Do you think these people would have been better off if tech had carried net fewer heads the past couple of years? Having an extra 100k employed for two years is worse than those jobs just never existing?
I'm not sure a union would have helped there, but I'm not opposed. Amazon tried to make hay while the sun was shining, and it didn't work out for all depts. It happens.
I have nothing to back up this claim, but it seems like selfishness is what caused reduction of unions in the US. And for the same selfishness it's tough to organize people and kickstart a new union.
1. I was saving for a house downpayment, so I put most my earnings right into the bank and had already minimized spending
2. They announced layoffs immediately, but then gave us time to finish work and transfer internally. If we couldn't transfer, they would lay us off after 6 weeks. This happened to me as I was a manager of a particular specialty and it was tough to transfer to a job I wanted. Furthermore, everyone around me was cut, so we could all work together and support eachother for 6 weeks.
3. My wife has a full time job so our income was reduced, not eliminated.
4. We had family nearby for any childcare problems, so I could focus on a new job hunt
5. I had friends and network nearby, so I could look for local jobs quickly and efficiently
6. I had a referral from an old co-worker, and that referral turned into my new job, which so far I love.
7. I had insisted on working remote from my hometown area, which has much lower cost of living (which helped with 4, 5), and made our situation much less dire
8. I got a lot of traction from a linkedin post during the 6 weeks job-hunt stage. This is just a function of my coworker network and I'm lucky to have those folks
I feel for those who didn't have these factors. I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to have to navigate visa issues on top of a lack of a local network and reduced / eliminated income. I definitely had home-court advantage in all this.
I personally would prefer to be hired by a big tech company and then laid off, having received the salary, severance pay, and experience, than to never set my foot there.
The in-between time sucks, of course.
We wouldn't be here discussing this if the economy had not done so poorly.
What if on average, you hire 10 people a year. Each year, there's a 10% chance of having to lay off 10 people. Details of profit/loss aside, what is the optimal move? Never hire so you never have to lay anyone off? Hire only 5 people a year so the impact is not so large?
Is that the point? That implies the market is hot again (and I agree with you, it will be eventually) and people are working where they want to. If that's your prediction, what's the problem here? The solution is not to jump ship to Google, then, isn't it?
From the hyper-scale startup point of view, it's blatantly unsustainable and frankly irresponsible to play fast-and-loose with people's careers by hiring them and then making the position redundant, sometimes within less than a year; even six months in some cases that I've known. The best one can hope for is a generous severance so as to buy time to find a new job in an increasingly crowded market.
Personally, I find layoffs irresponsible at a corporate level. When they happen they disrupt team relationships, gut out tribal knowledge, break trust, and create friction that trades short term savings for long term cost. The human cost for unemployment is also hard to ignore. For every 1% increase in unemployment there is a 1-1.6% increase in suicides.
I say that as someone who is working at a company that made headlines for layoffs.
Should I care? After all it is about my salary
Why should I care about those companies? I wish them good, but unless theyre an outlier then I would rather accept better salary
My guess is that these people, who are "doomed", don't actually exist. I have a strong suspicion that, over the last few years, most folks got in while it was good, and are happy they were around while it lasted.
Saying they would have been better off with a "regular job" is pretty presumptuous. What if these folks are actually smart people who just saved up while FAANGs were offering huge salaries? What if this isn't actually a big deal? What if it was a good thing that ICs were getting paid a lot of money for a bit, instead of having wages suppressed by investors to prevent situations like "probably wouldn't have happened to them if they had another, more regular job."
Give me the money. Let me choose how I spend it. Don't pretend you know what is best for me.
I’m not sure it works that way. With 100k fewer tech jobs, would there not have been fewer regular jobs as well?
The average tenure at these companies is what--18 months? Amazon especially.
I think it's delusional to act like a FANNG-gravy train role is something that'll be around in a decade. Especially now.