech workers is only going to increase.
I don't think tech workers are invincible but I think tech is now a requirement for economic growth, which poses a problem: Business leaders and investors have been really ticked off by the tech labor shortage. They tried to fix it with H1B, they tried with all these "learn to code" programs. They tried boot camps. They keep trying, and failing, because being a software engineer requires a degree of intelligence and critical thinking and there will always be a limited supply of that kind of labor.
My pet theory is that some portion of the layoffs are being engineered to undermine the remote work revolution, scare people into accepting lower wages, and get back to "how things were". But the economic need for tech is so large and the supply of labor is so limited I don't see much changing.
During rich years plenty of people came to the industry. Plenty of them are smart and capable, so competition will lower salaries and push some people from their levels.
And god save us if this AI thing will actually take off. It's dumb but it's progressing.
I don't see how it does anything but progress. I obviously have no idea how long it will take before it can replace a software engineer but after playing around with ChatGPT and seeing the code it can create, it's definitely progressing faster than I thought it would.
For example, when things start recovering, I'm curious how quickly companies will rush to increase comp back to recent levels, bring back cut benefits (or reduce their costs that have increasingly been passed on to the employee), change WFH policies, etc.
My gut says they will only do it when labor has leverage again, which means these companies will try to put their thumb on the scale as hard as they can to make up lost ground and then some.
Clean books, squeezed operations, cash reserves, and providing critical internet infrastructure you’re likely & able to discount at scale right now as well as foreseeable future.
Most non-tech businesses get by with, and prefer, the platform world that spoon feeds them.
It’s either a good time to be Google, or a self-funded startup. Not much in between.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/23...
Where I am, 2008 wasn’t too bad in tech, but the aftermath of the dotcom bust was like the end of Infinity War, just there one day and then gone.
No-one expects their career to end at the gilded hand of a giant purple alien.
At the same time, the web had only proven that regular people were willing to try it, but there was no meaningful consumer or advertiser money flowing through it for another ten years. So basically you had a perfect storm of a bunch of people trying to figure out something from scratch and massive over investment from VCs. When the music stopped it was a bloodbath because there was so little actual revenue.
I don't see the same thing happening now because the web is firmly embedded in our lives and someone needs to maintain all this code. I'm honestly more worried about environmental threats and the sustainability of our way of life than the economy per se.
This could describe today, with crypto (tech still looking for solutions to problems that aren't scams), AI (great potential but mostly in a gimmick phase right now), and VCs coming from a decade of record-low rates causing extreme valuations across the board ($5M seed rounds, etc).
If you exclude Big Tech (which also took a beating but is managing), the smaller tech scene is ripe for a disruption of a very uncomfortable kind.
I’m pretty happy for all those sectors to tank, they don’t produce value that people would pay for, while we struggle finding competent people for product startups generating 500k per employee.
Do the hard tasks and I pay you exactly this amount. People are, really, so lazy. Yes there is some jQuery in the app, well it’s not the bane of the world, and yes we gotta interact with customers, horror, well deal with it and I pay you exactly the revenue it generates.
But of course everyone wants to have K8s and microservices on their resume, rather than building something people want.
I’ve said almost that to my senior, but he keeps hating the jQuery app. It’s fine with me, but don’t complain.
The problem is that most of the people I've talked to were employed at huge, profitable companies that made actual products. So it was just a blip for them.
I was working on web development after school and got laid off, but all that meant was I had to eat the food my parents made for me instead of eating at fast food places with my friends..
Understanding and adapting to those changes are key. Next up -> IOT - computers in everything - applying AI - Biotech - ? Generally something expensive has to become cheap for the masses. Hayes modems took $1200 - $2000 devices down to <$300. Ethernet made LANs cheap. Twitter made stupidity availability massively scalable for zero dollars:)
Those jobs never really came back as websites became more "Dynamic" and CMSes began to proliferate: So rather than hiring 20 web developers converting copy and design to websites you could hire a 1-3 engineer(s) to customize and run your CMS and non-technical people can provide the content.
