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In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it sat
by whatwherewhy 4y ago
In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.
If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.
- weatherlite 4y agoYou're right but its not as if only Meta are firing or we're anywhere close to this recession ending. There's gonna be a bunch of pain to come still unfortunately.
- dagw 4y agoWhile it might not saturate the US job market as a whole, it will saturate the parts of the local programmer market that can come even close to matching the sorts of salaries these people where probably paid. If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.
- habinero 4y agoOr they'll start their own companies. Not a bad time to do it.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoIf they’re doing that then it means Meta, Twitter, Stripe, etc process got rid of the wrong people.
- HgW33WiY6m3W4H9 4y agoI work at Stripe. I can’t throw a proverbial paper clip at this company without hitting someone who could be founding a company right now. There’s no way to lay off 14% of Stripe without setting free scores of future founders.
- naijaboiler 4y agohubris of tech workers. as if starting successful companies is just that easy
- sillysaurusx 4y agoIt’s helpful to remember that we’re collectively doing about 1% of what we theoretically could be accomplishing. If you somehow forced someone to sit and practice drawing a hand for eight hours a day, they would get surprisingly far as an artist. Being a founder isn’t too dissimilar. Determination tends to be decisive. If you spent eight hours a day trying to make a small group of users love you, you’d get surprisingly far. I think that’s what they mean about potential founders at Stripe. There’s a lot of potential energy that a layoff might release.
- andsoitis 4y agomy guess is that most, if not nearly all, successful founders were pulled into that position (i.e. self-directed) vs pushed out of desperation.
- d6rd7rxuxutx 4y agoI'm not sure about that. Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company
- andsoitis 4y agoIf you were that risk averse (that you didn’t act on your entrepreneurial instincts) when times were good, my money is that you’re more likely to double down in searching for safety. I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)
- mbreese 4y agoNot necessarily… a potential good startup founder is not necessarily a skill set that a FB needs right now. And many business ideas that aren’t “FB-scale ideas” can still be quite successful for a small founding crew.
- underdeserver 4y agoNot necessarily. There may be business opportunities that Meta, Twitter and Stripe are not interested in.
- stephencanon 4y agoThat’s right—-any time you’re laying off thousands people at once, some of them will the “the wrong people”. There is no mechanism for mass layoffs that can accurately target only “low performers”. Even if these layoffs reflect good decisions, good decisions at corporate scale are not necessarily good decisions at the individual level.
- seydor 4y agoLet's hope so
- scarface74 4y agoExcept for that whole funding environment being dead thing. Not to mention that nine out of ten startups fail even in good times.
- indymike 4y agoI used a 1yr severance as a seed fund for my current company.
- scarface74 4y agoThat doesn’t dispute the fact that only 1 out of 10 startups “succeed” and that definition of “success” is overly generous.
- indymike 4y agoNo, it doesn't dispute that startups are risky, even if you know what you are doing. By the way, water is wet, too.
- headsoup 4y agoWouldn't layoffs starting at larger tech companies imply demand is waning and there would be a much smaller market for all of these new startups?
- nradov 4y agoDemand is always growing in some markets. I predict major growth in the defense and agriculture technology markets over the next decade.
- acdha 4y agoClean tech also seems big - even if the Republicans did manage to gut federal support for renewables (I’m doubtful given e.g. how much money Texas wind farms are making) consumer trends are looking solid and a lot of state policies represent locked-in market.
- nkozyra 4y agoDemand for what, though? Startups can cover ... well anything, really? There's certainly less demand for Facebook's style of social media, for sure.
- schnitzelstoat 4y agoYeah, ads revenues are down which means a whole load of ad-supported business models are no longer economically viable. I don't think a recession with low demand and high interest rates is a good time to start a company at all.
- reaperducer 4y agoWouldn't layoffs starting at larger tech companies imply demand is waning and there would be a much smaller market for all of these new startups? It depends on how you define "startup." They don't necessarily have to keep staring at screens for their living. It was mass layoffs of real estate and banking workers in 2008 that kick started the food truck industry.
- acdha 4y agoThis is a valid concern in a recession but there are different niches and business models. Facebook has been very profitable selling ads but that’s not the only option, and there are opportunities which might be a good fit for a small company which a big one is structurally incapable of finding. After the dotcom crash, I knew several people who found solid niches selling services to other businesses - it didn’t have the hypergrowth potential of something like an ad-supported social network but most of those fail, and there’s a lot of money in less sexy industries.
