Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge
wired.com
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I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool.
Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before.
Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings
It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
I see a correlation with development positions. There is just too many candidates for junior positions, but if you're a company trying to hire senior, principal or leadership your chance of success without a recruiter is very slim.
The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.
Also what matters? Artful descriptions of past positions? Activity on timeline? Upvotes on skills? Links to projects?
Now, there's no way to know for sure that keeping linkedin fresh actually helps. Also it was a special time where I had just finished an online masters in CS and I was really on a roll so I was taking a bunch of MOOCs afterwards as well. IMO keeping my linkedin updated with a degree in CS and mooc certificates helped. Normal day to day stuff I wouldn't update linkedin for.
For me, I was mostly looking for more detail on a candidate’s experience. Links to projects were good. I didn’t consciously look at anything else, but I’ll admit that I probably regarded more complete profiles better.
I would also check out candidate’s personal sites. Decent content (even not up to date) was generally a big bonus.
In terms of prior experience, I simply state what I achieved at each role in a bullet list. Nothing fancy. My university education is a list of all the modules I took.
Forget the "social media gamifying" side of it. Likes and posts don't matter if your goal is just getting offers. Keeping the profile current, and have your skills section up to date as recruiters use that to filter applicants. Block any recruiters that send you insultingly low-ball offers. Connect with those that provide value.
Although some of them are also good, and might help you to at least skip directly to the interview on site.
Having detailed job descriptions with rich detail as to what you did and a good number of connections in the industry you’re looking in is what drives the algo
My profile at that time probably hadn't been touched in about 5-6 years. After talking with her I cleaned it up a bit, but it's nothing more than a basic resume and a list of past positions going back about 10 years. IME, all they care about is that you provide enough context that they can compare against the openings they have. The "extra" skills, projects, etc., can come out when you have a pre-interview discussion.
I've been in industry 30 years and every position except my first has been through a recruiter. They're good at this (some of them anyway): make them do the hard work.
TL;DR don't bother with all that recruiter spam and general engagement tactics for yet another data hoarding, privacy violating "social network". If you are doing a good job and keep investing in yourself there will always be good jobs in this industry.
Build Trust and Carry On
The higher up on the career ladder you are, the better this works and more important it is if you’re not getting in via recruiter.
That doesn't mean they get 200 highly qualified candidates ;)
In my experience, before you would get 150 applicants and not a single one qualified for the job (could actually program or have any relevant experience). Now you get 3 qualified ones and 200 applicants.
Some companies (not many) are still recruiting, and there's now a massive amount of laid off people fighting for those jobs. Just because some recruited spammed you doesn't mean it would have been easy to get an offer...
A few of those jobs might even really exist!
I am of the opinion that the vast majority of inquiries I get from linked in (at least 5 a week) are from scammers and brand-new or desperate recruiters just looking to collect resumes to add to their database. I pretty much ignore all linkedin inquiries at this point - it has been taken over by scammer and hucksters.
Whether one likes musk or not, and whether or not you agree with how he is running twitter or not - he let go like 80% of the company and it is still more or less running (with some bumps) - I don't think other companies will go to quite that extreme, but I'd bank that some executives right now in some companies are asking themselves "can we at least cut 33% of the staff and still keep things (more or less) running"?
https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valua...
It's easily a full time job.
Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.
1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal
The industry has perpetuated the lie that stem means employment, so now we have a surplus of workers in an economic downturn, they're competing for the jobs because there is less capitol to create them.
When the market goes down the corps pull back. All the taxes we pay in infra and education are not returned by them.
It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.
Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box.
Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale.
I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup.
[0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less?
A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing.
If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.
The bigger question mark than the money, I think, is whether this scale up approach actually works, or whether you end up fundamentally changing everything anyway. In my experience it's a mixed bag. There are some advantages, but it also isn't a panacea, and certainly isn't as easy as turning that dynos knob on heroku was. But at the end of the day, I land on it being worth it for a business (though not for a hobby). But it isn't a no-brainer.
Here’s what you’ll need to setup and run a single database :-
- Installation script and infra provisioning. You need a repeatable way to do this with as little manual intervention as possible and I can swear it never just works.
