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I don't know how many of you relate, but a personal level this last few years has left me quite shaken. In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its

by kypro 4y ago

I don't know how many of you relate, but a personal level this last few years has left me quite shaken. In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home. Sure, things felt a bit crazy, but I remember thinking how lucky I was to land in tech as a career and that it was hard to see a future any time soon where the world wouldn't value tech workers highly. Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have. We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years and now we see this dramatic turnaround in hiring which will likely make it significantly harder to get a good tech job in the near future. And in addition to this we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months. It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too, but I've never felt so vulnerable about what the future holds. I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out. Anyway, I hope everyone involved in these layoffs lands on their feet.

time_to_smile 4y ago
> tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months. GPT is cool, and has a lot of potential uses, but don't be scared by the hype. The biggest impact GPT is going to have on most people's software careers is that everyone will have to include "Prompt engineering" on their resumes in the very near future, and data science/ML folks are going to have to answer a lot more questions about transformers by people who have never heard of "Attention is all you need", even though the deepest they'll have to dive into the subject in practice is a few api calls.
TheKarateKid 4y ago
What's so frustrating this time around is that almost all of the layoffs by Big Tech are being done on what appears to be entirely speculation with no concrete financial data to support their business decisions. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, etc. all have reported very healthy quarterly earnings and year-end results. Yet their actions are those of failing companies operating in the red for multiple quarters. Every company is giving the same excuses --ahem, I mean reasons-- ("overhiring", "economic downturn"), laying off the same amount of people, and making their announcements within days of each other. Have we ever seen such an industry-coordinated event like this? Especially with no public data supporting their actions? The real reasons many believe for these layoffs amount to taking back the power & control that employees gained in 2020 until early 2022: 1. Salary correction: Compensation boomed, with major tech companies offering new grads and junior engineers job offers high than employees 2 levels higher. Has there ever been a time that employee pay raised so quickly? 2. Corporate control: Leadership wanted everyone back in the office but employees collectively refused. Can you think of another time where companies had lost this much control over their own workforce? 3. Pay Wall St: The only public financial data to support layoffs of this kind are from the stock prices, which mostly plummeted. However, they did not plummet due to poor performance but rather due to the macroeconomic events out of their control. Even at their present day levels, they are still mostly above their pre-pandemic highs. And guess what? Almost every other company's stock price in most industries fell significantly as well. With the profits erased from the surged stock prices, layoffs are the quickest and easiest way to push up a company's value. I can only hope that employees continue to band together to know their worth and not settle for less.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home." Funny, I attribute that "assistance" to improvements in hardware and networking. Today's commercial software is not great to say the least. And then we have the ridiculous amount of surveillance that comes with it. Without a doubt, computers and networks are proving their worth. But intermediaries calling themselves "tech" companies I am not so sure. It seems the market, too, is questioning the need for them.
oofta-boofta 4y ago
Whether or not you should be concerned is really dependent on where you sit in the industry. Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig. The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  2nding this. I am hiring for engineers and it is still difficult to find quality candidates. I think for most engineers, the issue will not be "finding my next job" it will be that we all have raised expectations on output and quality. The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die.
  - projectazorian 4y ago
    > The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation. If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options: - Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars. - Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager. - Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it. And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain. There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.
throwaway71271 4y ago
> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 (thats maybe 1 in 1000 cvs) > Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have. how long you have to do what? to learn? to make money? you will find a way to make money, i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine, some times you have to steal some bread, but its not the end of the world, and you have a life time to learn. just don't stress too much, tech has ebbs and flows, your job does not define you.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 This is very reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. If you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a relatively high paying tech job. The quality of tech talent has dropped significantly in recent years, even (maybe especially?) among the leetcode grinding crowd. Software engineers have already replaced themselves with AI by turning into interviewing machines that know how to survive in a large tech company but if asked to build and ship a product from nothing would be completely frozen. I really miss programming in the post-dotcom shadow. Most people in tech where in it because they loved writing code and solving hard technical problems. TC was literally not a term at that point, virtually nobody had RSUs, comp was fine but nothing amazing. There were plenty of jobs that paid better than writing software so all the people looking for a quick buck fled there and left coders alone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- nicenewtemp84 4y ago
  As long as the person you're stealing the bread from isn't having their own financial crisis I suppose that's fine. You can steal it from larger corporations also until they close the store because too many things are being stolen.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  > about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work i know you're exaggerating but it doesn't change that dev is extremely saturated. and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.
laidoffamazon 4y ago
> I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out. If you could do a 180 switch this quickly I think you should look inward. The concept that you could be more concerned about the future in 2023 rather than 3 years ago where a novel virus was killing thousands per day would be funny if it wasn't so absurd - consider therapy, because this seems to be an internal issue rather than a problem with the world at large.
