21 ms·
Where have all the laid-off tech workers gone?
- freeone3000 4y agoAnswer: "Working somewhere else mostly, but some started their own company."
- afro88 4y agoWhat a scoop! Time to write an article behind a paywall
- skrebbel 4y agoThis is the Economist, they don't really go for scoops much. (And I think that makes them the only somewhat decent newspaper)
- passwordoops 4y agoWith ChatGPT!
- DrBazza 4y agoAnd probably leading to the next wave of innovation and/or unicorns. https://www.wired.com/story/tech-layoffs-are-feeding-a-new-startup-surge/ https://www.wired.com/story/tech-layoffs-are-feeding-a-new-s...
- rcarmo 4y agoI seriously doubt that. Might be true for younger people who were laid off by the "LIFO rule" (i.e., cheaper severance), but anyone with a 10y+ career would at least think twice before joining a startup... Especially in Europe, but these kinds of stories are never about Europe.
- saalweachter 4y agoWhat, if you were laid off with 10+ years of savings from a bigtech salary and 30-40 weeks of severance and continuing benefits, you wouldn't (after a few weeks to process and recover) begin hammering out a prototype to that idea that's been in the back of your head for the last 5-10 years? You could burn half a year and still have ten weeks to do a job search.
- rcarmo 4y agoYou assume too much regarding parting terms, and I don't see any mention of family responsibilities in that rosy scenario of yours.
- saalweachter 4y agoThose are the terms from Google's announcement: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/inside-google/messa... 10 years gives you 36 weeks of severance, plus 6 months of healthcare. If you have a family, you're never going to have a better opportunity to spend several months working on your side project without measurably impacting your family's stability. Plus, when you do need to resume your job search, your resume is now "I spent ten years doing these things at BigCo using their proprietary tooling, plus here's the demo of the thing I tried to startup the last six months using off the shelf frameworks, which I am now already proficient in."
- rcarmo 4y agoThose are the US terms. There is an entire planet beyond, you know.
- hgsgm 4y agoMost startup founders are over 40.
- rcarmo 4y ago
- imwithstoopid 4y agothe next wave of innovation will be things like battery tech, deep AI in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together in their kitchen realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as part of his online coding degree (really)
- fshr 4y ago1. It’s not zero sum 2. You don’t need to innovate like that to create a successful startup 3. There is a very, very aggressive skill curve for developers and being ex-Google will have an advantage over the pool boy
- robopsychology 4y agoIt's great your pool guy is furthering his education and going into tech but there is a skill gap between experienced ex-FAANG and those jumping into software for the pay check. Bootcamp/College grads are not competing at the same level as those who have 5+ years of good experience and a passion for tech (as most of us have, being on HN on a Friday evening/workday).
- UncleEntity 4y agoAnd make long rants about how they only make $200k/year. Poolboy will be happy to make anything significantly higher than what they make cleaning pools and won’t know about the good old days when you could call up the on staff chef and have food delivered to your cubicle. He’d be like “what’s a cubicle?”
- stcroixx 4y agoI wouldn't bet on it. Innovation takes hard work, sacrifice, low pay, etc. - exactly the opposite of what one does in big tech. They might try out of hubris until they burn through that nest egg and retreat.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- raydev 4y agoAnother answer: still just vibing and living off their generous 4 month severances and maybe planning to take the entire year off. I know a lot of these people, many are just now starting up their job search, if at all.
- _5hxt 4y agoAt home, enjoying their severance package. :-)
- torunar 4y agohttps://archive.is/UopZ0 https://archive.is/UopZ0
- ekianjo 4y agoMan this is such an empty article basically answering no questions at all
- clircle 4y agoI suggest lowering your expectations about how many questions the news can answer for you!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoIt answers plenty. That it's happening (for folks outside our industry), it's small (relative to the industry), and where they're going.
- mrweasel 4y agoA bit bland sure, but it's in there. They are going exactly where I expected them to: Companies that aren't considered tech companies, but have a need for software developers and engineers. From the article: Farming equipment, car industry, banking, insurers and retail. These places have been struggling to hire for years, now they can finally fill those positions, or at least some of them.
- lesuorac 4y agoI mean, the article does list those places but doesn't provide any sort of numbers at all. Who knows if John Deere hired 10k people before the layoffs and 3k afterwards. Sure some of the laid off people in this scenario could have gone to John Deere but it's more likely they've displaced other candidates JD would've hired as opposed to JD sponging up laid off people.
