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Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

347 points by dev_tty01 4y ago

tripleaaa 4y ago
[dead]
FlyingSnake 4y ago
No shit Sherlock. If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually. The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.
- mjr00 4y ago
  I don't know if it was "shot themselves in the foot" so much as "the unsustainable thing they were doing to prevent potential competition finally broke." FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.
  - screwturner68 4y ago
    I just think the FAANGs got a little drunk on profits and hiring during covid. Now that things are normalizing they realized that they hired too many people and they are chopping heads. To me I just don't see the big deal, tech does mass purges every few years and for the most part everyone lands on their feet and the industry expands even more. Giving a few thousand really smart 20-somethings six months salary and sending them on their way is going to create hundreds of startups and passion projects and a couple of those projects might actually have some value (outside of SV).
  - dumbotron 4y ago
    It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I know ByteDance has been slurping up some Meta talent, and you don't want someone you lay off to build the company that eventually kills you.
    - max_hammer 4y ago
      TikTok is also planning layoff in thousands https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150
      - randomdata 4y ago
        If you buy into the premise that Meta was holding talent just so that other companies couldn't hire them, no longer is, and ByteDance has since picked them up then it stands to reason that ByteDance would be ready to shed the no-so-talented stand-ins they were using previously.
- gcheong 4y ago
  Or maybe they just spawned a bunch of companies that they will eventually have the pick of to acquire when they decide they need to do "something" with their cash hoards and the founders are looking for a payout.
- runamok 4y ago
  I am positive faang engineers are very sharp but would they be "expert at the latest technologies"? E.g. an engineer at Google likely has a whole host of bespoke systems vs. a mixture of vendor and open source solutions the rest of companies tend to use. E.g. Borg vs. Kubernetes and the like.
simonw 4y ago
I imagine severance packages are a big factor here. People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!
- PyWoody 4y ago
  I sympathize with anyone who's been recently laid off but I am also genuinely excited for what's going to come next. I feel like we've been in a startup rut over these past few years. At least for non-crypto startups, that is. Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
  - afavour 4y ago
    I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.
    - peterlk 4y ago
      AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.
      - piva00 4y ago
        These are very specialised industries though, requiring some deeper and more formal knowledge than when a new platform appears and there's a sudden hunger for experiences on that platform. The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.
cameronfraser 4y ago
good luck getting funding
- par 4y ago
  there's still a ton of money sloshing around out there.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Not every startup idea needs millions of dollars to get started. Folks with a lengthy severance period have a cushion to experiment with fun ideas while job hunting.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    I've been seeing a few things like moonrepo crop up and have been curious about why these seem to be cropping up now when the target market (tech) is cutting costs (although maybe these products can be advertised as money-saving?).
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Bootstrap time.
  - mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    Never been a better time: lots of disillusionment around the disproportionate amounts of leverage that capital has over even megacorps.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      > leverage that capital has over even megacorps That statement doesn’t make sense. Companies become large (your “megacorp“) because they’re very good at attracting, growing, and applying capital.
- whatever1 4y ago
qqtt 4y ago
Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hints of start ups rising to do this, like OpenAI challenging search and Shopify testing the waters of it's own fulfillment network). It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.
- sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  I hope so
- greenthrow 4y ago
  99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server. Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
  - ptero 4y ago
    This. Cloud is great when a startup hits an unexpected growth spurt and can scale infra without getting distracted from the core mission. It is not cheap, but it may be worth it. But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    Depends on the cloud. Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box. Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale. I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup. [0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day
fatnoah 4y ago
From my view as someone hiring at startups, I feel like I'm seeing the best flow for candidates at all positions than I've see in 20 years.
ejb999 4y ago
I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs. I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool. Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before. Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings
- jonnycoder 4y ago
  Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.
  - Volundr 4y ago
    Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved. It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    The market for junior dev is even worse, imagine being fresh out of college in a market with 100,000 freshly laid off mid-staff level engineers
appleaday1 4y ago
Hopefully they contribute to meaningful open source projects or start some of their own. We really could use more contributions to more projects.
voisin 4y ago
This happened when BlackBerry laid off staff in Waterloo, Ontario. With a decade’s hindsight, it was exceptionally positive for the local economy.
- toyg 4y ago
  This is the sort of creative destruction that antitrust law should enable on a regular basis.
- matwood 4y ago
  It's said a similar thing happened when IBM laid off a bunch of people in the 90s. It sucks for those laid off, but these big tech companies have had tons of talent effectively locked up for years.
- rescripting 4y ago
  Same thing with the collapse of Nortel in Ottawa around 2001. Painful in the short term for those affected but long term it created a much more robust tech ecosystem.
patientplatypus 4y ago
This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece - He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place. So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business? Or this - Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking. From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross. I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers. The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address. So what?
- orangesite 4y ago
  What is that y'all can only perceive success in terms of cornering some market? Adam Smith be rolling in his grave!
  - _fol8 4y ago
    [dead]
- yunwal 4y ago
robotburrito 4y ago
Good, I'd like to work at one on of these startups :)
