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Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona. With google also slowing hiring, are the engineers laid off all going to be
by fyp 6y ago
Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona. With google also slowing hiring, are the engineers laid off all going to be absorbed by facebook?
- jccooper 6y agoFacebook is surely in a similar ad dollars crunch as Google. I can't imagine they're full speed.
- twblalock 6y agoThey are also seeing record traffic so they might be doing alright. We'll find out when they report earnings later today.
- stu2b50 6y agoI mean record traffic means record server usage with record low ad spend from their customers. However, that's just a short-term hit. FB and Google may very well increase their own spending so they can capture the huge amount of people who are now using their platforms.
- pthomas551 6y agoBased on what we've heard from Google yesterday, and FB's Q1 results just now, it looks like the much heralded ad crunch is turning into not much more than a speed bump.
- wuunderbar 6y agoBut we need to wait for Q2 results to know the full impact, right?
- pthomas551 6y agoYeah, but in Google's earnings call yesterday they said that the situation is stabilizing.
- epistasis 6y agoI'm not sure that's the case, as they never made it into the FANG acronym. Even Twitter doesn't quite fit up there.
- whymauri 6y agoAFAIK, the FANG acronym was meant to represent the FAANG stocks, not the perceived quality of engineering within the industry.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoI didn't know that. I thought it was because of their engineering chops.
- redisman 6y agoI always thought Big 4 was because they were basically the top 4 biggest market cap companies in the US
- dvlat 6y agoI’m not sure if Netflix ever had market capitalization higher tahn Microsoft
- beefalo 6y agoThe term was coined by Jim Cramer as the group of well performing tech stocks
- stu2b50 6y agoI'm pretty sure it was stock based. For one, Netflix is like, completely different than the rest. They only hire senior engineers and basically substitute a talent pipeline with giant wages. FAANG internships always sounded weird, considering, y'know, Netflix doesn't do internships.
- 6y ago
- jswizzy 6y agoMicrosoft is hiring for Jedi like crazy.
- baron_harkonnen 6y agoThis will play our more like the dotcom burst than the 2008 crisis. For most younger people here this may come as a shock but tech jobs can disappear, for years. The job market in 2019 felt a lot like the job market in 1999, people rushing to get upskilled so that they could get into software and make ridiculous money. After the dotcom burst huge number of people left tech, or at least left the world of software development. Salaries also went way down for nearly a decade. A common comment here on HN with layoffs is "well they're just getting rid of superfluous employees, so this is no big deal". This assumption is both ridiculously callous about real people losing job, it also underestimates how much work is superfluous in SV. It is very possible that tech will take a serious hit this time, and that the total number of software engineers, data scientists, dev ops people etc will go do... for years. And likewise salaries will also drop (TC automatically does this thanks to the magic of RSUs). Certainly people will need software and software engineers, just likely not nearly as much as they do now. Once FAANG realizes there's no longer a need to keep talent off the market, expect salaries to take a dive.
- bsanr2 6y agoWhich is gonna suck for a lot of people in major metros, as those salaries were necessary to keep up with asset inflation post-2008. Wariness about the future, spiced with a tinge of schadenfreude.
- bsanr2 6y agoI should point out, as I have no attachment to my karma, that the schadenfreude comes from the fact that those inflated asset prices were used to justify and fund gentrification and displacement. If a crash ruins a few of the entities profiting off that, well, chef's kiss.
- thewarrior 6y agoWell guess what those assets won't be able to sustain themselves without those salaries.
- corporateslave5 6y agoPeople have been calling software engineering wages a bubble for 20 years, and trying to call “the end of tech”. I just don’t see it, highly proficient software engineers are more valuable than ever. The wages are higher than ever. Going forwards, tech is really the only engine of growth in the American economy. Trying to say tech will be under for years is like saying the USA will be in a massive recession for years. I just don’t believe it.
- justapassenger 6y ago> Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona So was wework by many. Facebook/google cannot be more different from uber/airbnb/lyft. FB/G are in high margin business, operating largely in virtual space, where scaling to new markets has low marginal costs. Uber/airbnb/lyft are in historically low margin, capital intensive space, where scaling to new markets has very high marginal costs. Same as wework is an office rental with an app, so is uber, a taxi with an app. App part is cool, and gives them meaningful advantage, but it's still a taxi business, and they were not able to change that.
- yks 6y agoGP referred to the prestige as a workplace for SWEs and not to the viability of a business.
- decafninja 6y agoOdd that you say that. I got an offer from WeWork, which I declined because of weird cult-y vibes I was getting during the interview. A few months later they blew up. I got rejected by Uber, was too scared of rejection to try Airbnb or Lyft. But I considered all three a tier (or more) above WW. I'd have hands down, without hesitation, accepted a job from Uber even if I would have been laid off at some point down the road. Having Uber (or Lyft, or Airbnb) on the resume would open doors I imagine having WeWork (even disregarding the whole scandal) would not.