- edot 4y ago
  You assume that a novel virus is as bad as it can get. We might be wishing for 2020 if war in Europe, banking crises, inflation, or layoffs get any worse. I think for a lot of people, COVID was an eye opener that the world can indeed go off the rails really quickly.
  - laidoffamazon 4y ago
    No, we wouldn't. This is politically motivated reasoning at best, Biden derangement syndrome at worst. None of those things aren't terribly bad right now, though if you lived in Ukraine I'd at least understand the sentiment. Nobody should be "wishing for 2020". Everyone in this country is better off than they were in 2020 at this point.
    - llanowarelves 4y ago
      Do the 50% of all small businesses that had to permanently close fit into your definition of "everyone"?
      - laidoffamazon 4y ago
        Uh, what do you think happened to small businesses in 2020? If anything we're seeing a boom in small business dynamism today - more applications for small businesses to be formed in 2022 than anytime in recorded history, except for 2021 [0] [0] https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/small-business-applicants-smash-another-record-in-2022-as-more-americans-turn-to-entrepreneurship.html https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/small-business-applicants...
moneywoes 4y ago
Nothing like starting a career amidst this chaos
eastbayjake 4y ago
9000 jobs at one company is quite small compared to the overall industry and compared to the global shortfall in tech jobs. In Germany alone there's a 780k tech worker shortage over the next 3 years[1]. It ebbs and flows in particular companies and particular regions, but the trend is still upward globally. [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/tech-talent-tectonics-ten-new-realities-for-finding-keeping-and-developing-talent https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-i...
- nradov 4y ago
  There is no actual shortage of tech workers in Germany or any other capitalist country. It's just that some employers don't want to pay the market rate or provide training.
- kyawzazaw 4y ago
  yeah but that's Germany
  - tough 4y ago
    You can remotely work for a German company tho. They even will accept english if you're a good developer as lingua franca instead of german. YMMV
    - erispoe 4y ago
      With a CS or engineering degree, it's also very easy to immigrate to Germany on a blue card, with a relative short path to permanent residency and citizenship.
- glial 4y ago
  How does an American find a job in Germany willing to hire them? I'd jump at the opportunity.
- bitL 4y ago
  If you want to get paid $40/h then there are many jobs in Germany. If you want to get paid $150/h, there are almost none.
bcrosby95 4y ago
Hopefully you didn't vastly expand your expenses in the heydays. We keep our committed money to where we could easily survive on $100k/year and not have a dip in our day-to-day standard of living. There is no Tesla or BMW in our driveway. The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. Regardless, as that crazy money exits there will be less of those people. At the end of the day worry without preparation is pointless. I don't think it's a tech apocalypse, but I also work for a company that was formed in the wake of the dotcom crash. Crashes can cause problems for incumbents, but it also provides opportunity for others.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. I think a lot of the industry shake up will be to clear house of these people. At big tech companies it’s easier to hide, especially remotely, but slowly layoffs or PIP will come for some of them, and they will have a harder time getting a job than the rest. I just hope the layoffs can affect the management layer like the IC later, because I’ve seen the growth of pretty crappy management. I was recently laid off, and I know a few other people laid off. I have years of doing projects and contributing to OSS and being a technically curious learner. I found a new job much faster than my peers who admittedly joined tech for the money and don’t care to learn or grow beyond their next pay raise. I will echo the preparation thing though. I started saving an extra few months of salary across 2022, and tried to convince my partner to lower spending for a while.
  - Kye 4y ago
    I'm having trouble seeing what's wrong with doing a job for the money. That doesn't mean you do the job poorly. Plenty of people do it for the mythos or "company family" or whatever bullshit the company tries to sell and do a garbage job at it, and plenty of people clock in to do a good job, clock out, and not think about it again until the next day. "Why do you want to work here?" Because money rocks, my dude. I'll give a nice politic answer in an interview, but I'm there to do a job.
ajross 4y ago
> I don't know how many of you relate, but a personal level this last few years has left me quite shaken. Deep breaths. All industries are cyclic. We've been here before, we'll be here again. From my perspective as a wizened curmudgeon, this is more directly disruptive to tech careers than 2008/9 was. But it's significantly less of an existential disaster than 2001. It is true, though, that to new entries to the labor market, these things can be unfair. Someone coming out of college last year had a vastly different experience than a very similar candidate trying to get a job right now. And that sucks. But over decades, things even out.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home. I felt the opposite: I have no idea how anyone could look at the tech craziness for the past 3-4 years, especially after COVID, and think any of it was sustainable. But I've also lived through a couple of these economic cycles...
- sangnoir 4y ago
  The tech COVID boom looked sustainable to me because it was a mostly caused by money shifting from offline to online. The losers were brick and motor businesses and drive-time radio ad purveyors.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Plenty of people thought that a lot of changes from COVID were permanent. Pre-pandemic, there was a slow shift towards things like e-commerce - the % of purchases made online was growing steadily for years. Everyone thought that covid accelerated that trend, and few predicted it would return to in-store purchases. In 2023, we're basically at an equivalent point compared to if the pandemic didn't happen and that steady growth continued - that's not an obvious outcome. Things like remote work, many people absolutely loved it, and it changed how people can work and hire. It had far-reaching affects, and many thought it'd last. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but we had proven it works for at least some conditions. As Facebook recently announced, it may not work as well, but for many organizations, the savings is better than the decrease in productivity. Regarding a lot of the crazy tech-industry changes like salaries, employment demand etc, yeah I totally didn't think it'd last either. Same with the affects of 0% interest rates (not that I really invested any differently).
ambicapter 4y ago
> It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too I think this probably has the majority effect on how you're feeling. Jobs come and go, layoffs happen. I've been laid off and I've been fired, and I've found jobs afterwards. As long as you have a decent bankroll to keep you going through a couple months (easy for me to say as I'm single and have supportive family), I wouldn't worry about THE STATE OF THE WORLD/ECONOMY.