- Backup and recovery scripts and associated monitoring
- Replication setup, monitoring and debugging. It will break often.
- Monitoring for infra - CPU, memory, network. There’ll be unforeseen spikes and random slow downs and a whole bunch of slow queries you’ll debug on a regular basis.
- Security - users, permissions, auditing. Both machine and database. Regular password rotation and firewall rules. Ability to off-board users.
- If you survive all this, being able to scale up. And I mean just vertical scale up will take you far but you cross that limit, you now suddenly have to deal with sharding or partitioning.
So when I joined a new startup and we were building it all from scratch it was a very easy decision to go with the cloud. We spent $3500 a month. Not a lot but nothing compared to the salaries and marketing spend.
The underlying point I made that is being ignored is that 99.9% of start ups never need any of the stuff you are talking about. And hundreds of dollars a month is a large amount of money for them.
And when your product does take off, scaling is often trivial.
I consider the latter to be far more complex.
Thanks for sharing that.
> object storage
Is this like S3 or more like DynamoDB, or something else?
Like, I assume I'm the one missing something because people swear up and down that it's the other way around, but I haven't found the happy path for managing hosts (virtual or physical) that delivers on the promise of simpler-than-cloud. There's a disconnect somewhere because I'm sure there are a lot of people who can't find the happy cloud path that delivers on the simpler-than-diy approach.
This is where I feel like I'm doing stuff wrong. If we're comparing Terraform, it means we probably care about reproducibility (rather than an "AWS console vs SSH into pet hosts" scenario), so the like-for-like comparison involves bringing in something like Ansible. On top of that, you need to pick, install, and configure logging exfiltrators, monitoring agents, process managers, etc and you need to operate systems that let you explore those logs and metrics. You also need to configure SSH access and manage keys. You may also need a custom base image, so maybe you're doing packer stuff as well? On top of that, you need to run some database which means managing backups and running replicas with failover (or maybe we/re a small business and we don't care that much about reliability?). And again, we care about reproducibility, so we need to encode all of this stuff in Ansible playbooks or similar. You probably also need something like security groups to restrict which things are allowed to talk to which other things, and encoding this in Ansible or similar is maybe impossible if you don't have software-defined-networks.
It seems like a lot to get to parity with what someone could throw together with API Gateway, Lambda, S3/DynamoDB in a couple reasonably-sized Terraform files in a few hours for a pretty marginal cloud spend (most small businesses would probably stay pretty close to the free tier--these services are extremely inexpensive).
I think one place that I disagree is while you could do that in a few hours, your average developer couldn’t. You’re now talking about everyone to learn lambda and terraform and whatnot, whereas with a “standard” web server, that people are familiar with, a lot of that is more easily centralized. just throw some annotations and routes are done, vs the arcane api gateway config. The tools and frameworks for lambda just didn’t seem to be there yet.
Fwiw I’m all in on aws, cost was one of the easiest arguments to deflect. Ultimately we needed to show developer velocity increases as that’s the cost that mattered. And security isn’t compromised, which the bigger the company the more roadblocks I’ve seen to just give devs terraform.
Yeah, big companies don’t like giving devs raw Terraform. My company has sandbox environments where devs can do iteration with permissive Terraform access. That works pretty well for stuff like this.
Also, I use AWS for hobbyist stuff and you can easily use this serverless stack for <$5/month.
This is because I have to factor all the costs. This includes electricity, maintenance, incident response, networking, renting the cage, vendored software for backups, threat detection, fire suppression, equipment upgrades, licensing, alerting, and it goes on and on and on...
I'd challenge you to break down the full cost of owning a server as you see it. I bet you will miss 75% of the actual costs involved. I promise short of seizing a colo like its Nakatomi Plaza and running it at gunpoint you will never in a million years come close to the total ownership cost of cloud instance. You can't compete with the economies of scale and the caliber of the engineering.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but it’s interesting that your experiences are so different. Would love to hear your take on their numbers.
The most recent article, with lots of hard numbers, is here:
https://dev.37signals.com/our-cloud-spend-in-2022/
There was a recent article that made the HN in front page that broke down the savings they expected, but I’m on mobile and can’t find it now. Something about “two datacenter racks.”
