13 ms·

So big tech has 220,000 layoffs and there is not the merest hint of a blip in the unemployment rate. This is not a tragedy - these people are going to find job

• ttobbaybbob 4y ago
  part of the point, too, is that now that there's the pressure of unemployment instead of the moving as opportunistic jump many may be willing to accept a commensurate (possibly lower) salary/tc than they had previously instead of demanding an increase
• area51org 4y ago
  I very much want you to be correct, but having been around for a good amount of time, it's not always as straightforward as you suggest. In many instances, companies are reluctant to hire people who have been laid off, because they imagine that if company A laid the person off, obviously something's wrong with the person. In some cases, someone can take a couple of years or so to finally find a job, and that's enough time to create financial devastation. (I am not talking about myself, full disclosure, but I know people.)
  • killjoywashere 4y ago
    You do not have to divulge the basis of your departure from a company. "Creative differences".
    • rhaway84773 4y ago
      Many people would assume you got laid off if your creative differences happened to coincide with the layoffs.
    • ejb999 4y ago
      hiring managers are not that dumb ... if you prior job is amazon, and you are applying for a new job 2 months after 18K have been laid off - they can put 2 and 2 together pretty easily. Even if you did leave on your own accord, they will likely assume you were let go. It's almost always easier to get a new job, when you still have one.
      • killjoywashere 4y ago
        Maybe. They also might see the opportunity to get some inside skinny on Amazon, and anything they pay you will be cheap compared to the value of the intel.
      • mywittyname 4y ago
        I've seen good people get laid off. So I certainly don't fault people for being laid off. Plus, being an ex-FAANG is a huge bonus when applying for jobs at "normal" places or starts ups.
        • Phlarp 4y ago
          >Plus, being an ex-FAANG is a huge bonus when applying for jobs at "normal" places or starts ups. YMMV on this one, depending on what you consider "normal" companies (non-tech, non-coastal, non-advertising). Plenty of those hiring managers have their own opinions about FAANG employees
      • vkou 4y ago
        Any hiring manager who thinks that getting laid off in 2023 is some kind of black mark against you is dumb. Some people are being laid off for performance. Most are being laid off because they were unlucky.
      • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
        Well, they actually ARE that dumb (because they don't care), and it's none of their business. I had a 13 year track record building a series of apps with a user base of over 500K as a solo dev before I was laid off because of corporate mismanagement of funding. I interviewed with 9 companies, received offers from 4 before I stopped looking, and was still in the race for the remaining 5. Hiring managers don't have time to be super sleuths. If your interview and reference process can't weed people out, then you shouldn't be in charge of hiring people. Either way, the person who gets laid off from Amazon is going to have already shown the capacity to jump through a dozen stupid hoops by sheer process of being offered a job to work there.
    • AlbertCory 4y ago
      But if you're a big executive, "wanted to spend more time with my family" is a popular one. "Need to explore other opportunities" is a little weaker but still works. "This chapter in my life is over" is also popular. I think I should make a bingo card out of these.
    • taude 4y ago
      As a hiring manager, I wouldn't even ask a question around departing an old company, whether they were laid-off or not. I'd have questions that were more along the line: "what will you miss from your old company, work day, etc." "what do you imagine your new role/work day would look like." "What won't you miss", etc...
  • LewisVerstappen 4y ago
    Definitely not the case if you're a FAANG developer. The issue is that a lot of these people may have to take pay cuts and make less than what they were previously earning. Especially if you were L4+ at Google or something. Not many companies that'll pay $350k+ for a software engineer. Those that will are not currently hiring.
    • Phlarp 4y ago
      So FAANG developers traded long term stability for stock based comp and now that deal turned sour? From a super lame C# dev at a boring company in a flyover state that's never gotten stock comp-- I used to fear a collapse in big tech that would cause an influx of skilled devs flooding into boring companies and displacing mere mortals like myself. Now that it's actually happening I'm very amused at how unemployable the SV cohort is to normal companies. To them you're all annoying overpaid assholes that whine about tools and process instead of just doing work. They've got 10 years of experience with ephemeral front-end frameworks, while the companies still hiring deploy Java and build UIs with XML.
      • LewisVerstappen 4y ago
        No worries, even after these layoffs, there sure as hell isn't anyone willing to take a job in Minnesota.
  • spamizbad 4y ago
    Eh, this is just anecdotal, but as a manager whose hired people laid-off in the past, IME they're almost always better quality than the usual candidates that come across your desk. So when I see these layoffs I'm like a shark who smells blood. (ok, bad analogy, but I hope you understand I mean no harm). The most common reason for getting laid off is having the misfortune of working in a department or on a project that no longer aligns with the company's "vision" and that's no fault of the engineer. While some people might be biased to think the laid-off are poor performing employees, these people are simply buying into the "just-world fallacy" -- why would a bad thing happen to a good worker? But the truth is, while a company might ensure a few "rockstars" survive a layoff, there's plenty of "A" and "A-" talent that gets cut without a thought.
    • jarjoura 4y ago
      Yup, spot on and pretty much explains everyone I know who’s been laid off. We’re all lucky to land that great FAANG job, and just as unlucky to get laid off from it. This year should be a reminder to all of us to never take a day for granted.
  • jlarocco 4y ago
    Every situation is unique, but I haven't seen this myself and I personally haven't had any problems finding a job after being laid off, twice in the last 20 years. Context is important. If 20 out of 120k people get laid off then I might be suspicious of those 20. But if its 20k out of 120k then it's almost certain that whole departments and teams were cut, so it's hard to say anything about the individuals.
