44 ms·

How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

249 points by leeny 4y ago

thwayunion 4y ago
The market is still extremely tight for good talent in-between Senior and Junior.
- lumost 4y ago
  So the Senior market is saturated? this is an early sign companies are getting nervous about bloat. After the '08 recession many companies rushed to ditch Architect titles as they found that the role did not serve the interests of their productive engineers or the companies higher ups. Companies that had gone heavy on such talent might find themselves stuck. I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles. That depends. If they are actively involved and the architectural decisions are sound, it's fine. If they are "drive-by architects", showing up, dropping a bunch of useless boxes they read on some book, and then leaving before the consequences of their 'architecture' are known, you are right we don't like working with them. At many companies, however, staff engineers are still engineers.
    - theteapot 4y ago
      Drive by architects don't read books. They read AWS's latest product brochure and think "yes".
      - dijit 4y ago
        I think both exist, but you're right. The majority of Architects I've brushed against in the last decade have been exclusively an additional marketing force for AWS with very little ability to objectively reason from first principles or assist with knowledge of anything outside of the AWS ecosystem.
        qchris 4y ago
        Totally genuine question as someone coming from a background in mechanical engineering, who now does a lot of software-y things: what do you consider to be "first principles" in computing? Are you talking about first principles in terms of project development processes (i.e how information systems evolve) or code (i.e. bits and bytes, where microservices might not be the answer because the network connections are guaranteed to have a fundamental latency that, along with the amount of data required, means you can't meet requirements because [..])?
        openfuture 4y ago
        I think I can name an example, which is how I am approaching datalisp; https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/ https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/ the first principles bit for my context refers to: fixing a standard encoding that is sufficient for the task, determining inputs and outputs of model, setting a general guideline for expressivity of model (space of conflict-free programs), sketching interaction modes and user interfaces. These are the first principles in question, now from there your architecture is mostly determined, you can fall back on known patterns and decades of research. The axioms are the architecture.
        qchris 4y ago
        Thanks for the insight!
        ntr-- 4y ago
        Not the parent but I will offer you my opinion after I laughed at their comment because it reminded me of many of the engineers at my current work: "First principles" in this context is not just reaching for the nearest/newest AWS service that seems to do what you want. ie. if you want a webserver, don't just run magic lambdas that abstract everything away from you, go and provision a vps and install your dependencies on it so you fully understand and control how the stack works. None of the 12 engineers at my current company had written a test that actually wrote rows to a database when I arrived, they didn't know how. In fact none of them knew anything about how to run our databases on their own dev machines at all, they all shared one RDS PG instance. Again, "first principles" here is: running a process, connecting to a service, asserting the whole thing did what you expected. To do that effectively you have to actually control the whole system, and to do that you have to know how the whole system works together. A lot of developers now just delegate the provisioning and maintenance of everything to a provider, even in development setups.
  - sarchertech 4y ago
    Staff engineer is just title inflation for what used to be senior engineer. Senior engineers at most companies just means this isn’t your first job right out of college.
    - dominotw 4y ago
      I have 15 yoe and have senior software engineer title so do people with 2 yrs experience. I might be doing same thing over and over. Time to make a radical change :/.
      - thwayunion 4y ago
        There's also nothing wrong with plateauing for a while or even topping out, especially if you are generally happy with life and career. There's pride to be had in being a good individual contributor; not everyone needs to make it to Senior Super Special Principal :)
        spacemadness 4y ago
        I keep being told I shouldn’t be writing code at my level and should be knee deep in design docs and estimations all day long. This is actually what happens but I would much prefer to be writing software and am wondering if I can even be happy in this career any longer. This industry has some real bizarre notions of career progression.
        davewritescode 4y ago
        You need to write code and you need to get people around you to write better code. That’s basically what a staff engineer does in addition to making large design decisions.
        spacemadness 4y ago
        That’s my belief as well but there are managers out there that think staff engineers should never write code. It boggles my mind they think this way but many do.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > So the Senior market is saturated? I am not sure I would say saturated, but yeah, the Sr. SWE market is definitely not as tight as it was a year ago for most role types. However, it does depend on qualifications and company type. Seniors for R&D positions (so, PhD with 5+ years in product-focused R&D) are still basically impossible to hire. Friends tell me that hiring seniors at mid-pay or low-pay companies is still pretty hard. The more important dichotomy is between mid-career/late-career and junior. The entry level positions are absolutely saturated. CS programs are definitely over-producing at this point.
    - noir_lord 4y ago
      Might be true in the US, not what I’m seeing have seen in the UK. Here big companies are taking kids straight out of uni and boot camping them because decent juniors are hard to find.
      - lostcolony 4y ago
        How easy is it to find bad juniors? I think that may be relevant for determining how saturated the field is.
    - oceanplexian 4y ago
      CS programs are overproducing but they are overproducing the wrong skills. Most don’t have the cloud skillset or experience with IaC, they are never thought how to solve problems within distributed systems. And their idea of systems design is a Flask app talking to a MySQL database on a laptop. It’s not the students fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times, and sometimes even teach bad engineering patterns that cause problems and create technical debt.
      - monksy 4y ago
        > It’s not their fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times. Yes/no/maybe. The schools got pressured by the bootcamps that were teaching the "flask app talking to a mysql db" .. they simplified their classes and stop teaching some things. It sucks, the people who come out of that don't have the theory/flexiblity/skills coming out that you would expect before.
  - themagician 4y ago
