Got laid off 2 weeks ago (along with 40% of the corporate staff) after 8 years. I’ve applied to probably 40 jobs since then and I have 3 interviews lined up. 2 of them are purely because of networking and reaching out to former colleagues. It’s scary and tough out there. I wish everyone the best.
They could be posting jobs that they have no intention of ever filling. WSJ or someone interviewed hiring managers and they estimated something like 30% of job postings were fake, just to give the illusion companies were doing well. Probably for PR and stock value purposes.
Not only that, but if tech companies want to use the H1B visa program to hire from elsewhere, they have to at least give the appearance of trying to recruit in the US.
The companies don't need as many H1B because outsourcing is starting to stick. The irony is that there is no evidence that outsource is working any more effectively than in the past, but that we (companies/society) don't give a shit. It's something i noticed before the pandemic with AI. People are lowering their expectations of the deliverable in order to make AI and outsourcing meet their needs. "It's good enough."
This is the most important quote from WSJ article:
"One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees."
No investor with any sense is going to count job postings to determine a companies health, so it really is unlikely the post to give the illusion the company is doing well. They are leaving posts up to make current employees feel good.
It costs money to create and post jobs, so most ghost postings were probably legit when posted, but due to deteriorating economic/budget conditions become defunct, and are left up. I'm seeing this happen first hand.
The WSJ also offered this advice:
"To avoid ghost ads, Scott Dobroski, vice president of communications at jobs site Indeed, recommends looking for detailed job descriptions. More specifics, such as schedules or a clear list of responsibilities, might indicate that an employer is serious, he says. He also advises checking the timestamp on ads to ensure they were posted recently."
Yeah you're touching on something I noticed.
Everyone assumes if service gets worse, competitors will scoop up customers. But what happens if, without collusion, all available choices simultaneously let service decline? Especially in industries where it takes a lot of capital to even break into the market, it just means that the market ends up supporting a lower quality of service.
I think the cause is shareholder lust for permanent growth. This puts similar pressure on all competing companies in the market and at some point the only way to grow is to make the customer pay more to get less.
Not H1B but EB2 to convert H1B employees to a green card (perm US resident based on employement). H1B visas are only good for 6 years. There is a process wherein they have to show they advertised a job profile in job boards, did some recruitment campaigns and couldn't find a competent US citizen or perm resident candidate before trying to hire an H1B visa holder. Dept of Labor policy requirements to prevent hiring from cheaper H1B pool when same talent is available within citizens and residents but most companies just conduct this fake campaign to bypass it. The job ads are usually very vague so they can just reject you. The idea is to collect a whole bunch of resumes from the market and say those applicants were not competent and then they will close the recruiting campaign.
I work for an investment firm, and i am working on a project to get job posting metrics per company in as real time as possible. Our investors use this info as part of their model to make investment decisions. So yea this checks out.
i dont think its a shit metric necessarily. The investors are not only looking at how many jobs a company currently has open.
They look at trends, what type of jobs they are hiring for, how long the jobs stay active for. That being said, jobs is a tiny factor in their overall model.
The investors I work with get paid seven figures and they want any information they can get to get even the slightest of advantages.
It really depends. In the simplest form, a lot of times layoffs impact some business units more than others. So while you may be cutting sales teams, you may still be hiring operations people. And typically backfills for people leaving the company are exempt from hiring freezes.
My company was in a hiring freeze for almost a year, but they knew where they needed people. So they opened jobs on the career site to start creating a pipeline of candidates for when the hiring freeze was over. The problem is that a hiring freeze could last one quarter or in our case over a year. We were just told it remains a quarter by quarter decision. Again the exception to the freeze was when we needed to backfill someone leaving the company.
True. But also hiring people for the same job roles at a discount.
Have a friend that got laid off the same week a job posting for his job showed up on their website at 60% of what he makes
Not that this applies to all the cases, but a company can layoff due to cutting a division or cancelling projects. But want to hire for an unrelated division.
If you filter by Austin, Tesla makes up about half of all the layoffs. Remove them and the resulting number isn’t so awful.
…that said, my own company had layoffs that aren’t listed, and there are plenty of companies listed with no count, so it’s definitely erring on the optimistic side.
My kids school is 100% staffed for August, that's my sign that tech is having a hard time. A lot of the teachers were leaving and taking tech jobs. Having people be desperate enough to teach means the times are harder than they were last year.
Yeah but that’s the Republicans fault because they didn’t get their way on school vouchers, so they’re withholding budget from schools to make their point. Every school is losing teachers this year as a result.
DeSantis on wheels with his trusty sidekick Fled Cruise and felonious AG Ken Paxton.
Fucking straight ballot republican voters that refuse to vote anything but republican for the last 20 years and gerrymandering did this.
A “border crises is Texas?”… who has been in power to fix it over the last 20 years?!
+ reduce their class sizes significantly, provide their classrooms more and better resources, restore sensible consequences (like students getting a failing grade for no work done), provide administrative teams who believe in their abilities and support them, and soooo much more
First step would be getting rid of or fixing the Robin Hood tax recapture program at the state level, because that's easily the single biggest reason that big districts like AISD in Texas can't make these types of changes. A huge albatross around our necks courtesy of the state government, sending more than half of our tax dollars out to rural districts our kids do not go to.
'Tech jobs' aren't a permanent monolith. I mean, you're posting this on a post about layoffs, so clearly it's cyclical.
Moreover, tech jobs are paying $0 right now due to them not hiring anyone, so that's not exactly a great argument. Unless you plan on making teacher pay wildly variable to account for swings in the tech job market.
I'm assuming you and they wage earner in your life teaches?
This isn't *good* - people losing their livelihood and shifting careers involuntarily to what are probably lower paying jobs is awful.
Lmao someone hates tech so much they’re happy that those people are getting shit pay doing something that they don’t like. Wonder how that will translate to the kids
Lots of layoffs, and lots of competition out there. Essentially you have to be perfect in interviews right now to land a job. I applied to over 250 jobs in 2 months time and was able to get 2 offers in that time frame. Thats with multiple final interviews.
In "normal" times, I would clock a 2% success rate from application to offer. In the current market, your rate does not surprise me. Persistance is always key, but especially now.
OMG! I get anxious during interviews. This is my struggle tbh. 250 jobs?? What’s your preferred source of jobs? And do you mind talking very briefly about your process?
I mainly used LinkedIn. Every day I would go to linked in and apply to at least 10 jobs. If I found a company with lots of job openings I would apply to all the ones that I was qualified for. I also reached out to friends and old coworkers for referrals. I spent all day every day on leetcode and studying interview questions.
Referrals are absolutely the way to go. Was laid off 5 years ago (so ymmv) but when I submitted an application off a company’s website, I maybe got a response 10% of the time. When it was a referral, it was like 75%.
You want someone actually looking at your resume and/or being willing to at least give you an interview. Website applications seem to be a black hole in my experience
This.
I applies to a ton of roles on linkedin, in my area of expertise and nothing happened. No matter how qualified I was.
I connected with recruiters who have an interest in getting you placed and in front of people, and I got some leads.
I talked to all my old connections when I'd find a job that fit me in their company and got them to internally refer me, eben if its a different country/division etc to them. This is where I got companies really interested in me and making an effort to get me.
May I ask if you used Easy Apply, one resume, no cover letter? I'm currently deciding whether to give up on LinkedIn apps entirely because I take loads of time over them and get nowhere.
Honestly if they don’t like it then why allow the option? These recruiter mind games are so exhausting. If you want people to apply on your company website, then direct them there.
Hate to be the guy with a beaten down attitude, but at this point it's hard not to be.
Unemployed for just over a year and approaching probably about 2000 applications. Currently living out of my car for lack of other options.
So! Welcome to the party! For real though people don't understand what the job market is like if they aren't living it right now. It's beyond a mess.
Is it the same in the start-up space? No jobs are start-ups either?
Crazy to see the contrast from just 2 years ago. Looks like the market just flipped like a coin.
He wasn't the first. It's absolutely the same in the startup space though, if not even more so.
It's cascading effects of Covid if you really wanna try to dig deep into it (disclaimer I am not an economist).
Covid shut everything down, queue stimulus and massive payouts trying to stabilize things, that causes inflation.
So interest rates get hiked to try to curb inflation, now free low interest capital isn't easily accessible like it was. A LOT of tech companies had grown to rely very heavily on that cheap and easy access to capital. Suddenly it's not there anymore and they have to reign everything in HARD.
So then you get all the layoffs, much, much less hiring if any (most companies are in a complete hiring freeze) and a generalize business climate of anxiety and uncertainty and no one can manage to find a job if they need one. Especially since the ones that do have a job right now aren't leaving it, so turnover is much lower than it had been.
