Laid off tech workers quickly find new jobs
wsj.com
wsj.com
Like the article states, way more open jobs than people looking for them still.
In the end, I've learned nothing about the state of the job market.
You need competing offers to get a good offer - so you need to interview at places you have little interest in actually working for.
I would expect a lot of these people either got a good enough offer, or good enough competing offers, or just didn't get an offer from where they actually want to work - so don't need competing offers.
Additionally, there's a lot of people that interview for practice just to keep fresh for when they do need a job, and a lot of people that interview at a few places as practice before they interview at the places they're really targeting.
I'd expect a lot of no-shows from this cohort.
A lot of the process seems to be performative and not really being done for the purpose of matching a real job seeker with a real job.
There were, and still are a ton of recruiters hitting me up. Most of them are garbage, probably 95%. I still feel like a broke the salt circle by telling people I was actively looking for a new opportunity.
I have a family and need insurance for one of my daughters with special needs, so I went hard at interviewing. It took a solid 6 months, but I had half a dozen offers for Sysadmin work that met the pay I needed. The hardest part about comparing offers is the benefits... Different copays, deductibles, OOP max, and premiums. Also different pay schedules can make it difficult to compare premiums. Then you have waiting periods...
I ended up with an excellent opportunity and I've been super impressed, but it was a rough 6 weeks.
The majority of offers I received were from companies I applied to directly. I had some I cut short in early interview phases because I started my new job. Stability trumps the chase for afew more dollars. The market is still good, but remote hiring is slow, although in person wasn't really much faster at most companies.
More then I made last year, about the same as the DevOps position I left at the beginning of the year, but bonus opportunities and way better benefits.
I am the sole income, so I definitely needed a certain level.
They pretty much fell into two categories.
The first was person companies who wanted you to commit 1-2 days of in person interviewing after completing the phone screen and a at home test. If you are interviewing at multiple companies and are already employed, this is pretty much a no go unless you are already really enticed or want to work there. Even interviewing at just 3 of those places means taking off so much time from work that you'll either tip off your boss that you're on your way out, or use up all your PTO that you ideally use to have a life and not burn out.
The other category was remote interviewing companies. I observed that they did the same number of interview steps as the in person companies but instead of a day or two gauntlet they schedule an hour here, an hour there, an hour another day. This worked well for interleaving interviews in the regular work day without disrupting your current job, but it meant the full interview cycle would take 3-4 weeks on average as both your schedule and the schedule of their mandatory interview members(hiring manager, heads of various departments, whatever their companies "important" person was, etc) had to align. And that is all before there's interruptions like illness, or getting paged to an on call event.
Every company was doing a minimum of 4 hours and an average of 6 hours of interviews with the common gates being 30 minute phone screen, 45-60 minute take home code interview, 60 minute technical interview with 1-2 engineers, 60 minute system design with 1-2 senior engineers/architects, 60 minute interview with equivalent people in product to make sure you have similar philosophies, and then another 45-60 minutes with the hiring manager. Occasionally companies would also add in an hour with prospective teammates to see if you click, and/or an hour with some specific department they felt it was important to have engineering work directly with.
Its frankly a lot of work when you also have to prep for the typical interview questions that exercise a different skill set than the common job, and are likely doing this gauntlet with multiple companies simultaneously. Its also a high amount of spend on the company side when you add up all the man hours they are using per perspective candidate. My take is that the ghosting seen on both sides is because no one wants to deal with all of this once a match has been found.
It's really on companies to fix this. Candidates aren't clamoring for more and more interview time. When I speak to friends in professions outside of tech they are flabbergasted at the the length and depth of the interview process the tech industry has developed. Bad hires can be a problem but I think our industry has overcorrected for that. I won't believe that companies are truly "desperate" until I start seeing this interview process scale back. Desperate companies would be trying to hire a quickly as possible, not tick off all the checkboxes on a list of tests.
If they raise their salaries to become competitive again they will fill their positions. If they keep going with normal compensation from 3+ years ago they will keep looking to hire and losing their best employees.
I've been looking on Indeed, HN: Who is Hiring, and angel.co but have had zero luck this past year. I get that companies don't want to take on the risk of a potential bad hire but c'mon. I can't even get an interview.
To be frank, "too inexperienced to get a job? time to contribute to open source!" is almost always a glib and unhelpful retort. If someone can't get recruiters to reach out, they probably don't have the expertise to build open source, and vice versa. Open source is not a dumping ground for inexperienced newcomers.
In general, getting something done counts for a lot. And many floss projects will welcome contributions. There will generally be feedback, need adjustments for testing etc. But there's room to do productive things.
