Where have all the sacked tech workers gone? | Hacker News Reader

Where have all the sacked tech workers gone?

economist.com

66 pointspseudolus86 comments

Being laid off at 50 is fairly brutal but hoping to find something using my django experience and get back to work. Fortunately my mom is still alive I had to move in with her, I had already been laid off once, when you are laid off 2 times in one year they force you to go 6 months with no income whatsoever as a form of punishment.

Sending you good vibes in your search! Good luck to you.

Who is “they?” Who is forcing you to go without income?

I would assume OP is referring to unemployment benefits.

Do you know where I can learn more about this? I’ve never heard of a rule like that before

I'm guessing that being laid off twice in a year means they didn't have enough time/wages at the second job to re-qualify for unemployment.

seeing we asked the same, simultaneously, i'm deleting my question.

The ruling class. In the contemporary US, this constitutes the owners of capital; not as a whole but as an aggregate of their competitive behavior.

Every policy is a choice. The questions always are who benefits, and who are harmed?

Sorry to hear this and good luck in the search.

Out of curiosity, at age 50, wondering why you wouldn't have a substantial savings by this age, enough to avoid losing housing? Or are you simply living with your mom to reduce the impact on that savings? Sorry if i'm making it sound like everyone at 50 should have a ton of money, I know thats not the case. Just curious.

Honestly I'm sick of seeing people post this kind of thing. There's _all kinds_ of reasons people can not have the "expected" amount of savings at _any_ age. Medical. Divorce. Other life disasters. Failed investments. Business failure.

These kinds of questions frankly just lead to victim blaming and expose the asker as either (a) having grown up wealthy and staying that way their entire life, or (b) completely callous.

Well, I for one would be interested in hearing those reasons. If for nothing else, to learn from their story.

Not OP, but reasons that are pretty easy to imagine: - Living in America and suffering from either cancer, heart disease, or any chronic illness. - Have any number of children and not having a family member available to care for them before they are of school age and after school from Kindergarten until whatever local laws permit for the child to be home alone for a few hours a day. - Buying a home at the wrong time and taking an absolute bath on the "investment" once some unforseen circumstance forces you to sell the home while upside down on the mortgage. - Experiencing various forms of fraud. - Experiencing a lawsuit in America, whether you came out as the winner of said dispute or not. - Being 50 and having had the poor but not unreasonable "luck" of having worked for the wrong start-ups in 1999, 2007, and 2022.

Those are just top of mind.

Certainly we can imagine all those different scenarios, but I don't find them as insightful as a personal anecdote.

The point is, it's nobody's business why. The reasons are probably personal. Even asking opens a form of blame-game dialogue instead of beneficial and productive conversation.

Definitely true. But I've read a lot of personal stories on the Internet, and maybe OP is willing to share. As for the blame-game, yes, it could happen. But it's a bit shame if we shut down potentially interesting discussion by preemptively deciding the outcome.

I'm 40. I'm a single parent and divorced. I'm a Veteran.

I spent my 20s going to college, working for a porn company (not as a performer), and then joining the Navy. I paid off student debts, alimony, and child support. I have one successful and one failed startup under my belt. I've always, always, always, lived paycheck to paycheck until recently.

At 40. I was finally able to save up enough for a house in a HCOL city. I have roughly 6 months of savings and not a whole lot for retirement.

At 50 - I'd love to still be in tech, but I don't see it happening. I already see the writing on the wall that I need to start going the management route or I really need to find my niche as an individual contributor to be retained. I'm the old dude on my team.

In retrospect, I had a blast in my 20s and would not change it for the corporate grind that I'm currently in.

All of us have different stories and paths. There is no "right" or "wrong" path, it's all a journey.

Sure, if I had done things a more responsible way I may be in a completely different situation in life. Who knows? I don't.

Thanks for sharing your story.

> I have roughly 6 months of savings and not a whole lot for retirement.

