I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.
I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool.
Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before.
Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings
Last summer and also before that, when I applied, I would get ~90% response rate and would have at least a call from recruiter/HM.
Last week I sent a bunch of applications and crickets... this is something that I've never experienced in +10 years being in the industry. I'm not in dire need for a job but I can imagine how much,much stressful is to be unemployed now vs even 3-5 years ago.
I was laid off in December and this has been by far the hardest search of the now four times (yes, really) I’ve been laid off in my career.
The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.
I guess I don't exactly understand as my experience is quite different. I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs.
Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.
Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved.
It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
Checked mine too and the difference is stark. However just setting Linkedin to "looking for a job" was enough to get a lot of attention in early February. I didn't want to wait for layoffs on my company, so, in advance, I got a much better paid job in about 2-3 weeks. Listings always suck, btw. Recruiters is where it's at.
I got laid off in November (not faang). I was going to wait until the right position came around, but as the lay offs kept coming in January I jumped on the first non-terrible opportunity. If the music stops I don't want to be without a chair.
Excellent choice. If/when things improve you can make the switch, for now you've got steady income and a non terrible position. That's better than a lot of people.
good choice - you definitely don't want to be caught without a chair when the music stops.
Whether one likes musk or not, and whether or not you agree with how he is running twitter or not - he let go like 80% of the company and it is still more or less running (with some bumps) - I don't think other companies will go to quite that extreme, but I'd bank that some executives right now in some companies are asking themselves "can we at least cut 33% of the staff and still keep things (more or less) running"?
> I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.
Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.
1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal
It’s not mutually exclusive. Applying for jobs takes a few hours a week. Maybe a little more if you get a hit. You have a lot of bandwidth to work on an mvp and do bootstrapped startup stuff.
IDK about you, but applying, recruiting calls, company research, HM call, leetcoding, practicing system design interviews, scheduling coding/arch interviews, practicing with arch diagramming tool, telling recruiter it was good and no i still wont show my hand with comp, followups because layoffs hit recruiting and coodrinators (they're short handed now), more scheduling conflicts, interviewing, and then telling the recruiter "no you offer first, then I'll tell you what i think", "Ok I'll talk to your VP finance about how valuable you think the options are", more scheduling...
Its sad seeing the students coming into the field trying to find work right now. They don't understand why there's no responses or why the corps are not showing up to job events.
The industry has perpetuated the lie that stem means employment, so now we have a surplus of workers in an economic downturn, they're competing for the jobs because there is less capitol to create them.
When the market goes down the corps pull back. All the taxes we pay in infra and education are not returned by them.
Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hints of start ups rising to do this, like OpenAI challenging search and Shopify testing the waters of it's own fulfillment network).
It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.
> Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product.
The second statement does not follow from the first.
What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all the noise and reaching millions of users is now arguably harder than it was previously.
The key word in the phrase is 'reach'. If by 'reach' you mean the equivalent of getting an email into someone's account, then the statement is true. You can easily spam millions of email addresses for pennies. You can get ad space on lots of browsers. You can cold call millions of people with automated systems.
On the other hand if by 'reach' you mean actually getting someone's physical and mental attention, then it can be harder than ever. Your message gets filtered out or swallowed up in the sea of other messages and ignored either by technology or by the users themselves.
It is like those pictures of NY Times Square (or any corner in Asia) where you have 10,000 billboards of all shapes and sizes all flashing some marketing message. It is easier than ever to buy a few seconds or minutes of ad time on one of them. It is harder than ever to get the passing crowd to take notice of your message when it is drowned out by all the others.
I don't understand why Google and Amazon would invest all this money in these employees building up their tech and tribal knowledge just to lay them off. Do these companies not expect to grow in the future? Seems like just freezing hiring for a year or two would save you more money in the long run rather than having to rehire and rebuild all this expertise.
> Seems like just freezing hiring for a year or two would save you more money in the long run rather than having to rehire and rebuild all this expertise.
It took Google 6 years from 2012 to double headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $50B to $136B (almost triple). Profit from $10.7B to $30.7B (triple).
In 4 years from 2018 to 2022, Google more than doubled headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $136B to $279B (barely double). Profit from $30.7B to $50.9B (only up 65%).
Almost all these companies have similar stories.
They're still good companies. They just hired way too many people thinking that the pandemic trend would continue for a long period of time - rather than revert to the mean.
