How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments? | Hacker News Reader

How much have tech layoffs affected engineers vs. other departments?

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249 pointsleeny348 comments

We (large FANGish) are more or less in a hiring freeze but still grabbing a few new hires here and there. A friend just interviewed for SSE at AAPL and seemed to have the job only to be told they closed the req. I'm still getting lots of recruiter spam though so I think we're still fairly early in any sort of layoff cycle. The economy is still trucking. Despite many people trying to be first to declare it, we're not in a recession yet. All signs point to one next year though.

The US is in a recession. It has seen two quarters of negative economic growth.

I feel like a broken record but, the 'Two quarters' rule is an unofficial metric that does a bad job of representing recessions when you back-test it (no recessions from 1992-2008 in that case).

In the US, a recession is defined by NBER after the fact.

Then the "two quarters" rule is stricter. We have fulfilled a stricter criterion for a recession.

Whether the NBER contradicts us is irrelevant. Less value is going around in the economy.

I mean, if you're going to stick to the two-consecutive quarters definition, then you would be saying that we were in a recession, and are now out of one. Third quarter GDP estimates stand at 1.9% growth.

Estimates or reported? The recession based on two consecutive quarters is on reports not estimates of what is to be reported.

Reported as of current monthly figures. Estimates are even higher.

Keep in mind that the "two consecutive quarters" is just snapshots of the monthly data at 3 month marks. They get revised over time.

It's completely possible that data from Q2 will be revised upwards and there won't be two consecutive quarters of negative GPD in the future. The Q2 data has already been revised upwards once.

GDPNow has it at 2.9% even

Then we are out of recession?

Find a new word for whatever you're describing because the rest of us are speaking the same language.

That's too noisy given inflation is 6.6%.

Real GDP

We've only recently seen nominal GDP declines in 2008 and 2020.

I know it's real GDP. I'm saying this number is noisier when inflation is high because you only ever measure nominal GDP and then deflate.

Well what don't you believe because you're using 6.6% inflation as your reason for skepticism, but that's what GDP is deflated by?

They believe the error bar on that inflation number must be pretty wide, presumably.

But by that logic, error bars increased because the number went up? Idk if that’s how statistics works.

Errors in counting generally go as square root of the count. So yes, as number goes up so does the deviation.

Inflation readings being higher have nothing to do with a higher count.

Exact same amount of data points for inputs as 2% inflation.

It’s not about the amount of measurement points, uncertainties in dollar amounts tend to scale as sqrt. When you error propagate that you see that inflation uncertainty scales with inflation.

Very simple model

Inflation=v1/v2

D(inflation)=sqrt((D(v1)/v2)^2+(v1/v2^2 D(v2))^2)

Suppose

D(v1)=c sqrt(v1)

D(v2)=c sqrt(v2)

D(inflation)=c sqrt(v1/v2^2+v1^2/v2^3)= c sqrt(inflation+inflation^2)/sqrt(v2)

So can be seen that the leading term for uncertainty in inflation is linear with inflation.

Ok, let's play your game. How much of the first quarter decline was due to the ports clearing and imports rising?

Here, I'll give you a hint (More than 100%): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=UOxC

Do you think that's a real recession indicator?

EDIT: Said differently, if our imports were at 4Q:21 levels, we'd have 0 quarters of decline. So is this the first import-driven recession? Because no other recessions have been like this.

Doesn't matter the reason, net net less goods were produced. Imports couldn't stay at 4Q:21 levels forever, only the timing of the imports was shifted around.

>Doesn't matter the reason, net net less goods were produced.

That's not how GDP works? It's not adding up all the things that were made, it's measuring the value an economy produced.

A quirk of that is imports are value an economy consumes (usually offset by Foreign Direct Investment).

If those ships decided to bail from LA and head to Japan, would the economy have 'produced less'?

Isn't your whole point that goods were already paid for in one quarter but were held up until the next quarter to clear? If consumption and import were in the same quarter then it doesn't affect GDP at all in an accounting sense. But in your example, you get a +GDP in the quarter that consumption happened, making it seem like domestic production went up, then against that baseline you get a -GDP "due to" imports the next quarter, so you must "lose" the domestic production as a correction.

If the ships bailed and stole your money or destroyed their goods I'm not sure if that still counts as imports or not.

My point is that an amount of economic activity happened (let's simplify and say that its consumption/investment/government spend).

GDP measures how much a country makes, but that's only a proxy for economic activity because trade imbalances exist (and the US economy greatly benefits from its trade imbalance).

So the unprecedented lumpiness of imports shouldn't mislead you into thinking US domestic economic activity is down, when in fact it's just being financed differently (now more via trade imbalance than in previous quarters).

Again, all circling back to my point that the 2Q's of GDP rule is dumb.

Imports are neutral in their impact on GDP (it is domestic product after all). Imports are included in investment/consumption/govt spending, then subtracted back out: net zero. So imports rising definitely was not the cause of decreased GDP.

I'm glad you're confident, but you're wrong.

Net exports is a component of GDP and it's exports minus imports.

IDK where you got the idea you did.

> (it is domestic product after all)

Yeah, so buying more from overseas than you sell overseas is a net drag on the economy.

EDIT: Like here's the release, check it out for yourself. The tables start on page 11. https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2022-09/gdp2q22_3rd....

GDP isn't a measure of "net drag". It is a measure of "domestic production". Imports might be relevant to some other measure of economic health, but they are irrelevant to the total value of domestic production. You want to ignore or exclude them when calculating GDP.

But they are hard to exclude, because they get commingled with spending/consumption/investment. So what do you do? Leave them there, but then subtract total imports. They are counted positively, and negatively, so they have no net impact. Think it through and it should make sense.

Ok so now I get your convoluted point, but then great let's exclude net exports, the other categories like PCE etc. haven't declined?

EDIT: I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here because I like where you're headed (ignoring the timing effect that would make GDP useless under your framework), I really do, but let me chew on this. Because it is interesting, though it does completely ignore FDI (which is how imports are paid for)

Sorry if it sounds convoluted, but just trying to convey the actual rationale for the GDP equation (which is ignored or forgotten in most media reports). You understand GDP (It's not adding up all the things that were made, it's measuring the value an economy produced.). Imports clearly don't count as value an economy produced, and should not be in GDP.

But if I import something, that increases GDP (spending is positive to GDP). That starts to mess up the GDP numbers, because that spending is not value an economy produced. You have two choices, try to break down every purchase into domestic or import (impossibly complicated), or just leave it all in, and subtract out total imports at the end to nullify all the import spending (or foreign investment).

If imports went up in Q2, that means spending on imports went up. Those two cancel out for no net change to GDP.

My best shot at not being convoluted:

Why do we subtract imports in the GDP equation? It is not because imports reduce domestic production, it is because those imports inadvertently get added in the GDP equation as spending/investment. So to remove the effect of imports entirely, we need to subtract total imports.

Last edit. :)

From the fed:

GDP measures domestic production of final goods and services. The expenditure approach calculates GDP using total spending on domestic goods; but the equation, as stated, can lead to a misunderstanding of how imports affect GDP. More specifically, the expenditure equation seems to imply that imports reduce economic output. For example, in nearly every quarter since 1976, net exports (X – M) have been negative (see the graph and Table 1), which seems to imply that trade reduces domestic output and growth. This can influence people's perspective on trade. This essay explains that the imports variable (M) corrects for the value of imports that have already been counted as personal consumption (C), gross private investment (I), or government purchases (G). And remember, the purchase of domestic goods and services should increase GDP, but the purchase of imported goods and services should have no direct impact on GDP.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2018...

Yeah ok so here you go.

Philosophically, GDP is an useful economic metric because it proxies economic activity and in your framework, economic activity is up, we are just paying for it via trade imbalance, which great, I love that foreigners will trade us goods/services for debt/assets. Hard to call that a recession (which again is why the 2 quarters thing is dumb).

So circling back around to "my original point was correct and you were overly pedantic and actually just criticizing GDP as a measure" since imports are why GDP is down relative to the amount of economic activity that is happening (which is what should define a recession).

Also the Dunning-Kruger quip was unnecessarily rude and uncalled for given the circumstance. I hope it made you feel good.

EDIT: You agree that, in aggregate, the amount of consumption/investment/government spend are up, right? GDP has only declined because we didn't make all of it, which, sure, maybe a long-term problem, but irrelevant to a recession.

Dude, you have it 100% backwards, going all the way back to your first point. I feel like you aren't reading, aren't understanding, or something (d.k.?).

in your framework, economic activity is up, we are just paying for it via trade imbalance

Wrong, I don't have a framework. I am just trying to explain to you how GDP is calculated. Economic activity is down when measured used GDP.

Your original post misunderstands GDP. I am not being pedantic, it is just incorrect:

Ok, let's play your game. How much of the first quarter decline was due to the ports clearing and imports rising? Here, I'll give you a hint (More than 100%)

Wrong, None of the decline was due to increased imports, because by the definition of GDP, imports are excluded. To quote the fed from the link above, "imports do not add to or subtract from GDP."

You agree that, in aggregate, the amount of consumption/investment/government spend are up, right? GDP has only declined because we didn't make all of it, which, sure, maybe a long-term problem, but irrelevant to a recession.

Wrong, GDP declined because domestic spending and/or investment and/or exports declined. Nothing to do with imports at all. Imports are not included in GDP, ergo, imports can't cause a decline in GDP.

Bro, what you are not understanding is that equating a recession to a decrease in production is pointless. It’s why you won’t answer my C+I+G question.

What is happening is that Americans are selling debt/assets in exchange for goods/services (that’s what a trade imbalance is). They are still able to consume and invest an increasing amount of goods/services and there’s no signs of that ability to finance those activities via trade imbalance decreasing any time soon. In fact, the reason GDP went down without C+I+G going down is that they did more of it than ever before!

So keep calling me D-K but you have no idea what GDP even represents (production is not the economy my guy, trade imbalances have an impact).

Like you get that assets/capital formation aren’t in GDP but you can still sell them, right?

And that’s why

> Wrong, GDP declined because domestic spending and/or investment and/or exports declined.

Is incorrect.

None of those things declined, we just financed them with a trade imbalance (instead of production) which is why you should google FDI

EDIT: Lets just put this to rest and answer me this question. Imagine a world where tomorrow, China is willing to sell America everything it wants in exchange for shares of BigCo. (To be clear, the flow is dollars used to purchase RMB, RMB used to purchase goods/services, RMB used to purchase dollars, dollars used to purchase shares of BigCo.)

