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Startups Are Scooping Up Big Tech’s Cast-Off Workers
- forgotmysn 3y agouh ya no shit. start-ups froth over having devs with experience at big tech co's so they can throw the logos on their decks. thank the lord the WSJ is performing society-driving journalism like this.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoI mean, I do agree, but isn't this what journalism is? Reporting on the facts? It's a thing that's happening, ergo it's news. If there's a shooting and shootings have happened before, is that not still news? It happened after all. It's got to be better than just ignoring things because it's status quo.
- forgotmysn 3y agothis might have been news is like, 2009, but it's certainly not a new trend worth reporting.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoHow many people since have reached adulthood and entered employment who might not have been aware of what came before though? What about the trends that you and others weren't aware of that happened prior to you reaching adulthood and caring about the news? Just because something is a continuation of a trend doesn't mean it isn't somehow "news-worthy". The weather is entirely based on continuing trends over x periods—is there still value in knowing the weather? Of course. This is the weather of business. It's a "sunny day" in Startupville even if it's raining in Fortune500land, which is the counterpoint to the doom-peddling in other headlines.
- KyeRussell 3y agoEvery day, somebody’s born who hasn’t seen The Flintstones. You’re old, not everyone is. Not every article is for you.
- saagarjha 3y agoNot everyone is plugged into the tech world.
- f6v 3y agoNobody has any idea how tech works outside tech bubble. That is to say it’s news for 99% of population.
- Arnt 3y agoThere have been significant layoffs recently. What happens to those people is news, because the layoffs were large enough to be news.
- rsynnott 3y agoI think it is notable if it’s happening in bulk. Now, it’s not a new phenomenon; it has happened before with major waves of tech layoffs. But not often enough that it should be treated as a law of nature.
- dave4420 3y agoNo point in reporting on inflation — it’s happened before. No point in reporting on war — it’s happened before. No point in reporting on a corrupt or lying politician — it’s happened before.
- tcmart14 3y agoCould this contribute to people's nostalgia that the past was so much better? Because they were not really getting all the news. My grandparents will swear kidnappings never happened in the 50s when they were kids. The reality is, they happened but were not reported as they are today. Does this contribute to their view of, "the wold is so much worst today!" Is the reality that, the world only seems worst, but in reality isn't much different? Do we really prefer a world where kidnappings are hardly reported and not have much of a far reaching effect?
- JohnFen 3y agoIndeed. Statistically speaking, in the US, high school students were much more likely to be murdered in the 1980s than now. But just try to convince today's parents of that.
- krishadi 3y agoExactly! The audience is not a standing army but a moving parade. Rehashing something Ogilvy said.
- 6510 3y agoThere is so much stuff happening that to come to the tiny selection you can stack the filters to the roof. The first one would be: What would the people paying our bills like to see? What does our network like? What is our political affiliation? Who and which companies do we like or not like? How much drama or feel good stories does our current audience need? It's so refined there is pretty much no meat left in the sausage. It is an engineering project and you are the raw materials.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deofoo 3y agoI hope the mass layoffs will end up driving growth for the startup market. So many people with great financial stability and experience. I hope...
- christkv 3y agoI thought there was a VC funding crisis? How can they afford to hire so much?
- esjeon 3y agoI guess some may have leftover funds from the pandemic period.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoSometimes those tenured FAANG veterans have a bit of savings.
- hackernewds 3y agoAnd a willingness and ability to risk for these 10x moonshots
- antoniuschan99 3y agoAlso some of these startups could also already profitable and small instead of growing at all costs - in that case not vc funded
- esafak 3y agoThat's more of an issue for growth stage companies, not nascent startups.
- 908B64B197 3y agoWhere else should LPs invest their money?
- JohnFen 3y agoVenture capital is far from the only way to fund new ventures. The majority of new ventures are not VC funded.
- miiiiiike 3y agoIf it's anything like 2011-2015 these former-FAANG employee heavy startups are going to be desiccated once FAANG decides to start hoarding talent again.
- dpflan 3y agoDo you have references for this data? [Also, I’m wondering if FAANG are now more interested in hiring people with AI/ML experience (i.e. competition for the talent of the latest trend and so as to deprive competitors of the talent…)]
- nicenewtemp84 3y agoIf you let your bottom 20% performers go, what are the odds you'll want them back?
- mkr-hn 3y agoA bottom 20% can become a top 1% with more life experience. Humans are versatile.
- esafak 3y agoOr by just moving to a more suitable role.