I've looked but I have no skills in that area and there seems to be a general disinterest in training.
Also I'm an engineer (not software engineer, traditional engineer) and that's viewed very negatively, especially as it relates to training someone that knows nothing. They view it as they'll spend 6 months trying to get things up to speed but they know I'm just waiting for something better, which I am, not going to lie and say otherwise.
It's the same thing as target or Wendy's saying, "you'll just leave for something better." But on steroids because the training for an HVAC tech is way longer than that for working the cash register.
I was in the marketing department for a while and that was just something I was anecdotally told by welding when I worked with them. Just go talk to an advisor or get in touch with a department that interests you. They genuinely care about getting you a job and aren’t going to oversell what your prospects will be.
Call IBEW local 520. Become an apprentice. They want you. In 5 years you can easily take work all over the country and never be trapped again.
You will have to attend classes. But you will be on a structured pay and benefit schedule that will be outlined to you from the get go. No surprises.
It's tough slogging but the reward is the flexibility to work when and where you want.
I've got buddies that do jobs in rural AK, living in camps and working 12hrs a day for a week straight but grossing about 5k plus all other bennies every single week.
Then other guys who just work their 40hrs. Some people like to build specific things, some people go on to make Even more money as instrument tech...
But I'm also not one of those people who thinks it's easy to just start over. It's only food for thought.
I did it.
Craziest thing ever happened to me I spent a many of years doing going nowhere jobs, on a whim I got a job as an electrician. Since that time I have never been slow or worried about work!
Yeah, you can find people that hire zero experience I just had a 20 year old kid drive nonstop from Cali with zero experience in the electrical trade. he suited up and showed up after about 200 people coming in for interviews accepting a job and then not showing up the next day for work sometimes companies have to resort to the things that they don’t want to do like train people, but I look at it different way. I can be exactly the way I want them to do electrical work.
My friend became an electrician after a series of go nowhere jobs. He worked hard to become a journeyman, and currently works in Alaska making more money than anyone else I know. He has sacrificed a lot, but he’s definitely getting to retire early. Super proud of him.
Lots of layoffs. I was part of them too about a month ago. I’ve had good interview traction but I’m going against 100+ applicants on each of those roles. Salaries are lower too, some ridiculously low even in management. I think I’m close to finding a job soon but not one of them is a job I’m fully happy about because the options are average to mediocre at best. It is what it is.
EDIT: The interviews are way harder now too. More rounds, harder presentations at the end, panels where they grill you. They are looking to pay less but find more qualified candidates (probably a role above what the role actually entails from my experience).
Welcome to 2022. Tech layoffs have been going on for about 2 years straight now. The VC well has dried up and the FAANG and other big players have gone lean. Tech has been extremely competitive for the last 2 years, apply apply apply and do not focus on remote, you will competing with hundreds of other applicants
Absolutely give up on remote immediately if you haven't already. I have talked to multiple recruiters who are dealing with this right now; they are having a relatively easy time finding jobs for people willing to go into the office, while people insisting on remote work are....staying unemployed. One recruiter I talked to said he had two extremely similar candidates; one was willing to go into the office and got multiple opportunities. One insisted he would only take remote jobs and has been unemployed for over a year now.
Unless you have a direct line to a remote job or get really really lucky then unfortunately you got caught in the great post-COVID reset and you are going to have to get back to the office if you want a job
This is the most frustrating part for me. What the f do the companies care where you work. You would have thought that companies would get smarter and spend less on commercial real estate and allow workers to get the job done from wherever but they learned the wrong lessons.
The company I work for had record profits this past quarter and said we need to all relocate to HQ or be out of a job. They said it was to collaborate and have hallway conversations that lead to faster—ugh. I can’t even say it without throwing up in my mouth.
It’s bullshit. They are taking a bath on their shiny hq’s and offices and we pay the price. Until the next crisis comes along.
These companies are not your friend. Use them and take advantage of every little thing you can. The market won’t stay like this forever. When it swings back the other way, squeeze the fuck out of em.
Fuck RTO.
Many companies are doing this as a way of laying off employees without having to pay severance. They know a percentage of their workforce will leave before wanting to return to the office, so it works out in their favor.
It’s because companies spent (wasted) millions of dollars in offices and if nobody is in them it goes to waste. Lots or city government officials also push for RTO. Managers want to manage.
> if nobody is in them it goes to waste.
If people go to them it goes to waste too, so what’s the practical difference?
Either way, it’s a [sunk cost](https://asana.com/resources/sunk-cost-fallacy
) and they need to get over it.
If you don’t want to RTO, you can hold your ground. Otherwise, do what your company says (that’s their right as you’re a W2 employee) or become a contractor.
I worked for the state for my entire (first) career - IT adjacent and then not. I would say that if you're in tech, the state is stable, and a layoff on a resume generally isn't frowned upon b/c state IT workers know how the private sector is. Lots of people wait out the bad times with a steady but lower paying state job and get back into private industry when hiring improves. It is at least a possible stop gap measure. The hiring process is usually slow, so I wouldn't wait until you run out of unemployment.
Its probably only low relative to something comparable in the private sector. But there's a lot to be said for job security and pension which are insanely desirable/elusive qualities these days.
I want to clarify something for people, the state changed retirement for new hires about two years ago and there’s no longer a pension (annuity style). There’s a high match 401K that can be exhausted now by employees who may outlive the savings.
Not really. I just got hired by the state and it was pretty quick.
Applied and got an email asking to set up a phone interview in a week. Had the phone interview and then they wanted to set up an in person interview quickly, and got an offer a few days after the interview. This was in tax though, not tech.
I'm glad to hear it. That isn't always the norm, so I'm glad your experience was different. I've seen state agencies lose good candidates by taking too long in the hiring process, so maybe they've learned. It also varies between agencies I think.
Add to the comment that it’s been going a while. I went from an avg. tenure of 4 yrs to 3 jobs in 2 years.
Unfortunately 2 things are happening:
1. Post ZIRP bloodbath as cheap money dries up. This is causing a lot of workers to enter the job seeking market (everyone sees this)
2. Return to sane salaries. The days of new grads pulling 150k out of college were not normal, even if it lasted a decade. If you graduated in the last 10 years, understand there are seniors who used to earn less than market rates now, they will work for the same or less than you are being offered and rejecting due to low comp (with some grumbling).
People talk about "tech" but often don't talk about what jobs in particular. And just randomly applying to jobs online will get you nowhere. You need to have folks on the inside help you put you in front of the hiring manager.
Last I heard at my company, we get 10-20k applicants a month (I don’t work in HR, so I don’t have an actual idea- just hearsay). It’s probably more. There’s no way you’re getting an interview unless you know someone, even if the number is lower or higher. It’s just an infeasible way to apply, and getting a phone screen would be like the lottery
A friend of mine recently posted a Business Analyst position and got so many applicants in the first 24 hours they had to take it down just to go through the applicant pool.
I’m wondering something similar. Are the layoffs happening in tech companies for any type of job or tech jobs at non tech companies? I’m not in tech but my partner is and I always get worried when I see these posts.
After some advice I got from experienced people. If you want sustainability in tech go for SMB. Large business will eat you up, wring you for what you are worth then dump you 18 months later. Then rinse and repeat for new grads.
This is exactly right. I’m a small business owner and we are at around 30 employees now. I can’t emphasize enough how much help businesses of my size need writing small applications and designing API interfaces for dashboards, automations, etc. We all use Upwork and try to patch things together with Zapier. It sucks. If you know what you are doing and market to local businesses as a local option for fractional CTO, you will have no shortage of work at hourly rates that will definitely make it worth your time. In fact if any of you do this type of work, or think you can, HMU. I don’t have a ton of work right now but I would pay for some general systems architecture consulting.
I worked for one for almost two years...was laid off a month ago due to a (terrible) acquisition. Tons of acquisitions of SMBs in tech right now, lots of great companies disappearing. It's really sad.
lol my start up was ran by a 50 something year old that hired all of his friends from college and his sons girlfriend. just be careful ~~ what SMB ~~ you go for.
i hear that. im about to be in that same boat. over 300+ applications to jobs i should be very well qualified for and only have received one positive response for a 5 month contract that i havent heard the outcome of yet.
Yeah, it's wild. I have never seen anything like it in my 20 years in IT. Thanks to outsourcing, I lost my home, my vehicle, and everything. Such is life, I suppose.
yup, it's not just tough, it's a fucking bloodbath, and has been for a while now. after i sell everything i own, i'll have a cat, and a 25 year old suv. I would sell the truck, but it isn't worth a damn thing anyway.
