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I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences. I have way too many “life

I cannot speak for layoffs in all industries ever, but I agree with your assessment of layoffs in big tech from personal experiences. I have way too many “lifer” friends in big tech who are deadly scared of layoffs and job hopping. They are also the ones who rarely got promoted and havent had a significant pay bump pretty much ever. On another hand, half my team at a big tech company got laid off back at the start of 2023. 4 months later, I caught up with them over drinks, and the results were rather interesting. They all got around 4-6mo worth of severance pay, spent 2-3 months just skiing/traveling/hiking/vacationing, then 1 month or so interviewing, and then starting their new jobs shortly after. All seemed rather happy, both with their new positions/pay (which had a significant paybump) and, essentially, paid vacation break they took right before. It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically averse to and dread the interview process.

nquicksherlock 2y ago
I don't think that this narrative works in the current job environment. But nice try.
lumost 2y ago
Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again. Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point that passing requires at least one through of the question before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20 minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at least once in around 8 weeks of 40 hour weeks. Or 6 weeks at 60 hours. Not a pleasant way to spend two months - but not impractical. I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point It filters out the complete frauds. Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing. For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking. A friend of mine was looking at getting a FAANG job. He was worried about the leetcode tests. I suggested he spend a month going through the leetcode books studying them - that the return on his time investment doing that will be one of the best ROIs he's ever done. He did, and got the job. (Although the LC was just a first gate one had to go through to get to the real job interview.) Personally, I have no idea how I'd do on an LC test without prep. But I don't have a problem with studying it to get a top job.
  - indigodaddy 2y ago
    I get that perhaps you were using the proverbial "I" in your last sentence as an example of something everyone should be willing to do in/for their career, but does someone of your stature even need a real interview, much less a LC test, to obtain a top job? It's kind of funny imagining a young tech bro interviewing you, tbh.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      It's an interesting question. I'll try to answer. I generally do not use clever algorithms in my code. I just use straightforward ones. Rarely, I might need a better one and go looking for it (like a better hash algorithm). I rarely use a data structure more complicated than an array, list, binary tree, hash, or single inheritance. What I have, though, is decades of experience with what works and what doesn't work. (My favorite whipping boy is macros. Macros look like they are great productivity boosters. It takes about 10 years to realize that macros are a never-ending source of confusion, they just confuse and obfuscate every code base that uses them. I could go on about this! ...) I have become pretty good at writing modules that minimize dependencies, and pretty good at the user interface design of a language. But still, if the job wanted a leetcode test, I'd take it, no problem. I'd study up first, though. If a young tech bro was interviewing me, I'd suggest he show me his best code, and I'd do a review of it :-) The point of that would not be to humilate him, but to demonstrate the value I can bring to improving code quality. If I was being interviewed for a job writing a faster divide routine (the ones I wrote were shift-subtract, slower but bulletproof), a better random number generator, a cryptographically secure hash function, a tighter compression algorithm, a faster sort, I'm not the right guy for that.
      - indigodaddy 2y ago
        Thanks for that very interesting and insightful feedback!
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        P.S. I was once asked to review the code of a famous programmer I won't name. I was shocked to discover that the large codebase had 3 different implementations of bubblesort in it. I replaced them all with a call to qsort(). He asked me how I managed to speed it up :-/ We all have our blind spots. I do, too.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Just do what everyone is doing today and use those AI tools for cheating. There’s a whole industry of invisible and hard to detect leetcode AI cheating tools. Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using them aggressively.
- mym1990 2y ago
  I definitely feel that first part. I landed in a nice company in SF about 8 years ago and am still here. The culture has changed a lot but I often find myself doubting whether I could repeat the whole thing or if I got lucky. (The work is fine, and the company is one of the good ones I feel, so no real qualms there).
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  I agree, but I look at it like trying out for an athletic team. Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays, doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on the team in the first place you have to prove your general fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile. You may not be able to do that again easily right away once you've been on the team for a while because you don't practice running for pure time at that distance, but it's a level of fitness you should be easily able to obtain again if you had to, and it's a very useful benchmark to a scout. When you're laid off, it's time to start doing that "roadwork" again. It will be a bit hard at first in practice, but if you've been a solid contributor, you should be able to get fit enough again to prove that.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Unlike, you know, proving that by the fact my previous employer was happy to retain me for 10 plus years?