America takes them up on this deal and increases consumption by 5x overnight. Given that America is importing all its goods/services, it has a GDP of zero, a 100% decline.

Is that a good measure of an economy increasing its consumption of goods/services from $20tn to $100tn, or is the trade imbalance hiding something important there?

Which again, my original point: sure GDP is down, but that reflects trade financing more than it does economic activity (whereas you seem to have this weird fixation of in-quarter production being the only source of value creation in an economy, which lol D-K)

equating a recession to a decrease in production is pointless

I didn't equate a recession to anything. In fact, I never even used the word recession in any post, I don't have a framework, and not trying to push a political agenda. Literally, all I want to do is help you understand the GDP equation, which is often misunderstood as to how imports are excluded.

(production is not the economy my guy, trade imbalances have an impact)

Might be true, but we were talking about GDP. GDP is production. Imports are not included in GDP, so an increase in imports doesn't cause GDP to go down.

So keep calling me D-K but you have no idea what GDP even represents (production is not the economy my guy, trade imbalances have an impact).

OK, that is a very DK comment because all GDP does is try to represent production. So you may not like GDP, but you don't get to redefine it. It is what it is, flaws and all.

If you want to make the case that the health of an economy shouldn't be measured by GDP, awesome, go do it (somewhere else, I don't care, or even disagree). But when you do it, remember what I taught you: GDP excludes imports, so when imports go up and down they don't change GDP.

GDP is down, but that reflects trade financing

Wrong, because math. Spending is up equal to the amount of imports increasing, so there is no effect on GDP.

Lets just put this to rest and answer me this question.

You are conflating an increase in imports with a decrease in domestic spending. Trade is not zero sum.

>Might be true, but we were talking about GDP. GDP is production. Imports are not included in GDP, so an increase in imports doesn't cause GDP to go down.

Imports cause GDP to go down relative to C+I+G. Full stop. I'm sorry I didn't say "relative to economic activity which should be the true measure of a recession" but again, that's why I call you a pedant.

>Wrong, because math. Spending is up equal to the amount of imports increasing, so there is no effect on GDP.

Yes, but GDP is down relative to C+I+G because of imports. Why are you being so stubborn about that? And honestly, what's the Venn diagram of people who bring up D-K and those who suffer from it? Like ad hominen is a universal sign of intelligence, right?

>You are conflating an increase in imports with a decrease in domestic spending. Trade is not zero sum.

Answer my question about selling debt/assets please. Are those in GDP? Or can you sell things that aren't "produced" by GDP?

Imports cause GDP to go down relative to C+I+G.

Imports are included in C+I+G, so when imports increase, C+I+G also increases. But the goal of calculating GDP is to exclude imports, so imports are subtracted from the total. Therefore there is no effect on GDP from increased imports.

You were wrong when you said GDP decreased because imports increased, which is how this started. That's not being pedantic, that's correcting a misunderstanding of the how GDP works.

Don't feel bad, this is very commonly misunderstood and misreported, so you have company. People see the "- Imports" at the end of the equation and think they understand imports subtract from GDP. Easy but naive mistake. It's your confidence in your misunderstanding that pushes it into DK territory. Your unwillingness to read or comment on the Fed's own explanation of this is a little shocking though.

I'm also curious what you mean by "trade is not zero sum" when definitionally, trades are zero sum.

Definitionally, trading doesn't create things on its own (though I do recognize your D-K mind is probably trying to make an irrelevant and inappropriate point about comparative advantage or personal utility).

The point that you're too stubborn to see is that one can trade goods/services (GDP) for debt/assets (Not GDP), and that is why imports can cause GDP to go down without economic activity going down, which I think is a fair read of the comment that started this whole dumb thing. You seem to have some reason to not want to understand that, even though I've tried very hard to gently inform you of that fact.

Do you not think one of the most important features of the US economy is its ability to form capital/assets? Because if so, I bet you are German.

It's not convoluted at all, it makes perfect sense and you explain it well.

Philosophically, GDP is an useful economic metric because it proxies economic activity and in theirframework, economic activity is up, we are just paying for it via trade imbalance, which great, I love that foreigners will trade us goods for debt/assets. Hard to call that a recession (which again is why the 2 quarters thing is dumb).

You just can't give it a rest can you? You're in total denial of the reality that many people including experts and journalists use the GDP 2 quarters definition, entirely because you are blinded by politics. You didn't even understand how GDP was calculated and had to have the parent poster kindly and simply explain it to you, and instead of being grateful and learning something you've sunk to "it's dumb lol".

I think i ended our conversation with “agree to disagree” then you came over here.

So yeah you’re right I can’t give it a rest.

But I don’t know why citing BEA releases is considered politics.

Like I get it, you don’t like Biden, neither do I!

But it’s just so weird that people want to pin this fake recession on him, when in reality they should pin other real shit he did like the crypto bubble from stimulus payments or the inflation that followed.

My problem with you isn’t your politics. My problem is that you’re hungry for an easy answer to the detriment of accuracy.

> Yeah, so buying more from overseas than you sell overseas is a net drag on the economy.

Queen Elizabeth I called; she wants her 16th Century mercantilism back.

Bro I’m here fighting for my life trying to convince people that a trade deficit financed by asset sales is a good thing. I meant a net drag on GDP.

Please chill.

I don't think I'm the one who needs to chill, bro.

It was a joke?

I'm aware I'm not 'fighting for my life'

And I'm likewise aware that a centuries-old English monarch didn't call me to discuss the economic theories of her time (though it'd be pretty cool to see how accurately or inaccurately we've reconstructed Elizabethan-era English pronunciations).

Yeah so I responded to your joke with a joke then things got all serious because you didn't take it as a joke.

And here we are, two nerds online.

> because you didn't take it as a joke

You sure? :)

> And here we are, two nerds online.

Well yeah, that's kind of a given.

No, it's not stricter. It's a rule of thumb, an approximation.

No. It could also just be pointless. In isolation what does two quarters of negative growth mean? It obviously doesn't mean a bad economy, not always. The economy was awful plenty of times and GDP grew.

> In the US, a recession is defined by NBER after the fact.

This isn't true. There is no "official" declaration of recessions in the US by law. Yes, some federal officials will reference NBER, but that's not the same thing.

Bar far, the most common definition used worldwide is two quarters of negative growth -- and by that definition we're already in a recession.

NBER itself has never not declared a recession after two quarters of negative growth.

I think a lot of folks don't even know that NBER isn't a government organization. It's a private non-profit with a bunch of self-appointed academics that don't even publicly disclose their meeting notes or their criteria for what a recession is. People treat them like the Oracle of Delphi and it's very misplaced.

> In general usage, the word recession connotes a marked slippage in economic activity. While gross domestic product (GDP) is the broadest measure of economic activity, the often-cited identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not an official designation. The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private non-profit research organization that focuses on understanding the U.S. economy.

From: https://www.bea.gov/help/glossary/recession

Do you not consider the BEA an official source? Because I have bad news for you about who tracks GDP if so.

EDIT: and if you’re going to try to wriggle around with the “by law” part of your statement, there’s no legal definition of GDP.

EDIT2: And, just to cut you off at the pass, here's the archive from 2019 with the same exact text: https://web.archive.org/web/20190831041001/https://www.bea.g...

EDIT3: Going for the trifecta, from 1960-2011, NBER had never not declared a recession after one quarter of decline. And in its history, only 1955/1957/2011/2014 break that rule! US GDP just doesn't decline very often in general! And as I've said in other comments this is the very first time that the effect is explained mostly by net exports.

Still, let's not pretend the narrative has been recently "adjusted".

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-appears-to-misundersta...

"Recessions are generally defined as being six consecutive months of negative economic growth. By this definition, there is no such thing as a two-month recession."

Obviously that is a very widely used and well accepted definition of recession including among experts and industry journalists. The idiotic thing is that's recently being claimed is that's not an "official" definition of recession, as though that makes any difference or makes someone incorrect for using the definition. A government's definition of a word gives it no more weight than anybody else's definition of that word, outside the duties of that government. Arguably the two-quarters rule is the preferred definition because it is more widely used and known. And let's be honest, that definition certainly would be put to use by its most fervent deniers today if there were different politicians in office.

>EDIT2: And, just to cut you off at the pass, here's the archive from 2019 with the same exact text: https://web.archive.org/web/20190831041001/https://www.bea.g...

Why did we have a recession in 2000 if that's the rule then? Does 2020 not count since it was 4 months?

And what's your comment on the fact that this is the first 'recession' where the impact can be largely explained by net exports?

Maybe the narrative changed because the conditions changed?

I think you're making this more difficult than it is.

1. Different people have different definitions of recession. Two quarters is probably the most widely used and known one, so it's perfectly valid to use, but not everyone may agree so you can see differences.

2. People have ulterior motives for calling a recession. Even the same dishonest person will use different definitions at different times according to who can be blamed or credited. And there are a lot of dishonest people in government and corporate media.

So put all that aside. "The US is in recession." That's a perfectly reasonable statement that anybody can understand in context even those who have a slightly different definition where it doesn't fit.

>I think you're making this more difficult than it is.

I think you're missing the entire point

Whether or not the US is in recession is a very complex decision that is usually easy to make because most of the metrics move in the same direction.

A lot of people (you included) are still living in that world despite the fact that all the metrics are extremely weird right now (pandemic, etc.)

The fact that no one is talking about the weirdness is a major problem.

And you know who will talk about the weirdness? NBER.

I'm not missing the point, you are missing mine.

> Whether or not the US is in recession is a very complex decision

No, whether or not some government department proclaims the US to be in a recession is based on that "very complex decision". That does not make the other more widely used and known definition of the word wrong or less valid.

"The US is in a recession". Perfectly valid and reasonable statement and any economist and most people vaguely interested in economics and politics will know exactly what is meant if they heard that today.

>"The US is in a recession". Perfectly valid and reasonable statement and any economist and most people vaguely interested in economics and politics will know exactly what is meant if they heard that today.

Agree to disagree I guess

I feel like non-officially most people think of a recession simply in terms of like are less and less people able to make ends meet and less and less able to afford the same luxuries as they did before.

Sure, and by those metrics:

We are at an all-time high in terms of people employed: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=UysZ

People are consuming more than ever before (even accounting for inflation): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=UOQs

Now, to be my own Devil's Advocate, real wages are falling (though they are at about where they were pre-pandemic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=SxFv

Compare that to even a mild recession like 1990, where we were 2mn below peak employment, real PCE was falling and real wages were falling.