EGreg 4y ago
We live in a society with massive corporations venerated as “job creators”, even given tax breaks to come to a city and employ us. We can employ each other, thank you very much. Many people who choose full-time work for corporations would not have an experience any differenr whether they worked in Soviet Russia or USA or Feudal Japan. These corporations (especially in Japan) are intertwined with our lives and even sense of self-worth. In Japan they coordinate with your landlord. Here they are who gives you health insurance etc. If we had strong safety nets, none of this mentality would be an issue. You’d be jumping for joy that a project or warehouse has been automated and you don’t have to be a cog in a machine or warehouse wage slave. That’s if we had UBI and Universal Health Insurance too. People would work on projects because they want to, whether that is art, science, open source, wikipedia or other gift economies. At the end of the day, that’s where DALL-E, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot get their content to ape from. It’s our collective work product! We humans have given it away online for these companies to scrape and build models from. Be proud. Stop demanding a living wage and health insurance from a corporation and start demanding a Universal Health Insurance and a UBI in your community. We have to start valuing stuff the market doesn’t.. raising children instead of government schools, taking care of our own parents instead of nursing homes. Look around … if you and your partner are working 10 hour days just to make ends meet, the problem isn’t robots taking your job. It’s society not truly valuing human beings authentically living their lives!
charles_f 4y ago
I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, but I would hold my horses on that: > we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months. I am of a realistic nature that in today's craze over anything people tend to call pessimistic. However, some of the code generation examples we've seen are truly astonishing, but a far cry from replacing anyone in the real world. Best case scenarios it would save you minutes. > We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years You're being very generous with the word "talent" there. Things have been a bit crazy and all, but from anecdotal evidence the large influx of new developers has done what large influx always do and lowered the bar. I've literally been asked in two different companies who boast about their standards being high to "leave aside my ideals" and have "realistic expectations", while the only thing changing in the set {expectations, hiring goals} being the latter. "we need to hire very good people very fast" while not changing anything about the process and sourcing has to make you forgo one of these two. It's physical, people don't get instantiated out of thin air. So I think it may be harder on average to find a job in software for a while, mostly because of the direction of the job market, but it will be harder for people with less experience, and those who can do something else in which they have experience will also be incentivized to do so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lamontcg 4y ago
You need to get a little perspective, I got hired at Amazon in Nov of 2001 after the tech bubble burst and post-9/11. There was no AWS. Amazon was purely a retailer, it was losing money every single quarter, there was no confidence that e-commerce would ultimately be competitive with brick-and-mortar. If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. We're still going to need humans to find the horrible bugs in codebases caused by humans copypasting ChatGPT output into production code. You need to become an actual expert in something. Pick a system that is critical to your employer and get good at it.
- lr4444lr 4y ago
  If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. Harsh, but it has to be said! Too many devs are focused on code rather than the business it serves.
hintymad 4y ago
> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years Very true, colleges have been seeing double-digit growth in applicants of CS majors every year in the past 10+ years, and this year the number of applicants is at least 2x more than last year. That said, I'm not sure about the growth rate of qualified talent. At least 8 out 10 senior engineers who I interviewed could only throw some terms around and draw a few boxes. "Experts" of Apache Beam can't write a simple word count using even pseudo code of Beam's APIs. The team leads from FAANG could talk only about team coordination but not specifics of the tech stacks of their systems. ML experts could throw terms like BERT around but could not explain simple things like the difference between layer normalization and batch normalization, let alone coming up with models to solve specific problems. Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm. The list can go on and on. Given such shortage of true talent, I'd rather worry about whether there will be growth in IT the industry. Without growth opportunities, investment will drop, so will the demand of talent.
- TechnicolorByte 4y ago
  I’m curious what you think your observations say about the qualifications of engineers today. Is it that most of your applicants are liars with what they put on their resume? Or that those specific skills you mentioned aren’t applicable to their day-to-day work? Or is that your expectations are out of line with the reality of their work or is there something amiss with your interview style?
  - coredog64 4y ago
    Not OP, but I think there’s a tendency to put a lot of things on your resume where you were in the room where it happened. You get past the stupid automated resume screen and you know enough during the initial phone screen. If it comes up on the job, well, that’s what Google is for.
  - hintymad 4y ago
    I don't think people lied about their expertise. Instead, they likely believed that what they knew was sufficient for their work. Another possibility is that the big tech hired so many people in the past few years that many people ended up doing bike-shedding work. They could be excellent engineers in the past, but as time went by, their skills got rusty yet they were too busy to be aware of it.
jvanderbot 4y ago
I was just laid off. My new job is better and the break was amazing. 6 years ago my spouse was laid off. And by penny pinching she was able to network while on unemployment and navigate a career change. Her new job is way better. Btw, I use copilot every day. It makes me more productive. Someday I may only use copilot or maybe I'll do something else. Nothing is permanent. Speak to those who have been laid off, and make sure you can take care of yourself if it happens, but then stop worrying. You'll suffer more in imagination than reality.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I’m my 35 or so years in the industry it goes through ups and downs. I look at GPT as an evolution of the IDE, which compared to 35 years ago is basically writing the code for you now. But it’s not. GPT can’t from whole cloth develop an entire system, but it can accelerate certain boring stuff that hopefully isn’t your value. The market for labor expands and contracts violently in tech. You’ll be ok. Just love what you do and do what you love, don’t let the anxiety chase you as burn out lies down that path and that’s a hole that’s impossible to fully emerge from unscarred.
- ffwacom 4y ago
  How did you manage/avoid burnout over 35 years in the industry?
