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> Shopify’s workforce has increased from 1,900 in 2016 to roughly 10,000 in 2021 That’s pretty insane growth. No wonder What are the safest industries in tech

by saos 4y ago

> Shopify’s workforce has increased from 1,900 in 2016 to roughly 10,000 in 2021 That’s pretty insane growth. No wonder What are the safest industries in tech right now? Feel like it’s gonna get worse

pastor_bob 4y ago
The only industry I wouldn't want to be in now is Crypto. Everything else, it's just a blip. Upward and onward. Be greedy when others are fearful etc
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Ironically, crypto VCs are sitting on a lot of dry powder and the narrative is much stronger (WEB3! METAVERSE!) since it is completely detached from reality. In situations like these where the wealthy still have a ton of money, it is far better to be in a business that a) the wealthy don't understand, and b) is so outlandish that you can't assign a hard value to it. If you make $1 in profit, then investors can assign it a hard value (10-15x ARR). If you make $0 in profit, then investors can spin up narratives about your "potential".
- MangoCoffee 4y ago
  start up is probably not a good place to be. if Peter Zeihan is right about population and boomers. our world is shrinking with less young people for consumption, boomers retiring and taking their money to less risky investment. the money that prop up start up could be dry pretty soon.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Healthcare, energy, government should be safe. I spent a year at a DOE lab during an economic crisis. The pay sucked but the checks cleared.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >The pay sucked but the checks cleared. That's really the calculation people need to make. At a large tech employer? How are they doing? Is what you're working on strategic? Do you seem to be valued or are you maybe a bit on the bubble? Depending on the answers, it may make sense to stay put or it may make sense to find a life raft even if it isn't as cushy in some ways as where you are. And, as someone else noted, industries aren't homogeneous. Individual employers matter.
      - pastor_bob 4y ago
        Well, these people are getting at least 16 weeks severance. 4 months paid to grind at interviews. Then unemployment after. I wouldn't worry too much if I were at a similar company. Getting laid off during Covid was a boon for many people
        ghaff 4y ago
        It's certainly a nice severance package for this day and age. That said, hiring is pretty broadly more selective right now and may well become more so. During dot-bomb, I got lucky and landed another (lower paying) job with someone I knew at a small company. But there were a lot of people who were out of work or underemployed for a long time. And some I knew on the older side never really recovered I think.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        I had lost a job at the time (company dissolved) and had been unemployed for six months by the time the offer was extended, so the choice was easy. If you currently have a high income job and a robust emergency fund, you can make other choices.
pcurve 4y ago
Large healthcare. Always.
PheonixPharts 4y ago
> What are the safest industries in tech right now? If anyone knew what's safe then you'd see investor dollars pouring into those industries right now. At the company level you'll have a much better chance of survival if your company makes a profit (which is frighteningly rare these days). But overall, during downturns, it's only possible to know what was safe when looking backwards. My experience, having entered the work force in the shadow of the dotcom bust, is that the best path to safety in tech is to be in the highest percentile of skill you can be. As boom periods extend more and more people flock to tech because of the money. If you were in industry pre-2008 you'll likely recall that most programmers in tech were in it because they had a passion for programming (especially in the growing startup scene at the time). Eventually we get to more recent years when you have boot camps just churning out mediocre devs. Things were very similar in the dotcom boom, and after it went bust there were many programmers who never went back to programming. And nearly everyone took pay cuts. One good thing that changes in crashes is people start looking for sincerely good and experienced people more and more. A seasoned dev, who during boom times is an annoying hire when you're just trying to drive up head count, becomes a valuable asset when you need just enough devs to get the job done. So depending on how bad this gets determines which percentile you need to be in to maximize your probability of keeping your career. A small correction just means the bottom 10% disappear, in more severe cases only the top X% might survive. The other thing that changes is that interviewing will become as challenging as it was for the previous cohorts lower percentile. For example if you're just above average getting a job in the future will feel more like a newbie programmer just out of a bootcamp, if you're in the top 10% and previously didn't have to try to get jobs, it's going to feel more like an average dev struggling with their first leetcode interview.
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  Safe for investors is not the same as safe for workers.
- biohax2015 4y ago
  Enough of this “passion” nonsense. Most people just want a well-paying job. This was true before 2008 and after 2008.
- 4y ago
ProAm 4y ago
> What are the safest industries in tech right now? Just be good at your job. Ive been through many layoff cycles and its be extremely rare to see the good people laid off. Be undeniably the best and you'll always be safe and compensated.
TheCapn 4y ago
Safe? Probably anything supporting an industry that isn't affected as heavily by the downturn. There's no shortage of work in Industrial Controls. Most work isn't glamorous cutting edge tech, but there's sectors to work in that are engaging.
odiroot 4y ago
> What are the safest industries in tech right now? Military industrial complex, as usual.
tenpies 4y ago
Energy, especially oil and gas. The physics of civilization and general incompetence of Western leaders is raining cash on these companies, but the demonization of the sector by the globalist elites[1] mentioned above means that they are desperately short for people in every position. From well tech to field IT, to the guys in HQ handling well-management software, all these positions will need to be filled. It is a boom/bust industry, but it looks like we're about to begin a prolonged bull cycle.
