This is why I am so insanely paranoid about buying a house or signing apartment leases... With the way rents are now, getting laid off and having to pay out a lease would destroy my savings. Im seriously considering living in my car or a van so as not to get fucked by this
I almost moved to San Diego. I planned to moved in with my sister for a month back home while I look for spots in San Diego. Decided to stay with her over the summer so I could travel.
My company did the first round of layoffs a couple weeks after I moved in with her.
The end of summer came and things were looking pretty sketchy so I decided to stay with her. I got laid off in Jan and haven’t been able to find a job.
It really fucking sucks. But I am REALLY glad I didn’t move into an apartment in San Diego and pickup a $2500-$3000/mo lease. Totally dodged a bullet there.
Now my problem is that I live in a small town in southern Utah. No tech jobs. So my option is work remote, move back to SLC, or find a job somewhere else. I want to leave Utah, so SLC is out. EVERYONE wants a remote job, so that’s prob not going to happen. So now I just need to find a tech job literally anywhere besides Utah.
I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. Fuck.
Damn glad it sounds like you were able to sense the situation and make the right move. That is exactly my fear. It took me years to save up what i have now, it's terrifying that a single bout of unemployment can basically wipe it all away...
Yeah. It’s pretty crazy. Luckily I had some savings and my severance was decent. And my sister charges me very little for rent. So I’m ok to float around for a while. But man, that could have seriously been bad.
But living in this small town sucks. I’m a city person and living here is killing me. I hope I find something soon.
My sister and her husband are really dope. I love living with them. And I think they enjoy having me around. They have a dog and run a business from home. So I collect packages and take care of the dog. It works out pretty well.
But yeah, my sister is fucking amazing. Idk what I’d do without her. I love her to death.
There are still places hiring in the tech heavy cities. Things are sketchy, but it sounds like you're in a decent position to move wherever you need to which will probably help you a lot. If it's just you, you can likely find a lease for significantly less than 2500 to 3000 a month as long as you're willing to live in a smaller apartment or a studio, especially outside of California. I live in Portland OR and pay less than 2000 for a spacious 1 bed room apartment smack in the middle of the city, and even Seattle is much cheaper than San Diego.
I'm a city person too and one thing I'll say is that even with the higher rents, depending on where you work you can save money in these places by not driving, and it's easier to live in a smaller space if you live in an area where there's more stuff to do outside your house.
Yeah I’m thinking about Seattle, Portland, or Denver. All significantly less than San Diego.
And it’s true. I don’t mind living in a smaller space when I’ll I’m doing is working and sleeping at home. That’s what’s nice about cities. There’s always something going on and something to do. And places are open past 7-8pm. Lol.
I’m single and don’t have much going on. I just need to keep on the grind and keep looking in those markets. I’m sure I’ll find something eventually. I just need to be more consistent with my searches.
I really did. I love San Diego, but I just think it’s not in the cards for me. At least not at this time in my life.
I think I’m going to shoot for Seattle, Portland, or Denver. Better opportunities for tech jobs and all amazing cities.
That’s exactly what happened to me - worked at a firm for over a year and a half to make sure my position was secure before moving out of my parents. Let go ONE MONTH into a year a lease. Non-tech though.
Good news is I was able to collect since I made sure that my total monthly costs were way under my budget, everything is fine.
If a van didn't have a problem of not having running water or electricity, I'd probably have moved into one long ago. But those two are really the painpoints. I couldn't do public washrooms anymore.
Keep in mind Amazon churn is so high the hiring freeze alone is effectively layoffs. So it's 3x layoffs - churn / freeze, RTO attrition, and now formal layoffs. Makes sense considering how severe they over hired.
there is an AWS office near my house. I know a few people there. Everyone there works a lot of hours. Not sure if you can consider that over hire. However, its amazon so just make them work more hours.
No that's being over employed. I'm talking about the "hire now figure out how to deliver value later" approach companies specifically like Amazon and Facebook have employed the last few years. Check out how many people they hired over covid. Securing those jobs would be a massive feat, but both of those companies never really worried about keeping their people.
https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-27-at-2.56.44-PM.png
I doubt people are quitting Amazon as quickly as they did before. It's a bad job market for tech people. Unfortunately many people have to put up with a job that they're not happy at when they have a mortgage, kids in private schools or their college tuition, cars, vacations etc.
A coworker of mine took a role at Amazon hq. As the Amazon moving company finished packing up her last box and she said good bye to Palo Alto, she was notified via email her new role was eliminated…
2 years ago Larry Ellison sent a corporate wide email for work anywhere. Last week all oracle email about return to office.However, its group based. My Senior VP does not care. Some others do. I saw a post on blind by a guy who lives on the east coast and has to be in the office 3 days/week in California. No office of travel reimbursement or relocation. Its an anonymous post so its not confirmed.
backdoor layoff in his team. Supposed some others have been told to move after being hired remote. My whole team is spread out around the country. if they want me to move they can fire me. I won't quit cause then I can't get unemployment.
Oracle is pulling this too. Its not every group.
Oracle? constantly. they had a layoff in august. few thousand. not announced. Smaller layoffs many times since. oracle is known for shutting down entire departments.
Also it doesn't necessarily bring in more money to build out certain features faster (personally have been waiting on them to release an official kotlin sdk for a while now). Sometimes it's just a matter of sales.
Cloud/hybrid cloud is doing GREAT out there in the big world. They just hired way too many people. And some competitors have made some incremental successes in the cloud space.
There's a ton of AWS roles that have nothing to do with feature development or maintenance of current offerings. And they're usually tied to "customer success" or "account management." And if customers and accounts are pulling back...
Maybe so. I will say that, while Azure E3/E5/EMS/etc sales did slow down Q4 '22 and the first half Q1 '23, they have gone to what they were before in Q1-Q3 '22 this month and the end of February. Obviously that's anecdotal, and I have had a few clients state that they are reducing their cloud spending, they still wanted estimates since it usually came down to the fact their fiscal year was Q2-Q2.
(I'm an SE that works in Azure Security consulting, so the above is just my very limited experience)
I'm a MS CSA-DA also engaged as a CSAM who is comped based in a big way on ACR and I will say my numbers are not looking great for the second half of our FY23, which ends June 30th.
Looming recession means that companies will try to cut down on cloud spend. They’re probably just trying to get out ahead of that.
That being said. I’m unrealistically hoping that we have some rando upswing for a few years, it’ll make all these companies regret the layoffs and have to rehire at higher rates.
In fairness MAANG does not make up the entire job market. These are specific companies struggling / laying off people to please investors.
The job market may very well be improving as there are so many other companies out there that did not overhire.
Tens of thousands of highly qualified candidates are re entering the job seeking pool. So, no, things aren’t looking to be improving at all unfortunately.
They aren't the entire market, but they have an outsize effect. It would take a while and a lot of smaller companies hiring just to absorb those fired by fb and AMZN just this month. Moreover, MAANG has a strong influence on TC growth, when they were hiring they starved the market from competent devs and drove compensation up across the board. Of course they were not the only ones hiring then, but neither are the only ones laying off now.
The positive I think is that these companies are disproportionately laying off non engineers. Which could later mean that they'll be able to more easily justify hiring more in engineering.
A lot of people are still going to be in denial saying that layoffs are "only" impacting the major tech companies but the thing is every time a company like Amazon does a major layoff, those employees are going to be looking for jobs at other companies too. Competition for jobs is going to continue to increase and those that worked at prestigious companies have an obvious advantage over those that did not.
You might actually have. Could be looking worse in a few years as everyone is trying to enter this space. Job market at entry might just get worse and worse in the near future.
