Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again.
I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company.
Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space)
Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements."
With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.
A career change is really attractive but adjusting salary expectations is brutal. Skilled jobs I was interested in and assumed were making $30+ an hour I looked into and found they are closer to $18-20/hr. After tech gigs making 250k+ with equity it is a pretty brutal downgrade.
My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long.
It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.
I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you.
I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying.
But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow.
In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works.
Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
I am also one that doesn’t really enjoy total specialization but every single thing I can come up with, looks like a hobby compared to being a developer financially.
Agreed, I'm probably past the point where I could make a jump into the career area I wish I had gone into with hindsight (forest ranger, fisheries & wildlife, land management for land trusts, etc), but if I was <= 35 I would consider it. However at the age of 41 I've crossed into the 250k+ total comp territory and it's hard to imagine taking that significant pay decrease and making a move where I'm at the bottom of the ladder.
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
How do you make money doing this?
I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The best way to do this would imo run for city council with the backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road improvements.
Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally can't remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal level.
Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm charging for, but don't yet have customers) is:
1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize scooter usage.
2. The scooter parking would make use of existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't take away existing car parking.
3. Work with the staff to find the staff that lives relatively close to the business, and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold through their scooter purchase, so when they're working, their scooter is parked outside.
4. Once there's staff using scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or two parked outside the building, which will start to normalize scooter usage for customers
5. Hand-hold early adapting customers through the same process.
6. Add signage and website and email campaigns to let interested customers learn more about the whole thing.
Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining the process until during busy hours, there is a number of scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the number of parking spots.
I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking, and helping more people start scooting.
I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago, and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from the effects of their decisions.
There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper class white people.
The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not helpful to directly target legal changes.
you sell the scooters and get a commission for the people re-doing the parking lots. the customer company is incentivized by green initiatives and they have budgets to spend.
I'm working on a model of charging the business for this service. A monthly fee, or project based fee.
This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks.
I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts.
It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out.
I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.
> Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters…
> Working on going independent here in Denver … to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot
What will the scooter-users do when it snows? Don’t the parking lots still need to be scaled to the max likely number of cars?
when it snows, scooter-users probably won't scoot.
Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.
good question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island.
So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites.
I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs.
Here's the summary:
- 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022.
- Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
> Unfortunately, the term “tech” has become diluted to the point of worthlessness.
Indeed. Nearly every so-called "tech" company is not actually in the business of selling technology products, so they aren't really tech companies.
Of course they create technology (sometimes very nice ones) internally in support of their actual business, but tech isn't the business the company board cares about.
Netflix is a movie production and distribution company. Google and Facebook are advertising companies. At least Apple is an actual tech company.
The problem is that everything is technology. The wheel is technology.
But since there wasn't any good words to use to describe the practical application of computer science and other skills related to computers, we just used the term "information technology". Because, it's relatively descriptive. Computers are technology to leverage information. Everything related to getting computers to exchange information would be considered technology related to that.
But then it gets shortened to "IT" and just "tech". Networking is "tech", software is "tech", hardware is "tech".
I've come to disregard anything that bills itself as simply "tech". It's smoke and mirrors. You're looking to gussy up something that would otherwise be banal.
The linked blog post reads like the other 43.3% don't seem to have found any new jobs at all (if I'm reading it right). ("There could of course still be many that have found new jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a common practice on LinkedIn").
Actually even this is wrong. Every laid off employee with a LinkedIn account that changed their employer on LinkedIn. I typically am not in a hurry to change mine.
If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the employees anonymized by title that were laid off in California (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
Do you have any data on accuracy/completeness of LinkedIn profiles to accompany this? I get that LinkedIn is the most used platform, but as someone who doesn't use / update it (I have a largely dormant profile), I got the impression my demographic, while a minority, is still a relatively large minority.
Presumably the "total number of identified LinkedIn profiles" & the "total reported layoffs" figures don't match up: what happens to the data gap in your reporting?
