We have an expected attrition rate at my company across all departments. We normally lose about 10 people per quarter. This quarter the number of people leaving - zero.
This is my unpopular take on the layoffs at extremely profitable companies
Hiring rates skyrocketed during covid, but so did attrition rates (well, the same people joining Google left some other company)
After big tech started freezing hiring in summer 2022, attrition rates most likely tanked, people wanted to stay put. 6-8 months later, companies ended up with way more employees than they planned, even though they were the ones hiring, cue layoffs. People will crap on Google or Salesforce "why did you hire so much?" - but during the great resignation - what were they supposed to do?
This isn’t very unpopular. Most tech companies demonstrably hired at the same rate but as the base number grew, each new quarter brought in more people. And yes, attrition crashed when they announced hiring freezes. At companies like Google, the layoff count was similar to expected attrition.
What I've been seeing with the caveat that I may just be more aware of the senior people is a significant number of people with 10+ years tenure at the company leaving.
Thats what suprized me as well. I have one friend who was level 7 at google on the youtube team. His whole team was cut in the 1st round of layoffs.
He had been at google for 12 years.
We have already announced there will be no bonuses for 12 months. However we are quite obviously not going to go out of business, and people have higher-end salaries, so I think people just want to stay where it's safe.
Not the author, but quickly ran a script over "Who wants to be hired?" from Jan-2021 to March-2023 and here is the resulting plot of the top-level comments (where indent="0"): https://www.arminbuilds.com/2021_01-2023_03_hired.png
So I was perhaps the inventor of "who wants to be hired" (I had asked to be able to post that thread, and was told that I needed to wait two days... anyway someone ran with it, and I am happy that you have made this thread.
I wonder if it correlates with a /general/ loss of traffic. Personally I find the comments section to be less accepting of more classes of opinions each year.
Thanks for sharing this! Grouping by year, it looks like stories peaked in 2020 but comments continued to grow.
I am curious if the growth in comment count could be correlated with factors like more downvoted/hidden comments, more new comment-only reddit style users, more back and forth argument comments etc. or if it is genuinely healthy community growth.
Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA?
I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.
Anecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that out. But so far, developers are untouchable.
Naively, the category seems to be "high growth tech". So that includes both the SV megacorps and startups (which are also concentrated in the Bay Area).
At least in Germany, I'm not seeing any signs for a major downturn in IT. At least on the hiring side, it actually seems to be even harder to fill mid-to-senior technical roles than last year at this time, and it wasn't exactly easy then either. Hearing similar takes from several companies, all of them still on hiring sprees.
Higher interest rates mean that investments in technologies that will pay off in the long run have to have a higher ROI than they did a year ago, hence less money going into them and layoffs at some places. I'd be super surprised if this reached across all programming or associated jobs.
I was seriously considering government work, but they all seem to want TS clearances. I’m simply not interested in the process. Do you have any recommendations for anywhere that doesn’t have this requirement?
From what I've seen it's less pronounced in the EU. Recruiters I know say that things are slower than in 2022 but it's still healthy. And my direct vicinity still looks short on workers and high on demand.
This is entirely anecdotal. A local company here advertised for a developer position that was pretty well paid (regional Australia). They got a lot of interest from overseas developers but the really interesting applications came from "system architects" rather than developers.
I speculated that the layoffs in Australia are quietly happening amongst tech middle management / developer adjacent jobs but those quiet layoffs are encouraging everybody else to stay put for the moment.
Presumably the right-most data point is from yesterday (3/1/23). Isn't there a potential flaw here in regards to that most recent data point? Whereas in previous months people had all month to post jobs to the monthly job posting thread, there has only been one day since the 3/1/23 job post thread was started. I think this script should be run on the last day of the month, not the first.
Readit News
Hiring rates skyrocketed during covid, but so did attrition rates (well, the same people joining Google left some other company)
After big tech started freezing hiring in summer 2022, attrition rates most likely tanked, people wanted to stay put. 6-8 months later, companies ended up with way more employees than they planned, even though they were the ones hiring, cue layoffs. People will crap on Google or Salesforce "why did you hire so much?" - but during the great resignation - what were they supposed to do?
Gee, I dunno, maybe NOT double in size like Salesforce did?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/num...
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983765
I propose the following:
WHO HAS BEEN HIRED and metrics on such.
https://sql.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRvU3Rhcn...
I am curious if the growth in comment count could be correlated with factors like more downvoted/hidden comments, more new comment-only reddit style users, more back and forth argument comments etc. or if it is genuinely healthy community growth.
I think there's plenty of people that have got used to an inflated salary, so offering "local market rate" won't cut it.
Time will tell if the global downturn will lead to reverting to norm (especially as a lot of companies seem to be moving away from fully remote).
I speculated that the layoffs in Australia are quietly happening amongst tech middle management / developer adjacent jobs but those quiet layoffs are encouraging everybody else to stay put for the moment.
EDIT: The second link provides more insights: https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2021/percentage-of-hacker-news...
Most likely, there is just nothing to see, we are still in the process of being back to normal from the pandemic bubble.
This chart paints a very dishonest picture.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33773972
Feel free to use the historical data, I haven’t had time to update for Jan and Feb 2023!