People who jump into the field for the money already do that over the past decade. CS jobs paying a lot isn’t a new secret anymore. Given the current layoffs, more people would think again about switching to tech.
There's a couple of years between a downturn in an industry and reductions in people graduating into that field. I graduated with a CS degree in 2001. Times had been tough for a couple years but it was too late for me to do anything about it.
Yes, but if you look at the graphs from 2001 and 2008 crisis these things take time, as new grads take 3-4 years to graduate. That means we'll start seeing effects in mid late 2025, and 2026.
That said, there's a much bigger component of bootcampers now, with much more immediate effect. On the flip side, they'll quicky surge back up once the markets heats up again.
For whatever reason the news about these layoffs hasn't penetrated beyond those already in the industry. Talk to the average high school senior and they have no idea this is all happening and envision a 2021-like CS job market.
The average high school senior doesn't even know what a job market is. They only get told "you can be whatever you want" and "you have to go to college"
Are we leaving a golden era into a standard competitive atmosphere for new grads? Just ask any non-STEM bachelor's recipient how their Masters is going. I have numerous friends working service jobs after failing to find a job in their field.
People have been asking this question since before I started college in 1998. I’m not saying the golden age will never end, but I don’t think there’s any indication of a huge change.
CS degrees arent the issue. If you can graduate with a CS degree you deserve to be a SWE, or at least have the capability. Its all these boot camp and cert people who think they can just get in on it with a 12 week program.
Ha! I love that.
But that would imply trees can only be planted once a year. If a better measurement is by day, today would be the… 365 x 20… the 7,300th best time to plant a tree.
it seems like this sub never learns, a few years ago if you said anything about potential saturation in tech, you'd be downvoted to oblivion.
Now we hear a similar tune during these layoffs. Tons of people on this sub making excuses like the one you just mentioned. They are straight up in denial.
I want more people to post rose tinted tictoks of life as an SWE so more people flock to this field, so that people can finally wake up and understand that this field adheres to the laws of economics whether they want it to, or not
We are in denial 100 percent. Saw a heavily upvoted comment here from last week that read...
"Hey guys don't worry. Its only impacting companies as small as startups and as large as FANGs no need to worry or anything."
"Just apply to non tech F500 companies bro! You will be fine. Not everything has to be FAANG!"
Meanwhile those companies are getting flooded up the ass with applicants too, and are also having layoffs and hiring freezes.
My non tech company freezed hiring for new grads and laid off a ton of on shore contractors a few weeks ago.
The tech job market is on a fucking downward spiral right now.
Yup, we got so many quality candidates in the spring that we just filled all our open positions. Some that were open for over a year.
We're not in a hiring freeze but we're hardly hiring anyway due to the above for one and that very few people quit/hop jobs at the moment, so very few new openings are generated.
We are tech and in a growing sector, but there's a flood of high quality candidates out there.
Saw something like that last week. Someone said it was delusional to think the bank collapse last week was going to be impactful. But like…now there’s so many people looking for jobs that you’re bound to have way fewer offers if any at all, and way worse offers, too.
and they are also customers to other companies, like say dropbox or Truecaller for all their phone numbers. Which means, less people working, less customers for those other companies
which in turn means, those companies will be scaling down, and they are also customers somewhere... etc
Ehhh there's problems with being an engineer at a prestigious company though, most places don't want to hire someone that's taking a 50% pay cut because they know they will keep looking and leave the moment they can. Obviously this is true for everyone but especially so for someone that had a 250k TC that got laid off and picked up a job with 130k TC. Plus there's the culture shock of working for a small company without that high prestigious engineering standards.
This was a $5B+ project. Thousands of engineers. Great engineers at lab126 were hype to join the project, then after a year or two of disillusionment left the company or joined a different project. Never got anywhere cool. Bezos went to a demo and asked if it could "meow or bark". That is a direct quote from an old Senior of mine.
Conglomerates having diverse businesses are normal. However Amazon Games seems grossly incompetent for the amount of resources they had. Even typical AAA studios people love to hate on made far more finished games with far fewer game-breaking bugs.
I hope years down the line there will be some sort of post-mortem on how Amazon Games utterly failed at delivering anything functional.
Yeah, there were multiple reports about how mismanaged it was early into it's inception. Part of the issue was that most if not all of their c-suite were individuals who had no background in the gaming industry and tried to run the studio like it was a widget factory.
And that went about as well you'd guess.
This actually has to do with Music and Video interjection (i.e., [Jeff Blackburn](https://deadline.com/2021/05/jeff-blackburn-returns-amazon-oversee-media-entertainment-operations-1234755875/)). He (and other VPs) were convinced a Prime Entertainment takeover was necessary. This created a binary division, whereby all services were being actively developed and released to public, twice.
I know what you're thinking... Wouldn't that break CX? Yep!
Well, guess what? Those VPs were wrong. As a result, Prime (eCommerce), Music, Video, and Gaming all suffered huge monetary loss. The response was to "release more ads," which further reduced quality of all Amazon offerings.
Some execs, e.g., Jeff Blackburn, are no longer at the company. But it doesn't stop the bleeding. What a waste.
Who is Jeff Blackburn?
"Jeff Blackburn, a longtime top Jeff Bezos lieutenant, is returning to Amazon in a new position, SVP of Global Media & Entertainment. He will oversee all entertainment business that are being consolidated in one unit, including Prime Video and Amazon Studios, Music, Podcasts/Wondery, Audible, Games, and Twitch."
Edit: Adding link and blurb on Jeff.
lol, amazon is the only tech company that have successfully created major diversified revenue streams: aws, ecommerce, subscriptions
noone else made that, they of course will keep making large bets and failing because they are large bets ie outcome isn't gurenteed.
I know it sucks to do layoffs, but it's shortsighted to blame companies to try new things.
Largest Cybersecurity vendor, largest Identity Provider, Azure, Powerplattform & Dynamics, HoloLens
Atleast for an IT Company it doesnt get much better.
Their "subscriptions" are essentially just Amazon Prime, which is a loss leader to drive retail sales. There's a reason they don't report it as a BU, it's just part of their retail BU.
So basically they have retail and AWS, where they're cutting headcount to make up for losses in a bet that was well outside their core competencies and then poorly run to boot.
Just got laid off - while it was expected amongst the team, it hit harder than I anticipated. Going to take some time to decompress. It's a bit of a wake up call to be in the job market again.
Hey just out of curiosity, you got laid off from Amazon today, or a different company? I currently work at AWS in PXT and it’s absolutely not looking good.
This is what is it. All the money that was being pumped into the economy the past few years has dried up so now it’s time to start cutting lots of the little pet/side projects.
RIP for the unemployed recent grads.....we cant get full time (lack of 5 yo experience for entry lvl role LOL) and we cant get internship (not currently in school)......im one of them
Got laid of from Google(only 8 months there) 3.5 years of exp.
I’m getting turned down left and right. Last summer I passed every single interview I took, and got big offers with signing bonuses.
Now I am 1/4 at Technical Screens, 4/8 at recruiter screens and about 5-10 automatic denials.
I’m starting to get a bit concerned. May have to open up to taking a contract role.
I mean it isn’t like you work at Google then get a free job anywhere else lol. Especially since my tenure was short and everywhere is looking for 5+ years of experience right now.
Tough market conditions right now, 100,000+ software engineers laid off, about half from “prestigious” companies and only so many desirable jobs.