A good reminder that economic downturns can be actually healthy for people, families, and the environment. With less money, people will drive less, travel less, drink less, eat less meat, spend more time with loved ones, etc etc
It really hit hard about 2 years later in 2003, when all non-web contract work dried up and clients started having trouble paying for work you’d already done. That was really brutal for me, personally. I was also selling some software in addition to doing the contracting. I got really lucky and someone saw my products and wanted to license them for their particular niche. I was just barely able to hang on until a year later when things mostly returned to normal.
If it hadn’t worked out, I probably could have taken a job doing some development work I hated if I really had to. There were still openings, but they were at places like Accenture, or whatever a small-time version of them would be.
But no small number of people, including many who had worked at large firms, basically left tech.
Meta, Amazon, Stripe, Twilio, Salesforce etc are all profitable companies. That’s where the majority of non crypto layoffs came from.
I was talking about smaller, unprofitable, non-market dominating firms. If they are not profitable they will have to raise or die. And raising in the environment of 5+% rates and poor overall tech stock performance may get brutal. Currently, many of those companies still have significant runways (because they were able to raise a lot earlier), but this will start running out in the next several months. This may already be starting: two of my friends who work in such small companies (robotics and lasers) are sensing job uncertainty ahead. My 2c.
$1.1 billion operating loss the past four quarters on a mere $3.6b in sales. $915m operating loss fiscal 2021, $492m operating loss 2020, $369m operating loss 2019, $108m operating loss (on $650m in sales) for 2018, and so on. They have always lost money and are currently gushing red ink.
It's definitely part of the reason their stock has collapsed in such a dramatic way (a particularly unsupported valuation previously). While even most highly profitable tech stocks have dropped by a lot, Twilio's drop of ~89% is largely reserved for the group of very unprofitable extreme valuation tech stocks.
They are saying that many unprofitable companies haven't done their layoffs yet, because they're still coasting on huge funding rounds from 2021. Thus, there are more axes yet to fall.
Not sure how much stock I actually put in that argument -- lots of VC-funded companies are already doing layoffs, too -- but I think you're sort of agreeing with them.
Their stocks are either in or dangerously close to penny stock category.
November appears to be the exception where those profitable big company layoffs dominate but it's still not by much.
The long tail is the king, as always.
I won't believe this is near over until I see worldviews fundamentally change.
I do believe the bootcamp certificate crowd will have a harder time than this though. I'm seeing way more "degree required" postings than I did 5 years ago.
This is standard in the tech industry. The bulk of college hiring happens August-October for start dates in May-August or even later. And the local market is always going to be difficult in non tech hubs. Relocation is almost always a requirement for the better jobs.
The basic setup over 3 months:
1. Crash course in basic dev tooling setup (git etc.)
2. Crash course in data structures and algorithms (e.g. leetcode)
3. Crash course in setting up a production environment
4. Group interview prep sessions post-graduation
According to him this worked because:
1. There was very little talent on the market at all
2. Very few CS students had any experience writing production code, even for toy apps. This meant their ramp up time was often slower than bootcamp grads
3. There was a backlog of otherwise highly competent people trying to break into tech that just needed guidance on how to get in
None of these things are true anymore and he has sinced closed his bootcamp since it began to felt exploitative.
This sounds like self-serving BS to me, or if it’s at all real, it’s indicative of employers not understanding what’s important in hiring for software development.
Even if someone takes longer to ramp up, the depth of knowledge is much more important in the medium to long term. Perhaps if the work being done is just churning out boilerplate, the boot camp grad might have a brief edge, but that’s exactly the kind of thing CS grads can automate out of existence.
But anyway, the key phrase in your comment is “according to him”. It sounds like he came up with a maximally rosy-eyed rationale for his failure, but the reality was probably a lot simpler: he just wasn’t creating any value.