  • deleted 4y ago
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• AndrewUnmuted 4y ago
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• Apocryphon 4y ago
  Doesn’t that ignore 1) the layoffs keep coming and we don’t know what the final amount will be? And 2) much more difficult to find jobs when companies are also on hiring freezes?
• pwthornton 4y ago
  Big tech layoffs should work differently than most industries and may not impact unemployment as much. Big tech employees a lot of H1B visas holders. If they cannot quickly find a new job, they will have to leave the country.
  • JCM9 4y ago
    I get the practical element of this stinks, but technically that’s what H1Bs are about. The original sponsor said we have to bring this person into the country since nobody else here can do this incredibly important highly in demand thing. If people aren’t tripping over themselves to snatch up someone that came into the market with those skills then the attitude of the government is maybe it’s no longer rare or in high demand and thus we can’t justify having that person here anymore. Yeah it’s rather cold and transactional, but that’s the model for H1Bs.
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  • superfrank 4y ago
    On an individual level, I really feel bad for anyone put in that positions. I can't imagine how stressful that would be for anyone going through that. I wouldn't want anyone to go through that. Taking the emotion out of it and looking at a macro level though, I think the program has been abused by big tech to bring in workers who have less bargaining power and I'm all for it getting a bit of a reset. The purpose of the program is to bring in in-demand, high skill workers that employers cannot find in the US. If these employees cannot find other jobs quickly, it makes me question how in-demand their skills actually were.
    • marcus_holmes 4y ago
      I gather this question is being asked in government too: big tech has been arguing for years that the visas are needed because they need more skilled people than the domestic labour supply can supply. And now suddenly they don't, and hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off.
• kradroy 4y ago
  I'm hoping these highly compensated former employees go on to build their own companies that create more jobs. That would be a net gain for everyone.
• bushbaba 4y ago
  Unemployment doesn’t show laid off employees who aren’t yet collecting unemployment benefits. These tech workers got at least 60 days of severance thanks to the warn act.
  • aeternum 4y ago
    Like most modern legislation, the warn act is way too long and thus filled with loopholes. Lawyers have already come up with many ways to avoid it and companies are putting them to good use.
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  • deanCommie 4y ago
    As of Dec 2022, the US unemployment rate was 3.5% based on a count of 5.7MM unemployed people. Which means those 220,000 would still only raise the unemployment rate to 3.6% And that's assuming all those 220,000 were laid off in the US which they were not.
  • chimeracoder 4y ago
    > Unemployment doesn’t show laid off employees who aren’t yet collecting unemployment benefits. That is not true. The fact that they are receiving severance does not change their classification as unemployed. The unemployment rate, which is calculated using a standard approach across the country, is completely unrelated to unemployment benefits, which are handled at the state level with a high degree of variation. In fact, workers are counted as unemployed even if the layoffs are temporary and they are expected to be recalled (e.g. furlough).
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      They're often kept on as employees to satisfy the WARN act. This isn't actually severance, and they're not actually unemployed at that point.
• throwaway23597 4y ago
  How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.
  • bbor 4y ago
    Don’t you think a catalog would do a better job of matching up consumers to products? Given our environmental situation, is it really ethical to “convince” people that they need some new thing that they previously didn’t know about or want? Re: keeping stuff free, that’s still pretty convincing and it’s mostly what keeps me going as I work on the great google ad machine. It seems like a massive social good for sites to be free to users of an economic class worldwide, both large tools and tiny blogs. Any alternative I can think of (e.g. government buys everyone google drive subscriptions, sites run off donations, micropayments) have some pretty obvious issues
    • flavius29663 4y ago
      "ethical" is very hard to prove or disprove. For example, is it ethical for me to pay 400USD for a camera, since there is a 350 alternative that I didn't even know existed? A complete and fair catalog is very hard (if not impossible ) to implement. But even if you did, that would NOT be enough. You might not know you "need" a good mattress unless an ad would sell it to you. Btw, if you think a global catalog would solve all these issues why not build it yourself? It can't be that hard... There are probably only a few billion products on earth, with a few variants each. Why not just do it? Speaking of "ethical", there are many concept in the modern world that can be seen as "un-ethical", but at the same time they make the world run much better than the medieval (or communist) world they replace: interest, inflation, income taxes to name a few.
    • throwaway23597 4y ago
      It's not like we DON'T have a catalog though. Amazon exists. The problem is that there is such a deluge of products that it becomes difficult to choose. That's where advertising can help. As for the environmental situation, it is unfortunate. But I do believe that the only realistic way out of the climate crisis without a collapse-level drop in standard of living (read: starvation) is technological innovation, a process that seems to be aided a lot by a healthy economy (which results in stable livelihoods, etc). So I'd say if anything there's a moral imperative to keep the economy as healthy and productive as possible.
• angarg12 4y ago
  As an immigrant tech worker on visa (L1 to be specific) I find this comment cruel and tone deaf. Losing my job means losing my status, which means having to leave the country in short notice, my wife losing her job as well, and uprooting my family (again). Sure, I would survive, but I would definitely call it a personal tragedy.
  • anthonypasq 4y ago
    were you under the impression your job was guaranteed for life?
    • mateus1 4y ago
      What a rude thing to say to someone who just lost their livelihood and ties to the place they live. Do you ask grieving orphans if they expected their parents would live forever?
    • matthewdgreen 4y ago
      Please don’t post stuff like this.
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• klipklop 4y ago
  I know somebody that was in the first round of these layoffs about 6 months ago. This person still has not found another job. It's pretty hard to find a job when everyone has a hiring freeze. I suspect some of the 40-somethings that are turning a bit gray will have a very hard time finding a new job that paid as well as their FAANG job did. I always feel hackernews greatly overstates how easy it is for folks even working at a "top firm" to finding a new job in this current job market.