    More and more senior engineers are non-coding or practically so. I see it everywhere. As industries have matured, people have matured into higher level management roles and there hasn't been enough people to replace them. There's still plenty of fresh blood, software engineering actually looks a lot like the labor shortages do in the rest of the market—there's a lack of people who actually want to do the work. Everyone wants that $150k starting comp. Everyone wants a $500k director or VP role. But there is a shortage in that $200-300K range for people who are actually going to put in hours either writing code that makes it into production, or managing junior coders and their codebases. I'm talking SV salaries here. The scale is different elsewhere, but the problem is the same.
    - lumost 4y ago
      Not for nothing, but that sounds a bit like a market peak if I've heard one. Why would the person actually doing the work settle for a mere 300k when the director/VP gets double without doing the hard work? there is a balance here - but it seems like a good time to lure engineers with real equity compensation to early stage startups.
      - dilyevsky 4y ago
        Which industry has it different? I mean there are exceptions like sport teams but by and large this stuff happens everywhere else too.
        lumost 4y ago
        Difference in tech has been that productivity has largely been divorced from capital, OpEx, and experience. This may be becoming less true today with large enterprises owning specific market segments through network effects... but I wouldn't bet on that quite yet in the long-term. A doctor can't help but work at the world's best hospital, because it probably will still be the world's best hospital next year. A jet engine designer can't help but work at Boeing. A fresh college grad can start a tech business tomorrow.
      - themagician 4y ago
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    What makes a "Staff Engineer" is largely a product of an orgs engineering culture. And you may have multiple people with "staff engineer" as a job title that fulfill different roles to varying degrees. I've found those roles to be: * Technical Leadership (driving major technical initiatives) * Technical Contributor (shipping stuff, with technical mastery beyond what would normally be expected from senior engineer) * Architect (planning stuff) * Team Management (mentorship + taking load off an engineering manager's plate if the team is big) Biggest mistake I see orgs make when hiring staff engineers is hiring someone whose strength is in mentorship and technical contributors and decide their new role is architecture and driving major technical initiatives at a high level. Some are best "in the weeds" and others are better planners. Know their strengths!
  - hanszarkov 4y ago
    I'm a software architect, I write code every day, I design every day, I write documents every day, and I report to the VP and CTO every day. I have met other architects that claim they "don't code" and honesty don't understand how they can make decisions and reduce risk without that background. Most of the time I have a solution because I've been there and done that. I view my role as one that has the expertise to bring the engineering team to the next level, because if I did all the work - it would just be one person instead of many. I constantly try to unblock, solve hard problems, and reduce entropy - and let the creativity flow to the rest of the team. This has worked for me, as a software architect, for almost a decade.
- superfrank 4y ago
  I agree it's still tight, but it's not as bad as it was a few months ago, IMO. Anecdotal evidence, but I've had 2 open positions on my team since April and it's just been a constant flow of terrible candidates. I'm in a tech hub and we pay above market average according to levels.fyi, but we're competing with FAANGs for our candidates. The few good ones that popped up over that time often had multiple offers and it was hard to get them to choose us over a household name. In the last 6 weeks I've started to see the number of qualified candidates with no other offers increase to the point where I've filled both positions in a 2 week span.
system16 4y ago
> Articles like these drive engineers to speculate on Blind and on Reddit, in the internet equivalent of hushed whispers, about whether they’re next. Bizarre to reference a Blind thread from 2019 discussing Uber layoffs to back up a claim that engineers are reading the previously linked articles in the future and speculating about "whether they're next."
- leeny 4y ago
  Author here. Good call, just fixed to a more generic link about layoffs on Blind. No shortage of recent conversations.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
spacemadness 4y ago
“interviewing.io is both a mock interview platform and an eng hiring marketplace (engineers use us for technical interview practice, and top performers get fast-tracked at companies)” The source for this article has some strong incentives in the area of perceptions of increased competitiveness.
- leeny 4y ago
  Author here. For what it's worth, I added the conclusion pretty late in the game. When I first ran the data, it looked like engineers were barely getting laid off (because of engineers not opting in to layoff lists as much as others). And the graph about the bar going up came in as a zero hour suggestion from someone who proofread the piece. Believe me, I'd be much happier if eng hiring were back in full swing. With all the freezes and layoffs, we've taken a bigger hit than we can hope to gain back by shilling interview practice.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
theteapot 4y ago
> At some point in the last 2.5 years, you’ve probably visited layoffs.fyi. I have?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hitpointdrew 4y ago
  Never even knew it existed until just now. I feel like am not in the minority. Weird that the author assumes this is some well known site.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Its a very well known site
    - theteapot 4y ago
      Within your bubble.
      - imwillofficial 4y ago
        You assume to know my bubble?
        jopsen 4y ago
        HN is a bubble -- and we're all in it by definition :)
        imwillofficial 4y ago
        I also exist outside this bubble and in many other bubbles. Of all places, HN isn’t a place where I’d assume I know a given readers social circle.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
My firm is still playing the long game, so we’ve been actively hiring talent. Check back if/when a recession is in full swing.
- sremani 4y ago
  Everyone plays a long game until the cost of debt and debt servicing comes home. There are just too many Zombie Unicorns, it is matter of time. If your company is not profitable consider yourself jobless 6 months from now.
  - yamazakiwi 4y ago
    Are you positing that if we maintain our current trajectory economically that Zombie Unicorns will start harshly cutting costs. Why 6 months? I'm actually curious why that number as I'm not in the environment.
  - davewritescode 4y ago
    You are correct. There’s a particular company that’s local to me that hired away a bunch of my mediocre engineers at very high salaries because they were printing money during COVID. In 2022 their operations cost was 150% of revenue and I have to imagine that those people are sweating a bit now.
  - omniscient_oce 4y ago
    That's good. It was a terrible model to begin with. Profits and growth should come from providing value to customers not biding time until you can "exit" or whatever they call it.
- ttymck 4y ago
  What would "recession in full swing" look like exactly, from the perspective of changing your firm's behavior?
pineconewarrior 4y ago