Sounds like you’ve bought into your friend’s BS. Perhaps he believed it too. But I’m pointing out that it’s much more likely that the bootcamp wasn’t producing quality developers, and became unsustainable once the market became a bit more discriminating.
Having met many of these grads, and lived through that phase of hiring, I think it's a lot less ridiculous if you imagine the early bootcamp grads from my friends program as someone who's e.g. a senior mechanical engineer with a degree from good university.
These people have strong technical and soft skills and were unusual at the time in that they were already productive in stacks that companies were using.
By 2015, you couldn't fill a bootcamp with these kinds of people, so graduate quality is dropping at the same time that universities up their game and start including classes that teach some basic SWE skills.
I don't think we actually disagree that the value-add was never that great as the program mostly only helpful to people who already had most of the skills necessary to be a good engineer.
I do agree about the under-qualified part though. We do some basic technical pre-screening that has candidates spend maybe 15 minutes answering 2 fizzbuzz-style questions just to save everyone time and there's a solid minority of candidates that can't do a question they didn't rehearse in leetcode training.
It’s going to make them look rosy for the next few Qs while everyone else haemorrhages cash. Long term, not so much, but the long term isn’t important to the market.
He was told by one of the recruiters that while there are offers for contractors such as us, it's the first time since time immemorial when they're actually considerably lower than the previous year.
Don't know what to make of this - could be just a negotiation tactic but indeed the budget he was offered there was around 75% of what he had in his previous main thing(our project is technically his side gig).
Meanwhile Google was on a hiring spree around here for the past few months, but the compensation offered is reportedly, ahem, uninspiring.
Perhaps if enough companies do the same we'll be facing not a job shortage, but a well-paid job shortage. I think it's possible.
Not saying this is necessarily true with software since were a niche of the economy and may have a different outlook, but the affect of covid on our number would help figure that out
Can you provide some data around that?
[0]https://www.axios.com/2022/12/16/the-missing-workers-who-are...
All the emails I get are from recruiters begging for me to apply to their clients' many openings.
And I am not Skilled really.
I am not one for conspiracy theories (except for some really niche little ones :) ) but it does make me wonder how much the media follows facts and how much it follows the mood. People seem in the mood for a recession more than actually in one...
I don't think it's crazy to imagine that tech CEOs, investors, management, etc stand to benefit from tech workers being more scared to negotiate for more
of course there are no guarantees, we can't predict the timing or severity of the markets' reaction, but its not a complete fiction of the media and mood.
This round of layoffs has only been the end of easy money. If we have an actual recession it will get worse. Now's the time to think through emergency funds and contingency plans.
Google, Amazon, and Meta have all laid people off and they basically own dollar printing presses.
Remember the "great resignation"? That was never a thing - people aren't leaving the workforce - it was just time-shifted demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic, so that some transient numbers looked high.
What is this based on? Labor force participation rate[1] is still visibly lower than pre-pandemic levels.
Possibly only because it's still early. Unemployment doesn't lead up to recessions, it spikes months afterwards, and usually maxes out just after the recessions end: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
I thinks its going to be more like this for the next 8-12 months, until the fed stops raising interest rates, and then it will be a mad dash to get everything going again.
Currently, the fed is still saying December's CPI print (coming on January 12) may be high. But looking at the futures market, it seems like almost everything is down significantly and we might see the first CPI print of 0% MoM in a year. Is the fed keeping this narrative to temper the market and slow it down? Or do they know something we don't?
If January 12 shows 0% or even negative MoM, it's possible interest rates could come down in 2023.
if you're employed you still need to be working hard, like always
if you're unemployed you still need to be seeking employment, like always
so, why do i care about the economy? is there something i'm supposed to be doing about it?
Most companies have been having hacker-rank pre-screen coding, Hiring Manager Technical screen, System Design, Product round, Behavioral round, ML specific round.