    - lr4444lr 2y ago
      You've never worked at a place where someone was an incompetent hanger-on who was an expert at self promotion and stealing credit? Or hired someone like that accidentally? Notwithstanding, I have long argued that a non-profit credentialing body for SWEs offering cerification exams (which also required regular updates) akin to passing the bar or USMLE could go a long way to solving this problem. It would come with other drawbacks, perhaps not worth it, but we have to accept that constant tech interviews is the price we pay for refusal to standardize and professionalize.
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        > You've never worked at a place where someone was an incompetent hanger-on who was an expert at self promotion and stealing credit? Or hired someone like that accidentally? Thinking back on it. Not really. I’ve had a few people be outright incompetent, but I’ve never been at risk of them stealing the credit for stuff. The closest I’ve come is people that should probably be fired, but manage to barely hold on by being experts at self promotion.
- bbqfog 2y ago
  This is a persistent myth in our industry. If you're a good manager, you can tell within minutes if someone is "for real", if you can't, you aren't qualified to be hiring people. Have you even looked at their GitHub?
  - guappa 2y ago
    > Have you even looked at their GitHub? Lol, considering most big projects are not on github, you're just showing your own lack of clue.
    - bbqfog 2y ago
      Great, I'll continue my "lack of a clue" and keep hiring the best engineers in the world.
      - guappa 2y ago
        If your definition for "best engineer in the world" is "hired by you"… sure. I'm just not sure anyone else in the world would agree with this definition :)
        bbqfog 2y ago
        My definition of "best engineers in the world" are people that have wildly successful GitHub accounts. I'm very glad I'm in an industry with losers that don't know how to compete. It's like playing on easy mode!
        guappa 2y ago
        Lol. Don't worry "losers that don't know how to compete" have better things to do than to work with jackasses like you. :)
munificent 2y ago
A few months of skiing sounds nice, but not as nice as the profound pleasure of working on a team of people I've know and cared about for over a decade. You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me, that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I have real relationships with my coworkers.
- mym1990 2y ago
  This is ultimately what some of the risk comes down to: you invest time(a decade is a long time!) into creating meaningful relationships at work and one day you come in to have your key card de-activated and some corporate speak as to why. There are certainly people working on truly meaningful projects out there, with teams they trust and adore...but for most of the workforce, even in tech, its just work and any fun had at work is a great cherry on top.
  - andrewlgood 2y ago
    How is this different than the manager who has spent years developing an employee - making sure they are getting the experiences they need to build a better career, hiring the right people to complement the team, fighting for bonuses and pay raises - only to have them quit to join the next company for a 10% raise. It is difficult to build a long-term culture when society seems to expect job hopping to rapidly advance a career. On a related note, it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      I've never seen people leaving great jobs for a 10% raise. It's always something else: a much bigger benefit, or a significant downside of the current job, which are not widely publicized. Instead, I've seen people going to a lower-paying position for a more interesting job, a chance to learn new hot thing hands-on, a different set of responsibilities, etc.
      - al_borland 2y ago
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
This story is changing. There is now an oversaturation of us ex-BigCo people in the market. I quit Google before the layoffs, after being there for 10 years and sick of it. The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place. Then my ex-coworkers started getting laid off and things began to shift. Now I know people I used to work with who have been without work for many months and having a hard time getting interviews. Granted, I'm not in the Bay Area, so. But the market is saturated.
- screye 2y ago
  Yep, a sabbatical is taken to mean laid off and low performer. Have to sign an offer before leaving the old one.
- ltbarcly3 2y ago
  Its not that the market is saturated, its that a lot of incompetent ex googlers are interviewing now. People usually have a pretty good idea they can't do their job. They find a niche where a manager is not paying attention, or they can obfuscate and take credit for others work, etc. These people don't usually job hop, the interviews are way too hard and then they are very unlikely to find another long term safe niche to hide in. So previously seeing google on a resume correlated highly with strong competence. A lot of people laid off from google are complete incompetents. A lot were hard working geniuses too, but it doesn't take many interviews where a exgoogler is completely useless to spoil the brand. The reputation for googlers on the market right now is very bad, and it will keep getting worse as the group of ex googlers who are basically unemployable keep interviewing over and over and over.
  - shagie 2y ago