That is certainly one way to treat someone willing to do free labor in service of something the maintainers love, but I don’t think it’s a positive way. If open source is to continue and grow, it will always need a fresh set of people to work on it, and bringing those people along is part of the work of shepherding an open source project, in my opinion.
What is your advice to the person saying they can’t get an interview?
You still haven’t given your advice. If you’re going to be critical of mine you could add something positive in counter.
There's a lot of jobs where coding is part of it but it's not called coding.
After you do some contracts and get some good experience under your belt, register as an LLC and give yourself a title - software engineer at your company.
It should be enough to get your foot in the door for an interview and from there as long as you are a good talker you will get the job.
How is that possible when every 1 job has 100 applicants?
Most of the applicants already have a job. Even if one position is filled a new position is likely to open up to backfill the other.
I once applied for a really interesting incubator-within-telcom-giant role, which I thought would be a cool and unique experience. First red flag was it took about a month to just set up a phone interview, but I dealt with it because of how unique the role sounded. Then, after about two months, they flew me down to San Antonio for the onsite. They informally told me "You're a great match, we're going to get our ducks in a row and then call you with next steps!" Then... ghosted. After a few months, I gave up and found a different job. Moved my family across the country, signed the rental lease, and so on. Then, out of the blue, about a year after that initial interview, that telcom called me back with "Hi, [candidate], I'm calling to schedule a second interview for that [incubator] role. When would work for you?"
Beyond a simple rejection, never expect any feedback; just move on.
I've only ever gotten real feedback once (from Square) many years ago.
• Weirdly vague headline to the article -- no specificity, and could be talking about 2 people or 200,000. (To emphasize, I am not dogging the person who posted this on HN -- the HN thread title is a mirror of the article title.) Feels click-baity, but perhaps I'm being too rigid or cynical.
• The subhead is unrelated to the title. "Openings exceed unemployed Americans" is a different topic from "people who were laid off quickly found a new job.
• The article is based on 1 survey conducted by an online job-hunting portal (ZipRecruiter), and it took place in October, before ~5k people left Twitter, ~10k people left Facebook, and ~10K people left Amazon. 2,550 U.S. residents were surveyed.
• I'm guessing another person will notice this, but "tech worker" seems to be used loosely. I would not call a videographer who is now pivoting to social-media work a tech worker.
At the end of the day though, as long as you make sure you're excellent at your job, you'll be able to find something new in any market.
1. VC market was frozen towards end of 2022. VCs will point to seasonality; my guess is they were waiting for valuations to stabilize.
2. 2023 headcount has already been planned. While there are still some openings, many companies no longer seem to be in expansion mode.
3. Blitzscale startups will be hitting Sand Hill Road in a few days. Many will take severe downrounds and have to drastically downsize as a result; others will implode altogether.
4. There still might be a more severe market downturn, in which case even larger companies will be forced to make cuts.
Of course, there's a feedback loop in play here so the situation can change very quickly.
I see almost as much speculation that "we've already seen the worst" for this recession as I do that "it's going to get much worse". Even among the crowd that thinks it's going to get worse in 2023 before recovering in 2024, they can be right and also wrong (it could continue to get worse until 2025)
FOMC = Federal Open Market Committee
FFR = Federal Funds Rate
RRP = Reverse Repo Facility
TGA = Treasury General Account
All this together: The VC money will get redirected from blockchain-type of startups to climate startups first, which doesn’t create as many jobs for devs, and then to AI startups if they show some results, but again this employs very different profiles from simple programmers. The rest of the economy will keep inflating a little, despite anything the Fed can do, because scarcity causes inflation.
Look at the signs. We have high inflation, rapidly increasing interest rates, declining stock prices. 2 negative down quarters, only 10k jobs added vs 1M estimated.
Why do you think the odds of recession are low? What signs besides, economists being in agreement, do you see?
I'm not sure that we won't have a recession. But I'm not as convinced as everyone that it's a certainty.
What does this mean (blitzscale, and sand hill road) ?
I'm not really what the official definition of blitzscale is (or if there is one). I assume it means scale (specifically grow head count) really fast.
Of course they would say that because it's what they want. They hoped to wrestle back power from the worker in 2000, then 2008 and now they think maybe this time. The fed is actively attacking wage growth this time around, so maybe?
The problem is everyone tries and thinks they're doing well. Realistically only 5-10% are "excellent at their job". 50% of us are below average.
Now, does the employer use the median or the mean to evaluate their employees? Interesting question..., I don't know.
But most jobs are looking for 2-10 years.
At 20+ years if you're not headhunted you're kind of screwed.
I've heard it often said that it depends on what kind of experience, not necessarily its length. Someone could have one year of experience twenty times, or be working in old tech and hasn't kept up with modern practices, costs too much to hire, or a myriad of other reasons for not being preferable over greener candidates.