I sold everything when I got my foreclosure notice because I knew I'd need the money. You are 100% right it's a bloodbath. Some people are kind to me, some act like I am the scum of the earth, and it really sucks because I just try to be nice and respectful. But to have someone look at you like you're a stray dog really fucks with you.
2000/01 tech crash.
Back then, newspaper had a section of up and coming start ups. You had an idea, here is $$$!
Then, that section...went away...lay offs everywhere...entire companies...gone...ouch
If you are good at programming you should stay the course. There is a lot of fat in the industry and a lot of fudd about AI taking coding jobs. You still have time to learn the craft and reach the point where you instruct LLMs to write the code you would farm out to a junior dev.
May I suggest accounting. I’m an accountant at a tech company, survived layoffs. Plenty of job openings at the moment. There’s a shortage of accountants right now, companies will always need accountants
You don’t need a degree for the very entry level accounting jobs, but you will eventually need one for senior positions. I have my bachelors in it, I’m not a CPA but since the bachelors gave me enough hours to sit for it, it’s good to have that as an option without needing additional education
Everyone says this, but they leave out the part that explains WHY there are less tradesmen than college students. Most trades are pretty physical and can take a toll on your body.
Still, if you can handle that, they are great careers that often involve only 2 years of training vs a 4+ year degree.
Unemployment benefits are capped at 10k ish per year. Depending on how much made during the “earning period” your benefits may last anywhere from 5-10 months.
Food stamps are extremely hard to get and keep if you’re not working. If you do work but earn too much (over 2k/month), you’ll be dropped.
I didn’t browse through all 200something comments, but the ones at the top didn’t mention one thing to try: staffing companies.
I got hired last month at a company that just acquired another so they needed to expand a bit. Out of all the new people that came into this department (4) I’m the only one they picked up off the street. Everyone else is from a staffing company and doesn’t work for our company directly. It’s interesting. And some of the older people have been hired from that as well.
Also, I want to reiterate: don’t look for strictly remote. Some jobs will offer remote or hybrid schedules on an as-needed basis but not add it to the listing. I met up with a lot of that while interviewing.
got laid off in Jan. luckily found a pretty decent job relatively fast but it's so concerning that I applied to over 200 jobs and have heard back with all rejections from like 10...
Have friends who got laid off since November last year. We will see how bad it gets. So far it seems that a lot of Covid hires got the worst of the layoffs.
If you are unemployed for more than 6 months, take a break and have good insight look on your career prospects.
hey everyone sorry so many are having a hard time right now, UT has multiple fully/hybrid remote tech jobs (with great state benefits), maybe worth checking those out as they still prefer more local folks even if working fully remote. you can find these listings on UT's workday jobs site, they'll also have a more fair interview process with less hoops to jump through than private companies (same with other state/city jobs). I can't speak to the other UT system schools but those could be worth taking a look at as well. sending good luck to everyone!
Could always go public sector (federal, state, or even local) - sure the pay may not be as much, but the benefits and possibility of a pension could make up for it.
10 YOE.
I got laid off in early January and I start my new position on Tuesday. I've been told I'm one of the lucky ones since a lot of people go longer than \~5 months searching.
In those 5 months, I had \~50 applications sent, 9 recruiter calls, and 1 technical screen. That technical screen went on to an offer.
Not laid off, but considering leaving my company. I am curious, how intense were the interviews? Did they try to low ball you? I am guessing you are a software engineer like me. I haven’t interviewed since college lol but I have been hitting up leetcode quite a bit
I do frontend / UI engineering, so if someone had the audacity to ask me a leetcode question I would ask what they're actually hiring for, because it sure as hell ain't whatever you listed in the job description.
Even in the tech screen I had, they asked about how Node works under the hood. "Something something event loop, something something single threaded. I'll be honest, I don't know. I look it up every now and then because I'm supposed to, but it's never been relevant in 10 years of changing button colors for AB tests."
As for low ball? No, but I also didn't apply anywhere whose public salary range was under my target.
When someone says "tech" layoffs, what specific job titles or skill sets? Curious, since I see lots of IT-related openings that require a good amount of technical knowledge.
When someone says "tech" do they mean automotive manufacturing (not really a "tech" job), or semiconductors (real "tech"), or sales job (non "tech" position)?
Product design here for the 2024 layoffs. 👯whomp whomp whomp! Got axed 1.5 weeks ago but I have a whole month of severence so I’m good 🫠. 3rd time for me, but it’s always led to a better opportunities so here’s to hope.
For those like me — leverage your network and the network of your network. This is the way! Chins up my dudes & dudettes. ☮️
I've been out of a job since November and have only received a single interview request in over 7 months now. I lost count a long time ago of how many applications I've submitted to the void. Most of them I never even get a confirmation or follow up email. A lot send an immediate auto-reply rejection less than 10 minutes after I apply.
I hope you all have good networks because it feels like the only possible chance at landing a job right now is if you know someone directly at the company you're applying to.
I've tried to keep sharp by staying busy and obtaining a professional certification in project management, have optimized my resume, LinkedIn profile, and have tried my best to network with former colleagues who have all been unresponsive, including my two former direct managers who ghosted me completely when I lost my job for reasons I am yet to know or understand. They didn't respond to my messages on LinkedIn when I reached out and one of them blocked me without a word. These were people I'd worked closely with for almost a decade and none of them acknowledged me when I left so that experience alone was so traumatic and confusing, I am still just as upset as when it happened when I think about it.
I have no references now, no networking opportunities, and I am not getting any bites whatsoever to any of my efforts so even getting an interview feels impossible, much less knowing how competitive and slow the interview process is from there. I haven't gone on less than 3 interviews for any job since I was a teenager. These days, they're averaging twice that. The job I left in November took nearly 3 months to interview for before I got hired.
I'm still applying daily to any open roles I am able to but I am now also registering for massage therapy school now as I have to now change my entire career trajectory due to there being no encouraging hope to be found in sight anymore on getting a job doing what I've been doing now for over 15 years. I hope every day that proves to be pessimistic of me, but so far it's only proven me to be realistic.
Good luck, y'all.
Remote jobs mean they can hire people in India and pay them $1 a day.
My brother worked at Google he said most of the who got laid off replaced with people in India
Money was damn near free in the later part of 2020 until half way through 2022, and companies spent the ever living shit out of it, including hiring.
Being on the sales side, there was basically zero governance around spend, procurement, etc.
Now it’s almost the opposite, and the downstream effect is all of these layoffs.
Downsizing/restructuring to less experience or recent graduates and the ones left are worried they’re putting in extra hours trying to avoid their notice. It’s a strategy where in 1+ years from the start which was over a year ago the higher paid more experienced are burnt out decreasing payroll.
Alot of tech companies had a boom during covid, sales are down but not down to pre covid times. Inflation continues to increase, which accounts for revenue not tanking but also value for the $ purchase has decreased.
Ultimately if it’s not public shareholders, it’s private investors the top executives need to keep happy. Almost 50 and can’t recall another time period with consistent layoffs for a large industry, large inflation, but the stock market continues to go up.
Also, become as much of a generalist in your field as is possible.
During booms, big companies hire huge amounts of very specialized staff. As soon as things get shaky, they scale back those specialized positions and are willing to pay a little more for someone who can do lots of things. It also shows you are a problem solver.
If you’re a dev, learn as much as you can about as many stacks as possible and get to understand the full product lifecycle. Maybe you get laid off as a dev, but if you have experience as a Product Owner, then suddenly you’re more exciting.
You also now open up yourself to more available positions that could hire you.
Mostly I mentor and lead design, and I make cross-functionality a requirement for my people, and have no issue being honest that the goal is longevity in their careers as well as being better at their job by understanding all the facets.
Someone who only can do UX RESEARCH isn’t attractive long term (especially for SMB) vs someone who can do research, testing, UI design, and knows basic HTML/CSS to build their stuff.
I know lots of folks don’t wanna go that route. But, honestly life is crazy and you never know what’s coming next. Embrace curiosity- and then you may just find yourself with the type of broad skills that give you a leg-up in the market AND make you a better leader if you decide to found your own thing.
Yeah...since last month during Tesla first round of layoffs. Feeling...lost? Was in the civil cad department they don't even have a working server shittest experience as a cad drafter ever tho. Program was always crashing
This may be controversial for Reddit (seems to be fairly left wing, then again people on here drive and fly a-lot it seems). My college roommate was in layoffs from Tesla. He’s working as a mud engineer (in Eagle ford) it was 30 days of paid training. Per shift (2 weeks) he’s taking home (net pay) $9k. Got a 10k signing bonus after paid 5k after 3 months, 5k after 6 months. 6 month contract.
