Ask HN: Laid off folks, are you getting hired?
With the rampant layoffs, are you guys getting hired? How are you doing?
I reached out to every designer and coder laid off from Twitter and Amazon (one of my investors sent me a spreadsheet that those laid off folks added their contact info to).
I didn't receive a single interested response to my reach outs. Now granted, I'm sure they were bombarded with lots of startup offers and being picky what company/stage they were responding to, or were still in grief mode and not ready to start looking, or maybe (probably!) my reach-out finesse was lacking.
But I'm just pointing out that their are definitely companies like mine who are hiring and it's not all doom and gloom for laid off folks.
I ended up hiring via ads on LinkedIn and job posts on eng message boards.
Being real for a minute: There is definitely a perspective among hiring companies that regular lay offs are sometimes packaged alongside bottom performers, but I think that is something they would just do diligence on during an interview process.
EDIT: As other commenters are pointing out, this appears to be a list of voluntarily added people. In such case the lack of replies is indeed puzzling.
Hopefully that's actually true but, regardless, it seems to be what's believed. If it is true, it's reasonable to assume they knew what the list would be.
> that those laid off folks added their contact info to
They seem to have added their info to the list for it to be floated around.
If I just got laid off, I might not want to take another huge gamble like this.
Senior devs I know who got laid off are just enjoying their time off (with pay! if you consider the severance) after the rocketing market in 2021 (and maybe even H1 22) made them whole and financially secure. And they won't be entertaining a startup unless significant equity or big leveling up (eg Principal or Director).
On the other hand, fresh grads who got laid off are in such a panic mode (esp those on visa) they'd be willing to take anything.
The amount of wealth all people need is constant. It is 1.5 x whatever they have today.
Different ideas about retirement—such as retiring with different amounts of security, different standards of living, different amounts of money donated to charity, different locations, downsizing or not downsizing the house, living in the countryside or the city, traveling a lot or a little, etc.
My impression as someone who’s not retired is that you are signing up for a new relationship with your partner once you retire, and it’s hard to know what that new relationship will be like.
The majority of us don't actually know what we "have", because it isn't that much anyway. We do know though what we need to pay in the next 10 to 15 days(and if we somehow forget there's where anxious dreams come into play to help us out with that).
And back to developers (I am one, but not living in the US), I don't think most of them own their place of living. I know I don't, so, yes, I have to work in order to have a roof over my head.
I was more inaccurate or perhaps outdated with the 1% figure, turns out it's 600k.
But in every possible universe, the devs at your "small shop" not making "the big bucks" are making two to three times the median income in the country with the most disposable income per person - which means your counterexample is very weak to the argument that you and your team are making more than enough to be doing more with your finances than "just" keeping the lights on, and to compare that to people in the US who make regular wages for sympathy is kind of egregious.
You can filter out by other characteristics here: https://igotstandardsbro.com/
There are jobs out there, I've turned down 3 (2xUS, 1xUK/CH) last year I enquired about just to keep in touch with whats on offer and gain insight into projects underway or commencing. Paying 6 figures, US onsite, UK/CH offered remote, working as many hours as I wanted. Turned them down. I think US/Canada remote is rare because of the poor internet infrastructure once you get outside of the cities, Europe has better internet infrastructure so can offer more remote work. Management styles are generally different in the US compared to Europe, with the UK somewhere in between the two regions as usual.
I think people need to understand the different parts of a global economy and realise some sectors some countries wont be or will hardly be affected by the social media downturn especially if they are prepared to work abroad and broaden their horizons.
Plenty of money in China.....
But sometimes that number goes to == on layoff. I’ve seen this in real life.
When I bail (or get axed) I’m gonna just do some indie hacking or maybe scratch up some 1099 work.
If you are at a startup and working on support tools or platform infrastructure or whatever, maybe you're indispensable. But you'd still be better off if you were doing support tools or platform infrastructure that involves revenue.
(The obvious corollary is that if you work at a startup that doesn't make money, you should find a way to make money, or move to a startup that does make money. I feel like a lot of engineers don't know this.)
Of course, your team can be considered strategic one day, then disbanded the next.
These are very confusing times.
Obviously, if you're the junior hire on a team of 1,000 people doing third-derivative things that relate to revenue, YMMV.
Is this really broadly true? I worked for a FAANG for a ~year and half and was constantly over-burdened (rarely with enjoyable or challenging technical work).
I assumed outside of the TikTok "Day in the Life" PMs most folks were grinding away on build issues 50hours a week.
That would apply to me too. I have 10 years in the industry but have been underpaid and have a family. My current plan if I get fired is to work at Walmart or Lowes until I can find another job.
A fired employee is still eligible for unemployment as long as they were not fired because of specific misconduct. Poor performance does not constitute misconduct. Misconduct must be “willful and wanton.” (Regularly missing work or being late, stealing, fighting with coworkers, etc.)
The CA guidelines are long, but contain some useful examples and guiding principles: https://edd.ca.gov/en/uibdg/Misconduct_MC_5/
I know of people who should have been fired who were talked into quitting instead just because quitting means they can't sue. In turn the company gives the official answer "X worked here between these dates and left in good standing". Since the company always said the same thing when asked if someone worked there it wasn't a negative to the next employer, while if they fired they would have to say left in bad standing.
Of course since getting fired is a sensitive issue I won't say who. Reading between the lines in conversations and how the company acted though I'm sure that is how it worked.
Note that there is a difference between being sued and losing in court. Even if you win you still need to pay your lawyers. I've had one lawyer tell me about spending nearly a million dollars in court for a case that was about $100,000 in asked damages that the lawyer knew based on facts they would lose - but [I can't talk about this part] made it impossible to figure out how to settle out of court.
Also, you can focus on a finding a job in your field. If for some reason you didn't want to get unemployment while you look for a job I would try to find any type of contracting job even upwork or fiverr so you can at least put Self-Employed Consulting on resume.