Does your dataset include names or personally-identifiable information (IMO being able to key by all those 1-person companies counts)? If so, that seems a little... scuzzy? Would you consider pulling the dataset or at least making it coarse and pseudonymous? I would guess many of the people included and monetized here wouldn't expect or wish to be.
If the response is public scraping is legal, then I might suggest your company's framing of the product is making incorrect claims about this group. From your blog page:
"[N] people indicated a change of employment in the last 4 months (from the date of writing i.e. 14 February, yes Valentines’ Day) - aka ex-Googlers that got laid off."
That 'aka' doesn't necessarily follow, though? People leave companies for many reasons, and therefore this is not a valid "laid-off Googler" dataset.
(Edit: I might be misunderstanding but Google's layoffs were announced less than a month before Feb 14. Why look at the three months before that? Edit 2: noting sibling comment already asked this, didn't mean to duplicate)
Less important, while you do mention some biases inherent in the source (LinkedIn use by country, who has/updates a profile), please note that some of your blog article's headline claims are contradicted by publicly-available data available from press and WARN act filings.
Re: WARN act filings, here's a list of all the titles that were laid off in california (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
> We then used ChatGPT to clean up and categorize all 2-thousand and more roles into 9 main categories. Finally we did a quick manual comb-through to correct any discrepancy.
Yeah, that's a good question. Considering main revenue sources Google is a marketing/ad company and "tech" is simply an implementation detail.
I think a good litmus test is - if the Internet would die then would a given company be killed off by that. Ford and GS can function without it (it would be much harder but still they did that for decades) but for Google that would be the end.
> We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs.
This is an extremely inaccurate statement and really makes me question the validity of your research. And after I read it, there's so many problems that I think nothing conclusive can be drawn at all from it.
Equating "Everyone who changed their employer on LinkedIn from Google to somewhere else between these dates" and "laid off from Google." is embarrassingly bad methodology.
Even in a time of layoffs, hundreds, if not thousands, of people leave Google every month for their own reasons.
If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the titles that were laid off in california (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.
I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier.
I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer".
I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric".
A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects".
> Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.
I've spent most of my career at places that most people here would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time there working with programming, statistics and data analysis and data science research.
I'm calling BS on the "startups" number...I think this is a lot of people hacking around on side projects on their own dime
No mention also of how many will permanently leave tech...this may come down to who has the most savings to fall back on...if you just have to get paid to pay off that BMW lease, you're going to find work wherever you have to
Sorry to hijack this thread and be pessimistic, but whenever you get emails from recruiters about a startup that's got "ex-Google and ex-Facebook" on the "founding team" - keep in mind that it's 99% bs.
One thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off from a very big company during a recession is that you need to adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them.
I have always been very very conservative with my expenses, I don't expect the situation where I make hundreds of thousands of dollars an year as a developer something that will go on forever. They are out there to get you, you are not a business guy with connections, probably you came from a working class family, if they can, they will take the rug out of your feet. So, don't get too excited thinking that making 300k an year (or even 400, 500, whatever) by itself means you're rich now. Income by itself is not wealth if you don't save it. You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
>You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you must sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades. Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on, but frivolous stuff is much easier.
This dynamic is an important reason for the "perpetual childhood" people complain about in the educated urban classes. Because real estate is so expensive, it is legitimately much easier to access "fun" stuff than to have the kind of security needed to pay a mortgage for 30 years. The two don't even trade off against each other that meaningfully. $9-12k/mo mortgage and property tax payments buy a lot of toys, travel, and fancy dinners!
I have a friend who works at Meta working on the Metaverse as a TPM and they just sold their house and bought one twice as large (and expensive). I've warned them it's a risky situation but they didn't agree. They remain employed but if I were in that situation I'd be pulling my hair out.