I don't understand how they are going to achieve that. Does it include routers, switches, IPS's? What about the costs associated with having a physically wired network instead of a software defined network.
Also they state they are region redundant which is probably way overboard. Will they be protected if they lose their entire datacenter? Will they flop over to another geo? If not then you must consider not their current spend but their spend if they were single region. That would further eat into proposed savings.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe you can achieve cost parity in a Datacenter but you need a certain level of scale. I am skeptical that it can be done at $3 million in spend.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-stand-to-save-7m-over-five-year...
Yep read that guys blog history and the agenda just pops right out. It's not just about cost for Basecamp its ideological. I can't help but imagine this bias leaks into the financial and operational calculations.
We had a similar situation. We had a team did not want to move to the cloud, the business forced them, so they built the system in a way that fought the cloud. Then the self fulfilling prophecy kicked into high gear. "See we told you it was a bad idea, look at all the problems we have!". The problems were created through half baked attempts to be "agnostic" to the cloud. Once we removed those elements we were able to reduce the cost of the system by over 90%. It was far cheaper than when it was running in the Colo. These folks had no interest in optimizing for cloud native execution they were already planning their move back into the Colo.
And even right now today, ChatGPT regularly displays "too busy" messages.
i.e. this is absolute tosh.
And if you know what you're doing you can take something down overnight and put it on a dedicated server.
ChatGPT scaled from 0 users to 100 million in 2 months. Probably millions online at any given second.
Its too busy, because it literally exhausted all the GPUs Azure has as its disposal.
Without the Cloud, scaling ChatGPT would have been impossible. It would have been nowhere near its current success. Remember that GPT3 was released to the public in Mid 2022, had no public reaction, because it was put behind a paywall. ChatGPT had to be free, and able to cope with the load, to be successful.
Therefore, it did not have to be able to cope with the load to be successful.
All you did is illustrate my point.
Having an old school style IT structure was a pain. Maintaining your severs, networking gear if needed, OS updates ... on and on.
For very small teams (maybe not the well funded start ups) that could eat a lot of time and trouble.
It’s true that it would take a couple weeks to order all the hardware and a couple more to install and configure it, but that’s about the same amount of time you spend writing all the terraform and Kubernetes scripts and configuring cloudformation and VPCs and IAMs.
The second statement does not follow from the first.
What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all the noise and reaching millions of users is now arguably harder than it was previously.
On the other hand if by 'reach' you mean actually getting someone's physical and mental attention, then it can be harder than ever. Your message gets filtered out or swallowed up in the sea of other messages and ignored either by technology or by the users themselves.
It is like those pictures of NY Times Square (or any corner in Asia) where you have 10,000 billboards of all shapes and sizes all flashing some marketing message. It is easier than ever to buy a few seconds or minutes of ad time on one of them. It is harder than ever to get the passing crowd to take notice of your message when it is drowned out by all the others.
For the anecdote, i know someone that was let go by IBM and hire by RedHat the same month two years ago.
Yes and wages were outpacing that growth, so as soon as someone took the first step, all the big tech companies piled on in short order. And, low and beyond, offers appear to be down right now. Mission accomplished?
COVID era was a hiring boom. Most of the companies I saw doing layoffs still have significantly larger employment numbers than pre-COVID.
It took Google 6 years from 2012 to double headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $50B to $136B (almost triple). Profit from $10.7B to $30.7B (triple).
In 4 years from 2018 to 2022, Google more than doubled headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $136B to $279B (barely double). Profit from $30.7B to $50.9B (only up 65%).
Almost all these companies have similar stories.
They're still good companies. They just hired way too many people thinking that the pandemic trend would continue for a long period of time - rather than revert to the mean.
If Google continue to grow at it's more long-term average rate - without the layoffs, you're looking at being overstaffed for years.
Why?
A rule of thumb is at any organization roughly square root of employees are critical. So at Google that number would be < 500 people. So even when I consider that layoffs are totally random (unlikely), there would be 40 or so people laid off which could be considered important loss. This is bad but not going to hamper Google significantly where they are going.
In some cases, the layoffs were targeted at particular areas of the company, like Amazon targeting their devices group. If they don't anticipate growth in that area, it may not be worth it (to management, anyways) to reallocate those employees to other parts of the company.