If you feel like you could lose your current, underpaid job I encourage you to start looking around. I wish I would have before waiting til the bitter end.
It would not be smart of them to accept a lower paying job immediately. A lot of them have life expenses directly tied to the amount of money they're making. Maybe those who haven't found anything for 3 months can join your company, move to a new place, change their childrens' daycare, and do a lot of life changing decisions based on their new income
I get a ton of emails from random startups in stealth mode, early funding, whatever.
You know where they all go? Spam folder. As far as I’m concerned, they pay the equivalent of dog shit and are mostly full of extremely entitled founders. They rarely offer equity that’s even remotely worth the risk. I’m way better off joining a company at Series B/C. I can often get a very similar amount of stock that even seed or series A folks have with having avoided a huge amount of risk. Tbh - I find joining pre-IPO probably has close to the best reward+risk for non-public entities.
There’s just no benefit to joining early startups as a non-founder. Maybe when founders start offering serious percentages of stock that isn’t going to be diluted into nothing - I’ll be more inclined. Until then - no way!
If you're filtering for B/C, you're filtering for companies that need investor money post-supposed-PMF (A is generally considered the anointing of PMF).
That behavior was fine pre-2021, but it's a bit more suspect in 2022. Joining the median pre-IPO tech company within the last year or two would have left your initial option grant completely in the red, today.
In short, there's a continuum between "stealth mode" and Series B that's more lucrative than you're giving credit for, provided one chooses them wisely. The problem is it's hard to choose. There aren't good incentives for educating people on how to choose well.
Not sure what you mean here. I know of companies that lay off entire teams, irrespective of performance. I suspect that it's the same everywhere.
It's not just the comp difference (though I do expect most people with severance are hoping to get something close to their old TC), but startups are notoriously fragile and at the same time wildly over optimistic about their futures in down markets.
I've talked to a few startups about interesting roles over the past few months and no matter how obviously in trouble they are if the market continues the way it is, they all deeply believe that they have an infinitely bright future.
A shocking number of post-seed but still awaiting series A startups have started reaching out to me and none of them have sane business models. On top of that it looks like VC funding is way down.
Any senior engineers who just got the shock of being let go from what they thought was a very stable job with great comp simply aren't going to be excited to jump onto a high risk startup just to relive the whole experience again only this time with less severance.
I’ve considered some startups, but it seems like it’s often difficult to enforce boundaries on work… I benefit a lot from being able to go offline completely on evenings and weekends. That was always possible in my last job except during the occasional oncall and maybe one or two major launches per year. Also, the pay offered is usually half of what I made in my last job, or less. If the current market situation persists for another six months I’ll probably relax my standards. Or if I get contacted by a startup that’s especially impressive or interesting, or someone I trust tells me it’s a great place to work.
Pay isn’t the most important factor, but I don’t want to get locked in at low comp and have to change again in six months. Also, I have a hard time getting objective information about the work culture at startups. With Google or whatever I can always find contacts who work there and ask them how they feel about their job; with startups every person I talk to is trying to convince me to join and is incentivized to downplay the problems.
Yes this is a big problem as you have no idea what you're signing up with startups. Maybe the founder expects you to work 12 hours/day and constantly be available, maybe they will fire you a month before your equity vesting, or just randomly fire you one day despite having never given any negative feedback. I've seen all of this at startups, and there is zero accountability. Last time it happened to me I wasn't even offered any severance.
If anyone is considering working for a startup, please do your due diligence. Do not be naive and think that because the founders are very friendly and their startup is backed by YC that they are a good place to work and won't fire you the second they have any doubts about you (personally I'll never work as a full-time employee for a startup going through YC ever again, but that's a story for another day).
Going forward if I'm ever thinking about working for a startup, I will reach out to employees, and ideally ex-employees, to get the inside scoop on what the founders are really like behind the smoke & mirrors.
I know a friend who led product at a startup (YC). One fine day he shared concerns on how company is narrowly focusing on just one parameter. 10 mins later, he got employment termination letter.
You get a bit more cash, and I can't see it impacting your career negatively (though you do end up trading some of the time you could be resting and collecting severance to see if the company might be a good long-term fit)
I like to ask these people "Why did you choose this company versus any of the other ones?" and "What were your expectations about [thing I'm uncertain about], and how did your experience differ from that?"
Startups actually have more signal to offer than most big tech companies. However, the onus is on you to scuttlebut, and it's true that the risks of not doing it well are more severe.
Re: compensation, if you are able to demonstrate competence and efficacy, early stage startups will offer you a cash basis comparable to that of big tech. Of course, if your expenses have inflated to the expectation of selling big tech RSUs every year, you should expect a pretty significant "real" cut in annual income unless you walk in to another public company.
If anyone is struggling and is on the mid/senior/director side of their career (3+ yrs), I'm helping place people at my friends Seed and Series A companies.
VC money is still there but pumping into Seed/Series A companies with more upside now rather than insane B, C, D companies that have no profitability in sight. email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)
I also did a bunch of cold job applications, but didn't get a callback from any of them. The whole process led to a ton of anxiety and was really nerve-wracking, especially reading about layoffs from other tech firms in the same time period. I kept worrying that my new company was going to hit layoffs and that my offer would be rescinded, especially when the recruiter told me they were reducing hiring. Having it take about 3 months just drug that anxiety out.
I still have a bit of anxiety about getting laid off, but no more than I'd have anywhere else.
I also think there's a weird game going on with remote roles. On my new team everyone is "remote", but of the 10 people 3 are in the bay area and the other 7 are in 6 different cities, but each city has an office. The company has ~8 offices in North America, so the statistics are bothering. This matches with my circle of friends' experience; the only callbacks people get for remote roles are ones where they're already in the same city.
I suspect "remote" really means "remote, but in a city that we have a presence in, just in case we decide to force you to come into an office."