benburleson 4y ago
InsureTech is one, I think.
- tfehring 4y ago
  Lots of insurtechs - including Root, Lemonade, Policygenius, Next, and Vouch, just off the top of my head - have had layoffs this year. Insurtech is a really broad field, and the unit economics vary wildly depending on where in the value chain a particular company is operating, so it's hard to generalize.
newaccount2021 4y ago
rvz 4y ago
> What are the safest industries in tech right now? Feel like it’s gonna get worse The ones that make the most money with little head count in a short amount of time and those who are selling shovels and offering services for financial institutions or in trading systems.
- boringg 4y ago
  I disagree - I think fintech start ups are about to get squeezed hard. As capital gets more expensive their lack of growth will be hard to justify and they can no longer subsidize their subscriptions with low cost capital so will have to force users to pay for services that aren't very necessary. That and most of the financial services at the end of the day don't really provide a lot of real value that people are willing to pay for. Fin processing should be OK but if volume of processing drops significantly (main revenue driver) then they will have to look at ways to protect their margin. Crypto is already in a bad spot with low growth options.
  - decafninja 4y ago
    I think he means legacy finance - think IT department of Bank of America, not Stripe.
    - boringg 4y ago
      Stripe = fin processing. I'm not talking legacy - I'm talking startups that are trying to take market from the bank through subsidized VC and repackage it to sell to the banks which feels like a lot of the fin services business model. If anything fin legacy (i.e. IT dept) probably pretty safe.
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    See Brex dropping clients
Bilal_io 4y ago
I wonder if that growth includes minimum-wage workers for their warehouses.[0] I am not sure how many they've hired as part of this effort. 0. https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2022/shopify-makes-1b-bet-on-warehouses-2-day-delivery-as-ecomm-growth-slows/amp/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2022/shopify-makes-1b-bet...
- exhilaration 4y ago
  Ha, nobody's paying minimum wage for warehouse workers. In warehouse-heavy Eastern Pennsylvania we're seeing billboards advertising $25/hour starting wages: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiring-upward-of-120-workers-to-man-new-lehigh-county-warehouse-starting-at-25-hourly.html https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiri...
  - Bilal_io 4y ago
    > https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiring-upward-of-120-workers-to-man-new-lehigh-county-warehouse-starting-at-25-hourly.html https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiri... Quoting the article you referenced > and is offering wages up to $25 hourly.
Bayart 4y ago
Everything legacy. Defense, pharma, banking, insurance, manufacturing, energy etc.
- mathattack 4y ago
  These industries all have layoffs too.
  - kilroy123 4y ago
    True, but I feel like Defense is pretty safe these days.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Overall, probably yes. But contractors and their subs can still take big hits if some contract they were banking on goes to the other guy instead.
    - mathattack 4y ago
      I love your name in a defense thread. :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here Defense has a lot of challenges. The government isn’t a great or reliable customer. The contractors tend to lay off on great waves if they lose and important contract. They have quarterly earnings targets to hit like everyone else. People used to think the phone company was a safe spot to lay your hat but they found layoffs too be an easier way to goose earnings than growing revenue.
  - Bayart 4y ago
    Sure but they have steady revenue streams and are less susceptible to conjuncture. In my neck of the woods I see a lot of hiring. Those trying to cut costs would rather internalise consultants and cut their firms out rather than get rid of otherwise necessary workforce.
ShakataGaNai 4y ago
If you're looking for safety in tech, look at the individual companies rather than the industries. Sure there are some industries that are slightly better or worse than others, but overall there isn't a huge difference. Why look at the companies? See who's growing in a logical fashion. If the company doubled in size at the start of COVID and keeps growing at similarly crazy rates - that might be a sign of trouble. It doesn't matter if the company is 100, 1000, or 10,000. The same general rules apply. Belts are tightening. If a company was hiring stupidly/risky, they are going to need to lay off people - unfortunately. Or maybe they don't "need to" layoff, but they will want to. We've already seen this at some of the bigger tech companies.
papito 4y ago
The safest companies are the ones that understand the basics of burn rate and do not hoover up VC money to show fake growth, by growing its headcount to insane levels (and employ an army of engineers who design and maintain ridiculously complicated systems as part of resume-driven development).
stephc_int13 4y ago
There is something I don't understand about the way those big companies work. From what I can see they are providing software and services. Even the biggest software teams I have seen were rarely larger than 50-80 people. And they were working on large complex codebase for AAA games. Of course you need support, admin, HR, and sales, and R&D on new projects, but still. How can they manage to productively use the time of 10000+ people? What are they doing?
- randomUserHere 4y ago
  So many times I see this kind of comments were people totally ignore the complexities that comes with large scale projects, huge complex legacy codebases that need to be maintained. What they see is a simple website that can be build by 5 people startup team in a day.
- acatton 4y ago