The above is exactly why shorthand rules are not the best tools.

Tldr things are great, vote dem.

Irrelevant to the conversation and not adding anything meaningful other than revealing your biases.

And you don’t think you’re doing the same?!

I don't.

Please expand on what my bias is. I'm curious.

You refuse to acknowledge the fact that by common definitions the US is in a recession. I believe your refusal comes from rhetoric put forward by the current administration.

I have never said that’s not a definition for a recession.

I said it’s not the official (or frankly good) definition. Which it is not.

Then everyone who doesn’t like that assumes it’s some grand political statement when I’m just some autistic guy, moderately critical of Biden, who has a thing for accuracy.

Maybe you should check your own biases given that.

EDIT: don’t believe me? Here’s an earlier comment that also applies to you.

like I get it, you don’t like Biden, neither do I! But it’s just so weird that people want to pin this fake recession on him, when in reality they should pin other real shit he did like the crypto bubble from stimulus payments or the inflation that followed. My problem with you isn’t your politics. My problem is that you’re hungry for an easy answer to the detriment of accuracy.

> an all-time high in terms of people employed

The population goes up over time (and in fact is currently at an all-time high as well; the US population has never shrunk year-over-year), so this is a bum metric. The labor force participation rate is still lower than it was pre-pandemic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=UOVS

Consumer loans are substantially higher than pre-Covid: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=UOVO (I know this isn't per-capita basis, either, but that's all they have ;-))

So, there are some data points that don't look so rosy, as well. I agree with you that the feeling on the street isn't one that of a recession, though there are hints that we are headed that way.

>The labor force participation rate is still lower than it was pre-pandemic:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOP65UPTOZSUSA

>Consumer loans are substantially higher than pre-Covid

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP

I disagree with all of you. Why? I learned in middle school that a 'recession' is defined by multiple consecutive months of GDP shrinkage. That is it. That is why most experts think we are "heading" into a recession without being in one, and news flash: they are right. My normal skepticism tends to go out the window when that particular definition pays dividends over and over again.

This is a point of contention among economists, as the current economic conditions are quite unlike most others seen. US/China decoupling is causing massive shocks across the world.

The US Federal Reserve is responding to these economic conditions far stronger than any other central bank, and the US dollar has grown in strength accordingly. Weakening the labor market is one of the goals. That will mean lots of layoffs, in exchange for a reduction in inflation (and domestic purchasing power).

Decoupling what? That is not the cause of recession and it isn't happening.

This is a pointless battle. There is a US election this year so there is zero chance a recession will be admitted until mid November regardless of facts on the ground.

US gov uses a non-partisan third party think tank to officially declare recessions.

> a non-partisan third party think tank

How can such a thing possibly be non-partisan? The people running surely vote in the elections and thus care about the outcome, I don't see how they couldn't be partisan when their statements can have huge effects on the outcome.

Non-partisan usually means people aren't directly influenced by political leadership. Pelosi has no recourse if NBER doesn't make the decision that she wants, whereas, she can punish/reward the junior Congresspeople in her party by withholding seats or funding for election campaigns. Thus, NBER is non-partisan while Democratic Congresspeople are partisan.

I would hope that every member of NBER votes. It's their civic duty.

In that case why wouldn't they try to influence the election? It depends on what kind of people sit there, but most academics favor democrats. So I don't see how that statement gives us a good reason to believe that they aren't taking one side here.

Economists don't favor democrats but rather seek reality, and the argument that conservative viewpoints are somehow not present in universities, especially in economics departments where Marxists econ profs and Austrian econ profs dine at the same tables and chair the same candidates, is both hilarious to people who have lived experience there and somewhat sad for those same because to communicate reality to folks espousing the silliness that conservatism is under attack at universities is not worth the effort. Truly a shame. Dinner parties are ruined by similar conversations around religion and politics, yet neither matter when the grill is ready.

How dare you accuse a marxist economist of seeking reality.

Right? The umbrage! Yet, I cannot deny their existence no more than I can deny that Linux is a superior operating system due to its open nature.

One of your professional colleagues disagrees, feeling that academia generally is partisan

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/07/woke-week.html?m=...

and that economics in particular is too

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2022/06/aea-p-measure-of-...

Economics is less partisan than any other social science, with only three times as many Democrats as Republicans but academia in general is merrily burning its reputation for truth seeking and Economics won’t escape. Not being as bad as psychology or sociology where all conservative academics could meet in a small lecture theatre is a low bar.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...

I once belonged to a cult. I am no longer in it. It was an organization that preferred its version of reality in spite of evidence. It doesn't perform well among educated folks. Would you argue that a cult that loses members as they gain knowledge and alternative mental models should be protected from the savagery of educated minds due to its loss of adherents?

I'll answer my rhetorical because it's important you understand: no.

John's (and I'd probably be on firm footing to assume your) presumption here is that political affiliation automatically means discriminatory bias and inherent exercises in partisanship. I wouldn't call it a universally bad assumption, but it's also likely not a terribly consistent one across the universe of universities and colleges.

I'm glad you recognize that Economics has a more even partisan distribution than some other fields in social science. Many fields are.

Props to the University of Austin, which John lauds. May they prove to be a bastion of freedom of thought that stands as vanguard against the cravenness that represents itself as the modern marriage of business conservatives, theocrats, and the eat-the-rich contingent, as well as freedom of thought from all other attacks, whether perceived or real.

Note too: the academy has been attacked before, many times. No matter. Ultimately it converges back to the form of a tenured faculty supported be benefactors in the pursuit of knowledge, even and especially when that goes against their benefactors' preferred version of reality. Fields occasionally ossify and lose value, to be replaced one death at a time, but like writing, speech, and real analysis, the academic model is akin to toothpaste and its relationship to the toothpaste tube.

Good luck out there.

> Would you argue that a cult that loses members as they gain knowledge and alternative mental models should be protected from the savagery of educated minds due to its loss of adherents?

Are you arguing that sociology and anthropology and other more conservative hostile departments are in some way more educated than economists? Or that academia is not a hostile environment for conservatives? I think the pursuit of truth is a great idea and wish more academics believed in it.

> John's (and I'd probably be on firm footing to assume your) presumption here is that political affiliation automatically means discriminatory bias and inherent exercises in partisanship.

I’m not presuming anything. There’s ample research on this. I wouldn’t say there’s automatic discriminatory bias or exercise of partisanship but it exists and it’s not state. See for example https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academicfreedom “Across three Anglophone countries, a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications. Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.”

> I wouldn't call it a universally bad assumption, but it's also likely not a terribly consistent one across the universe of universities and colleges.

Who cares if it’s consistent? If it consistently holds in a subset of schools that’s bad. As it happens one sees open displays of hostility to convervatives across academia, from when Larry Summers was fired as Harvard President to the witch hunt for Josh Katz at Princeton or the hunt for Eric Weinstein at Evergreen College. It’s not rare.

> I'm glad you recognize that Economics has a more even partisan distribution than some other fields in social science. Many fields are.

None in the social sciences. None in the humanities. If you’re arguing that a more even partisan distribution in economics is in some sense good or makes it more trustworthy that says the opposite about other fields.

> [T]he academy has been attacked before, many times. No matter. Ultimately it converges back to the form of a tenured faculty supported be benefactors in the pursuit of knowledge, even and especially when that goes against their benefactors' preferred version of reality.

The research university is not 200 years old. The original academy was closed and Greek academic life lost all vigour at roughly the same time, turning away from anything like production of new knowledge. Universities as producers of knowledge are a new thing and their social role could be usurped by others. Or it could just be lost, for centuries. Good things sometimes just end and are not replaced. Probably not as finishing schools: they’re genuinely good at that.

There’s been an extreme amount of unprompted bellyaching about Donald Trump at these dinner parties past six years.

And?

If you believe there exists a "non partisan third party think tank" I have a bridge to sell you in Arizona.

London bridge?

Is it for sale again? :)

https://www.history.com/news/how-london-bridge-ended-up-in-a...

I assume they're talking about the Brooklyn Bridge: https://www.blogtyrant.com/the-man-who-sold-the-brooklyn-bri...

Like the Fed with the 1980 election, non-partisan semi-governmental groups prefer to not make themselves to blame for election outcomes and risk inane increases to oversight by legislators.

Third parties aren't official.

It seems the two quarter definition is British? From Wikipedia

> In the United Kingdom, a recession is defined as negative economic growth for two consecutive quarters.

So, technically, the US is in recession in the UK.

Oh my sweet summer child...

Data for Q3 will be released on Oct 27 (before the election). And current estimates for ~2.0% growth. Thus, the country will technically be "out of a recession" by election time.

I wonder if these people claiming that we are "technically in a recession" will suddenly start saying that economy has recovered come Oct 28.

> I wonder if these people claiming that we are "technically in a recession" will suddenly start saying that economy has recovered come Oct 28.

I absolutely will - that's the whole point of any technical argument.

Estimates for Q2 were for 2.3% growth, and were wrong. Thus, you actually don't know if the country will be out of recession until the real numbers come out. Maybe wait for the actual numbers before worrying about your opponents reaction?

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/surveys-and-data/real-time-d...

Unemployment is at a historic low, which is not typical of a recession.

The economy is shrinking because boomers are retiring at a rate faster than we can fill jobs. The Boomer economists at the Fed have responded by raising interest rates so that Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers don't get uppity and ask for more money.

> The Boomer economists at the Fed have responded by raising interest rates so that Xers, Millennials, and Zoomers don't get uppity and ask for more money.

Maybe so, but you might want to also consider at the same time what's happening to all that Boomer wealth mostly tied up in retirement accounts (stocks and bonds) and in the real estate that they own while these interest rates rise. Sure, the effects here aren't equally distributed (neither generationally nor by asset class), but hardly anybody is getting away unscathed.

That is the game, figuring out what pain affects the decision makers personally.

They apparently don't worry much about stocks. Bonds they care more about (I'd guess their personal wealth is mostly there). Sooner or later they'll probably do something (or bigger somethings).

Real estate is the big question. Will they let it really crash or not?

Really? I thought it was high inflation triggering consumers into savings mode. And monetary tightening destroying investments.

nope it's 100% the boomers up to their usual antics /s

> high inflation triggering consumers into savings mode

Huh? The rational response to inflation is to spend. The only thing that inflation triggered, vis-a-vis saving, was a shift from cash and bonds to stocks and real estate.