I have not seen or heard of any engineering cuts in any of my circle's workplaces. Only supporting staff (project managers etc). I clicked on a few of the google sheets linked in the article and it seems (at least per my random selection) that this seems to be the case at these places too.
pcurve 4y ago
Managers are still so busy trying to fill open headcounts because it’s usually use it or lose it. But they know hiring freeze is coming
yulaow 4y ago
Here in Europe layoffs are more uncommon but I am having a very hard time finding open positions compared to just 3 years ago ( last time I was changing jobs ), and the situation is getting worse and worse each week that passes. And for juniors is already far worse: I very rarely see job openings targeted to them anymore. It seems like everything is frozen.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  There is a large backlash happening against blockchain right now in Europe, from your profile I would assume that that is the problem.
  - yulaow 4y ago
    Actually it's the opposite. I am done with dapps and blockchain development and just looking for fullstack (preferring only backend when possible) typescript/golang positions. I am getting a good amount of recruiters contacting me for blockchain related positions but every single time I speak with them their projects are so ridiculously stupid I am flabbergasted that they got investors. "Normal web dev" recruiters? Just got 5 of them contacting me in the last 4 weeks and of those I contacted myself: most of them have ghosted me. Last time I was looking for a new job in 3 days I had like 30 recruiters already spamming my linkedin inmail Also I put myself in honeypot, talent.io and hired.com. Got like only one proposal... so thinking something was bad with my profile I contacted their "talent advisors" and each of them sort-of told me the profile was perfect but they were having an hard time getting job openings because of the "current market situation".
    - illusiveman 4y ago
      I used to have 2 requests a week on average on Hired. Now, my profile has expired twice without a single request. Definitely, something is wrong with that service. Guess fewer companies are using it. By contrast, it's odd the day I don't get a message on LinkedIn.
      - 4y ago
walshie4 4y ago
The fact that snap's web3 team being cut is one of the listed examples is pretty comical IMHO.
- jesuspiece 4y ago
  yea like no shit the web3 fat got cut first lol. anyone with eyes could see through all the people selling shovels in a gold rush
  - andirk 4y ago
    They also cut their AR wing. Sounds like they're going back to their laurels: d** pics.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Ah yes, durable blockchains, an obvious next step for the world's most famous ephemeral-messaging company
- wepple 4y ago
  This is a flimsy PR piece for interviewing.io submitted by the founder. It worked, front page of HN is great for backlink value
  - leeny 4y ago
    Founder here. This piece took my team and I months to research and tag and write. We spent hours counting individual layoffs in spreadsheets and on LinkedIn and running and rerunning the numbers. And the conclusion wasn't even what I wanted. When I started writing, I really thought that the layoffs were overblown and weren't affecting engineers. That's not what's happening at all. Now, you're right, why do we put effort into pieces like this? It's to get some eyeballs on interviewing.io. But this piece is not flimsy, and I think it's not correct or fair to assume that just because something serves our business that it's of poor quality. Normally I wouldn't say anything, but the "flimsy" thing really got me.
    - 4y ago
01100011 4y ago
We (large FANGish) are more or less in a hiring freeze but still grabbing a few new hires here and there. A friend just interviewed for SSE at AAPL and seemed to have the job only to be told they closed the req. I'm still getting lots of recruiter spam though so I think we're still fairly early in any sort of layoff cycle. The economy is still trucking. Despite many people trying to be first to declare it, we're not in a recession yet. All signs point to one next year though.
- kingnothing 4y ago
  The US is in a recession. It has seen two quarters of negative economic growth.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    I feel like a broken record but, the 'Two quarters' rule is an unofficial metric that does a bad job of representing recessions when you back-test it (no recessions from 1992-2008 in that case). In the US, a recession is defined by NBER after the fact.
    - danuker 4y ago
      Then the "two quarters" rule is stricter. We have fulfilled a stricter criterion for a recession. Whether the NBER contradicts us is irrelevant. Less value is going around in the economy.
      - mywittyname 4y ago
        I mean, if you're going to stick to the two-consecutive quarters definition, then you would be saying that we were in a recession, and are now out of one. Third quarter GDP estimates stand at 1.9% growth.
        sieabahlpark 4y ago
        Estimates or reported? The recession based on two consecutive quarters is on reports not estimates of what is to be reported.
mkl95 4y ago
My employer has literally stopped hiring engineers and product roles. Sales people are still being hired in droves though.
- marcyb5st 4y ago
  Aren't sales people "cheap" as their salary is negligible compared to sales bonuses if and only if they exceed their sales quota?
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Not usually. Oftentimes sales people have pretty high base pay. Last time I worked somewhere with a sales force, their base was the same as the engineers with the same level of experience, and then they got commission on top of that.
  - mkl95 4y ago
    I don't know. My bosses claim good engineers are a nightmare to find. Cash is surely not the bottleneck.
conqrr 4y ago
The so called 'bar' references doesn't make much sense. There is no way to measure the performance of an individual. Leetcode style questions don't indicate performance. And what cannot be measured in the first place in a 4 hour interview, cannot have a 'bar'.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  There are absolutely ways to measure the performance of an individual. That leetcode style questions are not a great indicator of ability to do the job well does not mean you cannot predict job performance at all.
  - conqrr 4y ago
    The bar here is interview performance bar. There is no way to judge a person's performance in 4 hours. Anything you come up with can be hacked or imperfect. Therefore there is no way to set a bar.
    - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
      You can't perfectly judge someone in an interview context, but you can get pretty good if you ask the right questions with the right structure. Where I work the final round interview we give the candidates a week to write a design doc for a recent project they have worked on and present it to us in a 45 minute meeting. We deep dive on their impact, the decisions they made, the tradeoffs etc. It has been an extremely strong signal for us.
      - imwillofficial 4y ago
        I love this method.
      - mrj 4y ago