On the other hand my house is 1/3 the size and I could pay the mortgage working retail if I had to. I'm worried about a bunch of friends who bought big houses that required faang incomes for 30 years if the tech market turns and doesn't return for long periods of time.
I used this just as a symbol. The problem is that expenses have the nasty habit to compound over time and get bigger and bigger. If you don't watch yourself, you'll end up doing things like buying an over-sized home, then a boat, an expensive german car, a very expensive private school for the kids, the family expectation of expensive trips now and then.
And when things get tight, all those "small-ticket" itens and their maintainance come back to bit you if you have insanely high mortage payments like lots of my colleagues.
Last year I took a $15.000 a year pay cut, for a job I really wanted, and that's more aligned with my ideals. It didn't effect our home economy in any meaningful way and I wasn't making anything close to the salaries I've seen people on HN expect (closer to $100K).
If we get to a point, and I'm not sure we're quite there yet, where the big tech companies, startups and other VC funded ventures can't absorb the layoff, then yes, you're absolutely correct. People need to adjust their expectations. $100K - 150K is a pretty comfortable salary in most areas. If you expect $300K to maintain your current lifestyle, you really need to think about scaling back. It may never be an issue, but if it does, you're better prepared and will have a sizable saving for those rainy days.
HN is such a bubble sometimes. Hearing the problems of 250k/yr+ programmers is so completely strange.
I know there are a lot of us programmers and tech workers working in non profits, government, education, or in small but sustainable businesses.
I'm resigned to making well under what HN would consider a junior level salary, but in exchange I get to work at a place with a mission I can believe in, and I still have a comfortable lifestyle.
Maybe we're doing it wrong? I could probably double my salary at some VC funded company, after all. But in threads like this I do wonder if mo money means mo problems.
I don't think we're in a recession. At least not yet. I think your point about salary expectations is kind of interesting though. In my industry (restaurant disposables), we're going through a big price "reset" right now. Almost all of our pricing is trending towards where it was before everything started going crazy in 2021. Maybe tech salaries are heading the same way?
> You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
This kind of just general bashing on tech people is so conceited. You're acting like a $2,000 stationary bike is really worth fussing over when you're making $400-500k/yr.
Very few people at these incomes in tech are living month to month. They're overall saving a fuckload even if they own a 911.
It is not bashing man. As I explained elsewhere this is just a symbol. I am not that young anymore, and I've seen this play have been played a few times now: boom and bust, boom and bust, and to make things worse, now it looks like our wheater supercharged by global warming: faster and more violent swings.
You'd get surprised how fast people can spend money while looking financially healthy. More so when they live in places with insanely high Cost of Living, like London, NYC or the Bay Area.
The Peloton is just a symbol of overconsumption, maybe unfair, maybe inexact, but an useful symbol anyway. It usually comes along with the multi-million mortgage, a lot of the wealth in papers that can get marked to zero overnight. Then you have all the expenses that come with an expensive lifestyle: lavish trips, expensive restaurants, maybe a boat, maybe a couple of very expensive to maintain german cars. And did I mention the multi-million 30 years mortgage that could also become underwater?
I've been there in the past, done that, get some sleepless night thinking not about the next month, but about the next year, and they year after that one. By sheer luck I've avoided the worse, but I got the lesson that you need to respect your money, as much as you have of it, it is not infinite. Buying something just because it looks inexpensive compared to your income is not a good idea.
I seriously doubt that. Might be true for younger people who were laid off by the "LIFO rule" (i.e., cheaper severance), but anyone with a 10y+ career would at least think twice before joining a startup... Especially in Europe, but these kinds of stories are never about Europe.
I wouldn't bet on it. Innovation takes hard work, sacrifice, low pay, etc. - exactly the opposite of what one does in big tech. They might try out of hubris until they burn through that nest egg and retreat.
the next wave of innovation will be things like battery tech, deep AI
in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together in their kitchen
realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as part of his online coding degree (really)
I turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k for my education.