If Google continue to grow at it's more long-term average rate - without the layoffs, you're looking at being overstaffed for years.
A lot of people even at Google just do run-of-the-mill stuff. Not everyone is making deep learning artificial big table or some such.
A rule of thumb is at any organization roughly square root of employees are critical. So at Google that number would be < 500 people. So even when I consider that layoffs are totally random (unlikely), there would be 40 or so people laid off which could be considered important loss. This is bad but not going to hamper Google significantly where they are going.
Sometimes, you'll hear pundits say that these kinds of layoffs are aimed at "the bottom 5%" or whatever, but who's been around for these cycles knows that lots of good people get cut alongside the actual underperformers. There's also a lot of "last to be hired, first to be fired" in big layoffs, so presumably with those people you aren't losing too much tribal knowledge.
In some cases, the layoffs were targeted at particular areas of the company, like Amazon targeting their devices group. If they don't anticipate growth in that area, it may not be worth it (to management, anyways) to reallocate those employees to other parts of the company.
All that being said, these things tend to be driven by short-term financial metrics rather than long-term ones. A hiring freeze wouldn't have as dramatic an impact on next quarter's earnings.
> Do these companies not expect to grow in the future?
Yes and wages were outpacing that growth, so as soon as someone took the first step, all the big tech companies piled on in short order. And, low and beyond, offers appear to be down right now. Mission accomplished?
Some are, but a lot of them are also made to be successful long term companies. Small business is still a large employer overall. Some businesses need to be very big, and if you want to be "filthy rich" you have to be in one of those. However you can be nicely wealthy at a small company.
99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server.
Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less?
A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing.
If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.
This. Cloud is great when a startup hits an unexpected growth spurt and can scale infra without getting distracted from the core mission. It is not cheap, but it may be worth it.
But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
I disagree, mostly because if your product takes off, that single day or few weeks where the adoption rate sky rockets may be your defining moment for your startup, and scaling up on the cloud is trivial in comparison. Remember, when you're that small, the expenses of the cloud vs dedicated hardware is tiny compared to your employee expenses anyways.
Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box.
Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale.
I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup.
[0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
Looking back 20-30 years, it absolutely was a primary limiting factor. Massive capital outlays were required to serve the kind of traffic you can get with the free tier of modern cloud infra providers.
I was employee #2 at Airship (was Urban Airship) which was started by laid off tech workers after the 2008 housing crash. Oregon, where we were all located, had an unemployment incentive for starting a new business… and it worked! Airship has employed hundreds of Oregonians (and others) over more than a decade.
Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.
I imagine severance packages are a big factor here.
People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).
Cobra has this unique advantage that you can turn it on retroactively, so it's actually decently cheap for healthy individuals. You can just plan to not pay for it and then if things go wrong you can incur medical bills and send them to cobra after signing up. Of course you do have to backpay cobra if this happens.
As someone laid off from a company with no name recognition and two weeks of severance, I’m just hoping to find something before all the more impressive resumes come flooding back into the system.
Honestly, I have a few startup ideas I’d love to try, but this cycle has not put me in a place to try them.
I'd imagine the way the stock market was prior to 2022 also plays a factor. I know plenty of senior+ level people in tech who made a killing off their RSU growth and could basically retire modestly in their 30s. There's lots of talented people with strong tech backgrounds and big safety nets right now.
I sympathize with anyone who's been recently laid off but I am also genuinely excited for what's going to come next. I feel like we've been in a startup rut over these past few years. At least for non-crypto startups, that is.
Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.
Of course we’re in the beginning of a market correction and see thousands of people losing their livelihoods will always be sad.
However one thing that only a few people are discussing is that the current compensation model for start/scaleups needs some rethinking.
In my previous demographic, you used to go to startups knowing that of could fail in 12 months, but would be a great intense professional and learning work experience. And eventually you could have some stocks that if you survive 4+ years you could sell it to the company or coming investors in liquidity events.
If case of company bankruptcy, after 1 or 2 months you could be back in the game.
Fast forward for today, going to some startups in my new demographic most of them does not offer some stock upside for employees, and the ones that offer some of them always have this “carrot-stock-game”. No liquidity events, sometimes 7 or even 9 years as a startup, tons of mind games like “the IPO will be <current year + 3> to create a sense of urgency on people, companies with series F,G,H where high ego founders wants to “ring the bell” at NYSE instead to sell to a PE and give an exit for employees, and de list goes on.