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
This is great news. Google, Facebook, Amazon are over. You can see the writings on the wall. It's time for the next wave of tech companies.
- jb1991 4y ago
  And what writing is on the wall, exactly, for Amazon? AWS powers the internet. Apple uses it for cloud services, for cryin' out loud -- the largest AWS customer in fact. AWS has more market share than all of its competitors combined. Where is this writing you're speaking of?
  - geodel 4y ago
    I think writing this time is Move along, nothing to see here .
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    But where is AWSs moat? It's not enough to have all of the customers. Customers are fleeting and will leave if they get a BBO (bigger, better offer). If you scrap together an AWS migration tool that can pull databases, instances, and lambdas off of AWS and mirror them in your cloud, for less money, you'll probably attract a lot of customers.
    - jb1991 4y ago
      That sounds like just basic guesswork on your part. Replicating their infrastructure is not the trivial challenge you suggest.
      - orangesite 4y ago
        I think the trick you are missing is that AWS competitors do not need to replicate their infrastructure. The model you are wed to is "one service-provider per niche." Yeah, that requires scaling to an absolutely ridiculous extent. …but for those of us not in favor of soviet-style centralism, and there are a couple of us, well we'd love hosting providers that can let us serve a sufficiently profitable percentage of the market. Down with monopolist capitalism and oligopolist communism! All hail the vibrant marketplace!
BenFranklin100 4y ago
Good. The best minds of a generation have wasted their talents figuring out how to best maximize media addiction and serve ads for Facebook and Google. Let’s hope a new generation engages in more socially productive endeavors.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Being good at leetcode is not equivalent to being one of "the best minds". Comments like this are why the general public feels like SWEs are stuck up elitist know-it-alls
  - algem 4y ago
    I somehow envision working at some of the top tech companies in the world requires more than just being good at coding exercises. And more than just software engineers were let go at these companies…
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I find this line of thinking interesting, but the sentiment in my social circles is not against SWEs at all. Is there a campaign going to make software engineers the facto scape goat of the current downturn ( and ads, and layoffs and ai taking everyone's job )? If so, it may be worthwhile to nip it in the bud.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- swyx 4y ago
  those endeavors: - Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking - a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place - a software design and development studio
  - joaogui1 4y ago
    What's the name of the 3rd one?
user3939382 4y ago
Personally as a senior developer with a family, I wouldn’t stake my stability on a startup. Does that reservation generalize? Do startups end up lacking wiser devs?
- mock-possum 4y ago
  Wages from a volatile source is better than no wages, and what you previously thought to be a stable source has proven otherwise - you’ve just unexpectedly been laid off. Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
- nfRfqX5n 4y ago
  During the last few years some start ups were offering solid base salaries in addition to RSUs, so the risk wasn’t horrible. Not sure what it’s like now.
- PyWoody 4y ago
  As a senior looking for FTE? Probably not. As a senior looking for a semi-retired interesting place to work? Definitely. We've hired the latter for shorter term but not really contract worthy work in the past that was beneficial for both parties.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Agreed, especially very early stage startups. I'd not work for one of those unless I was the (co-)founder.
- est31 4y ago
  Ideally if you are a senior big tech employee you are not living paycheck to paycheck any more, so you could endure a few months of not being employed. And even then, if you are good and have a network, you would find employment very quickly if a startup fails, unless there is some event that causes all startups to not look for new employees. The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.
lasermike026 4y ago
Hire me now or buy my company later. You choose.
- geodel 4y ago
  I guess buy later, if its still standing and worth something.
- conductr 4y ago
  They’ve already chosen, it’s why you’re laid off and building an MVP /s
timkofu 4y ago
Expected, and welcome.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I have talked to a lot of people in the last few months who have AI-related startups that are pre-funding. I am hearing that the big VC funds are pulling back, I don't know what is going in terms of angel investing and how (and if) these startups are going to get on the funding train.
seattle_spring 4y ago
How does someone currently unemployed by choice with a good financial cushion take advantage of this if I don't have any startup ideas I'm deeply passionate about? I've kept an eye on the startup market and all I see are exceedingly boring ideas with mind numbing pitches around them. "Democratizing shipping!" "Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market!" Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.
- rshaban 4y ago
  same :) dm if you want to hire an ex-Google linguist-engineer with search ranking experience
- __derek__ 4y ago
  Have you considered a startup studio? Assuming your handle indicates location, Pioneer Square Labs[1] and the Allen Institute[2] both have incubators to connect skilled people with promising ideas for startups. [1]: https://www.psl.com/jobs/job?gh_jid=4418268002 https://www.psl.com/jobs/job?gh_jid=4418268002 [2]: https://jobs.ai2incubator.com/jobs https://jobs.ai2incubator.com/jobs
- cosboy 4y ago
  > “Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market” Im currently working on something like this. Yes it’s boring but it does have potential. you’re exact opinion is why I’m having a hard time looking for a cofounder!
- parthianshotgun 4y ago
  Hey you and me are on the same boat. Feels like putting on the glasses from "They Live", but maybe I'm not that misanthropic about it..I've found that it's exceedingly hard for me to not look at the big machine around me as I'm 'doing my job' of cranking the lever. In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, being bored being a crucial part of this. In the market I'm seeing things that fail common sense checks. AI powered X that is trying to 'solve' things that we barely have a grip on as humans, assemblages of startups that exist solely to manage self created problems, and a whole host of deathcult crypto stuff. Even the progenitors seem to not buy into the stuff they pitch; the zeal, to me, is often just an affectation ("we're going to completely revolutionize..."), maybe the charm is wearing off as decades of consumption and greed are slowly deflating our collective ego. Anyways how are you faring?
asim 4y ago
Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding. We built this https://M3O.com https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro https://github.com/micro/micro Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.
- jeremycarter 4y ago
  Have you got a spare 30 minutes to have a look at my pitch deck? How can I contact you?
- ahstilde 4y ago
