The tech job recession is over | Hacker News Reader

The tech job recession is over

businessinsider.com

86 pointspseudolus123 comments

Can confirm. I am getting above average number of recruiter messages.

However, this last cycle of layoffs have taught me something. It is 1) the whole chase to Total compensation isn’t worth it, it matters the stability of the organization and the overall value of the work that we produce. To that end, stock compensation is really not to be relied upon at its face value. My total compensation in 2022 was less than 2020 when I was working as a new hire 2) if a company starts hiring to the point where you are taking more and more interviews every week without any real explanation behind the hiring, it’s time to GTFO.

So you would gtfo from 2001 google or 2013 uber? Scaleups are totally fine if you have revenue to support it (right now not at some unspecified future date). Many companies that scaled in 2020-21 just didn’t

Counterexample: Pets.com cost of goods sold would go quicker than their revenue. Similarly, many companies inflate their revenue in all kinds of ways including excessive marketing spending.

This time we didn’t really have that. It was pretty meh revenue numbers across the board and a lot of spending

How many people joined Uber in 2013 vs in 2017-18ish or such? What was the breakeven point for it to be worthwhile?

It's easy to be late to the party these days if looking at gaudy Series B/C/D numbers and stock-based comp.

> stock compensation is really not to be relied upon at its face value.

This is a fantastic realization to have. Getting stock as compensation is a bit like getting lottery tickets as compensation. This is triply true if they're options rather than actual stock.

I learned decades ago to ignore the stock component of compensation packages when evaluating an offer. I'll never turn stock or options down, but they will also never be something that will "tip the scales" for me.

Is there a technical difference in considering an RSU to be a stock option with a $0 strike price?

RSU have immediate tax implications, while options may not (and mostly do not) until time of exercise.

You pay taxes when RSUs vest. You pay taxes on options only when you exercise them. In addition, when the RSUs vest, they are yours when you leave the company, with options you have to exercise within a time period (a short one if it's an ISO, potentially 10 years for NSOs).

Stock in a large publicly traded company is a lot different than options in startup.

I definitely think it makes sense to apply some discount to stock compensation when comparing offers, but if stock in a large publicly traded company is very likely worth something.

The two are definitely different, yes. But I ignore both of them anyway, personally. It's very hard to know what the future value of any stock (even in a large publicly traded company) will be, so it's very hard to figure out how to translate that into value in terms of compensation.

Just pick some conservative discount like 50% of the current value. Your average large publicly traded company is unlikely to dip that far and not bounce back.

That's fully reasonable, yes. It's not my style, but there's nothing wrong with it.

TWLO has left the chat. (it was down about 90% from peak to trough)

(as have many other names, not to pick on twlo specifically). I actually think (and so far am right) that it was massively undervalued at $45 a share.

I think this is perhaps overly pessimistic. In general if you are getting RSUs and the share price tanks, you’ll get bumped back up with a refresher grant.

The big public companies are making sure that your annualized total comp is in the right range, because if it isn’t (so the assumption goes) you’ll just move to another BigCo that will cut you a fresh grant at market rate.

that is a very California way of looking at it. Non-competes don't work that way in a lot of places, and few companies outside of the largest would deem to throw that kind of compensation at people if the stock falters -- and only for certain tiers of employees.

IBM would just fire you. Ditto for most of the other F500 sphere.

Fair. Perhaps I should be more specific: if your RSUs are <= 10% of total comp, as you say the employer might not top you up, and so conservative rounding down may be more reasonable. If your RSUs are closer to 50% of comp, rounding to zero will unreasonably hurt your comp comparisons, both by sheer magnitude of the grant, and because employer will definitely be conscious of regrants.

Not all CA tech companies give huge RSU grants, but the biggest ones tend to.

I think there needs to be a distinction between options in a series A startup and RSUs in a large (but still private) company. I don't value the latter at zero since the chance of a liquidity event is much higher and RSUs mean there is no need to actually purchase the options when you leave the company (and risk all the tax problems that go along with this).