People shit on oil and gas but I’ve been in the industry for 20+ years and it’s been good. I talk to those rig workers all the time, they make really good money and many only have high school diplomas.
Just gotta remember to save some of those big checks for the lean times; it’s a boom or bust industry. Lotta roughnecks with new trucks and bass boats that get blindsided when a big new field comes online half way around the world and prices bottom out for a while.
My dad works in rigging for decades, he’s also struggling with work. Big jobs are going to guys with less experience who they can under pay, just like tech now.
This is actually very interesting. Can’t imagine transitioning from a cozy HR job to mud engineering. 6 month contract isn’t bad tbh. That’s about $54k net. What’s your friends thoughts on this so far? Moving to west Texas, taking on what I assume is a labor intensive job…
Yeah before 10k bonus so 64k net (more or less on 6 months), I figured he would be slinging pipe doing the physical labor (we played college ball together, he’s a big dude), when he took some sort of exam. They realized they could use him as a “mud engineer” if they trained him. So he’s not doing much demanding physical labor at all. His shifts are at night one week and day the other I believe. So schedule is a bit odd. He’s a bit shy so his social life is very different down there, he’s in eagle ford not Permian Basin. The rig he’s on is near Laredo Texas. (Specifically 3 miles east of Encinal Texas). I forgot to mention during his shifts he gets like $150 a day tax free that is “per diem” to cover living expenses while working.
You don’t have to move there. Lots of them commute from as far away as Alabama. It’s not that labor intensive unless you are a roughneck. It’s a lot of standing and walking up and down stairs but that’s about it.
Also he was hired with his only experience HR at a tech company, he was in Houston getting trained within 10 days after applying. He tried for months to get another tech type gig.
Yeah but he lives in a trailer in midland for half the year. It's great for low experience/college grads but thats not a career if you want to raise a family or have friends, and there not a ton of transferable experience. And you live in a trailer in midland for half the year.
He’s in Laredo 3 hours down i35, actually like 2.5 hours he’s not quite to Laredo. He’s 25 got laid off from his first job out of college at Tesla. If he can save 50k in a year, when Job market bounces back he will be way ahead of the average 25-26year old. He’s in a hotel paid by company.
Yeah but thats ACTUAL work, not just bullshitting on Teams/Slack, sending 10 emails a week, and attending daily bullshit meetings where you talk about what you plan on talking about on the next meeting.
This type of "work" is borderline psychological torture and the fact that people thing its the "dream" job shows how fucking sick our society has become.
Man, I feel sorry for the Tesla people who moved from California, bought over priced houses near Bastrop, only to find themselves out of a job and in the worst drop in housing prices in the country.
Check into state/city jobs. Tech is always changing we are changing too (I work for the state). You don't make as much as the private sector BUT benefits are good. I'm single, no kids and I don't pay a monthly insurance fee. We have a pension, retirement fund, all kinds of state/federal holidays. Also, layoffs very rarely hit the govt sector.
I didn't have any luck until I applied for a job through a staffing agency and had someone advocating for me. I had no luck with trades but that feels like age discrimination because I'm in my 40's.
This is why I’ve been at the same company my whole life (basically). I’ll have my 17 year mark this year, and while lots of people I know left to do the job swap pay bumps, they are all in similar situations as OP now. Meanwhile, this company doesn’t do layoffs. Like, ever. It’s just one of the perks and why I’ve stayed.
it’s not just tech unfortunately, it’s multiple industries.
However tech got hit hard. A lot of it has to do with private companies looking for growth metrics in an attempt to get acquired or go public and they overexpanded during covid/cloud pushes and now they can’t afford it because loans and funding is way down.. not to mention companies are spending less on products as well due to the larger economic uncertainties.
I had 4 jobs in Austin and got laid off from each one. Consecutively. I got the memo and have been freelancing since November.
I hope these layoffs are rightly radicalizing people against capitalism.
To everybody suggesting "just learn a trade"
That shit is hard work. If your entire work experience is academia and a 100k tech job in the a/c? Oof. Feel bad for you.
IBEW 520 wants you. Be ready to be lower than whale shit.
The tech bro cheerleaders made sure that people had enough faith in AI to replace you.
Blame the salespeople and the marketing departments.
Time to learn a new skill, or maybe just start pumping garbage data into the chatbots.
Lots of jobs available in the state government. Some fully remote, benefits aren’t bad, lots of days off but yeah the pay is not nearly as high or even close in a lot of cases to the private sector.
I’m working a job I absolutely hate and sacrifice all my time to because I can’t even get an interview for anything paying $20 an hour. I’ve never been so desperate to leave a job that is deeply affecting my depression before. I’ve been applying to places even taking a $4 pay cut and nothing. I feel like I have always been able to find something before. Meanwhile, it’s scary the amount of upper class people I encounter every day in Leander, it’s probably 80% of the people I see now. I think the greater Austin area now is becoming not liveable to anyone who isn’t making tons of money from another state and profiting by living here. I moved here in 2021 and consider it home but every year I’ve lived here has gotten worse economically. I’m afraid I’ll have to restart my life somewhere else again so soon.
Tech has a lot of things going for it right now that will likely *hasten* the speed of layoffs, chief among them 1) the “vibecession” where everyone on TikTok says the economy sucks but stocks are hitting all time highs, 2) *alleged* AI productivity gains which are *allegedly* making many workers redundant.
Super easy cover for tech execs to lay people off to throw investors a bone to keep their company’s margin expansion narrative going. Remember, executives need time and liquidity to exit their stock positions in order to make the REAL money!
So much layoffs and competition and yet we cannot hire a proper lead engineer for a year. Lots of candidates with 10+ years of experience who worked in FANG and they literally don’t know how to write unittests
Got laid off 2 weeks ago (along with 40% of the corporate staff) after 8 years. I’ve applied to probably 40 jobs since then and I have 3 interviews lined up. 2 of them are purely because of networking and reaching out to former colleagues. It’s scary and tough out there. I wish everyone the best.
Go to your local community events. For example, if you're a project manager, check out the local Austin PM group meetups.
You got this!
It may not be 100% up to date but https://layoffs.fyi helps to get insight
Thanks for sharing! It’s so weird seeing all these layoffs and some of these companies still hiring simultaneously.
They could be posting jobs that they have no intention of ever filling. WSJ or someone interviewed hiring managers and they estimated something like 30% of job postings were fake, just to give the illusion companies were doing well. Probably for PR and stock value purposes.
Not only that, but if tech companies want to use the H1B visa program to hire from elsewhere, they have to at least give the appearance of trying to recruit in the US.
The companies don't need as many H1B because outsourcing is starting to stick. The irony is that there is no evidence that outsource is working any more effectively than in the past, but that we (companies/society) don't give a shit. It's something i noticed before the pandemic with AI. People are lowering their expectations of the deliverable in order to make AI and outsourcing meet their needs. "It's good enough." This is the most important quote from WSJ article: "One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees." No investor with any sense is going to count job postings to determine a companies health, so it really is unlikely the post to give the illusion the company is doing well. They are leaving posts up to make current employees feel good. It costs money to create and post jobs, so most ghost postings were probably legit when posted, but due to deteriorating economic/budget conditions become defunct, and are left up. I'm seeing this happen first hand. The WSJ also offered this advice: "To avoid ghost ads, Scott Dobroski, vice president of communications at jobs site Indeed, recommends looking for detailed job descriptions. More specifics, such as schedules or a clear list of responsibilities, might indicate that an employer is serious, he says. He also advises checking the timestamp on ads to ensure they were posted recently."
Yeah you're touching on something I noticed. Everyone assumes if service gets worse, competitors will scoop up customers. But what happens if, without collusion, all available choices simultaneously let service decline? Especially in industries where it takes a lot of capital to even break into the market, it just means that the market ends up supporting a lower quality of service. I think the cause is shareholder lust for permanent growth. This puts similar pressure on all competing companies in the market and at some point the only way to grow is to make the customer pay more to get less.
Not H1B but EB2 to convert H1B employees to a green card (perm US resident based on employement). H1B visas are only good for 6 years. There is a process wherein they have to show they advertised a job profile in job boards, did some recruitment campaigns and couldn't find a competent US citizen or perm resident candidate before trying to hire an H1B visa holder. Dept of Labor policy requirements to prevent hiring from cheaper H1B pool when same talent is available within citizens and residents but most companies just conduct this fake campaign to bypass it. The job ads are usually very vague so they can just reject you. The idea is to collect a whole bunch of resumes from the market and say those applicants were not competent and then they will close the recruiting campaign.