The Fed has been pushing ultra-low interest rates for a long time, which has gotten businesses to borrow tons of money and expand in ways that they never could have done organically. At the same time, the combination of COVID and the supply chain shortage caused prices to spike. Unemployment is near an all-time low: easy money has made it easy to expand companies. Companies have decided to fight against lowering their prices tooth and nail regardless of how much less it now costs to ship product. At the same time, boomers are cycling out of the job market and none of the subsequent generations have enough population to replace them all.

Remember the press releases that stated that Biden intended to hire 80K new IRS workers over the next 10 years? The IRS is predicted to lose 50K workers over the next 5 years due to retirements.

Most companies have refused to invest in employees and refuse to have sensible plans to reward employees for their allegiance. The easiest and most painless way for most employees to get the pay raise they deserve is to find another job. Most employees realize that they have options and are willing to take the right job rather than the first job.

And since spending habits usually don't change if you're making more money, most people have more money to spend and companies are willing to get their piece of that pie. Combine that with OPEC cutting production and the war in Ukraine, and we've now got relatively high inflation. The inflation is real. The fed rate hikes are artificial. We've needed a serious upward adjustment in wages for quite some time, at least until people stop pretending that government is the root of all evil and there's a place for a conversation about how much housing costs.

I think it's all just about too-little production. Stimulating demand just made prices worse so they finally stopped that.

Anyway they need those younger generations to keep making more money so they can afford to pay absurd rents for the rest of their lives.

I believe it's typical before a recession though :D

Right. But the claim is were in a recession now not that we're right before one..

but then the context is a discussion about recent layoffs

We have horrible ways of measuring economic growth. I'll be worried when it starts affecting things in the real world.

Has it? I remember hearing that unemployment is still going down.

That's not really a great definition, do you disagree?

I'm seeing a massive uptick in recruiting for contract roles compared to a year ago though.

A year ago (and even, 3-4 months ago) it was all full time positions nearly exclusively, now it's all heavily weighted toward contract

Lots of "18+ month" or "long term" contract verbiage, but contract none the less.

Definitely a shift.

Seeing more contract to hire too

I’ve always seen a lot of those, i think the SNR just favors them for now with general slow down in direct hires.

I guess hiring for contracts routes around arbitrary headcount limits.

Not really arbitrary. Headcount are typically approved in tranches, budget is a lot more fluid. Headcount is also part of long term forecasting whereas again contractors are just a budget item.

"A $100k engineer costs $150k per year all in" vs. "We need to spend $150k to get X done"

I think it has more to do with getting around benefits, usually.

The expense for businesses isn't just the salary, in fact alot of businesses, if they could just pay the salary, would be able to retain / hire more people, but benefits + high salary is harder to take on.

This is a great argument for universal healthcare and a nationalized pension system, but I digress

But you just pay _more_ for the contractors, at least if you hire locally. In my experience contract rates for comparable work any place you'd want to work are typically marked up (at least) enough to roughly compensate for the difference in benefits and taxes.

Especially now that remote for FTEs has become so common, there wouldn't be much motivation to take long term contracts otherwise. That may change if the job market goes pear-shaped, but doesn't seem like we're there yet.

Tech workers are so highly compensated anyway that benefits aren't a huge percentage of the total cost of employment. The main reasons to prefer contractors in times of economic difficulty are: (a) contracts are fixed length, so it's easy to simply let a contract lapse rather than renewing it if conditions worsen/don't improve and you want to cut headcount without having a layoff, and (b) contractors frequently count differently on a balance sheet (as operating expense vs employee expense).

tech workers are not highly compensated on average, lawyers, doctors etc are.

Average salary for a lawyer isn't that different than for a software engineer (slightly higher). Doctor's average on the other hand is more than double.

>Doctor's average on the other hand is more than double.

And often have spent a lot more time in relatively low-paid training.

And lawyers are at least somewhat bimodal (though maybe trimodal). White shoe firms, corporate lawyers/successful private practices, everyone else.

if you are one, you are not the other (type of lawyer), in same vein as dentist will never be GP or neurosurgeon or dermatologist and vice versa. you also don't see linux admins leading development of some software projects

Not really. They all went to law school and passed the bar. Of course, there are tiers of school, class rank, and clerkships that perform a sorting function. Law has pretty strong credentialing mechanism.

any lawyer you try to hire in the bay area will be charging you $700+ per hour. doesn't matter if they work for a big law firm or not. the lowest I ever paid a lawyer was $400 per hour.

I don’t know the situation in the US but in Germany a large part of basic benefits (your company might offer more on top) are explicitly a % if your salary, to the point where you can say the minimum legally required benefits (and often the minimum is what you get) mean salary cost regardless of how much you earn is about 23% higher than gross salary. When I worked remotely for a US firm they paid me 25% more on the advertised gross salary to compensate for not being able to offer benefits abroad (I was a freelancer as they didn’t have a German subsidiary), which sounds like not that different than the German overhead.

Also lets you trim headcount without announcing layoffs, down the line.

Contract rates are down though, less than what you would expect to earn as a FTE.

I’m intrigued. Can you share any data points here?

I haven't seen this at all, I'm currently contracting and I see rates anywhere from 63.50 per hour to 80+. Depending on the locale and whether we're talking FAANG or not those are pretty good rates. (130-150+ respectively)

$150 per hour is very low.

I've never seen anything close to $150/hr -- I'd jump on that if I did. $63-$80/hr is actually about what I'm seeing, which is less than I'd made from my last FTE gig (I have 16 yoe, mind you). When you consider those rates don't include PTO and benefits, it's even worse.

Contracting is the thing you do when you're between permanent jobs and you do it because it pays better than slinging coffee and keeps your resume current.

contracting is being in business for yourself which means you need to learn how to sell and negotiate. if you don’t do that then yes, you will work for a low rate.

That's 130,000-150,000 annually if you clock 40 hours 5 days a week, not hourly.

I don't know in what universe you think $150 per hour is low, I've never seen anything near that rate. Maybe for highly specialized work but not any general purpose development.

cost of living in US metros is extremely high. and you need to pay for the cost of being self employed.

150k is still a great wage in most major US metros. The bay is expensive, but this is still a top-10% compensation package compared to the general population.

150/hr would be great in europe, and companies do pay it, not to individual contractors, but to other companies

I really like contract to hire, both from the employee and the employer perspective. You have a nice honeymoon period and if it works then great and if not no hard feelings.

It sounds like you are either being dishonest or you haven’t actually thought about this.

Or the recruiters are working extra hard to avoid layoffs

Not in a recession only in the sense that recessions are self fulfilling as people stop transactions

But by several other metrics we are

Genuine question: what does FANGish mean?

Resembling FANG: large, high-paying consumer tech co. My guess is it could be Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, something like that.

Makes sense, thank you!

Microsoft.

Amazon

If it were Amazon they would have just said FAANG.

Amazon is not part of FAANG

F - Facebook A - Apple A - Amazon N - Netflix G - Google

Source: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp

No that's Albertsons

My initial guess was Facebook, which is now called Meta and therefore isn't F any longer. "ish" is just enough plausible deniability.

> we're not in a recession yet.

Yes, yes we are.

> The Bureau of Economic Analysis, an independent federal agency that provides official macroeconomic and industry statistics, says "the often-cited identification of a recession with two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth is not an official designation" and that instead, "The designation of a recession is the province of a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession

Q2 2022 (3rd) -0.6%

Q1 2022 (3rd) -1.6%

https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp/gross-domestic-product

To be clear, I’m saying the political apparatus of the government can’t dictate terms of a recession. The definition used in the industry for decades is two quarters of negative growth —- I’ll use the industry standards, not the politically appointed group.

Regardless, the UK pension funds just had to be rescued by the Bank of England. Bond interest is exploding and what’s about to happen is all the government debt is going to have high interest rates.

To the point, credit is about to become VERY expensive. Idk what’s about to happen, but it’s going to be painful.

I'm not convinced.

According to that page, we had 24.6% growth last year:

1.062 * 1.07 * 1.025 * 1.07 = 1.246..

YoY growth last quarter was 7.3%:

1.025 * 1.07 * 0.994 * 0.984 = 1.0727

The US GDP usually grows 3-4% per year. It's beat that on average since Covid started:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...

So, by any reasonable definition of the terms, we're simultaneously in the middle of an economic boom and a recession.

The last few years broke all sorts of macroeconomic rules of thumb.

shrug

GDP growth being negative could also be attributed to product shortages.

Maybe not, we haven’t been in a situation with working population decline due to retirement and fewer upcoming workers.

This is likely to be the recession that halts the rapid inflation in tech wages.

Rising risk free rate has hit growth companies the hardest, and there are likely to be a large swath of layoffs right as we have tons of people bootcamping and switching into the industry.

Supply and demand of labor in tech will enter balance for the first time since ~2010. The FFR is looking to have a reasonable chance to go to 5% at this point, so the pain isn’t even close to being over

Get used to not being special like pretty much every other industry

Contrary view - this will sprout more startups that were previously starved for talent rest&vesting at faang&co and we'll see much tighter market in 2-3 years.

It will definitely do that if FAANG comp compresses via lower equity issuances. The difference is startups generally can’t compensate at the level that FAANGs do or did.

And if discount rate stays higher, valuations will be much lower at the same revenue and growth rates than they had been in the past.

Of course this also implies the value of the dollars you earn is greater via opportunity of higher yielding investments.

> It will definitely do that if FAANG comp compresses via lower equity issuances.

I think it will absolutely happen at least in short term. In fact in many cases already happened.

small crypto startups compete directly with faang because they can give their own liquid tokens alongside their base salary

given how big the VC funds for crypto startups are now I dont really see any talent acquisition situation improving for other tech startups, I see it getting more impossible

who wants below market salary and illiquid lottery tickets that you have to also put up your own money to redeem after 1 to 4 years of your life with a higher chance of getting zeroed after VCs get their cut first assuming the company doesnt fold? Given a choice

Nobody is going to work for Crypto startups now that the whole sector has imploded. And likely will go even lower from here. The days of profiting off ponzi scheme-esque tokens is over

most crypto assets can fall 99% from their initial trading price (like IPO price) before employees, founders and investors are at anything resembling a loss.

99.99% from all time highs

thats true for newly or to be launched crypto assets, and for existing established cryptos the fully diluted value (non circulating supply that company holds) is often many times the supply that “marketcap” sites show, and this is paid to employees and slowly increases the circulating supply

all while the cash compensation and bonus structure is now similar to FAANG

so I think you might be right that there are potential employees that don't understand that and can only relate to their or their friend’s attempts at day trading

A coin with a market cap of $1B that falls 99% is worth $10m. I'd love to see the startup with more than a few employees where that leaves anybody but the founders with anything.