- haasted 4y agoAlso discussed a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35337326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35337326
- rvz 4y agoThey are simply 'Gone'.
- rationalfaith 4y ago[dead]
- PedroBatista 4y agoCool Buzzfeed article. The only thing “new” it’s the confirmation of the obvious regarding who is getting the axe at big tech, which is mostly sales and paper pushing people.
- rcarmo 4y agoNot really. It's an even mix from where I'm standing.
- Beaver117 4y agoI can't find another job even with a FAANG background. The market is brutal. Maybe my only choice is to start a startup.
- thaufeki 4y agoCould also be why you can't find a job. You may be too expensive, and they're looking for engineers in the sweet spot of cheap/can keep the machine running.
- rcarmo 4y agoThere is always an element of "let's see how low we can get" in mainstream IT, since people outside tech view tech as a cost center and not a profit center, which devalues candidates.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoThere is IT and there is Dev, and much of the latter drives profits. Most of IT is there to support business ops, and is basically there to do what a secretary pool did 60 years ago.
- dathinab 4y agoFANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, especially smaller companies, so it's not that uncommon for small companies to hesitate to hire someone directly coming from FANG. Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people. Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG. Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
- jghn 4y ago
- turbobooster 4y agoMost likely on welfare
- optimalsolver 4y agoIt's da first of tha month.
- supernova87a 4y agoSide question, is the 3-4 months of severance pay cushioning a bit the impact to whatever micro-economy laid off workers would otherwise be affecting? We're not yet seeing the potentially worse effects yet until severance runs out? But I would hope that most laid off workers are able to find jobs in that time frame.
- gtop3 4y ago> https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ There's 120k US layoffs documented here in 2023, or 0.07% of the US workforce. We could imagine the ~50% reemployment rate for FANG is a fair estimate for the rest of the tech layoffs (fang employees might be easier to be rehired, but might have more savings and be less inclined to return). So 0.035% of the workforce would potentially be running out of severance. It probably will have an impact. This alone isn't a crisis level event. It's hard to determine regional data for the laid off workers because of WFH, but we could imagine tech heavy regions receiving a bigger share of the impact than national averages. The impact is probably more spread than it would have been if the layoffs happened in 2019.
- shapefrog 4y agoLearning to code.
- nubela 4y agoWe actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs. Here's the summary: - 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022. - Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company. - 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups. See the full blog post here: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-billion-worth-of-startups-2023-layoffs/#part-ii--747-ex-googlers-found-new-jobs---at-which-companies- https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...
- sakex 4y agoGoogle layoffs started in January 2023. How is the November date relevant?
- whiplash451 4y agoBecause you want to marginalize out non-layoff-related variables?
- lucideer 4y agoDo you have any data on accuracy/completeness of LinkedIn profiles to accompany this? I get that LinkedIn is the most used platform, but as someone who doesn't use / update it (I have a largely dormant profile), I got the impression my demographic, while a minority, is still a relatively large minority. Presumably the "total number of identified LinkedIn profiles" & the "total reported layoffs" figures don't match up: what happens to the data gap in your reporting?
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago> I got the impression my demographic, while a minority, is still a relatively large minority. Based on my anecdote experience, your not in the minority.
- robin_reala 4y ago“every laid off individual” should be “every laid off individual with a LinkedIn account”.
- kkoste 4y agoProbably back home to their original country since they only have 60 days to find a new job. I imagine that is extremely hard when you are in competition with a lot of your former colleagues.
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoWhat suggests that the majority of laid off employees were H1Bs?
- fundad 4y agoThe last thing this nation needs is to depopulate further.
- taude 4y agoWhat makes you think US Population is receding? By all census counts, we're still growing, a lot. Numbers for 2022 are something like 900K immigrants living in the U.S. became U.S. citizens. 2 Million more migrants came with about @ 150K documented boarder crossings per month for 18 months straight. The only time there was a huge drop-off was during Covid, for obvious reasons. "The Build Back Better Act included a a $1.75 trillion framework that called for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and a recapture of visas that were not issued in previous years" US is the third largest populated country at 335M. Trying to understand your "depopulate further" statement.