All that being said, these things tend to be driven by short-term financial metrics rather than long-term ones. A hiring freeze wouldn't have as dramatic an impact on next quarter's earnings.
In the most recent quarter, Google’s profit was down 34% and it was the fourth consecutive quarter with decrease in profits. How many quarters do you think they should wait out before trying to stem the tide of costs outpacing revenues?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/technology/alphabet-earni...
Not even close.
Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.
People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.
In this way I think it's very similar to the web and then mobile booms
Look at websites like CivitAI. Its literally just a front-end + a S3 bucket backend that allows people to share and download large stable-diffusion models (100MB-8GB).
The website founder was not an AI guy, he was a web-dev background and former founder. The website is already a huge success, forcing the incumbent (Huggingface, backed by Amazon) to try and hurriedly copy its features.
The tech and business mindset of 15 years ago is remarkably similar to that of 15 years before that, and 15 years before that, even.
Businesses need technical functionality that enables the core mission of the company, and they need accurate operational insights.
This means "boring" technology. It means reliable systems and processes. It means accurate reports who's methodology can be understood clearly.
I prefer to solve real problems with boring technology, than to solve imaginary problems with exciting technology.
Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).
Honestly, I have a few startup ideas I’d love to try, but this cycle has not put me in a place to try them.
However one thing that only a few people are discussing is that the current compensation model for start/scaleups needs some rethinking.
In my previous demographic, you used to go to startups knowing that of could fail in 12 months, but would be a great intense professional and learning work experience. And eventually you could have some stocks that if you survive 4+ years you could sell it to the company or coming investors in liquidity events.
If case of company bankruptcy, after 1 or 2 months you could be back in the game.
Fast forward for today, going to some startups in my new demographic most of them does not offer some stock upside for employees, and the ones that offer some of them always have this “carrot-stock-game”. No liquidity events, sometimes 7 or even 9 years as a startup, tons of mind games like “the IPO will be <current year + 3> to create a sense of urgency on people, companies with series F,G,H where high ego founders wants to “ring the bell” at NYSE instead to sell to a PE and give an exit for employees, and de list goes on.
In my opinion one unattended consequence of that is that people are going to consider startups only as a paid learning bridge to get a job at bigger companies.
We built this https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro
Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.
Sounds like you were successful without giving up 7+% of your company.
> Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
Btw sorry for your issues with the product. We were a small team, we raised $2m in 2019, but didn't launch that product until 2021. We just didn't have enough time to execute on it effectively.
Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.
Senior dev != big tech
What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months?
Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself and a few other people.
Realistically, if you're starting a startup and not currently working, plan on having at least 12 months of expenses saved (not a few months).
A few months is 2. For the sake of this hypothetical let’s say it’s 3.
You’re saying that someone can build a product that’s capable of having investor level revenue within a few months? Or not even revenue, but more than 5 companies using it? This one person is not only building a fully functioning software product that’s capable of being useful to companies, but also doing high levels of networking to find those customers and users. They’re doing this all within 3 months? I just don’t see how that’s possible. The fastest moving early stage teams I’ve ever seen have gone to market in no less than 4 months, and that was with multiple people working on the problem.
I think at a minimum you can expect it to take 6 months if you’re going at it alone. Certainly less if you have other co-founders.
Long story short, you can start sooner than quitting with research, prototyping. The key is to get the scope right.
But I agree that "few" has a different meaning for us. I did suffer with sales, but that's another story.
A startup with a good runway (say 2-3 years) and faith from investors is an OK place to be in. And there are many parents in such companies.
It sucks for those laid off, but these big tech companies have had tons of talent effectively locked up for years.
Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.
dm if you want to hire an ex-Google linguist-engineer with search ranking experience
Im currently working on something like this. Yes it’s boring but it does have potential. you’re exact opinion is why I’m having a hard time looking for a cofounder!
In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, being bored being a crucial part of this.
In the market I'm seeing things that fail common sense checks. AI powered X that is trying to 'solve' things that we barely have a grip on as humans, assemblages of startups that exist solely to manage self created problems, and a whole host of deathcult crypto stuff. Even the progenitors seem to not buy into the stuff they pitch; the zeal, to me, is often just an affectation ("we're going to completely revolutionize..."), maybe the charm is wearing off as decades of consumption and greed are slowly deflating our collective ego.