- nicenewtemp84 3y agoSure. If/once they become that all bets are off.
- uw_rob 3y agoFar be it from me to try to change your mind here, but based on my first hand experience this isn't true. Myself, and all of members of my team in my location, were laid off 2 weeks ago from one of the big 4 tech companies. Within the 4 people on my team one was stack ranked within the top 20% of the org of ~75 engineers earlier this year and another was in the process of being promoted. The other two were new to the team. From a strategic perspective as a company, firing us can be considered trimming the fat, but it isn't a reflection on the quality of the engineers. It's a reflection on the leadership of the engineers and if they believe they will be essential for the operation/growth of the org over the next few years. Before this happened to me I had the same mindset that you had here -- that there was some responsibility the fired engineers had for being fired. I can tell you, from the other side, that just isn't so. The world is bigger than any single person and this stuff happens regardless if you are skilled at your craft or even liked by your coworkers. It's painful right now for everyone who has been laid off, but from a holistic perspective, I agree with this article. It will be interesting to see what all of these people do with their talents.
- KyeRussell 3y agoCue some until-now-insulated Big Tech workers getting a huge dose of culture shock when they see how work is done somewhere without their own money printer.
- rsynnott 3y agoMost people who work in ‘big tech’ have previously worked elsewhere. Having worked both in small (<100 people and sometimes <10 people) startups and now in Big Tech(TM), it’s not necessarily clear to me that one’s better than the other. They’re different, but working in a startup is not clearly _worse_.
- gumballindie 3y agoPersonally i find startups better to work at. Instead of being a cog in a machine that takes years to “approve” what’s actually needed for the task at hand or having some inexperienced “cio” worker dictating what os or kit you can use you actually get to play with modern tech and do fun things. Even as a manager it’s more fun.
- JohnFen 3y agoI'm with you. But this is a matter of personality and preference. It's not that startups are objectively better or worse -- it's that startups have different tradeoffs.
- ghaff 3y agoI've worked at everything from a 20K person company to a 5 person company and there are pros and cons with probably a lot more variance as you get to the smaller end of the scale. And people have different priorities and even a given person can have different priorities and preferences depending upon where they are in life.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsociety 3y ago
- EGreg 3y agoBut where do they find and meet them?
- fmajid 3y agohttps://archive.ph/cxQgH https://archive.ph/cxQgH
- fmajid 3y agoMany are going to start their own startups and the seeds for the next Cambrian explosion are being cast today, just as they were in 2001–2003 or 2008. That said not all Big Tech employees can deal with the hustle required at a startup.
- kbos87 3y agoI’m skeptical that the same patterns we saw in the early 2000s are going to play out again. Last time, tech was in its infancy. There was a small universe of people who understood baseline concepts like getting to product market fit, how to measure and implement growth patterns, etc etc. Today these are practically household concepts, and they have been for years. There aren’t a few hundred other people in SV you are competing against, it’s the rest of the world. On top of that, there’s a tried and true playbook that large tech companies quickly put to use to capture any remotely adjacent areas of product market fit. I’m not saying there won’t be startups - there are today of course - but it also seems like there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on. (Among founders, VCs, and billionaires who made their money in the early 2000s too. It shocks me that many of them haven’t realized that the playbook that made them money in 2008 doesn’t make them special in 2023.) Tech has been professionalized and nothing is nearly as easy as it once was.
- bradhe 3y agoAgreed. The type of employee at big tech today is a lot different than what once was. But given the volume perhaps the output will be similar.
- fmajid 3y agoI think you underestimate the effects of bureaucracy and sclerosis at large companies like Google, and the upcoming crackdown like the EU's DMA and DSA. Just look at how OpenAI basically stole Google's lunch.
- fullshark 3y agoToo early to spike the football over that, OpenAI got outfoxed on Dall-E illustratively and ChatGPT's best chance for monetization remains as a feature for MSFT services, not an independent entity.
- TruthWillHurt 3y agoIf you're a startup that can pay my salary you must have fired me already.
- gigatexal 3y agoAs they should. When big tech lays off staff and principal level engineers it’s at their loss. Let’s see what these new empowered startups can do!
- _vbnz 3y agoAmerican engineers are lucky to earn enough to be able to save up and do stuff like this, like on $200k you can save enough to really try a start-up for a year or two. Whereas in Europe we're lucky to get $80k in the same jobs, and then the state steals half of that :/
- ant6n 3y agoIn France, apparently you can go on unemployment for 2, up to 3 years to start a startup. With up to 80% pay. In Germany you can get 6 months of unemployment insurance when starting a startup out of unemployment. Or get 6 months paid when starting a startup out of Uni. Then you could get various public funding opportunities like a startup bonus (for example 50K public funding for 50K private investment in an innovative company in Berlin).