- elzbardico 4y agoOne thing that is very important to realize after being laid-off from a very big company during a recession is that you need to adjust your salary expectations for the new reality. And the other thing is that you should have been prepared for this a long, long time ago. Economic cycles are a thing, it is in all history books, there's no excuse for not being aware of them. I have always been very very conservative with my expenses, I don't expect the situation where I make hundreds of thousands of dollars an year as a developer something that will go on forever. They are out there to get you, you are not a business guy with connections, probably you came from a working class family, if they can, they will take the rug out of your feet. So, don't get too excited thinking that making 300k an year (or even 400, 500, whatever) by itself means you're rich now. Income by itself is not wealth if you don't save it. You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs.
- mrweasel 4y agoLast year I took a $15.000 a year pay cut, for a job I really wanted, and that's more aligned with my ideals. It didn't effect our home economy in any meaningful way and I wasn't making anything close to the salaries I've seen people on HN expect (closer to $100K). If we get to a point, and I'm not sure we're quite there yet, where the big tech companies, startups and other VC funded ventures can't absorb the layoff, then yes, you're absolutely correct. People need to adjust their expectations. $100K - 150K is a pretty comfortable salary in most areas. If you expect $300K to maintain your current lifestyle, you really need to think about scaling back. It may never be an issue, but if it does, you're better prepared and will have a sizable saving for those rainy days.
- JeremyNT 4y agoHN is such a bubble sometimes. Hearing the problems of 250k/yr+ programmers is so completely strange. I know there are a lot of us programmers and tech workers working in non profits, government, education, or in small but sustainable businesses. I'm resigned to making well under what HN would consider a junior level salary, but in exchange I get to work at a place with a mission I can believe in, and I still have a comfortable lifestyle. Maybe we're doing it wrong? I could probably double my salary at some VC funded company, after all. But in threads like this I do wonder if mo money means mo problems.
- Eisenstein 4y ago> John Deere, an American tractor-maker, has been snapping up fired tech workers to help it make smarter farm machinery. Oh yay. Who wants to work for a company that is actively antagonistic against its own customer base?
- colonelpopcorn 4y agoThe same people that wanted to work for Meta and Amazon?
- euroderf 4y agoThey could all become mall cops and do a lot less harm.
- pcthrowaway 4y agoYeah, any of FAANG is well-qualified to work at John Deere, from that angle.
- jesse__ 4y agoHAHAHAHAHAHA The accuracy of this statement just tickles me
- s1k3 4y agoDo you see the irony in your question yet? =P
- kybernetyk 4y agoMost FAANG tech workers have a lot experience with that already...
- Exendroinients 4y agoFinally the market is correcting themself. Software engineers aren't worth more than any other engineers.
- waselighis 4y agoI kinda agree with this sentiment, I've certainly known plenty of software engineers who weren't half what they were getting paid, mostly juniors but also a few seniors. But I've also known plenty of software engineers who were worth every cent. However, I'd argue the bigger problem is other engineers are underpaid, especially considering many types of engineering require a strong grasp of advanced mathematics and physics. Then again, most professions in this world are woefully underpaid.
- ducknalddon 4y agoIt's all just supply and demand, it has little to do with worth. Yet another reason not to link your self esteem to your job.
- Hermitian909 4y agoTwo other factors worth thinking about: 1. How differentiated is engineer output in a measurable way? 2. How much profit is unlocked by the engineers work at market rates? (2) tells you how much room there is for an engineer's share of the profits to grow. In traditional engineering fields there often isn't as much profit to share everything comes from margin off a physical product). Physical constraints also mean that it's difficult to differentiate in traditional engineering. The problems my EE friends solve are harder mathematically but they're almost all using design patterns and even components created decades ago, it's unusual to have a chance to do work that's "different" in a way the market might care about.
- rcme 4y agoPer-employee, software companies like Google are much more profitable than "other" engineering companies.
- 4y ago
- squalo 4y agoI was recruited by two different google people in the last six months and both of them are unemployed now according to LinkedIn. The only tech dudes I know there are on visas and they haven't been axed.
- tzs 4y ago[flagged]
- tsol 4y agoI know an AI with a knack for poetry and possibly even some real creativity
- alanwreath 4y agoOh hah - I posted that exact thing here earlier with chatGPT’s rendition. Wasn’t bad - but I couldn’t get it to recurse into itself.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- astrange 4y agoNobody should ever write filks. It should be punishable by community service.
