In what is interesting, TikTok / ByteDance was on an absolute hiring spree for devs October to January for sure, while most other tech companies took the back seat or did cuts. Here’s data I got my hands on, comparing the number of “software engineer” positions at companies and ByteDance stands out unmissably:
Makes me wonder how they missed the memo that Meta got by October/November, Google and Amazon also by end of year: that the market is slowing.
I assumed Bytedance had just as good - if not better - data on the market than eg Meta, but Meta seems to have responded far far earlier to what looks like a stagnating market for as spend, than TikTok.
Tinfoil hat: the cuts have nothing to do with market fundamentals, but are rather collusion by the big players to drop tech salaries. Bytedance is outside the clique.
I doubt it's conscious collusion, it seems more like network effects: if everyone around you is dropping employees, it makes sense to do so at the same time so you don't get negative media coverage were you to do it independently. If you do it now, it just seems like you're following the crowd.
So while it might seem like active collusion, it's more than likely just emergent game theoretic behavior.
I've heard this theory a number of times. I'm not against it. I just don't understand how it would work. Wouldn't salaries just increase again once everybody starts hiring? If this theory is true, all these layoffs are leaving these companies understaffed. Meaning they need to hire everyone back eventually.
Isn’t TikTok still growing like crazy? I don’t see why they need to layoff now - that’s like OpenAI saying they’re laying off 10% because the market is so tough.. not for you it isn’t!
I wonder if it’s TikTok vs ByteDance. From my friend at the former, they are growing rapidly and understaffed vs the teams in China which are bloated and looking for projects. Also seems like they may need to sever the corporate structure and tech architecture which may also reduce the need for headcount in China.
I don’t work in tech (and my question here will prove that) but how does a company lay off 10,000 people without seriously harming their product or ceasing products all together? Is tech that bloated? What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?
Working on R&D for anticipated features. The number of employees that work purely on KTLO is going to be under half at least. The rest are justifying the large revenue multipliers tech stocks get - from their rather high growth rates, which are from expansion and moonshots that pan out.
Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.
This is not borne out by the data. The data shows most layoffs are in recruiting, HR, product, design, data science. Yes, it’s cutting new projects but it’s also just trimming fat.
1. You stop pretty much building anything new. That’s what most people are working on.
2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.
3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.
The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic
This mentality wouldn’t have worked out for MySpace or Snapchat or Facebook and it’s probably not going to be good for whoever is momentarily king of the hill.
Maybe they had internal teams that were working on a new social network app and are now divesting from that (not working on it, not releasing it). Maybe they had a lot of smaller teams who were iterating on the experience to increase engagement, lower friction etc which they will now not pursue etc. "Bloat" is a bit naive that somehow they are just paid to look at the left corner of their office or something. The company built out teams to look into new experiences or to make the experience better and they are going to be doing less of that at least for a while
The vast majority of employees at any tech company are working on the next version of the product. So huge layoffs will not impact their ability to keep the lights on, but will likely have an impact on the product roadmap a few months or even years down the line.
Not everyone at a tech company works on the product. It takes a ton of staff to do things like marketing, ad sales, content moderation. They may be backing away from some markets or maybe they automated a lot of the work.
It's essentially the same as R&D layoffs in other industries, it's just that tech companies have comparatively huge R&D departments funded by outsized proceeds from other business units.
Based on data from other "tech layoffs", very few if any core engineers will go. It'll be sales, recruitment, and an assortment of engineering-adjacent positions like solutions, industrial design, data analytics, and product.
If you look at pure software engineering, it's about 5%. When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.
I work in Big Tech. In the recent layoff, no software engineer was laid off within my org. But several program managers were laid off. I don't necessarily agree with that decision; they do the dirty work of pushing things forward, like doing cross-functional communication, thinking about timelines and milestones, organizing meetings and sometimes attending meetings on behalf of actual engineers. Without them, work is slower, more chaotic, and it is now impossible to ask a program manager to attend a meeting on your behalf. Guess what? Actual engineers' productivity drops.
There is bloat, of course, but there is also a reason why those tech-adjacent positions exist.
This is extremely interesting data, and not what I would have expected. I'm aware HR and recruiting folks are having much much harder times than engineers in finding new positions, but assumed engineers had still been hit harder than that link shows.
For companies outside the big techs that are still wildly profitable and sitting on mountains of cash, laying off people is largely about refocusing on actual profitable activity. Keeping engineers around makes sense for them.
For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Still, 5% seems low. How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
Interesting data! And very different from the anecdotes presented in another top HN discussion today, detailing fierce competition with software engineer job postings receiving 100x the number of applicants compared to just a few months ago.
As someone who has been doing primarily Android engineering for the last 7 years. I am not surprised they are still hiring Android people. It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles. TikTok has reached out to me every month for the last year or so as well.
I did a minuscule amount of app development for android back in the like 4.0 days, and recently tried again, using kotlin and jetpack or whatever their UI kit is. It was awful. Everything is so hard to use. Your UI framework requires you to define completely separate """magic""" functions to preview how it is rendered, as if that makes any sense. All documentation seems to make the classic blunder of assuming you already know the answer, already are an expert in the platform, and already know what you are doing. Every example either hides some magic that they had to add, or requires you already know everything that the example should be teaching you.
I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.