        That process would be biased to those with experience and enough rank to be able to make decisions. It would miss those who are capable but who haven't gotten the chance. There are many, many people who haven't gotten the chance and a diminishing market of those with experience. How would an interview process identify the capable but not experienced? It's infinitely hard. I mean, you take the same group of people and change the circumstances slightly and have a completely different outcome. Some groups don't gel. It's like last year's Super Bowl team, they're all still good but the circumstances have changed. Nobody knows how to predict who will step up in a situation and past performance is not a good indicator. The circumstances have changed. Every interview technique has some horrible downside and therefore it's not really possible to correctly assess talent. Just biasing towards experience isn't solving the problem of figuring out who can do the job. Even just knowing who was capable would be a step up from the current state. Figuring out how to moneyball a team together to win the Super Bowl (hit launch goals) is a whole added level. Our 45 minute tell-us-about-your-previous-projects-interview is nowhere good enough.
redleggedfrog 4y ago
My company is not hiring developers at the moment, but there sure are some people who should be let go.
- yazzku 4y ago
sitzkrieg 4y ago
i feel like im on another planet when single digit growth is considered so bad. and this requirement for endless growth invariably destroys every product
smeagull 4y ago
We've seen a few people leave for other jobs, and are still hiring. Still getting offers from recruiters. I haven't seen this play out in the real world yet beyond news stories.
avrionov 4y ago
The article doesn't answer the question. The list is also missing 2 of the big names which announced layoffs Oracle and Citrix. For more detailed and depressing discussion about layoffs check [1]. [1] https://www.thelayoff.com/ https://www.thelayoff.com/
- alephnerd 4y ago
  Well, I wouldn't neccessarily treat the Citrix layoff as directly macroeconomic related, as they are going through an M&A event right now with TIBCO to make the "Cloud Software Group" [0][1], and it's ex-Broadcom leadership (who are very dollar/efficiency oriented). [0] - https://www.cloud.com/news/press-release.html https://www.cloud.com/news/press-release.html [1] - https://www.cloud.com/ https://www.cloud.com/
ge96 4y ago
Small company around 500+ employees hiring freeze (for everyone not just eng) for a month to assess.
- haskellandchill 4y ago
  $40-50B is a small company? I see.
  - ge96 4y ago
    Yeah I got that number wrong, that's the valuation for this particular industry as a whole.
victor9000 4y ago
I just went through a round of interviews and received offers from large, small, and medium sized companies. So the opportunities are still there if you can navigate the interview gauntlet.
- andirk 4y ago
  I tell people that you are looking for _one_ position, not 10,000. There will always be a position somewhere that fits your needs. Its more difficult in down times to a degree. And if your industry is in a huge slump, find a new industry! There's more work to do than can ever be done.
  - Raydovsky 4y ago
    I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs. Switching a stack won't help cos places want years of experience.
    - alexanderchr 4y ago
      Most ads seem to be written for the unicorn engineer with 10+ years of experience in every part of the company's stack, but realistically any place you'd actually want to work for is going to be happy with a few years of dev experience in a similar domain + ability and willingness to learn new stuff.
    - ramesh31 4y ago
      >I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs. Someone told me early in my career that "my grandkids will be maintaining PHP applications". He was probably right. You might be seeing less on the job boards nowadays, but half the web still runs on PHP.
      - lowercased 4y ago
        Some of the jobs won't be posted - they'll just be in-network referrals. That's how much of my work comes to me.
adam_arthur 4y ago
This is likely to be the recession that halts the rapid inflation in tech wages. Rising risk free rate has hit growth companies the hardest, and there are likely to be a large swath of layoffs right as we have tons of people bootcamping and switching into the industry. Supply and demand of labor in tech will enter balance for the first time since ~2010. The FFR is looking to have a reasonable chance to go to 5% at this point, so the pain isn’t even close to being over Get used to not being special like pretty much every other industry
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Contrary view - this will sprout more startups that were previously starved for talent rest&vesting at faang&co and we'll see much tighter market in 2-3 years.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    It will definitely do that if FAANG comp compresses via lower equity issuances. The difference is startups generally can’t compensate at the level that FAANGs do or did. And if discount rate stays higher, valuations will be much lower at the same revenue and growth rates than they had been in the past. Of course this also implies the value of the dollars you earn is greater via opportunity of higher yielding investments.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      > It will definitely do that if FAANG comp compresses via lower equity issuances. I think it will absolutely happen at least in short term. In fact in many cases already happened.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      small crypto startups compete directly with faang because they can give their own liquid tokens alongside their base salary given how big the VC funds for crypto startups are now I dont really see any talent acquisition situation improving for other tech startups, I see it getting more impossible who wants below market salary and illiquid lottery tickets that you have to also put up your own money to redeem after 1 to 4 years of your life with a higher chance of getting zeroed after VCs get their cut first assuming the company doesnt fold? Given a choice
peruvian 4y ago
Anecdotal, but we had a decent amount of layoffs over the summer and every single engineer laid off (seriously, every) has a job by now.
babblingfish 4y ago
Cries in Data & Analysis :'(
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I wonder why this was hit so hard?
  - dnissley 4y ago
    No need for those positions if you're just trying to keep the lights on
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
code_runner 4y ago
I just landed a dream gig and start in about 3 weeks. Horrified of layoffs etc but super excited for the move. Article made me feel a little bit better but only mildly.
jcadam 4y ago
I was laid off last week. The previous rounds of layoffs at my employer were focused on sales and operations folks. The latest was in IT, seemingly focused on senior level engineers.
lettergram 4y ago
Engineers keep the lights on. You can lay-off some, but you’d likely spend more money than it’s worth.
ultra_nick 4y ago
My fortune 100 has hiring freezes and and small layoffs. However, select departments are still hiring.
whoIsYou 4y ago
My company has a hiring freeze in place right now but are still brining on new contractors for high-priority initiatives as needed. No engineers have been let go yet And recruiters keep spamming me on LinkedIn about "great" contract to hire roles they have People still need engineers, they just don't want to commit to increasing headcount, because it will upset the beancounters. That's my take anyway
RickJWagner 4y ago
Sales is on one side of the graph and Marketing is on the other. Amazing.
not_enoch_wise 4y ago
This thread proves yet again, that learning computers also makes you a sharp economist
Havoc 4y ago
Well the finance being low seems consistent with my experience. I know my employer is currently way more stressed about hanging on to people