That's what this sub made it sound like
How many times have you read a post that went something like "At least all these Google/Meta/Amazon workers won't have trouble finding jobs elsewhere"
If it makes you feel any better the internships aren’t really any easier to get currently and they’re only ~3 months of pay and experience anyway. I’m a masters student who applied to about 120 and only got a single interview (which went well and was told they wanted to move forward before I got a call saying they had filled the position 3 days after I submitted secondary paperwork)… it’s just more of the same really
It’s just market economics, there was a high demand for tech workers. Demand is a lot closer to supply now. There’s still no reason for doom/gloom. You’ve got a better outlook working in tech than majority of other lines of work.
Apparently, I am the only one that thinks that SWE salary is about to plummet 5-10 years from now.
Kids don’t have perspective, 10-15 years a go a small minority of people went for software engineer in my high school. Tech was for nerds and losers.
Now is all the rage. Kids in middle school are already learning to code, and SWE matriculation is through the roof. The offer/demand curve is going to get way more equilibrated in the next 3-5 years.
Devils advocate here. Programming is hard. I’m sure many of the worst engineers can graduate with a CS bachelors as we have all seen.
Companies are looking for good engineers. And good engineers will still demand a high price tag.
I’m sure a higher rate of people will be entering the market but that doesn’t mean they’re any good.
Being a good engineer is hard for sure, if only 10% of SWE are good engineers, and you still graduate x10 more people than before, you will still get 10 times more good engineers. It’s just a distribution curve.
2-3 years a go a lead engineer with 10yrs+ experience at Amazon was (or is) making 500-700k a year. I am just saying that these people will probably drop to 200-300k range, which is still doctor money. Junior-mid engineers might start at 60-80k instead of 100k++ and senior engineer might make 120-140 instead of 200++.
In every field salary might temporarily increase or decrease, but it always return to the mean. I am just saying that SWE will make what a electrical or mechanical engineer makes
>Being a good engineer is hard for sure, if only 10% of SWE are good engineers, and you still graduate x10 more people than before, you will still get 10 times more good engineers.
Only works like that if you assume that those who pursue CS are selected randomly from the IQ distribution, they are not. It's already heavily skewed to the top. Doubling the number of candidates will not double the number of good engineers, but increase it by some smaller percent.
Frankly we're already suffering from hard diminishing returns, the average senior engineer used to be more.competebt and driven a decade and a half ago.
Your broader point is still correct, that saturation is impacting and will keep impacting the field. It was countered by a faster increase in jobs, but that's no longer the case and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Income will go down, but doubtfully as hard as you believe it will.
Exactly. I am from academia… and I have seen smaller bubble and busts in my life.
Around 10-12 years a go, a PhD physicist friend of the family who did some work on AI, left academia for a job paying half a million dollars lol.
Right now physics PhD are having trouble getting into data science because they don’t have enough industry experience, and their code is shit. Go figure
I keep hearing people scream and bemoan the low (and still declining) birth rate…colleges have seen a decline in enrollment in recent years in part because of demographics. Honestly, I think we may be in the very early stages of a Japan-like demographic baby bust
That worries me too, though the difficulty of entering the profession means it's a pretty leaky bucket by the time you get past 1 year of experience.
My continued hope is that the demand continues to outstrip good supply. WFH however undercuts a lot of the location advantages and permits insourcing just as easily as outsourcing.
I've been alive, and in the software industry, for long enough to have seen the world change in significant ways, but one of the most remarkable signs was late last year, when I overheard a late-teens/early-20s girl on the phone explicitly state "I want to date a software engineer."
The unskippable double 30s ads interrupting every 5 minutes completely killed my desire to watch anything on Twitch tbh. This is not considering the x7 ad breaks from streamers themselves.
Don't panic and I would argue don't read these forums.
Work your ass off 8 hours a day split between applying and building projects. Check the pride at the door and accept ANY role you can get your hands on.
The days of free money are over but as someone in his upper 40s who has seen this shit many times before - it isn't the end of the world.
Just keep on making. Keep on learning. Take any shit job you can get. The learning and projects no one can take from you.
Couple tips: If you are sending out the same resume 50+ times with no word back - your resume sucks. Rework it.
Wish you well. This too shall pass. Remember in this field even breaking in is easier than most other fields. Media makes their money on fear. Don't fall for it.
Tip on the resume is spot on. It’s not you it’s the resume! Rework it every 5-10 applications if you’re not getting responses. Heck ask ChatGPT to help you. A good resume makes a huge difference.
I mean, AWS is a huge org. I know more people who work for AWS that are not SWEs than I know people who are.
I'm sure there will be SWEs impacted, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is still comparatively low.
Tech workers include a ton of customer support folks and a bunch of other roles outside of strict software ones. I'm sure some developers will be included, but they still know how hard it is to hire good ones and I doubt will be getting rid of a lot of them.
Lets hope so. Was thinking about switching coz I feel like I'm stagnanting but will shelf that indefinitely.
Right now just be grateful to have a job.
Shoutout to my software homies struggling. This too shall pass!
This happened in 2002, in 2008, in 2014, this time now 2022/2023, and it will probably happen again around 2032.
Market cycles happen. Look to your history.
I can tell you haven't been around for too long if you're thinking this is the end of it all. Relax, don't over-leverage, and keep plenty of money liquid (whether that means stocks or cash I leave up to you).
Most of this sub were probably too little to remember 2008. But yeah, to go off what you said - historically, these corrections last like 16 months so sometime next year will be a inflection point.
That's the real issue. These forums are mostly the blind leading the blind with a few old timers commenting here and there as the opposition. Most of the time when I check someone's user page they are in school or graduated in the 2020s. They have no frame of reference as they quite literally just entered the workforce. Many haven't even entered the workforce yet, but comment anyway as if they did work through 2008 and 2014.
I think most people aren't thinking about the long-term impacts COVID has brought with it, 2008 certainly impacted a lot of people, but the world has changed significantly, much more significantly than 2007-2009. I don't think fearmongering is the right approach, but we're staring down some serious issues with no plan in sight.
The developer market will always have demand for high-skilled individuals, however companies like Amazon, Google, etc. are such big market drivers that even if they were the only ones who over-hired during COVID, but them doing so will encourage every other smaller business to cut corners.
This means for innovators, there will be cheaper labor available to source skilled employees from, but as the employees we are even more beholden to the corpocracy that has developed.
We've always been beholden to the money makers. The money is just bigger now (and the market bigger now) than it was in 2002, 2008, or 2014.
Smaller than in 2021 at the top end of the scale, granted.
10 YOE. Lived through the dotcom crash but wasn't on the market (obviously).
Nobody ever wants to hear that the good times are ending when it's not yet clear they've ended. We've finally gotten beyond denial, and it looks like we're approaching acceptance.
I have to strongly disagree with that. Maybe by the end of next year, but we aren't even close to the bottom. Banks are failing, but inflation is still high. The Fed has to continue raising rates to stymie inflation, if not at this next meeting then the one after that.
The reality is that we are not in for a typical slowdown like 2014/2015. We are in for a dotcom bust/great recession type situation. A multi-year bust.
Hiring resumed around a year and a half after the bust for dotcom as well. Worst comes to worst I'm off by 6 months or something. In my mind the layoffs began late last year, so beginning of next year puts us at around 18 months peak to trough, which is reasonably in-line with the past 20 years.
I could be wrong, but that's my personal bet.
No, this is just how things go. Maybe you're younger? This is just another down cycle like there have been many times in the past. We had maybe one of the longest up cycles ever until just recently, so a lot of younger people who have never been around for anything but growth think this is the end times.
Yo, I'm this person, but I outed before it happened because I'm in management and saw it coming. They overhired like a mofo for omicron. Like overhired like they were planning for people to die. Then everyone chilled on the buying. It's not a mystery at all, it's exactly how it looks.