Here in Mexico I just today made note of a phone service provider offering unlimited use of TikTok with their basic offering.
Personally I have never been anything but annoyed by the whole concept of the short videos, but my 5 year old daughter likes it. But then again I also get irrationally angry at programming tutorials in video form as opposed to text, so maybe I just don't "get it".
The weird commas are because it's from an Indian site. Indian languages usually count by one, ten, hundred, thousand, and then lakh (one hundred thousand), crore (ten million), etc. That's why there's an additional comma just after the hundred thousands place.
> Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."[1] The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".
> i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
It's arguably a regional/dialect distinction. Here "layoffs" is being treated as a collective noun, similar to how people say "the data is" instead of "the data are". Notice how people usually say "layoffs" when referring to the entire round.
English has less dialectal variation than most languages, so English speakers (particularly educated British or American speakers) aren't used to seeing it, but collectivization of nouns is one of the more common ones to spot. If you pay attention, you'll start seeing other examples here and there.
Without commenting on the correctness of the English in the article, which I didn't finish reading: when I moved to the US as a Brit, I was amused by many commercials' use of "a savings" to describe the effect of a sale or discount (e.g. "a 20% Savings!")
In this case, the collective noun "savings" is used with the singular article "a". This one shows up in both spoken and written American English.
Obviously, I can point intellectually to how and why it's correct, but it still sounds somehow weird and a bit folksy to this immigrant :)
> Indian English is just about as different from American English as it's possible to get.
Hardly. Indian English is not even very different from some dialects of British English (just not the one British dialect that most non-Brits are used to). Even many of the features that people commonly associate with Indian English are actually taken from British English and still present in present-day British dialects (again, just not the one that most non-Brits are familiar with).
There are other dialects of English that are far more different from Standard American English, to the point where an American speaker will have trouble understanding them altogether, as opposed to being able to understand the meaning correctly albeit with noticeable distinctions.
But you're right that there's a good chance that this is a dialect difference.
Readit News
https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1628831860611506178
Makes me wonder how they missed the memo that Meta got by October/November, Google and Amazon also by end of year: that the market is slowing.
I assumed Bytedance had just as good - if not better - data on the market than eg Meta, but Meta seems to have responded far far earlier to what looks like a stagnating market for as spend, than TikTok.
So while it might seem like active collusion, it's more than likely just emergent game theoretic behavior.
Robot voice and pointing at things while making dumb faces or dancing
Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.
2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.
3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.
The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic
Yes
>What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?
They're probably in meetings, while a fraction of their time is actually spent doing work.
Dead Comment
https://careers.tiktok.com/position?keywords=android&categor...
Wonder if Android people will be laid off.
I quite like this article from interviewing.io on the make-up of most layoffs by position based in LinkedIn data: https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
If you look at pure software engineering, it's about 5%. When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.
There is bloat, of course, but there is also a reason why those tech-adjacent positions exist.
For companies outside the big techs that are still wildly profitable and sitting on mountains of cash, laying off people is largely about refocusing on actual profitable activity. Keeping engineers around makes sense for them.
For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Still, 5% seems low. How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913015
It sounds a little callous but the way I make the distinction is working _in_ tech vs working _on_ tech.
I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.
Why is that? Does iOS present similar hiring challenges?
Personally I have never been anything but annoyed by the whole concept of the short videos, but my 5 year old daughter likes it. But then again I also get irrationally angry at programming tutorials in video form as opposed to text, so maybe I just don't "get it".
That's about 40% of GOOG - which prints $60B per year. TikTok makes nothing.
It's only growing revenues at 53%, and they're massively decelerating.
It's going to be hard to IPO for anything near that without ZIRP when they don't have profits and their growth rates are declining...
Easiest way to make the numbers look better for IPO is fire half the employees and make the other half work 3x as much.
Chances are those openings are just bait, permanently there regardless of whether they actually need people.
Other sources say they have around 150k employees. With 10k laid off, that would indeed be about 7%
i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
The issue with critizising someones grammer are that it always slips in an error or two.
> Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."[1] The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".
Nothing is perfect. Get over it.
Dead Comment
> i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
It's arguably a regional/dialect distinction. Here "layoffs" is being treated as a collective noun, similar to how people say "the data is" instead of "the data are". Notice how people usually say "layoffs" when referring to the entire round.
English has less dialectal variation than most languages, so English speakers (particularly educated British or American speakers) aren't used to seeing it, but collectivization of nouns is one of the more common ones to spot. If you pay attention, you'll start seeing other examples here and there.
In this case, the collective noun "savings" is used with the singular article "a". This one shows up in both spoken and written American English.
Obviously, I can point intellectually to how and why it's correct, but it still sounds somehow weird and a bit folksy to this immigrant :)
I can't think of a collective noun that ends in S that I would follow with "is".
Hardly. Indian English is not even very different from some dialects of British English (just not the one British dialect that most non-Brits are used to). Even many of the features that people commonly associate with Indian English are actually taken from British English and still present in present-day British dialects (again, just not the one that most non-Brits are familiar with).
There are other dialects of English that are far more different from Standard American English, to the point where an American speaker will have trouble understanding them altogether, as opposed to being able to understand the meaning correctly albeit with noticeable distinctions.
But you're right that there's a good chance that this is a dialect difference.