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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

I blame companies for blaming with people's lives like this: not market dynamics.

companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around. companies not the market, resulted in a war over talent.

now it's a war on talent.

and of course everyone and their grandma will want to work at these tech companies where life is laid back and you get all the benefits and can express your political opinions.

but other big companies - say a tech company in the middle of nowhere e.g Epic - was paying good salary and not matching the faang / vc salaries. i'm sure those companies, if they didn't follow the herd ain't laying off people. their people are still employed, getting paid decent (enough). and work normal hours.

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Is overhiring really a problem, would the world be better if companies didn’t overhire? Then many of the people now laid off wouldn’t have had a job in the first place. If you accept a job for what it is, a temporary need for your help, and plan for what’s next, a period of layoffs should become manageable.

Consider my situation. I passed my Google interview in October for New Grad 2023 and was told that my starting date would be April.

Now I’m most likely not going to be hired and need to restart my job search and this will have derailed my entire plans for the first few months of this year. I won’t see a cent.

OTOH, you've learned an important lesson early: You aren't hired until your first day of work. The job search never stops and never ends, until you're really ready to stop working.

Next time when someone agrees to hire you in the hypothetical future, you will keep looking and interviewing, at least until you have accepted a formal offer from someone.

(I'm assuming here that they didn't give you an actual, formal offer even if they did tell you about a starting date)

Your situation is one of extreme privilege, being able to have desirable plans, for many months, while unemployed.

I've turned down job offers in the future, because they're empty promises. You're a hiring req in some drawer, until the first day, because everyone is aware it's an empty promise.

I agree.

Which is worse: never getting hired by google, or getting hired, working for a few years making a great or even outsized salary and then getting laid off after getting great experience? - or never having had the opportunity to in the first place?

An awful lot of people would prefer the first scenario and will come out ahead.

Due to tech giants' overhiring and overpaying policies, a lot of people re-qualified in recent years. Now those Juniors can't find their easy-to-get-dream-jobs f or months and situation is getting worse for Seniors, too, as both bigger and smaller (and also both public and private) companies are doing hiring freezes, layoffs, invoke no-raises policies and all sorts of cost cuts.

Sure - all those people could try to go back to what they were doing earlier but there are layoffs and freezes in not only tech and related industries.

Those people are being punished for doing what the giants-led market demanded.

I’m convinced I got into FAANG last year because of overhiring. Even if I get layed off, a year of FAANG on my resume is a blessing

Yes, there's an opportunity cost to society.

That overhired person who's not productive in Google could have done something better for society.

> companies are the ones that decided to overhire, overpay - based on covid demand, cheap money that was floating around

But this concept of over-hiring and overpaying doesn't make sense.

There is no way to predict whether a positive economy will last 10 years or 10 months, and if you don't follow the economic growth you will lose bigger than if you follow it and have to make cuts later.

Everyone is quick to blame companies for "over-hiring", but they would also be quick to blame them for being too careful in a positive economy, and the market would punish them.

overpaying makes sense, over-hiring makes sense.

for two comparable companies, with comparable products look at Asana vs Basecamp.

How much does Basecamp pay for a senior engineer ? they pay top end of SF salary regardless of location. However, you can best that Asana is paying at least 1.5x what Basecamp pays + RSU's etc.

Yet Basecamp is printing money and yet Asana is bleeding money.

How many engineers does Basecamp have ? How many does Asana have ?

so yeah the concept of overpaying and over-hiring exists and not just a fallacy.

if it was market driven, then the laws of the market would dictate Asana not to pay a premium over Basecamp for talent.

You’re not wrong but at the same time I was hiring for a senior engineer a year ago and the market was ridiculous. Seniors only wanted to work if they could do part time for six figures and the consensus was they should be allowed to work 2-3 companies at once.

This is just the way the market works, whoever has the greater demand will always use that fact to their demand. So while it may suck to be an engineer compared to the ones hiring them: that’s just the nature of our mode of production.

To a European this kind of description always boggles the mind.

Having been in the field for 12 years, with a degree in CS, worked as a senior IC and been personally responsible for critical projects at financial institutions and startups alike, the highest wage I have ever had was 75k. And this is in western Europe.

