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Comment by totetsu | Hacker News Reader

Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..

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It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.

Anecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that out. But so far, developers are untouchable.

I work for a smaller company (< 200 employees) and it's similar. We are still hiring additional engineers but we've let go some project people as well as our scrum masters. Scrum masters at least do feel like they don't justify their salary to me really, it isn't as if the team leads don't have to be in all the meetings they run so may as well have the team leads run them

Do you get the sense it’s for profit padding or is there a downturn in business? If there is a downturn in business, is that downturn related to Covid measures at the consumer or business level?

My theory around this is that they don't want to give competitors an edge or allow room for devs to go build a competing product.

Naively, the category seems to be "high growth tech". So that includes both the SV megacorps and startups (which are also concentrated in the Bay Area).

At least in Germany, I'm not seeing any signs for a major downturn in IT. At least on the hiring side, it actually seems to be even harder to fill mid-to-senior technical roles than last year at this time, and it wasn't exactly easy then either. Hearing similar takes from several companies, all of them still on hiring sprees.

How much of that is due to salary expectations?

I think there's plenty of people that have got used to an inflated salary, so offering "local market rate" won't cut it.

Time will tell if the global downturn will lead to reverting to norm (especially as a lot of companies seem to be moving away from fully remote).

Very much this I think. Actual Senior devs (10+ years, fullstack from react down to AWS or bare metal, leadership xp, even DevSecOps skills, …) and offers below 100k are simply a joke. Of course these 500k+ compensations of SV are not usual in Germany, but thanks to remote most senior guys I know earn much more than what is offered locally

FAANG-style companies are laying off in Europe, too. So are start-ups.

Higher interest rates mean that investments in technologies that will pay off in the long run have to have a higher ROI than they did a year ago, hence less money going into them and layoffs at some places. I'd be super surprised if this reached across all programming or associated jobs.

I work in government and government adjacent contracting. We need people badly right now.

I was seriously considering government work, but they all seem to want TS clearances. I’m simply not interested in the process. Do you have any recommendations for anywhere that doesn’t have this requirement?

Yep, same. Somewhere relatively stable and doing a public good sounds great, but I'm not bothering with security clearances or the myriad other red tape required at almost all of those roles, especially for almost always significantly less comp than the private sector :\

I'll believe this need is genuine when salaries for government employed/contracted software engineers are anywhere close to market rates.

Money from the lavish contracts won't reach workers anyway, so why bother? https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-arrivecan-a...

From what I've seen it's less pronounced in the EU. Recruiters I know say that things are slower than in 2022 but it's still healthy. And my direct vicinity still looks short on workers and high on demand.

Depends on where you are, I think. It's definitely been a lot slower in Ireland in the last nine months.

This is entirely anecdotal. A local company here advertised for a developer position that was pretty well paid (regional Australia). They got a lot of interest from overseas developers but the really interesting applications came from "system architects" rather than developers.

I speculated that the layoffs in Australia are quietly happening amongst tech middle management / developer adjacent jobs but those quiet layoffs are encouraging everybody else to stay put for the moment.

In my country there is almost no downturn but we don't earn US level salaries.

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