- netheril96 4y agoFed raising the interest rate is hardly a good time to start a startup.
- slaw 4y agoOnly for startups that depends on free money from Fed like Movie Pass, Juicero. Startups with sound ideas should be fine.
- oska 4y agoOnly if you can start a company that's cashflow positive from essentially day one. Burn rate provided by suppressed interest rates and cashed up venture capitalists is quickly becoming a disappearing concept.
- acdha 4y agoThe first dotcom crash was good that way: people make worse decisions when they have piles of VC funny money and anyone with a real business has trouble standing out when the field is full of competitors burning bright but fast.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chasd00 4y agoIsn't this about the worst time to start a company? Uncertain economic outlook, high inflation, high borrowing costs.
- shagie 4y agoLess competition, more available labor, the books start with a "this is hard" and get better when things get better (compare with starting when things are easy and then having it rough when times get hard)...
- Archelaos 4y agoIt should also be noted that a person recalled from the home office already has a hidden 20% pay cut if she or he has to commute for about an hour in each direction. EDIT: I mistakenly first wrote "each day" instead of "in each direction".
- brookst 4y agoTrue, if you assume time is perfectly fungible into money. For most of us it’s not.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y agoYou can also consider this in terms of work. Being forced into the office increases work by 20% without a commensurate raise.
- namdnay 4y agounless you spend a less time in the office than you would at home
- brookst 4y agoSure, but "pay cut" has a specific meaning, and that's not it. When I roll on to a new project and it is more/less work than my previous one, I don't think of it as a pay increase or decrease.
- acdha 4y agoDefinitely true normally but we’re in this weird world where a ton of people got to try a previously unavailable or unemphasized option. Full-time remote work used to be a bit unusual but a couple of years was enough for a lot of people to get used to the idea and now it feels like a cut to go back, even if they were used to being in the office in February 2020.
- acdha 4y agoNo, but commuting has other expenses: beyond the obvious cost of cars that often includes eating out more (often at pricier locations), extended childcare, wardrobe expenses, etc. No, a FAANG employee probably isn’t suffering (although consider the pay outside of the prestige jobs) but everyone just got a multi-year reminder of those indirect costs.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y agoI’ve been here long enough to have seen the countless comments lamenting the current state of qualifications and ability in the industry. Here’s to hoping that meta and stripe laid off under achievers that would be wise to get into a different industry where they’ll perform better. Musks layoffs ignored since it seems clear that his were indiscriminate and hasty to the point of negligence.
- pedrosorio 4y ago> under achievers that would be wise to get into a different industry where they’ll perform better Why would they perform better in another industry where presumably they do not have qualifications either (nor ability)?
- KingOfCoders 4y agoDid I misread or you live in a small central EU country with 200.000 open tech positions?
- whatwherewhy 4y agoWell to be honest 1/10 was a little bit of overstatement, but yeah every year there's a governmental report about how this country is missing 150k programmers so it's about 1/8 or so.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoWe have this too in Germany, but it's usually not based on open positions but some "we would need this to grow the GDP further industry is saying they miss these number of people" from some lobbying group like Bitkom. But Chapeau! for your country.
- netheril96 4y ago> there's a governmental report about how this country is missing 150k programmers You shouldn't take these governmental reports at face value. In my country, we see a lot of these reports too, and for all kinds of professions. Most of the time it just means that the corporate want more people willing to work for less.
- Aeolun 4y agoWell, yes. But if all the corporates only want to hire people at that price it’s still a shortage. It’s just a shortage of shrubs.
- whimsicalism 4y agoThat's quite explicitly not a shortage in the economic sense.
- koliber 4y agoKeep in mind that government reports have a time lag. It's based on someone doing research some time ago. The time lag could easily be months. If it was 100% true at the time of research, the current situation may be very different. Meta was hiring aggressively at the beginning of the year, as were many other companies.
- tifadg1 4y agoI'm quite interested in learning which small central EU country has 150k outstanding programming jobs.
- rco8786 4y agoSame
- alvis 4y agoSurely they're not all engineers, many are sales and admin positions. But the number is still large tho
- przefur 4y agoRomania? Poland?
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoRomania and Poland aren't exactly small by European standards, in fact they're some of the biggest by population and area. And Romania is not Central but Eastern European [1], so that's out. Small and Central European would be Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland based on the most widely used definition of Central Europe [1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe#/media/File:Central_Europe_(Brockhaus).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe#/media/File:Cen...