I roughly value RSUs in a late-stage private company (say, Stripe) at 50%-75% of market value when considering an offer, while a very early stage options grant is almost worthless to me, say 5% of its value.

This doesn't work for a lot of mature tech companies. RSUs are as good as cash at vest time, but the delay between grant and vest basically leaves you with variable pay. You can't just ignore it though, since the targeted value of your RSU compensation alone will be higher than base pay in many cases.

> You can't just ignore it though, since the targeted value of your RSU compensation alone will be higher than base pay in many cases.

Sure you can. You just gauge based on the base pay alone. If that's adequate, I'm good to go. If it isn't, then I'm not. That way, I'm not hurt if the stock ends up being worthless.

I may be leaving money on the table, of course, but I'm also eliminating unnecessary risk. Other people may have different risk tolerances, naturally. My main point is that counting stock as part of a compensation package is the same as buying stock -- you need to be aware that you're taking on risk.

In using that strategy, you're trading one risk for another risk, not eliminating risk.

What risk am I taking on?

The risk of foregone upside in expected value (or, alternately, expected utility) to the extent that you are mis-valuing one of your genuine choices.

If Netflix is going to pay you $200K/yr and Facebook $180K plus $400K in FB shares vesting over 4 years, IMO, it's an error (IMO) to conclude that Netflix's offer is $20K/yr more than Facebook.

Ah, OK.

I don't consider that a risk at all, but I get that others might. This sort of thing is what makes acceptable risk evaluation such a personal thing.

To me, "risk" means that income I'm expecting doesn't happen. The risk you're talking about doesn't count as risk to me, because any money left on the table is money I wasn't expecting to get in the first place, so I haven't lost anything. I just failed to gain something that I could have.

I don't think my attitude is incorrect (it's saved me from a lot of actual loss over the decades), and I also don't think that yours is incorrect. It's more about what makes the most sense considering our personal situations, temperaments, etc.

I also acknowledge that I'm unusual in the HN crowd in that I am not primarily money-driven. When I'm considering a position, the compensation is the third or fourth most important consideration, not the first.

You can talk about it opportunity. You might apply a (heavy) discount to that opportunity, sure, and personally I agree it's not a "loss" if you choose it away, but it it is an opportunity that has a value even if you decide a 100% discount is the right value.

I'm reasonably money-driven, but I also heavily discount the value of stock or options, because while I've come out ahead on my shares and options in almost every company I've worked in, the effective return has ranged from very decent multiples of the initial valuation to 1% of it, so I'm very comfortable applying a very high discount (reducing said discount for e.g. listed companies - but one of my best returns was from a listed company where the best engineer on my team was still under water on the vast majority of his options 7 years in, and now long after their expiry the price has never been as high as then)

I completely understand having a low risk tolerance. But I think discounting stock offers by 100% is going further than is reasonable even for the most risk averse person.

Put it this way, at the limit. Company A pays $120k + $1,000,000 dependent on the result of a random number generator where there is a 99.999% chance that you'll get the money. Company B pays $125k. All else being equal, any rational person would obviously choose Company A.

But if you're saying you discount variable pay by 100%, you would choose company B.

Or think of it another way. How much are you willing to pay to avoid loss. What you're doing is equivalent to buying insurance to avoid loss. How much would you pay for such insurance? There has to be a limit.

Since you evaluate based on pay alone, next time you judge two or more offers with public equity, let me unconditionally buy all your equity for $5K. That should tip the scales if the base is the same.

I think that you're conflating "not taking it into account when evaluating the offer" with "not caring about it at all".

What I do is the same as the commenters who say they discount the face value of stock when assessing the compensation. I just discount it more deeply than they do.

If you aren’t willing to sell the equity for $5k then we’ve found the lower limit of how much value you place on it. Meaning that you should be considering at least $5k of that equity when comparing compensation.