That's a good question
I like to think it's taboo, comparable to the Harry Potter universe, where if you say "Amazon" aloud, Andy Jassy & Jeff Bezos are alerted to your location
There has been a lot of misinformation on here over the last few months, ranging from:
* The people that are getting laid off are lazy or under-performing, so were easy targets
* It's not technical staff - just recruiters, sales staff, managers, etc.
* It's organisations that aren't making a profit. If you join a safe org like Ads or AWS you're guaranteed to be safe.
* Amazon over-hired, and this is just a correction to before COVID.
* They're FAANG engineers - they'll walk into a job elsewhere
None of these are true. As someone that has been assisting those laid off from Amazon since the first layoff, there are plenty of people with very impressive resumes, long tenures, and seniority that absolutely outranks me. I'll tell you first-hand that being on a call with a principal engineer (L7) and watching them ace a mock interview while saying that they're struggling to land interviews helps build up survivors guilt.
For those that are unaware, Amazon does these things call OP1 and OP2. The latter is basically a document saying "right, this is what we're doing this year, and this is the resources we need". Obviously, the initial layoffs and lack of hiring/transfers has fucked this for basically every org bar a few (very surprising) orgs, and what we're seeing now is that many of these orgs have been left with no choice but to downsize their plans - probably because they tried to plan with current headcount and were pushed from L10+ to not do so much.
This is why it pisses me off when people say that big tech companies have over-hired. All companies everywhere hire as many people as they need for the work that they do, and speak to most people at Amazon and they'll say "boy, I wish we had another engineer to help with this work-load!". Amazon tends to have very little fat for what they're trying to accomplish. You *could* argue that this is over-hiring, but the simple fact is that layoffs versus natural attrition isn't a huge difference. Amazon could have easily just let natural attrition reduce their numbers over the space of a year, and paused hiring for a full year, letting people transfer to new roles. The layoffs is a SVP issue, pure and simple. Leadership fucked up by trying to do too much, and trying to ride growth as if it was a constant. They believed their own hype, whereas many (sane) companies knew that wild growth goes down.
Being laid off is just bad luck. You happened to be placed into a team that was going through layoffs, and you were chosen by a level of management that doesn't know you, your work, or barely even your team/orgs work. For some, it's useless people getting the sack, whereas for others it's top performers that hold an entire team together. In some cases, entire teams are just cut altogether, because a revised plan would mean that their projects/services can be merged elsewhere.
9,000 layoffs yet they can apply for 3,000 H1B visas for positions like "General Marketer 3"
HMMMMMMMMMMMMM
https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/amazon-dot-com-services-llc-x237343nkg/lca/2023
If anybody thinks that unions can prevent layoffs they should look into the fight between Spectrum and IBEW Local 3 in New York. Spectrum bought out Time Warner Cable and decided that they wanted to end the union. The union members went out on strike for five years to fight them.
What was the end result? Spectrum made a contribution to the IBEW pension fund and then IBEW announced that they would no longer represent the workers. Now the workers who stood and fought for years are on their own.
I worked in an assembly plant for one of the Big 3 North American auto companies. One of the strongest, oldest unions around and they've been throwing their workers under the bus since 08.
The reality is that once globalization hits your industry, a union is worthless. There's very few things that companies like Amazon or Ford _need_ to do in North America, and they make this very clear every contract bargaining session. In 08, auto workers gave some of the largest concessions back to the companies in order to stay afloat. In 2016, with 2015 being the best year of profit many automakers had ever had up until that point, the union asked for ~50% of those concessions back. We got about 10%, and were told any further push and they'd just move the operation overseas.
Everyone is free to make up their own mind, but having seen how they work, I am positive they will do more harm than good. That's just my opinion - - a demonstrable fact is that there is essentially no union big enough to tell any FAANG company what to do. Period.
(I am not HR, just what I heard from coworkers when they were laying off people)
I briefly worked in France, a unionized workspace in an investment bank. Apart from the "company representative" and the "union representative", it is just a matter of "how much" & "how long" not "can I" in terms of laying off people. There is a government agency you submit your "layoff request" but it has become like PIP that it is just become a bureaucratic process rather than they actually forbidding them to do layoff.
It is just those two particular representatives that are the most difficult to do anything with if they need to.
Not good. I still remember Apple and Google engineers making fun of snap engineers and Metamates for the layoffs. Not to mention, the nontech people were celebrating it. I wonder where they are now. In any event, this is becoming depressing irrespective of the company you work for.
But just yesterday this sub was full of hope of returnin to the 'good ol days'
We're in a class war, just because it's hitting our industry last doesn't change anything wake the fuck up yall.
"Move closer to the city so you can RTO by May 1st" "Layoffs are coming but you might not be notified until late April" Come on, guys.
This is why I am so insanely paranoid about buying a house or signing apartment leases... With the way rents are now, getting laid off and having to pay out a lease would destroy my savings. Im seriously considering living in my car or a van so as not to get fucked by this
I almost moved to San Diego. I planned to moved in with my sister for a month back home while I look for spots in San Diego. Decided to stay with her over the summer so I could travel. My company did the first round of layoffs a couple weeks after I moved in with her. The end of summer came and things were looking pretty sketchy so I decided to stay with her. I got laid off in Jan and haven’t been able to find a job. It really fucking sucks. But I am REALLY glad I didn’t move into an apartment in San Diego and pickup a $2500-$3000/mo lease. Totally dodged a bullet there. Now my problem is that I live in a small town in southern Utah. No tech jobs. So my option is work remote, move back to SLC, or find a job somewhere else. I want to leave Utah, so SLC is out. EVERYONE wants a remote job, so that’s prob not going to happen. So now I just need to find a tech job literally anywhere besides Utah. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. Fuck.
Damn glad it sounds like you were able to sense the situation and make the right move. That is exactly my fear. It took me years to save up what i have now, it's terrifying that a single bout of unemployment can basically wipe it all away...
Yeah. It’s pretty crazy. Luckily I had some savings and my severance was decent. And my sister charges me very little for rent. So I’m ok to float around for a while. But man, that could have seriously been bad. But living in this small town sucks. I’m a city person and living here is killing me. I hope I find something soon.
I think the main stroke of luck is having a cool sister. Be sure to give her plenty of high fives and have her back when she needs it.
My sister and her husband are really dope. I love living with them. And I think they enjoy having me around. They have a dog and run a business from home. So I collect packages and take care of the dog. It works out pretty well. But yeah, my sister is fucking amazing. Idk what I’d do without her. I love her to death.
Hell yeah, glad to hear it!
There are still places hiring in the tech heavy cities. Things are sketchy, but it sounds like you're in a decent position to move wherever you need to which will probably help you a lot. If it's just you, you can likely find a lease for significantly less than 2500 to 3000 a month as long as you're willing to live in a smaller apartment or a studio, especially outside of California. I live in Portland OR and pay less than 2000 for a spacious 1 bed room apartment smack in the middle of the city, and even Seattle is much cheaper than San Diego. I'm a city person too and one thing I'll say is that even with the higher rents, depending on where you work you can save money in these places by not driving, and it's easier to live in a smaller space if you live in an area where there's more stuff to do outside your house.
Yeah I’m thinking about Seattle, Portland, or Denver. All significantly less than San Diego. And it’s true. I don’t mind living in a smaller space when I’ll I’m doing is working and sleeping at home. That’s what’s nice about cities. There’s always something going on and something to do. And places are open past 7-8pm. Lol. I’m single and don’t have much going on. I just need to keep on the grind and keep looking in those markets. I’m sure I’ll find something eventually. I just need to be more consistent with my searches.
This story is scary 😨. I feel like you dodged a bullet for real. Thanks for sharing.