I'm working on a team that's >50% 30+ year career engineers. It's the best team I've ever worked on by an enormous margin.
I don't know how many dollars any of them spent on education, but I know everyone I work with has spent many tens of thousands of hours of their time practicing, working on, and becoming extremely good at what they do.
I don't know anything about you, or your life, what field you work in, and I won't presume anything, but I would like to suggest that you may be encountering negativity due to an outlook that you 'have been basically turned back into a child', or were 'forced to spend 478k for [your] education'.
...
Moving in with your aging mother to help her during a global pandemic does not turn you back into a child. I'll likely live with my mother again before she dies because I wouldn't want to live in a long-term-care home, so I won't put her though that.
Similarly, having spent a small fortune on your education doesn't mean anything other than you're capable of, and have (or had) the means to, spend a bunch of money.
I'm in my 50s, I got 6 job offers in the last round of job interviews I had last year. I haven't felt the age discrimination yet, maybe at some point but hopefully I can retire before that.
No way, since any such degree wouldn't cost any money, instead it would pay you.
Spending 500k on a degree is absolutely insane and indicates that there's a lot more to the story than what's being told. The only exception I can think of is if this person attended a top 10 university, like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, in which case they likely have nothing to worry about.
Are you expecting a salary similar to the one you were getting at a FAANG though? Because that seems to be the main issue - FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are.
> FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are.
I find your tone concerning, considering there's something driving wages down (which if you're a wage worker should make you squirm regardless of how much you make). I feel some resentment against fellow workers (because it doesn't matter how much you make, if you MUST work to live, you're a worker), but it doesn't matter.
Wages aren't tied to worth, or the value added to the business. If this was true, extrapolating from the sheer amount of money FAANG companies make, these compensation ranges should actually be higher.
Wages are tied to the 'market', basically what companies are willing to pay. If they cartelize (like they did with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) they can drive wages down. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the future that something similar is happening today, but I'm not wearing my tin foil hat yet..
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't work in a FAANG company.
“Moving down” can be more difficult than it looks. Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire “overqualified” people (indicated by a high previous salary), because they believe these people will jump ship at the earliest higher paying opportunity elsewhere.
A kinder way to say this is "the talent entering the market is pushing wages down" or something like that. It's pretty rare that wages reflect worth. They reflect what employers have to / are willing to pay.
It will be painful to get a 50%+ paycut but I'm willing to accept any job - but like others guessed small companies instantly reject me. I only get interviews with other companies similar to FAANG, only for them to tell me they have a hiring feeeze. Or very early stage startups, like seed or series A, which I'm not comfortable joining.
The biggest reason I've seen FAANG candidates (mostly Google, FB, and Amazon) get rejected is too much experience with proprietary technology, esp. if they've been there a long time, like 5+ years. I've even spoke to some FAANG candidates who think their internal proprietary tech is widely known or commercial products.
For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite. Not just because of differences in people, time and money resources but also due to scale.
Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5 years. And due to the small number of time and human resources the actual cost can easily be much higher.
You can see this in some of the design decisions around open source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations being important."
But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very small number at the same time on the same component. Most micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a catastrophe for the company."
For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any migration complications.
Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small company which might only provide one or two services such a mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not.
Or for example in a small company having a repo where you define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to generate glue code to bind all your services together in a "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many people but many teams might work on code interacting with the same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
I spent a long, long time in startups before moving to larger companies, and eventually a FAANG. The folks I worked with at the FAANG were incredibly smart, motivated, and collaborative, but a huge percentage of them had no experience outside of the FAANG. They were able to use the in-house systems for build, deploy, data storage, etc. but had never actually had to design and/or build or even think too much about how such things work. It's a great luxury that lets them focus on the product they're building vs. foundational infra, but it's a huge detriment when looking to go outside of those things.