  > I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding. Sounds like you were successful without giving up 7+% of your company.
  - asim 4y ago
    Depends on the measure of success. Might have been able to shrink the timelines on everything if I had a sounding board and people on my side with prior experience. They just didn't think I was worth the time.
- sublimefire 4y ago
  It is an interesting approach to developing services. The company did not survive though, found this in a blog: > Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
  - asim 4y ago
    Yup company is defunct but I left the product running while I push it toward something else. Basically why does every saas service need to be backed by a corporation. Why can't we have something community led. We have open source which many people can contribute to but not running services. So it's an experiment.
revskill 4y ago
More startups, more creative ideas, more free stuffs please. Heroku is good example for such time.
phendrenad2 4y ago
The only data cited is the increase in YCombinator applications. But they only have data for the last year, because YCombinator didn't publish how many applications they received in previous years. (Also, if you're looking for it: archive.is slash WE4WH)
- EarlKing 4y ago
  Can I take this to mean that they're censoring archive links finally?
  - metadat 4y ago
    https://archive.today/WE4WH https://archive.today/WE4WH People are weird.
  - phendrenad2 4y ago
    Just in case they do in the future.
conductr 4y ago
Friendly reminder that the “web 2.0” era was born out of the dot com bust.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  Except that these layoff companies aren't exactly busting. They are still very profitable.
  - conductr 4y ago
    The excess labor seeking productive pursuits is a driving force more so than the state of the companies doing the layoffs.
__derek__ 4y ago
> However, new founders may find it harder to tap than those who went before them. A spate of founder scandals at unicorns like WeWork and Theranos have caused investors to dig deeper into a company before throwing money at the latest shiny promise. Market uncertainty only adds to that scrutiny. These examples made me laugh because they notably didn't increase scrutiny during the last few years. Otherwise, we wouldn't have more recent examples (FTX, among others).
dxuh 4y ago
At the end of last year I decided I would look for a new job at the beginning of this year, but I think I have to put it off for a while. The big companies, who just laid off thousands, probably aren't to eager to hire me right now and the rest of the market is flooded with people with better CVs than me (because theirs say Google or Microsoft or something like that). Is that correct? Should I wait half a year or so?
- awb 4y ago
  Depends on how you’d like to use your time. Applying is quick and easy. And a company will probably progress anywhere from 5-15 applicants to an initial round. So while your chance of getting a 1st round interview are much smaller than last year, once you’re in it’s probably only moderately lower odds of landing the job.
schmichael 4y ago
I was employee #2 at Airship (was Urban Airship) which was started by laid off tech workers after the 2008 housing crash. Oregon, where we were all located, had an unemployment incentive for starting a new business… and it worked! Airship has employed hundreds of Oregonians (and others) over more than a decade. Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.
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black_13 4y ago
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throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Why don't we all just form a cooperative tho. Do we just suck at working together? Is capitalism / money a bigger draw?
- ambientqtns 4y ago
  I wonder this. It's the route I want to go if I get laid off (or if I find the right business to get into).
- fijiaarone 4y ago
  I’ll lead the co-op. I just want 2 times everyone else’s salary and final decision on everything.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  99.999% of software developers don't know anything about business, let alone the legal and business complexities of forming a co-op. We're all waiting for someone to come along and figure that out, but so far no one has.
xbmcuser 4y ago
In the last decade most startups it seems were being created with the end goal being getting bought by the a larger company and if not by the first or 2nd round of investments the investors would push the startup in that direction . I think with these layoffs as well as big 4 now slowing acquisitions we probably will start seeing new startups with actual profits and business plans in mind.
John23832 4y ago
Good luck with funding. That seems to be the barrier right now.
weatherlite 4y ago
How long do you guys anticipate current crisis to be over? I'm not expecting us to ever return to the Covid craziness of hiring but lets say to relative stability? I think we have another year in this and then things improve. Interest rate needs to go down first.
- kmonsen 4y ago
  Interest rates are still going up. It needs to get worse better they will go down so we are still probably not close to the bottom. All these layoffs need to play out and have an effect on the economy, most importantly house prices, before things can turn around. Soft landings are very rare.
braza 4y ago
Of course we’re in the beginning of a market correction and see thousands of people losing their livelihoods will always be sad. However one thing that only a few people are discussing is that the current compensation model for start/scaleups needs some rethinking. In my previous demographic, you used to go to startups knowing that of could fail in 12 months, but would be a great intense professional and learning work experience. And eventually you could have some stocks that if you survive 4+ years you could sell it to the company or coming investors in liquidity events. If case of company bankruptcy, after 1 or 2 months you could be back in the game. Fast forward for today, going to some startups in my new demographic most of them does not offer some stock upside for employees, and the ones that offer some of them always have this “carrot-stock-game”. No liquidity events, sometimes 7 or even 9 years as a startup, tons of mind games like “the IPO will be <current year + 3> to create a sense of urgency on people, companies with series F,G,H where high ego founders wants to “ring the bell” at NYSE instead to sell to a PE and give an exit for employees, and de list goes on. In my opinion one unattended consequence of that is that people are going to consider startups only as a paid learning bridge to get a job at bigger companies.
nubela 4y ago
I can confirm that the title is true. To be even more specific, we found that 19 startups were founded by ex-googlers after the recent layoffs. Even better, 1 in 3 of the ex-Googlers that were laid off, joined startups valued at 15M. Relevant: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-billion-worth-of-startups-2023-layoffs/?utm_campaign=layoff%20data%20campaign&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_term=-&utm_content=ex%20googlers%20layoff https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  19 startups for 12,000 people is nothing at all. For the third of ex-Google employees that went to startups, it's way too early to tell if it's a long term change. What is likely is that those people get ANY job to keep some income and are applying to other positions that are more suitable to their past experience. I am in a FAANG, and I would definitely do that if I was laid off.