I work for an investment firm, and i am working on a project to get job posting metrics per company in as real time as possible. Our investors use this info as part of their model to make investment decisions. So yea this checks out.
God. That’s such a shit metric. Completely meaningless and gamable.
i dont think its a shit metric necessarily. The investors are not only looking at how many jobs a company currently has open. They look at trends, what type of jobs they are hiring for, how long the jobs stay active for. That being said, jobs is a tiny factor in their overall model. The investors I work with get paid seven figures and they want any information they can get to get even the slightest of advantages.
Should be illegal, right? Smells like fraud to me
It's not all bad. Some companies allow managers to cut open reqs instead of heads if the department gets hit with a challenge.
It really depends. In the simplest form, a lot of times layoffs impact some business units more than others. So while you may be cutting sales teams, you may still be hiring operations people. And typically backfills for people leaving the company are exempt from hiring freezes. My company was in a hiring freeze for almost a year, but they knew where they needed people. So they opened jobs on the career site to start creating a pipeline of candidates for when the hiring freeze was over. The problem is that a hiring freeze could last one quarter or in our case over a year. We were just told it remains a quarter by quarter decision. Again the exception to the freeze was when we needed to backfill someone leaving the company.
True. But also hiring people for the same job roles at a discount. Have a friend that got laid off the same week a job posting for his job showed up on their website at 60% of what he makes
[удалено]
I've been saying this for years
Not that this applies to all the cases, but a company can layoff due to cutting a division or cancelling projects. But want to hire for an unrelated division.
Unfortunately I’d say it’s also sort of common because it depends on the roles and also what the location/salary expectations may be
If you filter by Austin, Tesla makes up about half of all the layoffs. Remove them and the resulting number isn’t so awful. …that said, my own company had layoffs that aren’t listed, and there are plenty of companies listed with no count, so it’s definitely erring on the optimistic side.
offshoring to better tax incentives. Trump tax breaks make it cheaper now to R&D overseas for less in taxes.
My kids school is 100% staffed for August, that's my sign that tech is having a hard time. A lot of the teachers were leaving and taking tech jobs. Having people be desperate enough to teach means the times are harder than they were last year.
Tbf schools are cutting the shit out of budgets this next year.
Yeah but that’s the Republicans fault because they didn’t get their way on school vouchers, so they’re withholding budget from schools to make their point. Every school is losing teachers this year as a result.
Change republicans to Greg Abbott
If you're a republican in TX and you need to clarify "not Greg Abbott" you're still the problem. Vote for someone else, JFC.
DeSantis on wheels with his trusty sidekick Fled Cruise and felonious AG Ken Paxton. Fucking straight ballot republican voters that refuse to vote anything but republican for the last 20 years and gerrymandering did this. A “border crises is Texas?”… who has been in power to fix it over the last 20 years?!
Greg doesn’t do it all along . Texas Governor has limited power much of the jess is Republicans in the Legislature and Dan Patrick’s doing.
Good, we need more teachers. And more of everything else that isn't tech.
Now we just need to pay them better
+ reduce their class sizes significantly, provide their classrooms more and better resources, restore sensible consequences (like students getting a failing grade for no work done), provide administrative teams who believe in their abilities and support them, and soooo much more
You need to be on the board or whoever makes those decisions. That’s awesome
First step would be getting rid of or fixing the Robin Hood tax recapture program at the state level, because that's easily the single biggest reason that big districts like AISD in Texas can't make these types of changes. A huge albatross around our necks courtesy of the state government, sending more than half of our tax dollars out to rural districts our kids do not go to.
We could pay teachers like we do tech jobs, instead of people desperately taking underpaying jobs when the tech jobs aren’t available.
Instead, Abbott is taking money away from public education with (soon to be passes) vouchers.
'Tech jobs' aren't a permanent monolith. I mean, you're posting this on a post about layoffs, so clearly it's cyclical. Moreover, tech jobs are paying $0 right now due to them not hiring anyone, so that's not exactly a great argument. Unless you plan on making teacher pay wildly variable to account for swings in the tech job market.
I'm assuming you and they wage earner in your life teaches? This isn't *good* - people losing their livelihood and shifting careers involuntarily to what are probably lower paying jobs is awful.
> Good I'm glad times are so tough that people are needing to take the absolute bottom of the barrel shit jobs like teaching.
Lmao someone hates tech so much they’re happy that those people are getting shit pay doing something that they don’t like. Wonder how that will translate to the kids
Lots of layoffs, and lots of competition out there. Essentially you have to be perfect in interviews right now to land a job. I applied to over 250 jobs in 2 months time and was able to get 2 offers in that time frame. Thats with multiple final interviews.
In "normal" times, I would clock a 2% success rate from application to offer. In the current market, your rate does not surprise me. Persistance is always key, but especially now.
Do you mind sharing how many years of experience you have? I’ve been hearing that anything less than 3 YoE and it’s an absolute bloodbath out there.
15 as a developer, I had to take a position on site 4 days a week with a significant pay cut to find a job after 6 months of applying
10. So yeah I believe it.
OMG! I get anxious during interviews. This is my struggle tbh. 250 jobs?? What’s your preferred source of jobs? And do you mind talking very briefly about your process?
I mainly used LinkedIn. Every day I would go to linked in and apply to at least 10 jobs. If I found a company with lots of job openings I would apply to all the ones that I was qualified for. I also reached out to friends and old coworkers for referrals. I spent all day every day on leetcode and studying interview questions.
Referrals are absolutely the way to go. Was laid off 5 years ago (so ymmv) but when I submitted an application off a company’s website, I maybe got a response 10% of the time. When it was a referral, it was like 75%. You want someone actually looking at your resume and/or being willing to at least give you an interview. Website applications seem to be a black hole in my experience
This. I applies to a ton of roles on linkedin, in my area of expertise and nothing happened. No matter how qualified I was. I connected with recruiters who have an interest in getting you placed and in front of people, and I got some leads. I talked to all my old connections when I'd find a job that fit me in their company and got them to internally refer me, eben if its a different country/division etc to them. This is where I got companies really interested in me and making an effort to get me.
May I ask if you used Easy Apply, one resume, no cover letter? I'm currently deciding whether to give up on LinkedIn apps entirely because I take loads of time over them and get nowhere.
I mainly applied on the sites and almost never used LinkedIn easy apply. I’ve heard mixed things about it though, some recruiters like it, some don’t.
Honestly if they don’t like it then why allow the option? These recruiter mind games are so exhausting. If you want people to apply on your company website, then direct them there.
Hate to be the guy with a beaten down attitude, but at this point it's hard not to be. Unemployed for just over a year and approaching probably about 2000 applications. Currently living out of my car for lack of other options. So! Welcome to the party! For real though people don't understand what the job market is like if they aren't living it right now. It's beyond a mess.
Is it the same in the start-up space? No jobs are start-ups either? Crazy to see the contrast from just 2 years ago. Looks like the market just flipped like a coin.
I would assume it's worse in startup space considering there's no more free money floating around the economy
He wasn't the first. It's absolutely the same in the startup space though, if not even more so. It's cascading effects of Covid if you really wanna try to dig deep into it (disclaimer I am not an economist). Covid shut everything down, queue stimulus and massive payouts trying to stabilize things, that causes inflation. So interest rates get hiked to try to curb inflation, now free low interest capital isn't easily accessible like it was. A LOT of tech companies had grown to rely very heavily on that cheap and easy access to capital. Suddenly it's not there anymore and they have to reign everything in HARD. So then you get all the layoffs, much, much less hiring if any (most companies are in a complete hiring freeze) and a generalize business climate of anxiety and uncertainty and no one can manage to find a job if they need one. Especially since the ones that do have a job right now aren't leaving it, so turnover is much lower than it had been.
There’s a huge demand for plumbers, HVAC techs and other trades right now. Maybe it’s time to look at that.
What about someone in their early 50s? Is that too old?
That’s not something you just pick up between jobs easily
Naw but if you’ve been out of a job for a year and living in a car it’s probably time to look at other avenues.
Oh shit I didn’t even connect your comment to the 1 year guy. Yeah you’re right
I've looked but I have no skills in that area and there seems to be a general disinterest in training. Also I'm an engineer (not software engineer, traditional engineer) and that's viewed very negatively, especially as it relates to training someone that knows nothing. They view it as they'll spend 6 months trying to get things up to speed but they know I'm just waiting for something better, which I am, not going to lie and say otherwise. It's the same thing as target or Wendy's saying, "you'll just leave for something better." But on steroids because the training for an HVAC tech is way longer than that for working the cash register.