Anyways how are you faring?
As is probably apparent, I’ve been dealing with depression for years. Despite the description, things are better lately but I’m still having a hard time finding an identity beyond what was wrapped up in work over the last decade.
Anyway, probably more than you asked for! I’ve always had a passion for 3d and gaming, and I feel like there’s some opportunity out there related to this that’d be perfect for me, but I can’t get around the exploitative nature of the industry. I’d make my own but wrestle with what I mentioned above: I just can’t find any ideas that I’m excited enough to work on.
Im not working for anyone but myself at this point. I saw a comment on HN along the lines of, I don't need to be maximally efficient because the cause (corporate profits) won't ever justify the means.
Hopefully we both find a way out but I'm beginning to suspect that out in just another way back in, without a drastic reframing I fear I've grown too complacent on the usual. Maybe reading Nagel might help, or maybe Tolstoy :p
I have a few ideas. None are really monetizable, but I want to do them, so I am. Once I get them out of my system I'll probably go back to being an employee.
I think if you are interested in making something, you should make it. If you are interested in making money, then look for a job.
To be even more specific, we found that 19 startups were founded by ex-googlers after the recent layoffs. Even better, 1 in 3 of the ex-Googlers that were laid off, joined startups valued at 15M.
Relevant: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...
For the third of ex-Google employees that went to startups, it's way too early to tell if it's a long term change. What is likely is that those people get ANY job to keep some income and are applying to other positions that are more suitable to their past experience.
I am in a FAANG, and I would definitely do that if I was laid off.
These examples made me laugh because they notably didn't increase scrutiny during the last few years. Otherwise, we wouldn't have more recent examples (FTX, among others).
(Also, if you're looking for it: archive.is slash WE4WH)
People are weird.
The model you are wed to is "one service-provider per niche." Yeah, that requires scaling to an absolutely ridiculous extent.
…but for those of us not in favor of soviet-style centralism, and there are a couple of us, well we'd love hosting providers that can let us serve a sufficiently profitable percentage of the market.
Down with monopolist capitalism and oligopolist communism! All hail the vibrant marketplace!
Sure, if you have TB-scale data it is still doable, but once you reach PB-scale it's better to negotiate an EDP rather than move out.
Ah yes, I’ll just throw a quick script together. Never mind that there are entire consulting firms dedicated to doing exactly this and each of their projects takes months to years and hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
That statement doesn’t make sense. Companies become large (your “megacorp“) because they’re very good at attracting, growing, and applying capital.
As things improve all this money will look for employment.
It's undoubtably a great time for startups to get talent, but startups as we know them today tend to be very hungry for VC money, which is drying up rapidly. I would be very hesitant to join one unless the match was really good.
it's a double whammy
For anybody willing to start their own thing, it's never been easier.
And for anybody else who's smart and wants to do big things, message me.
I think the problem we have is a generation of people in the industry have been convinced hifalutin money making schemes are sustainable business ideas. I'm glad that nonsense has finally past.
The realignment is good for humanity.
I’ll bite. How?
I’m working a startup and would give 50% of my company to an investor just so I could work on this thing full time.
All these layoffs need to play out and have an effect on the economy, most importantly house prices, before things can turn around.
Soft landings are very rare.
Heroku is good example for such time.
Comments like this are why the general public feels like SWEs are stuck up elitist know-it-alls
- Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking
- a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place
- a software design and development studio
If you win the lottery starting a company at the right time, are you really the best mind of the generation or just lucky?
I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing or neither.
But I think the "why didn't I think of that guy" is mostly luck.
Lots of people are smart and work hard and don't really get anywhere.
Those that I knew who went to Google/Amazon/etc. were more diverse personalities: ambitious, interested in hard problems, wanting a good life, etc.
Those going to Facebook though, I'm not sure I can put it in a polite way. Let me just say, in different times and different places I could imagine them joining a certain type of organization.
I have also noticed FBers have a certain kind of personality. Vaguely utopian but removed from reality with a heavy emphasis on hedonism.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”.