Note that one can save a 'decent' amount even if you have 'only' ten years before your planned/desired day. This book has a Canadian focus, but the principles are probably pretty general:

* https://www.cpacanada.ca/en/public-interest/financial-litera...

Interview with author:

* https://www.moneysense.ca/save/retirement/procrastinating-on...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_MIMfd5emg

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh74xUdBITU

You may not need as much of a nest egg as you think:

* https://www.moneysense.ca/save/calculating-how-much-money-yo...

* https://www.macleans.ca/economy/money-economy/heres-the-real...

* https://findependencehub.com/qa-with-author-david-aston-abou...

Dont forget: all your successes, and all your failures are the result of your actions and your actions only. You exist in a vacuum.

Not OP, but also almost 50. The ability to save doesn't tend to scale with income or age. Major costs like taxes, housing, healthcare and so on very efficiently and elastically scale up to soak your income, even as that income is rising. If you're living in the Bay Area and making a "typical" Bay Area comp, your rent cost is likely set by knowledgable local landlords to maximize the amount of that income they can sponge up. Health insurance works similarly.

Of course there are other good reasons for not being able to save. Medical debt, education debt, child support, parental support and so on.

Without guaranteed pensions, saving takes deliberate effort, deliberate avoidance of lifestyle creep, a lot of health luck, and a lot of luck in the market. Those savings vehicles you do manage to take advantage of, like 401(k)s and so on, are mostly inaccessible outside of the context of retiring. So anything you put into them is gone until you're elderly.

No matter how wealthy you are on paper, your spend should be less than your income. That means swallowing your pride and moving back home sometimes.

Not OP, but I'm almost 40, and also have very little savings. Not everyone has the super high TCs that you often see here or on Blind

I've only been working in tech for 9 years, much of that was paid pretty low. And I live in a very HCOL city. Unfortunately living with parents is not an option, but I live in a house with 9 other people and have been cooking rice and beans and saving as much as possible, so if I get laid off, between low rent (for my city) and my savings and RRSP I can get by for a little over a year if I absolutely have to. I'd have to start withdrawing from my RRSP (Canadian version of 401K) at around the 10 month mark.

I actually really want to quit my job and try starting my own business, but I feel like it's a terrible time for it. If I get laid off I at least get some benefits from the govt, which I think will extend my cushion by a month or 2.

I'm starting side hustles, making investments, reducing my living expenses and casually applying to jobs. If any of my side hustles start making $1000 a month I'm quitting the industry for the foreseeable future.

https://archive.is/nUklO

TLDR:

* most of the workers being laid off are not engineers

* the laid off engineers are either being hired by “old school” industries like John Deere or carmakers or are creating new startups, many around generative AI.

Honestly am impressed at how wasteful such articles are in how little content they actually contain.

While agree with your premise usually, this article was actually pretty concise compared to most of what I try to read online these days.

"Where are the non-engineers going, and is it to somewhere that will continue to give them north of 200k per year so they can keep borrowing millions and propping up the artificially inflated housing market in the periphery of the Bay Area," is the question on the minds of those whose clicks I imagine this headline is trying to attract.

Honest question: how is the Bay Area housing market artificially inflated? I assumed the high prices were the normal market response to high demand from many people with deep pockets.

IIRC, new housing is not being approved for construction mainly because the local gov is full of people who own real estate. In a natural situation, supply would be increased to meet demand.

Additionally cities earn more from commercial zoning than residential. And dense residential projects reliably get blocked by NIMBY neighbors. (NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard)

It's important to take into account the construction costs (and all the parties that are profiting from building new stuff). I think the cost of construction has gone up a lot in recent history. People in general also have much more luxurious requirements for housing than in the past which contributes to the cost. So, building just more is not some magical way to solve this. It's one efficient tool, however, especially if legislative point is made to strongly prefer affordable housing (and be strict about it).

But this is not artificial.

This is a result of the fact that some resources do not have infinite space to increase supply. Land is one of those resources.

No matter how much someone demands it, we cannot simply wish more land into existence in SF.