People who will bring new ideas, rock the boat, offer to do the same task but in an easier way... Don't make good peons for these managers.
That's why Microsoft loves contractors. Contractors will do what they're told and have very little leverage. Empire-building managers there can easily control their contractor work force even if speed and sometimes quality is sacrificed.
I've often pondered on this, likely some survivorship biases involved as well.
They are repetitive and frequently off the mark. A client has issue A, and she strongly advocates for solution B1. A client has issue B, and she strongly advocates for solution B2. A client has issue C, and she strongly advocates for solution B3. A client has issue D, and she strongly advocates for solution B2 again.
She lacks the knowledge to access solution spaces A, C, and D.
That means nothing (and I say that as someone with much more than 20 years of experience) - unless all that experience is in exactly the area the hiring company wants - someone with 20 years of the wrong experience (cobol for example) is going to be passed over for someone with 3 years of javascript experience, if you are looking for a JS developer. You probably won't even get passed the HR person if the skills and keywords on your resume don't line up exactly.
Doctors, engineers, lawyers, builders, architects, brick layers, pilots etc are sought after if they have more experience
And families can live on $100k or less per year, so one partner can take a 50% pay cut without it destroying their life.
So I guess depending exactly on the specifics, "my TC dropped by 50%" might not really be a very meaningful statement without more context.
That's usually because so much of the total comp is from options/RSUs. You can take a new job that pays more in base pay but take a huge cut because it's a startup (so the option are worth nothing on paper today) vs. a public company with RSUs that have value on the open market.
Or, as the current market is showing, you could take a huge cut in pay even while staying on the same role, simply because the RSUs are suddenly underwater.
My base salary has been on a slow but steady increase for decades. But my total comp has taken wild swings up and down. It's an industry where pay is very unpredictable, due to most of it being in options/RSUs.
It takes me almost 2 months of interview prepping (SRE: Leetcoding, brushing up on Linux syscalls, and low-level networking concepts) to pass FAANG+ interviews.
I'd say 3 months sounds about right as someone with 8 years of experience.
The effective TC at even FAANG (provided the roles aren't frozen) has dropped 20-30% or more.
It's also much harder to competitive compensation for remote work.
Mid-level and senior engineers, absolutely.
Even "hiring freeze" companies are still hiring senior engineers without official openings by reusing attrition head count.
Always be hiring! (top talent) unless going out of business.
Of the people profiled in this article:
- 1 videographer
- 1 "systems engineer" (not sure what this means, but doesn't seem like it involves programming since they taught themselves Python after getting laid off)
And that's it. The article makes the point that the number of SWE job openings are way down, -50% YoY. It's clear that there is less slack at the moment. What's unclear is when it will become a full crunch.
I heard the same thing in 2020 when I got laid off, and it took me __a year_ to get back on my feet. I speculate on why this was the case in Hard Truth #3 in a post I just published.[0]
Good luck to everyone searching! It was a really rough time for me, but I learned a lot about myself and, as trite as it sounds, forced me to take a hard look at my skills and be more targeted in my outreach. Now I'm the happiest I've been in my entire career. Feel free to contact me if you need to vent, contact information in profile.
[0] https://www.stevenbuccini.com/8-hard-truths-on-getting-laid-...
You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
You will have to interview for jobs where you will use a language you despise. Maybe even Java. Definitely Javascript.
You might need to commute to the office again. Perhaps every day!
Commuting though, oh no...
I met someone who was a "systems engineer" at a job orientation about a year ago. I thought that they did lower level programming or something, apparently they didn't know how to program at all
Companies love having more dev's they just dont like paying them. In the tech underclass (admins,systems, ect)you keep your mouth shut if you know how to do more than your job unless you want more unpaid jobs. "Sorry that stuff goes way over my head... aww shucks wish I was smarter"
I wonder what percentage of those cut job posts were actually needed by the company versus being vanity job posts or a “we’re always looking for random superstars that may apply, but we don’t really need anyone right now” posts.
Obviously some slack has been removed from the market, but I don’t really get the sense that a lot of postings in the “hot hiring market” were serious about filling the position with a market clearing candidate (i.e., the quality of applicant that would work with that specific company at the offered salary).
There is no crunch right now if you have a degree and can program. Companies are tightening their belts and recruiters are not aggressively spamming you. This does not mean jobs aren't there. The only thing an environment like this changes for me is all extra expenses are cut hastily and I begin hoarding money.
Companies with infinite VC money are certainly slowing down hiring. FAANGs are slowing down hiring because they used PPP money to overhire and are now trimming down the fat. There are PLENTY of companies that fit in neither of these categories. The work may not be pretty, but it'll keep you fed and insured. I have friends in outsourcing jobs and they have have gone gangbusters the last two years. If there's one thing I fear it's not this alleged "slow down" it's that every job is slowly being filled by foreigners working for pennies on the dollar.