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    I didn’t. I was so wrapped up in my career and related things that I pushed myself into areas I don’t enjoy under pressures I couldn’t sustain. I spent at least 5, maybe more, suffering. It took a concerted effort, a lot of meditation and Buddhism, and a realization of the non existence of self and identity, before I could emerge. I still struggle a bit, if I over pressurize myself I develop flu like symptoms and have to back off for a few days. I’d suggest avoiding it.
    - ffwacom 4y ago
      [dead]
madrox 4y ago
I was in tech during the dot com bubble. It was the same then as today. In the early 2000s, there were two open tech jobs for every qualified person. Businesses like Microskills (no longer around) sprung up to teach basic network administration and other IT skills and do job placement. When the market contracted, a lot of people who were treading water or were making more than their role could afford got pushed out. It's no different now. Instead of network admin bootcamps it's coding bootcamps. Lots of people have been building a lot of dumb stuff (more than usual) for the last several years and the market is correcting. The good news is that what came after that contraction was a huge wave of innovation that became known as Web 2.0. Most of the unicorns you're familiar with today came out of that period. Keep your chin up and you'll see.
- shams93 4y ago
  I was there in the early 2000s metldown. What is different today is lack of easy money, also these jobs are likely never coming back, having so much automated is changing the world very rapidly and the powers that be have no plan it would seem besides perhaps having a nuclear war intentionally to "clear out" the population of 99.9% of humans.
  - madrox 4y ago
    I'm not sure how serious you are being. Back then, money wasn't easy and those jobs didn't come back either. New jobs did emerge, though. We also didn't wait for the powers that be back then to figure it out, either, lest we forget that was the "series of tubes" era.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Also dot-bomb was really nuclear winter for jobs in the tech industry. I was lucky enough to slide into a new job with someone I knew after I was laid off. I didn't have so much as a nibble anywhere else. The new company barely made it through but it did. The pay wasn't great but I mostly enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it directly led to knowing the person who brought me into my current role. So far this is nothing like that from what I can tell. People are taking longer to land positions and at least some of the highest compensation will be very hard to come by, but there seem to be lots of positions. They may just be in insurance companies rather than prestigious tech companies.
giantg2 4y ago
You sound a lot like me. Only I'm a low performer who might have a real chance at getting fired for performance issues.
streetcat1 4y ago
Its all about interest rates, the rest is irrelevant. ChatGPT is very hyped. Also, you are not competing with new talent, unless you are entry level. My assumption is that by next summer, interest rate will go back down to 1.5% (the long term growth based on demographic) and than you will see tech rise again (as it is still the only growth story around).
s1k3 4y ago
If you are talented you will have no problem keeping or landing a new job. The people that have trouble maintaining employment are the ones that are not very good. Tech is about as close to a meritocracy as there is in the US. There is of course a lot of nepotism and politics but generally if you have talent you will be employed. There is simply too much demand for talented tech people. The large layoffs are not good but they are course correcting and these companies are still actively hiring despite the billboard layoff announcements.
4t34g34gf34gg34 4y ago
Yeah tech workers should unionize. Any effort otherwise is dumb as fuck. I have watched engineers consistently automate themselves out of a job and didn't even have the foresight to update their resume because they over inflated their own self value to the company. Hint: You are about as valuable as your tech companies building's custodian crew. Tech companies know their burn rates, why do you think they stay close to campuses like Berkley? Plenty of fresh blood to burn through.
- x86x87 4y ago
  hindsight is 20/20
- redeeman 4y ago
  no thanks. I dont see what a union can do for me, quite the opposite
tkiolp4 4y ago
Since around Facebook became a thing, I think we (most of the developers of the world) have been wasting our time and effort in what I would call useless fancy toys: Twitter, Facebook, vine, instagram, tiktok, thousands of saas, millions of npm libraries, crypto, and a long etc. I love programming but I certainly hate most ofthe tech companies and products that exist nowadays. I’m part of it, though, since it doesn’t pay that bad in this part of the world (not usa).
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > in what I would call useless fancy toys Toys aren't useless. People enjoy playing. I'd certainly rather work on a "toy" that lots of people use and enjoy than some CRUD app to handle insurance claims data or some other random "serious business" use. But seriously, Twitter is a global network that can disseminate news globally in minutes, its been used to start revolutions. TikTok, YouTube, etc help distribute knowledge, and grow communities. "Thousands of SaaS apps" help people work better, faster, quicker, and employ millions of workers to build and maintain. "Millions of NPM libraries" are the result of the toil of countless developers choosing to freely share their hard work and learning to anyone who wants it. What is not a waste of time to you? What is noble enough to receive your approval?
scarface74 4y ago
I’ve been a “developer” since 1996. I’ve seen people prognosticate about the end of the glory days every few years.
twblalock 4y ago
This is a return to sanity -- businesses need to control costs and be sustainable, product ideas need to actually make sense, you have to prove you have a good idea to get investment, etc. This is good for the long-term health of the industry. The real problem right now is not the layoffs. The layoffs are needed, because many companies cannot reasonably justify their headcount, and it's destructive to a culture to have so many new people join so fast. If you've worked at the same company since 2021 you might have more tenure than half your coworkers! The real problem is the hiring freezes. These especially impact new grads, but also experienced people will have trouble finding jobs simply because few companies are actively hiring. If you get laid off from a FAANG you might be able to find a startup job paying ~1/4 to 1/2 of your previous total comp. Might as well just not work for a year. Businesses overhired so much they need to shed more employees before they can even backfill or grow teams that work on things that make sense. This happened in 2001 too, but the big difference between now and then is we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business.
- nradov 4y ago
  There are hardly any real hiring freezes. Companies might declare a hiring freeze but if you look at their actual HR systems they're still quietly hiring to replace critical attrition losses or expand in high-growth markets.
whiplash451 4y ago
I am with you. My recommendation is to keep a cold head. Invest in yourself and your relationships. Find meaning/balance outside of work.