Stock at a big tech company is incredibly unlikely to suddenly end up worthless. Let's say your base pay is $160k and you have $240k in RSUs vesting each year. It would be ridiculous to take another offer of $250k or $300k cash elsewhere. Maybe at $350k you might prefer straight cash. Someone else's cutoff might be at $375k.

In the end, you can't ignore it.

Netflix dropped >70% in six months in late 2021/early 2022. That $400k total comp package would suddenly be $230k or so -- less than the $300k cash offer. I recognise Netflix offers are usually all-cash, but it's an illustrative example. Feel free to substitute with Facebook stock.

As a bit of real-life anecdata, I knew someone who struggled to pay their mortgage when AMZN dropped ~30% in 2018.

The real trick is to realize that having a 4 yr grant valued at present value is tough. only hindsight can give you a perfect picture of what you were compensated. This is partly why folks should always be selling at least a portion of their equity and shifting it into other assets smoothly as they vest.

My middle ground was to sell ~50% of my vesting meaning I took some risk off the table, but also wouldn't feel left out if it moonshot. People with economics (game theory) degrees likely could figure out a better way to deleverage + prevent fomo.

Or the company is in a slump and decides to downsize you a week before your RSUs vest.

That’s possible, but after the 1 year cliff assuming quarterly vesting you’re only going to be out at most 3 months of “earned” stock.

Either way you just figure the chance of losing all or some of it into your expected value calculation.

Annual vesting, and got nothing.

So at worst you were out just under a years worth equity pay. That seriously sucks, but it is possible to build that into expected value. Expected stock value * (1 - likelihood you get laid off).

I could have written your comment verbatim!

Compensation matters, don't lose sight of that goal. Technologists contribute an outsized impact to the profits of technology companies. We should be fairly compensated and its on each of us to push for it.

+ WLB is worth a lot more than we realized, as evidenced by people happily taking a 20% cut for better WLB.

> the whole chase to Total compensation isn’t worth it

I always flat out tell recruiters that while total comp matters, when comparing I always heavily discount anything not in my basic. Of course how much depends on details (e.g. I discount options to near zero; RSU's much less so), but some parts of total comp will rarely enter the picture when I evaluate an offer unless the basic salary is already good enough.

I'll expect a good total comp, but not at the expense of a low basic salary.

Total Comp is the important thing, but calculate it using your own methods.

No your 'health insurance' plan isnt worth $24,000/yr, I can get that same plan on healthcare.gov.

No your stocks don't count, the vesting period is too long.

No I'm not going back to school, I already have a grad degree and I'm not doing that again.

> I can get that same plan on healthcare.gov.

But not 100% paid for right? And it might cost $1000-2000 depending on your family size.

> No your stocks don't count, the vesting period is too long.

This one I totally agree. And even if you vest, if it's a startup you're mostly locked in and can't sell them, and without liquidity they're basically worthless.

>But not 100% paid for right? And it might cost $1000-2000 depending on your family size.

Its the same plan, often worse.

Anyway, you can even calculate the value of that plan, say the cheapest healthcare.gov plan costs $1000/mo, you get it free through work, that is $12000 per year of compensation. Pretty substantial, although I've never seen someone get a free plan at work, though a union firefighter pays $20/mo and is harshly underpaid. For the max out of pocket, you can multiply that by the chance of hitting it per year.

But what really matters is the delta cost. Healthcare.gov is quite comparable to w2 jobs. Its often significantly better since you can shop around instead of the corrupt plans the company was sold by some insurance dealer.

It depends on how big the TC difference is. If you can make 2x working at a more volatile company, you can stash away the extra to get through hard times.

I would also only count TC in the first year (or 6 months), not some stock options that vest in year 2+.

It generally takes ~2 years to actually turn your unstable stock into a stable dollar value. As many who joined Square (Block now lol) learned - your idiot CEO can tank your money printing machine at any moment, and while your stock may have quadrupled since you started it's just one dumb move away from dropping a ridiculous amount, and all before you could actually turn any of it into a dollar.

Definitely describes my time at AWS between 2016 and 2022.

