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I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One th
by eschneider 4y ago
I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.
- curiousllama 4y agoAre you referring to rounds at the same company, or rounds across the economy?
- eschneider 4y agoRounds at the same company.
- marcus0x62 4y agoNot the OP, but what I’ve experienced is severance packages get worse across rounds at a single company. A previous employer started at 1 year pay / benefits, then six months, then six weeks + two weeks per year of service.
- cableshaft 4y agoThen you have corporations like the previous one I worked at, which had a terrible 1 week pay per year you've worked there, capped at 4 weeks pay. I know someone who had worked there for 17 years that got laid off and only got 4 weeks because of it. They never got around to laying me off, I ended up quitting much later than I should have.
- marcus0x62 4y agoThat really puts loyalty towards your employer into perspective, doesn’t it?
- throwaway2037 4y agoI read it as same company.
- truthwhisperer 4y ago
- refurb 4y agoI've been through 3 lays offs years ago and after the 2nd one I got pretty good at predicting the 3rd. It's basically a cookie cutter approach. Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.
- agotterer 4y agoMaybe less relevant now that a lot of companies are still remote. In the past when a company cuts back on office perks, such as snacks, it’s often a leading indicator of financial issues and possible looming cuts.
- IronWolve 4y agoCorrect, Take the first round of payouts, always. Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left. Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
- washywashy 4y agoAre employees able to “take” a layoff even if they don’t receive an email telling them they are among the affected group?
- WanderPanda 4y agoI was wondering about this as well, would be nice if someone could clarify!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- crims0n 4y agoIt depends on the company and situation. Sometimes they ask for volunteers and you can request the package, most times you don't get a choice.
- ciropantera 4y agoThe writing is usually on the wall for a while before the layoff actually happens, so there's time for you to let your manager know that you wouldn't mind getting the boot.
- madengr 4y ago
- pjmlp 4y agoI have been through a couple of merges and layoffs, it taught me that what matters is loyaty to the team, employer not so much.
- yarky 4y agoDo you mind to elaborate a bit?
- boringg 4y agoIf your team lead can protect you they will but the employer at large is rather indifferent. Also further in your career those relationships to your team mean a fair bit while who you worked for as a company might not make that much difference.
- JackFr 4y agoI’ve gone back to work for a manger who laid me off. There were literally no hard feelings. When he laid me off it was clear that he had to hit a hard headcount number, and I knew the project I was working on was “discretionary”. The HR meeting was “this is a headcount reduction and not a reflection on your work. Have a lawyer look over your severance and please accept or decline it within a week.” Really quite professional.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 4y agoOthers have pretty much covered the matter, you will always bump into former team mates, or it will be thanks to them that you will get some gig. Employers themselves usually look into spreadsheets with a bunch of KPIs deciding who to lay off, without any regards for the effort you have actually placed into the job.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- H8crilA 4y agoI'm close to deciding to go back to University to get some additional education that's likely to improve my work in the future. I can afford it without any salary. Based on your experience, do you think this is the right moment to do so? I'm employed at the moment.
- typeofhuman 4y agoWhat are you going to pursue? If you're looking for income growth and are already in professional position making decent money it's almost never worth it to go back to school.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurusx 4y agoIf you’re going in order to get education that you personally want, now seems like the best time. The economy will recover and you’ll be able to get back in later. If you’re going because you think it’ll give you better work opportunities later, I suggest thinking carefully about that. You’re already in your field. Even if you’re in an adjacent field but still in tech, you can usually transition — I’ve been a gamedev, worked in finance, been a pentester, and now I do ML. The question of whether I had a degree came up exactly once, very early in my career. Academia can be a good fit if you’re going for the right reasons. Make sure you research what life is like at that university, and plan out what you hope to get from it and where you want to be five years from now.
- yarky 4y agoGreat advice! Where do you see more opportunities in the near future, ML?
- computomatic 4y agoNothing interesting will be reliably funded over the next 5-ish years given the current macroeconomics. If we’re talking about where the opportunities (jobs) are going to be, then you’re probably looking at tech roles within non-tech companies. These companies have been dying to modernize but haven’t been able to hire engineers due to the tech bubble. After that, tooling that enables non-technical companies to build software - whatever that looks like.
- mrits 4y agoI'm not sure comparing a company with $28 billion Q3 revenue to .com bubble makes much sense.
