Many are going to start their own startups and the seeds for the next Cambrian explosion are being cast today, just as they were in 2001–2003 or 2008. That said not all Big Tech employees can deal with the hustle required at a startup.
Last time, tech was in its infancy. There was a small universe of people who understood baseline concepts like getting to product market fit, how to measure and implement growth patterns, etc etc.
Today these are practically household concepts, and they have been for years. There aren’t a few hundred other people in SV you are competing against, it’s the rest of the world.
On top of that, there’s a tried and true playbook that large tech companies quickly put to use to capture any remotely adjacent areas of product market fit.
I’m not saying there won’t be startups - there are today of course - but it also seems like there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on. (Among founders, VCs, and billionaires who made their money in the early 2000s too. It shocks me that many of them haven’t realized that the playbook that made them money in 2008 doesn’t make them special in 2023.)
Tech has been professionalized and nothing is nearly as easy as it once was.
I'm a PM and I think veeerrrryyy few people understand this, including many of my fellow PMs.
I think it's like reading a book about how to pitch a baseball. Knowledge and application are entirely different. Someone might be able to regurgitate the theory on how to achieve product-market fit, but put them in the driver seat of a real product and lots of people flounder.
One of the most common mistakes is simply delusion - the believe that your product is 'there' when it's not. I believe there's a cognitive dissonance that impacts the product owner - you kinda have to believe (or at least outwardly project) that your product is doing well.
Preach. And the universe of people who can actually do the work to start something and get it to PMF is a pretty small subset of those who understand the concepts in theory.
Same sports analogy- it is better to be someone who can play (but doesn't know the rules) than someone who has encyclopedic knowledge on the said sport but cannot play (physical limitations).
Hum... The reason why large companies have historically been unable to do that is because nobody in them bothers to do it, not because they don't know how.
And one of the consequences of a series of mass layoffs is exactly that people stop caring about things like this.
Now, they are laying off people that went into tech because it seemed like easy money.
It's not the same caliber of tech person.
The truth: Eenie meenie miny moe
The truth: everyone knows who the underperformers are.
AFAICT, companies are both jettisoning entire departments related to bad bets (or bad business models) and preparing for anticipated recession-level revenues.
Skills are not perfectly fungible. Managers making layoff decisions based on the roles/skills they need to keep and what budget they can afford. This necessarily means that some underperformers will be retained and many overperformers will be cut.
Sure some employees on PIPs or otherwise considered low performance may be cut regardless of role. But more typically projects get cut/defunded (whether in engineering or elsewhere) and those roles are eliminated or cut back. A good performer may have an opportunity to find a job elsewhere in the company but, in my experience, that's pretty hard given that any open slots were probably also closed as part of the layoff and everyone is pretty distracted anyway.
It reminds me a bit of the argument against massive conspiracies to demonstrate how many people have to perfectly as an organization (leaving no evidence behind) and then have to stay quiet indefinitely. The larger the accused conspiracy, the more likely information is to leak.
Furthermore, having worked in big tech, most of the roles that are getting filled are essentially "busy work" - i.e here is a entire proprietary build system, barebones service and deployment pipeline, all you have to do is add logic. Someone who has worked in this type of environment isn't going to succeed at a startup where you have to build systems from scratch.
The market is still incredibly strong for SV caliber devs, and I see no signal it's going to slow down. If anything, it kept compensation for engineers from cratering by propping up the stocks.
[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...
[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...
[4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
Where are they going? Genuinely curious. Where outside of the US are SV caliber devs getting paid even more than they'd be getting paid here?
I don’t agree that companies successfully filtered them out via layoffs. If anything it’s the opposite. One of the “skills” that help you avoid being laid off is to be good at office politics and gaining visibility (so the VP making the layoff decision knows your name). That skill seems correlated with ladder-climbing more than tech-enthusiasm.
Big tech employs more people than startups, which means it's more likely for someone to get a job at big tech than a startup. It's just a law of numbers and has nothing to do with whether they're suited for startup life or big tech life.
In addition, in the US, foreign students who just graduated are more likely to get a job at big tech than startup because more big tech sponsor H1B/Green card than startups. And the fear/circumstances around losing your immigration status means more of them might opt for big-tech than startup
Google for example is much more rigorous with code reviews and code quality. They maintain a high % test coverage, continuous integration and delivery… etc. startups can’t maintain those same standards and move quickly. learn the rules before you break them.
Thank God for that. Who better to look at broken processes draining productivity and then say “oh, we solved this with X, when I worked at Y” ?