> Can confirm. I am getting above average number of recruiter messages.

Is this the US? In Canada, my inbox is still empty relative to 2022 and earlier. I used to be so annoyed by all the recruiter spam I got, and now I'd love to have it back.

Pick your favorite mainstream news outlet (I checked Atlantic, Guardian, CNN, Axios, NYT, WSJ, and maybe one or two others) and you can find an article to the effect of “Why Do Americans Think the Economy is Terrible When It’s Actually Amazing?”

Credit where credit is due to the administration, they seem to know better than to push that narrative just at the moment.

Regarding tech jobs, inbound recruiter contacts at flat at nearly nothing, we’ll over 80% of the people I know who were laid off are still looking, and competition remains brutal for the openings that exist.

Tough job markets happen, we get by. But it’s starting to really grind my gears that there is a full-court press to act like it’s been like this in the last decade or two. It was easier in 2005.

"The economy," at least as far as the big publications is concerned since the early 80s, has always been about stock performance and unemployment numbers regardless of who is in charge.

Stock performance is great. Unemployment numbers are great. To them, inflationary periods are just a time when big businesses which are flush with cash get to buy up smaller, cash-strapped businesses at discount rates. And the average consumer is so stupid that they're using credit just to maintain their lifestyles.

I’m not exactly a Jane St. quant, but people piling into SPY at a time when 40+ PEs for mature businesses are the order of the day and bond yields are spiking via open-market operations doesn’t smell right.

Inflation is 25% over 2019 so the only people celebrating the economy got a 25% raise.

The rest? Debt piling up, some teetering on the edge of homelessness.

But that doesn't matter because the president in office can't have bad news. I think we can sum up Biden's presidency with "no comment"

Yeah I think a lot of any "hiring boom" right now is really inflation-related churn as companies refuse to match inflation and people leave for jobs that offer slightly better (pre-inflation) pay.

A lot of the hiring is also at a decade old pay rate... People may be working, but are they, generally speaking, making as much or more. I don't think so, especially in light of inflation.

For me, the real kicker is what feels like the cost of food and other common items doubling in the past year, and record profits, but the actual people working haven't seen a raise in a decade. With the bump in interest, and my home "value" doubling in the past 5 years, it's hard to imagine anyone not born into it being able to buy a home at this point forward.

On the tech sector, I'm feeling less than stable where I'm at and seeing a lot of dev jobs where the pay is roughly what I was seeing a decade ago or more. It may be great if you're on the top 1-3% of earners and making most of your money from investments, it's another if you're working for a living.

    Regarding tech jobs, inbound recruiter contacts 
    at flat at nearly nothing, we’ll over 80% of the 
    people I know who were laid off are still looking, 
    and competition remains brutal for the openings that 
    exist.

I'm seeing this too. However this doesn't seem like it's incompatible with the linked article's claim, although it's heavily dependent on an individual's definition of a recession being "over."

I think economists would tell us that a recession is over when recovery begins.

By that definition, yeah, the recession is over.

In more casual usage I think we would refer to a recession being over when recovery (to some perceived "normal") is complete. By that definition, hell no, it's not over. Things will be tight for a while.

If you want some more anecdotal hope, though, all the recruiters I've talked to have agreed that things seem to be improving.

Instead of looking at layoffs, should look at the net of hires and departures (both voluntary and involuntary) to see where things stand. In more than a few places, natural attrition often isn't rehired, which will tighten the labor market.

Anecdotally, far fewer recruiter mail messages as well. It may not be 'recessionary', but it isn't a rapid hiring environment either.

Same. Plus many of the ones I get are for "hybrid" situations 100's of miles away. Did these recruiters even look at my profile?

The vast majority of the time the answer is no. I've even had recruiters contact me assuming I was with a company I left 2 years ago -- a company that no longer exists.

A friend started his profile with a very visible "if you are a recruiter contacting me for a job I will mock your attempt in public". It was a bit cringey, but proved the point that many recruiters didn't look.