It's ironic, because the System Design interview is a major delineator between lower and higher level Engineers when they interview at these companies, yet many of the tenured people would do very poorly because many of the questions and considerations of the problems presented in such interviews are effectively solved problems in their daily work that they've never had to think about.
Yup, this. I found many ex-Googlers who just don't know how to count up. In the past, "we don't know how to count that low" was a valid joke, but, these days, it seems like a lot of young engineers don't really understand how things work beneath their feet. Every level from 1 to 1k to 1m to 1b is a unique problem, but these kids only learnt how to float above the clouds.
Yeup. I had a similar comment above. I tried phone screening someone, and they had no working knowledge of the commercial apps that we integrate with, the databases we use, etc. And I can hire literally for half the price someone with working knowlege AND know they won't be resentful about the job....
I hope you don't mind me poking into your history, but didn't you make a post a few months ago saying that you quit your job and wanted out of tech?
Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.
Yes, I quit, wasn't laid off. But now I'm in the same pool as the tens of thousands of other very qualified people. How do you think that affects my job hunt?
Could also be why you can't find a job. You may be too expensive, and they're looking for engineers in the sweet spot of cheap/can keep the machine running.
FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, especially smaller companies, so it's not that uncommon for small companies to hesitate to hire someone directly coming from FANG.
Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people.
Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG.
Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
There is always an element of "let's see how low we can get" in mainstream IT, since people outside tech view tech as a cost center and not a profit center, which devalues candidates.
You FAANG background doesn't impress me. I need colleagues I can count on, who make themselves an expert in what's needed in the moment. If you can demonstrate that from your projects, wherever you did them, I look forward to working with you.
Readit News
I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company.
Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space)
Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more.
Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides).
If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars.
Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements."
With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.
My interest is in starting an all electric gardening company, electric tools have caught up to gas ones, they are almost silent and have 0 emissions. If you live in the suburbs you will know that gas blowers are the death of quiet afternoons and I am not sure why the transition to electric is taking so long.
It would just require a large initial investment followed by a huge pay cut and the uncertainty of being able to build it into something larger :P.
I wonder if you could start by buying the equipment, and popping fliers around your neighborhood, and doing the work yourself nights-and-weekends, sorta dog-food your own business, until it's stable enough to hire a neighborhood kid to do the work for you.
I mowed lawns and shoveled driveways growing up (suburban kid) and found it to be rather enjoyable and satisfying.
But yeah, tech salaries have been drafting on the VC over-investment for a while. I was never at $250k+ with equity, but it's a bitter pill to swallow.
In some ways, though, it'll build empathy for how the rest of the world lives/works.
Earning so much money doing nothing more difficult then pressing buttons on a box is pretty cool.
How do you make money doing this?
I also don't see how you really achieve this as a business. The best way to do this would imo run for city council with the backing of developers, remove zoning, and then implement road improvements.
Most cities have parking requirements for cars, so they legally can't remove paring spaces. This needs to change at a legal level.
Offer this as a service to a business. The service (which I'm charging for, but don't yet have customers) is:
1. Paint some scooter parking lines in a reasonable spot, and add a signage explaining why the org wants to incentivize scooter usage. 2. The scooter parking would make use of existing nooks and crannys in the parking lot, so it wouldn't take away existing car parking. 3. Work with the staff to find the staff that lives relatively close to the business, and is amenable to scooting. Teach and train and hand-hold through their scooter purchase, so when they're working, their scooter is parked outside. 4. Once there's staff using scooters regularly, there will nearly always be a scooter or two parked outside the building, which will start to normalize scooter usage for customers 5. Hand-hold early adapting customers through the same process. 6. Add signage and website and email campaigns to let interested customers learn more about the whole thing.
Done. Every time there is a scooter parked in front of a business, that's a car parking spot freed up. Keep refining the process until during busy hours, there is a number of scooters in front of the business equal to ten percent of the number of parking spots.
I won't be removing any parking. Only creating new parking, and helping more people start scooting.