    There's also the "we can only pay a third of what Google paid you..." and given two candidates that interview equally well, one is former Google and appeared to be making $300k and another is from somewhere where they were making $70k before... I'd argue for the $70k person. They are less likely to have experienced lifestyle inflation and looking at this position as a "slumming it until they can get a job making $300k+ again." It further complicates the issue that most companies don't have Google scale problems and don't have the engineering culture for a Google scale solution. There are several factors working against even not incompetent former Google employees - especially if their experience is entirely within Big Tech. A bit ago a former Tesla person was in the set of interviews and it became clear that they wanted to make the organization that was considering hiring them into a copy of how Tesla works... and that wasn't something that was going to be doable. The post interview discussion was "this person is going to try to make us into a copy of Tesla for six months, and then leave shortly after they realize that we weren't a place that could become another Tesla." Big Tech experience may be a positive signal for getting hired at other Big Tech companies... but it can be a negative signal at a company that isn't trying hiring for an organization that can't become a Big Tech company - especially if that is the only thing that is known. Hiring isn't necessarily picking the "best" person for the role, but rather the least risky. Former Big Tech employees are often riskier than other candidates given their lifestyle expectations and the mismatch of the engineering cultures.
tayo42 2y ago
I don't get how people get jobs so easily. It took me like 8 months and it was extremely stressful.
- ltbarcly3 2y ago
  They have connections from previous jobs who will vouch for them.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend". I don't have any other power. There is no "Skip the interview, I vouch for him!" button that I can push.
    - yodsanklai 2y ago
      That's how it works in my company too. The recruitment teams barely work with the engineering teams themselves. You may know a very good fit for the team, possibly even a previous member/intern of that team, and you won't be sure you can put the person into the recruitment loop. And then they'll need to pass the interviews...
      - grandempire 2y ago
        And at the end of the day the HR work for your VP. And your VP needs people to do things, and if he hears you are a good person and you are available it will happen. HR is just a layer of process. Make them happy in regards to the things they care about.
    - tmh88j 2y ago
      > How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend I haven't worked for any massive companies with thousands of employees where there might be a lot of bureaucracy, but the few I've worked for ranged from ~100-700 and it was pretty easy to get interviews for referrals. One of my employers encouraged referrals and offered bonuses if it led to a hire.
screye 2y ago
Has to do with H1b visas. Post layoff, a person on H1B has 2 months to sign a new job offer or they must leave the country. Majority of Indian and Chinese H1bs do not have green cards, and are the main group that suffers. Some of these folks are well into their 30s, with kids and houses in the US.
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  I’m familiar with H1b visas. Yes it’s an irritating situation for an immigrant to be in but it’s not as bad as you make it out to be. If you have good life savings, you can convert to tourist visa, and stay in the country for an additional 6 months and a higher hassle when restarting your career. You can leave the country, and get back as long as your H1b is still valid. If your spouse is working, you can be convert to being a dependent on them with H4 visas. At the end of the day I think the government should not let people end up in such a situation. After the 6 year H1b deadline, I would prefer if the government just sends a notice to those that it thinks can immigrate long term and send the rest back. At least then we won’t have the ridiculous situation of upending families and children who have started schooling just because their parents lost a job.
- youcanalwaysgo 2y ago
  [flagged]
- modo_mario 2y ago
  I'm kind of curious how they have houses in the US. I'm from Europe but I would have kind of assumed that banks aren't willing to lend to someone without residency pinned down or would only do so at extortionate rates. I also kind of assume most wouldn't be able to pay for a house outright.
  - screye 2y ago
    In the US, it's common for folks to sell a house with a partially paid loan. Makes real-estate a liquid asset and that reduces risk. Further, it's low risk for the bank because they can always repossess the house if something goes wrong. A resident who falls on hard times can missa lot of payments before repossession can be forced. An H1b on hard times has 2 months to leave the country. This means at worst, they'll miss 1 payment before they're forced to sell the house. Much lower risk for the bank. If you pay your monthly installments and have solid financial health (good credit score, high income, paid your taxes) then you'll get a standard deal. H1b Indians are on 30-50 yr queues for green card. Buying houses without residency is the norm, not the exception.
plussed_reader 2y ago
What was the age range of the referred 2023 sample of workers?
giantg2 2y ago
Yeah, I make the same adjusted for inflation that I did when I got my last/only promotion 10 years ago. I have grey hair, a disability, and a family that relies on the health insurance. Switching or being laid off is a risky proposition for me. It sounds like all your examples are young, childless people (who else could take a month off to go vacationing?). Life is much harder for some of us.
- andrewlgood 2y ago
  I understand the trade offs you mention. I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” You have chosen a different payoff - your family, certainty of health insurance, etc. You get the benefits that children bring and the joy of being a parent. The “young, childless people” have made a different choice - more freedom in employment decisions but no joy from children. Everyone has their own cost/benefit analyses on these issues. That is life.