  > Even the biggest software teams I have seen were rarely larger than 50-80 people. And they were working on large complex codebase for AAA games. […] How can they manage to productively use the time of 10000+ people? I work for a 100k-employees company. According to the internet, a third of it are engineers.[1] I think I can explain. First of all, I think the AAA game example is bad. Most of my acquaintances working in the gaming industry work long hours for a crappy salary compared to their skill, because most of them are passionate. Most business software is written by overpaid engineers who see the whole thing as a 9to5 job. So you can already divide the amount of hour worked per employees by at least 1.5 if not 2. Even then, if you take something which seems as simple as Shopify the system can be made complex for managers and directors to justify headcount. It's an e-commerce website, right? So you can split 100 engineers over 5 teams. 10 "production engineers" (or SRE/DevOps/SysAdmins) and 10 software engineers for each team: - Product search team; - Payment team; - Authentication team; - Admin UI team; - CRM team. Once you have 100 engineers, you can multiply your headcount by 10 by just splitting each of these teams into five more. If you take the Payment team, you can create a credit card team, a paypal team, an alipay team, … For product search, you can create a team to manage just the suggestions of the search bar, another team which optimizes term matching with products, another team which does the list of related products on the side bar, … I just found jobs for 1,000 engineers, right at the top of my head! Now you have so many engineers and so many customers, you also need internal tools. You need an internal tool to manage customer refunds, customer support, etc… You need HR tools for vacations, performance review, … Of course all of this comes with waste, but who cares as long as you're offsetting it with your revenue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, this is why I will never be a business person :) . [1] https://earthweb.com/how-many-software-engineers-does-google-have/ https://earthweb.com/how-many-software-engineers-does-google...
tempsy 4y ago
It’s not insane when you look at the revenue growth over the same period. Especially if most are operations focused employees eg support staff.
infamouscow 4y ago
If you're doing something genuinely innovative and disruptive, investor money is flowing and it's easier than any time in the last decade.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Investor capital flows towards whatever will generate a return fastest. Money is flowing into shitcoins daily, should I take that as a signal that that's where innovation is happening? No, because innovation and investor sentiment do not map 1:1.
- boringg 4y ago
  Completely disagree. It's like saying, if you are building the next google (early days) you can still easily get cash. Sure but not as much as say 6 months ago. It isn't easier than any time in the last decade - 6 months ago people didn't even do due diligence before the wrote massive checks. edited: for politeness as per comment.
  - infamouscow 4y ago
    Maybe it's a signal-to-noise thing. Companies that have been growing sustainably and building innovative technology that reduces costs 10x (in a recession) get a lot of attention. Especially if they are turning a profit without any accounting tricks. Companies that were never going to be profitable are having problems raising money now and sounding the horns. There are a lot of those companies, especially on HN, but please don't categorically dismiss my experience as a fantasy.
    - boringg 4y ago
      Still doesn't resonate and unfortunately I will point that your experience does not represent the broader market. Just because you (assumptions made on your comment about personal experience) made a fast round doesn't mean that the market is easier or better for raising - it probably means you found product-fit/sold it better or some other kind of micro strategy benefit. My comment is and still stands: if you are making something truly amazing then you will almost always find investors (which isn't a good metric). If you were making something amazing 6 months ago you would have gotten more money on more favorable terms. This market isn't easier or friendly at all - investor appetites have changed.
phantomathkg 4y ago
Civil servant?
- PheonixPharts 4y ago
  Typically layoffs hit civil servants with a lag of a few years since government budgets are already decided before economic down turns, and only really impacted when the next budget is decided. For example the friends I had working in the public sector during 2008 didn't start to get really hit until 2010.
  - bumby 4y ago
    Were they working as contractors for the government or as actual civil servants? It's common for hiring to essentially stop during downturns but still relatively rare for true govt employees to be laid off.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > Typically layoffs hit civil servants with a lag of a few years since government budgets are already decided before economic down turns, and only really impacted when the next budget is decided. For federal government, it is usually delayed because downturns tend to provoke temporary countercyclical deficit spending, and thus hiring. For state governments it is often sooner because operating deficits are structurally more difficult for them, so revenue cuts are reflected in spending more directly, though short-term circumstances may be addressed by furloughs, hiring freezes, real pay cuts via wage freezes during inflation, effective (temporary or permanent) pay cuts by altering employer/employee sharing arrangements for benefits, attrition, and other non-layoff means.
hackitup7 4y ago
Historically enterprise SaaS with strong product/market fit has been (comparatively) safe. Companies tend to get hit in order of consumer > SMB > mid-market > enterprise. The above does not apply if you're a high burn organization that overhired, those jobs are at risk in every industry except maybe the government. (Of course nowhere is entirely safe, even in good times)
- jameshart 4y ago
  In a downturn, enterprise SaaS vendors have to cut back on development and hold on to the customers they have. They aren’t winning new big contracts, and losing a few big customers could be fatal. And when you cut back on roadmap on a product like that, consolidation starts looking sensible. That’s when you get bought out by Oracle or ADP or someone.
  - hackitup7 4y ago
    Yeah I mean bad things can happen to anyone, but relatively speaking enterprise tends to be safer all else being equal. A great consumer company is still probably safer than a decent enterprise SaaS company. "losing a few big customers could be fatal" For sure, but there's also a long history of enterprise companies weathering this just find (eg Twilio famously churning Uber). There often is just less pullback than one would think as well, it's typical to see 3+ year contracts in enterprise.
moneywoes 4y ago
Defense
altdataseller 4y ago
The safest companies in tech are bootstrapped, lean, profitable cash-flow companies.