by kypro 4y ago

time_to_smile 4y ago

> tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months. GPT is cool, and has a lot of potential uses, but don't be scared by the hype. The biggest impact GPT is going to have on most people's software careers is that everyone will have to include "Prompt engineering" on their resumes in the very near future, and data science/ML folks are going to have to answer a lot more questions about transformers by people who have never heard of "Attention is all you need", even though the deepest they'll have to dive into the subject in practice is a few api calls.

TheKarateKid 4y ago

What's so frustrating this time around is that almost all of the layoffs by Big Tech are being done on what appears to be entirely speculation with no concrete financial data to support their business decisions. Google, Amazon, Salesforce, etc. all have reported very healthy quarterly earnings and year-end results. Yet their actions are those of failing companies operating in the red for multiple quarters. Every company is giving the same excuses --ahem, I mean reasons-- ("overhiring", "economic downturn"), laying off the same amount of people, and making their announcements within days of each other. Have we ever seen such an industry-coordinated event like this? Especially with no public data supporting their actions? The real reasons many believe for these layoffs amount to taking back the power & control that employees gained in 2020 until early 2022: 1. Salary correction: Compensation boomed, with major tech companies offering new grads and junior engineers job offers high than employees 2 levels higher. Has there ever been a time that employee pay raised so quickly? 2. Corporate control: Leadership wanted everyone back in the office but employees collectively refused. Can you think of another time where companies had lost this much control over their own workforce? 3. Pay Wall St: The only public financial data to support layoffs of this kind are from the stock prices, which mostly plummeted. However, they did not plummet due to poor performance but rather due to the macroeconomic events out of their control. Even at their present day levels, they are still mostly above their pre-pandemic highs. And guess what? Almost every other company's stock price in most industries fell significantly as well. With the profits erased from the surged stock prices, layoffs are the quickest and easiest way to push up a company's value. I can only hope that employees continue to band together to know their worth and not settle for less.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home." Funny, I attribute that "assistance" to improvements in hardware and networking. Today's commercial software is not great to say the least. And then we have the ridiculous amount of surveillance that comes with it. Without a doubt, computers and networks are proving their worth. But intermediaries calling themselves "tech" companies I am not so sure. It seems the market, too, is questioning the need for them.

oofta-boofta 4y ago

Whether or not you should be concerned is really dependent on where you sit in the industry. Former barista who did a 90-day bootcamp and trying to find a job? Oooof, good luck. Have a BS in Comp Sci and work on backend/distributed systems with several years of experience? You'll have no problem finding a gig. The vast majority of over-hiring was with engineering-adjacent roles, think project managers, recruiters, hr, etc.

0xB31B1B 4y ago
2nding this. I am hiring for engineers and it is still difficult to find quality candidates. I think for most engineers, the issue will not be "finding my next job" it will be that we all have raised expectations on output and quality. The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die.
- projectazorian 4y ago
  > The idea of taking weds thru friday basically off to loaf and surf the internet while you wait for other threads on your project to get back to you will hopefully die. I don't like sitting around waiting for PR feedback, and will typically find other ways to be productive when this happens, but I'm unclear what you expect people to do in this situation. If you have some code that needs to be reviewed, and the available reviewers aren't reviewing it after you requested their review, then you have three options: - Remind them. Always a good idea, but you can only do it so often. Sending someone daily reminders over a non-urgent PR is a great way to get your PRs reviewed even more slowly next time. Also, once you're senior or above, your reviewers tend to be busy. You can't wave a magic wand and clear their calendars. - Escalate to your manager. May or may not be effective. Will make you unpopular if you do it too often, especially if the two of you have the same manager. - Escalate to their manager. May or may not be effective, but you just irrevocably burned your bridges with that person, hope it was worth it. And this is just for code review. If QA is involved then you have a whole other layer of bureaucracy to deal with, except with a different reporting chain. There's a reason engineers at large companies seem so unproductive and it often has nothing to do with their work ethic.

throwaway71271 4y ago

> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 (thats maybe 1 in 1000 cvs) > Skip to today and I'm honestly wondering how long I have. how long you have to do what? to learn? to make money? you will find a way to make money, i have lived with 2$ per day and with 200$ per day and its fine, some times you have to steal some bread, but its not the end of the world, and you have a life time to learn. just don't stress too much, tech has ebbs and flows, your job does not define you.

time_to_smile 4y ago
> about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work, we still hired about 10 out of 100 This is very reminiscent of the dotcom bubble. If you knew how to turn a computer on you could get a relatively high paying tech job. The quality of tech talent has dropped significantly in recent years, even (maybe especially?) among the leetcode grinding crowd. Software engineers have already replaced themselves with AI by turning into interviewing machines that know how to survive in a large tech company but if asked to build and ship a product from nothing would be completely frozen. I really miss programming in the post-dotcom shadow. Most people in tech where in it because they loved writing code and solving hard technical problems. TC was literally not a term at that point, virtually nobody had RSUs, comp was fine but nothing amazing. There were plenty of jobs that paid better than writing software so all the people looking for a quick buck fled there and left coders alone.
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nicenewtemp84 4y ago
As long as the person you're stealing the bread from isn't having their own financial crisis I suppose that's fine. You can steal it from larger corporations also until they close the store because too many things are being stolen.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
> about 1 out of 100 people i interviewed actually know how computers work i know you're exaggerating but it doesn't change that dev is extremely saturated. and toxic job market has shown being good won't protect you from being filtered.

laidoffamazon 4y ago

> I guess I should just be grateful that we had a good run while it lasted, but it's hard to think like that when people depend on you to have things figured out. If you could do a 180 switch this quickly I think you should look inward. The concept that you could be more concerned about the future in 2023 rather than 3 years ago where a novel virus was killing thousands per day would be funny if it wasn't so absurd - consider therapy, because this seems to be an internal issue rather than a problem with the world at large.

edot 4y ago
You assume that a novel virus is as bad as it can get. We might be wishing for 2020 if war in Europe, banking crises, inflation, or layoffs get any worse. I think for a lot of people, COVID was an eye opener that the world can indeed go off the rails really quickly.
- laidoffamazon 4y ago
  No, we wouldn't. This is politically motivated reasoning at best, Biden derangement syndrome at worst. None of those things aren't terribly bad right now, though if you lived in Ukraine I'd at least understand the sentiment. Nobody should be "wishing for 2020". Everyone in this country is better off than they were in 2020 at this point.
  - llanowarelves 4y ago
    Do the 50% of all small businesses that had to permanently close fit into your definition of "everyone"?
    - laidoffamazon 4y ago
      Uh, what do you think happened to small businesses in 2020? If anything we're seeing a boom in small business dynamism today - more applications for small businesses to be formed in 2022 than anytime in recorded history, except for 2021 [0] [0] https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/small-business-applicants-smash-another-record-in-2022-as-more-americans-turn-to-entrepreneurship.html https://www.inc.com/melissa-angell/small-business-applicants...