249 points by leeny 4y ago

thwayunion 4y ago

The market is still extremely tight for good talent in-between Senior and Junior.

lumost 4y ago
So the Senior market is saturated? this is an early sign companies are getting nervous about bloat. After the '08 recession many companies rushed to ditch Architect titles as they found that the role did not serve the interests of their productive engineers or the companies higher ups. Companies that had gone heavy on such talent might find themselves stuck. I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles. That depends. If they are actively involved and the architectural decisions are sound, it's fine. If they are "drive-by architects", showing up, dropping a bunch of useless boxes they read on some book, and then leaving before the consequences of their 'architecture' are known, you are right we don't like working with them. At many companies, however, staff engineers are still engineers.
  - theteapot 4y ago
    Drive by architects don't read books. They read AWS's latest product brochure and think "yes".
    - dijit 4y ago
      I think both exist, but you're right. The majority of Architects I've brushed against in the last decade have been exclusively an additional marketing force for AWS with very little ability to objectively reason from first principles or assist with knowledge of anything outside of the AWS ecosystem.
      - qchris 4y ago
        Totally genuine question as someone coming from a background in mechanical engineering, who now does a lot of software-y things: what do you consider to be "first principles" in computing? Are you talking about first principles in terms of project development processes (i.e how information systems evolve) or code (i.e. bits and bytes, where microservices might not be the answer because the network connections are guaranteed to have a fundamental latency that, along with the amount of data required, means you can't meet requirements because [..])?
        openfuture 4y ago
        I think I can name an example, which is how I am approaching datalisp; https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/ https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/ the first principles bit for my context refers to: fixing a standard encoding that is sufficient for the task, determining inputs and outputs of model, setting a general guideline for expressivity of model (space of conflict-free programs), sketching interaction modes and user interfaces. These are the first principles in question, now from there your architecture is mostly determined, you can fall back on known patterns and decades of research. The axioms are the architecture.
        qchris 4y ago
        Thanks for the insight!
        ntr-- 4y ago
        Not the parent but I will offer you my opinion after I laughed at their comment because it reminded me of many of the engineers at my current work: "First principles" in this context is not just reaching for the nearest/newest AWS service that seems to do what you want. ie. if you want a webserver, don't just run magic lambdas that abstract everything away from you, go and provision a vps and install your dependencies on it so you fully understand and control how the stack works. None of the 12 engineers at my current company had written a test that actually wrote rows to a database when I arrived, they didn't know how. In fact none of them knew anything about how to run our databases on their own dev machines at all, they all shared one RDS PG instance. Again, "first principles" here is: running a process, connecting to a service, asserting the whole thing did what you expected. To do that effectively you have to actually control the whole system, and to do that you have to know how the whole system works together. A lot of developers now just delegate the provisioning and maintenance of everything to a provider, even in development setups.
- sarchertech 4y ago
  Staff engineer is just title inflation for what used to be senior engineer. Senior engineers at most companies just means this isn’t your first job right out of college.
  - dominotw 4y ago
    I have 15 yoe and have senior software engineer title so do people with 2 yrs experience. I might be doing same thing over and over. Time to make a radical change :/.
    - thwayunion 4y ago
      There's also nothing wrong with plateauing for a while or even topping out, especially if you are generally happy with life and career. There's pride to be had in being a good individual contributor; not everyone needs to make it to Senior Super Special Principal :)
      - spacemadness 4y ago
        I keep being told I shouldn’t be writing code at my level and should be knee deep in design docs and estimations all day long. This is actually what happens but I would much prefer to be writing software and am wondering if I can even be happy in this career any longer. This industry has some real bizarre notions of career progression.
        davewritescode 4y ago
        You need to write code and you need to get people around you to write better code. That’s basically what a staff engineer does in addition to making large design decisions.
        spacemadness 4y ago
        That’s my belief as well but there are managers out there that think staff engineers should never write code. It boggles my mind they think this way but many do.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > So the Senior market is saturated? I am not sure I would say saturated, but yeah, the Sr. SWE market is definitely not as tight as it was a year ago for most role types. However, it does depend on qualifications and company type. Seniors for R&D positions (so, PhD with 5+ years in product-focused R&D) are still basically impossible to hire. Friends tell me that hiring seniors at mid-pay or low-pay companies is still pretty hard. The more important dichotomy is between mid-career/late-career and junior. The entry level positions are absolutely saturated. CS programs are definitely over-producing at this point.
  - noir_lord 4y ago
    Might be true in the US, not what I’m seeing have seen in the UK. Here big companies are taking kids straight out of uni and boot camping them because decent juniors are hard to find.
    - lostcolony 4y ago
      How easy is it to find bad juniors? I think that may be relevant for determining how saturated the field is.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    CS programs are overproducing but they are overproducing the wrong skills. Most don’t have the cloud skillset or experience with IaC, they are never thought how to solve problems within distributed systems. And their idea of systems design is a Flask app talking to a MySQL database on a laptop. It’s not the students fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times, and sometimes even teach bad engineering patterns that cause problems and create technical debt.
    - monksy 4y ago
      > It’s not their fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times. Yes/no/maybe. The schools got pressured by the bootcamps that were teaching the "flask app talking to a mysql db" .. they simplified their classes and stop teaching some things. It sucks, the people who come out of that don't have the theory/flexiblity/skills coming out that you would expect before.
- themagician 4y ago
  More and more senior engineers are non-coding or practically so. I see it everywhere. As industries have matured, people have matured into higher level management roles and there hasn't been enough people to replace them. There's still plenty of fresh blood, software engineering actually looks a lot like the labor shortages do in the rest of the market—there's a lack of people who actually want to do the work. Everyone wants that $150k starting comp. Everyone wants a $500k director or VP role. But there is a shortage in that $200-300K range for people who are actually going to put in hours either writing code that makes it into production, or managing junior coders and their codebases. I'm talking SV salaries here. The scale is different elsewhere, but the problem is the same.
  - lumost 4y ago
    Not for nothing, but that sounds a bit like a market peak if I've heard one. Why would the person actually doing the work settle for a mere 300k when the director/VP gets double without doing the hard work? there is a balance here - but it seems like a good time to lure engineers with real equity compensation to early stage startups.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      Which industry has it different? I mean there are exceptions like sport teams but by and large this stuff happens everywhere else too.
      - lumost 4y ago
        Difference in tech has been that productivity has largely been divorced from capital, OpEx, and experience. This may be becoming less true today with large enterprises owning specific market segments through network effects... but I wouldn't bet on that quite yet in the long-term. A doctor can't help but work at the world's best hospital, because it probably will still be the world's best hospital next year. A jet engine designer can't help but work at Boeing. A fresh college grad can start a tech business tomorrow.
    - themagician 4y ago
- spamizbad 4y ago
  What makes a "Staff Engineer" is largely a product of an orgs engineering culture. And you may have multiple people with "staff engineer" as a job title that fulfill different roles to varying degrees. I've found those roles to be: * Technical Leadership (driving major technical initiatives) * Technical Contributor (shipping stuff, with technical mastery beyond what would normally be expected from senior engineer) * Architect (planning stuff) * Team Management (mentorship + taking load off an engineering manager's plate if the team is big) Biggest mistake I see orgs make when hiring staff engineers is hiring someone whose strength is in mentorship and technical contributors and decide their new role is architecture and driving major technical initiatives at a high level. Some are best "in the weeds" and others are better planners. Know their strengths!
- hanszarkov 4y ago
  I'm a software architect, I write code every day, I design every day, I write documents every day, and I report to the VP and CTO every day. I have met other architects that claim they "don't code" and honesty don't understand how they can make decisions and reduce risk without that background. Most of the time I have a solution because I've been there and done that. I view my role as one that has the expertise to bring the engineering team to the next level, because if I did all the work - it would just be one person instead of many. I constantly try to unblock, solve hard problems, and reduce entropy - and let the creativity flow to the rest of the team. This has worked for me, as a software architect, for almost a decade.
superfrank 4y ago
I agree it's still tight, but it's not as bad as it was a few months ago, IMO. Anecdotal evidence, but I've had 2 open positions on my team since April and it's just been a constant flow of terrible candidates. I'm in a tech hub and we pay above market average according to levels.fyi, but we're competing with FAANGs for our candidates. The few good ones that popped up over that time often had multiple offers and it was hard to get them to choose us over a household name. In the last 6 weeks I've started to see the number of qualified candidates with no other offers increase to the point where I've filled both positions in a 2 week span.