by saos 4y ago

pastor_bob 4y ago

The only industry I wouldn't want to be in now is Crypto. Everything else, it's just a blip. Upward and onward. Be greedy when others are fearful etc

spaceman_2020 4y ago
Ironically, crypto VCs are sitting on a lot of dry powder and the narrative is much stronger (WEB3! METAVERSE!) since it is completely detached from reality. In situations like these where the wealthy still have a ton of money, it is far better to be in a business that a) the wealthy don't understand, and b) is so outlandish that you can't assign a hard value to it. If you make $1 in profit, then investors can assign it a hard value (10-15x ARR). If you make $0 in profit, then investors can spin up narratives about your "potential".
MangoCoffee 4y ago
start up is probably not a good place to be. if Peter Zeihan is right about population and boomers. our world is shrinking with less young people for consumption, boomers retiring and taking their money to less risky investment. the money that prop up start up could be dry pretty soon.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Healthcare, energy, government should be safe. I spent a year at a DOE lab during an economic crisis. The pay sucked but the checks cleared.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >The pay sucked but the checks cleared. That's really the calculation people need to make. At a large tech employer? How are they doing? Is what you're working on strategic? Do you seem to be valued or are you maybe a bit on the bubble? Depending on the answers, it may make sense to stay put or it may make sense to find a life raft even if it isn't as cushy in some ways as where you are. And, as someone else noted, industries aren't homogeneous. Individual employers matter.
    - pastor_bob 4y ago
      Well, these people are getting at least 16 weeks severance. 4 months paid to grind at interviews. Then unemployment after. I wouldn't worry too much if I were at a similar company. Getting laid off during Covid was a boon for many people
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It's certainly a nice severance package for this day and age. That said, hiring is pretty broadly more selective right now and may well become more so. During dot-bomb, I got lucky and landed another (lower paying) job with someone I knew at a small company. But there were a lot of people who were out of work or underemployed for a long time. And some I knew on the older side never really recovered I think.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      I had lost a job at the time (company dissolved) and had been unemployed for six months by the time the offer was extended, so the choice was easy. If you currently have a high income job and a robust emergency fund, you can make other choices.

pcurve 4y ago

Large healthcare. Always.