When connecting to companies through recruiters, you're expected to still come up with some semi-BS about why you're so excited to work there. But you need to go through the motions because the places you are actually excited to work won't even interview you.
Referrals and recruiters = success.
Apply to a position = failure.
I've had in the past a few recruiters on the lazier side ask me to "please apply directly at the company portal" and that had a perfectly round 0% success rate.
1 personal connection, 2 recruiters employed by the hiring company, 1 third party recruiter on contract through the hiring company.
It just seems to me like a company having put out an application just doesn't mean they are all that motivated to hire. Having hired recruiters on the other hand...
I’ve gotten all my jobs through non-referrals in the past. It does work. Can’t speak for now though - could be most places just aren’t hiring even though they make it seem like they are.
Folks here need to spend more time on the hiring side and see how the meat is made.
As it stands today, a "warm" candidate is brought into the system by someone else. Recruiters just give them information, match them with the processors (interviewers), and tell the candidate results. MAYBE, some advocacy. MAYBE.
Then they ignore "cold" candidates.
Recruiters are really the bottleneck here, imo.
A couple years ago I did an experiment and sent out 25 applications through linkedin for job postings I was very qualified for. Never heard a peep back from any of them. Good thing I wasn't actively looking! Based on that I'm fairly convinced none of those ever went anywhere or were seen by anyone.
I think part of it is that I was applying to a lot of larger companies with efficient hiring pipelines, none of which are currently hiring.
> I also did a bunch of cold job applications, but didn't get a callback from any of them.
This was my experience when I was let go in Mar 2020 (not from any place as prominent as Meta, however). The network of people you have worked with and know has been by far the best way I've found to get a job. Even when you're senior, cold applications are a low-chance bet.
I started looking again at the start of this year, and it's been rough, at least compared to my last job search where I had multiple offers in under two weeks. I've submitted ~50 applications so far, most with a non-generic cover letter. Most haven't responded, several declined to interview, and just one scheduled an interview.
Using my referral network hasn't been that effective. Most of my former colleagues are working at large companies that either aren't hiring or are in midst of layoffs themself. I was able to get 4 references at hiring companies through my network, but of those, 3 haven't responded and 1 declined to interview.
I have had a decent amount of interviews through 3rd-party recruiting agencies. I've gotten to final interview stages with a few companies, but no offers. Most of these places were very early seed-stage companies. I'm actively interviewing with a handful now.
When companies decline to even interview, it's discouraging and stressful for sure. It's easy for imposter syndrome to creep in. But overall, I'm still relatively optimistic that I will find something soon-ish.
I can see how hiring companies must be inundated now, but it also seems a bit strange that nearly every company I connect with through a recruiter wants to interview, but my success rate submitting applications myself is basically 0%.
The funny one was one that came back 2 years after I had another job and rejected me. I had to go dig up my notes and see what I had applied for!
My internal network was the same as yours with lots of 'nothing here'.
Most of my luck has been like you, with 3rd party recruiters. Unless I reach out to them directly. Then they suddenly have nothing. One of them just for fun I called them every week but 'we currently do not have anything' which I knew was rubbish and I would pull items off their own site and show them. But if they have something that tweaked their buzzword bingo they blow up your phone. Getting a recruiter who likes to hustle is the key.
Only thing I regret for the 'time off' was not starting to look sooner. I figured it was a 1-2 month tops thing. Turned into 8 months of looking. What is really annoying is if you do not have a job they do not want you. But have a job and suddenly 2-3 calls a day.
Hiring is broken in a very weird way. But nothing really clear how to fix it. Adding more fizz-buzz testing is not going to fix it.
My take is that this is not nearly as bad as the dotcom crash in the early 2000s, but the red hot tech market of 2021 where companies were hiring as fast as they could with incredible comp packages is gone. There are still a good number of roles out there, but companies are being more careful in their hiring and they are not trying to compete with (the no longer hiring) FAANGs when it comes to compensation.
Which one offer did you take?
It’s helpful to read stories like yours and feel less isolated. Good luck.
If so, please keep in mind that interviewers at big tech generally have to follow the HR script for interviewing. I have very little leeway as an interviewer in how to conduct the interview. I can select from a narrow group of problems, and I ask each candidate a couple of “soft skills” questions to gauge their level of experience, but the bulk of the interview still relies on their performance on the technical assessment.
Turned out I was just getting burned out from the feature factory work I was doing. I took a little break and did some fun hobby projects, and I instantly fell in love with programming again. I think making a programming career sustainable requires that we do work we actually enjoy.
A few decades later, I know what I do and don't want in a workplace. For me that means: No corporate gigs, no java, no barnacle coworkers and no jira. Yes to smart coworkers, projects I care about, technically interesting work, small teams, and a culture of responsibility taking and ownership.
The "eventually" part is a nod towards retirement and then joking not having a choice.
huh? TIL.
Most devs I know live in condos and have no chance of having a place to do woodworking.
Maybe it's a regional thing.
It intersects well with 3d printing and CNC stuff.
(mmmm 1910 manual on steel production.)
It's a copy of this: https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/CompositionandHeatTr...
Mine is a dark red hardback, printed by McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1911.
I mean, I have a collection of very old engineering books, including one on Petroleum Refinery Engineering and a Reinforced Concrete Design Handbook printed when text books where $2. But I had no idea this was a "thing" among developers.
So, very very anecdotally: yep it's a thing.
In the back of my mind, I think of flipping houses as something to do if I ever get laid off from my tech job. I look at places coming up for sale on Zillow that were obvious flips and they all look like the parts all came straight out of Ikea / HomeDepot (and usually the most ugly stuff to choose from).
Your best bet is fixers - houses with obvious major issues that everyone is scared of but you know you can fix reasonably cheaply. This can mean buying a $500k house with major foundation damage for $100k because everyone is scared - but you know a whole foundation replacement will only run you $200k.