Italian philosopher & Minister of Public Education under Mussolini Giovanni Gentile, who was arguably the architect of 1930's Italian fascism.
He was told about the consequences pretty much from day 1. I don't think anyone at Facebook (especially not Zuckerberg) gets to be oblivious.
The CDC study is a lagging indicator; it describes the trendline of a mental health crisis that's self-evident to practitioners. On the research side, there have been many studies in the last 10 years associating Facebook use with poor mental health outcomes.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out 5 years ago.
Smart, Fun and Nice: there are LOTS of people who have all three; don't settle for less!
FAANG unquestionably soaked up a lot of highly intelligent people, and built a lot of clever stuff and solved a lot of challenging technical problems.
To a worthwhile end, maybe not so much.
that's debatable.
Look at all the stuff this generation of workers have built in big tech — the amazing devices in all areas of the market, the progress in electric cars, the massive scale in compute infrastructure that enables most smaller companies to easily spin up entire regions rather than run their own hardware…
We now carry devices in our pockets that put more information at our fingertips than entire civilizations could access throughout all of human history. Mobile payments have enabled entrepreneurial capitalism in impoverished parts of the world. Anywhere we are, we can get a map of our location and directions to anywhere we want to go.
The scale and technology that makes remote work even possible for much of the population didn’t even exist a decade ago. Some pieces existed but they never would have scaled the way we needed them to. If you didn’t lose your job during the pandemic, you ought to be grateful to the major cloud providers for the fact that your video conferencing software was able to function while you and almost everyone else were piling onto it. You should also be grateful there were multiple delivery companies able to bring you groceries and restaurant food when you weren’t allowed to leave the house. I know restaurants are grateful for the delivery services — so many more would have gone out of business if in-person transactions were the only way to sell their product!
Anyone who owned a total market index fund in the past decade has benefitted massively from the success of big tech, including most pension funds, university endowments, and many individuals. The creation of wealth has been enormous in scale and enormously socially beneficial.
The big tech companies have delivered results to our economy like the space program did — most of the technology that smaller companies and startups depend on was developed by big tech and either turned into a line of business open to others (like AWS) or was open sourced (like Kubernetes, most of the major app frameworks, multiple programming languages, distributed consensus, distributed tracing, modern CI/CD…) The industry as a whole would be a lot worse off if that hadn’t happened. So what if some of it was used to sell ads?
The signal to noise ratio needs to be good, or there will be no point to reading the comments.
The number of people working on these is insignificantly irrelevant compared to the number of people working on the bad stuff.
It's good that the people you highlight exist because they maintain my faith in humanity, but for every engineer that worked on Webb, there are a thousand working on privacy-destroying addiction engines.
My employer can't find people to work on space-based synthetic aperture radar that will be used to monitor and potentially combat global climate change through detecting sea level rise, coastal erosion, and foliage cover (and health) because you can make more money working on an app. We can't pay more because we're funded through grants and apps are funded either through VCs or intrusive ad revenue and intrusive ads generate more revenue than university partnerships and piecemeal contracts from various international departments of the environment.
It's ridiculous because I make so much that I am the cause of gentrification, i.e. "Enough".
But it's not as much as an engineer at Facebook.
Even your comment focuses on the financial incentives....
I also mentioned the Renaissance of access to knowledge in our pockets, the way mobile payments help people, the access to maps, the ability of remote work to scale to a large portion of the population...
<new start-ups are all focused on AI art and LLMs that put hundreds of thousands if not millions out of jobs>
HN: "wait, not like that!"
He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place.
So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business?
Or this -
Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking.
From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross.
I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers.
The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address.
So what?
Adam Smith be rolling in his grave!
The dumbest dismissals of business ideas always start with this phrase. Moats aren't like some obvious thing where you pull up a ladder and no one can follow you. Usually just having a slightly better UX (or a UX that people are used to) is enough to be a moat. Users latch onto things they have good experiences with.
Of course, if you want to benefit from anticompetitive business practices (outprice competition, drive them out of business, hike prices), rather than value creation, you need a big pull-up-ladder-type moat, but not every company needs to be Uber/Lyft getting in winner-take-all funding wars.
If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually.
The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.
FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.