PheonixPharts 4y ago

> What are the safest industries in tech right now? If anyone knew what's safe then you'd see investor dollars pouring into those industries right now. At the company level you'll have a much better chance of survival if your company makes a profit (which is frighteningly rare these days). But overall, during downturns, it's only possible to know what was safe when looking backwards. My experience, having entered the work force in the shadow of the dotcom bust, is that the best path to safety in tech is to be in the highest percentile of skill you can be. As boom periods extend more and more people flock to tech because of the money. If you were in industry pre-2008 you'll likely recall that most programmers in tech were in it because they had a passion for programming (especially in the growing startup scene at the time). Eventually we get to more recent years when you have boot camps just churning out mediocre devs. Things were very similar in the dotcom boom, and after it went bust there were many programmers who never went back to programming. And nearly everyone took pay cuts. One good thing that changes in crashes is people start looking for sincerely good and experienced people more and more. A seasoned dev, who during boom times is an annoying hire when you're just trying to drive up head count, becomes a valuable asset when you need just enough devs to get the job done. So depending on how bad this gets determines which percentile you need to be in to maximize your probability of keeping your career. A small correction just means the bottom 10% disappear, in more severe cases only the top X% might survive. The other thing that changes is that interviewing will become as challenging as it was for the previous cohorts lower percentile. For example if you're just above average getting a job in the future will feel more like a newbie programmer just out of a bootcamp, if you're in the top 10% and previously didn't have to try to get jobs, it's going to feel more like an average dev struggling with their first leetcode interview.

bigbillheck 4y ago
Safe for investors is not the same as safe for workers.
biohax2015 4y ago
Enough of this “passion” nonsense. Most people just want a well-paying job. This was true before 2008 and after 2008.
4y ago

ProAm 4y ago

> What are the safest industries in tech right now? Just be good at your job. Ive been through many layoff cycles and its be extremely rare to see the good people laid off. Be undeniably the best and you'll always be safe and compensated.

TheCapn 4y ago

Safe? Probably anything supporting an industry that isn't affected as heavily by the downturn. There's no shortage of work in Industrial Controls. Most work isn't glamorous cutting edge tech, but there's sectors to work in that are engaging.

odiroot 4y ago

> What are the safest industries in tech right now? Military industrial complex, as usual.

tenpies 4y ago

Energy, especially oil and gas. The physics of civilization and general incompetence of Western leaders is raining cash on these companies, but the demonization of the sector by the globalist elites[1] mentioned above means that they are desperately short for people in every position. From well tech to field IT, to the guys in HQ handling well-management software, all these positions will need to be filled. It is a boom/bust industry, but it looks like we're about to begin a prolonged bull cycle.

benburleson 4y ago

InsureTech is one, I think.

tfehring 4y ago
Lots of insurtechs - including Root, Lemonade, Policygenius, Next, and Vouch, just off the top of my head - have had layoffs this year. Insurtech is a really broad field, and the unit economics vary wildly depending on where in the value chain a particular company is operating, so it's hard to generalize.

newaccount2021 4y ago

rvz 4y ago

> What are the safest industries in tech right now? Feel like it’s gonna get worse The ones that make the most money with little head count in a short amount of time and those who are selling shovels and offering services for financial institutions or in trading systems.

boringg 4y ago
I disagree - I think fintech start ups are about to get squeezed hard. As capital gets more expensive their lack of growth will be hard to justify and they can no longer subsidize their subscriptions with low cost capital so will have to force users to pay for services that aren't very necessary. That and most of the financial services at the end of the day don't really provide a lot of real value that people are willing to pay for. Fin processing should be OK but if volume of processing drops significantly (main revenue driver) then they will have to look at ways to protect their margin. Crypto is already in a bad spot with low growth options.
- decafninja 4y ago
  I think he means legacy finance - think IT department of Bank of America, not Stripe.
  - boringg 4y ago
    Stripe = fin processing. I'm not talking legacy - I'm talking startups that are trying to take market from the bank through subsidized VC and repackage it to sell to the banks which feels like a lot of the fin services business model. If anything fin legacy (i.e. IT dept) probably pretty safe.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  See Brex dropping clients