Right. Yes, the mass layoffs are over, but nobody seems to be hiring en masse.

The report this article is based on seems to say as much. From the article:

> "The Tech Job Recession is Over," the Bernstein analysts declared in a recent email to clients. "Tech layoffs have slowed to a trickle. When will the hirings start to reaccelerate?"

"Anecdotally, far fewer recruiter mail messages as well"

Anecdotally for me, I know several recruiters that were the first to be laid-off. So, even if tech jobs are back, there may be a case of nobody being left to run the recruiting.

I can tell you where all these jobs went - here - east of the 14th meridian east.

At least that's where Amazon, Google and Netflix have been hiring for the past few months.

> Most big tech companies have also halted layoffs and some have even begun to rehire staff they let go only a few months ago.

But have they tracked how many of the 300,000+ from this year and 150,000+ from last year have found jobs? The article just says "begun to rehire"...

So the layoffs have stopped, but there are still almost half a million former tech company workers who need to be soaked up by the labor market.

And that assumes there isn't an additional downturn in Q4 this year.

Making the situation worse, venture capital investment has dramatically slowed down, so even if some of the laid off workers wanted to start companies, they either a) can't, if they require initial capital, or b) need to slowly, slowly bootstrap the companies, meaning they can't do fast hiring this year or probably next year or the year after.

Start your AI ventures now, people. There's only 2 or 3 more years left in the hype cycle, and after that people will realize language robots are pretty stupid and the gravy train will dry up.

You gotta give it to the tech industry for constantly tricking investors into paying for junk and ignoring that they make no profit.

> You gotta give it to the tech industry for constantly tricking investors into paying for junk and ignoring that they make no profit.

It probably has something to do with the fact that most of the biggest and most profitable companies on the planet are tech companies. Meta, Google, Amazon etc. all famously made no profit for a long time.

Still, it would be a fallacy to conclude that because a company makes no money, it may be the next Amazon. You need some way to consistently distinguish between unprofitable companies. That is probably pretty hard, and sure enough investors have an embarrassing track record at doing it successfully.

Sam Altman has one of the best track records and he chose to go all in on OpenAI without even getting compensated for it, so that definitely says something.

The problem is that most tech companies and entrepreneurs seem to think they are going to be the next “big thing.” And so many tech folk seem to also think they’re Wozniak underneath their imposter syndrome.

Anecdote: I'm at a 0% hit rate over ~60 applications the last month. I'm not really actively looking so I'm not hand-tailoring each app, just moreso looking to interview to keep those skills sharp.

This is down from a ~75% hit rate on cold applications, also not hand-tailored, pre-pandemic.

It's still rough out there.

Also seeing this. Thats with 7 solid years of experience (granted, non-FAANG).

Whats really deceiving is I am actually getting tons of inmail. I respond to most with my contact info, times to talk, and my resume, and almost none progress beyond a initial phone call with the recruiter, if even that.

Recruiters need to be recruiting, even if they don't currently have job openings, or even clients. Your resume is the product.

Right now, if an initial contact is from a recruiter, rather than management at the company, I'm probably not going to take it very seriously.

Similar experience here.

I thought with about 10 years of experience working on the web, and 5 of those working on large React projects, I could finally be more picky with my next role. I was wrong, I'm struggling more now than as a junior.

I wish the frequent advice to interview even when not actively looking, to keep interviewing/Leetcoding skills sharp... would stop.

It's bad for the people at the company. And it's bad for the people who are genuinely job-hunting. And it's bad for people who do it, because they'll surely end up spending commensurate time in purgatory.

If we all apply only to places where we're genuinely interested, that's good for everyone.

Ok but how does that benefit me though? By not interviewing I don't keep my skills sharp, so that if and when I lose my current job I'll need more time to ramp back up those leetcode skills. I also might be missing out on a good job market or pay raise if I haven't checked my market value in a while.

I think this is partly the fault of our utterly BS dysfunctional industry culture around interviewing.

