#layoffs #jobmarket #employment #economicoutlook
Do you all think we might be facing another round of massive layoffs akin to what we saw in 2022? 🤔
I recently found out that my company is shutting down an entire division and letting go of over 100 employees out of a total headcount of around 500. This is on top of the 70+ people who were laid off last year. It’s a tough time out there for sure.
I’m noticing that even developers with 5+ years of experience are struggling to land interviews, and a close friend of mine who is a fantastic developer has been job hunting without success since being let go earlier this year. It’s disheartening to see so much talent going to waste.
Possible solutions to combat this wave of layoffs:
– Improve networking skills and reach out to connections in the industry for job opportunities
– Update resumes and online profiles to better reflect skills and experience
– Consider upskilling or pursuing further education to stay competitive in the job market
Let’s help each other out and share any tips or insights that could help those who are currently facing job insecurity. We’re all in this together! 💪🏼 #jobsearch #careeradvice #jobsecurity
Easy money from the fed led to a massive sugar high in the economy. This got felt heavily in stuff like assets and risky investments, where everyone and their mom had cash and wanted to dump it somewhere that would make an ROI. Startups and technology were a big dumping ground, so demand for tech professionals was through the roof. My friend was CTO of a startup and told me that he failed to secure a software engineer with 1 YOE through a $175k total comp package, because other firms were able to offer much more.
But we’re now training way more CS professionals than we have CS professionals retiring, and the easy money is all gone. And there’s still lots of companies who have 2021 human investments still on the books in 2024.
We need to grind hard to get through this
When the AI bubble pops, and it probably will eventually, the entire market will easily tank 25-30%. AI hype is holding the entire market together right now. AI hype basically saved everyone from the complete crash of 2022 and fueled the rally of 2023.
Layoffs are still happening while stocks are at all time highs now. Now imagine if share prices nuke even harder than they did in 2022.
Everyone is like “oh the jobs will come back when rates go down!”. Yeah, you know why rates go down? When a massive negative catalyst happens and fed has to step in and stimulate the economy. People seem to think rates just go down for no reason at all. Rates are historically normal right now, even a bit low actually.
It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.
The cool thing about software engineering is its relatively low cost to get a product into people’s hands if you have the grit to build your own product.
I think we’re going to see a huge explosion in high-quality indie game titles as the corporate layoffs choose to pursue other ventures while out of work. The AAA game industry has been completely enshitified by private equity and live service lootbox chasing. Their industry is also facing a lot of layoffs so we are seeing a high level of talent get pooled into the “free agent” category of software engineering.
Corporations by design choose to get rid of high cost employees to appease quarterly earnings reports and the short sighted shareholder. They will then all attempt to get the same level of talent back at a much lower salary, so lots of churn but overall job growth in the market. Everyone has a point where their savings are depleted and a job with a 50k reduction in TC is still better than no job. The real pain is people like me clawing at the gates lol. I’m basically going to have to build and sell my own products to use my degree because who wants to hire a new grad when you can get 5 YoE at the same pay?
It would be nice to see an uptick in Indie Tech where the people who understand the struggle are more open to taking on knowledgeable but inexperienced developers, as opposed to the usual nature of start ups where running lean means no time to train.
Either way, if the market is good or the market is bad you should always have smart spending habits and a heavy emergency fund. The AI bubble has to burst first, which is going to hurt a lot, and then corporations will begrudgingly go back to onboarding more pesky people.
I dunno bro, I work 3 jobs (as And dev). One full-time, other two part-time.
Context around what the company does and location would be helpful. There are several midsize companies that I know of (former co-workers work/worked there) that are in relatively stable markets, but their C suite made terrible judgement calls that screwed the companies.
Not saying there isn’t some volatility afoot, but I think it’s regional. In my area, it was not difficult to find a position in 2022, unless you were director+ or had no experience, in such cases it was, and still is, difficult.
A whole generation of devs got into CS with one purpose – to ace that Leetcode and make money in a FAANG. They didn’t get into it out of passion (or, you know, mild Asperger’s).
Now even the grey beards such as myself can’t get a job because the market is oversaturated with these grifters. And to make it worse, the smaller idiot companies are copying the Leetcode interview process, making it so much worse.
And what are they going to get? An ex-Googler who knows how to walk a red/black tree (very useful for web development!) who is an insufferable tool who tells you about “how they did it at Google instead”.
Yes. It won’t be quite as bad, but something is coming before end of year. 2022 was largely the elimination of the ZIRP mania. The next round will be more about the lag in commercialization of the next big thing (AI I guess). We have to wait for that to hit mass commercialization such that companies can justify hiring again. But that could take a few more years and until then it won’t make sense to keep the roster. Tech has always been like this, timing matters a lot. I will probably age out before the next big hiring wave. But I’m not complaining, in my case I was able to ride Cloud and Mobile. I saved like crazy during my hey day because I know it will end abruptly.
I am not in the CS field (I am in Finance but have worked with dev teams in the past)…the most recent company I worked for (a $60 billion rev/year Ag tech company) has greatly increased hiring for SEs and dev teams in countries such as Poland, India, and Colombia/Brazil vs what I had seen in the past. I also noticed this trend for many business analyst/Finance/Accounting jobs. Moving jobs out of the U.S. to countries with an educated populace and decent grasp of English. This is in stark contrast to what I saw pre-Covid unfortunately. It is easier now than ever to manage a remote team via MS Teams IMO.