I ran for city council in golden, Colorado, a few years ago, and saw far too much of how the sausage is made. City councils have no power, by design. They exist to absorb the ire of angry citizens, and to insulate the city staff from the effects of their decisions.
There is no world where city council is helpful. They're a lagging indicator of the social norms of middle and upper class white people.
The legal changes will lag social changes, so it's not helpful to directly target legal changes.
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This week is the beginning of my sales process, and I've talked to many people that are super interested, working my way to the people that sign checks.
I'm hoping to get a spend of a few grand per month per company I work with, and get them to commit to a few months of my efforts.
It costs $1500 to pave a new asphalt parking spot (and $25k for a parking spot in a parking garage) so a service that "adds 10 parking spots", roughly, is valuable, and, more importantly, adds capacity to the business when they're otherwise maxed out.
I'm talking to restaurants, breweries, and climbing gyms, at the moment. All of these institutions are sensitive to their customers and staff not being able to find parking.
Denver gets really cold.
It's not just cold, but rain, snow, darkness, sandy roads after snow is plowed, even when warm, etc.
It's all part of exercising good judgement. Skills can be built incrementally.
What will the scooter-users do when it snows? Don’t the parking lots still need to be scaled to the max likely number of cars?
Personally, I'd hate it, but it sounds like it's probably a good place to try something like what the GP describes.
Denver remains surprisingly usable in times around snow, though. a 5a trip in the winter with snow is quite different than a 1p trip that same day, when the sun is out, the roads have been cleared, and the temp is 38 degrees.
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So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites.
I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
It's a nice spot but it's just for fucking around in your 20's. (Or 30's if you live an alternative lifestyle or are a terrible romantic partner)
I write to that list about random things, which is inclusive of more than scooters.
Currently, the next thing I'll be emailing about is about my journey out of evangelicalism, so... Consider yourself warned. ;)
Here's the summary:
- 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022.
- Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
- 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups.
See the full blog post here: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...
There’s a very good chance that their new jobs are similar to their former jobs.
Unfortunately, the term “tech” has become diluted to the point of worthlessness. Every company of any size needs programming, statistics, and such.
Conversely many companies swept under the “tech” term don’t develop any technology at all.
It’s so bad that actual technology development is now referred to as “deep tech”.
Indeed. Nearly every so-called "tech" company is not actually in the business of selling technology products, so they aren't really tech companies.
Of course they create technology (sometimes very nice ones) internally in support of their actual business, but tech isn't the business the company board cares about.
Netflix is a movie production and distribution company. Google and Facebook are advertising companies. At least Apple is an actual tech company.
But since there wasn't any good words to use to describe the practical application of computer science and other skills related to computers, we just used the term "information technology". Because, it's relatively descriptive. Computers are technology to leverage information. Everything related to getting computers to exchange information would be considered technology related to that.
But then it gets shortened to "IT" and just "tech". Networking is "tech", software is "tech", hardware is "tech".
I've come to disregard anything that bills itself as simply "tech". It's smoke and mirrors. You're looking to gussy up something that would otherwise be banal.
We can race to the bottom on the true definition of "tech" as far as actually producing new technology but in this context it doesn't matter.
The linked blog post reads like the other 43.3% don't seem to have found any new jobs at all (if I'm reading it right). ("There could of course still be many that have found new jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a common practice on LinkedIn").
Reminds me of this:
https://www.satellitetoday.com/innovation/2019/02/26/microso...
HR sent policies, and would help you with a headshot, with the idea you'd use that w/ your email, Teams, etc. as well.
Presumably the "total number of identified LinkedIn profiles" & the "total reported layoffs" figures don't match up: what happens to the data gap in your reporting?
Based on my anecdote experience, your not in the minority.