So while we can increase housing supply by optimizing the usage of that land (more houses per unit area), this has adverse consequences for the people already using it...

> So while we can increase housing supply by optimizing the usage of that land (more houses per unit area), this has adverse consequences for the people already using it...

It would certainly have some kind of consequences for the people currently using it. Whether they would be better or worse that the consequences already being experienced is a matter for debate. I don't live in the bay area but would assume more density would largely be a good thing for regular people -- either their rent will drop because the market isn't so tight, or the home they own would rocket in value because it can suddenly be cleared to make way for an apartment or condo building (that they might have a hope of affording a unit in).

There are other people "using" the land though: the rentiers who run the local (and state, and national) government.

> … how is the Bay Area housing market artificially inflated?

I shouldn’t have an opinion on this because I don’t live in the Bay Area or closely follow its politics, but the most common refrain I see is that policies (e.g., zoning) prevent building more and higher density housing, thus artificially limiting supply.

Artificially constrained supply combined with marginal buyers that earn >$300k/year and 0% interest rates would lead to extremely high prices.

dual income with socioeconomic equals too

The Bay Area is also geographically constrained by water and mountains. This is compared to say a plains city that can greatly expand in all directions e.g. Dallas (?).

That's nowhere near being a real constraint.

It's refusal to allow housing construction all the way down.

Zoning and other municipal restrictions along with environmental regulations dampen the supply of housing

The way I see it, you have these tech companies that are writing larger and larger checks to their employees. Combine that with limited housing and you start getting bidding wars from folks making $500k, all of a sudden that house that went for $600k is now going for $1.2M. If you work back from that price you see that the prices would not have been able to go that high had all these tech companies not offered massive comp packages.

That's not artificial though, that's fair market pricing. It's growth in income leading to higher prices for goods purchased with that income.

That is true and I’m not here to disagree, but what the parent pointed out raised a question for me: weren’t these salary increases in part due to the fact that since the 2008 Financial crisis, money has been cheap, and now with the Feds raising rates, money is now more expensive? And if so, and those salaries were not sustainable because the profits that allowed for them hypothetically cannot be sustained because people are out of work and tightening their belts or taking salary cuts to land their next job and taking out a loan to cover payroll for businesses is a more costly proposition, then isn’t this actually a volatile situation for the Bay Area housing market and the mortgages backing it?

More important than LIRP influence is that Bay Area tech companies were incredibly successful in the decade at increasing revenues, so they could afford to pay more.

Apple: $65.2B in 2010 vs $260B in 2019 Facebook: $1.97B in 2010 vs $70.9B in 2019 Netflix: $1.67B in 2010 vs $20B in 2019 Google: $29.3B in 2010 vs $160B in 2019

You make an excellent point and I had to sit down and think about this more holistically because I’m just trying to understand what is going on in the economy right now and using this comment chain as a lens to try and do it in. So what I came up with is that is true but more context is necessary I think: payroll isn’t the only cost they increased. M&A was also huge this past decade: Apple bought Beats for $3B, Intel’s modem business for $1B and between 2010 and 2022 they had at least 14 other acquisitions for >$100M and this is excluding the financing and equipment purchases for their suppliers including TSMC and that weird deal they had with the PRC to invest $275B into mainland China.

Facebook’s 4 largest purchases in the last decade were WhatsApp for $19B, Oculus VR for $2B, Instagram for $1B and Kustomer for $1B along with at least 5 other acquisitions for >$100M.

I don’t want to go down the whole list in detail, but Google has invested heavily into YouTube, Waymo and other bets this past decade and Netflix was up until very recently just pouring money into Hollywood and other media markets like Japan to acquire production and/or distribution rights and built up pretty much their entire streaming infrastructure in the post-2008 world. All of this was an also financed with cheap money and these investments allowed them to grow their revenue, maybe some more successfully than others.

None of that is really artificial inflation, but I guess this is why dollar inflation is called inflation?

What about all of the startups whose profits are over the horizon?