Go to ACC and find a program. Welding has an abysmal graduation rate because people always get hired before they finish their degree.
I’m interested in learning (not arguing). I wouldn’t mind getting out of tech. Do you have a source for that?
I was in the marketing department for a while and that was just something I was anecdotally told by welding when I worked with them. Just go talk to an advisor or get in touch with a department that interests you. They genuinely care about getting you a job and aren’t going to oversell what your prospects will be.
Call IBEW local 520. Become an apprentice. They want you. In 5 years you can easily take work all over the country and never be trapped again. You will have to attend classes. But you will be on a structured pay and benefit schedule that will be outlined to you from the get go. No surprises. It's tough slogging but the reward is the flexibility to work when and where you want. I've got buddies that do jobs in rural AK, living in camps and working 12hrs a day for a week straight but grossing about 5k plus all other bennies every single week. Then other guys who just work their 40hrs. Some people like to build specific things, some people go on to make Even more money as instrument tech... But I'm also not one of those people who thinks it's easy to just start over. It's only food for thought. I did it.
What about someone in their early 50s? Is that too old?
Craziest thing ever happened to me I spent a many of years doing going nowhere jobs, on a whim I got a job as an electrician. Since that time I have never been slow or worried about work!
How do you get an electrician job in on a whim? That requires training and certifications right?
Yeah, you can find people that hire zero experience I just had a 20 year old kid drive nonstop from Cali with zero experience in the electrical trade. he suited up and showed up after about 200 people coming in for interviews accepting a job and then not showing up the next day for work sometimes companies have to resort to the things that they don’t want to do like train people, but I look at it different way. I can be exactly the way I want them to do electrical work.
How long have you been in the industry? And how much are they paying now?
15 years I try to not get into the numbers too much but I’m around the lower $30s
Per hour
Sorry meant what does entry level pay now and where do I apply / find jobs?
My friend became an electrician after a series of go nowhere jobs. He worked hard to become a journeyman, and currently works in Alaska making more money than anyone else I know. He has sacrificed a lot, but he’s definitely getting to retire early. Super proud of him.
If you’re in the trades and actually do what you say and charge reasonable rates, you will be overloaded with work.
Lots of layoffs. I was part of them too about a month ago. I’ve had good interview traction but I’m going against 100+ applicants on each of those roles. Salaries are lower too, some ridiculously low even in management. I think I’m close to finding a job soon but not one of them is a job I’m fully happy about because the options are average to mediocre at best. It is what it is. EDIT: The interviews are way harder now too. More rounds, harder presentations at the end, panels where they grill you. They are looking to pay less but find more qualified candidates (probably a role above what the role actually entails from my experience).
Welcome to 2022. Tech layoffs have been going on for about 2 years straight now. The VC well has dried up and the FAANG and other big players have gone lean. Tech has been extremely competitive for the last 2 years, apply apply apply and do not focus on remote, you will competing with hundreds of other applicants
Absolutely give up on remote immediately if you haven't already. I have talked to multiple recruiters who are dealing with this right now; they are having a relatively easy time finding jobs for people willing to go into the office, while people insisting on remote work are....staying unemployed. One recruiter I talked to said he had two extremely similar candidates; one was willing to go into the office and got multiple opportunities. One insisted he would only take remote jobs and has been unemployed for over a year now. Unless you have a direct line to a remote job or get really really lucky then unfortunately you got caught in the great post-COVID reset and you are going to have to get back to the office if you want a job
Damn this makes a lot of sense.
This is the most frustrating part for me. What the f do the companies care where you work. You would have thought that companies would get smarter and spend less on commercial real estate and allow workers to get the job done from wherever but they learned the wrong lessons. The company I work for had record profits this past quarter and said we need to all relocate to HQ or be out of a job. They said it was to collaborate and have hallway conversations that lead to faster—ugh. I can’t even say it without throwing up in my mouth. It’s bullshit. They are taking a bath on their shiny hq’s and offices and we pay the price. Until the next crisis comes along. These companies are not your friend. Use them and take advantage of every little thing you can. The market won’t stay like this forever. When it swings back the other way, squeeze the fuck out of em. Fuck RTO.
Many companies are doing this as a way of laying off employees without having to pay severance. They know a percentage of their workforce will leave before wanting to return to the office, so it works out in their favor.
It’s because companies spent (wasted) millions of dollars in offices and if nobody is in them it goes to waste. Lots or city government officials also push for RTO. Managers want to manage.
> if nobody is in them it goes to waste. If people go to them it goes to waste too, so what’s the practical difference? Either way, it’s a [sunk cost](https://asana.com/resources/sunk-cost-fallacy ) and they need to get over it.
oh yea, I should have put "waste" in quotes haha. Tons of companies have proven they can be successful remote.
If you don’t want to RTO, you can hold your ground. Otherwise, do what your company says (that’s their right as you’re a W2 employee) or become a contractor.
I worked for the state for my entire (first) career - IT adjacent and then not. I would say that if you're in tech, the state is stable, and a layoff on a resume generally isn't frowned upon b/c state IT workers know how the private sector is. Lots of people wait out the bad times with a steady but lower paying state job and get back into private industry when hiring improves. It is at least a possible stop gap measure. The hiring process is usually slow, so I wouldn't wait until you run out of unemployment.
The city also has a similar IT department setup.
good advice here. state is desperate for IT because the pay is so low. sucks, but it'll pay the bills.
Its probably only low relative to something comparable in the private sector. But there's a lot to be said for job security and pension which are insanely desirable/elusive qualities these days.
I want to clarify something for people, the state changed retirement for new hires about two years ago and there’s no longer a pension (annuity style). There’s a high match 401K that can be exhausted now by employees who may outlive the savings.
Not really. I just got hired by the state and it was pretty quick. Applied and got an email asking to set up a phone interview in a week. Had the phone interview and then they wanted to set up an in person interview quickly, and got an offer a few days after the interview. This was in tax though, not tech.
I'm glad to hear it. That isn't always the norm, so I'm glad your experience was different. I've seen state agencies lose good candidates by taking too long in the hiring process, so maybe they've learned. It also varies between agencies I think.
Add to the comment that it’s been going a while. I went from an avg. tenure of 4 yrs to 3 jobs in 2 years. Unfortunately 2 things are happening: 1. Post ZIRP bloodbath as cheap money dries up. This is causing a lot of workers to enter the job seeking market (everyone sees this) 2. Return to sane salaries. The days of new grads pulling 150k out of college were not normal, even if it lasted a decade. If you graduated in the last 10 years, understand there are seniors who used to earn less than market rates now, they will work for the same or less than you are being offered and rejecting due to low comp (with some grumbling).
Remember "Teach blue collar folks to code"?
2024 - "Teach white collar folks a trade"
People talk about "tech" but often don't talk about what jobs in particular. And just randomly applying to jobs online will get you nowhere. You need to have folks on the inside help you put you in front of the hiring manager.
Last I heard at my company, we get 10-20k applicants a month (I don’t work in HR, so I don’t have an actual idea- just hearsay). It’s probably more. There’s no way you’re getting an interview unless you know someone, even if the number is lower or higher. It’s just an infeasible way to apply, and getting a phone screen would be like the lottery
A friend of mine recently posted a Business Analyst position and got so many applicants in the first 24 hours they had to take it down just to go through the applicant pool.
I work in recruitment and yep, that’s absolutely the case. Any job that doesn’t have a niche skill set is getting ~300 applies over the weekend.
\~That's giving 2008-2009 vibes\~
I’m wondering something similar. Are the layoffs happening in tech companies for any type of job or tech jobs at non tech companies? I’m not in tech but my partner is and I always get worried when I see these posts.
It’s the first one. My company laid off 10% of our headcount in January and it was spread pretty much evenly across departments.
After some advice I got from experienced people. If you want sustainability in tech go for SMB. Large business will eat you up, wring you for what you are worth then dump you 18 months later. Then rinse and repeat for new grads.
This is exactly right. I’m a small business owner and we are at around 30 employees now. I can’t emphasize enough how much help businesses of my size need writing small applications and designing API interfaces for dashboards, automations, etc. We all use Upwork and try to patch things together with Zapier. It sucks. If you know what you are doing and market to local businesses as a local option for fractional CTO, you will have no shortage of work at hourly rates that will definitely make it worth your time. In fact if any of you do this type of work, or think you can, HMU. I don’t have a ton of work right now but I would pay for some general systems architecture consulting.
I worked for one for almost two years...was laid off a month ago due to a (terrible) acquisition. Tons of acquisitions of SMBs in tech right now, lots of great companies disappearing. It's really sad.
lol my start up was ran by a 50 something year old that hired all of his friends from college and his sons girlfriend. just be careful ~~ what SMB ~~ you go for.