In my opinion one unattended consequence of that is that people are going to consider startups only as a paid learning bridge to get a job at bigger companies.
Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding.
Happy to see you here, i love the idea of your app, but on my tests i had a poor experience, with latency, speed of execution and with your responses. it seem unmaintaned, what is tha state of the company today?
Product is on autopilot, company ran out of money and couldn't raise further funding. I'm not offering help to find product/market fit and not showing these things to sell the product. Just offering help to fellow founders trying to get something off the ground. I managed to do that part.
Btw sorry for your issues with the product. We were a small team, we raised $2m in 2019, but didn't launch that product until 2021. We just didn't have enough time to execute on it effectively.
Depends on the measure of success. Might have been able to shrink the timelines on everything if I had a sounding board and people on my side with prior experience. They just didn't think I was worth the time.
It is an interesting approach to developing services. The company did not survive though, found this in a blog:
> Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
Yup company is defunct but I left the product running while I push it toward something else. Basically why does every saas service need to be backed by a corporation. Why can't we have something community led. We have open source which many people can contribute to but not running services. So it's an experiment.
Personally as a senior developer with a family, I wouldn’t stake my stability on a startup. Does that reservation generalize? Do startups end up lacking wiser devs?
Ideally if you are a senior big tech employee you are not living paycheck to paycheck any more, so you could endure a few months of not being employed. And even then, if you are good and have a network, you would find employment very quickly if a startup fails, unless there is some event that causes all startups to not look for new employees.
The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.
What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months?
Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself and a few other people.
Realistically, if you're starting a startup and not currently working, plan on having at least 12 months of expenses saved (not a few months).
Not all startups are terrible.
In general yes the workload is higher but big tech is now a stressful place as well (layoffs, performance reviews etc). I'm positive many people in big tech started working harder, unless they wanna get fired.
A startup with a good runway (say 2-3 years) and faith from investors is an OK place to be in. And there are many parents in such companies.
Wages from a volatile source is better than no wages, and what you previously thought to be a stable source has proven otherwise - you’ve just unexpectedly been laid off.
Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
During the last few years some start ups were offering solid base salaries in addition to RSUs, so the risk wasn’t horrible. Not sure what it’s like now.
As a senior looking for FTE? Probably not. As a senior looking for a semi-retired interesting place to work? Definitely. We've hired the latter for shorter term but not really contract worthy work in the past that was beneficial for both parties.
I would think the other way around: Public markets are correcting to a higher interest rate (i.e. liquidity being removed from the system) but for startups and scale-ups this correction did not start yet with all force (e.g. valuation slashing, 50% layoffs, acquisition and liquidation by PE firms, etc).
Same thing with the collapse of Nortel in Ottawa around 2001. Painful in the short term for those affected but long term it created a much more robust tech ecosystem.
Readit News
I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool.
Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before.
Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings
The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.
Dead Comment
It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
Whether one likes musk or not, and whether or not you agree with how he is running twitter or not - he let go like 80% of the company and it is still more or less running (with some bumps) - I don't think other companies will go to quite that extreme, but I'd bank that some executives right now in some companies are asking themselves "can we at least cut 33% of the staff and still keep things (more or less) running"?
Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.
1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal
It's easily a full time job.
The industry has perpetuated the lie that stem means employment, so now we have a surplus of workers in an economic downturn, they're competing for the jobs because there is less capitol to create them.
When the market goes down the corps pull back. All the taxes we pay in infra and education are not returned by them.
It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.
The second statement does not follow from the first.
What is true (partly because of the first statement) is that building is now easier than ever. Precisely because of that, however, rising above all the noise and reaching millions of users is now arguably harder than it was previously.
On the other hand if by 'reach' you mean actually getting someone's physical and mental attention, then it can be harder than ever. Your message gets filtered out or swallowed up in the sea of other messages and ignored either by technology or by the users themselves.
It is like those pictures of NY Times Square (or any corner in Asia) where you have 10,000 billboards of all shapes and sizes all flashing some marketing message. It is easier than ever to buy a few seconds or minutes of ad time on one of them. It is harder than ever to get the passing crowd to take notice of your message when it is drowned out by all the others.
It took Google 6 years from 2012 to double headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $50B to $136B (almost triple). Profit from $10.7B to $30.7B (triple).
In 4 years from 2018 to 2022, Google more than doubled headcount.