moneywoes 4y ago

Nothing like starting a career amidst this chaos

eastbayjake 4y ago

9000 jobs at one company is quite small compared to the overall industry and compared to the global shortfall in tech jobs. In Germany alone there's a 780k tech worker shortage over the next 3 years[1]. It ebbs and flows in particular companies and particular regions, but the trend is still upward globally. [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/tech-talent-tectonics-ten-new-realities-for-finding-keeping-and-developing-talent https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-i...

nradov 4y ago
There is no actual shortage of tech workers in Germany or any other capitalist country. It's just that some employers don't want to pay the market rate or provide training.
kyawzazaw 4y ago
yeah but that's Germany
- tough 4y ago
  You can remotely work for a German company tho. They even will accept english if you're a good developer as lingua franca instead of german. YMMV
  - erispoe 4y ago
    With a CS or engineering degree, it's also very easy to immigrate to Germany on a blue card, with a relative short path to permanent residency and citizenship.
glial 4y ago
How does an American find a job in Germany willing to hire them? I'd jump at the opportunity.
bitL 4y ago
If you want to get paid $40/h then there are many jobs in Germany. If you want to get paid $150/h, there are almost none.

bcrosby95 4y ago

Hopefully you didn't vastly expand your expenses in the heydays. We keep our committed money to where we could easily survive on $100k/year and not have a dip in our day-to-day standard of living. There is no Tesla or BMW in our driveway. The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. Regardless, as that crazy money exits there will be less of those people. At the end of the day worry without preparation is pointless. I don't think it's a tech apocalypse, but I also work for a company that was formed in the wake of the dotcom crash. Crashes can cause problems for incumbents, but it also provides opportunity for others.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> The other thing to keep in mind is that tech has attracted a lot of people in it just for the crazy money that FAANGs pay, despite that not being representative of the industry as a whole. I think a lot of the industry shake up will be to clear house of these people. At big tech companies it’s easier to hide, especially remotely, but slowly layoffs or PIP will come for some of them, and they will have a harder time getting a job than the rest. I just hope the layoffs can affect the management layer like the IC later, because I’ve seen the growth of pretty crappy management. I was recently laid off, and I know a few other people laid off. I have years of doing projects and contributing to OSS and being a technically curious learner. I found a new job much faster than my peers who admittedly joined tech for the money and don’t care to learn or grow beyond their next pay raise. I will echo the preparation thing though. I started saving an extra few months of salary across 2022, and tried to convince my partner to lower spending for a while.
- Kye 4y ago
  I'm having trouble seeing what's wrong with doing a job for the money. That doesn't mean you do the job poorly. Plenty of people do it for the mythos or "company family" or whatever bullshit the company tries to sell and do a garbage job at it, and plenty of people clock in to do a good job, clock out, and not think about it again until the next day. "Why do you want to work here?" Because money rocks, my dude. I'll give a nice politic answer in an interview, but I'm there to do a job.

ajross 4y ago

> I don't know how many of you relate, but a personal level this last few years has left me quite shaken. Deep breaths. All industries are cyclic. We've been here before, we'll be here again. From my perspective as a wizened curmudgeon, this is more directly disruptive to tech careers than 2008/9 was. But it's significantly less of an existential disaster than 2001. It is true, though, that to new entries to the labor market, these things can be unfair. Someone coming out of college last year had a vastly different experience than a very similar candidate trying to get a job right now. And that sucks. But over decades, things even out.

itsoktocry 4y ago

>In 2021 I remember thinking how tech really proved its worth by so quickly assisting our economies through the pandemic with e-commerce, video conferencing and work from home. I felt the opposite: I have no idea how anyone could look at the tech craziness for the past 3-4 years, especially after COVID, and think any of it was sustainable. But I've also lived through a couple of these economic cycles...

sangnoir 4y ago
The tech COVID boom looked sustainable to me because it was a mostly caused by money shifting from offline to online. The losers were brick and motor businesses and drive-time radio ad purveyors.
vineyardmike 4y ago
Plenty of people thought that a lot of changes from COVID were permanent. Pre-pandemic, there was a slow shift towards things like e-commerce - the % of purchases made online was growing steadily for years. Everyone thought that covid accelerated that trend, and few predicted it would return to in-store purchases. In 2023, we're basically at an equivalent point compared to if the pandemic didn't happen and that steady growth continued - that's not an obvious outcome. Things like remote work, many people absolutely loved it, and it changed how people can work and hire. It had far-reaching affects, and many thought it'd last. Not everyone was convinced, of course, but we had proven it works for at least some conditions. As Facebook recently announced, it may not work as well, but for many organizations, the savings is better than the decrease in productivity. Regarding a lot of the crazy tech-industry changes like salaries, employment demand etc, yeah I totally didn't think it'd last either. Same with the affects of 0% interest rates (not that I really invested any differently).

ambicapter 4y ago

> It doesn't help that I'm going through a lot in my personal life at the moment too I think this probably has the majority effect on how you're feeling. Jobs come and go, layoffs happen. I've been laid off and I've been fired, and I've found jobs afterwards. As long as you have a decent bankroll to keep you going through a couple months (easy for me to say as I'm single and have supportive family), I wouldn't worry about THE STATE OF THE WORLD/ECONOMY.