- wonder_er 4y agoLaid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, customer support, customer success, and inside sales at a B2B SaaS company. Modestly obsessed with mobility networks. (like... roads, streets, bike paths, sidewalks, and the vehicles and people that occupy that space) Working on going independent here in Denver, acting as a 'broker' between businesses and their staff/customers to convert single-occupancy-vehicle-users to scooters, to increase the functional number of parking spaces in a given parking lot by 10% or more. Just started recently, partially inspired by spending a few weeks in Bali. (Being a laid-off tech worker has its upsides). If I can get traction around this business idea, I'll move sideways into guerilla action road network improvements, to make the junctions around the businesses I work with more habitable and safe for scooters, pedestrians, and cars. Soooo I'm trying to make my job something like "one who improves the functioning of road networks, sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of those improvements." With a little success, I'll be able to start hiring people to help. Maybe I'll find a few other tech people to help. There's plenty of room for software developers to make meaningful contributions to these projects, but only after spending a lot of time not behind a laptop.
- sjf 4y agoHow many other laid off tech people are there in Bali?
- wonder_er 4y agogood question. No idea. I didn't ask, and wasn't there as a laid-off tech worker. :) I was visiting a friend who moved there a decade ago, and scootering around the island. So, I had good food, met lots of interesting people, read books in beautiful places, and saw beautiful sites. I called it 'a research trip for bringing better scooter norms to the USA'. Bali's scooter game is fire!
- testplzignore 4y agoThey've gone to plant-based meat substitute companies. Such a high-growth industry has a lot of rolls - err, I mean roles! - to fill.
- 734129837261 4y agoMany of the ones I know end up at other companies that had troubles finding good employees before. And a bunch of others started their own companies, and they are/will hire their own employees, too. I wonder if there are statistics about this kind of trend. How many new companies spawn for ever 100 tech layoffs? How many more jobs are created in 1, 2, 4, and 8 years after the layoffs?
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoThis whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP). It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be fired if you're not. Once you're past Sr. Manager you'll be challenged on whether you side with your employees or the stock price. We all know who chooses which. Want to start a high tech company or even a company with high CAPEX or OPEX entry points? Better get a ton of capital, and guess what, that capital wants ownership because the theory is "they deserve it." The reality is money required to do anything (duh!) and you have no choice, because your broke friends can't afford the 500k you need to hire all those well paid FAANG engineers away. Fine you say, those are the spoils of victory. Well so here's the problem...if all that money only cares about maintaining the power structures and whitewashing their Rand inspired business sins via "charity" or perhaps "running for president" and that group gets smaller and smaller, what's the rest of folks to do? I ended up writing about this [1] and now I'm doing everything I can to build or support syndicalist organizations crowding out for-profit investor driven companies. At this point, tech is just an extension of finance. There's no counter-culture here, it's maximum capitalism and we're ubering humanity off a cliff. I've stopped trying to be in tech and founded a non-stock democratic cooperative that does residential waste hauling [2,3] and hopefully we'll be picking up trash by July. I'm about to send out our first mailer to two major residential groups. I'm open to anyone who wants to give us a loan or be hired eventually. andrew@seegull.co [1]https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html [2]https://www.seegull.co/ https://www.seegull.co/ [3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34873099
- fnimick 4y agoI suspect you'll never be able to compete, is the problem. You might not be a profit maximizer, but everyone you interact with is a cost minimizer, and ethical solutions will inevitably be more expensive. This is not to rain on your parade (I agree with you!) but I see the only solution as political via vastly higher taxes on higher incomes to support social services. The only place we are remotely close to having any influence is in the political realm, in the economic world, we are completely irrelevant.
- bigbacaloa 4y ago[flagged]
- shams93 4y agoI turned 50, you hit middle age and then there's a huge negative wall of discrimination. This layoff hit me after I had been unemployed in the same year so I got no unemployment. I had moved in with my mom to help her during covid so I have been basically turned back into a child after having been forced to spend 478k for my education.
- patrickthebold 4y ago> having been forced to spend 478k for my education Go on...
- darth_avocado 4y agoWow that’s a lot of money. Did you have master’s/post doc degrees?
- Kranar 4y agoNo way, since any such degree wouldn't cost any money, instead it would pay you. Spending 500k on a degree is absolutely insane and indicates that there's a lot more to the story than what's being told. The only exception I can think of is if this person attended a top 10 university, like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, in which case they likely have nothing to worry about.