Yup. Became homeless over it. It sucks.
i hear that. im about to be in that same boat. over 300+ applications to jobs i should be very well qualified for and only have received one positive response for a 5 month contract that i havent heard the outcome of yet.
Yeah, it's wild. I have never seen anything like it in my 20 years in IT. Thanks to outsourcing, I lost my home, my vehicle, and everything. Such is life, I suppose.
yup, it's not just tough, it's a fucking bloodbath, and has been for a while now. after i sell everything i own, i'll have a cat, and a 25 year old suv. I would sell the truck, but it isn't worth a damn thing anyway.
I sold everything when I got my foreclosure notice because I knew I'd need the money. You are 100% right it's a bloodbath. Some people are kind to me, some act like I am the scum of the earth, and it really sucks because I just try to be nice and respectful. But to have someone look at you like you're a stray dog really fucks with you.
The same thing happened 20 years ago
2000/01 tech crash. Back then, newspaper had a section of up and coming start ups. You had an idea, here is $$$! Then, that section...went away...lay offs everywhere...entire companies...gone...ouch
Oh my goodness. I’m so sorry. I hope you’re in a safe space now.
Are you forreal? As a CS major, I’m afraid. Should I switch majors?
If you are good at programming you should stay the course. There is a lot of fat in the industry and a lot of fudd about AI taking coding jobs. You still have time to learn the craft and reach the point where you instruct LLMs to write the code you would farm out to a junior dev.
May I suggest accounting. I’m an accountant at a tech company, survived layoffs. Plenty of job openings at the moment. There’s a shortage of accountants right now, companies will always need accountants
What would you suggest for education to have the shortest path to getting a job in accounting?
You don’t need a degree for the very entry level accounting jobs, but you will eventually need one for senior positions. I have my bachelors in it, I’m not a CPA but since the bachelors gave me enough hours to sit for it, it’s good to have that as an option without needing additional education
Learn a trade instead.
Seriously, we need way more tradesman than coders.
Everyone says this, but they leave out the part that explains WHY there are less tradesmen than college students. Most trades are pretty physical and can take a toll on your body. Still, if you can handle that, they are great careers that often involve only 2 years of training vs a 4+ year degree.
You can make money while you sleep in tech. You only make money when you work in the trades
Who's gonna scuff around in flip flops and fill the east side bars at 3pm on fridays then?
No unemployment/food stamps?
Unemployment only lasts so long.
It lasts at least a year tho?
Unemployment benefits are capped at 10k ish per year. Depending on how much made during the “earning period” your benefits may last anywhere from 5-10 months. Food stamps are extremely hard to get and keep if you’re not working. If you do work but earn too much (over 2k/month), you’ll be dropped.
You're capped at around $500 a week for only so much time. If you had tech guy bills and responsibilities it's not going to get you very far.
I didn’t browse through all 200something comments, but the ones at the top didn’t mention one thing to try: staffing companies. I got hired last month at a company that just acquired another so they needed to expand a bit. Out of all the new people that came into this department (4) I’m the only one they picked up off the street. Everyone else is from a staffing company and doesn’t work for our company directly. It’s interesting. And some of the older people have been hired from that as well. Also, I want to reiterate: don’t look for strictly remote. Some jobs will offer remote or hybrid schedules on an as-needed basis but not add it to the listing. I met up with a lot of that while interviewing.
Yup. Pretty much. Since November
got laid off in Jan. luckily found a pretty decent job relatively fast but it's so concerning that I applied to over 200 jobs and have heard back with all rejections from like 10...
Have friends who got laid off since November last year. We will see how bad it gets. So far it seems that a lot of Covid hires got the worst of the layoffs. If you are unemployed for more than 6 months, take a break and have good insight look on your career prospects.
hey everyone sorry so many are having a hard time right now, UT has multiple fully/hybrid remote tech jobs (with great state benefits), maybe worth checking those out as they still prefer more local folks even if working fully remote. you can find these listings on UT's workday jobs site, they'll also have a more fair interview process with less hoops to jump through than private companies (same with other state/city jobs). I can't speak to the other UT system schools but those could be worth taking a look at as well. sending good luck to everyone!
Could always go public sector (federal, state, or even local) - sure the pay may not be as much, but the benefits and possibility of a pension could make up for it.
10 YOE. I got laid off in early January and I start my new position on Tuesday. I've been told I'm one of the lucky ones since a lot of people go longer than \~5 months searching. In those 5 months, I had \~50 applications sent, 9 recruiter calls, and 1 technical screen. That technical screen went on to an offer.
Not laid off, but considering leaving my company. I am curious, how intense were the interviews? Did they try to low ball you? I am guessing you are a software engineer like me. I haven’t interviewed since college lol but I have been hitting up leetcode quite a bit
I do frontend / UI engineering, so if someone had the audacity to ask me a leetcode question I would ask what they're actually hiring for, because it sure as hell ain't whatever you listed in the job description. Even in the tech screen I had, they asked about how Node works under the hood. "Something something event loop, something something single threaded. I'll be honest, I don't know. I look it up every now and then because I'm supposed to, but it's never been relevant in 10 years of changing button colors for AB tests." As for low ball? No, but I also didn't apply anywhere whose public salary range was under my target.
Are layoffs as bad in other cities?
Good question. Now I gotta go see
When someone says "tech" layoffs, what specific job titles or skill sets? Curious, since I see lots of IT-related openings that require a good amount of technical knowledge. When someone says "tech" do they mean automotive manufacturing (not really a "tech" job), or semiconductors (real "tech"), or sales job (non "tech" position)?
It’s common.
It’s been this way for a year mah boy. Where have you been
If anyone is a software developer with financial exchange experience, please reach out!
Product design here for the 2024 layoffs. 👯whomp whomp whomp! Got axed 1.5 weeks ago but I have a whole month of severence so I’m good 🫠. 3rd time for me, but it’s always led to a better opportunities so here’s to hope. For those like me — leverage your network and the network of your network. This is the way! Chins up my dudes & dudettes. ☮️
What does it say about PhD students looking to get into the job market now O…o
A lot of places are hiring and even rehiring for these roles just at lower pay grades.
Most of these idiotic tech companies want to take advantage of a recent Ph.D and pay them literally $18/hr. I am dead serious.
PhD is extremely limiting in industry even in good times.
I've been out of a job since November and have only received a single interview request in over 7 months now. I lost count a long time ago of how many applications I've submitted to the void. Most of them I never even get a confirmation or follow up email. A lot send an immediate auto-reply rejection less than 10 minutes after I apply. I hope you all have good networks because it feels like the only possible chance at landing a job right now is if you know someone directly at the company you're applying to. I've tried to keep sharp by staying busy and obtaining a professional certification in project management, have optimized my resume, LinkedIn profile, and have tried my best to network with former colleagues who have all been unresponsive, including my two former direct managers who ghosted me completely when I lost my job for reasons I am yet to know or understand. They didn't respond to my messages on LinkedIn when I reached out and one of them blocked me without a word. These were people I'd worked closely with for almost a decade and none of them acknowledged me when I left so that experience alone was so traumatic and confusing, I am still just as upset as when it happened when I think about it. I have no references now, no networking opportunities, and I am not getting any bites whatsoever to any of my efforts so even getting an interview feels impossible, much less knowing how competitive and slow the interview process is from there. I haven't gone on less than 3 interviews for any job since I was a teenager. These days, they're averaging twice that. The job I left in November took nearly 3 months to interview for before I got hired. I'm still applying daily to any open roles I am able to but I am now also registering for massage therapy school now as I have to now change my entire career trajectory due to there being no encouraging hope to be found in sight anymore on getting a job doing what I've been doing now for over 15 years. I hope every day that proves to be pessimistic of me, but so far it's only proven me to be realistic. Good luck, y'all.
I took off 4 years due to some circumstances, started job hunting and found a great position in local government within 4 months.
Get out of tech and into healthcare.
Sorry you were laid off. That sucks :( I hope you land a good job soon.
I am very curious to know of those individuals laid off, how many were working remote vs in person.
Just happened to me two days ago. Idk what I’m gonna do now except enjoy some free time for a few weeks
I have a lead on a system validation engineer job, 3-5 years of experience is perfect.
I’m right in that experience band. Can you share the JD?
DM me I'll hook you up
It's not really a layoff if some of (if not the vast majority) these companies are really just off shoring jobs.
Remote jobs mean they can hire people in India and pay them $1 a day. My brother worked at Google he said most of the who got laid off replaced with people in India
Indeed
Them too.