And usually these lesser known tokens are thinly traded and the volume doesn't support actually cashing out large trades at market price

But yeah, if you trick enough ignorant retail investors to bid up your token, you can siphon their money to your employees. Certainly.

Death spirals happen. Its a risk that lockups expiring create ongoing dilution not met by increased demand. Thats not controversial or exclusive to crypto assets, the early liquidity is currently exclusive and competitive.

The liquidity pool technology fixes the liquidity issue and many company’s investors park additional capital in the liquidity pools. Sometimes even their unvested tokens sit in them or the generated liquidity pool shares is put in the vesting timelock smart contract, guaranteeing liquidity for others (which often increases confidence for holding, knowing that people can get out at any time)

they aint liquid until they vest and by the time they vest you'd be lucky to have a job so no - nobody in their right mind would go with small crypto startup now

There are also plenty of people unhappy with their FAANG jobs and don't want to trade it for a growth-chasing but ultimately unfulfilling startup. Those might be tempted to join a more robust startup.

Really? Why? I thought FAANG jobs were the closest thing to heaven on earth.

Okay, I am being obnoxious, but seriously, this is first I have heard of this. Do you know why? Surely it can't be the remote work thing. I would assume there has to more to this.

Have you ever worked for a large company? Some people thrive there, others would rather die.

I assume it's mostly about that.

It's the constraints that come from working in a large team/company - the bureaucracy, the politics, the kind of work (focusing more on scaling vs fun features). A lot more features can be tried out in a startup due to their smaller scale, but not if growth is the only thing they care about.

Those people already left or are on their way out soon, and there is a fresh crop every year

There are still many who are coasting along because there is no better alternative.

Personally, myself and several others I know don’t care to work on the problems that the big tech corpos are working on, no matter the salary. I make well below what I could because the things I work on are important contributions to society rather than helping an advertising business or help a closed garden become more closed.

Where do you work?

I’ve worked at several companies that have efforts in renewable energy and building energy management optimization. Reducing use and reducing peak demands mostly.

> Personally, myself and several others I know don’t care to work on the problems that the big tech corpos are working on, no matter the salary.

While there are indeed people like you out there (don't care about the money)

You have to remember that you're more of the exception than the rule. The average developer is indeed very keen on optimizing their salary, and the possibility of a 50-100% raise by moving to a FAANG is undeniably a huge motivator.

Sprouting startups funded by what? All indications as I read are VCs becoming note risk averse right now.

scrappy startups not "lets plow 100 mil with no market fit" startups.

Tech is pretty different in that its whole point is automation and reduction of redundancies. I would imagine over time there wouldn’t be a need for a mediocre engineers as their jobs would just be done by code written one time by a superior engineer.

We’ve seem this already happen to “mom and pop” web dev shops getting pushed out by the work of a handful of companies (Weebly, squarespace, Shopify).

Yup, a single dev can build out a massive business via severless cloud components in what used to take a large army of engineers.

It just so happens job growth has historically exceeded efficiency gains. The equilibrium point seems close from my perspective, especially if there’s a shock of recession to hammer tech employment

The real value add of software engineering hasn't been code for awhile, it's figuring out what code needs to be written and which architecture/services are the most efficient to implement it.

Yes, same as the value of a plumber, electrician or architect. Difference there is there isn't a supply/demand imbalance of labor in those jobs. And there soon won't be one in engineering either

Have you tried to call an electrician or plumber recently? Assuming you can even get one on the phone, they can basically name their price for any job.

Especially in Silicon Valley.

That’s a very hard prediction to make. The most expensive part of software is maintenance and it’s not decreasing over time.

Of course it's decreasing. The amount of people required to maintain an application of a given size continues to drop significantly over time.

Something like Docusign, once built out, could be maintained by a handful of people using serverless components. Same thing with Twitter and pretty much every other application.

Interestingly, as a side effect of this, the marginal gains on the most skilled engineers continues to increase.

For certain classes of work it is very difficult to hire even at the top of the market. There are positions my company would happily pay a million/yr to fill and simply cannot find anyone who meets the requirements.

Yes, so the median wage declines, and the wage of the most productive increases. You'll have 20% or fewer of engineers doing most of the work.

The amount of impact an individual can have has never been higher

What sort of positions out of curiosity?

It's hard to list all of the sorts because sometimes the needs are quite nebulous. Sometimes it's someone who's a great engineer who's just... really great at certain kinds of growth hacking, whatever that entails. These are more "you know it when you see" opportunities. Engineering leadership can be sort of similar. The kind of person who can "make things happen". More technical roles are often easier to describe. A few concrete examples:

Someone who got their PhD researching databases who is also a very experienced software engineer.

A senior software engineer who's worked for a few years in the finance world, and understands some of the more advanced math like stochastic calculus.

Someone with experience helping hypergrowth mode startups whose main DB is MySql to adopt Vitess.

Considering many F500 have old crusty mainframes deep in the bowels of their core operations… who wants to deal with that stuff. The stories I could tell from doing security consulting engagements and peering into these abysses. HN is a bubble about this stuff and loses perspective some of the time. The cool and sexy engineering might end up funneling into a harder to reach place, but meat and potatoes software maintenance and engineering that keeps big business going is not going anywhere. The things and languages we are inventing now will take decades to penetrate and replace the things deep in big business right now. Never mind the horror that is operations software like SAP.

> We’ve seem this already happen to “mom and pop” web dev shops getting pushed out by the work of a handful of companies (Weebly, squarespace, Shopify).

Yet automattic is a 7 billion dollar company and wordpress runs almost half the web. Point being that if anything weebly and such lowered the entry bar for small businesses. Of which some are lucky and move upwards, driving demand for devs. I like to call such companies and tools facilitators. The more, the easier for non tech people to enter the digital business world, and the more demand for developers.

> This is likely to be the recession that halts the rapid inflation in tech wages.

I think the transition to remote combined with the recession will put a damper on high tech salaries. I've already started seeing pressure from our executives to explore more hiring of remote workers to cut costs further.

A FAANG-ish company I am familiar with budgets for salary, not roles. If you're a manager trying to build the best team possible and you think you can do 2x the work by hiring engineers from Nebraska who make 50% what they might in SF, you are stupid not to. For a time there was a rule managers on a particular team couldn't hire from SF or NY for this reason.

I'm a remote worker. My company explicitly tells me they like remote workers because we are cheaper than locals (they are based in NYC). My comp is about 20-30% lower than I expect I could get if I had relocated to NYC. It's still more than double anything I could get where I actually live (Salt Lake City).

We are barely in the early stages of automation and digitalisation. There may be a temporary bump but we are nowhere near where we should be in terms of automating things. Let alone the existing code that needs maintenance. Large and boring companies, the Chryslers of the software world, will undergo a slowdown. There will be new tech and process coming around. We still have trains driven by people, planes flown by pilots, factory floors maned by workers, tills handled by cashiers, cars that dont drive themselves, we dont yet have robots coming to our door, and so on. The current state is just the beginning.

This: "We are barely in the early stages of automation". I would disagree from the perspective of manufacturing. Most people do not realise how much automation has occurred in the last 30 years. The labour cost per unit of manufactured product continues to fall at an incredible rate. The future feels like a bunch of 99% automated factories in the middle of nowhere. It seems scary to imagine the day when someone can manufacture a car (end-to-end) with almost zero labour input. Imagine: Semi-autonomous robots at all points in the supply chain: Mining, refining, steel & aluminum production, deliveries (driving trucks), car manuf. plant.

But, yes, I do agree that this statement is generally true for services industries ("office work / retail").

The factory automation you're talking about is the culmination of the industrial automation that started in the 1800s, so it's no surprise that it's so far ahead.

Information automation, on the other hand, is still very much in its infancy. Not just office and retail—construction, farming, and medicine are huge growth areas for IT right now.

"I would disagree from the perspective of manufacturing" as long as we are not at a stage i like to call FaaS (Factory as a Service) we are no there yet. Full automation means self driving trucks unloaded by robots that place raw materials on manufacturing lines which after fully automated processed are packed and loaded into self driving trucks.

There's also a lot of automation to be done before a factory begins producing something. There are large capital costs, and even larger opportunity costs, to the really slow testing setups for all kinds of industrial goods.

For the area I'm most familiar with, batteries, a novel chemical composition for a battery can take 5-10 years, to hit market (leaning towards the latter end of the spectrum). IMO this could be brought down to 6-12 months with much lower capital costs.

I feel like this could be true in an environment where software adoption stagnates but I like to remain optimistic about the fact that there's still a lot of room for software to improve various industries. Lots of big and small problems yet to be solved.

lots of people bootcamping = lots of garbage engineers

I struggle with this - I tend to agree they will trend lower, but will still be high for the best engineers.

Most high paying jobs pay well because of leverage. Private equity/investment bankers make decisions to invest huge sums of money. The people who make those decisions get a small cut. Similarly, consultants make decisions that steer entire companies, in exchange for a small cut.

Software is unique vs many other jobs because it has a lot of leverage. An afternoon where I write a few lines of code can impact billions of people - this is why software engineers get paid a lot.

Where it breaks down is that only select few software engineers work at Google. There is a lot of software that does not impact a lot of people.

I could see either

a) A shift toward long hours, like finance, where software engineering is a commodity and the highest paid engineers are simply the ones who are willing to work the most

b) A shift of the median downward, but comp among the 95+ percentile of engineers staying the same with competition among the highest leveraged companies.

I actually see this as a good thing. The market got flooded with bootcamp dudes. I've nothing against people who are self-taught or changed careers (I am one). But many of the "developers" joining the market are really only interested in making a quick buck with as little effort as possible. (and adding a whole new range of buzzwords too).

The Tech industry is not going anywhere, though. We are still in a paradigm shift and companies are going to need software more than ever. Here are things that I'm now extensively using, that I was barely using 3 years ago: Food/Items delivery, eWallets, Apple Watch, Airbnb, Web3/Crypto, Discord, Streaming services, Dental, DNA Testing.

While many of these were used by people here for longer than 3 years, many people haven't shifted yet; and their shift is going to trigger the need for more software. There are still a lot of things that can definitively benefit from tech. One example I can think of is health care. Finding a doctor still require the old ways. You medical document is not necessarily transferred between countries or updated by your doctor. There are no apps to track the medecines your doctor gave you, etc...