- credit_guy 4y agoNot even that. Someone who is 50 now would have gone to MIT/Harvard/Stanford in the early-mid '90's. Tuition was not that high in those times, maybe $25k/year. Here's a quote from MIT [1] >Nine months' tuition for 1994-95 is $20,100. In addition, undergraduate room and board ranges from $4,530 to $6,075, with a standard of $5,975; actual costs depend on the student's housing and dining arrangements. Books, materials and personal expenses (including clothes, laundry, recreation and optional medical insurance, but excluding travel) are approximately $2,325. [1] http://web.mit.edu/resdev/www/facts95.html#Tuition%20 http://web.mit.edu/resdev/www/facts95.html#Tuition%20
- Animats 4y agoThe big question - where will they be a year from now? Savings gone, "stealth startups" mostly failed, and the US deeper into a recession.
- ilikehurdles 4y agoThere’s a saying that goes something like, “Economists have predicted 9 of the last 2 recessions.” I’ve been hearing about the real estate bubble popping any day now since at least 2013. How many people sat on the sidelines of a skyrocketing housing market waiting for that day, out of fear? How many have fallen into a doom and gloom cycle over the last few years hoping for some big “told-you-so” payoff that never came? If you have a few decades of able working life ahead of you, capitalize on opportunities. Take risks. You’re not going to time the crash, whatever that means; and you’ll likely end up more resilient for it anyway.
- Animats 4y ago> I’ve been hearing about the real estate bubble popping any day now since at least 2013. That's the market timing problem. You look at the graph of median house price vs median family income, and you can see that at some point things will crack. But you can't tell when. Few people have shown success at market timing. James Dines, of the Dines Letter well known to investors, died last year at age 91. He was one of the very few people to have correctly called several recessions in advance, in his 70 years of publishing a newsletter.
- ftxbro 4y agoPivoted to their next journey of radical nomadism and quantified self neurohacking by DIY intravenous synaptic inhibitors.
- smm11 4y agoPart of me thinks new companies will sprout up and a few may disrupt. The other part of me sees that Gen Z are using dumb phones and don't own computers, so given AI I can see the WWW being computers talking to one another with the odd human checking in.
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
- alanwreath 4y ago—-deleted—-
- vore 4y agoI really wish people would stop posting ChatGPT output onto Hacker News like this. If I wanted to know what ChatGPT thought I would go ask ChatGPT myself.
- alanwreath 4y agoYou know - good point, I thought it was fun but it’s just noise, I’ll remove it, the title of this post reminded me of the song by Peter Paul and Mary. But who cares.
- rentzed 4y agoI have like 2 years of experience as a SE and I didn't get laid off but I quit to try entrepreneurship. Currently, I've built a website where people can look up an address and see what tenants are paying there. The site relies on user submitted data, like a Glassdoor for Rents. Site is called rentzed.com. I'd appreciate if anyone contributed their rent data and/or shared it with people they know. I have years before I run out of money so I'll just try a couple other ideas I have or join a startup to pay my bills if I need to. I think they'd be interested in having someone join them who has tried building a Startup.
- jwsteigerwalt 4y agoBeing laid off from a tech company does not mean that they were a tech worker.
- readonthegoapp 4y ago> On March 14th Meta, the tech giant Mr Zuckerberg runs, announced it would fire 10,000 staff—on top of the 11,000 it laid off last November. i think the 'fire' vs. 'laid-off' language is interesting - just because of the stigma associated with being fired as opposed to being laid-off, which doesn't have as much of a stigma.
- mock-possum 4y agowhere have all the laid-off tech workers gone long time passing where have all the laid-off tech workers gone long time ago where have all the laid-off tech workers gone unsexy industries like industrial goods are pouncing on them, everyone oh when will we ever learn oh when will we ever learn
- dwild 4y agoWe all saw the charts showing the number of employees if the past few years and that they just laid off the over hiring... No one remember during that time how we were lacking employees too? I know at my job which is not a sexy one, we were struggling to find new hire. We are still hiring... just as much as before. That's where they are going. To the place that wanted them in the first place. All theses peoples didn't appear out of thin air (though for sure the amazing pay did pushed some to go to "bootcamp" or whatever, but that's been true for the past decade). It's the normal amount of workers that would have been hired otherwise. In any other field, sure maybe there could be more workers than demands, but in tech, placement has been good and it won't change in a few years (as it takes a few years of school). The only thing that may change is the pay expectation of theses workers, as the one that did the laid off are the one that were paying a pretty penny for theses jobs.