- asnyder 3y agoNot to mention that in Germany many University students not only get free schooling, but also housing AND a monthly stipend. Essentially UBI for students!
- nxm 3y ago*free=tax payer funded
- FinnKuhn 3y agoDefinitely not really true. Under 15% of students receive BAFÖG [1]. No idea where you got the idea that German students get free housing at many Universities as that couldn't be further from the truth considering that there are only enough rooms for around 10% of all students [2] and those are definietly not free, although pretty cheap. However many struggle to find an Apartment, especially in bigger Cities like Berlin or Munich. [1] https://www.bafoeg-rechner.de/Hintergrund/art-2416-bafoeg-statistik-2019.php https://www.bafoeg-rechner.de/Hintergrund/art-2416-bafoeg-st... [2] https://www.iwd.de/artikel/wohnungsnot-der-studenten-verschaerft-sich-weiter-499592/ https://www.iwd.de/artikel/wohnungsnot-der-studenten-verscha...
- Demoloto 3y agoThen move if you don't like a social government... You do understand that USA rich people living of the life's of the poor? No proper health care etc for people cleaning their flats or flipping their burgers...
- arp242 3y agoThis is really a different issue; tech salaries in parts of the US really are substantially higher, and that has fairly little to do with the differences in government policies in the areas you mentioned.
- choeger 3y agoIn Germany, it's not the social system per se but it's aoparent utter ineffectiveness. We're paying more and more every year but the state/public system seems to fail everywhere and worse so than the year before. It's like the money is completely sucked up by some unproductive black hole. And no, it's not because of reduced taxation from rich to working class, or missing taxes on property or some other policy. These policies didn't change that much in the last decade or two. Yet throughout the last decade the state and social security systems had record income, record levels of employment and managed to run down pretty much every part of the public system from education, over healthcare to defense. The money just vanished. I am very much convinced that Germany as a whole doesn't have an income problem, but a spending problem.
- M3L0NM4N 3y agoThat is, in my opinion, by far the strongest argument for lower taxes. The money we (the US) do spend in education/healthcare/infrastructure is already poorly utilized, why would we want to spend more and end up like that? To simplify it dramatically with an example, I'd rather pay $3 on the toll road and $50k for a surgery myself than pay $10 in taxes towards the road and $100k in taxes towards the healthcare system but receive both of them for "free". I understand the advantages of a social safety net, I do. But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.
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- PUSH_AX 3y agoAm I missing something or is this literally "Displaced workers get new jobs"?
- revlolz 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, flamebait, and/or snark? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Your other comments are good but the ones like that are destructive of the purpose here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit to heart, we'd be grateful.
- dentemple 3y ago"Displaced workers get new jobs at the only companies still hiring."
- egourlao 3y agoI mean yeah, that's one way to spin it. But it's interesting to observe the dynamics in the work force and how that benefits some smaller companies that were having a hard time hiring before.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI used to be a hiring manager in robotics. It was _impossible_ to find good workers. Now, I am a laid off roboticist who found I had my pick of jobs at smaller companies who were suffering from big-tech's vacuum hiring policy. It was always just moat-making, until it got too expensive.
- bilsbie 3y agoI don’t understand what the opportunities for startups are these days. Anyone know? I feel like the world doesn’t need more saas companies or otherwise you’re doing a chatgpt api company.
- boondoggle16 3y agoA lot of b2b opportunities. Yes, more saas companies are needed, in niche markets. Lots more saas companies, lots more value to build.
- throwaw12 3y agoany examples? At this point, it seems everything has been already build (saying as a person who only worked in IT and don't have visibility on other industries, but would like to get some)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- unity1001 3y agoEverything was already built in 2005. It turned out that the more things are already built, the more things people build, and that requires building even more things on top of it...
- esafak 3y agoAre you saying you think we are living in the best possible world and you see nothing to improve? Many people feel otherwise, and they are the ones launching companies.
- ghaff 3y agoI think that's probably right. A ton of B2B opportunities in market niches that aren't well-served today. (Or could be served better.) I assume a lot of people would consider that boring but a well-targeted B2B coming from people who really understand the market space has a lot better odds than becoming the next B2C company that everyone is talking about.