In a way I hope that in the near future more US firms start looking outside their boarders when hiring.

Because there is plenty of hungry talent here just waiting for a chance.

google has plenty of dev offices in western europe. Did you try to apply?..

Working for Google is not the goal for all developers.

I personally know enough who are or have been employed there to know that the gauntlet to get hired is stressful enough and unlikely enough for a skilled developer to get through that I'm not sure I would even ever give it a go.

From those same personal connections, there have plenty of stories about feeling like a tiny insignifican cog in a giant soulless machine (which any giant company like this would be) that I wouldn't want to work there. Let it also be said I have heard great things from individuals working at Google (it is a large enough workplace that any kind of situation will be found there).

It just doesn't sound like the place for me.

My perfect employer would be a software development company, focusing on a product or product range, with product market fit and an actually profitable, with hopefully no more than 300 employees (not gotten too big).

you also can try to apply on remote positions, there are plenty successful small/mid companies have remote openings.

Healthcare is largely recession proof although hospitals had big layoffs just as COVID hit which was a huge mistake in retrospect.

Epic is also a private company and yes pays less but they’ve taken up with Google now as well.

As someone who threw away too many years writing medical systems for the American market stay away from this industry segment. Do you want lower pay, rent seeking companies, CFO centric not end user products, and the personal stress that you are kind of making the world a better place so too much guilt to leave, then medical software is the perfect fit for you (until you break).

Hospitals chose to do that because everyone thought that bubonic plague was upon us and we no longer needed staff in elective surgeries.

Obviously everyone was proven very wrong.

Yeah, I also wonder how much of the current layoffs are "we need to fire people as to look good on paper for the market"

I think it's more "we want to increase company value" rather than "we want to increase the perception of company value, aka stock price".

Which is good, that's what the management is supposed to do.

Its entirely that. A business method that relied on inflated valuations over the anticipated future market domination measured in current growth can only be possible in a market that has practically unlimited money entering the economy and it cannot survive in an environment where the money flow stops.

The dollar losing its uncontested dominance as foreign exchange currency due to the results of the sanctions and economic war started over Ukraine with almost entire global south, Asia and most importantly, Arabia moving to trade in their own currencies has killed the zero interest economy. Which stopped the money that Federal reserve and private banks were feeding into the economy. (private banks were doing it through fractional reserve lending).

More like: Oh shit, helicopter money has come to an end. The bottom line actually starts to matter. Let's get rid of the dead weight.

I didn't realize the Raleigh, NC metro was in the middle of nowhere. ;)

He was likely referring to HQ in Verona, Wisconsin. I've been there, can confirm it sure looks like the middle of nowhere :)

Ah, the EMR company. I was referring to Epic Games.

The government and their policies aren't responsible at all (not just the USA but other countries as well)?

But people that know that industry segment don't want to work at Epic ;) So crappy employer/crappy industry based on government rent seeking not product quality/crappy pay/crappy location = no thanks brother.

What's "VC salary"? First time heard this and didn't find meaninging result from Google, nor does ChatGPT.

I believe they're referring to startups who use VC capital to attract people away from other tech firms at very high cost to themselves.

Really it's what all the big companies are doing, but at least some of them can claim solvency.

A large salary that is subsidized by VC funding.

You should check out this guy called Marx, he wrote a couple books about how labor is always disadvantaged in such a system because their power ebbs and flows with the fluctuations of the market. The main check that labor has on this power is to bargain collectively. Seems tech missed that opportunity five years ago when it was top of mind but many people felt things are good why would we need a union.

The LVT is incoherent when applied to tech work.

We don't exploit electrons.

Boom bust cycles don't end up with contradictions that capitalism can't resolve, it just makes capitalism stronger.

The absolute law of general accumulation doesn't exist either. As tech gets better, unemployment trends down.

The tendency for the rate of profit to fall also doesn't exist. Economists have a name for the law that says the tendency for the rate of profit rises over time.

So why should I trust Marxism when at least 4 of his giant predictions are empirically wrong after hundreds of years? Scientific socialism implies that we should have seen successful communist states by now. Zero of them are successful.

Epic the games company??

The medical software company in Madison WI I think

I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher performing team. I don't want to work with people who are here to coast.

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