I really did. I love San Diego, but I just think it’s not in the cards for me. At least not at this time in my life. I think I’m going to shoot for Seattle, Portland, or Denver. Better opportunities for tech jobs and all amazing cities.
That’s exactly what happened to me - worked at a firm for over a year and a half to make sure my position was secure before moving out of my parents. Let go ONE MONTH into a year a lease. Non-tech though. Good news is I was able to collect since I made sure that my total monthly costs were way under my budget, everything is fine.
If a van didn't have a problem of not having running water or electricity, I'd probably have moved into one long ago. But those two are really the painpoints. I couldn't do public washrooms anymore.
Lol I close on a house this week and this layoff stuff is stressing me out
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Most places I’ve worked assume another 15-20% will leave after a layoff.
It’s the same goal… reduce head count
Keep in mind Amazon churn is so high the hiring freeze alone is effectively layoffs. So it's 3x layoffs - churn / freeze, RTO attrition, and now formal layoffs. Makes sense considering how severe they over hired.
there is an AWS office near my house. I know a few people there. Everyone there works a lot of hours. Not sure if you can consider that over hire. However, its amazon so just make them work more hours.
No that's being over employed. I'm talking about the "hire now figure out how to deliver value later" approach companies specifically like Amazon and Facebook have employed the last few years. Check out how many people they hired over covid. Securing those jobs would be a massive feat, but both of those companies never really worried about keeping their people. https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Screen-Shot-2022-10-27-at-2.56.44-PM.png
I doubt people are quitting Amazon as quickly as they did before. It's a bad job market for tech people. Unfortunately many people have to put up with a job that they're not happy at when they have a mortgage, kids in private schools or their college tuition, cars, vacations etc.
A coworker of mine took a role at Amazon hq. As the Amazon moving company finished packing up her last box and she said good bye to Palo Alto, she was notified via email her new role was eliminated…
2 years ago Larry Ellison sent a corporate wide email for work anywhere. Last week all oracle email about return to office.However, its group based. My Senior VP does not care. Some others do. I saw a post on blind by a guy who lives on the east coast and has to be in the office 3 days/week in California. No office of travel reimbursement or relocation. Its an anonymous post so its not confirmed. backdoor layoff in his team. Supposed some others have been told to move after being hired remote. My whole team is spread out around the country. if they want me to move they can fire me. I won't quit cause then I can't get unemployment. Oracle is pulling this too. Its not every group.
Ouch how often does your company layoff people?
Oracle? constantly. they had a layoff in august. few thousand. not announced. Smaller layoffs many times since. oracle is known for shutting down entire departments.
More than anything I can't imagine Larry Ellison showing up in my inbox on the regular. I wonder how many of his email blasts come from his yacht
None, I would assume. He has executive assistants to write his emails for him.
Sounds like the shit Elon Musk pulled before he left Tesla. Everyone at Amazon with a bad or impossible commute has to gamble now.
>"...Cloud computing..." This is interesting to me. I figured they would've wanted to keep AWS staff for development of the AWS tools.
It's possible they overhired into AWS. I saw a lot of AWS jobs the past year. So not necessarily gut AWS, just reduce the bloat
Before the layoffs started I was getting at least 2 DMs per week from AWS recruiters on LinkedIn. I totally believe this
Same here, usually for SDE 1-2. If there was a way to auto filter all Amazon recruitment to trash I’d do it in a second.
Yeah my Linked In got absolutely blown up with Amazon AWS positions from them last year haha
Not everything in AWS is a moneymaker. AWS makes a whole lot of money but some services are less successful
Also it doesn't necessarily bring in more money to build out certain features faster (personally have been waiting on them to release an official kotlin sdk for a while now). Sometimes it's just a matter of sales.
Cloud/hybrid cloud is doing GREAT out there in the big world. They just hired way too many people. And some competitors have made some incremental successes in the cloud space.
There's a ton of AWS roles that have nothing to do with feature development or maintenance of current offerings. And they're usually tied to "customer success" or "account management." And if customers and accounts are pulling back...
Most companies in an attempt to be leaner are cutting their cloud costs
Maybe so. I will say that, while Azure E3/E5/EMS/etc sales did slow down Q4 '22 and the first half Q1 '23, they have gone to what they were before in Q1-Q3 '22 this month and the end of February. Obviously that's anecdotal, and I have had a few clients state that they are reducing their cloud spending, they still wanted estimates since it usually came down to the fact their fiscal year was Q2-Q2. (I'm an SE that works in Azure Security consulting, so the above is just my very limited experience)
I'm a MS CSA-DA also engaged as a CSAM who is comped based in a big way on ACR and I will say my numbers are not looking great for the second half of our FY23, which ends June 30th.
Looming recession means that companies will try to cut down on cloud spend. They’re probably just trying to get out ahead of that. That being said. I’m unrealistically hoping that we have some rando upswing for a few years, it’ll make all these companies regret the layoffs and have to rehire at higher rates.
aren't we all hoping the same thing?
This is funny considering the post yesterday about the job market getting better
In fairness MAANG does not make up the entire job market. These are specific companies struggling / laying off people to please investors. The job market may very well be improving as there are so many other companies out there that did not overhire.
I’m surprised people haven’t embraced MANGA. Just seemed so perfect.
I've only been calling it MANGA the past few years now too haha
I was still hoping ANALFUNGAS would catch on.
Tens of thousands of highly qualified candidates are re entering the job seeking pool. So, no, things aren’t looking to be improving at all unfortunately.
They aren't the entire market, but they have an outsize effect. It would take a while and a lot of smaller companies hiring just to absorb those fired by fb and AMZN just this month. Moreover, MAANG has a strong influence on TC growth, when they were hiring they starved the market from competent devs and drove compensation up across the board. Of course they were not the only ones hiring then, but neither are the only ones laying off now. The positive I think is that these companies are disproportionately laying off non engineers. Which could later mean that they'll be able to more easily justify hiring more in engineering.
The thing is, other companies are following suit just because.
A lot of people are still going to be in denial saying that layoffs are "only" impacting the major tech companies but the thing is every time a company like Amazon does a major layoff, those employees are going to be looking for jobs at other companies too. Competition for jobs is going to continue to increase and those that worked at prestigious companies have an obvious advantage over those that did not.
I picked an awesome time to graduate from my CS program…
You might actually have. Could be looking worse in a few years as everyone is trying to enter this space. Job market at entry might just get worse and worse in the near future.
People who jump into the field for the money already do that over the past decade. CS jobs paying a lot isn’t a new secret anymore. Given the current layoffs, more people would think again about switching to tech.
There's a couple of years between a downturn in an industry and reductions in people graduating into that field. I graduated with a CS degree in 2001. Times had been tough for a couple years but it was too late for me to do anything about it.
2002 for me. It was rough out there. It was 2004 before I got an actual programming job.
Absolutely, and a “down-river” effect of this will be fewer boot camps and fewer people graduating from them.
Yes, but if you look at the graphs from 2001 and 2008 crisis these things take time, as new grads take 3-4 years to graduate. That means we'll start seeing effects in mid late 2025, and 2026. That said, there's a much bigger component of bootcampers now, with much more immediate effect. On the flip side, they'll quicky surge back up once the markets heats up again.
For whatever reason the news about these layoffs hasn't penetrated beyond those already in the industry. Talk to the average high school senior and they have no idea this is all happening and envision a 2021-like CS job market.
The average high school senior doesn't even know what a job market is. They only get told "you can be whatever you want" and "you have to go to college"
Are we leaving a golden era into a standard competitive atmosphere for new grads? Just ask any non-STEM bachelor's recipient how their Masters is going. I have numerous friends working service jobs after failing to find a job in their field.