  - margalabargala 2y ago
    Your good health is an invisible crown that can only be seen by those who do not wear it.
    - hakaneskici 2y ago
      Wisdom speaks. Hidden gem of this thread.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      What a great saying. I feel this in my very core. Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens... I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health. I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of. And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.
gwbas1c 2y ago
I stayed in the same job for nearly a decade, it got really interesting in the second half; in a way that it never would have gotten if I had job hopped every 3 to 5 years. That being said, once I got bored in the job, I sniffed out that the parent company wanted to lay a few people off, and hinted that I was open to it. It worked out well for me. I was just too busy in my personal life to look for a job on the side, and honestly I didn't want to walk away halfway through a project.
- stogot 2y ago
  How do you bring up that you want to be laid off?
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    Situation: My boss was given a month notice about getting laid off. He told me that he believed the department head was told to cut costs dramatically. Situation, part 2: All tech products have a life cycle. At some point they go into maintenance mode where there's no active development of new features. Situation, part 3: Although we were a market leader in our niche, we just couldn't compete with what was coming from Microsoft. Thus, I had a 1-1 with the department head. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I probably alluded to wondering what I was going to do when the feature I was working on was complete, and hinting that, after working on this product for a decade, I was getting kind of bored. The package was confidential, but given that my last day of work was February 29, 2020, I made out rather well. :)
ryandrake 2y ago
Those "lifer" friends may just be later in their career, though. Your ability to significantly advance your compensation depends on how early in your career you are. You will plateau at some point, but early on it makes a lot of sense to job hop. My first job hop was for +66% comp increase. My next was for about +25%, next for +15% or so. Eventually you hit a ceiling. After 30 years in the industry, my last job change was probably about +0.05%. I expect if I have to interview again, it's a toss up whether I'd get a higher or lower offer.
yodsanklai 2y ago
Sure, maybe that's how people in their 30s living in NYC or bay area feel about layoffs. But when you're older, have a family, and live in an area with a less dynamic job market, you may see things differently.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them. Those who are naturally monogamous would be stressed in a game like that. Constantly uprooting is a stressful lifestyle and can truly be torture (as evidenced by constant anxiety, no way to be). I can promise you people who are job hopping are hopping around other things in life (friends, family, relationships, projects, interests, roles, identities). It's a whole way of being. Edit: This is not a judgement, but if you felt like it was, I very much want to hear about it.
  - darkwater 2y ago
    > Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them. Yes, buuut many will be players from 25 to 35 (with some degree of flexibility), that's why it's still an age thing. Yes, there are persons that are players for life, sure. But IME they are a minority. Or maybe I'm just projecting, who knows?
  - neumann 2y ago
    Doesn't have to be an age thing, but it often is an age thing. Because lots of us were carefree before dependents and a mortgage as well. Unexpected or deliberate change was an opportunity, a challenge, a stimulant! Job hopping (or hopping around relationships) when young can be about exploring the world, finding yourself and your values and isn't inherently bad. Then you discover what you are good at doing and that you like doing and dedicating time to (or perhaps another person with whom you want to spend all your time) and your priorities change. Then you might have kids and the work becomes more about financial security for the family then about your personal growth. And so you aren't looking at layoffs and unexpected change as opportunity because you are happy with what you've got. It just often is an age or 'stage of life' thing for many people.
mschuster91 2y ago
> It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically averse to and dread the interview process. Not helped by the fact a lot of interview processes - unless you can rely on word-of-mouth and the corporate structure allows for shortcuts - are byzantine, maddening and/or don't have much relations to the work one will be doing afterwards. No fuck you I'm in for a sysop/cloud position, I won't waste my time doing Fizzbuzz. Give me a laptop with internet and an actual work task if you want to judge my competence.
j7ake 2y ago
Nobody on your team had kids or dependents?
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Yeah, that was the situation until 2023. This market is absolutely brutal and there's no guarantee of an offer in 6+ months, even for roles you'd get in a month. I wanted to be a "lifer" (you don't build expertise jumping jobs every 2 years) but I more or less knew going into games that that was never going to truly be the case. But this bad market only amplifies the issues.
joquarky 2y ago
I have pretty severe social anxiety and this industry was a refuge for me. The added social and political mental load that has crept in over the past decade or so has effectively pushed me to burnout. And I was a happy "lifer" making subpar salary writing government software. I got to work in a large dark office with other nerds and joked about esoteric things. But once software development became formalized, homogenized, and micromanaged, I couldn't conform.