It's inflation. Now it's leaked out into the general economy as a result. Same thing happens when you inflate a tire: it makes it nice a hard until it goes boom.

I think that when people describe these kinds of markets as "artificially" inflated, they're reacting to the sharp increase in income inequality. For a person who has had a 60-80th percentile income for 20 years, it probably feels more like prices are artificial than it feels like their economic status has declined significantly. Unfortunately the latter is the case, as increasingly fewer people gather an increasing share of wealth.

I would definitely agree that the pricing is not artificial, but I don't think I would call it fair.

I'm referring to the most recent artificial fluctuations in home prices that were not caused by some noticeable increase in people living in the Bay capable of paying off a 1.2 M loan, rather than referring to the default baseline of high prices.

artificially inflated in the sense that if it wasn’t for government regulation that makes building difficult, then the normal market forces that incentivize builders to meet demand would result in costs lower than they are now.

If you want to model the hypothetical non-artificial situation, you have to remove all relevant government-controlled knobs and levers.

That can't be the only one?

Instead you have million dollar hovels surrounded by $20 tents.

> I assumed the high prices were the normal market response to high demand from many people with deep pockets.

The response is normal, but the deep pockets were an aberration. No one was making $$ in cash; tech stocks floated to ~80 P/E for mature companies and higher for billion dollar _growth_ companies (aka a bubble).

It’s not necessarily the tech workers. 42% of US existing home purchases were from foreign investors (defined as non-residents). That’s for the US as a whole, and it stands to reason that outsized investment is happening in high demand areas, driving up the price.

https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-i...

> 42% of US existing home purchases were from foreign investors

Maybe I misunderstood you, but that article says out of house purchases by foreigners, 42% were by foreign buyers living abroad, and the other 58% were by foreign buyers living in the US.

US citizens buying property _vastly_ outweigh foreign buyers, in both numbers and dollar amounts.

I have to find the article, but my understanding is 15% of all US residential real estate is bought by foreign buyers, and then combined with the 25% that's bought by investment firms, a total of around 40% of the US housing marking is off the table.... Should be pretty easy to find the articles.

EDIT: it should be noted, that foreign investment was down the last couple years do to covid, though.

> my understanding is 15% of all US residential real estate is bought by foreign buyers

It’s not. If an article says that, it’s using such an absurd methodology that renders it useless.

The number likely hovers around 2-3% depending on how you define foreign investor.

There’s no QA around these types of articles and every incentive to just come up with the biggest number possible to try and rile people up. Often these are press reports from people with vested interests in real estate.

I think you're misreading that 42%. "Foreign buyers purchased 98,600 properties" compared with "Overall in the U.S., existing-home sales totaled 6.12 million in 2021".

The 42% number you're citing is the percentage of foreign buyers living abroad out of all foreign buyers. So 100k/6.1M or 1.6% of homes in the US were bought by foreign buyers, and of that 1.6% we see that 42% of those live abroad.

That is quantity of homes, if you'd like to look at dollar values of those purchases, it is also given as "International buyers accounted for 2.6% of the $2.3 trillion in existing-home sales during that time period."

That’s not what your reference is saying. It’s saying 42% purchases * by foreign buyers * are from investors who live outside the USA. Not existing home purchases.

Well, when you are a content company like a newspaper, you need to generate content daily. No matter how crappy it is.

But nobody wants to read "content". We want to read things that actually say something. If your newspaper can't write that, then I will stop buying your newspaper.

All the data disagrees with you here - we eat content up.

I'm finding that one of ChatGPT strengths is summarizing fluff-heavy texts.

Can you give it the URL, or do you need to provide the full body text for it to summarize?

Yes, just ask it to summarize the article and provide it with the link. I just did, here is the output:

------------------

"The article explores the job market for tech workers who have been laid off from their previous jobs due to the pandemic. Despite the high demand for tech talent, many of these workers have struggled to find new employment, and the article highlights several factors that may be contributing to this.