Maybe the individuals who want to bad-faith or casual interviewing... could limit themselves to the companies that are bad-faith on their own end?

The problem, of course, is that interviewing is a separate skill from doing the job in our industry (and in others, but it's especially bad in tech). That means the only way to keep your interview skills sharp is to interview.

> Meta shed about 25% of its workforce in multiple rounds of cuts that ended in May. Now, dozens of those workers have returned to Meta, mostly since June, Insider reported.

So they laid off tens of thousands of people, and rehired dozens. The article speculates that because layoffs have slowed, everybody who was laid off will be rehired. I don't see evidence for that yet, and I'm not sure how you'd come to that conclusion at this point. I mean, I hope they do, but.

I'm currently interviewing with Meta, but the process is amazingly slow:

- early June: a Meta employee submits my referral

- mid June: talk to Meta recruiter

- late July: screening interview with hiring manager

- mid August: still scheduling an interview-planning meeting with the hand-off recruiter.

I'm guessing that on their side, either the recruiters are super busy, or there's no sense of urgency.

Maybe a blessing in disguise, since it gives me more time to work on their coding-practice problems. Which are great, btw.

It's possible that candidates are getting shuffled around, as some of the Meta recruiters themselves have been laid off. I know multiple people that were/are in the Meta process that this happened to. Takes a few weeks for the new recruiter to go through their double/triple work load of candidates and schedule.

And therein lay the ridiculousness. Just because the rate of something has slowed does not mean a reversal.

It’s like when people report on inflation going down. No, it’s not going down. The _rate_ is going down and you need it to go negative if you expect things to “return” to normal.

How does this jibe with all the news / media hype about Startups facing impending doom and the big squeeze to focus on profits vs growth (which means cutting staff):

[0] https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/monthly-vc-funding-recap...

[1]https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-venture-survival-p...

[2] https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/unicorn-sector-investor...

I can go on and on. Maybe for the MAFANG's life is going .. ok, but it seems in startup land, the sky is still falling? Or is this all a head fake?

It's both. Profitable companies mostly did performative layoffs (they sacrificed some of their employees to appease the gods of wall street), whereas for lots of money losing startups, they should never have hired as many people in the first place.

Unless the startup has incredible PMF (and sometimes even then), they won't be hiring at least till mid next year, as lots of them need time to grow into their valuations.

Also, the ridiculous AI stock price boom of this year has left the profitable companies (MAGMA) with no need to reduce headcount to juice their income statements.

So in sum, the Big Tech job recession (might be) over, but the Startup tech recession stays on. There have been a lot of AI startup failures over the same period as the credited GenAI boom. GenAI is favoring large, entrenched companies, and startups (and the hype-following VCs and investors) might want to look elsewhere for big opportunities.

Yeah, basically.

Most companies can stretch their runway a little and have done so. We are still 12 months away from many startups who don't have solid economics collapsing.

...if literally nothing changes.

But that's never been true at any point in human history, so we can rely on change of some kind taking place.

Yeah hiring in January is the real tell of what's going on. The layoffs winding down now were all planned and executed early at the start of the year. If next year rolls around and companies are still doing rounds of layoffs then everything is very far from being over.

When I got laid off in January 2023 and then created a LinkedIn, I was spammed by recruiters such that I had interviews set up within a week and a job offer by late February. I don't have an impressive resume on paper either. The only thing I did different than others was I didn't chase a high TC upgrade - I just wanted a solid job.

Yeah, I've been trying to reconcile the reports I read here about how rough the job market is with the fact that everyone I personally know has had no problems getting a good job in the industry.

The only things I can think of to explain it is that people are looking at a very narrow slice of the industry (the FAANGs) where things are rough right now, or people are asking for more compensation than the market will support.

But I don't know. There does seem to be a disconnect somewhere, though.

I have one friend that got laid off Twitter in November due to Musk. He just got a job this week.