Tech is still slowly making its way into our everyday life. The Web3/Crypto/Bubbles are really just distractions for this long-term trend.

Dental?

Invisalign.

Does invisalign use software? Wow. I'm curious, is it to model the adjustments that need to be done to the invisalign mouth thing? Or is it something way more futuristic?

I remain skeptical of the claim that an influx of inexperienced developers will significantly affect demand for people with significant amount of experience and proven success in the industry.

Obviously I'm biased, but still

The fact that snap's web3 team being cut is one of the listed examples is pretty comical IMHO.

yea like no shit the web3 fat got cut first lol. anyone with eyes could see through all the people selling shovels in a gold rush

They also cut their AR wing. Sounds like they're going back to their laurels: d** pics.

Ah yes, durable blockchains, an obvious next step for the world's most famous ephemeral-messaging company

This is a flimsy PR piece for interviewing.io submitted by the founder.

It worked, front page of HN is great for backlink value

Founder here. This piece took my team and I months to research and tag and write. We spent hours counting individual layoffs in spreadsheets and on LinkedIn and running and rerunning the numbers. And the conclusion wasn't even what I wanted. When I started writing, I really thought that the layoffs were overblown and weren't affecting engineers. That's not what's happening at all.

Now, you're right, why do we put effort into pieces like this? It's to get some eyeballs on interviewing.io.

But this piece is not flimsy, and I think it's not correct or fair to assume that just because something serves our business that it's of poor quality.

Normally I wouldn't say anything, but the "flimsy" thing really got me.

Ok, now I'm motivated to go read the article.

Yeah I'd say it's a fairly sturdy PR piece. I appreciate the content.

Right on. The comment you replied to is a perfect example of the zero-effort, knee-jerk, dismissive comments that are such a tired trope of this site.

PS: Had a great time giving my second peer practice interview on your platform this morning. Love the product and the insights you provide in articles like this one!

just saw this. thank you. that means a lot.

Just because you can surmise as to the obvious ways in which writing this post might generally serve the interests of the author or the company behind does not, in itself, establish that the piece is flimsy. Your comment, on the other hand, with its baseless assertion and borderline ad hominem IS flimsy. Be better.

> The fact that snap's web3 team being cut is one of the listed examples is pretty comical IMHO.

We're seeing a huge influx of applicants who are coming from failed web3/blockchain projects. It was very much a gold rush that attracted a lot of people looking to strike it rich. Now that the momentum has disappeared, the employees of those projects are all running for safety.

The interesting question to be answered now is if "web3" skills are an effective substitute good (in the pure economic sense) for employers looking for developers.

I suspect a lot of pure web3 devs won't actually make a more competitive market beyond incentivizing yet another fizzbuzz-like hoop in the interviewing process to weed out people who learned about blockchain tech and otherwise can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag.

On second thought... I should acknowledge my elitism in that last sentence and maybe be more cautious. Good grief, I got my last 4 years of professional experience working on IoT, which I bet was looked down upon in a similar manner by others when it started.

Maybe the takeaway is that we should all to the best of our abilities keep at least a casual hand in the water of tech so we have a general idea of the current.

Silver lining

Here in Europe layoffs are more uncommon but I am having a very hard time finding open positions compared to just 3 years ago ( last time I was changing jobs ), and the situation is getting worse and worse each week that passes. And for juniors is already far worse: I very rarely see job openings targeted to them anymore. It seems like everything is frozen.

In the US, there's definitely less hiring going on, too. Seems more and more common to shut down a successful interview pipeline with the "hiring freeze" excuse.

There is a large backlash happening against blockchain right now in Europe, from your profile I would assume that that is the problem.

Actually it's the opposite.

I am done with dapps and blockchain development and just looking for fullstack (preferring only backend when possible) typescript/golang positions.

I am getting a good amount of recruiters contacting me for blockchain related positions but every single time I speak with them their projects are so ridiculously stupid I am flabbergasted that they got investors.

"Normal web dev" recruiters? Just got 5 of them contacting me in the last 4 weeks and of those I contacted myself: most of them have ghosted me. Last time I was looking for a new job in 3 days I had like 30 recruiters already spamming my linkedin inmail

Also I put myself in honeypot, talent.io and hired.com. Got like only one proposal... so thinking something was bad with my profile I contacted their "talent advisors" and each of them sort-of told me the profile was perfect but they were having an hard time getting job openings because of the "current market situation".

I used to have 2 requests a week on average on Hired. Now, my profile has expired twice without a single request.

Definitely, something is wrong with that service. Guess fewer companies are using it.

By contrast, it's odd the day I don't get a message on LinkedIn.

I've had good experiences with Hired in my current and previous job searches. While there are a couple of companies (the usual suspects) who use it to send out the same recruiter spam that they send elsewhere, I've mostly gotten targeted reach-outs for pretty solid roles. I'm actually starting a job next week that I found with them. LinkedIn, by comparison, is just a constant stream of unsolicited garbage.

I had 8 companies reach out to me via Hired.com when I put my profile on there in June/July 2021. One of those companies successfully hired me. They were also where I was getting the highest stated offer ranges (and got the highest offer).

LinkedIn was a crapshoot and most of the stated offer ranges were lower, although I did get bombarded with recruiters via LinkedIn (30 reached out the day I flipped the switch, 18 the next day, then it started slowing down).

But in general I had a good experience with Hired and plan to use them again next search.

I'm in the UK and I've noticed the same thing. I have a job, but currently looking for something else at the moment as it's looking quite unstable.

I've been getting maybe an email or two a day from recruiters and I haven't received a phone call in weeks, which is at lot less than I would usually get. I emailed two recruiters back this week with my CV and neither replied. I'm fairly experienced too (12+ years) so I was kind of surprised. Normally I'd at least get a call back.

It didn't seem too bad a couple of months ago, but this last month things seem to have really slowed.

I have 5+ years of experience and was looking for a Senior Go developer position.

I started sending out my CV on the second week of September. I got more interviews that I could manage. The companies getting more picky and I got fewer offers than expected, but getting interviews wasn't a problem.

As I see here are only a few junior or medior position, but companies are still hiring for senior and above.

How do you feel your blockchain/etc history is impacting potential recruiters?

Neutral

Recruiters for blockchain companies contact me but I said I don't want to work with that technology anymore, recruiters for standard web dev roles understand dapp development as standard web app development

I'm not seeing this at all. Hiring is pretty hot still and wages have increased fiercely. Recruiters are still a plenty too.

yeah, agreed. i got a really good offer from an european company, with relocation included.

I mean europe is a bunch of diverse economies. So where in europe are you seeing this?

I am looking at remote position in the whole euw

Ah well the eu is narrow in tech. In the uk, also a european country, there are loads of roles available.

I just went through a round of interviews and received offers from large, small, and medium sized companies. So the opportunities are still there if you can navigate the interview gauntlet.

I tell people that you are looking for _one_ position, not 10,000. There will always be a position somewhere that fits your needs. Its more difficult in down times to a degree. And if your industry is in a huge slump, find a new industry! There's more work to do than can ever be done.

I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs.

Switching a stack won't help cos places want years of experience.

Most ads seem to be written for the unicorn engineer with 10+ years of experience in every part of the company's stack, but realistically any place you'd actually want to work for is going to be happy with a few years of dev experience in a similar domain + ability and willingness to learn new stuff.

>I wish that was the case, but my experience is that there are fewer PHP jobs.

Someone told me early in my career that "my grandkids will be maintaining PHP applications". He was probably right. You might be seeing less on the job boards nowadays, but half the web still runs on PHP.

Some of the jobs won't be posted - they'll just be in-network referrals. That's how much of my work comes to me.

Fewer PHP jobs, or fewer job openings, or fewer postings? I don't know if "fewer PHP jobs" is true across the board, but might be regional or 'industrial'? It may just be because I try to stay plugged in, but I don't see a marked difference in PHP jobs.

I have a colleague who was at a place that had a decent PHP base. Several years old, but... it was mostly written by a couple of people, and it got... quite hairy. After 4-5 years, they brought in a very capable person, who began a lot of refactoring. But... he was still doing this primarily in isolation. The company was growing, but they kept treating the big monolith API ... as its own thing, and it kept getting harder to expand.

"We can't find good PHP people!". But... they weren't trying very hard. This was pre-pandemic, and they were requiring people to be onsite in most cases. Colleague pinged me last year - they started rebuilding in node "because it was easier to find people".

But... this was such a ... shifting of goal posts. The problem was not "PHP is bad", but letting one person write all your business logic in isolation from the rest of the company is bad. The node rebuild is a moderate size team, who have an existing API to code against, and they're all working, greenfield, with the latest/newest versions of everything. Somehow "node is better" is the lesson they're drawing from this.

My colleague had suggested "let's rebuild some portions of this monolith API as a group". "Nope, no time for that". Well... they made time, but decided that the language was the main root cause. I can guarantee if they'd let someone build large chunks of this on their own in isolation from everyone else for weeks/months at a time... they'd hit the same problems in the next year or so.

And so "PHP is dying" sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, at least in the eyes of some. Yet... I've been hearing it for 22 years. And it ain't going away. And yes, it's being used for new dev/projects. I'm scheduled to convert a java system over to PHP8 early next year.

This may not help immediately, and I know the landscape has changed in many areas, but years ago, I went to multiple different tech groups and conferences - java, ruby, perl, ms/.net. I introduced myself as a PHP person. Beyond the standard lame jokes people tried to lay on me, I made connections. I was often the only PHP person some of these folks had ever met face to face. Months went by, and I would get calls from those same people "hey, someone is asking me for a PHP dev - are you available?" or "my friend's company has some PHP questions - can you help?"

This is not an immediate silver bullet, and I know COVID changed a lot of how we meet and interact. But... it may be something that helps someone out there.

My company recently gave up on acquiring another company, mainly because their backend is written in PHP. Not that there is anything wrong with PHP, but we deemed it too expensive to expand the team, because there are a few big companies that snap up all the good PHP developers in my area and we couldn't match the salary.

There are plenty of legacy systems that people need to maintain, no matter what the tech stack is. As others say, network, network and network some more...

There's more scrutiny of shorter-term stays, so you can't just leetcode yourself into a job.

How many applications did you send, compared to number of phone screens?

I had the most success just replying to inbound recruiter messages for companies that seemed interesting. I mainly used LinkedIn and YC's WaaS. Also, be sure to create a detailed profile that contains the alphabet soup of technologies that you have experience with, because this is how companies search for a potential match.

i feel like im on another planet when single digit growth is considered so bad. and this requirement for endless growth invariably destroys every product

The market is still extremely tight for good talent in-between Senior and Junior.