nquicksherlock 2y ago

I don't think that this narrative works in the current job environment. But nice try.

lumost 2y ago

Big tech interviews tend to be daunting. Many long term employees lose the skill, and fear the impact of work interruption on their resume as well as their ability to get in again. Anecdotally, the LC bar for many firms has risen to the point that passing requires at least one through of the question before. If you Time bound your practice per question to 20 minutes, this means that you can solve most LC problems at least once in around 8 weeks of 40 hour weeks. Or 6 weeks at 60 hours. Not a pleasant way to spend two months - but not impractical. I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point.

WalterBright 2y ago
> I'm unclear what employers are deriving from this exercise at this point It filters out the complete frauds. Yes, there are people who know all the right things to say in a job interview, but cannot code at all. If you hire one of them, it takes a bit to find out they cannot code, and a bit longer to fire them, so you're out $$$$ paying their salaries for nothing. For example, a recruiter I know will ask a tech candidate "what is 20% of 20,000?" A significant percentage cannot answer the question. Some even cry. It's shocking. A friend of mine was looking at getting a FAANG job. He was worried about the leetcode tests. I suggested he spend a month going through the leetcode books studying them - that the return on his time investment doing that will be one of the best ROIs he's ever done. He did, and got the job. (Although the LC was just a first gate one had to go through to get to the real job interview.) Personally, I have no idea how I'd do on an LC test without prep. But I don't have a problem with studying it to get a top job.
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  I get that perhaps you were using the proverbial "I" in your last sentence as an example of something everyone should be willing to do in/for their career, but does someone of your stature even need a real interview, much less a LC test, to obtain a top job? It's kind of funny imagining a young tech bro interviewing you, tbh.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    It's an interesting question. I'll try to answer. I generally do not use clever algorithms in my code. I just use straightforward ones. Rarely, I might need a better one and go looking for it (like a better hash algorithm). I rarely use a data structure more complicated than an array, list, binary tree, hash, or single inheritance. What I have, though, is decades of experience with what works and what doesn't work. (My favorite whipping boy is macros. Macros look like they are great productivity boosters. It takes about 10 years to realize that macros are a never-ending source of confusion, they just confuse and obfuscate every code base that uses them. I could go on about this! ...) I have become pretty good at writing modules that minimize dependencies, and pretty good at the user interface design of a language. But still, if the job wanted a leetcode test, I'd take it, no problem. I'd study up first, though. If a young tech bro was interviewing me, I'd suggest he show me his best code, and I'd do a review of it :-) The point of that would not be to humilate him, but to demonstrate the value I can bring to improving code quality. If I was being interviewed for a job writing a faster divide routine (the ones I wrote were shift-subtract, slower but bulletproof), a better random number generator, a cryptographically secure hash function, a tighter compression algorithm, a faster sort, I'm not the right guy for that.
    - indigodaddy 2y ago
      Thanks for that very interesting and insightful feedback!
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      P.S. I was once asked to review the code of a famous programmer I won't name. I was shocked to discover that the large codebase had 3 different implementations of bubblesort in it. I replaced them all with a call to qsort(). He asked me how I managed to speed it up :-/ We all have our blind spots. I do, too.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Just do what everyone is doing today and use those AI tools for cheating. There’s a whole industry of invisible and hard to detect leetcode AI cheating tools. Glad they exist and I fully support all candidates using them aggressively.
mym1990 2y ago
I definitely feel that first part. I landed in a nice company in SF about 8 years ago and am still here. The culture has changed a lot but I often find myself doubting whether I could repeat the whole thing or if I got lucky. (The work is fine, and the company is one of the good ones I feel, so no real qualms there).
lr4444lr 2y ago
I agree, but I look at it like trying out for an athletic team. Once you're on the team, you are mostly practicing plays, doing clinics, and simulating competition, but to get on the team in the first place you have to prove your general fitness by running, say, a 6 minute mile. You may not be able to do that again easily right away once you've been on the team for a while because you don't practice running for pure time at that distance, but it's a level of fitness you should be easily able to obtain again if you had to, and it's a very useful benchmark to a scout. When you're laid off, it's time to start doing that "roadwork" again. It will be a bit hard at first in practice, but if you've been a solid contributor, you should be able to get fit enough again to prove that.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Unlike, you know, proving that by the fact my previous employer was happy to retain me for 10 plus years?
  - lr4444lr 2y ago
    You've never worked at a place where someone was an incompetent hanger-on who was an expert at self promotion and stealing credit? Or hired someone like that accidentally? Notwithstanding, I have long argued that a non-profit credentialing body for SWEs offering cerification exams (which also required regular updates) akin to passing the bar or USMLE could go a long way to solving this problem. It would come with other drawbacks, perhaps not worth it, but we have to accept that constant tech interviews is the price we pay for refusal to standardize and professionalize.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      > You've never worked at a place where someone was an incompetent hanger-on who was an expert at self promotion and stealing credit? Or hired someone like that accidentally? Thinking back on it. Not really. I’ve had a few people be outright incompetent, but I’ve never been at risk of them stealing the credit for stuff. The closest I’ve come is people that should probably be fired, but manage to barely hold on by being experts at self promotion.
bbqfog 2y ago
This is a persistent myth in our industry. If you're a good manager, you can tell within minutes if someone is "for real", if you can't, you aren't qualified to be hiring people. Have you even looked at their GitHub?
- guappa 2y ago
  > Have you even looked at their GitHub? Lol, considering most big projects are not on github, you're just showing your own lack of clue.
  - bbqfog 2y ago
    Great, I'll continue my "lack of a clue" and keep hiring the best engineers in the world.
    - guappa 2y ago
      If your definition for "best engineer in the world" is "hired by you"… sure. I'm just not sure anyone else in the world would agree with this definition :)
      - bbqfog 2y ago
        My definition of "best engineers in the world" are people that have wildly successful GitHub accounts. I'm very glad I'm in an industry with losers that don't know how to compete. It's like playing on easy mode!
        guappa 2y ago
        Lol. Don't worry "losers that don't know how to compete" have better things to do than to work with jackasses like you. :)

munificent 2y ago

A few months of skiing sounds nice, but not as nice as the profound pleasure of working on a team of people I've know and cared about for over a decade. You're going to spend half your waking life at work. For me, that's too much time to not want to do so at a place where I have real relationships with my coworkers.