In that time, revenue went from $136B to $279B (barely double). Profit from $30.7B to $50.9B (only up 65%).
Almost all these companies have similar stories.
They're still good companies. They just hired way too many people thinking that the pandemic trend would continue for a long period of time - rather than revert to the mean.
If Google continue to grow at it's more long-term average rate - without the layoffs, you're looking at being overstaffed for years.
Why?
A rule of thumb is at any organization roughly square root of employees are critical. So at Google that number would be < 500 people. So even when I consider that layoffs are totally random (unlikely), there would be 40 or so people laid off which could be considered important loss. This is bad but not going to hamper Google significantly where they are going.
In some cases, the layoffs were targeted at particular areas of the company, like Amazon targeting their devices group. If they don't anticipate growth in that area, it may not be worth it (to management, anyways) to reallocate those employees to other parts of the company.
All that being said, these things tend to be driven by short-term financial metrics rather than long-term ones. A hiring freeze wouldn't have as dramatic an impact on next quarter's earnings.
Yes and wages were outpacing that growth, so as soon as someone took the first step, all the big tech companies piled on in short order. And, low and beyond, offers appear to be down right now. Mission accomplished?
Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I have to look after myself? How much can I really save? $50 a month maybe less?
A long time ago when I was working a major telecomm provider I had the privilege of working with a great software mentor. He instilled in me the lesson of knowing approximately where you are going to land and not do anything now that would jeopardize that landing.
If I was a CTO at a greenfield startup. I would insist we deploy on a PaaS that supports serverless, object storage, and container orchestration. We would recognize and enforce well accepted patterns that will not impair our ability to scale later. There is plenty I can do to keep the costs low(most importantly turning things off) then when I need to scale up its as easy as turning a knob.
But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box.
Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale.
I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup.
[0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
Having an old school style IT structure was a pain. Maintaining your severs, networking gear if needed, OS updates ... on and on.
For very small teams (maybe not the well funded start ups) that could eat a lot of time and trouble.
Not even close.
Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.
People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
Nb. using COBRA is often pretty damn expensive, since you're paying the full cost of whatever plan the company uses. It can make sense for some people since it means your deductible and max-out-of-pocket don't reset like they would if you switched to a marketplace plan (and then reset again when you get a new job and another plan) but it's not quite as nice a thing to have as it was before the HCA (when staying on COBRA could be a major money-saving move on premiums alone, for people with illnesses who'd probably be stuck on some incredibly-expensive state-backed insurer of last resort, without access to a company's group plan, if they could get coverage at all).
Honestly, I have a few startup ideas I’d love to try, but this cycle has not put me in a place to try them.
Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
However one thing that only a few people are discussing is that the current compensation model for start/scaleups needs some rethinking.
In my previous demographic, you used to go to startups knowing that of could fail in 12 months, but would be a great intense professional and learning work experience. And eventually you could have some stocks that if you survive 4+ years you could sell it to the company or coming investors in liquidity events.
If case of company bankruptcy, after 1 or 2 months you could be back in the game.
Fast forward for today, going to some startups in my new demographic most of them does not offer some stock upside for employees, and the ones that offer some of them always have this “carrot-stock-game”. No liquidity events, sometimes 7 or even 9 years as a startup, tons of mind games like “the IPO will be <current year + 3> to create a sense of urgency on people, companies with series F,G,H where high ego founders wants to “ring the bell” at NYSE instead to sell to a PE and give an exit for employees, and de list goes on.
In my opinion one unattended consequence of that is that people are going to consider startups only as a paid learning bridge to get a job at bigger companies.
We built this https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro
Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.
Btw sorry for your issues with the product. We were a small team, we raised $2m in 2019, but didn't launch that product until 2021. We just didn't have enough time to execute on it effectively.
Sounds like you were successful without giving up 7+% of your company.
> Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.
What kind of insanely high growth business is going to either generate enough revenue for a Sr. Dev's full yearly salary (or close to it) or lead to investment in just a few months?
Even if you're an insanely well connected person it's going to take more than a few months to put together a pitch deck and a POC for a new business and then raise enough money to pay yourself and a few other people.
Realistically, if you're starting a startup and not currently working, plan on having at least 12 months of expenses saved (not a few months).
A startup with a good runway (say 2-3 years) and faith from investors is an OK place to be in. And there are many parents in such companies.
Senior dev != big tech
Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
It sucks for those laid off, but these big tech companies have had tons of talent effectively locked up for years.