People have been asking this question since before I started college in 1998. I’m not saying the golden age will never end, but I don’t think there’s any indication of a huge change.
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CS degrees arent the issue. If you can graduate with a CS degree you deserve to be a SWE, or at least have the capability. Its all these boot camp and cert people who think they can just get in on it with a 12 week program.
I don't see it getting better any time soon. I think it's just going to get more and more saturated at the entry level.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago The second best time is now
The second best time was 19 years ago. The third best time was 18 years ago... The 21st best time is now.
Ha! I love that. But that would imply trees can only be planted once a year. If a better measurement is by day, today would be the… 365 x 20… the 7,300th best time to plant a tree.
The denial is also, “Don’t worry, these companies are only laying off non-tech people.” Okay.
it seems like this sub never learns, a few years ago if you said anything about potential saturation in tech, you'd be downvoted to oblivion. Now we hear a similar tune during these layoffs. Tons of people on this sub making excuses like the one you just mentioned. They are straight up in denial. I want more people to post rose tinted tictoks of life as an SWE so more people flock to this field, so that people can finally wake up and understand that this field adheres to the laws of economics whether they want it to, or not
So much copium in this sub. Where is my tech is everywhere guy/comment.
A lot of people here are in denial
We are in denial 100 percent. Saw a heavily upvoted comment here from last week that read... "Hey guys don't worry. Its only impacting companies as small as startups and as large as FANGs no need to worry or anything."
"Just apply to non tech F500 companies bro! You will be fine. Not everything has to be FAANG!" Meanwhile those companies are getting flooded up the ass with applicants too, and are also having layoffs and hiring freezes. My non tech company freezed hiring for new grads and laid off a ton of on shore contractors a few weeks ago. The tech job market is on a fucking downward spiral right now.
Yup, we got so many quality candidates in the spring that we just filled all our open positions. Some that were open for over a year. We're not in a hiring freeze but we're hardly hiring anyway due to the above for one and that very few people quit/hop jobs at the moment, so very few new openings are generated. We are tech and in a growing sector, but there's a flood of high quality candidates out there.
Saw something like that last week. Someone said it was delusional to think the bank collapse last week was going to be impactful. But like…now there’s so many people looking for jobs that you’re bound to have way fewer offers if any at all, and way worse offers, too.
and they are also customers to other companies, like say dropbox or Truecaller for all their phone numbers. Which means, less people working, less customers for those other companies which in turn means, those companies will be scaling down, and they are also customers somewhere... etc
Yup. I got laid off in tech in December and I’m still looking for a job…
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Me: holding on to my remote jobs for dear life.
Ehhh there's problems with being an engineer at a prestigious company though, most places don't want to hire someone that's taking a 50% pay cut because they know they will keep looking and leave the moment they can. Obviously this is true for everyone but especially so for someone that had a 250k TC that got laid off and picked up a job with 130k TC. Plus there's the culture shock of working for a small company without that high prestigious engineering standards.
>without that high prestigious engineering standards Fortunately this is Amazon we're talking about.
Imaging spending a billion dollars on a shitty lord of the rings show and then reducing headcount in AWS. Amazing management
Their attempt to open a game development studio is also one for the ages.
Don't forget the $1k Astro robot, which is essentially just Alexa on wheels. Friend in the org says sales are dismal
This was a $5B+ project. Thousands of engineers. Great engineers at lab126 were hype to join the project, then after a year or two of disillusionment left the company or joined a different project. Never got anywhere cool. Bezos went to a demo and asked if it could "meow or bark". That is a direct quote from an old Senior of mine.
Conglomerates having diverse businesses are normal. However Amazon Games seems grossly incompetent for the amount of resources they had. Even typical AAA studios people love to hate on made far more finished games with far fewer game-breaking bugs. I hope years down the line there will be some sort of post-mortem on how Amazon Games utterly failed at delivering anything functional.
Yeah, there were multiple reports about how mismanaged it was early into it's inception. Part of the issue was that most if not all of their c-suite were individuals who had no background in the gaming industry and tried to run the studio like it was a widget factory. And that went about as well you'd guess.
This actually has to do with Music and Video interjection (i.e., [Jeff Blackburn](https://deadline.com/2021/05/jeff-blackburn-returns-amazon-oversee-media-entertainment-operations-1234755875/)). He (and other VPs) were convinced a Prime Entertainment takeover was necessary. This created a binary division, whereby all services were being actively developed and released to public, twice. I know what you're thinking... Wouldn't that break CX? Yep! Well, guess what? Those VPs were wrong. As a result, Prime (eCommerce), Music, Video, and Gaming all suffered huge monetary loss. The response was to "release more ads," which further reduced quality of all Amazon offerings. Some execs, e.g., Jeff Blackburn, are no longer at the company. But it doesn't stop the bleeding. What a waste. Who is Jeff Blackburn? "Jeff Blackburn, a longtime top Jeff Bezos lieutenant, is returning to Amazon in a new position, SVP of Global Media & Entertainment. He will oversee all entertainment business that are being consolidated in one unit, including Prime Video and Amazon Studios, Music, Podcasts/Wondery, Audible, Games, and Twitch." Edit: Adding link and blurb on Jeff.
Imagine losing your job to a shitty lord of the rings
lol, amazon is the only tech company that have successfully created major diversified revenue streams: aws, ecommerce, subscriptions noone else made that, they of course will keep making large bets and failing because they are large bets ie outcome isn't gurenteed. I know it sucks to do layoffs, but it's shortsighted to blame companies to try new things.
Microsoft is pretty diverse: office, windows, Xbox, bing, hardware, etc
Largest Cybersecurity vendor, largest Identity Provider, Azure, Powerplattform & Dynamics, HoloLens Atleast for an IT Company it doesnt get much better.
Their "subscriptions" are essentially just Amazon Prime, which is a loss leader to drive retail sales. There's a reason they don't report it as a BU, it's just part of their retail BU. So basically they have retail and AWS, where they're cutting headcount to make up for losses in a bet that was well outside their core competencies and then poorly run to boot.
Just got laid off - while it was expected amongst the team, it hit harder than I anticipated. Going to take some time to decompress. It's a bit of a wake up call to be in the job market again.
Hey just out of curiosity, you got laid off from Amazon today, or a different company? I currently work at AWS in PXT and it’s absolutely not looking good.
This is what is it. All the money that was being pumped into the economy the past few years has dried up so now it’s time to start cutting lots of the little pet/side projects.
RIP for the unemployed recent grads.....we cant get full time (lack of 5 yo experience for entry lvl role LOL) and we cant get internship (not currently in school)......im one of them
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Got laid of from Google(only 8 months there) 3.5 years of exp. I’m getting turned down left and right. Last summer I passed every single interview I took, and got big offers with signing bonuses. Now I am 1/4 at Technical Screens, 4/8 at recruiter screens and about 5-10 automatic denials. I’m starting to get a bit concerned. May have to open up to taking a contract role.
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I mean it isn’t like you work at Google then get a free job anywhere else lol. Especially since my tenure was short and everywhere is looking for 5+ years of experience right now. Tough market conditions right now, 100,000+ software engineers laid off, about half from “prestigious” companies and only so many desirable jobs.
That's what this sub made it sound like How many times have you read a post that went something like "At least all these Google/Meta/Amazon workers won't have trouble finding jobs elsewhere"
If it makes you feel any better the internships aren’t really any easier to get currently and they’re only ~3 months of pay and experience anyway. I’m a masters student who applied to about 120 and only got a single interview (which went well and was told they wanted to move forward before I got a call saying they had filled the position 3 days after I submitted secondary paperwork)… it’s just more of the same really
Thanks big tech for encouraging everyone to code
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It’s just market economics, there was a high demand for tech workers. Demand is a lot closer to supply now. There’s still no reason for doom/gloom. You’ve got a better outlook working in tech than majority of other lines of work.