347 points by dev_tty01 4y ago

[dead]

No shit Sherlock. If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually. The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.

mjr00 4y ago
I don't know if it was "shot themselves in the foot" so much as "the unsustainable thing they were doing to prevent potential competition finally broke." FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.
- screwturner68 4y ago
  I just think the FAANGs got a little drunk on profits and hiring during covid. Now that things are normalizing they realized that they hired too many people and they are chopping heads. To me I just don't see the big deal, tech does mass purges every few years and for the most part everyone lands on their feet and the industry expands even more. Giving a few thousand really smart 20-somethings six months salary and sending them on their way is going to create hundreds of startups and passion projects and a couple of those projects might actually have some value (outside of SV).
- dumbotron 4y ago
  It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I know ByteDance has been slurping up some Meta talent, and you don't want someone you lay off to build the company that eventually kills you.
  - max_hammer 4y ago
    TikTok is also planning layoff in thousands https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150
    - randomdata 4y ago
      If you buy into the premise that Meta was holding talent just so that other companies couldn't hire them, no longer is, and ByteDance has since picked them up then it stands to reason that ByteDance would be ready to shed the no-so-talented stand-ins they were using previously.
gcheong 4y ago
Or maybe they just spawned a bunch of companies that they will eventually have the pick of to acquire when they decide they need to do "something" with their cash hoards and the founders are looking for a payout.
runamok 4y ago
I am positive faang engineers are very sharp but would they be "expert at the latest technologies"? E.g. an engineer at Google likely has a whole host of bespoke systems vs. a mixture of vendor and open source solutions the rest of companies tend to use. E.g. Borg vs. Kubernetes and the like.

simonw 4y ago

I imagine severance packages are a big factor here. People laid off by Google might have a full six months or more of severance pay, plus health insurance through Cobra. That's a pretty fantastic opportunity to spend six months on a startup in relative economic safety!