system16 4y ago

> Articles like these drive engineers to speculate on Blind and on Reddit, in the internet equivalent of hushed whispers, about whether they’re next. Bizarre to reference a Blind thread from 2019 discussing Uber layoffs to back up a claim that engineers are reading the previously linked articles in the future and speculating about "whether they're next."

leeny 4y ago
Author here. Good call, just fixed to a more generic link about layoffs on Blind. No shortage of recent conversations.
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spacemadness 4y ago

“interviewing.io is both a mock interview platform and an eng hiring marketplace (engineers use us for technical interview practice, and top performers get fast-tracked at companies)” The source for this article has some strong incentives in the area of perceptions of increased competitiveness.

leeny 4y ago
Author here. For what it's worth, I added the conclusion pretty late in the game. When I first ran the data, it looked like engineers were barely getting laid off (because of engineers not opting in to layoff lists as much as others). And the graph about the bar going up came in as a zero hour suggestion from someone who proofread the piece. Believe me, I'd be much happier if eng hiring were back in full swing. With all the freezes and layoffs, we've taken a bigger hit than we can hope to gain back by shilling interview practice.
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theteapot 4y ago

> At some point in the last 2.5 years, you’ve probably visited layoffs.fyi. I have?

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hitpointdrew 4y ago
Never even knew it existed until just now. I feel like am not in the minority. Weird that the author assumes this is some well known site.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Its a very well known site
  - theteapot 4y ago
    Within your bubble.
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      You assume to know my bubble?
      - jopsen 4y ago
        HN is a bubble -- and we're all in it by definition :)
        imwillofficial 4y ago
        I also exist outside this bubble and in many other bubbles. Of all places, HN isn’t a place where I’d assume I know a given readers social circle.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

My firm is still playing the long game, so we’ve been actively hiring talent. Check back if/when a recession is in full swing.

sremani 4y ago
Everyone plays a long game until the cost of debt and debt servicing comes home. There are just too many Zombie Unicorns, it is matter of time. If your company is not profitable consider yourself jobless 6 months from now.
- yamazakiwi 4y ago
  Are you positing that if we maintain our current trajectory economically that Zombie Unicorns will start harshly cutting costs. Why 6 months? I'm actually curious why that number as I'm not in the environment.
- davewritescode 4y ago
  You are correct. There’s a particular company that’s local to me that hired away a bunch of my mediocre engineers at very high salaries because they were printing money during COVID. In 2022 their operations cost was 150% of revenue and I have to imagine that those people are sweating a bit now.
- omniscient_oce 4y ago
  That's good. It was a terrible model to begin with. Profits and growth should come from providing value to customers not biding time until you can "exit" or whatever they call it.
ttymck 4y ago
What would "recession in full swing" look like exactly, from the perspective of changing your firm's behavior?

pineconewarrior 4y ago

I have not seen or heard of any engineering cuts in any of my circle's workplaces. Only supporting staff (project managers etc). I clicked on a few of the google sheets linked in the article and it seems (at least per my random selection) that this seems to be the case at these places too.

