Wanted to check how everyone is doing. Especially given all the continued layoffs that are going on.
What are you all doing with your free time? What are you doing to not fall into a depressive hole?
And if you're doing okay - what advice can you share to help those out there who may be struggling?
Thank you
When I consider the advice to seek an "adjacent" position and then move to the role I want internally, it feels like I'm in an even worse position because to work tech support, any customer-facing experience is preferable, meaning anyone who's worked retail has yet another leg up on me.
Well, you asked. I'd rather not try to give advice even if I have any.
This. I came in thinking as long as I become as great as possible at engineering, creating useful things and even grinding out algorithm problems it would be enough eventually. Even contributed to a few popular open source repositories. But guess what, in an interview despite acing all the technical questions and programming problems; I ended up being told that despite showing great ability that I "wasn't engaged enough in the interview and were concerned by my motivation".
I literally got told this after my 6th and final interview. At that point I understood, it is not just your ability that matters but how much the interviewer likes you as a person and they can discriminate you for anything without you helping it. I would even bet that even if I were to get the job I would be dealing with office politics seen as it has people like this in there. This was a big tech company.
I got layer off in January 2023 before I even started my role with Avanade. I quit my job at a mining startup (which recently got bought for 45mil AUD, which I could've got a cut of if I stayed there and dealt with SA) to go work for Avanade. One of the worst decisions I've ever made since it caused my fiancé to break up with me (which caused a mental health crisis). Got some dosh out of them which was good (because they breached my contract), didn't even sign the release documents to get the money and make me shut up (but I got the money anyway).
Was working at a mining equipment company and developing copy protection/DRM there, and I got sacked the day after I completed the project.
I was unable to get a job for a while because both of my previous bosses gave the worst references ever and went dead silent after I confronted them about it :/
But I'm back on my feet with a dev job working for my State Government (in the Health Sector) which is quite lovely, and my co-workers aren't assholes for once!
Finding a tech job in 2024 is definitely going to be a lot of luck, mass-applying, and trying to make yourself stand out from other candidates.
My only comments from someone who found Linux in high school, used to love computers, the old internet, and used to do scientific computing in Fortran and matlab.
I read through some of these posts and feel like I'm on a different planet when it comes to computers. So many packages, podmans, stand ups, etc etc. seems like there's a package, library, git runner whatever for everything. Micro services, web apps, the word app in general. Virtualize everything.
When did software design / engineering change so much? Are things really getting better, or is computing power allowing the industry to duck tape a billion things together instead of writing in low level languages and using standard packages and compilers?
What are recruiters and companies looking for?
We need to do more complex things, and if you want to do these things efficiently without reinventing things from scratch, you need to rely on different tooling and work on various level of abstraction.
> Are things really getting better
No but they aren't getting worse either, they're just different (except for the parts that aren't).
> or is computing power allowing the industry to duck tape a billion things together instead of writing in low level languages and using standard packages and compilers?
Lower level languages aren't better than higher level languages, they serve a different purpose. As a professional, you need to pick the right tools to do your job.
> And if you're doing okay - what advice can you share to help those out there who may be struggling?
I hear the market isn’t doing much better. I was saved by the grace of a referral, but I’m confident remote work is dead for most reach workers. Part of the reason I was out of work so long was that remote was my one hard requirement. I was willing to take a massive salary cut for a remote role, but could never make it past the first round. For on site roles (which I honestly used for interview practice) I usually got much further. Even the job I managed to get started out hybrid, and now upper management is slowly trying to claw us back in full time, despite being warned of retention issues.
My suggestion: keep unusual avenues open. I got my start through a game - Counter Strike
I met the right person who worked at the right place/knew my interests
It ain't the first time I've been laid off, and I'm trying to be optimistic that I'll bounce back again, but it still sucks. I don't know if it's comforting or worrying that I ain't alone.
Kinda wish I wasn't sometimes, would make it easier to escape.
Most of my unaffected friends are afraid to change jobs or take risks right now. The fear is real.
Ask HN: Is the job market is bad as everyone claims it is?
I find great joy thinking about next cycle of growth, imagine how cool it would be, what new great products and tech it will bring.
Last year I was working 12 hour days at a startup with regular spikes into 14-18 hour days, until I was abruptly and unceremoniously laid off. I've been dealing with varying degrees of burnout since 2017 but this experience rocketed me to all new levels of burnout; I couldn't stand to be at a computer for several months after the layoff.