I don't want to speak ill of him but he's the kind of TC/resume-maxxing type — has to work at top 10 company on "impressive" technology (ML, now AI). He did well on interviews and had offers but kept rejecting or stalling because it wasn't impressive enough. He was living at home so he could afford to do this.

I just took the first job I found that paid slightly more and I liked. I can interview again in a year if I don't like it.

Can you share more information? Industry, location, any special skills, any personal attributes that might make this more likely to have happened for you than others?

June, July, August is the summer. People might be spacing their vacations apart to have coverage in on-call rotations and the like.

I would wait for the next Federal Reserve meeting in September before calling it over and done with, but that is just me.

UK contracting market is pretty much dead. Full-time/Perm hiring pretty much still very quiet as well. They might have stopped layoff but we have a lot to catch up to be back at the bonanza days of 1-2 years ago, the market is now flooded with ex-faang people working for pennies on the dollar. The ride is still bumpy ahead

After months of not seeing any outside ir35 contracts I've seen about 3 today

> OpenAI's careers website listed 60 open roles on Tuesday afternoon, for instance.

Yeah, that's one company -- whose product is contributing to the layoffs. Not to mention, 60 engineers is a rounding error compared to the layoffs.

> Meta shed 25% of its workforce in multiple rounds of cuts that ended in May. Now, dozens of those workers have been rehired, mostly since June, Insider reported recently.

"Dozens" is a tiny fraction of that 25%.

> Amazon laid off 25,000 employees in January. By February, AWS HR VP Ian Wilson was telling staff that the company was looking for ways to rehire some of the laid off workers.

So they were "looking for ways to rehire" 6 months ago, and that's it? Come on. It's impossible to take this as a sign of the job market coming back.

Anyway, it's really telling that these tiny little things are what the article presents as signs of some kind of tech job market recovery. FWIW, depressing as it is, my money is on the tech job market as we know it being a ZIRP. A huge chunk of the tech sector is dead in the water without infusions of VC cash, as we're now seeing, and I don't think things can go back to the way they were without interest rates dropping to near-zero again (and that seems impossible in the near future).

> Anyway, it's really telling that these tiny little things are what the article presents as signs of some kind of tech job market recovery. FWIW, depressing as it is, my money is on the tech job market as we know it being a ZIRP. A huge chunk of the tech sector is dead in the water without infusions of VC cash, as we're now seeing, and I don't think things can go back to the way they were without interest rates dropping to near-zero again (and that seems impossible in the near future).

If antitrust were enforced against Google, Facebook, etc., and the companies split into 3-4 companies, there might be enough jobs created by that lack of consolidation to soak up all the extra labor. The profits for the shareholders might go down a little, but there could still be many profitable companies. It might also be good for the ecosystem as a whole because 3-4 Facebooks would likely purchase common services from a new, 5th company that sells certain services all "Facebooks" use, which could then ALSO be used by a startup trying to compete with Facebook.

If the last few years have taught us anything it's that if Google, FB etc. were forced to return money to shareholders instead of spending it on R&D those shareholders would be even more lost as to what to spend the money on which would almost certainly not be good for tech employees.

People are desperate for good things to invest in, it's just there aren't a whole load of things that actually work as contrary to idealist expectations the web seems impossible to make money on unless you are a monopoly.

> People are desperate for good things to invest in, it's just there aren't a whole load of things that actually work as contrary to idealist expectations the web seems impossible to make money on unless you are a monopoly.

Yeah, unfortunately the really obvious things to invest in are made difficult to do by regulations. For example, building a bunch of housing would be a great way to deploy capital, but the red tape makes it extremely difficult and unprofitable.

And if there were more housing, and cheaper rents and mortgages, then the middle and working classes would have more money to spend, which would mean they could spend on other things besides housing, causing other businesses to be created...

Contributing to the layoffs? They are the ones who generated the next/current hype cycle that's ending the layoffs.

I agree with all your points except for ZIRP being strictly needed for tech to recover. I think there's such enormous leverage from the application of tech to business problems that we haven't seen anything like "peak tech".