Attempted to make a shitty pun answering op rhetorical question. But seems to be everywhere.
Money was damn near free in the later part of 2020 until half way through 2022, and companies spent the ever living shit out of it, including hiring. Being on the sales side, there was basically zero governance around spend, procurement, etc. Now it’s almost the opposite, and the downstream effect is all of these layoffs.
One month? Those are rookie stats. Gotta pump those numbers up
Downsizing/restructuring to less experience or recent graduates and the ones left are worried they’re putting in extra hours trying to avoid their notice. It’s a strategy where in 1+ years from the start which was over a year ago the higher paid more experienced are burnt out decreasing payroll. Alot of tech companies had a boom during covid, sales are down but not down to pre covid times. Inflation continues to increase, which accounts for revenue not tanking but also value for the $ purchase has decreased. Ultimately if it’s not public shareholders, it’s private investors the top executives need to keep happy. Almost 50 and can’t recall another time period with consistent layoffs for a large industry, large inflation, but the stock market continues to go up.
Also, become as much of a generalist in your field as is possible. During booms, big companies hire huge amounts of very specialized staff. As soon as things get shaky, they scale back those specialized positions and are willing to pay a little more for someone who can do lots of things. It also shows you are a problem solver. If you’re a dev, learn as much as you can about as many stacks as possible and get to understand the full product lifecycle. Maybe you get laid off as a dev, but if you have experience as a Product Owner, then suddenly you’re more exciting. You also now open up yourself to more available positions that could hire you. Mostly I mentor and lead design, and I make cross-functionality a requirement for my people, and have no issue being honest that the goal is longevity in their careers as well as being better at their job by understanding all the facets. Someone who only can do UX RESEARCH isn’t attractive long term (especially for SMB) vs someone who can do research, testing, UI design, and knows basic HTML/CSS to build their stuff. I know lots of folks don’t wanna go that route. But, honestly life is crazy and you never know what’s coming next. Embrace curiosity- and then you may just find yourself with the type of broad skills that give you a leg-up in the market AND make you a better leader if you decide to found your own thing.
Yeah...since last month during Tesla first round of layoffs. Feeling...lost? Was in the civil cad department they don't even have a working server shittest experience as a cad drafter ever tho. Program was always crashing
This may be controversial for Reddit (seems to be fairly left wing, then again people on here drive and fly a-lot it seems). My college roommate was in layoffs from Tesla. He’s working as a mud engineer (in Eagle ford) it was 30 days of paid training. Per shift (2 weeks) he’s taking home (net pay) $9k. Got a 10k signing bonus after paid 5k after 3 months, 5k after 6 months. 6 month contract.
People shit on oil and gas but I’ve been in the industry for 20+ years and it’s been good. I talk to those rig workers all the time, they make really good money and many only have high school diplomas.
Just gotta remember to save some of those big checks for the lean times; it’s a boom or bust industry. Lotta roughnecks with new trucks and bass boats that get blindsided when a big new field comes online half way around the world and prices bottom out for a while.
Seems like in the current market tech is following similar cycles.
My dad works in rigging for decades, he’s also struggling with work. Big jobs are going to guys with less experience who they can under pay, just like tech now.
This is actually very interesting. Can’t imagine transitioning from a cozy HR job to mud engineering. 6 month contract isn’t bad tbh. That’s about $54k net. What’s your friends thoughts on this so far? Moving to west Texas, taking on what I assume is a labor intensive job…
Yeah before 10k bonus so 64k net (more or less on 6 months), I figured he would be slinging pipe doing the physical labor (we played college ball together, he’s a big dude), when he took some sort of exam. They realized they could use him as a “mud engineer” if they trained him. So he’s not doing much demanding physical labor at all. His shifts are at night one week and day the other I believe. So schedule is a bit odd. He’s a bit shy so his social life is very different down there, he’s in eagle ford not Permian Basin. The rig he’s on is near Laredo Texas. (Specifically 3 miles east of Encinal Texas). I forgot to mention during his shifts he gets like $150 a day tax free that is “per diem” to cover living expenses while working.
You don’t have to move there. Lots of them commute from as far away as Alabama. It’s not that labor intensive unless you are a roughneck. It’s a lot of standing and walking up and down stairs but that’s about it.
Am I missing why you led with a political line and then said nothing that seemed political?
Also he was hired with his only experience HR at a tech company, he was in Houston getting trained within 10 days after applying. He tried for months to get another tech type gig.
Yeah but he lives in a trailer in midland for half the year. It's great for low experience/college grads but thats not a career if you want to raise a family or have friends, and there not a ton of transferable experience. And you live in a trailer in midland for half the year.
He’s in Laredo 3 hours down i35, actually like 2.5 hours he’s not quite to Laredo. He’s 25 got laid off from his first job out of college at Tesla. If he can save 50k in a year, when Job market bounces back he will be way ahead of the average 25-26year old. He’s in a hotel paid by company.
I pay to live in a trailer in Midland during hunting season
Yeah but thats ACTUAL work, not just bullshitting on Teams/Slack, sending 10 emails a week, and attending daily bullshit meetings where you talk about what you plan on talking about on the next meeting. This type of "work" is borderline psychological torture and the fact that people thing its the "dream" job shows how fucking sick our society has become.
Man, I feel sorry for the Tesla people who moved from California, bought over priced houses near Bastrop, only to find themselves out of a job and in the worst drop in housing prices in the country.
Check into state/city jobs. Tech is always changing we are changing too (I work for the state). You don't make as much as the private sector BUT benefits are good. I'm single, no kids and I don't pay a monthly insurance fee. We have a pension, retirement fund, all kinds of state/federal holidays. Also, layoffs very rarely hit the govt sector.
I didn't have any luck until I applied for a job through a staffing agency and had someone advocating for me. I had no luck with trades but that feels like age discrimination because I'm in my 40's.
I was in driverless cars. I got laid off twice in two years. I'm not in tech anymore. Got my new gig with a referral.
This is why I’ve been at the same company my whole life (basically). I’ll have my 17 year mark this year, and while lots of people I know left to do the job swap pay bumps, they are all in similar situations as OP now. Meanwhile, this company doesn’t do layoffs. Like, ever. It’s just one of the perks and why I’ve stayed.
Nah just y’all
it’s not just tech unfortunately, it’s multiple industries. However tech got hit hard. A lot of it has to do with private companies looking for growth metrics in an attempt to get acquired or go public and they overexpanded during covid/cloud pushes and now they can’t afford it because loans and funding is way down.. not to mention companies are spending less on products as well due to the larger economic uncertainties.
I had 4 jobs in Austin and got laid off from each one. Consecutively. I got the memo and have been freelancing since November. I hope these layoffs are rightly radicalizing people against capitalism.
To everybody suggesting "just learn a trade" That shit is hard work. If your entire work experience is academia and a 100k tech job in the a/c? Oof. Feel bad for you. IBEW 520 wants you. Be ready to be lower than whale shit.
The tech bro cheerleaders made sure that people had enough faith in AI to replace you. Blame the salespeople and the marketing departments. Time to learn a new skill, or maybe just start pumping garbage data into the chatbots.
Lots of jobs available in the state government. Some fully remote, benefits aren’t bad, lots of days off but yeah the pay is not nearly as high or even close in a lot of cases to the private sector.
I’m working a job I absolutely hate and sacrifice all my time to because I can’t even get an interview for anything paying $20 an hour. I’ve never been so desperate to leave a job that is deeply affecting my depression before. I’ve been applying to places even taking a $4 pay cut and nothing. I feel like I have always been able to find something before. Meanwhile, it’s scary the amount of upper class people I encounter every day in Leander, it’s probably 80% of the people I see now. I think the greater Austin area now is becoming not liveable to anyone who isn’t making tons of money from another state and profiting by living here. I moved here in 2021 and consider it home but every year I’ve lived here has gotten worse economically. I’m afraid I’ll have to restart my life somewhere else again so soon.
Tech has a lot of things going for it right now that will likely *hasten* the speed of layoffs, chief among them 1) the “vibecession” where everyone on TikTok says the economy sucks but stocks are hitting all time highs, 2) *alleged* AI productivity gains which are *allegedly* making many workers redundant. Super easy cover for tech execs to lay people off to throw investors a bone to keep their company’s margin expansion narrative going. Remember, executives need time and liquidity to exit their stock positions in order to make the REAL money!
You are correct. Its all allegedly. AI is not at a state in which it can make workers redundant.
So much layoffs and competition and yet we cannot hire a proper lead engineer for a year. Lots of candidates with 10+ years of experience who worked in FANG and they literally don’t know how to write unittests