If the response is public scraping is legal, then I might suggest your company's framing of the product is making incorrect claims about this group. From your blog page:
"[N] people indicated a change of employment in the last 4 months (from the date of writing i.e. 14 February, yes Valentines’ Day) - aka ex-Googlers that got laid off."
That 'aka' doesn't necessarily follow, though? People leave companies for many reasons, and therefore this is not a valid "laid-off Googler" dataset.
(Edit: I might be misunderstanding but Google's layoffs were announced less than a month before Feb 14. Why look at the three months before that? Edit 2: noting sibling comment already asked this, didn't mean to duplicate)
Less important, while you do mention some biases inherent in the source (LinkedIn use by country, who has/updates a profile), please note that some of your blog article's headline claims are contradicted by publicly-available data available from press and WARN act filings.
Yet another example of how times are changing!
I think a good litmus test is - if the Internet would die then would a given company be killed off by that. Ford and GS can function without it (it would be much harder but still they did that for decades) but for Google that would be the end.
This is an extremely inaccurate statement and really makes me question the validity of your research. And after I read it, there's so many problems that I think nothing conclusive can be drawn at all from it.
Even in a time of layoffs, hundreds, if not thousands, of people leave Google every month for their own reasons.
Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.
I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer".
I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric".
A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects".
But, perhaps this is a good thing.
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...
[3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...
[4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
I would say they're just as useful as developers - plenty of developers are bad at their job or are employed extraneously to begin with.
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No mention also of how many will permanently leave tech...this may come down to who has the most savings to fall back on...if you just have to get paid to pay off that BMW lease, you're going to find work wherever you have to
Do you know what a sigfig is?
I have always been very very conservative with my expenses, I don't expect the situation where I make hundreds of thousands of dollars an year as a developer something that will go on forever. They are out there to get you, you are not a business guy with connections, probably you came from a working class family, if they can, they will take the rug out of your feet. So, don't get too excited thinking that making 300k an year (or even 400, 500, whatever) by itself means you're rich now. Income by itself is not wealth if you don't save it. You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
It would be quite hard for frivolous spending to become a problem on levels.fyi money. What you really have to watch out for is things like buying a house or starting a family. Not only are they much larger in absolute terms, but you must sustain them at the same quantity every month for decades. Nothing is easy or pleasant to cut back on, but frivolous stuff is much easier.
This dynamic is an important reason for the "perpetual childhood" people complain about in the educated urban classes. Because real estate is so expensive, it is legitimately much easier to access "fun" stuff than to have the kind of security needed to pay a mortgage for 30 years. The two don't even trade off against each other that meaningfully. $9-12k/mo mortgage and property tax payments buy a lot of toys, travel, and fancy dinners!
On the other hand my house is 1/3 the size and I could pay the mortgage working retail if I had to. I'm worried about a bunch of friends who bought big houses that required faang incomes for 30 years if the tech market turns and doesn't return for long periods of time.
And when things get tight, all those "small-ticket" itens and their maintainance come back to bit you if you have insanely high mortage payments like lots of my colleagues.
If we get to a point, and I'm not sure we're quite there yet, where the big tech companies, startups and other VC funded ventures can't absorb the layoff, then yes, you're absolutely correct. People need to adjust their expectations. $100K - 150K is a pretty comfortable salary in most areas. If you expect $300K to maintain your current lifestyle, you really need to think about scaling back. It may never be an issue, but if it does, you're better prepared and will have a sizable saving for those rainy days.
I know there are a lot of us programmers and tech workers working in non profits, government, education, or in small but sustainable businesses.
I'm resigned to making well under what HN would consider a junior level salary, but in exchange I get to work at a place with a mission I can believe in, and I still have a comfortable lifestyle.
Maybe we're doing it wrong? I could probably double my salary at some VC funded company, after all. But in threads like this I do wonder if mo money means mo problems.
Actual wealth comes from having ownership in wealth generating assets.
You can act rich for a season off of a big paycheck but you'll soon be back to poverty if your money isn't converted into value generating assets.