mym1990 2y ago
This is ultimately what some of the risk comes down to: you invest time(a decade is a long time!) into creating meaningful relationships at work and one day you come in to have your key card de-activated and some corporate speak as to why. There are certainly people working on truly meaningful projects out there, with teams they trust and adore...but for most of the workforce, even in tech, its just work and any fun had at work is a great cherry on top.
- andrewlgood 2y ago
  How is this different than the manager who has spent years developing an employee - making sure they are getting the experiences they need to build a better career, hiring the right people to complement the team, fighting for bonuses and pay raises - only to have them quit to join the next company for a 10% raise. It is difficult to build a long-term culture when society seems to expect job hopping to rapidly advance a career. On a related note, it is odd that HN comments rarely seem to include a manager’s perspective.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    I've never seen people leaving great jobs for a 10% raise. It's always something else: a much bigger benefit, or a significant downside of the current job, which are not widely publicized. Instead, I've seen people going to a lower-paying position for a more interesting job, a chance to learn new hot thing hands-on, a different set of responsibilities, etc.
    - al_borland 2y ago

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

This story is changing. There is now an oversaturation of us ex-BigCo people in the market. I quit Google before the layoffs, after being there for 10 years and sick of it. The first year was serious ego boost, having Google on the resume opened doors all over the place. Then my ex-coworkers started getting laid off and things began to shift. Now I know people I used to work with who have been without work for many months and having a hard time getting interviews. Granted, I'm not in the Bay Area, so. But the market is saturated.

screye 2y ago
Yep, a sabbatical is taken to mean laid off and low performer. Have to sign an offer before leaving the old one.
ltbarcly3 2y ago
Its not that the market is saturated, its that a lot of incompetent ex googlers are interviewing now. People usually have a pretty good idea they can't do their job. They find a niche where a manager is not paying attention, or they can obfuscate and take credit for others work, etc. These people don't usually job hop, the interviews are way too hard and then they are very unlikely to find another long term safe niche to hide in. So previously seeing google on a resume correlated highly with strong competence. A lot of people laid off from google are complete incompetents. A lot were hard working geniuses too, but it doesn't take many interviews where a exgoogler is completely useless to spoil the brand. The reputation for googlers on the market right now is very bad, and it will keep getting worse as the group of ex googlers who are basically unemployable keep interviewing over and over and over.
- shagie 2y ago
  There's also the "we can only pay a third of what Google paid you..." and given two candidates that interview equally well, one is former Google and appeared to be making $300k and another is from somewhere where they were making $70k before... I'd argue for the $70k person. They are less likely to have experienced lifestyle inflation and looking at this position as a "slumming it until they can get a job making $300k+ again." It further complicates the issue that most companies don't have Google scale problems and don't have the engineering culture for a Google scale solution. There are several factors working against even not incompetent former Google employees - especially if their experience is entirely within Big Tech. A bit ago a former Tesla person was in the set of interviews and it became clear that they wanted to make the organization that was considering hiring them into a copy of how Tesla works... and that wasn't something that was going to be doable. The post interview discussion was "this person is going to try to make us into a copy of Tesla for six months, and then leave shortly after they realize that we weren't a place that could become another Tesla." Big Tech experience may be a positive signal for getting hired at other Big Tech companies... but it can be a negative signal at a company that isn't trying hiring for an organization that can't become a Big Tech company - especially if that is the only thing that is known. Hiring isn't necessarily picking the "best" person for the role, but rather the least risky. Former Big Tech employees are often riskier than other candidates given their lifestyle expectations and the mismatch of the engineering cultures.

tayo42 2y ago

I don't get how people get jobs so easily. It took me like 8 months and it was extremely stressful.