I agree with both of you. Lots of the funded companies of the last decade only got to where they are because of ZIRP, but there are definitely huge opportunities for more profitable companies to be built with current tech, even with positive interest rates.

I hope so, but I can't really think of any myself, and the fact that such applications haven't been realized despite the massive tech investment in the last years makes me skeptical they exist. Do you maybe have some examples?

I think there are many boring industries that are benefiting from the use of technology to improve their operations.

We had the misfortune of being rear-ended a month ago. No injuries, but three damaged cars. The entire claims handling process had significant technology components, including a pretty usable website, a mobile application that the adjuster was using, text messaging for communications, etc.

Electronic health records. Electronic procurement. Increased technology applied to logistics (every UPS, Fedex, and Amazon driver has some kind of mobile device to assist them and assist in communicating with shippers and recipients). My bank has a solid mobile app, as do my investment brokers and 401K providers.

Across all of those boring industries, there are hundreds of thousands of, maybe a million, tech/software jobs with an easy prospect to more than double in the coming decade.

# of layoffs being down doesn't necessarily indicate the job recession is over. The total # of job postings is still much much lower than late 2021: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE#

The job market is still kind of cold in terms of open roles and many orgs are going through a soft hiring freezes, and instead only hiring for critical roles. For example my company has no IC roles open currently and only listing some managerial roles on the career page. I think things will pick up early next year. Many orgs and teams have been running very lean this past year and I’m sure most of you have been feeling overworked.

This is only meaningful if all "tech jobs" are interchangeable. If you are a COBOL programmer and you get laid off, you aren't just a priori qualified to start working at OpenAI or whatever.

There was no mention of H1B workers in the article either. Are any of the hirings H1Bs?

I agree. Although to be fair, there's always going to be some limit to the precision of these statistics.

My linkedin has really picked up the last few weeks, lots of contacts

Same here. A sudden up-tick in the amount of recruiter contacts in the past few weeks.

I'm not clear what that says about the number of attractive positions, but it's at least encouraging.

So will the tech giants go back to hiring everyone and parking them to create a talent mote against startups that might disrupt them? The business press never seems to mention that.

Interest rates create cheap money which makes the talent parking you describe more possible.

It seems like rates may be at this level for some time.

Rates at this level means governments must either pay back debt (good luck with that) or cut spending ~5% per year, every year, and borrowing more for new projects will be very hard to justify.

Next year is an election year. Also in many European countries.

i've been out for almost a year now. i'll decide when it's over. but thank you, business lobby, for confirming the tech recession is still in full swing.

Maybe one reason you're struggling to find a job is that you can't understand that just because something is effecting you doesn't mean it's a larger problem for many people...

This is just hateful. The same point could have been made without kicking someone who is down.

I also love smugly insulting people who are having a hard time with a poorly-considered take

I'm sorry, that sucks.

I've been out for nearly 5 months now, and I'm starting to feel anxious about my domain-specific knowledge fading / getting stale.

I'm hoping to stave that off via interview prep and practicing coding problems. But I'm wondering how long it is before hiring managers start to assume my knowledge / skills have atrophied.

I'm starting to appreciate the old saying, "It's easier to get a job when you have a job."

https://archive.is/hc8lQ

> Thank OpenAI and the generative AI boom for limiting the carnage here. AI startups have raised billions of dollars this year

how can that "limit the layoff carnage"? Were "AI startups" the ones who were doing the layoffs? what a nonsensical piece of text

Maybe: "AI startups raised billions of dollars" => "The megacorps had to jump into that market, relatively unprepared, to avoid surprises down the road" => "The megacorps couldn't pull through with even more layoffs because they need the flexibility to redirect folks to wherever the AI boom leads while keeping their established business afloat"

Have you observed significant numbers of tech people redirected to wherever the AI boom leads? i haven't. And the article is certain not to give you any numbers for that, aside from hand-wavy, unsourced, non-quantified "newfound AI startups billions save people from layoffs"

Generative AI is the gift that keeps on giving.

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