TikTok-owner ByteDance planning to layoff thousands in coming months
firstpost.com
firstpost.com
https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1628831860611506178
Makes me wonder how they missed the memo that Meta got by October/November, Google and Amazon also by end of year: that the market is slowing.
I assumed Bytedance had just as good - if not better - data on the market than eg Meta, but Meta seems to have responded far far earlier to what looks like a stagnating market for as spend, than TikTok.
1. layoffs make people desperate and reset the expectations. Eg I made 300k at Google but when unemployed I’ll take a job for 100k at a random company. Then Google can hire back at 200k and be the top salary again.
2. Layoffs make the employees scared of being laid off. They don’t expect raises, just employment. They work harder for less just to keep a job. Look at Amazon announcing most people won’t get a raise or even a stock refresh with the stock crash.
This works at scale even as some individuals and companies don’t comply.
Bonus: layoffs (somewhat) reset the cost basis of the company and save a ton in a long term downturns. It gives cover to kill that blockchain department that everyone realizes they don’t need.
There goes Web 3 (and 2.5). I guess we'll be stuck with sucky Web 2 for a while still, while all the aunties are onboarding.
1. There are a finite number of software engineers capable of competing with FAANG.
2. You outbid outsiders. At times, talk to your friends and tell them not to gum up intra-clique recruiting.
3. This continues for a long time, but at some point, salaries get a little too high.
4. Flush everyone all at once... resetting the baseline of what a tech salary "should be." This resets expectations for all the new talent coming in that might compete with you.
5. After the tech salary "should be" a few tens of thousands less... quietly start (2) again.
If you time it right, (2) happens when money is cheap and it's easy to found a competitor, while (4) happens when there is a "tech downturn" and VC are scared. What a tech salary "should be" is quite sticky, it takes a few years of (2) to actually change baseline expectations.
The existing cultural understanding of what tech workers "should be making" influences: what do the most promising new hires demand? how aggressive are your existing workers in asking for a raises, promos, etc? what do people take as a "given" and what do they think is a reach for them? These things operate as a sort of piggy bank. Every time you outbid a startup for promising talent, you are drawing from the piggy bank; that person tells their friends, makes a post on linkedin about it, which causes subsequent outbiddings to cost, pound for pound, ever so slightly more. When the piggy bank is empty, you refill it again by traumatizing everyone with a big, industry-wide layoff. But: you can only do this if you have a big hammer to wield.
As a bonus, if you can be a little bit discerning in your firings, you actually can shed dead weight in the process.
How long until that? 12 months, 18 months?
If you got fired from your $180k/yr job in 2023 and inflation is another 6% this year (after being 8% last year), you need a $190k/yr job in 2024 to have broken even, right?
> 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action ... Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
had colluded to not hire workers from each other, to suppress salaries. Facebook actually didn't play along, ultimately leading to the decade's compensation explosion.
So while it might seem like active collusion, it's more than likely just emergent game theoretic behavior.
Who was the first person to kick it off? Microsoft? Google? Meta? Meta had a reason because their stock tanked due to Apple's privacy changes or whatever.
I think the economy didn't go as bad as they thought though.
Then we started having news of thousands of layoffs every couple of weeks.
I too wonder how the perception has changed in the meantime - and what the effect of a tech recession/layoffs spree will be on the general economy and real businesses.
So everybody now believes that until it is called as such, everything is fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515267 (407 comments)
Robot voice and pointing at things while making dumb faces or dancing
https://wallaroomedia.com/blog/social-media/tiktok-statistic...
Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.
Data science tends to span both (future product dev and analysis of existing functionality), and data science can be particularly tricky to assign a value to, so not surprised there are also significant cuts there.
Yes
>What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?
They're probably in meetings, while a fraction of their time is actually spent doing work.
2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.
3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.
The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic
https://careers.tiktok.com/position?keywords=android&categor...
Wonder if Android people will be laid off.
Personally I have never been anything but annoyed by the whole concept of the short videos, but my 5 year old daughter likes it. But then again I also get irrationally angry at programming tutorials in video form as opposed to text, so maybe I just don't "get it".
The tech is made to be addictive. You shouldn't let children use such a thing IMO.
Chances are those openings are just bait, permanently there regardless of whether they actually need people.
100%.... most firms will have permanent reqs open just to see if there are outstanding candidates available.
I quite like this article from interviewing.io on the make-up of most layoffs by position based in LinkedIn data: https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
If you look at pure software engineering, it's about 5%. When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.
For companies outside the big techs that are still wildly profitable and sitting on mountains of cash, laying off people is largely about refocusing on actual profitable activity. Keeping engineers around makes sense for them.
For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Still, 5% seems low. How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
Bothering to do a layoff only makes sense if management wants to see the company survive. So, assuming that the only outcomes being targeted are the ones in which the company is still alive, consider the cost of replacing the employee later: at least right now, engineers are more expensive to hire than most other roles[0], so it could cost less overall to lay off HR/recruiting with the expectation that you'll backfill those roles in 9-18 months.
[0] for various reasons; to hire for any given role, you have to source, engage/recruit, interview (which takes up the time of the people on the team they'll join), somehow pick one or more of the candidates, make offers, and then onboard them. These costs are largely the same for any role, except that interviewing engineers costs engineering time (and it's harder to get enough quality candidates in the top of the funnel for engineers than other roles, so you have to spend more HR/recruiter time there).
That's what they want you to assume, that way us engineers feel pressure to fall in line. Welcome to the disinformation era.