PyWoody 4y ago
I sympathize with anyone who's been recently laid off but I am also genuinely excited for what's going to come next. I feel like we've been in a startup rut over these past few years. At least for non-crypto startups, that is. Does anyone have a list of new startups to watch out for over the next year or so?
- afavour 4y ago
  I'm a little more pessimistic. IMO the last true burst of startup innovation coincided with the creation of the App Store and the iPhone: brand new tech, brand new markets to innovate in. It's possible that AI is that next frontier but I'm personally not convinced. I don't think more startups is going to automatically mean we're out of a rut.
  - peterlk 4y ago
    AI continues to advance (there is mich more beneath the surface if the endless ChatGPT nonsense), the fediverse is gaining more traction, biotech continues to advance. There continues to be immense opportunity. But you have to skill up and look past the tech and business models of 15 years ago.
    - piva00 4y ago
      These are very specialised industries though, requiring some deeper and more formal knowledge than when a new platform appears and there's a sudden hunger for experiences on that platform. The web and later smartphones have been the real startup breeders of the past 30 years. Biotech and AI require quite a bit of academic knowledge to innovate on and aren't on the same potential of big platforms like web/phones.

cameronfraser 4y ago

good luck getting funding

par 4y ago
there's still a ton of money sloshing around out there.
ceejayoz 4y ago
Not every startup idea needs millions of dollars to get started. Folks with a lengthy severance period have a cushion to experiment with fun ideas while job hunting.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I've been seeing a few things like moonrepo crop up and have been curious about why these seem to be cropping up now when the target market (tech) is cutting costs (although maybe these products can be advertised as money-saving?).
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
Bootstrap time.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Never been a better time: lots of disillusionment around the disproportionate amounts of leverage that capital has over even megacorps.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > leverage that capital has over even megacorps That statement doesn’t make sense. Companies become large (your “megacorp“) because they’re very good at attracting, growing, and applying capital.
whatever1 4y ago

qqtt 4y ago

Good. Both Google and Amazon are barreling down the path of democratizing scale and infrastructure with their cloud offerings. It's never been easier to reach millions of users in a short amount of time with your product. These are the companies that will end up ultimately challenging them down the road for talent and potentially even hitting at their core business models of search and commerce (we've already seen hints of start ups rising to do this, like OpenAI challenging search and Shopify testing the waters of it's own fulfillment network). It's going to be interesting to watch Google and Amazon become so dependent on their infrastructure revenue that they essentially turn into the Oracle/IBM of today. Hope all those layoffs were worth it for the bottom line.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago
I hope so
greenthrow 4y ago
99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server. Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.
- ptero 4y ago
  This. Cloud is great when a startup hits an unexpected growth spurt and can scale infra without getting distracted from the core mission. It is not cheap, but it may be worth it. But this is a fairly narrow use case and until hitting limitations of a couple of VPSes, moving to the cloud does not make sense for most startups. My 2c.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Depends on the cloud. Looking at Supabase, I think it would be a good choice for most startups[0] and it will scale as the business does, but it removes most of the overhead of getting started. It has Auth, A database, Lambda Support, CDN and File Storage. Baked in are REST APIs and GraphQL APIs out of the box. Its reasonably well priced and there's little friction on setting up and far, far less to worry about hosting wise. No need to setup a box and maintain updates etc, and it can scale if the business really does scale. I don't think all cloud propositions are the same. AWS, GCP (maybe sans Firebase?) and Azure definitely have their place but I don't think they're great for the average startup. [0]: Even medium sized and enterprise businesses could leverage it. Its all powered by Postgres at the end of the day

fatnoah 4y ago

From my view as someone hiring at startups, I feel like I'm seeing the best flow for candidates at all positions than I've see in 20 years.

ejb999 4y ago

I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs. I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool. Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before. Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings

jonnycoder 4y ago
Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.
- Volundr 4y ago
  Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved. It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  The market for junior dev is even worse, imagine being fresh out of college in a market with 100,000 freshly laid off mid-staff level engineers

appleaday1 4y ago

Hopefully they contribute to meaningful open source projects or start some of their own. We really could use more contributions to more projects.

voisin 4y ago

This happened when BlackBerry laid off staff in Waterloo, Ontario. With a decade’s hindsight, it was exceptionally positive for the local economy.

toyg 4y ago
This is the sort of creative destruction that antitrust law should enable on a regular basis.
matwood 4y ago
It's said a similar thing happened when IBM laid off a bunch of people in the 90s. It sucks for those laid off, but these big tech companies have had tons of talent effectively locked up for years.
rescripting 4y ago
Same thing with the collapse of Nortel in Ottawa around 2001. Painful in the short term for those affected but long term it created a much more robust tech ecosystem.

