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Comment by mkl95 | Hacker News Reader

I'm more interested in hiring freezes, i.e. locking people out of the industry vs forcing them to switch jobs

I’ve never seen entire industry hiring freezes so i’m not aware of the concern. Would rather stay on job during hiring freeze than he let go. I can sense if i need to bail without being subject to one or another.

Hiring freezes don't have to be industry wide to be problematic. If you are competing with dozens of people for a job, there is a high chance some of them are both a good fit and willing to accept crappier compensation.

Yeah, even if there are only some actual layoffs and only some degree of hiring freezes/slowdowns/tight budgets, that translates to fewer openings with more people competing for them with lower TC being offered. The general sense among the people I talk to is that it's increasingly significantly less of an employee's market than it was 6 to 12 months ago.

Nowhere near dot-bomb territory of course (and the dynamics are different) but the market has changed.

Interesting. I haven’t seen this. Been through many hiring freezes and economic downturns but my salary has only ever gone up and if my employer tightened the reigns, i moved on. (here is your sign)- nothing really changed the market unless it was something such as 2008 meltdown with was systemic.

2008 didn't really effect tech that much. In dot-bomb, a lot of people were out of work for a long time and many left the industry. I was lucky to find something fairly quickly but it was a significant pay cut. (Not developer but in "tech").

None of this really supports your argument. 9/11 was the largest workforce reduction in tech as far as people leaving the industry.

A hiring freeze at all or most of the big FAANG companies lowers negotiable salary cap for all of us.

What?

FAANGS still offer upwards of 1m/year compensation.

I wonder if there's an intuitive ratio here, like 10 freezes for every layoff, and 10 slowdowns for every freeze

Freezes and slowdowns don't really need to get announced. We've definitely seen an uptick in candidate quality (we're especially keen on an open position in data to work w/ DOJ leadership on-site in DC!), and while the growing graph AI market can explain some of the interest, the broader industry slowdowns elsewhere have to be part of it.

Hiring freezes are definitely more sinister. I'll take being laid off over facing endless dead-end prospects. Too bad they usually come hand in hand.

Layoffs may not even be a bad thing if job mobility is high. Startups lay off a lot of people who have bullshitted their way into their position, members of low ROI teams who can't be easily be transferred somewhere else, quiet quitters, etc. On the other hand struggling to find a job as an experienced engineer is usually a symptom of a sick economy.

Heck, I've even been almost jealous of the ones who got laid off once, at a company that was starting to circle the drain. They were effectively being paid to job hunt with the severance package.

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