ltbarcly3 2y ago
They have connections from previous jobs who will vouch for them.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend". I don't have any other power. There is no "Skip the interview, I vouch for him!" button that I can push.
  - yodsanklai 2y ago
    That's how it works in my company too. The recruitment teams barely work with the engineering teams themselves. You may know a very good fit for the team, possibly even a previous member/intern of that team, and you won't be sure you can put the person into the recruitment loop. And then they'll need to pass the interviews...
    - grandempire 2y ago
      And at the end of the day the HR work for your VP. And your VP needs people to do things, and if he hears you are a good person and you are available it will happen. HR is just a layer of process. Make them happy in regards to the things they care about.
  - tmh88j 2y ago
    > How does this work, though? Every company I've worked for has an HR system, and resumes flow through it, and there's a set process. If I have worked with a candidate in the past and highly recommend them, all I can do is submit their resume into the great void and check a box "Recommend I haven't worked for any massive companies with thousands of employees where there might be a lot of bureaucracy, but the few I've worked for ranged from ~100-700 and it was pretty easy to get interviews for referrals. One of my employers encouraged referrals and offered bonuses if it led to a hire.

screye 2y ago

Has to do with H1b visas. Post layoff, a person on H1B has 2 months to sign a new job offer or they must leave the country. Majority of Indian and Chinese H1bs do not have green cards, and are the main group that suffers. Some of these folks are well into their 30s, with kids and houses in the US.

sashank_1509 2y ago
I’m familiar with H1b visas. Yes it’s an irritating situation for an immigrant to be in but it’s not as bad as you make it out to be. If you have good life savings, you can convert to tourist visa, and stay in the country for an additional 6 months and a higher hassle when restarting your career. You can leave the country, and get back as long as your H1b is still valid. If your spouse is working, you can be convert to being a dependent on them with H4 visas. At the end of the day I think the government should not let people end up in such a situation. After the 6 year H1b deadline, I would prefer if the government just sends a notice to those that it thinks can immigrate long term and send the rest back. At least then we won’t have the ridiculous situation of upending families and children who have started schooling just because their parents lost a job.
youcanalwaysgo 2y ago
[flagged]
modo_mario 2y ago
I'm kind of curious how they have houses in the US. I'm from Europe but I would have kind of assumed that banks aren't willing to lend to someone without residency pinned down or would only do so at extortionate rates. I also kind of assume most wouldn't be able to pay for a house outright.
- screye 2y ago
  In the US, it's common for folks to sell a house with a partially paid loan. Makes real-estate a liquid asset and that reduces risk. Further, it's low risk for the bank because they can always repossess the house if something goes wrong. A resident who falls on hard times can missa lot of payments before repossession can be forced. An H1b on hard times has 2 months to leave the country. This means at worst, they'll miss 1 payment before they're forced to sell the house. Much lower risk for the bank. If you pay your monthly installments and have solid financial health (good credit score, high income, paid your taxes) then you'll get a standard deal. H1b Indians are on 30-50 yr queues for green card. Buying houses without residency is the norm, not the exception.

plussed_reader 2y ago

What was the age range of the referred 2023 sample of workers?

giantg2 2y ago

Yeah, I make the same adjusted for inflation that I did when I got my last/only promotion 10 years ago. I have grey hair, a disability, and a family that relies on the health insurance. Switching or being laid off is a risky proposition for me. It sounds like all your examples are young, childless people (who else could take a month off to go vacationing?). Life is much harder for some of us.

andrewlgood 2y ago
I understand the trade offs you mention. I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” You have chosen a different payoff - your family, certainty of health insurance, etc. You get the benefits that children bring and the joy of being a parent. The “young, childless people” have made a different choice - more freedom in employment decisions but no joy from children. Everyone has their own cost/benefit analyses on these issues. That is life.
- margalabargala 2y ago
  Your good health is an invisible crown that can only be seen by those who do not wear it.
  - hakaneskici 2y ago
    Wisdom speaks. Hidden gem of this thread.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    What a great saying. I feel this in my very core. Dealing with poverty in my youth, homeless at 16, no parents to help me, debilitating ADHD, tourettic OCD, bipolar type II, CPTSD from 10 years of intense childhood physical/emotional abuse, my full-ride college scholarships illegally stolen from me by a high school who knew I was homeless and had no recourse and allowed a teacher to illegally modify my grades out of pure spite, malnourished, intense, crippling sciatica, fused lumbar discs, possible fibromyalgia, and then developing excruciating daily pains and physical disability which greatly impacted my life and sometimes made me suicidal, which turned out to be an autoimmune disorder that took 10 years for doctors to figure out... an extremely intense case of gout developing since my teens... I just keep pushing on but every day I see people who take so much for granted, and who are so ready to pass judgement without appreciating the basic privilege of good health. I've had to deal with so much struggle that the average person wouldn't even want to take the time to hear all of it much less believe it, once someone momentarily realizes that they'd have it comparatively easy compared to others, they often get defensive as they begin to realize that their life doesn't have nearly as many barriers as they've convinced themselves, and they have to come to terms with not applying themselves harder. It's easier for them to be dismissive and tell me, "all your problems would go away if you worked out more" or tell me to get on a keto diet, or whatever have you, as if I haven't tried every single thing I can think of. And the insane thing is I am still quite privileged compared to some people in war-torn countries, even if they are able to move around without swallowing a truckload of ibuprofen. Reminding myself of that is a source of strength and determination to keep moving forward.