patientplatypus 4y ago

This sounds like a puff piece and it's hard to be all that excited about the products that are being touted in the piece - He decided instead to quit and pursue his idea to start Feasier, a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place. So...what's the moat? Why can't anyone build a clone sight and come in with slightly cheaper shipping and undercut his business? Or this - Zhu says she is working every day on Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking. From what I know of the current health care tech situation, everything uses EPIC which is terrible technology, but it's entrenched because it follows regulation and probably pays off some senators/regulators/insurance companies - much like every DOD government project. So unless her product can follow every regulation as well as EPIC (it can't) she can't win in an entrenched market that has a moat she can't cross. I don't doubt there are a bunch of unemployed web developers out there (I'm one), and a lot of VC money that doesn't know what to do after crypto imploded, but these are uninspiring. Of the thousands of web dev companies maybe one will become popular, but it would be from random chance. This just sounds like a bunch of unemployed and desperate people buying lottery tickets, but with computers. The people who are going to make money are the people who are able to corner the energy market or the server and computation market. The innovations will be from a few brilliant academics who make the next transformer model or the next quantum computing model and so forth, which makes up a few thousand people. The "democratization" of the internet just now means everyone is equally broke. Shit, you can make websites now by drawing them and then having an AI make the code (as edge-case clunky as that is). So anyone with a Bamboo pad and a "million dollar" idea can draw one up and buy a web address. So what?

orangesite 4y ago
What is that y'all can only perceive success in terms of cornering some market? Adam Smith be rolling in his grave!
- _fol8 4y ago
  [dead]
yunwal 4y ago

robotburrito 4y ago

Good, I'd like to work at one on of these startups :)

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

This is great news. Google, Facebook, Amazon are over. You can see the writings on the wall. It's time for the next wave of tech companies.

jb1991 4y ago
And what writing is on the wall, exactly, for Amazon? AWS powers the internet. Apple uses it for cloud services, for cryin' out loud -- the largest AWS customer in fact. AWS has more market share than all of its competitors combined. Where is this writing you're speaking of?
- geodel 4y ago
  I think writing this time is Move along, nothing to see here .
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  But where is AWSs moat? It's not enough to have all of the customers. Customers are fleeting and will leave if they get a BBO (bigger, better offer). If you scrap together an AWS migration tool that can pull databases, instances, and lambdas off of AWS and mirror them in your cloud, for less money, you'll probably attract a lot of customers.
  - jb1991 4y ago
    That sounds like just basic guesswork on your part. Replicating their infrastructure is not the trivial challenge you suggest.
    - orangesite 4y ago
      I think the trick you are missing is that AWS competitors do not need to replicate their infrastructure. The model you are wed to is "one service-provider per niche." Yeah, that requires scaling to an absolutely ridiculous extent. …but for those of us not in favor of soviet-style centralism, and there are a couple of us, well we'd love hosting providers that can let us serve a sufficiently profitable percentage of the market. Down with monopolist capitalism and oligopolist communism! All hail the vibrant marketplace!

BenFranklin100 4y ago

Good. The best minds of a generation have wasted their talents figuring out how to best maximize media addiction and serve ads for Facebook and Google. Let’s hope a new generation engages in more socially productive endeavors.

Der_Einzige 4y ago
Being good at leetcode is not equivalent to being one of "the best minds". Comments like this are why the general public feels like SWEs are stuck up elitist know-it-alls
- algem 4y ago
  I somehow envision working at some of the top tech companies in the world requires more than just being good at coding exercises. And more than just software engineers were let go at these companies…
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I find this line of thinking interesting, but the sentiment in my social circles is not against SWEs at all. Is there a campaign going to make software engineers the facto scape goat of the current downturn ( and ads, and layoffs and ai taking everyone's job )? If so, it may be worthwhile to nip it in the bud.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
swyx 4y ago
those endeavors: - Maida AI, which automates health care administration tasks like patient intake and note-taking - a platform that aggregates home furnishing listings from different stores into one place - a software design and development studio
- joaogui1 4y ago
  What's the name of the 3rd one?

user3939382 4y ago

Personally as a senior developer with a family, I wouldn’t stake my stability on a startup. Does that reservation generalize? Do startups end up lacking wiser devs?