- someweirdperson 4y agoSmall would be Luxembourg.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoLuxembourg is not Central European. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe
- 4y ago
- throwaway0x7E6 4y agomost of the people being laid off are not programmers
- vaxman 4y agoThey used to say “assets have legs in silicon valley” but not in Horizon World!
- xbmcuser 4y agoI think the pay will go down its the meta and google etc that have been pushing up the salaries without the demand from them the pressure on salaries will bring them down.
- mythhouse 4y ago> I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way. Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.
- amusedcyclist 4y agoGoing off the article it sounds like most of the layoffs are in business and recruiting so I suspect a small-ish fraction of the layoffs will be programmers
- tobase 4y agoIsn't that forecasted by the same people who now says that they didn't see this coming? :)
- vaxman 4y agoYeah, fly ‘em all to a “small central EU country” which shall henceforth be known as LuxemValley. As a bonus, ‘errbody working in LuxemValley shall be known as the SiliconBourg and be issued a mug, backpack and Chemin de Fer paddle. :D Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoOr they'll start their own companies and crush the competition like insects, while the dinosaur companies full of contractors slowly die out just like we saw in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s
- vaxman 4y agoI hear you, but things will be different this time around. It would take me 20 minutes to explain, but gist is there is a HUGE diff between senior engineer and senior tech, there was no H1B phenom until 2001, almost no senior level engineers (cough) remaining in the biz until around 2006 (thanks to dot-com bust nuclear winter) and balance wasn't even restored until recently (very recently) because, you know, engineers with 10 years experience aren't half as confident as techs with 5 years experience. If you're a senior level engineer who can write operating systems, firmware and glance at a data center blueprint and see RF signaling issues as easily as you can look at a schematic and see DMA inefficiencies, are you going to pledge allegiance to a turd like company run into the ground by the spoiled Boomers or are you going to start your own company (or throw in with some hungrah folks you maybe met saving from the supremely over-confident senior technician crowd)? This time around, those Strange Conditions don't exist anymore and, much as it was in the 80s, you can't buy/refi a house in the US unless you can show significant ATR and lastly, with tightening credit (that comes with higher interest rates and, for now at least, higher home prices), you are going to need to be compensated in greenbacks (not stock) and show stability (not 1-3 years per gig)...all things that are harder in startup-land. For now, find another gig with a large company, go overseas (Europe not Middle Eassssst) if you have to. I will write a book, but they won't let me publish until the movie is done roflmao
- smcl 4y agoI reckon 11k would pretty well fill all the available tech roles in Czech Republic (which fits the "small Central European" description). God knows where they'd live though, rents + prices would explode
- swalsh 4y agoI don't see it, I used to get a few emails from recruiters every day. The other day I got 1, and it made me realize it's been literally weeks since I had one. Lots of companies froze their hiring. The music is stopping, and there's a lot less chairs. Not everyone is going to find a new seat.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoTrue, but these aren't ordinary engineers who'll settle for ordinary salaries. These are the top paid engineers in the industry - there are practically no places that can hire all 20,000 of them at their current salaries.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoIt does mean that a lot of folks will be looking for work, expecting really big salaries. Because they have become used to a very high standard of living, these salaries will actually be required. MANGA companies pay ridiculously well. I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.
- ransom1538 4y ago"these salaries will actually be required." I wonder if foreclosures spike. Bay area.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoYup. I suspect a lot of these folks are living in overpriced rental apartments in SF (and Brooklyn).
- zero_ 4y agoDoes the small EU country you are living in pay FAANG level salaries (200k and more) for their developers? Because in the small central EU country where I live, they always say skilled workers are in demand until you tell them your desired salary ;-)
- eastbound 4y ago“Oui mais vous avez des tickets resto” — Explanation: French people seem always very happy with low salaries as long as they have social benefits such as 4,60€ ticket for restaurant at lunch. And free healthcare, which they pay 800€ per month (for a 65k€ salary). They really need some economy lessons. If I were a true capitalist, I’d teach them socialism for free.
- fy20 4y agoSimilar here. Over the summer my country of 3m people, reached its yearly immigration quota in tech jobs of 16,000. And that doesn't include people moving inside the EU or refugees from Ukraine.
- TheOsiris 4y agothe effect this kind of thing has on the broader market is that it makes everyone else reconsider their hiring plans. I doubt there will be as many open positions after this announcement and it won't all be from hiring
- samstave 4y agoThe real problem to worry about is hiring practices, shitty HR people, algo-based auto rejecting and shitty fucking interviewers... THIS will have impact on these people suffering to find a new position.... So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb. There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.