gwbas1c 2y ago

I stayed in the same job for nearly a decade, it got really interesting in the second half; in a way that it never would have gotten if I had job hopped every 3 to 5 years. That being said, once I got bored in the job, I sniffed out that the parent company wanted to lay a few people off, and hinted that I was open to it. It worked out well for me. I was just too busy in my personal life to look for a job on the side, and honestly I didn't want to walk away halfway through a project.

stogot 2y ago
How do you bring up that you want to be laid off?
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  Situation: My boss was given a month notice about getting laid off. He told me that he believed the department head was told to cut costs dramatically. Situation, part 2: All tech products have a life cycle. At some point they go into maintenance mode where there's no active development of new features. Situation, part 3: Although we were a market leader in our niche, we just couldn't compete with what was coming from Microsoft. Thus, I had a 1-1 with the department head. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I probably alluded to wondering what I was going to do when the feature I was working on was complete, and hinting that, after working on this product for a decade, I was getting kind of bored. The package was confidential, but given that my last day of work was February 29, 2020, I made out rather well. :)

ryandrake 2y ago

Those "lifer" friends may just be later in their career, though. Your ability to significantly advance your compensation depends on how early in your career you are. You will plateau at some point, but early on it makes a lot of sense to job hop. My first job hop was for +66% comp increase. My next was for about +25%, next for +15% or so. Eventually you hit a ceiling. After 30 years in the industry, my last job change was probably about +0.05%. I expect if I have to interview again, it's a toss up whether I'd get a higher or lower offer.

yodsanklai 2y ago

Sure, maybe that's how people in their 30s living in NYC or bay area feel about layoffs. But when you're older, have a family, and live in an area with a less dynamic job market, you may see things differently.

bloomingkales 2y ago
Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them. Those who are naturally monogamous would be stressed in a game like that. Constantly uprooting is a stressful lifestyle and can truly be torture (as evidenced by constant anxiety, no way to be). I can promise you people who are job hopping are hopping around other things in life (friends, family, relationships, projects, interests, roles, identities). It's a whole way of being. Edit: This is not a judgement, but if you felt like it was, I very much want to hear about it.
- darkwater 2y ago
  > Why does it have to be an age thing? Some men and women are players and the game is the game to them. Yes, buuut many will be players from 25 to 35 (with some degree of flexibility), that's why it's still an age thing. Yes, there are persons that are players for life, sure. But IME they are a minority. Or maybe I'm just projecting, who knows?
- neumann 2y ago
  Doesn't have to be an age thing, but it often is an age thing. Because lots of us were carefree before dependents and a mortgage as well. Unexpected or deliberate change was an opportunity, a challenge, a stimulant! Job hopping (or hopping around relationships) when young can be about exploring the world, finding yourself and your values and isn't inherently bad. Then you discover what you are good at doing and that you like doing and dedicating time to (or perhaps another person with whom you want to spend all your time) and your priorities change. Then you might have kids and the work becomes more about financial security for the family then about your personal growth. And so you aren't looking at layoffs and unexpected change as opportunity because you are happy with what you've got. It just often is an age or 'stage of life' thing for many people.

mschuster91 2y ago

> It seems like the heavity majority of those stressed about layoffs in big tech are lifers and those who are chronically averse to and dread the interview process. Not helped by the fact a lot of interview processes - unless you can rely on word-of-mouth and the corporate structure allows for shortcuts - are byzantine, maddening and/or don't have much relations to the work one will be doing afterwards. No fuck you I'm in for a sysop/cloud position, I won't waste my time doing Fizzbuzz. Give me a laptop with internet and an actual work task if you want to judge my competence.

j7ake 2y ago

Nobody on your team had kids or dependents?

johnnyanmac 2y ago

Yeah, that was the situation until 2023. This market is absolutely brutal and there's no guarantee of an offer in 6+ months, even for roles you'd get in a month. I wanted to be a "lifer" (you don't build expertise jumping jobs every 2 years) but I more or less knew going into games that that was never going to truly be the case. But this bad market only amplifies the issues.

joquarky 2y ago

I have pretty severe social anxiety and this industry was a refuge for me. The added social and political mental load that has crept in over the past decade or so has effectively pushed me to burnout. And I was a happy "lifer" making subpar salary writing government software. I got to work in a large dark office with other nerds and joked about esoteric things. But once software development became formalized, homogenized, and micromanaged, I couldn't conform.