And it is not like you can find such disasters easily, nor that you can easily be able to make them into fixers, without years of previous experience.
The whole approach, "everyone is scared but you know ..." is based on the assumption that you know more than anyone else (possibly including many people dealing with this kind of stuff for decades), I doubt that anyone can learn what is needed in this field overnight, by reading a book, and should it be possible, everyone would do it, not just you.
Anything that "anyone can do" is going to explode at some point.
keep assets instead of cash and you'll be a genius
The "somewhat specialized" knowledge can be explicited as four main things:
1) years (and I mean years) of experience in the field (to be able to quickly assess the non-evident potentialities of a building)
2) knowing a few good, tested, reliable technicians such as architects/engineers (to be able to get a valid project leveraging on these potentialities)
3) knowing (more than) a few good tested, reliable, capable firms (masons/carpenters/plumbers/electricians/painters/etc.) to actually execute the restoration
4) time to be dedicated to managing the project
If you think that - even if you actually happen to find a "gem" - that you can make money hiring people you find on the internet or on the yellow pages, or that the people involved will manage to do a good work at a fair price by themselves, you won't go very far.
The problem I see is that you need to find the fixer gem, but location matters. Certainly, you can buy a fixer in the middle of Ohio, but who wants to live there? There is just too much surrounding inventory with low desirability.
The thing that works in my eyes is to buy in areas that are extremely desirable, even pay a bit more for it, but very low inventory. That's where the insane appreciation comes in. Popular beach towns are a good example because they are land locked and can also be turned into short term rental properties relatively easy, which increases their perceived value.
It isn't easy to find such places and often requires paying in cash, but it is possible.
Millions of people. It's the seventh largest state in the USA, is home to three major cities and many large multinational companies.
The millions of people who live there, already live there. That doesn't increase demand. It is a large state, so there is plenty of space to build. Density is centered around three locations and the largeness of the state means that people can expand out to the suburbs.
What you want is somewhere with a high density, inability to add more property and desirable for vacations (like a beach with views). San Francisco was kind of a good example of this for a very long time, until it wasn't. There are other cities on coastlines that fit this model though.
Buy a condo that has dual use (STR), refurb it, flip it.
Has your network been helpful?
- Automated manual process that saved the company X hours each time they do this process.
- Built a website that served X00,000 customers over the span of Y months.
- Managed X number of people on this project.
Instead of:
- Was responsible for making this software, filling out forms, talking to client, etc.
- I built a website with a database.
- I used X, Y, and Z technologies on this project.
Focus on bullets that show real numbers in metrics that companies care about (saving time, money, gaining customers, number of reports), wherever possible.
The others can be useful too, but shouldn't be what you highlight (list of tech doesn't hurt for hitting buzzwords, though).
After the program I worked in the industry for a while. When you are starting in carpentry it's a lot of grunt work. People won't care if you have any training. After a full day of vacuuming drywall dust I had enough. Quit and landed a programming job.
I still think it was a valuable experience. It shows you value of hard work. If there is time to lean there is time to clean is a very real thing. I was in the best shape of my life. I now have the skills to do most of my own Renos.
You are obviously an intelligent person who is entertaining some unhealthy thoughts. Many people have felt the way you feel-- it happens. But you need to seek therapy or the council of someone you trust to put your problems in perspective. Your life is precious even if it doesn't feel that way right now.
Do share what's up, though. Unhappiness isn't that uncommon. I am not very happy and have been oscillating between "I should quit first thing tomorrow" and "but I have to do the grind while I still can"
It is precisely due to my varied experience that I can point this out: the vast majority of startups and tech is dust in the wind.
If ephemeral codebases bother you, work on projects that will last longer. Things I expect will outlive us: Chrome, PostgreSQL, SQLite, LLVM, Linux/Windows/MacOS, Unity, Nodejs, Nginx.
I have a few small contributions in chromium and nodejs. There's something really delightful about looking at a strangers' laptop and knowing some of my code is in their machine.
FWIW, I found my last two jobs through third party recruiters, and still count them as friends. It's an industry with an oddly-poor reputation, but there are some real gems of people to be found in it.
However it does seem there is still a lot of flux, especially with larger companies who are still trying to allocate headcount. I've had calls with Google that were basically like: "we're interested, but we don't know HC yet, let's circle back in 3 weeks".
It's always been like this. Most businesses have permanently listed "openings" that don't necessarily mean they're hiring.
Always try and find out if the role they’re hiring for is an actual role they have a vested interest in filling and not just a generic “statement of interest”.
There are 1000 different flavors of mixed home-office working right now, but not that much fully remote
In the end it doesn't matter. Due to family concerns relocation is not an option, and anything local would be a huge pay cut. I'll go that route if I reach the point where I need to, but I'm holding off for now.
(Asking for a friend)
Then negotiate the definition of "regular" with your comp.
...did anybody actually agree to that?
Maybe I'm off base, but requiring employees to pay for mandatory business trips out of pocket seems insane to me. Is that even legal? It's a camouflaged pay cut, from one point of view (probably actually worse when you consider taxes).
I'm curious how others feel.
Remember: people don't (always) hire resumes. People hire people.
Still on the lookout for senior rust engineers who want to work at a company that's remote-first with a minimal-meetings culture.
You can message me on telegram @jommi for info
If I were looking, after exhausting personal contacts from previous employment, that's where I would head next.
I've been on both sides of using HN to find work. It's just sooo good.
Interesting how companies have trouble hiring for hyper specific tech that they might abandon in a few years. Then what happens to these "rust engineers", do they get laidoff for the next hiring of "X engineers".
A rust engineer that knows why the borrow checker exists and can safely do unsafe operations likely will do fine in C,C++, Go, Java and many others.
This doesn't feel like a sustainable way to build engineering org. You only get N chances for such 'juicing', what do you do when you need to juice but don't have open headcount. You have to come up with a strategy for that anyways, so why not implement ' want juice but no headcount' strategy and expand your hiring pool.