Bilal_io 4y ago

I wonder if that growth includes minimum-wage workers for their warehouses.[0] I am not sure how many they've hired as part of this effort. 0. https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2022/shopify-makes-1b-bet-on-warehouses-2-day-delivery-as-ecomm-growth-slows/amp/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2022/shopify-makes-1b-bet...

exhilaration 4y ago
Ha, nobody's paying minimum wage for warehouse workers. In warehouse-heavy Eastern Pennsylvania we're seeing billboards advertising $25/hour starting wages: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiring-upward-of-120-workers-to-man-new-lehigh-county-warehouse-starting-at-25-hourly.html https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiri...
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  > https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiring-upward-of-120-workers-to-man-new-lehigh-county-warehouse-starting-at-25-hourly.html https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/business/2022/04/uline-hiri... Quoting the article you referenced > and is offering wages up to $25 hourly.

Bayart 4y ago

Everything legacy. Defense, pharma, banking, insurance, manufacturing, energy etc.

mathattack 4y ago
These industries all have layoffs too.
- kilroy123 4y ago
  True, but I feel like Defense is pretty safe these days.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Overall, probably yes. But contractors and their subs can still take big hits if some contract they were banking on goes to the other guy instead.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    I love your name in a defense thread. :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here Defense has a lot of challenges. The government isn’t a great or reliable customer. The contractors tend to lay off on great waves if they lose and important contract. They have quarterly earnings targets to hit like everyone else. People used to think the phone company was a safe spot to lay your hat but they found layoffs too be an easier way to goose earnings than growing revenue.
- Bayart 4y ago
  Sure but they have steady revenue streams and are less susceptible to conjuncture. In my neck of the woods I see a lot of hiring. Those trying to cut costs would rather internalise consultants and cut their firms out rather than get rid of otherwise necessary workforce.

ShakataGaNai 4y ago

If you're looking for safety in tech, look at the individual companies rather than the industries. Sure there are some industries that are slightly better or worse than others, but overall there isn't a huge difference. Why look at the companies? See who's growing in a logical fashion. If the company doubled in size at the start of COVID and keeps growing at similarly crazy rates - that might be a sign of trouble. It doesn't matter if the company is 100, 1000, or 10,000. The same general rules apply. Belts are tightening. If a company was hiring stupidly/risky, they are going to need to lay off people - unfortunately. Or maybe they don't "need to" layoff, but they will want to. We've already seen this at some of the bigger tech companies.

papito 4y ago

The safest companies are the ones that understand the basics of burn rate and do not hoover up VC money to show fake growth, by growing its headcount to insane levels (and employ an army of engineers who design and maintain ridiculously complicated systems as part of resume-driven development).

stephc_int13 4y ago

There is something I don't understand about the way those big companies work. From what I can see they are providing software and services. Even the biggest software teams I have seen were rarely larger than 50-80 people. And they were working on large complex codebase for AAA games. Of course you need support, admin, HR, and sales, and R&D on new projects, but still. How can they manage to productively use the time of 10000+ people? What are they doing?

randomUserHere 4y ago
So many times I see this kind of comments were people totally ignore the complexities that comes with large scale projects, huge complex legacy codebases that need to be maintained. What they see is a simple website that can be build by 5 people startup team in a day.
acatton 4y ago
> Even the biggest software teams I have seen were rarely larger than 50-80 people. And they were working on large complex codebase for AAA games. […] How can they manage to productively use the time of 10000+ people? I work for a 100k-employees company. According to the internet, a third of it are engineers.[1] I think I can explain. First of all, I think the AAA game example is bad. Most of my acquaintances working in the gaming industry work long hours for a crappy salary compared to their skill, because most of them are passionate. Most business software is written by overpaid engineers who see the whole thing as a 9to5 job. So you can already divide the amount of hour worked per employees by at least 1.5 if not 2. Even then, if you take something which seems as simple as Shopify the system can be made complex for managers and directors to justify headcount. It's an e-commerce website, right? So you can split 100 engineers over 5 teams. 10 "production engineers" (or SRE/DevOps/SysAdmins) and 10 software engineers for each team: - Product search team; - Payment team; - Authentication team; - Admin UI team; - CRM team. Once you have 100 engineers, you can multiply your headcount by 10 by just splitting each of these teams into five more. If you take the Payment team, you can create a credit card team, a paypal team, an alipay team, … For product search, you can create a team to manage just the suggestions of the search bar, another team which optimizes term matching with products, another team which does the list of related products on the side bar, … I just found jobs for 1,000 engineers, right at the top of my head! Now you have so many engineers and so many customers, you also need internal tools. You need an internal tool to manage customer refunds, customer support, etc… You need HR tools for vacations, performance review, … Of course all of this comes with waste, but who cares as long as you're offsetting it with your revenue? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, this is why I will never be a business person :) . [1] https://earthweb.com/how-many-software-engineers-does-google-have/ https://earthweb.com/how-many-software-engineers-does-google...