One of the main challenges is the way in which hiring managers are evaluating candidates. Many companies are now using AI-powered tools to screen resumes, which can lead to qualified candidates being overlooked. In addition, there may be biases in the hiring process that are preventing certain candidates from being considered.

Another issue is that many of the jobs that have been created in the tech industry during the pandemic are concentrated in certain geographic areas, such as the Bay Area and Seattle. This can make it difficult for workers who live in other parts of the country to find new employment.

The article also notes that many of the workers who have been laid off come from industries that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, such as hospitality and tourism. These workers may not have the same level of experience or technical skills as those who have been working in the tech industry for years, which can make it harder for them to find new roles.

Overall, the article suggests that while the demand for tech talent remains high, the job market is still challenging for many workers who have been laid off due to the pandemic. Companies and hiring managers may need to rethink their approach to hiring in order to ensure that qualified candidates are not being overlooked, and more support may be needed for workers who are transitioning to new careers in the tech industry."

That's actually quite a bad summary with some hallucinations included (tourism, hospitality, AI screened resumes, focus on the pandemic). The summary I got was after I copy/pasted the contents and it's pretty much on the mark. Not sure why there is such a difference:

------------------------------------

Big tech companies like Meta and Amazon have announced massive layoffs, with American tech firms having announced 118,000 sackings so far this year. However, techies have been mostly spared, and the axe has fallen mainly on business functions like sales and recruitment. These functions had grown steadily as a share of tech-industry employment in recent years, a sign of bloat. The recent layoffs may release talented tech workers back into the job market, which could benefit other sectors struggling with digital reinvention, such as industrial goods, carmakers, banks, health insurers, and retailers. Some of the laid-off techies are also helping fuel a new generation of startups.

Ahaha, it’s… not actually reading the article. That is a hallucinated summary of what it thinks an article is most likely to say given the url, which contains the title of the article.

Ah, that does actually make sense, because ChatGPT can’t reach out to URLs right? It has its own time contained dataset, correct? Wonder if it would have a cache of that URL if the URL existed at the snapshot/time of its dataset?

oh really? wow, bad chatGPT! I didn't know that.

thank you - this is why i only read articles linked to on hn if the comments make it sound like there's some substance

In this case, you would've wanted to wait for other reactions before believing the comment.

As someone who took a job with a John Deere competitor, tractor AI is super sexy. :>

> Honestly am impressed at how wasteful such articles are in how little content they actually contain.

The Economist isn't a tech publication. A lot of the context around tech layoffs is more familiar to HN than the average reader.

The article seems to be 100% content and context to me. No waste at all. You personally just happen to know a lot of the context already. But that doesn't make it "waste".

In my case I took about 7 months off to work on side projects, ride my bicycle and day dream. I had to recharge after the lay off.

Still on severance and chilling out maybe?

The most severance I ever got was 2 weeks. Not enough time to chill.

Given we are in the AI revolution right now, a part of those workers, often quite well paid so they have a bit of cash aside, have taken the opportunity to explore that.

Maybe those layoff will create tomorrow's unicorns.

Was laid off Thursday after 10 years. This is exactly what I'm doing for the immediate future. In no hurry to go through the dog and pony show of groveling and prostrating myself for the opportunity to make money for someone else.

I did my first actual prostration last week. Let me tell you, I’d much rather lower my heart to the earth for someone who moves me with her singing than play ego minesweeper on a whiteboard for an engineer who happened to be hired earlier than me at a company revolutionizing the used tire industry.

Theye're all applying here:

https://i.imgur.com/WPr7rDj.png

Those rates are not daily, or even weekly.

Some of my network has gone straight into military/defense companies. Quite a bit of recruitment going on since they've been in contact since 2019 too

it was on HN: at CIA and NSA. Not a big change of domain, if you ask me.

I doubt many of these people laid off have yet to make it through the NSA/CIA pipeline. The background checks alone can take months for those positions.

many of them have long severance packages plus savings...

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