I've also found that people who sell themselves as "Rust/SAP/Java engineer" seem to have a huge bias against anything else which makes sense since they've built their careers selling themselves as experts in a particular niche.
It was quite jarring, for me, as I had been quite sought-after, before (Which was why I had the job I had, at a marquee corporation).
Turns out out, it was because of my age.
Lot of these laid off folks, are probably gonna encounter the same thing.
What do you mean? Are you young and they were interested? Or a senior level developer who was older and they were interested?
The ageism in tech is pervasive. People seldom even bother hiding it; even though it's just as illegal as sexism or racism.
Lots of smiling young faces. Maybe one or two gray heads, and you often find out they are Principals, in one way or another.
One of the dirty little secrets of tech ageism, is the ones doing it, are often older folks, themselves. IBM has been caught doing it, and the impetus came from their (quite gray) C-Suite.
Especially people in their late 30s to 40s with kids who haven't left yet. I suppose there's really no too old to have kids who are not yet independent, given that a non-negligible percentage of millenials and zoomers will still be living with parents and whatnot
What's it like when being laid off in the UK? Do you get guaranteed severance and some breathing room from the stress of rent or mortgage payments? Do you worry about access to high quality Healthcare?
Overall, do you think being in the UK makes you less worried that a layoff will leave you broke and homeless?
You get a minimum of 2 week's extra pay if you have over 2 years service, and Job Seekers' Allowance is about 77 quid a week - so imagine living on less than $500 a month.
Healthcare access (via the NHS) is unaffected, you might be able to get free prescriptions too.
But in general it's terrible.
As always in Europe you either want to be an ultra-rich landowning aristocrat (little to no property tax, inheritance tax, etc.) or very poor/unemployed (e.g. a refugee) so you qualify for state housing, etc. - work does not pay. You pay high taxes and then don't qualify for assistance when it matters. The USA is better by far where you can just manage your own savings with your 3-4x higher salary, healthcare is still an issue though.
First of all you get around 1kish a month no questions asked, more if you have bills etc. you can prove you need to pay
and if you opted into "unemployment insurance" while employed, you'd be getting 60-80% of your salary for the next 12 months
this insurance costs around 100e a year to opt into
I just left an inappropriately long comment saying, in effect, actually the same thing.
The US isn't perfect, but if you want to work you're generally able to move up the economic ladder easier from what I've seen. High income taxes combined with consumption taxes make wealth creation via employment almost impossible.
Depends on what 'wealth' means here, but you can get a 1% salary in England in your late 20s by contracting in tech and save several grand a month. Put that in shares & buy-to-lets and you'll be very well off by 40 compared to the average person. With the lower cost of living I don't see any issues here... If that's what drives you of course.
According to recent Nobel prizes in economic (Duflo and Banerjee), moving up the economic ladder has degraded so much in the US that it's currently lagging slightly behind Europe.
Their study dates back to ~2018, though.
When my partner became unemployed in the USA i was amazed that she was getting $750 a week and her healthcare plan was $200 a month due to the marketplace subsidy.
I studied, lived and worked in high demand field all my adult life in Europe, am in my mid 30s and have nothing really to show for it. Salaries are lower than USA, the taxes are ridiculous, (progressive up to 50%), reasonably new house prices in reasonable locations are in millions. And health care... lol.. ok - it just about works, but as you can imagine anything public is prone to corruption and lowest passable quality
Seeing USA, the last bastion for people who could make something out of themselves by real work crumbling and crawling to its death is disheartening.
I was merely pointing out the fact that it was possible to ascent to higher wealth class in USA with regular 'honest work' some years ago, whereas in Europe this is in general impossible due to taxation schemes designed to suck the life out of anyone who decides to work as opposed to being born an 'aristocrat' inheriting money, land etc...
Marginal tax rates in California are also around 50% as well (above or below, depending on income). Houses are certainly in the millions.
But on top of this you get to pay separately for extremely expensive health insurance and education, things that in most countries are very reasonably priced or even "free" (not free since it's paid for by the taxes, but at least you get services in exchange for your taxes, unlike in the US where you pay the taxes and have to pay separately for all the services).
$35,000-$80,000 [25%] $80,000-$170,000 [28%]
I'm just going to let you know that in Europe (Austria) personal income of 32,076 to 62,080 is taxed at 42% rate above 60k is taxed with 50%. And this does not include social and health insurance that is mandatory...
To give you TLDR of the European experience, you look at the gross salary, multiply by 0.45 and this is the real money you would see landing in your account, .. enjoy .. :)
Have you ever spoken to a (non-white) refugee in Europe?
> Do you worry about access to high quality Healthcare?
I don't have private healthcare. Unless you're very rich most people in the UK just put up with the NHS. I'm young and healthy though so almost never need it anyway. In general I don't think any worries about access to healthcare here.
> Overall, do you think being in the UK makes you less worried that a layoff will leave you broke and homeless?
I'll give you a long answer to this because social mobility and the affordability of homes is something I care deeply about and apparently have a controversial opinion on... But the TL;DR would be that I'm more worried about being broke, but less about being homeless than someone in a similar situation to myself living in the US.
Now the long answer...
The UK is weird in that if you're from a background like mine and you want a decent life (a home and family) you're generally better off not working. With the exception of myself the only people I know from my childhood who have their own homes are those without jobs and on benefits. I don't believe this is the same in the US.
In the UK if you work you're unlikely to be able to afford your own home unless you have fairly wealthy parents who can give you money, or a very good job – and if you're from a council estate you're almost guaranteed to have neither.
So I'm not worried about being homeless because the state will give me a home, but I often feel I'm in an impossible situation in terms of moving up the economic ladder via employment. Imo there's no real wealth mobility in the UK because we're taxed so aggressively and progressively on income. In effect the more you try to earn to not be poor the more the state will hold you back to ensure that never happens, but if you're super wealthy already then you're not taxed a penny on what you have while the poor will pay for your public services and pension via income tax and various consumption taxes.