EGreg 4y ago

We live in a society with massive corporations venerated as “job creators”, even given tax breaks to come to a city and employ us. We can employ each other, thank you very much. Many people who choose full-time work for corporations would not have an experience any differenr whether they worked in Soviet Russia or USA or Feudal Japan. These corporations (especially in Japan) are intertwined with our lives and even sense of self-worth. In Japan they coordinate with your landlord. Here they are who gives you health insurance etc. If we had strong safety nets, none of this mentality would be an issue. You’d be jumping for joy that a project or warehouse has been automated and you don’t have to be a cog in a machine or warehouse wage slave. That’s if we had UBI and Universal Health Insurance too. People would work on projects because they want to, whether that is art, science, open source, wikipedia or other gift economies. At the end of the day, that’s where DALL-E, ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot get their content to ape from. It’s our collective work product! We humans have given it away online for these companies to scrape and build models from. Be proud. Stop demanding a living wage and health insurance from a corporation and start demanding a Universal Health Insurance and a UBI in your community. We have to start valuing stuff the market doesn’t.. raising children instead of government schools, taking care of our own parents instead of nursing homes. Look around … if you and your partner are working 10 hour days just to make ends meet, the problem isn’t robots taking your job. It’s society not truly valuing human beings authentically living their lives!

charles_f 4y ago

I can relate to a lot of what you're saying, but I would hold my horses on that: > we have tools like GPT potentially disrupting our careers on a timescale best viewed on the scale of months. I am of a realistic nature that in today's craze over anything people tend to call pessimistic. However, some of the code generation examples we've seen are truly astonishing, but a far cry from replacing anyone in the real world. Best case scenarios it would save you minutes. > We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years You're being very generous with the word "talent" there. Things have been a bit crazy and all, but from anecdotal evidence the large influx of new developers has done what large influx always do and lowered the bar. I've literally been asked in two different companies who boast about their standards being high to "leave aside my ideals" and have "realistic expectations", while the only thing changing in the set {expectations, hiring goals} being the latter. "we need to hire very good people very fast" while not changing anything about the process and sourcing has to make you forgo one of these two. It's physical, people don't get instantiated out of thin air. So I think it may be harder on average to find a job in software for a while, mostly because of the direction of the job market, but it will be harder for people with less experience, and those who can do something else in which they have experience will also be incentivized to do so.

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lamontcg 4y ago

You need to get a little perspective, I got hired at Amazon in Nov of 2001 after the tech bubble burst and post-9/11. There was no AWS. Amazon was purely a retailer, it was losing money every single quarter, there was no confidence that e-commerce would ultimately be competitive with brick-and-mortar. If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. We're still going to need humans to find the horrible bugs in codebases caused by humans copypasting ChatGPT output into production code. You need to become an actual expert in something. Pick a system that is critical to your employer and get good at it.

lr4444lr 4y ago
If you're worried about ChatGPT taking your job you weren't doing much. Harsh, but it has to be said! Too many devs are focused on code rather than the business it serves.

hintymad 4y ago

> We've had a massive influx of new tech talent over the last few years Very true, colleges have been seeing double-digit growth in applicants of CS majors every year in the past 10+ years, and this year the number of applicants is at least 2x more than last year. That said, I'm not sure about the growth rate of qualified talent. At least 8 out 10 senior engineers who I interviewed could only throw some terms around and draw a few boxes. "Experts" of Apache Beam can't write a simple word count using even pseudo code of Beam's APIs. The team leads from FAANG could talk only about team coordination but not specifics of the tech stacks of their systems. ML experts could throw terms like BERT around but could not explain simple things like the difference between layer normalization and batch normalization, let alone coming up with models to solve specific problems. Experts of distribute system couldn't design a simple stateful system or articulate any distributed algorithm. The list can go on and on. Given such shortage of true talent, I'd rather worry about whether there will be growth in IT the industry. Without growth opportunities, investment will drop, so will the demand of talent.

TechnicolorByte 4y ago
I’m curious what you think your observations say about the qualifications of engineers today. Is it that most of your applicants are liars with what they put on their resume? Or that those specific skills you mentioned aren’t applicable to their day-to-day work? Or is that your expectations are out of line with the reality of their work or is there something amiss with your interview style?
- coredog64 4y ago
  Not OP, but I think there’s a tendency to put a lot of things on your resume where you were in the room where it happened. You get past the stupid automated resume screen and you know enough during the initial phone screen. If it comes up on the job, well, that’s what Google is for.
- hintymad 4y ago
  I don't think people lied about their expertise. Instead, they likely believed that what they knew was sufficient for their work. Another possibility is that the big tech hired so many people in the past few years that many people ended up doing bike-shedding work. They could be excellent engineers in the past, but as time went by, their skills got rusty yet they were too busy to be aware of it.

jvanderbot 4y ago

I was just laid off. My new job is better and the break was amazing. 6 years ago my spouse was laid off. And by penny pinching she was able to network while on unemployment and navigate a career change. Her new job is way better. Btw, I use copilot every day. It makes me more productive. Someday I may only use copilot or maybe I'll do something else. Nothing is permanent. Speak to those who have been laid off, and make sure you can take care of yourself if it happens, but then stop worrying. You'll suffer more in imagination than reality.