So the Senior market is saturated? this is an early sign companies are getting nervous about bloat. After the '08 recession many companies rushed to ditch Architect titles as they found that the role did not serve the interests of their productive engineers or the companies higher ups. Companies that had gone heavy on such talent might find themselves stuck.

I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles.

> I recall seeing talks on "Staff Engineer" and thinking that this was going to be the next version of "Architect". Engineers who's primary job is to write code often dislike working with people in such roles.

That depends. If they are actively involved and the architectural decisions are sound, it's fine.

If they are "drive-by architects", showing up, dropping a bunch of useless boxes they read on some book, and then leaving before the consequences of their 'architecture' are known, you are right we don't like working with them.

At many companies, however, staff engineers are still engineers.

Drive by architects don't read books. They read AWS's latest product brochure and think "yes".

I think both exist, but you're right.

The majority of Architects I've brushed against in the last decade have been exclusively an additional marketing force for AWS with very little ability to objectively reason from first principles or assist with knowledge of anything outside of the AWS ecosystem.

Totally genuine question as someone coming from a background in mechanical engineering, who now does a lot of software-y things: what do you consider to be "first principles" in computing? Are you talking about first principles in terms of project development processes (i.e how information systems evolve) or code (i.e. bits and bytes, where microservices might not be the answer because the network connections are guaranteed to have a fundamental latency that, along with the amount of data required, means you can't meet requirements because [..])?

I think I can name an example, which is how I am approaching datalisp; https://sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman/ the first principles bit for my context refers to: fixing a standard encoding that is sufficient for the task, determining inputs and outputs of model, setting a general guideline for expressivity of model (space of conflict-free programs), sketching interaction modes and user interfaces.

These are the first principles in question, now from there your architecture is mostly determined, you can fall back on known patterns and decades of research. The axioms are the architecture.

Thanks for the insight!

Not the parent but I will offer you my opinion after I laughed at their comment because it reminded me of many of the engineers at my current work:

"First principles" in this context is not just reaching for the nearest/newest AWS service that seems to do what you want. ie. if you want a webserver, don't just run magic lambdas that abstract everything away from you, go and provision a vps and install your dependencies on it so you fully understand and control how the stack works.

None of the 12 engineers at my current company had written a test that actually wrote rows to a database when I arrived, they didn't know how. In fact none of them knew anything about how to run our databases on their own dev machines at all, they all shared one RDS PG instance.

Again, "first principles" here is: running a process, connecting to a service, asserting the whole thing did what you expected. To do that effectively you have to actually control the whole system, and to do that you have to know how the whole system works together. A lot of developers now just delegate the provisioning and maintenance of everything to a provider, even in development setups.

This is basically the same definition I have.

First principles to me is the basic foundations of an idea.

Abstractions are used but; any given abstraction is not owned by a single vendor and are based on agreed upon standardised abstractions as they relate to to operating systems and databases etc.

Every architect i worked with read books.

The bad ones took what they read as gospel and the good ones took what they read in context.

May I also add the demi-god of arhcitecture juggernaut Martin Fowler.

My personal experience screams, ouch!

Staff engineer is just title inflation for what used to be senior engineer. Senior engineers at most companies just means this isn’t your first job right out of college.

I have 15 yoe and have senior software engineer title so do people with 2 yrs experience.

I might be doing same thing over and over. Time to make a radical change :/.

There's also nothing wrong with plateauing for a while or even topping out, especially if you are generally happy with life and career. There's pride to be had in being a good individual contributor; not everyone needs to make it to Senior Super Special Principal :)

I keep being told I shouldn’t be writing code at my level and should be knee deep in design docs and estimations all day long. This is actually what happens but I would much prefer to be writing software and am wondering if I can even be happy in this career any longer. This industry has some real bizarre notions of career progression.

You need to write code and you need to get people around you to write better code.

That’s basically what a staff engineer does in addition to making large design decisions.

That’s my belief as well but there are managers out there that think staff engineers should never write code. It boggles my mind they think this way but many do.

Writing code means that your impact can be directly measured. Others can see quality, volume, and impact. If you stop writing code then you can't be measured. If your impact is measured by others, and you aren't bound by a team... then you can just float to where the wind is blowing. It's comparatively easy to surf in this manner.

I agree and know all this and argue it weekly, trust me. Bad management doesn’t care.

There are other organizations that are trying to deflate titles as well. (Demanding the work of a lead, staff, or principal in a Sr without the influence to do so)

What is the spread in compensation, scope of work, level of responsibility, etc.?

I have 16 yoe and have been a senior software engineer since forever.

3 jobs ago I was principal engineer, 2 jobs ago I was an engineer, now I'm a senior.

The type of work I'm doing has been the same, manage a team or more of engineers, do some architecture, some coding, help and mentor other engineers.

Pay went up.

Depends on the company. The industry can’t seem to agree on what these terms mean.

And some companies don't even have a "staff" title, just several levels of "Senior Engineer." Makes it hard when applying for a staff role at another company.

> So the Senior market is saturated?

I am not sure I would say saturated, but yeah, the Sr. SWE market is definitely not as tight as it was a year ago for most role types. However, it does depend on qualifications and company type. Seniors for R&D positions (so, PhD with 5+ years in product-focused R&D) are still basically impossible to hire. Friends tell me that hiring seniors at mid-pay or low-pay companies is still pretty hard.

The more important dichotomy is between mid-career/late-career and junior. The entry level positions are absolutely saturated. CS programs are definitely over-producing at this point.

Might be true in the US, not what I’m seeing have seen in the UK.

Here big companies are taking kids straight out of uni and boot camping them because decent juniors are hard to find.

How easy is it to find bad juniors? I think that may be relevant for determining how saturated the field is.

CS programs are overproducing but they are overproducing the wrong skills. Most don’t have the cloud skillset or experience with IaC, they are never thought how to solve problems within distributed systems. And their idea of systems design is a Flask app talking to a MySQL database on a laptop.

It’s not the students fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times, and sometimes even teach bad engineering patterns that cause problems and create technical debt.

> It’s not their fault, but the education system is constantly behind the times.

Yes/no/maybe. The schools got pressured by the bootcamps that were teaching the "flask app talking to a mysql db" .. they simplified their classes and stop teaching some things. It sucks, the people who come out of that don't have the theory/flexiblity/skills coming out that you would expect before.

A lot of development jobs can be simplified into a web endpoint that hits a database. So that seems like a completely fair project to have students work on in an applied course.

Also, universities do offer courses in cloud computing. I was helping our interns with their cloud computing courses back in like 2016, so it's not a recent addition either.

> A lot of development jobs can be simplified into a web endpoint that hits a database.

This doesn't ring right. It might (maybe) be educational to do this, but I'd say that any "development job" that is about software development is not trivial like you say.

An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist [1] - I think you're making a simplification here and the real argument is if its educational.

[1] find a job description that says REST or GQL endpoint directly to database, and doesn't have a long wishlist of other skills, experience, or design - I'll gladly take 100 of those and be on my merry way (!)

> An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist [1]

This was my entire career pre-phd, and it was a pretty excellent career. Oh how the times change.

> I'd say that any "development job" that is about software development is not trivial like you say.

I did say, "simplified too." Yes, there's other things you might have to learn, but being able to, "take data from some place, then stick it into a database"; and "take data from a database, and send it to some other place" is a fundamental skill set for a lot of dev jobs.

You might be working at a FAANG and get to do fancy cutting edge development that never touches a database. But a lot of us at banks, insurance companies, etc are piping data into/out of a databases or other endpoints all day long.

> An "endpoint-to-database" job doesn't exist

9 of the 10 dev jobs I've ever had amounted to this, including my current one. Half of my job is maintaining a Go-backend bolted to a Postgres DB, and the other half is piping data from various APIs into BigQuery or vice versa.

Very insightful and interesting comment. Thanks.

is it CS programs or is it the bootcamps?

I've seen the bootcamp crowd more often than not in these situations coming through, not many with actual 4 year CS degrees, though I've seen many of those too, but not nearly as much, by an order of magnitude.

EDIT: could be a difference in what part of the industry we work in too. I do more frontend / "design engineer" work.

Yep, I'm probably going to have to accept yet another paycut if I want to keep working. Peak of earnings for me was at about 13 yoe. Now it's downhill until I'm better off working retail.

More and more senior engineers are non-coding or practically so. I see it everywhere. As industries have matured, people have matured into higher level management roles and there hasn't been enough people to replace them. There's still plenty of fresh blood, software engineering actually looks a lot like the labor shortages do in the rest of the market—there's a lack of people who actually want to do the work. Everyone wants that $150k starting comp. Everyone wants a $500k director or VP role. But there is a shortage in that $200-300K range for people who are actually going to put in hours either writing code that makes it into production, or managing junior coders and their codebases. I'm talking SV salaries here. The scale is different elsewhere, but the problem is the same.

Not for nothing, but that sounds a bit like a market peak if I've heard one. Why would the person actually doing the work settle for a mere 300k when the director/VP gets double without doing the hard work? there is a balance here - but it seems like a good time to lure engineers with real equity compensation to early stage startups.

Which industry has it different? I mean there are exceptions like sport teams but by and large this stuff happens everywhere else too.

Difference in tech has been that productivity has largely been divorced from capital, OpEx, and experience. This may be becoming less true today with large enterprises owning specific market segments through network effects... but I wouldn't bet on that quite yet in the long-term.

A doctor can't help but work at the world's best hospital, because it probably will still be the world's best hospital next year. A jet engine designer can't help but work at Boeing. A fresh college grad can start a tech business tomorrow.

Because managing people is the hard work, but it's not the grunt work. It can be emotionally exhausting.

It is much easier to teach someone how to code than to teach them how to manage. Management is two parts: (1) making sure people produce a good product for a little expenditures as possible, and (2) manage liability from employees. Particularly now, the second part is very difficult to teach.

Most people do not have great judgement when it comes to managing people and it's a really hard skill to teach. You can make someone watch training videos all day that tell them explicitly what NOT to do and they will still do exactly that. Everyone wants to believe they are good at management—very few people actually are. Most fail upwards into it.

Interesting, anecdotally at a faang adjacent company, I do not know of any Seniors who do not have code as their primary output. Even a large majority of staff actively code IME.

I'd be glad to know about these $200-300k positions. I must be applying to the wrong places - I keep hearing that my current base of 187k as a Senior SWE is out of their range.