While it's not been hard to land interviews, the process is taking a long time and it looks like people are looking for previous experience in the specific stack they work on. Offers are also lower from a year ago.
It really all depends on how many years you can survive without a job from your savings and how much faith you have in your startup to survive long term. You seem to be in a high risk, high reward situation which necessarily has no one right answer because every person has different risk tolerances. If you can survive 2-3 years without a high paying tech job, and don't have a family to support, the reward of sticking it out might be worth the risk. Only you can answer that.
Kind of risky to join a new company though because if they do layoffs, recent hires or more likely to get the axe.
It sounds like you're saying that companies are going to lay off (say) half their workforce, and replace them by a handful of "10x engineers" who they pay twice as much.
Is there any evidence that this happens?
It sounds to me like saying that luxury mansions go up in a housing market crash, or blue chips went up in 1929.
I don't think it describes reality.
Combine that with post-covid environment where employers want to boost productivity to prior levels, and as they see other companies successfully perform layoffs without huge hits to productivity or stock price, and you get a perfect storm.
And yes, most companies that have had had layoffs are still hiring, but obviously more selectively.
Follow up:
> It sounds like you're saying that companies are going to lay off (say) half their workforce, and replace them by a handful of "10x engineers" who they pay twice as much
they don't have to be 10x engineers, just perceived as better than their current "hand". Put some card back in the pile, draw some new ones from the deck. And they don't have to pay them twice as much either (unless a really desirable skillset), it's an employers market.
A lot of layoffs targeted "tech-adjacent" or "non-technical" positions too (perhaps this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816 can shed a light on how essential these jobs were). Some of it were expected, like at Microsoft where they trim about 1% of the workforce deemed underperforming on an annual basis.
The market is still incredibly hot for high performing engineers, especially senior. I think where the squeeze really happened are junior positions, but I still see a strong market for qualified candidates. It's certainly not like back in 2015 where you would see junior hires come in with only a coding bootcamp on their resume.
Now something I noticed is a renewed interest for startups, especially from experienced engineers who might have "cashed out" in the last few years and have bit of runway. Crypto and Twitter both created their fair share of well-off engineers that are looking for their next challenge.
> Craig Freedberg, from UK-based specialist recruitment firm, Robert Half, says businesses will still have a need for tech resources and software development projects.
> However, he thinks companies will be reluctant to expand their workforces and will instead turn to temporary tech workers.
Maybe in the UK, but it's not what I've seen this side of the pond.
Brexit made the UK a risky destination to start or operate a business, and out of control inflation didn't help. Salaries adjusted to cost of living have decreased, inducing an even larger brain drain. Temporary resources are good for the immediate bottom-line but when has this ever worked out? Long term, it generally means a loss of technical expertise for a company. The reason a lot of UK businesses are doing it might also be that Brexit made it much harder to secure finding, as investors aren't too confident in the UK's future.
> Could this erode Silicon Valley's attraction for ambitious software engineers and developers? After all, other cities like Lisbon and Toronto are offering attractive tax breaks in the hope of attracting tech entrepreneurs.
Startups aren't worried about taxes. They are worried about funding. The real question here is are Toronto and Lisbon attractive places to secure funding? That's what matters to founders.
> Author Margaret O'Mara does not see a big exodus. "Companies come here for the talent, to recruit the best people, and that's still happening in Silicon Valley," she notes.
> But venture capitalist Lu Zhang views it another way. "The new normal will be to rely on the core values within Silicon Valley to help founders get started and create their initial products and learn about market fit, but then to expand outside those borders to leverage talent outside Silicon Valley and remotely hire from other tech hubs."
From my experience that's already the case. However, long term, I've seen a lot more employees move from other tech hubs to the Valley than the opposite.
Every time I've been pitched the "next Silicon Valley" or that innovation just wasn't going to happen in the Valley anymore, the correct bet was to ignore it. I don't see how this time is different.