- marcus0x62 4y agoDuring the dot com bubble even companies with massive (for the time) revenue did huge layoffs. Cisco was probably the poster child for that.
- johnvanommen 4y agoI helped a friend move after she was laid off, a couple years after the dot com bubble popped. One of the eeriest things was seeing all those shiny new buildings in Silicon Valley, sitting empty. It was like 15% of the businesses just evaporated. It was a Cisco building in particular that I remember. I was over on that street recently and everything is occupied again, though many of the names have changed.
- marcus0x62 4y agoWhen I left Cisco in 2014, some of those buildings were still practically empty.
- tootie 4y agoThis is going to be a repeat of 2000, not 2008. There's seemingly no contagion and no secular stagnation. This is just unwinding of the cheap money era that flowed overwhelmingly into SV. You'll see a cooling off of red hot compensation, a lot of failed startups that no one ever understood and the ongoing crypto crash. This may end up being enough to trigger a mild recession.
- swalsh 4y ago" mild recession" If we're lucky
- mywittyname 4y agoWe're like 2.5 years into one at this point and some people still don't acknowledge it. A lot of people just keep saying "we're heading into one." It's likely this one will pass long before people come to a general consensus on whether or not one really happened.
- kevstev 4y agoIf this is a recession, its not one I am feeling. 2008, the .com bust, those were recessions that everyone felt acutely. Unemployment is still at record lows. If the GDP dial isn't where people would like it to be then fine, but overall jobs are plentiful and no one I know is scared like they have been during the previous recessions.
- erehweb 4y agoThe U.S. unemployment rate was 3.7% in October, and GDP was up 2.6% annualized in 2022Q3. Why do you say we're in a recession?
- fortran77 4y agoWe didn't have inflation like this in 2000. I'm old enough to remember the 70s
- 4y ago
- registeredcorn 4y agoI'm interested to hear your opinion: Do you have any thoughts on the current way companies are valued/how they operate vs how they were leading up to the 2000 crash? Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested to hear your perspective on the matter.
- matwood 4y agoThis is literally nothing like 2000 unless in you're in something like crypto. Meta hired 30k+ people during covid and they are correcting that over hire mistake. They are fine financially. In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months. Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.
- BurningFrog 4y agoYeah, SV is never completely sane, but the Dot Com era was truly mental bonkers.
- registeredcorn 4y agoThanks for the response. :) Under what circumstance do you believe the current landscape would be comparable to the 2000's era? Certainly, I would hope that the same kind of foolish behavior wouldn't reoccur, outside of a very specific set of circumstances, but do you see any sort of comparison between the historical foolishness of the market, and the wastes of money that have been devoted to things like, Stadia, Zillow AI pricing, Quibi, WeWork, etc.? When I see the amount of money spent vs brought in by the various big names out there (social networks, in particular) I can't help but see a thing essentially worth little outside of name recognition. I naturally assume it to be a house of cards ready to collapse at some point, I just can't really determine when or why that might be. Perhaps not anytime soon, or to the extent that it would have were it 2000, but certainly companies that has such a noticeably poor ability to create profit, that it seems assured to fail. I've certainly been wrong about such things in the past. Twitter, for example, was a thing that I assumed around 2008 or 2009, would never catch on, and that whatever traction it had would fade within a few months. I had similar assumptions with Netflix being "doomed to failure" after they tried to split the steaming/DVD rental services. I've been laughably wrong on each of those things, so it's entirely possible that I'm just not appreciating that maybe the world itself works has changed in a way that I haven't grasped. I just don't see how tech companies which can't manage to turn a profit, let alone offer predictable income, are able to sustain longterm value investment. It just seems like a hopeful anemic.
- eyear 4y agoNot necessarily: I know companies paid 2 weeks/year in the first round and 3 weeks/year in the second round a year later.
- bagels 4y agoSounds like everyone got a weak deal.
- anthomtb 4y agoI survived two rounds of layoffs in 2008/2009 and they went as you describe. The first round had significantly better benefits. Which, ironically, ended up going to the worst performers. That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dboreham 4y agoExcept the very last round, where you're the person left to handle sale of IP and so forth. Then they'll pay you well to stick around for a few months doing nothing.
- commandlinefan 4y ago> There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse Yep, was with a company that went out of business slowly - I was one of the last 10 employees to be let go (on the day the company officially went out of business). The first round of layoff severance was something like 6 months of salary. By the time they got down to the last of us, it was two weeks.