Also, tech does have a lot of people on visa compared to other industries, who need to find a job within 60 days of termination or leave the country.
Wouldn't HR and recruiting folks be able to look for work with companies the broader economy?
Hardest hit positions are "tech adjacent".
> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Twitter was an example of that, but it was massively overblown by the media due to the company profile (and the identity of the buyer!).
Companies trimming senior talent are also slowing down the pace at which they can ship new features and products. That's ok short term, but longer terms, those that will be able to secure funding to keep their engineering will get ahead.
> How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
How many serious applications?
This has always been the case.
The engineers that were axed were in business units that focused on unprofitable products, and couldn't or wouldn't relocate to other engineering teams in the company. Think Amazon's devices unit. Even then, the they were mostly kept around, and administrative roles were the first to go.
It sounds a little callous but the way I make the distinction is working _in_ tech vs working _on_ tech.
There is bloat, of course, but there is also a reason why those tech-adjacent positions exist.
Why is that? Does iOS present similar hiring challenges?
I would actually argue the opposite. Any techie that loves to tinker on things will probably prefer an andriod phone over an apple one.
Then there is fragmentation, availability of $50 devices that guaranteed to have issues with your app.
IMO iOS development is very pleasant (if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing) and Android isn't pleasant at all. Combine that with companies not caring about android apps... All of that contributes to a smaller number of good developers available.
I hear that, though fastlane [0] makes like 1000x easier. Now my first step for any app is setting up a fastlane job to run Github Actions. My goal is to be able to push code and have an app show up in TestFlight without me ever needing to manually manage that. I can even make "blind" changes to the code and push it which is nice for old codebases or when I'm not on my main laptop but have access to my code.
Then there's the develop loop where the Android emulator is terrible, and the iOS simulator is great. So Android development meant constantly futzing with a device, which you really only want to have to do when you're ready really test.
[1] Games may be different since the game UI is often the same across platforms.
I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.
That's about 40% of GOOG - which prints $60B per year. TikTok makes nothing.
It's only growing revenues at 53%, and they're massively decelerating.
It's going to be hard to IPO for anything near that without ZIRP when they don't have profits and their growth rates are declining...
Easiest way to make the numbers look better for IPO is fire half the employees and make the other half work 3x as much.
Alphabets revenue in 2022 was $280B, with ~$60B profits.
ByteDance info is harder to find, but in 2021 it was ~$60B revenue, with $7B loss. [1]
Other sources say they have around 150k employees. With 10k laid off, that would indeed be about 7%
i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
> i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
It's arguably a regional/dialect distinction. Here "layoffs" is being treated as a collective noun, similar to how people say "the data is" instead of "the data are". Notice how people usually say "layoffs" when referring to the entire round.
English has less dialectal variation than most languages, so English speakers (particularly educated British or American speakers) aren't used to seeing it, but collectivization of nouns is one of the more common ones to spot. If you pay attention, you'll start seeing other examples here and there.
I can't think of a collective noun that ends in S that I would follow with "is".
Rules are dialect-dependent, though (or a better way to frame it: "rules" are observations about clusters which are used to define a dialect).
> I can't think of a collective noun that ends in S that I would follow with "is".
Sure, in the forms of American and British English that most HN readers are used to, there may not be any. That isn't universal, though.
There's a related phenomenon which may be more familiar to you: some English speakers will use a possessive form even when no possessive is being conveyed semantically, eg: "I'm going to Burger King's", or "Wal-Mart's is a good store". This particular one is fairly well-documented.
I might type "walmart's a good store" in an informal setting (not as a possessive, but as a contraction for "walmart is"), but no American / British newspaper editor would let that through. Its against the rules of english grammar.
I'm curious whether kids in Indian primary school are taught that "the layoffs is" is correct grammar, or whether its just a common mistake (like walmart's).
pretty sure this is also incorrect and something to be avoided in print, no?
"data" vs "datum" is pretty obscure. While an outfit like the New York Times may know the difference, I doubt that most people even know that "data" is always plural, since its forms are not even coming from English.
In this case, the collective noun "savings" is used with the singular article "a". This one shows up in both spoken and written American English.
Obviously, I can point intellectually to how and why it's correct, but it still sounds somehow weird and a bit folksy to this immigrant :)
Hardly. Indian English is not even very different from some dialects of British English (just not the one British dialect that most non-Brits are used to). Even many of the features that people commonly associate with Indian English are actually taken from British English and still present in present-day British dialects (again, just not the one that most non-Brits are familiar with).
There are other dialects of English that are far more different from Standard American English, to the point where an American speaker will have trouble understanding them altogether, as opposed to being able to understand the meaning correctly albeit with noticeable distinctions.
But you're right that there's a good chance that this is a dialect difference.
The issue with critizising someones grammer are that it always slips in an error or two.
Nothing is perfect. Get over it.
As opposed to what? People just showing up to interviews unannounced?
> or equate a university degree with ability to program computers?
Most of the really successful tech companies are doing this to a small degree. You're at a pretty big advantage if you try to get an early internship at FAANG if you went to Harvard or Stanford or whatnot - and you probably should be (and this is coming from someone who believes strongly those universities are mostly a waste).
The unis already did the hard work of sifting through students to find ones who are willing to work 100x more than necessary just to get into a slightly better school. If you're FAANG, that's sort of who you want to hire for a tech internship, and eventually take advantage of with an underpaying salary for namebrand recognition upon graduation.
> Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."[1] The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".