What makes a "Staff Engineer" is largely a product of an orgs engineering culture. And you may have multiple people with "staff engineer" as a job title that fulfill different roles to varying degrees.

I've found those roles to be:

* Technical Leadership (driving major technical initiatives)

* Technical Contributor (shipping stuff, with technical mastery beyond what would normally be expected from senior engineer)

* Architect (planning stuff)

* Team Management (mentorship + taking load off an engineering manager's plate if the team is big)

Biggest mistake I see orgs make when hiring staff engineers is hiring someone whose strength is in mentorship and technical contributors and decide their new role is architecture and driving major technical initiatives at a high level. Some are best "in the weeds" and others are better planners. Know their strengths!

I'm a software architect, I write code every day, I design every day, I write documents every day, and I report to the VP and CTO every day.

I have met other architects that claim they "don't code" and honesty don't understand how they can make decisions and reduce risk without that background. Most of the time I have a solution because I've been there and done that.

I view my role as one that has the expertise to bring the engineering team to the next level, because if I did all the work - it would just be one person instead of many. I constantly try to unblock, solve hard problems, and reduce entropy - and let the creativity flow to the rest of the team.

This has worked for me, as a software architect, for almost a decade.

I agree it's still tight, but it's not as bad as it was a few months ago, IMO.

Anecdotal evidence, but I've had 2 open positions on my team since April and it's just been a constant flow of terrible candidates. I'm in a tech hub and we pay above market average according to levels.fyi, but we're competing with FAANGs for our candidates. The few good ones that popped up over that time often had multiple offers and it was hard to get them to choose us over a household name. In the last 6 weeks I've started to see the number of qualified candidates with no other offers increase to the point where I've filled both positions in a 2 week span.

Managers are still so busy trying to fill open headcounts because it’s usually use it or lose it. But they know hiring freeze is coming

I was laid off last week. The previous rounds of layoffs at my employer were focused on sales and operations folks. The latest was in IT, seemingly focused on senior level engineers.

My employer has literally stopped hiring engineers and product roles. Sales people are still being hired in droves though.

Aren't sales people "cheap" as their salary is negligible compared to sales bonuses if and only if they exceed their sales quota?

Not usually. Oftentimes sales people have pretty high base pay. Last time I worked somewhere with a sales force, their base was the same as the engineers with the same level of experience, and then they got commission on top of that.

I don't know. My bosses claim good engineers are a nightmare to find. Cash is surely not the bottleneck.

Anecdotal, but we had a decent amount of layoffs over the summer and every single engineer laid off (seriously, every) has a job by now.

My firm is still playing the long game, so we’ve been actively hiring talent.

Check back if/when a recession is in full swing.

Everyone plays a long game until the cost of debt and debt servicing comes home. There are just too many Zombie Unicorns, it is matter of time. If your company is not profitable consider yourself jobless 6 months from now.

Are you positing that if we maintain our current trajectory economically that Zombie Unicorns will start harshly cutting costs. Why 6 months? I'm actually curious why that number as I'm not in the environment.

You are correct. There’s a particular company that’s local to me that hired away a bunch of my mediocre engineers at very high salaries because they were printing money during COVID.

In 2022 their operations cost was 150% of revenue and I have to imagine that those people are sweating a bit now.

That's good. It was a terrible model to begin with. Profits and growth should come from providing value to customers not biding time until you can "exit" or whatever they call it.

What would "recession in full swing" look like exactly, from the perspective of changing your firm's behavior?

I just landed a dream gig and start in about 3 weeks. Horrified of layoffs etc but super excited for the move. Article made me feel a little bit better but only mildly.

I have not seen or heard of any engineering cuts in any of my circle's workplaces. Only supporting staff (project managers etc).

I clicked on a few of the google sheets linked in the article and it seems (at least per my random selection) that this seems to be the case at these places too.

My company has a hiring freeze in place right now but are still brining on new contractors for high-priority initiatives as needed. No engineers have been let go yet

And recruiters keep spamming me on LinkedIn about "great" contract to hire roles they have

People still need engineers, they just don't want to commit to increasing headcount, because it will upset the beancounters.

That's my take anyway

The article doesn't answer the question. The list is also missing 2 of the big names which announced layoffs Oracle and Citrix. For more detailed and depressing discussion about layoffs check [1].

[1] https://www.thelayoff.com/

Well, I wouldn't neccessarily treat the Citrix layoff as directly macroeconomic related, as they are going through an M&A event right now with TIBCO to make the "Cloud Software Group" [0][1], and it's ex-Broadcom leadership (who are very dollar/efficiency oriented).

[0] - https://www.cloud.com/news/press-release.html

[1] - https://www.cloud.com/

Engineers keep the lights on. You can lay-off some, but you’d likely spend more money than it’s worth.

Small company around 500+ employees hiring freeze (for everyone not just eng) for a month to assess.

$40-50B is a small company? I see.

Yeah I got that number wrong, that's the valuation for this particular industry as a whole.

This thread proves yet again, that learning computers also makes you a sharp economist

We've seen a few people leave for other jobs, and are still hiring. Still getting offers from recruiters.

I haven't seen this play out in the real world yet beyond news stories.

Well the finance being low seems consistent with my experience. I know my employer is currently way more stressed about hanging on to people

My fortune 100 has hiring freezes and and small layoffs. However, select departments are still hiring.

My company is not hiring developers at the moment, but there sure are some people who should be let go.

Cries in Data & Analysis :'(

I wonder why this was hit so hard?

No need for those positions if you're just trying to keep the lights on

Sales is on one side of the graph and Marketing is on the other. Amazing.

> Articles like these drive engineers to speculate on Blind and on Reddit, in the internet equivalent of hushed whispers, about whether they’re next.

Bizarre to reference a Blind thread from 2019 discussing Uber layoffs to back up a claim that engineers are reading the previously linked articles in the future and speculating about "whether they're next."

Author here. Good call, just fixed to a more generic link about layoffs on Blind. No shortage of recent conversations.

“interviewing.io is both a mock interview platform and an eng hiring marketplace (engineers use us for technical interview practice, and top performers get fast-tracked at companies)”

The source for this article has some strong incentives in the area of perceptions of increased competitiveness.

Author here. For what it's worth, I added the conclusion pretty late in the game. When I first ran the data, it looked like engineers were barely getting laid off (because of engineers not opting in to layoff lists as much as others). And the graph about the bar going up came in as a zero hour suggestion from someone who proofread the piece.

Believe me, I'd be much happier if eng hiring were back in full swing. With all the freezes and layoffs, we've taken a bigger hit than we can hope to gain back by shilling interview practice.

> At some point in the last 2.5 years, you’ve probably visited layoffs.fyi.

I have?

Never even knew it existed until just now. I feel like am not in the minority. Weird that the author assumes this is some well known site.

Its a very well known site

Within your bubble.

You assume to know my bubble?

HN is a bubble -- and we're all in it by definition :)

I also exist outside this bubble and in many other bubbles.

Of all places, HN isn’t a place where I’d assume I know a given readers social circle.

Sure, there are many different people on HN.

But my point was that like or not, HN is also a bubble.

If you hang out on HN, you most likely think that technology is fantastic. The only reason we don't think we're in a bubble is because, we're so stuck in the bubble that we can't believe someone wouldn't think that technology is amazing.

(okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but HN is still a bubble)

They did say probably and for the post hoc case which knows they didn't it's hard to believe, but probably on balance, you're right: maybe they should have used maybe?

The so called 'bar' references doesn't make much sense. There is no way to measure the performance of an individual. Leetcode style questions don't indicate performance. And what cannot be measured in the first place in a 4 hour interview, cannot have a 'bar'.

There are absolutely ways to measure the performance of an individual. That leetcode style questions are not a great indicator of ability to do the job well does not mean you cannot predict job performance at all.

The bar here is interview performance bar. There is no way to judge a person's performance in 4 hours. Anything you come up with can be hacked or imperfect. Therefore there is no way to set a bar.

You can't perfectly judge someone in an interview context, but you can get pretty good if you ask the right questions with the right structure. Where I work the final round interview we give the candidates a week to write a design doc for a recent project they have worked on and present it to us in a 45 minute meeting. We deep dive on their impact, the decisions they made, the tradeoffs etc. It has been an extremely strong signal for us.

I love this method.

That process would be biased to those with experience and enough rank to be able to make decisions. It would miss those who are capable but who haven't gotten the chance. There are many, many people who haven't gotten the chance and a diminishing market of those with experience. How would an interview process identify the capable but not experienced?

It's infinitely hard. I mean, you take the same group of people and change the circumstances slightly and have a completely different outcome. Some groups don't gel. It's like last year's Super Bowl team, they're all still good but the circumstances have changed. Nobody knows how to predict who will step up in a situation and past performance is not a good indicator. The circumstances have changed.

Every interview technique has some horrible downside and therefore it's not really possible to correctly assess talent. Just biasing towards experience isn't solving the problem of figuring out who can do the job. Even just knowing who was capable would be a step up from the current state. Figuring out how to moneyball a team together to win the Super Bowl (hit launch goals) is a whole added level. Our 45 minute tell-us-about-your-previous-projects-interview is nowhere good enough.

You scope the deliverable to the level of the person you’re hiring, but at the end of the day I do want to hire people who have actually really done something, not just people with the potential to do something. There is nothing wrong with that and nearly every other job role and industry works within those constraints. Jr devs with no formal decision making authority have done well in our process, the bad ones do really poorly.

My personal experience has been that this format 1) gives the engineer “home field advantage” by allowing them to go deep on a project they should know a lot about and hopefully show off a bit and be confident 2) allows us to really press on how deep the engineer actually understands the tools they use and what they do/did 3) allows us to understand if the candidate is a leader/get shit done orientation person or a passenger on projects 4) allows us to see how polished their technical writing is

In my current role I've done about 30 whiteboard interviews in the last 2.5 years, and I come down on the side that they are about as predictive as throwing darts.

The most successful candidates I've helped hire in my career were the ones where we had an informal process where we just talked about things and I went with my gut. They say that's not objective or measurable, full of bias, etc.

I toss my hands up in frustration.

That's true for me too but it's not allowed now because of DEI and anti-bias processes

so now it's a leetcode packets for everyone even though the candidates we've hired though them have been worse, our org is now filled people folks who studied for the test instead of having geniuine interest and unique aspirations

it's a charade since I had people from more varied backgrounds (economic, national .. etc) who were able to start decent carreres before having to change

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