mock-possum 4y ago
Wages from a volatile source is better than no wages, and what you previously thought to be a stable source has proven otherwise - you’ve just unexpectedly been laid off. Do you take the startup job, to provide for your family? You need to make money.
nfRfqX5n 4y ago
During the last few years some start ups were offering solid base salaries in addition to RSUs, so the risk wasn’t horrible. Not sure what it’s like now.
PyWoody 4y ago
As a senior looking for FTE? Probably not. As a senior looking for a semi-retired interesting place to work? Definitely. We've hired the latter for shorter term but not really contract worthy work in the past that was beneficial for both parties.
fullshark 4y ago
Agreed, especially very early stage startups. I'd not work for one of those unless I was the (co-)founder.
est31 4y ago
Ideally if you are a senior big tech employee you are not living paycheck to paycheck any more, so you could endure a few months of not being employed. And even then, if you are good and have a network, you would find employment very quickly if a startup fails, unless there is some event that causes all startups to not look for new employees. The problem with startups is I think more around the stock options trap (short excercise windows), stressful work environments, and the general lower compensation. And, if you are a parent, they will probably offer less programs for parents.

lasermike026 4y ago

Hire me now or buy my company later. You choose.

geodel 4y ago
I guess buy later, if its still standing and worth something.
conductr 4y ago
They’ve already chosen, it’s why you’re laid off and building an MVP /s

timkofu 4y ago

Expected, and welcome.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I have talked to a lot of people in the last few months who have AI-related startups that are pre-funding. I am hearing that the big VC funds are pulling back, I don't know what is going in terms of angel investing and how (and if) these startups are going to get on the funding train.

seattle_spring 4y ago

How does someone currently unemployed by choice with a good financial cushion take advantage of this if I don't have any startup ideas I'm deeply passionate about? I've kept an eye on the startup market and all I see are exceedingly boring ideas with mind numbing pitches around them. "Democratizing shipping!" "Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market!" Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.

rshaban 4y ago
same :) dm if you want to hire an ex-Google linguist-engineer with search ranking experience
__derek__ 4y ago
Have you considered a startup studio? Assuming your handle indicates location, Pioneer Square Labs[1] and the Allen Institute[2] both have incubators to connect skilled people with promising ideas for startups. [1]: https://www.psl.com/jobs/job?gh_jid=4418268002 https://www.psl.com/jobs/job?gh_jid=4418268002 [2]: https://jobs.ai2incubator.com/jobs https://jobs.ai2incubator.com/jobs
cosboy 4y ago
> “Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market” Im currently working on something like this. Yes it’s boring but it does have potential. you’re exact opinion is why I’m having a hard time looking for a cofounder!
parthianshotgun 4y ago
Hey you and me are on the same boat. Feels like putting on the glasses from "They Live", but maybe I'm not that misanthropic about it..I've found that it's exceedingly hard for me to not look at the big machine around me as I'm 'doing my job' of cranking the lever. In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, being bored being a crucial part of this. In the market I'm seeing things that fail common sense checks. AI powered X that is trying to 'solve' things that we barely have a grip on as humans, assemblages of startups that exist solely to manage self created problems, and a whole host of deathcult crypto stuff. Even the progenitors seem to not buy into the stuff they pitch; the zeal, to me, is often just an affectation ("we're going to completely revolutionize..."), maybe the charm is wearing off as decades of consumption and greed are slowly deflating our collective ego. Anyways how are you faring?

asim 4y ago

Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding. We built this https://M3O.com https://M3O.com. It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro https://github.com/micro/micro Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, etc.

jeremycarter 4y ago
Have you got a spare 30 minutes to have a look at my pitch deck? How can I contact you?
ahstilde 4y ago
> I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding. Sounds like you were successful without giving up 7+% of your company.
- asim 4y ago
  Depends on the measure of success. Might have been able to shrink the timelines on everything if I had a sounding board and people on my side with prior experience. They just didn't think I was worth the time.
sublimefire 4y ago
It is an interesting approach to developing services. The company did not survive though, found this in a blog: > Jan 12, M3O was developed as a VC funded company. There is no longer a path to towards a sustainable outcome or further funding. For this reason we’re not able to support the platform any longer.
- asim 4y ago
  Yup company is defunct but I left the product running while I push it toward something else. Basically why does every saas service need to be backed by a corporation. Why can't we have something community led. We have open source which many people can contribute to but not running services. So it's an experiment.

revskill 4y ago

More startups, more creative ideas, more free stuffs please. Heroku is good example for such time.

phendrenad2 4y ago

The only data cited is the increase in YCombinator applications. But they only have data for the last year, because YCombinator didn't publish how many applications they received in previous years. (Also, if you're looking for it: archive.is slash WE4WH)

EarlKing 4y ago
Can I take this to mean that they're censoring archive links finally?
- metadat 4y ago
  https://archive.today/WE4WH https://archive.today/WE4WH People are weird.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Just in case they do in the future.

conductr 4y ago

Friendly reminder that the “web 2.0” era was born out of the dot com bust.

francisofascii 4y ago
Except that these layoff companies aren't exactly busting. They are still very profitable.
- conductr 4y ago
  The excess labor seeking productive pursuits is a driving force more so than the state of the companies doing the layoffs.