I was hoping that time off would help, but after being in the industry for 19 years I think I'm just done. I used to really enjoy software development but these days completing most tasks feels like pushing through thorns. Between chasing down failures within GitHub actions, writing piles upon piles of YAML instead of real code, futzing around trying to debug a crashing process within a Kubernetes pod -- or generally trying to beat misbehaving clusters into submissions, waiting for Terraform runs to complete, etc, I spent more time shaving yaks rather than doing rewarding tasks. On top of that, agile has turned into "the product team has the attention span of a squirrel so good luck cranking out half-baked features without having any idea of what next week will look like!" Software engineering as a discipline feels like it's become more hectic, more needlessly complicated, more grating and much, _much_ less rewarding than what it was a decade ago.
I wrote a great deal of open source code, I've got applications that have millions of downloads, I even have code running on the ISS; regrettably the satisfaction that I got from shipping features that thrilled customers has basically vanished. It's important to me that I take pride in my work and know that I genuinely did a good job rather than shovel software as fast as humanly possible. That feeling hasn't shown up in 5-7 years.
I find that I still enjoy writing software. Recently my girlfriend was diagnosed with a number of allergies and I had a lovely time writing a Rust app that OCRed a product ingredient list, queried a the Pubchem and CAS databases to resolve food/cleaning product/cosmetic ingredients and determine if they contained any allergens, and I'm likely going to keep working on that for a while. Recently I picked up a project (shelved during the pandemic) building a scaled replica of the Curiosity/Perseverance rovers and getting into ROS/machine learning/SLAM has been a delight. It's fun, it feels natural, and I don't feel gross doing it. I've still got the skills, even if I'm not working.
In the current macroeconomic conditions, finding another job would mean a ton of work crafting the perfect resume, grinding the joy out of life via leetcode, and going through endless interviews. The idea makes me physically sick, one year after getting laid off. When you add that emotional state on top of the profound fear of being hired as a SWE and then getting stuck writing Terraform or being an emotional caretaker for Kubernetes, the end result is complete paralysis in my process of applying for jobs.
Over the last few years I picked up my Firefighter I/II certifications and got my EMT license; I'm currently midway through the recruit fire academy as a volunteer for a nearby fire department. I'm seriously considering becoming an ER tech at a nearby hospital to make ends meet and build experience in pursuit of becoming a career firefighter. At present it feels like trying something new is worth a shot; if nothing else I feel like I'll be able to take some pride in doing some real, tangible good for people.
I have complicated feelings about the prospect of a career that's going to have worse hours, less pay, be more physically demanding, and will expose me to emotional and physical trauma. But a long time ago I took so much pride in my work; I was proud to call myself a software engineer and felt like I was able to make a difference.
In summary -- maybe tech has changed, maybe I've changed, but getting laid off may have been the final straw for me. I'm looking into alternative careers that might be a better match for my needs.
The rest of us were dragged along with the expectations the CTO had set with his working hours, and I was gunning for a staff level position and thought that we'd only be working these hard hours for a few weeks (which dragged into months). I genuinely trusted the people involved and my mistake was made clear when the only person on my team that wasn't cut was the only other person that regularly worked as many hours as the CTO.
In an environment like this it's very difficult to say "Nope, I'm doing my eight and then I'm clocking out." When you have the CTO and a chunk of the most senior engineers working non-stop trying to enforce reasonable working hours carries a healthy chunk of risk.
Ultimately I got cut because I'm on US/Pacific and most people were in Europe/Central. Was it foolish to work those hours? Sure was. Is there a strong unspoken expectation within startup culture that sometimes you'll be working long, painful hours in the pursuit of a promotion? Talk to anyone that has worked for Stripe and you'll find plenty of other people that have either landed a promotion or got equally burned out.
This kind of thing is also why I'm interested in leaving tech - actual overtime pay, and having the possibility of union representation.
I was planning on leaving tech before the layoff. In fact, I was hoping to use my last job to fund my education in something else, and then had to piss away my savings while out of work. I was telling people at the time that that was the last job I ever planned on working in software.
Now I’m very close to just resigning and accepting I’ll never get out.
If you want out, I'd strongly encourage you to start investing in that education now. Working a day job and taking night classes is challenging but it'll start building a foundation to exit -- or at least provide some novelty. I took my severance and put it into an accelerated EMT program which is giving me some badly needed routes forward.
Regardless, I wish you the best of luck no matter where you go. Sometimes we just need to pay the bills for a few years and figure out next steps.
I've had that happen at startups too, but believe me, you can probably be making triple what the startup paid you and have pretty good job security putting in merely 9 hours a day or something.
You have the talent, you're a hard worker, you seem like you're so close to being set. There are enjoyable high paying jobs that, while a little bit of stress, are not near as stressful as the overworked startup life that pays peanuts.
Just something to chew on, as someone who jumped from startup life to FAANG after ~18 YoE recently.