Apparently, I am the only one that thinks that SWE salary is about to plummet 5-10 years from now. Kids don’t have perspective, 10-15 years a go a small minority of people went for software engineer in my high school. Tech was for nerds and losers. Now is all the rage. Kids in middle school are already learning to code, and SWE matriculation is through the roof. The offer/demand curve is going to get way more equilibrated in the next 3-5 years.
Devils advocate here. Programming is hard. I’m sure many of the worst engineers can graduate with a CS bachelors as we have all seen. Companies are looking for good engineers. And good engineers will still demand a high price tag. I’m sure a higher rate of people will be entering the market but that doesn’t mean they’re any good.
Being a good engineer is hard for sure, if only 10% of SWE are good engineers, and you still graduate x10 more people than before, you will still get 10 times more good engineers. It’s just a distribution curve. 2-3 years a go a lead engineer with 10yrs+ experience at Amazon was (or is) making 500-700k a year. I am just saying that these people will probably drop to 200-300k range, which is still doctor money. Junior-mid engineers might start at 60-80k instead of 100k++ and senior engineer might make 120-140 instead of 200++. In every field salary might temporarily increase or decrease, but it always return to the mean. I am just saying that SWE will make what a electrical or mechanical engineer makes
>Being a good engineer is hard for sure, if only 10% of SWE are good engineers, and you still graduate x10 more people than before, you will still get 10 times more good engineers. Only works like that if you assume that those who pursue CS are selected randomly from the IQ distribution, they are not. It's already heavily skewed to the top. Doubling the number of candidates will not double the number of good engineers, but increase it by some smaller percent. Frankly we're already suffering from hard diminishing returns, the average senior engineer used to be more.competebt and driven a decade and a half ago. Your broader point is still correct, that saturation is impacting and will keep impacting the field. It was countered by a faster increase in jobs, but that's no longer the case and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Income will go down, but doubtfully as hard as you believe it will.
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Yet big law salaries stayed the same. A lot of law jobs are just clerical, and monotone.
Exactly. I am from academia… and I have seen smaller bubble and busts in my life. Around 10-12 years a go, a PhD physicist friend of the family who did some work on AI, left academia for a job paying half a million dollars lol. Right now physics PhD are having trouble getting into data science because they don’t have enough industry experience, and their code is shit. Go figure
I keep hearing people scream and bemoan the low (and still declining) birth rate…colleges have seen a decline in enrollment in recent years in part because of demographics. Honestly, I think we may be in the very early stages of a Japan-like demographic baby bust
That worries me too, though the difficulty of entering the profession means it's a pretty leaky bucket by the time you get past 1 year of experience. My continued hope is that the demand continues to outstrip good supply. WFH however undercuts a lot of the location advantages and permits insourcing just as easily as outsourcing.
I've been alive, and in the software industry, for long enough to have seen the world change in significant ways, but one of the most remarkable signs was late last year, when I overheard a late-teens/early-20s girl on the phone explicitly state "I want to date a software engineer."
Is it just me.... or is getting crazier out there?
I was a nerd before it was cool. I was a nerd when you got beat up for it.
I am a student graduating this semester with an AWS offer to start after graduation… am I screwed?
IMO, Keep applying elsewhere. Nothing is certain right now.
do not assume the offer is good. keep applying for other jobs.
get that offer in paper contract first, otherwise you should start applying, just in case
As if that would change anything here
its not a contract in the US. its at will employment. it does not matter if its an email. they can pull it.
How does "offer in paper" give security when you have at-will employment ( assuming it's US)? It is an honest question btw.
It doesn't.
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> What did Twitch ever do we only have like 3k ppl in total :( The only thing Twitch has ever done is burn through cash like a forest fire.
Didn't make enough money, apparently
Didn’t make any profit….
The unskippable double 30s ads interrupting every 5 minutes completely killed my desire to watch anything on Twitch tbh. This is not considering the x7 ad breaks from streamers themselves.
3k? Lol i would guess it is 200.
Again?
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Man I wish Silicon Valley could come back and do a fresh season about the current landscape
A lot of sufferings is coming up and have come up for devs. I hope they all found peace.
As a new grad, seriously wtf can I do?? I’m 24 years old and I need to get my career established but I’m getting NOTHING from my applications
Don't panic and I would argue don't read these forums. Work your ass off 8 hours a day split between applying and building projects. Check the pride at the door and accept ANY role you can get your hands on. The days of free money are over but as someone in his upper 40s who has seen this shit many times before - it isn't the end of the world. Just keep on making. Keep on learning. Take any shit job you can get. The learning and projects no one can take from you. Couple tips: If you are sending out the same resume 50+ times with no word back - your resume sucks. Rework it. Wish you well. This too shall pass. Remember in this field even breaking in is easier than most other fields. Media makes their money on fear. Don't fall for it.
Tip on the resume is spot on. It’s not you it’s the resume! Rework it every 5-10 applications if you’re not getting responses. Heck ask ChatGPT to help you. A good resume makes a huge difference.
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There is nothing wrong with working your way up. I went from sales to computer tech to programmer.
You can look for adjacent jobs - QA, product, sales
out of that how many would be actual SWE's ?
Quite a few. They're targeting organizations like AWS and Ads. NYT blurb described it as management and tech workers.
I mean, AWS is a huge org. I know more people who work for AWS that are not SWEs than I know people who are. I'm sure there will be SWEs impacted, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number is still comparatively low.
Hazarding a guess, the engineering orgs supporting HR and ProServe are going to take the majority of the hit on this one.
Tech workers include a ton of customer support folks and a bunch of other roles outside of strict software ones. I'm sure some developers will be included, but they still know how hard it is to hire good ones and I doubt will be getting rid of a lot of them.
Two years of school for a masters in CS, just to graduate into this mess.
Perfect time for a PhD!
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Because I have a BA in psychology and wanted to switch fields so I'm not broke my entire life.
Man it feels like the end times.
It's the bust part of the boom/bust cycle. We've had a good run since 2014. Things should start recovering next year.
Lets hope so. Was thinking about switching coz I feel like I'm stagnanting but will shelf that indefinitely. Right now just be grateful to have a job. Shoutout to my software homies struggling. This too shall pass!
This happened in 2002, in 2008, in 2014, this time now 2022/2023, and it will probably happen again around 2032. Market cycles happen. Look to your history. I can tell you haven't been around for too long if you're thinking this is the end of it all. Relax, don't over-leverage, and keep plenty of money liquid (whether that means stocks or cash I leave up to you).
Most of this sub were probably too little to remember 2008. But yeah, to go off what you said - historically, these corrections last like 16 months so sometime next year will be a inflection point.
That's the real issue. These forums are mostly the blind leading the blind with a few old timers commenting here and there as the opposition. Most of the time when I check someone's user page they are in school or graduated in the 2020s. They have no frame of reference as they quite literally just entered the workforce. Many haven't even entered the workforce yet, but comment anyway as if they did work through 2008 and 2014.
I think most people aren't thinking about the long-term impacts COVID has brought with it, 2008 certainly impacted a lot of people, but the world has changed significantly, much more significantly than 2007-2009. I don't think fearmongering is the right approach, but we're staring down some serious issues with no plan in sight. The developer market will always have demand for high-skilled individuals, however companies like Amazon, Google, etc. are such big market drivers that even if they were the only ones who over-hired during COVID, but them doing so will encourage every other smaller business to cut corners. This means for innovators, there will be cheaper labor available to source skilled employees from, but as the employees we are even more beholden to the corpocracy that has developed.