This kind of just general bashing on tech people is so conceited. You're acting like a $2,000 stationary bike is really worth fussing over when you're making $400-500k/yr.
Very few people at these incomes in tech are living month to month. They're overall saving a fuckload even if they own a 911.
You'd get surprised how fast people can spend money while looking financially healthy. More so when they live in places with insanely high Cost of Living, like London, NYC or the Bay Area.
The Peloton is just a symbol of overconsumption, maybe unfair, maybe inexact, but an useful symbol anyway. It usually comes along with the multi-million mortgage, a lot of the wealth in papers that can get marked to zero overnight. Then you have all the expenses that come with an expensive lifestyle: lavish trips, expensive restaurants, maybe a boat, maybe a couple of very expensive to maintain german cars. And did I mention the multi-million 30 years mortgage that could also become underwater?
I've been there in the past, done that, get some sleepless night thinking not about the next month, but about the next year, and they year after that one. By sheer luck I've avoided the worse, but I got the lesson that you need to respect your money, as much as you have of it, it is not infinite. Buying something just because it looks inexpensive compared to your income is not a good idea.
Not reading history books sounds like a good excuse in this scenario.
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-layoffs-are-feeding-a-new-s...
in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together in their kitchen
realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as part of his online coding degree (really)
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I know a lot of these people, many are just now starting up their job search, if at all.
Oh yay. Who wants to work for a company that is actively antagonistic against its own customer base?
The accuracy of this statement just tickles me
I don't know how many dollars any of them spent on education, but I know everyone I work with has spent many tens of thousands of hours of their time practicing, working on, and becoming extremely good at what they do.
I don't know anything about you, or your life, what field you work in, and I won't presume anything, but I would like to suggest that you may be encountering negativity due to an outlook that you 'have been basically turned back into a child', or were 'forced to spend 478k for [your] education'.
...
Moving in with your aging mother to help her during a global pandemic does not turn you back into a child. I'll likely live with my mother again before she dies because I wouldn't want to live in a long-term-care home, so I won't put her though that.
Similarly, having spent a small fortune on your education doesn't mean anything other than you're capable of, and have (or had) the means to, spend a bunch of money.
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Go on...
Spending 500k on a degree is absolutely insane and indicates that there's a lot more to the story than what's being told. The only exception I can think of is if this person attended a top 10 university, like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, in which case they likely have nothing to worry about.
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I find your tone concerning, considering there's something driving wages down (which if you're a wage worker should make you squirm regardless of how much you make). I feel some resentment against fellow workers (because it doesn't matter how much you make, if you MUST work to live, you're a worker), but it doesn't matter. Wages aren't tied to worth, or the value added to the business. If this was true, extrapolating from the sheer amount of money FAANG companies make, these compensation ranges should actually be higher.
Wages are tied to the 'market', basically what companies are willing to pay. If they cartelize (like they did with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) they can drive wages down. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the future that something similar is happening today, but I'm not wearing my tin foil hat yet..
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't work in a FAANG company.
Don't understand the hate on FAANG salaries as it sets a precedent for higher tech salaries.
For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite. Not just because of differences in people, time and money resources but also due to scale.
Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5 years. And due to the small number of time and human resources the actual cost can easily be much higher.
You can see this in some of the design decisions around open source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations being important."
But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very small number at the same time on the same component. Most micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a catastrophe for the company."
For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any migration complications.
Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small company which might only provide one or two services such a mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not.
Or for example in a small company having a repo where you define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to generate glue code to bind all your services together in a "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many people but many teams might work on code interacting with the same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
It's ironic, because the System Design interview is a major delineator between lower and higher level Engineers when they interview at these companies, yet many of the tenured people would do very poorly because many of the questions and considerations of the problems presented in such interviews are effectively solved problems in their daily work that they've never had to think about.
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Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.
Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people.
Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG.
Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
Clearly not the case anymore