pcurve 4y ago

Managers are still so busy trying to fill open headcounts because it’s usually use it or lose it. But they know hiring freeze is coming

yulaow 4y ago

Here in Europe layoffs are more uncommon but I am having a very hard time finding open positions compared to just 3 years ago ( last time I was changing jobs ), and the situation is getting worse and worse each week that passes. And for juniors is already far worse: I very rarely see job openings targeted to them anymore. It seems like everything is frozen.

radicalbyte 4y ago
There is a large backlash happening against blockchain right now in Europe, from your profile I would assume that that is the problem.
- yulaow 4y ago
  Actually it's the opposite. I am done with dapps and blockchain development and just looking for fullstack (preferring only backend when possible) typescript/golang positions. I am getting a good amount of recruiters contacting me for blockchain related positions but every single time I speak with them their projects are so ridiculously stupid I am flabbergasted that they got investors. "Normal web dev" recruiters? Just got 5 of them contacting me in the last 4 weeks and of those I contacted myself: most of them have ghosted me. Last time I was looking for a new job in 3 days I had like 30 recruiters already spamming my linkedin inmail Also I put myself in honeypot, talent.io and hired.com. Got like only one proposal... so thinking something was bad with my profile I contacted their "talent advisors" and each of them sort-of told me the profile was perfect but they were having an hard time getting job openings because of the "current market situation".
  - illusiveman 4y ago
    I used to have 2 requests a week on average on Hired. Now, my profile has expired twice without a single request. Definitely, something is wrong with that service. Guess fewer companies are using it. By contrast, it's odd the day I don't get a message on LinkedIn.
    - 4y ago

walshie4 4y ago

The fact that snap's web3 team being cut is one of the listed examples is pretty comical IMHO.

jesuspiece 4y ago
yea like no shit the web3 fat got cut first lol. anyone with eyes could see through all the people selling shovels in a gold rush
- andirk 4y ago
  They also cut their AR wing. Sounds like they're going back to their laurels: d** pics.
brundolf 4y ago
Ah yes, durable blockchains, an obvious next step for the world's most famous ephemeral-messaging company
wepple 4y ago
This is a flimsy PR piece for interviewing.io submitted by the founder. It worked, front page of HN is great for backlink value
- leeny 4y ago
  Founder here. This piece took my team and I months to research and tag and write. We spent hours counting individual layoffs in spreadsheets and on LinkedIn and running and rerunning the numbers. And the conclusion wasn't even what I wanted. When I started writing, I really thought that the layoffs were overblown and weren't affecting engineers. That's not what's happening at all. Now, you're right, why do we put effort into pieces like this? It's to get some eyeballs on interviewing.io. But this piece is not flimsy, and I think it's not correct or fair to assume that just because something serves our business that it's of poor quality. Normally I wouldn't say anything, but the "flimsy" thing really got me.
  - 4y ago

01100011 4y ago

We (large FANGish) are more or less in a hiring freeze but still grabbing a few new hires here and there. A friend just interviewed for SSE at AAPL and seemed to have the job only to be told they closed the req. I'm still getting lots of recruiter spam though so I think we're still fairly early in any sort of layoff cycle. The economy is still trucking. Despite many people trying to be first to declare it, we're not in a recession yet. All signs point to one next year though.

kingnothing 4y ago
The US is in a recession. It has seen two quarters of negative economic growth.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  I feel like a broken record but, the 'Two quarters' rule is an unofficial metric that does a bad job of representing recessions when you back-test it (no recessions from 1992-2008 in that case). In the US, a recession is defined by NBER after the fact.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Then the "two quarters" rule is stricter. We have fulfilled a stricter criterion for a recession. Whether the NBER contradicts us is irrelevant. Less value is going around in the economy.
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      I mean, if you're going to stick to the two-consecutive quarters definition, then you would be saying that we were in a recession, and are now out of one. Third quarter GDP estimates stand at 1.9% growth.
      - sieabahlpark 4y ago
        Estimates or reported? The recession based on two consecutive quarters is on reports not estimates of what is to be reported.

mkl95 4y ago

My employer has literally stopped hiring engineers and product roles. Sales people are still being hired in droves though.

marcyb5st 4y ago
Aren't sales people "cheap" as their salary is negligible compared to sales bonuses if and only if they exceed their sales quota?
- jedberg 4y ago
  Not usually. Oftentimes sales people have pretty high base pay. Last time I worked somewhere with a sales force, their base was the same as the engineers with the same level of experience, and then they got commission on top of that.
- mkl95 4y ago
  I don't know. My bosses claim good engineers are a nightmare to find. Cash is surely not the bottleneck.

conqrr 4y ago

The so called 'bar' references doesn't make much sense. There is no way to measure the performance of an individual. Leetcode style questions don't indicate performance. And what cannot be measured in the first place in a 4 hour interview, cannot have a 'bar'.

0xB31B1B 4y ago
There are absolutely ways to measure the performance of an individual. That leetcode style questions are not a great indicator of ability to do the job well does not mean you cannot predict job performance at all.
- conqrr 4y ago
  The bar here is interview performance bar. There is no way to judge a person's performance in 4 hours. Anything you come up with can be hacked or imperfect. Therefore there is no way to set a bar.
  - 0xB31B1B 4y ago
    You can't perfectly judge someone in an interview context, but you can get pretty good if you ask the right questions with the right structure. Where I work the final round interview we give the candidates a week to write a design doc for a recent project they have worked on and present it to us in a 45 minute meeting. We deep dive on their impact, the decisions they made, the tradeoffs etc. It has been an extremely strong signal for us.
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      I love this method.
    - mrj 4y ago
      That process would be biased to those with experience and enough rank to be able to make decisions. It would miss those who are capable but who haven't gotten the chance. There are many, many people who haven't gotten the chance and a diminishing market of those with experience. How would an interview process identify the capable but not experienced? It's infinitely hard. I mean, you take the same group of people and change the circumstances slightly and have a completely different outcome. Some groups don't gel. It's like last year's Super Bowl team, they're all still good but the circumstances have changed. Nobody knows how to predict who will step up in a situation and past performance is not a good indicator. The circumstances have changed. Every interview technique has some horrible downside and therefore it's not really possible to correctly assess talent. Just biasing towards experience isn't solving the problem of figuring out who can do the job. Even just knowing who was capable would be a step up from the current state. Figuring out how to moneyball a team together to win the Super Bowl (hit launch goals) is a whole added level. Our 45 minute tell-us-about-your-previous-projects-interview is nowhere good enough.