__derek__ 4y ago

> However, new founders may find it harder to tap than those who went before them. A spate of founder scandals at unicorns like WeWork and Theranos have caused investors to dig deeper into a company before throwing money at the latest shiny promise. Market uncertainty only adds to that scrutiny. These examples made me laugh because they notably didn't increase scrutiny during the last few years. Otherwise, we wouldn't have more recent examples (FTX, among others).

dxuh 4y ago

At the end of last year I decided I would look for a new job at the beginning of this year, but I think I have to put it off for a while. The big companies, who just laid off thousands, probably aren't to eager to hire me right now and the rest of the market is flooded with people with better CVs than me (because theirs say Google or Microsoft or something like that). Is that correct? Should I wait half a year or so?

awb 4y ago
Depends on how you’d like to use your time. Applying is quick and easy. And a company will probably progress anywhere from 5-15 applicants to an initial round. So while your chance of getting a 1st round interview are much smaller than last year, once you’re in it’s probably only moderately lower odds of landing the job.

schmichael 4y ago

I was employee #2 at Airship (was Urban Airship) which was started by laid off tech workers after the 2008 housing crash. Oregon, where we were all located, had an unemployment incentive for starting a new business… and it worked! Airship has employed hundreds of Oregonians (and others) over more than a decade. Layoffs suck. I’ve been laid off before and wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but with the right supports it can be an opportunity. I hope we see some exciting new ideas come from folks who have been given a chance to go their own way.

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black_13 4y ago

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throwawaaarrgh 4y ago

Why don't we all just form a cooperative tho. Do we just suck at working together? Is capitalism / money a bigger draw?

ambientqtns 4y ago
I wonder this. It's the route I want to go if I get laid off (or if I find the right business to get into).
fijiaarone 4y ago
I’ll lead the co-op. I just want 2 times everyone else’s salary and final decision on everything.
phendrenad2 4y ago
99.999% of software developers don't know anything about business, let alone the legal and business complexities of forming a co-op. We're all waiting for someone to come along and figure that out, but so far no one has.

xbmcuser 4y ago

In the last decade most startups it seems were being created with the end goal being getting bought by the a larger company and if not by the first or 2nd round of investments the investors would push the startup in that direction . I think with these layoffs as well as big 4 now slowing acquisitions we probably will start seeing new startups with actual profits and business plans in mind.

John23832 4y ago

Good luck with funding. That seems to be the barrier right now.

weatherlite 4y ago

How long do you guys anticipate current crisis to be over? I'm not expecting us to ever return to the Covid craziness of hiring but lets say to relative stability? I think we have another year in this and then things improve. Interest rate needs to go down first.

kmonsen 4y ago
Interest rates are still going up. It needs to get worse better they will go down so we are still probably not close to the bottom. All these layoffs need to play out and have an effect on the economy, most importantly house prices, before things can turn around. Soft landings are very rare.

braza 4y ago

Of course we’re in the beginning of a market correction and see thousands of people losing their livelihoods will always be sad. However one thing that only a few people are discussing is that the current compensation model for start/scaleups needs some rethinking. In my previous demographic, you used to go to startups knowing that of could fail in 12 months, but would be a great intense professional and learning work experience. And eventually you could have some stocks that if you survive 4+ years you could sell it to the company or coming investors in liquidity events. If case of company bankruptcy, after 1 or 2 months you could be back in the game. Fast forward for today, going to some startups in my new demographic most of them does not offer some stock upside for employees, and the ones that offer some of them always have this “carrot-stock-game”. No liquidity events, sometimes 7 or even 9 years as a startup, tons of mind games like “the IPO will be <current year + 3> to create a sense of urgency on people, companies with series F,G,H where high ego founders wants to “ring the bell” at NYSE instead to sell to a PE and give an exit for employees, and de list goes on. In my opinion one unattended consequence of that is that people are going to consider startups only as a paid learning bridge to get a job at bigger companies.

nubela 4y ago

I can confirm that the title is true. To be even more specific, we found that 19 startups were founded by ex-googlers after the recent layoffs. Even better, 1 in 3 of the ex-Googlers that were laid off, joined startups valued at 15M. Relevant: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-billion-worth-of-startups-2023-layoffs/?utm_campaign=layoff%20data%20campaign&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=social&utm_term=-&utm_content=ex%20googlers%20layoff https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...

iLoveOncall 4y ago
19 startups for 12,000 people is nothing at all. For the third of ex-Google employees that went to startups, it's way too early to tell if it's a long term change. What is likely is that those people get ANY job to keep some income and are applying to other positions that are more suitable to their past experience. I am in a FAANG, and I would definitely do that if I was laid off.