The end result is that it means the best way to be wealthy in the UK is simply to inherit it (in ways that avoid inheritance tax, obviously). Although I would acknowledge starting a business is another viable option as that way you don't need to worry about income tax – but that's obviously not easy and requires a decent amount of luck.
So I think the right answer your question is that it's just different here. If you're poor the state looks after you very well in comparison to the US. I know single mums who have been given £500,000 houses to live in by the state and £30,000 a year to live on (untaxed). But if you're from a background like mine and want to work for a living there isn't a practical path to afford a £500,000 house in your 30s as a single parent – not to mention the luxury of not having to work a single day of your life for that lifestyle.
Speaking purely from a personal perspective, I would I'd feel much more financially secure in the US because the tax system is fairer there. My understand is that in the US you're taxed less for trying to build wealth and I don't believe you have consumption taxes. I think this is generally why people who work hard in the US can end up wealthy, but in the UK similar things don't really happen.
But I would point out that most people in the UK disagree with me on this. Those who claim to care about social mobility the most here are generally the loudest advocates for even higher levels of income tax.
If you’re not working, sure there are some state benefits but to assume that life on benefits is some sort of ‘easy ride’ is nonsense. Your quality of life will be poor, there will barely be enough money to heat and eat and your “house” will most often be a poor quality council flat. Some accommodation is so bad there have been deaths caused by mould.
It sounds like you may have developed a skewed view of the situation perhaps due to your personal experiences. You should read up on some of the myths about benefits at this website:
https://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/exposing-benefit-‘myths’
Income tax rates for the highest earners are relatively low in the UK compared to other European nations. Denmark has the highest personal income tax rate, at 56%, compared to 45% in the UK.
I do agree there is a problem with inherited wealth in the UK though. Money makes money.
But on your overall point — nope. For the vast majority of people in the UK, all the stats evidence that your life is likely to be way more pleasant if you’re earning.
Here's a real world example for you – my sister is a single mum with no qualifications. Were she to get a job and work her ass off the most she'll realistically make is about £20,000. Some of this will be taxed and she'll no longer receive state benefits. But if you're a single mum on benefits you make around £2,000 a month tax free and have housing provided. The fact you think she can work to afford a house and a better quality of life than this is almost laughable.
But to your point if you're a median earner, say someone who's middle class and you work your ass off, then yes, you'll probably make a bit more – maybe £28,000. But keep in mind you'll have to work every day of your life and struggle for that privilege.
Point is the statistics suggest something that isn't true – that most poor people in the UK are better off working.
To give another example, my girlfriend's mum is a single mum of 5 children. Last year she decided she wanted a part time job because she's getting bored sitting around doing drugs and drinking all day (this is actually what she said). My girlfriend was obviously really happy about this and went with her to the job centre to help her find work for the first time in her life. But guess what happen? The job centre advised her not to get a job because she would be financially worse off for doing so. Unlike the link you provided this isn't some hypothetical calculation based on median UK salaries verse some hypothetical entitlement to state benefits, is a real example of what happens when you're poor. And I could cite you more examples like this from real families I know. So I respectfully I don't think you know what you're talking about here.
And I'm sorry if I'm coming off as defensive, but I need you to understand I feel people like yourself are in part responsible for the crap I have to deal with on daily basis. This single mum I'm citing just this week went to hospital for liver failure. Had she got a job last year this probably wouldn't be happening. And almost all of the kids in my family end up on drugs, in prison or in gangs. In my opinion this is largely because they have no reason to work. It's fucking hard watching people you love in pain constantly and encouraged to fuck their lives up by the state.
I know I won't change your opinion, but I guess just question some of what you read and ask if the statistics are painting a representative picture. Maybe ask why so many people aren't getting jobs and choosing to live on benefits if what you're saying is correct – do you think they're just too stupid to understand that working would be better or something?
But you see, every time without fail I try to have this conversation someone like yourself pops up citing me stats trying to disprove things which I have direct experience with and it's frustrating because I just don't think this this can be resolved until more people suffer and understand what's happening to poor families.
Anyway, to be clear, because I wasn't in my last comment, I actually don't think benefits are generous enough, which might surprise you? The problem we have in the UK is that the majority of our tax gets allocated to boomers in one way or another, mostly via the NHS and pensions. Boomers as the wealthiest generation shouldn't be the largest beneficiary of state support at the cost of young workers. What we should do is keep all of the support currently offered but stop making that dependent on not having a job. What should be conditional is benefits like pensions and free healthcare to those with wealth (not income). Tax should be more dependant on wealth and not income. This would allow those trying to build wealth an easier path to do so while also taxing those with the most, not just those earning a lot but poor because they're single parents and need to pay for a house and two kids.
To your point on UK income tax rates being low relative to other European countries, I believe what I'm describing is a problem elsewhere in Europe too.
> For the vast majority of people in the UK, all the stats evidence that your life is likely to be way more pleasant if you’re earning.
I agree, but we're not all middle class.
Your experience is your experience, all I can say is mine is different and almost certainly less relevant to this thread.
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/benefits/help-if-on-a-low-...
The single parent on 30k presumably is either disabled or has a disabled child?
Good luck with it
- high guaranteed severance (~3-5 months of salary), then benefits that quickly decrease from pretty good to rather bad for 1.5 years;
- lower severance (1-2 months of salary), then high benefits for one year (nearly full pay), then low benefits for a few months.
In either case, you get ~1 year of the same health care coverage as you had before layoff, then you get downgraded to cheap health care coverage.
Still highly stressful, though.
The macro environment looks to be improving, and companies are mostly doing this to put downward pressures on salaries or because they overzealously hired during the pandemic. There are lots of things being built right now that need to be scaled.