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I’m my 35 or so years in the industry it goes through ups and downs. I look at GPT as an evolution of the IDE, which compared to 35 years ago is basically writing the code for you now. But it’s not. GPT can’t from whole cloth develop an entire system, but it can accelerate certain boring stuff that hopefully isn’t your value. The market for labor expands and contracts violently in tech. You’ll be ok. Just love what you do and do what you love, don’t let the anxiety chase you as burn out lies down that path and that’s a hole that’s impossible to fully emerge from unscarred.

ffwacom 4y ago
How did you manage/avoid burnout over 35 years in the industry?
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I didn’t. I was so wrapped up in my career and related things that I pushed myself into areas I don’t enjoy under pressures I couldn’t sustain. I spent at least 5, maybe more, suffering. It took a concerted effort, a lot of meditation and Buddhism, and a realization of the non existence of self and identity, before I could emerge. I still struggle a bit, if I over pressurize myself I develop flu like symptoms and have to back off for a few days. I’d suggest avoiding it.
  - ffwacom 4y ago
    [dead]

madrox 4y ago

I was in tech during the dot com bubble. It was the same then as today. In the early 2000s, there were two open tech jobs for every qualified person. Businesses like Microskills (no longer around) sprung up to teach basic network administration and other IT skills and do job placement. When the market contracted, a lot of people who were treading water or were making more than their role could afford got pushed out. It's no different now. Instead of network admin bootcamps it's coding bootcamps. Lots of people have been building a lot of dumb stuff (more than usual) for the last several years and the market is correcting. The good news is that what came after that contraction was a huge wave of innovation that became known as Web 2.0. Most of the unicorns you're familiar with today came out of that period. Keep your chin up and you'll see.

shams93 4y ago
I was there in the early 2000s metldown. What is different today is lack of easy money, also these jobs are likely never coming back, having so much automated is changing the world very rapidly and the powers that be have no plan it would seem besides perhaps having a nuclear war intentionally to "clear out" the population of 99.9% of humans.
- madrox 4y ago
  I'm not sure how serious you are being. Back then, money wasn't easy and those jobs didn't come back either. New jobs did emerge, though. We also didn't wait for the powers that be back then to figure it out, either, lest we forget that was the "series of tubes" era.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Also dot-bomb was really nuclear winter for jobs in the tech industry. I was lucky enough to slide into a new job with someone I knew after I was laid off. I didn't have so much as a nibble anywhere else. The new company barely made it through but it did. The pay wasn't great but I mostly enjoyed it, I learned a lot, and it directly led to knowing the person who brought me into my current role. So far this is nothing like that from what I can tell. People are taking longer to land positions and at least some of the highest compensation will be very hard to come by, but there seem to be lots of positions. They may just be in insurance companies rather than prestigious tech companies.

giantg2 4y ago

You sound a lot like me. Only I'm a low performer who might have a real chance at getting fired for performance issues.

streetcat1 4y ago

Its all about interest rates, the rest is irrelevant. ChatGPT is very hyped. Also, you are not competing with new talent, unless you are entry level. My assumption is that by next summer, interest rate will go back down to 1.5% (the long term growth based on demographic) and than you will see tech rise again (as it is still the only growth story around).

s1k3 4y ago

If you are talented you will have no problem keeping or landing a new job. The people that have trouble maintaining employment are the ones that are not very good. Tech is about as close to a meritocracy as there is in the US. There is of course a lot of nepotism and politics but generally if you have talent you will be employed. There is simply too much demand for talented tech people. The large layoffs are not good but they are course correcting and these companies are still actively hiring despite the billboard layoff announcements.

4t34g34gf34gg34 4y ago

Yeah tech workers should unionize. Any effort otherwise is dumb as fuck. I have watched engineers consistently automate themselves out of a job and didn't even have the foresight to update their resume because they over inflated their own self value to the company. Hint: You are about as valuable as your tech companies building's custodian crew. Tech companies know their burn rates, why do you think they stay close to campuses like Berkley? Plenty of fresh blood to burn through.

x86x87 4y ago
hindsight is 20/20
redeeman 4y ago
no thanks. I dont see what a union can do for me, quite the opposite

tkiolp4 4y ago

Since around Facebook became a thing, I think we (most of the developers of the world) have been wasting our time and effort in what I would call useless fancy toys: Twitter, Facebook, vine, instagram, tiktok, thousands of saas, millions of npm libraries, crypto, and a long etc. I love programming but I certainly hate most ofthe tech companies and products that exist nowadays. I’m part of it, though, since it doesn’t pay that bad in this part of the world (not usa).

vineyardmike 4y ago
> in what I would call useless fancy toys Toys aren't useless. People enjoy playing. I'd certainly rather work on a "toy" that lots of people use and enjoy than some CRUD app to handle insurance claims data or some other random "serious business" use. But seriously, Twitter is a global network that can disseminate news globally in minutes, its been used to start revolutions. TikTok, YouTube, etc help distribute knowledge, and grow communities. "Thousands of SaaS apps" help people work better, faster, quicker, and employ millions of workers to build and maintain. "Millions of NPM libraries" are the result of the toil of countless developers choosing to freely share their hard work and learning to anyone who wants it. What is not a waste of time to you? What is noble enough to receive your approval?

scarface74 4y ago

I’ve been a “developer” since 1996. I’ve seen people prognosticate about the end of the glory days every few years.

twblalock 4y ago

This is a return to sanity -- businesses need to control costs and be sustainable, product ideas need to actually make sense, you have to prove you have a good idea to get investment, etc. This is good for the long-term health of the industry. The real problem right now is not the layoffs. The layoffs are needed, because many companies cannot reasonably justify their headcount, and it's destructive to a culture to have so many new people join so fast. If you've worked at the same company since 2021 you might have more tenure than half your coworkers! The real problem is the hiring freezes. These especially impact new grads, but also experienced people will have trouble finding jobs simply because few companies are actively hiring. If you get laid off from a FAANG you might be able to find a startup job paying ~1/4 to 1/2 of your previous total comp. Might as well just not work for a year. Businesses overhired so much they need to shed more employees before they can even backfill or grow teams that work on things that make sense. This happened in 2001 too, but the big difference between now and then is we aren't seeing a lot of tech companies completely fail and go out of business.

nradov 4y ago
There are hardly any real hiring freezes. Companies might declare a hiring freeze but if you look at their actual HR systems they're still quietly hiring to replace critical attrition losses or expand in high-growth markets.

whiplash451 4y ago

I am with you. My recommendation is to keep a cold head. Invest in yourself and your relationships. Find meaning/balance outside of work.