redleggedfrog 4y ago

My company is not hiring developers at the moment, but there sure are some people who should be let go.

yazzku 4y ago

sitzkrieg 4y ago

i feel like im on another planet when single digit growth is considered so bad. and this requirement for endless growth invariably destroys every product

smeagull 4y ago

We've seen a few people leave for other jobs, and are still hiring. Still getting offers from recruiters. I haven't seen this play out in the real world yet beyond news stories.

avrionov 4y ago

The article doesn't answer the question. The list is also missing 2 of the big names which announced layoffs Oracle and Citrix. For more detailed and depressing discussion about layoffs check [1]. [1] https://www.thelayoff.com/ https://www.thelayoff.com/

alephnerd 4y ago
Well, I wouldn't neccessarily treat the Citrix layoff as directly macroeconomic related, as they are going through an M&A event right now with TIBCO to make the "Cloud Software Group" [0][1], and it's ex-Broadcom leadership (who are very dollar/efficiency oriented). [0] - https://www.cloud.com/news/press-release.html https://www.cloud.com/news/press-release.html [1] - https://www.cloud.com/ https://www.cloud.com/

ge96 4y ago

Small company around 500+ employees hiring freeze (for everyone not just eng) for a month to assess.

haskellandchill 4y ago
$40-50B is a small company? I see.
- ge96 4y ago
  Yeah I got that number wrong, that's the valuation for this particular industry as a whole.

victor9000 4y ago

I just went through a round of interviews and received offers from large, small, and medium sized companies. So the opportunities are still there if you can navigate the interview gauntlet.

andirk 4y ago
I tell people that you are looking for _one_ position, not 10,000. There will always be a position somewhere that fits your needs. Its more difficult in down times to a degree. And if your industry is in a huge slump, find a new industry! There's more work to do than can ever be done.
- Raydovsky 4y ago
  I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs. Switching a stack won't help cos places want years of experience.
  - alexanderchr 4y ago
    Most ads seem to be written for the unicorn engineer with 10+ years of experience in every part of the company's stack, but realistically any place you'd actually want to work for is going to be happy with a few years of dev experience in a similar domain + ability and willingness to learn new stuff.
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    >I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs. Someone told me early in my career that "my grandkids will be maintaining PHP applications". He was probably right. You might be seeing less on the job boards nowadays, but half the web still runs on PHP.
    - lowercased 4y ago
      Some of the jobs won't be posted - they'll just be in-network referrals. That's how much of my work comes to me.

adam_arthur 4y ago

This is likely to be the recession that halts the rapid inflation in tech wages. Rising risk free rate has hit growth companies the hardest, and there are likely to be a large swath of layoffs right as we have tons of people bootcamping and switching into the industry. Supply and demand of labor in tech will enter balance for the first time since ~2010. The FFR is looking to have a reasonable chance to go to 5% at this point, so the pain isn’t even close to being over Get used to not being special like pretty much every other industry

dilyevsky 4y ago
Contrary view - this will sprout more startups that were previously starved for talent rest&vesting at faang&co and we'll see much tighter market in 2-3 years.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  It will definitely do that if FAANG comp compresses via lower equity issuances. The difference is startups generally can’t compensate at the level that FAANGs do or did. And if discount rate stays higher, valuations will be much lower at the same revenue and growth rates than they had been in the past. Of course this also implies the value of the dollars you earn is greater via opportunity of higher yielding investments.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    > It will definitely do that if FAANG comp compresses via lower equity issuances. I think it will absolutely happen at least in short term. In fact in many cases already happened.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    small crypto startups compete directly with faang because they can give their own liquid tokens alongside their base salary given how big the VC funds for crypto startups are now I dont really see any talent acquisition situation improving for other tech startups, I see it getting more impossible who wants below market salary and illiquid lottery tickets that you have to also put up your own money to redeem after 1 to 4 years of your life with a higher chance of getting zeroed after VCs get their cut first assuming the company doesnt fold? Given a choice

peruvian 4y ago

Anecdotal, but we had a decent amount of layoffs over the summer and every single engineer laid off (seriously, every) has a job by now.

babblingfish 4y ago

Cries in Data & Analysis :'(

dehrmann 4y ago
I wonder why this was hit so hard?
- dnissley 4y ago
  No need for those positions if you're just trying to keep the lights on

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code_runner 4y ago

I just landed a dream gig and start in about 3 weeks. Horrified of layoffs etc but super excited for the move. Article made me feel a little bit better but only mildly.

jcadam 4y ago

I was laid off last week. The previous rounds of layoffs at my employer were focused on sales and operations folks. The latest was in IT, seemingly focused on senior level engineers.

lettergram 4y ago

Engineers keep the lights on. You can lay-off some, but you’d likely spend more money than it’s worth.

ultra_nick 4y ago

My fortune 100 has hiring freezes and and small layoffs. However, select departments are still hiring.

whoIsYou 4y ago

My company has a hiring freeze in place right now but are still brining on new contractors for high-priority initiatives as needed. No engineers have been let go yet And recruiters keep spamming me on LinkedIn about "great" contract to hire roles they have People still need engineers, they just don't want to commit to increasing headcount, because it will upset the beancounters. That's my take anyway

RickJWagner 4y ago

Sales is on one side of the graph and Marketing is on the other. Amazing.

not_enoch_wise 4y ago

This thread proves yet again, that learning computers also makes you a sharp economist

Havoc 4y ago

Well the finance being low seems consistent with my experience. I know my employer is currently way more stressed about hanging on to people