I hope this doesn't come off tonally bad - I'm able to contract to hire a few (3-5) folks. I'm building an at-home Hollywood studio, and I'm looking for remote engineers with the following skills:
- Rust/Actix for backend, web services (and a real time desktop app we've yet to launch). This is my #1 need.
- Unreal Engine engineers, preferably with animation and C++ experience. This will help us tremendously. Longer term we'd like to explore Godot, but that's less immediate - more Q3/4.
- ML, especially with generative media experience. We've got a good sized team, but we're always looking to expand it. Experience with audio, images, LLMs/NLP, video a plus.
I'm financing this myself, and we have considerable runway financed from my last exit. There will be equity and full time offers extended if you're interested in sticking with us.
EDIT: I got 18 years of experience, web full stack (react/vue/golang/rails/C#/haskell) + devops, if that matters.
Are there companies paying for ICs in that range?
EDIT: Also the market moved quite a bit recently. A few years ago I wouldn't see this salary range at all. Also notice I'm getting old... Due to my experience/resumé I was also headhunted for principal and CTO positions, so there's that.
Which is kinda interesting because years ago I noticed some resistance from companies in hiring Senior/Principal/Staff in languages other than their main.
I think the entire hiring/search process is so broken. Different applications, formats. Don't get me started on having to fill out sections in a form that are just resume sections (work experience, schools etc.).
Going across big VC firm portfolio openings also super fragmented. It's opened my eyes to how awful the process of hiring is from both sides.
Doing consulting/contract work, advisory, and side projects as I hang on cofounder matching and apply to jobs on workatastartup, wellfound, and linkedin. Pretty dismal job search process.
I haven't been laid off but I've been dipping my toe in the past few months because I'm a bit bored in my current role.
The process is much more fiddly than it needs to be. When I run into those 'fill this out again for our system' forms, often times it's after a long day and I will just save it to come back to it later...and I never do.
I wonder how much talent mobility there'd be if someone really solved the issues of repetative job search data entry and just proving to strangers that you can excel in a role without running through an obstacle course that may or may not represent the actual job.
If you can't trust that somebody who has 10+ years of experience as an engineer at a FAANG company is competent, then that says something bad about social proof and confidence.
Two sided marketplace recruiting company is unfortunately entering such a crowded market. The other thing is so many different roles and industries have nuanced ways of hiring. Finance vs tech/startups is wildly different.
10 applications, 2 rejections, 1 initial phone screen
Anecdotally I see very few junior/low level positions open, most jobs seem to be senior+. Salary ranges are all a bit higher than I remember them being 3 years ago. I am still a long way from being scared enough to take something I don't like or that doesn't pay well, still optimistic things will swing back eventually.
i quit/retired about 4 years ago and often wonder if i applied places how much it would be held against me wanting to have control over my life like that.
Who would hire an employee they can't fully own.
Many recruiter pings/week, but mostly not great fits (they glom onto a keyword that doesn't mean what they think it does) and often it's easy to tell that several emails from different recruiters are for the same exact job. Hardware verification and FPGA seems to be in great demand, but it's been too many years since I worked in that space so I don't feel like my experience would still be relevant for those.
Talked to a recruiter today who said things are starting to slow down on his end - not getting as many jobs to recruit for. This is to be expected, I think.
So far it's pretty easy to make my 5 contacts/week as required by the unemployment dept.
Is that standard?
The market is pretty rough. I had a lot of good interviews fizzle out into rejections after the final round. I assume this is because I was competing with several other recently laid off engineers. My new salary is 33% less than my previous and I’m getting much less equity. It sucks but I’m happy to be employed.
(this is all presuming the profession isn't in the process of downgrading to a trade level as a result of constant pressure to remove humans from high value work)
Applied to a couple positions ~5-6 and got a couple automated rejections, no interviews or initial calls through this process. I think not having a degree makes it difficult to get past the initial screening
About 2-3 recruiter messages per day on linkedin. I responded to around 10 or so, of which 7 I had initial interviews with the company after my resume was passed up. Had 2 rejections and 3 offers, only 1 of which was under my current salary. I interviewed for mostly 100% remote, I think only 1 company of the ones I was looking at required 2-3 days in office
I'm focusing on my SaaS project, and trying to market myself outside the box instead of the old resume as my 16 years long career doesn't seem to impress anyone. Sorry, I will not elaborate further as you're all my competition here.
The FAANGs gobbled up so much talent just to deny it to their competition that it sucked all the oxygen out of the industry and now that the people are available there’s still companies desperate to hire even with the higher cost of capital and inflation
How are you still here? I thought you had 30 days to leave, abandoning all of your properties indefinitely.
But it's good that you know this about yourself and can hopefully formulate an actionable path to improvement!
Tip: There is always someone better at X than you are.
My experience so far is that most companies who seem to be hiring for these types of roles aren't actually hiring. Some of the positions I saw last year in June are still listed on careers pages, some applications are met with an instant auto-decline (maybe gathering resumes?), some companies have swapped hiring managers mid-interview process, others seem to burn through one idiot recruiter after the next. I don't think most companies know what they need when they hire for "customer experience" or "customer success", so roles and job descriptions are poorly defined and the business need is unclear, but that's a discussion for another day.
The current market doesn't have a lot of opportunities for the post-sales customer facing crowd. I've toyed with the idea of a highly curated job board that is specifically for this group.
It's hard for me to understand recruiters "fishing in the neighbor's pond" while there are plenty of unemployed, qualified senior devs out there right now.
Laid off in August, new job by end of September. That being said, it was much tougher than other times, and I have 10+ years experience in data science (which most candidates in this field won't have). I also interview well, which helped a lot.
This round of layoffs seems different. If big tech isn't hiring, and they're the only ones wise enough to see through the stigma, that is a possible explanation for why.
Or how about the time a clueless recruiter asked DHH how many years of Rails experience he had and he replied "all of them."