tempsy 4y ago

It’s not insane when you look at the revenue growth over the same period. Especially if most are operations focused employees eg support staff.

infamouscow 4y ago

If you're doing something genuinely innovative and disruptive, investor money is flowing and it's easier than any time in the last decade.

rchaud 4y ago
Investor capital flows towards whatever will generate a return fastest. Money is flowing into shitcoins daily, should I take that as a signal that that's where innovation is happening? No, because innovation and investor sentiment do not map 1:1.
boringg 4y ago
Completely disagree. It's like saying, if you are building the next google (early days) you can still easily get cash. Sure but not as much as say 6 months ago. It isn't easier than any time in the last decade - 6 months ago people didn't even do due diligence before the wrote massive checks. edited: for politeness as per comment.
- infamouscow 4y ago
  Maybe it's a signal-to-noise thing. Companies that have been growing sustainably and building innovative technology that reduces costs 10x (in a recession) get a lot of attention. Especially if they are turning a profit without any accounting tricks. Companies that were never going to be profitable are having problems raising money now and sounding the horns. There are a lot of those companies, especially on HN, but please don't categorically dismiss my experience as a fantasy.
  - boringg 4y ago
    Still doesn't resonate and unfortunately I will point that your experience does not represent the broader market. Just because you (assumptions made on your comment about personal experience) made a fast round doesn't mean that the market is easier or better for raising - it probably means you found product-fit/sold it better or some other kind of micro strategy benefit. My comment is and still stands: if you are making something truly amazing then you will almost always find investors (which isn't a good metric). If you were making something amazing 6 months ago you would have gotten more money on more favorable terms. This market isn't easier or friendly at all - investor appetites have changed.

phantomathkg 4y ago

Civil servant?

PheonixPharts 4y ago
Typically layoffs hit civil servants with a lag of a few years since government budgets are already decided before economic down turns, and only really impacted when the next budget is decided. For example the friends I had working in the public sector during 2008 didn't start to get really hit until 2010.
- bumby 4y ago
  Were they working as contractors for the government or as actual civil servants? It's common for hiring to essentially stop during downturns but still relatively rare for true govt employees to be laid off.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > Typically layoffs hit civil servants with a lag of a few years since government budgets are already decided before economic down turns, and only really impacted when the next budget is decided. For federal government, it is usually delayed because downturns tend to provoke temporary countercyclical deficit spending, and thus hiring. For state governments it is often sooner because operating deficits are structurally more difficult for them, so revenue cuts are reflected in spending more directly, though short-term circumstances may be addressed by furloughs, hiring freezes, real pay cuts via wage freezes during inflation, effective (temporary or permanent) pay cuts by altering employer/employee sharing arrangements for benefits, attrition, and other non-layoff means.

hackitup7 4y ago

Historically enterprise SaaS with strong product/market fit has been (comparatively) safe. Companies tend to get hit in order of consumer > SMB > mid-market > enterprise. The above does not apply if you're a high burn organization that overhired, those jobs are at risk in every industry except maybe the government. (Of course nowhere is entirely safe, even in good times)

jameshart 4y ago
In a downturn, enterprise SaaS vendors have to cut back on development and hold on to the customers they have. They aren’t winning new big contracts, and losing a few big customers could be fatal. And when you cut back on roadmap on a product like that, consolidation starts looking sensible. That’s when you get bought out by Oracle or ADP or someone.
- hackitup7 4y ago
  Yeah I mean bad things can happen to anyone, but relatively speaking enterprise tends to be safer all else being equal. A great consumer company is still probably safer than a decent enterprise SaaS company. "losing a few big customers could be fatal" For sure, but there's also a long history of enterprise companies weathering this just find (eg Twilio famously churning Uber). There often is just less pullback than one would think as well, it's typical to see 3+ year contracts in enterprise.

moneywoes 4y ago

Defense

altdataseller 4y ago

The safest companies in tech are bootstrapped, lean, profitable cash-flow companies.