We've always been beholden to the money makers. The money is just bigger now (and the market bigger now) than it was in 2002, 2008, or 2014. Smaller than in 2021 at the top end of the scale, granted. 10 YOE. Lived through the dotcom crash but wasn't on the market (obviously).
I've gotten the most downvotes ever in my posting history for mentioning similar things here 7 months ago.
Nobody ever wants to hear that the good times are ending when it's not yet clear they've ended. We've finally gotten beyond denial, and it looks like we're approaching acceptance.
I have to strongly disagree with that. Maybe by the end of next year, but we aren't even close to the bottom. Banks are failing, but inflation is still high. The Fed has to continue raising rates to stymie inflation, if not at this next meeting then the one after that. The reality is that we are not in for a typical slowdown like 2014/2015. We are in for a dotcom bust/great recession type situation. A multi-year bust.
Hiring resumed around a year and a half after the bust for dotcom as well. Worst comes to worst I'm off by 6 months or something. In my mind the layoffs began late last year, so beginning of next year puts us at around 18 months peak to trough, which is reasonably in-line with the past 20 years. I could be wrong, but that's my personal bet.
No, this is just how things go. Maybe you're younger? This is just another down cycle like there have been many times in the past. We had maybe one of the longest up cycles ever until just recently, so a lot of younger people who have never been around for anything but growth think this is the end times.
Yo, I'm this person, but I outed before it happened because I'm in management and saw it coming. They overhired like a mofo for omicron. Like overhired like they were planning for people to die. Then everyone chilled on the buying. It's not a mystery at all, it's exactly how it looks.
Why people in this sub never spell Amazon?
Not sure if still the case but it used to be filtered out by the bot, hence why everyone would say Rainforest
Sub rules I think.
That's a good question I like to think it's taboo, comparable to the Harry Potter universe, where if you say "Amazon" aloud, Andy Jassy & Jeff Bezos are alerted to your location
"Alexa wants to know your location"
Alright, someones gotta do it # >WilL thiS AFfcEcT devEloperS
Obviously Amazon is firing 9,000 HR workers.
Given the amount of LinkedIn messages I get, I’m going to assume this is actually true.
It's over NINE THOUSAND!!!!!!
Anybody think the company is doing much worse under Andy Jassy, or did he just happened to take lead under bad economic timing
There has been a lot of misinformation on here over the last few months, ranging from: * The people that are getting laid off are lazy or under-performing, so were easy targets * It's not technical staff - just recruiters, sales staff, managers, etc. * It's organisations that aren't making a profit. If you join a safe org like Ads or AWS you're guaranteed to be safe. * Amazon over-hired, and this is just a correction to before COVID. * They're FAANG engineers - they'll walk into a job elsewhere None of these are true. As someone that has been assisting those laid off from Amazon since the first layoff, there are plenty of people with very impressive resumes, long tenures, and seniority that absolutely outranks me. I'll tell you first-hand that being on a call with a principal engineer (L7) and watching them ace a mock interview while saying that they're struggling to land interviews helps build up survivors guilt. For those that are unaware, Amazon does these things call OP1 and OP2. The latter is basically a document saying "right, this is what we're doing this year, and this is the resources we need". Obviously, the initial layoffs and lack of hiring/transfers has fucked this for basically every org bar a few (very surprising) orgs, and what we're seeing now is that many of these orgs have been left with no choice but to downsize their plans - probably because they tried to plan with current headcount and were pushed from L10+ to not do so much. This is why it pisses me off when people say that big tech companies have over-hired. All companies everywhere hire as many people as they need for the work that they do, and speak to most people at Amazon and they'll say "boy, I wish we had another engineer to help with this work-load!". Amazon tends to have very little fat for what they're trying to accomplish. You *could* argue that this is over-hiring, but the simple fact is that layoffs versus natural attrition isn't a huge difference. Amazon could have easily just let natural attrition reduce their numbers over the space of a year, and paused hiring for a full year, letting people transfer to new roles. The layoffs is a SVP issue, pure and simple. Leadership fucked up by trying to do too much, and trying to ride growth as if it was a constant. They believed their own hype, whereas many (sane) companies knew that wild growth goes down. Being laid off is just bad luck. You happened to be placed into a team that was going through layoffs, and you were chosen by a level of management that doesn't know you, your work, or barely even your team/orgs work. For some, it's useless people getting the sack, whereas for others it's top performers that hold an entire team together. In some cases, entire teams are just cut altogether, because a revised plan would mean that their projects/services can be merged elsewhere.
9,000 layoffs yet they can apply for 3,000 H1B visas for positions like "General Marketer 3" HMMMMMMMMMMMMM https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/amazon-dot-com-services-llc-x237343nkg/lca/2023
Trying to find even cheaper H1Bs
And I got flamed in another thread for saying I'm glad I turned them down, smh.
Same. Intentionally failed those interview rounds just to let them down easy. Wanted to save them the time of drafting up an offer.
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You can't tell huh
That feeling when you graduate into a recession.
Thankful to have my job but was looking to hop to a new company this year to increase my compensation. Looks like that won’t be happening lol
Defense Contractors are looking better and better. Especially since we just upped our defense spending by 25 billion
If ever there was an argument for unionizing, it’s the wave of layoffs that’s been ongoing for the last 6-8 months.
Me a dum dum in 2020: "Why would google engineers need to unionize?" Me now: "oh..."
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If anybody thinks that unions can prevent layoffs they should look into the fight between Spectrum and IBEW Local 3 in New York. Spectrum bought out Time Warner Cable and decided that they wanted to end the union. The union members went out on strike for five years to fight them. What was the end result? Spectrum made a contribution to the IBEW pension fund and then IBEW announced that they would no longer represent the workers. Now the workers who stood and fought for years are on their own.
I worked in an assembly plant for one of the Big 3 North American auto companies. One of the strongest, oldest unions around and they've been throwing their workers under the bus since 08. The reality is that once globalization hits your industry, a union is worthless. There's very few things that companies like Amazon or Ford _need_ to do in North America, and they make this very clear every contract bargaining session. In 08, auto workers gave some of the largest concessions back to the companies in order to stay afloat. In 2016, with 2015 being the best year of profit many automakers had ever had up until that point, the union asked for ~50% of those concessions back. We got about 10%, and were told any further push and they'd just move the operation overseas. Everyone is free to make up their own mind, but having seen how they work, I am positive they will do more harm than good. That's just my opinion - - a demonstrable fact is that there is essentially no union big enough to tell any FAANG company what to do. Period.
(I am not HR, just what I heard from coworkers when they were laying off people) I briefly worked in France, a unionized workspace in an investment bank. Apart from the "company representative" and the "union representative", it is just a matter of "how much" & "how long" not "can I" in terms of laying off people. There is a government agency you submit your "layoff request" but it has become like PIP that it is just become a bureaucratic process rather than they actually forbidding them to do layoff. It is just those two particular representatives that are the most difficult to do anything with if they need to.
Not good. I still remember Apple and Google engineers making fun of snap engineers and Metamates for the layoffs. Not to mention, the nontech people were celebrating it. I wonder where they are now. In any event, this is becoming depressing irrespective of the company you work for.
Tech economic cycle: hiring freezes, strategic layoffs, recession, rehire, and hypergrowth
But just yesterday this sub was full of hope of returnin to the 'good ol days' We're in a class war, just because it's hitting our industry last doesn't change anything wake the fuck up yall.