I have seen people out of FAANGs with 10+ years of experience sharing their CV after being laid off and some will struggle to get any interview, let alone get a good job, just because the format of said CV was absolutely awful.
If you aren't getting interviews, it's your CV that is the problem.
You are selling your time.
If you have money, find a career coach with a big network.
But I do consulting for platform engineering and site reliability engineering. I haven’t had problems paying the bills over the past ~year.
If I decided to jump ship now and join a financial company in which I can guarantee quick offer due to networking I feel I'm risking exactly that.
It feels like a wave, if you jump to another industry you may risk to catch the wave when it comes. Specifically financial seems to just start now?
But seriously now: this only goes to show how those layoffs are about companies fucking up, rather than about people. Laying off people who just got hired is amateur hour.
I got my first fulltime job ever in 2019, got laid off in 2021, and had no issue getting interviews and finally landing another job. In 2021 the process was surprisingly easy, fast and without much input from my end. I never really did leetcode exercises, so it was quite a shock to find so many companies do them.
I have seen weird verbiage for remote work at big companies where they post a senior level job description with an amazing shopping list of requirements and nice-to-haves but its a "junior developer" job title and pay. Which is an interesting way to handle wage deflation. Sometimes the desired shopping list of technologies is so immense I can't imagine what the role would be doing day to day, the entire technology stack at a small startup is possible but the entire technology stack at a huge multinational is, well, very huge!
As such I've pretty much stopped trying for remote. Maybe the market will be better later.
edit: this is rapidly becoming an interview about my job search and I don't really have the energy for it. I've answered the questions I feel like answering and I'm good for now.
That being said, I have a similar profile to you and I've been getting nearly no messages from recruiters even if I'm open to on-site work. The market's just difficult right now, keep looking!
Why do you think you're not getting responses?
A lot of reasons that should be reassuring to most of the rest of you don't worry I'm sure everything will be fine :)
I had multiple concurrent interview tracks start pretty quickly, and ended up with 5 competing offers. I was lucky to be able to tolerate that many interviews, and it worked out for me. Though I think I disappointed some employers by being honest about how many I had going concurrently.
I moved back to hands-on work as well, which has been really nice.
I've reached out to my network and found some success there but I've also been shotgunning out applications on LinkedIn to any "close-enough" remote role that had easy apply (I'm saving a ton of time on resume customization and cover letter bullshitting). That's resulted in a lot of rejections which is demoralizing - but it's a numbers game at this point.
No new job yet - but definitely some good responses and intro calls after only 2 weeks of searching.
(Background - 10 years experience/full stack and marketing/college drop out/LA)
I am building a product that improves job search compared to the current offerings.
May I ask you a couple of questions about how your job search has changed and what would improve it even more?
My compensation dropped by 30-40%, but I figured if I'll probably spend more than 30% of the year waiting for an offer close to what had before. Considering my poor interview performance, I did not want to compete with a glut of engineers I had a hunch would be let go in the new year (which turned out correct).
I registered a Delaware LLC for $200, my current job is not as remotely challenging as my FAANG job so I have plenty of mental energy at the end of my 8-hour(!) work day, even when I go out of my way to add tasks outside of my duties. I just haven't thought up a lifestyle-business idea to run with.
It is aspirational, but I needed to take the step for self-accountability and self-motivation
Honestly, I don't see anything changed that much here. I got hired during this downtrend from an US-based company and, although some slightly more pessimistic speeches from CEO, everything seems just fine. Hires have been slowed down, but not really freezed.
As other mentioned, it seems harder for people who just graduated to enter their first job. But actually, the companies that were used to hire young people (e.g. my first company, 'cause they like cheap workforce, or many consultancies since they just always need fresh workers), are continuing to get them. Their trick is just to pay the same salaries as before: inflation-free!
I'd be curious to know how self-employed workers are doing instead. From one side, the risk should be higher for them, on the other side they should be preferred from companies to compensate for hiring freeze while still pushing on projects, right? I'm seriously thinking about making the switch, as this industry downturn has also brought a new sense of awareness in workers, and thus in me too...
It reminds me of 2008. I switched during the covid boom expecting the obvious crash after governments run out of excuses
Recruiter outreach has dried up significantly on LinkedIn, so I'm not sure this is still valid, even though it was <2 months ago.
Reply me the post and I'll upvote it
That being said, I've just redesigned my hired.com profile, we'll see if that helps.
My deepest sympathies to anyone else facing this process right now. Even in a reasonably healthy (if not wildly overheated) hiring market, facing a layoff sucks. Best wishes to everyone out there.
There's a definite hiring slowdown due to current market circumstances and the fact that "Senior" really doesn't mean what it used to, so there's a lot more competition for those roles now.
I'm guessing it will be less bad 2nd quarter, but prolly not back to, erm, "normal".
I wrote a book, and I don't think it's especially good, but I've gotten a lot of respect for having published it because people think it's hard.
What do you mean by "Senior" changing meaning?
So now a lot of people that have experience sort into the bucket of Senior.
Good luck to everyone else.
Much different than it was a few years ago. I had a response rate of about 60% and had multiple interviews each week. Now I would say my response rate is about 10% at the moment.
https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r...
Not sure if it's because of all these layoffs or just yearly budgets haven't been done yet. (I'm generally looking for react/nodejs/rest/graphql type 1099 roles).
email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)
This year, I have 4 promising leads, each of them having at least 4 interviews.
I'm sorry for the ill-minded advice you got, but not everyone in tech is an asshole.
By definition a very small minority has Ivy-league, trust fund-brat backgrounds. There are people from all walks of life, many like yours, and not few that would think _you_ are spoiled and entitled - I've seen developers from Gaza posting on HN, for instance. Give that a thought before wishing suffering for all.
But the evidence says otherwise. Broken hiring, big egos, bad software. This field is a mess and the people made it like this.