The article gets their data from Indeed. I do not use such a site, and I know of no one who uses such a site. I generally only take jobs through my network of friends I've made and only after that exhausts do I begin the process of asking recruiters whats up. I don't believe job-farm sites are a good proxy for actual industry jobs.
That’s not to say there isn’t value in having a degree, like every component of a resume, it’s part of someone’s story on how they got to now. When I am hiring for tech roles, I staunchly cut back almost all requirements, limiting entry level SWE roles to something so basic as “Comfortable working with (almost) any programming language.”
People can learn the basics of Python in a weekend, but even senior engineers take some non-trivial time to onboard to how a sufficiently complicated and interconnected system works, team works style and dynamics, and repo/project layout and organization.
I wish that was always the case, but not the way you initially read it. I WISH they wouldn't look at me if they cared that much.
I've had 4 interviews at places with "degree required" but been told to ignore it by the people recommending me. I explicitly state I don't have one in my resume, to the initial recruiter screen, and anyone else that will listen.
Only one of them actually mentioned it at the initial screen and said they were firm on it.
The rest of them have ended during negotiations, with someone in HR saying something like "oh you don't have a degree?" and all communication instantly being dropped.
Do you have any evidence that any FAANGs took PPP money to overhire? I searched the PPP loan datasets (using fairly terrible online tools) and couldn't find any instances that would be aligned with your claim above. Did I miss some?
Tech skillsets are in demand because there's a huge backlog of unfilled positions at non-tech companies (take a look at US DOL JOLTS reports for November). Non tech CEOS talk about talent shortages and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers. The tech worker shortage is really hitting the bottom line for many non-tech companies who can't bring product to market, can't complete integrations or can't keep up with business demands (the problems at Southwest Airlines are what happens when you understaf IT for an extended time). If the DOL's numbers can be believed, barring GPT-4 making tech workers obsolete, you are still in a market where even with layoffs, demand will remain high for skilled tech workers (and not just SWEs).
All businesses are becoming tech companies, or are dependent on tech and looking for talent to move them from on-prem to the cloud, looking for talent to integrate SaaS tools with their existing systems and in many cases, looking to launch new tech enabled products. Most companies hire slowly (my company makes software to fix that), and so yes, if you get laid off, the average company will take 43 days to go from "Hi" to "Offer", so expect it to take at least a few months or more... but the prospects of a .com era style labor market collapse are minimal because the labor market is actually shrinking while demand for workers is growing (US DOL says this will be the case until 2045).
This is the crux of the problem for many younger job seekers, is that they see "tech-first" / FAANG as the only career path.
But every Fortune 1,000 company today is fundamentally "tech-first". And it could be argued that "advertising-first" companies no longer offer the cutting edge tech opportunities of say, Financial Services or Transportation, who have all shifted to Cloud/GPS/AI in recent years.
A big problem is that most of these non-tech companies are offering far less pay for a much worse working environment, and then wondering why they can't hire people. Even if they could hire, the aren't structured to let software engineering be involved with the product closely enough to actually have a reasonable ROI on their investments. I live in a medium sized city in the Midwest, and anecdotally the medium and large non-tech companies here are capping out at compensation far below even the cash part of the offer you could get at many series A tech companies working remotely. I know more than a few people working at non-FAANG companies whose stock price have taken a beating in the last few years who still have a TC roughly 10x the absolute top of market for these non-tech companies. Even if they can get close on comp, they still tend to use outdated tech, offer very little individual autonomy, and be highly bureaucratic environments.
All in all, I think that if working for companies like this is the fallback position for software engineers right now, it would count as being a fairly dire situation for the job market whether or not there are theoretically jobs to be had.
In my experience, there has never been a shortage. Some legacy businesses have wildly out of touch expectations and a cargo cult mentality regarding tech.
In the end, they typically end up with contractors because they simply can't operate the culture shift requires to have good engineering (or get pushed out of the market by real tech companies).
> and flyover states have government funded programs to repatriate tech workers
I assume by having California-style non-compete, top 5 universities and a world class VC ecosystem? Else what are they doing?
Labor stats don't agree. The reason technworker pay has soared is scarcity.
It's something of a catch-all term I think. When I had that title at an investment management firm many years ago I was mostly setting up external data feeds with bash and Perl to be loaded into a database and republished as datasets (in SAS) for consumption by portfolio managers and research so it did involve programming in that instance; probably closer to what a "Data Engineer" does today.
i don't understand why this term is so foreign as i literally all the time.
Did you work with a recruiter?