I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. I do agree this is generous af.
Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.
They are also saying that departments are affected disproportionately. It's likely much harder for recruiters to find a new job, especially when hiring is being frozen at most companies
> I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway.
Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT.
If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants.
We'll be back to the days of:
Sure, you can code, your algorithms are efficient and your CV is impressive, but can you tell me how many overloads of string.contains are there in the Foo lang standard library? Ah, you say that's unfair? Well, the previous 10 candidates where just as good as you so we need more. We need you to hit the ground running, be productive the first week and be coaching our experienced devs within the first month.
You're right, and this is in the guidelines. Swipes like these (even if they feel jovial by the writers) sap credibility from posts and civility from the threads.
Sure. If there wasn't already a sprawl from this, I'd have kept quiet. But like, the "summer child" thing really is super annoying, and the parent commenter is mostly right, if off-topic.
I'm only here because we're all here. But summer child seems like the most prosaic insult possible, if one can even call it that, and it serves as a sort of useful shorthand. With a certainty approaching 99%, I think there is something better to be annoyed at.
I don't think it's super insulting or anything, it's just a condescending swipe. When you take a condescending swipe, you set a ceiling on the tone for everything that follows.
It's a new expression to me (in regular use, I had heard it before but not often) but it also works fine. I disagree that we need to get rid of it just because it's old fashioned.
It's a very apt phrase. Young people whose only experience of professional life has been in the "summer", e.g. the good times, and have no conception of what it's like to find employment in the proverbial winter.
ZIRP has created an entire generation with absolutely no clue about the very existence of, let alone the harshness of, cycles.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
I doubt it. It’s a direct reference to the book. To be a sweet summer child in the book is to be naive about the winter that is eventually coming, since you’re too young to have ever lived through a winter before, and therefore have no idea or conception or experience of what the real world is actually like. For those who don’t know, summers and winters are exceptionally long in the fantasy world of Westeros, and if you were born at the beginning of summer, you could reach the age of 10 before ever knowing a winter.
Thanks for the correction. I’m from California and never heard it before. Do you think the author of GOT was paying homage to the Southern usage for a reason?
Also the trick is, if they want you to live anywhere with a median home price > $360k, then it's a bad deal. A $120K job better be full time remote and have fantastic work life balance.
Borrowing with 0% equity is also often considered a bad idea. If you assume 25% initial equity, you can go 1:4 salary:cheapest available housing.
If you intend to buy a family home, chances are there are two people sharing the burden. If you make $120k and the partner $60, you could borrow $540k, for a total home price of $720k if you have 25% starting equity.
That opens up quite a lot of options.
Personally, though, in the current market, I wouldn't borrow that much. It's quite possible that the biggest housing crash in several generations is just around the corner, and interest rates may very well be 15% within 5 years.
Man, it feels like interest rates SHOULD get to 15% in the next year, but I don't think Powell has the guts to grind the stock and real estate markets into dust the way he's supposed to
For now, he seems committed to raising rates until inflation normalizes. I don't think he's very worried about stock and real estate markets. But at some point, there will be effects in the real economy, and unemployment will start to rise.
Hopefully, inflation will go down at around 5% unemployment. But if he has to continue tightening until unemployment hits 6, 8 or 10%, I suspect he will will be forced to eventuall pivot, even if he doesn't want to.
In that case I'm in need of a significant salary increase... Over here, in a high priced region of Germany, house prices tend to be some at 10x of yearly salaries, which is totally fine.
Tell me your ways. I wouldn’t mind working in government. Bonus that I’m a veteran (states) but now I’m 40 and still new to software ( 3 years experience self taught )
Governments are serviced by a long chain of middle man businesses, and at the end of the chain is usually a group of highly paid developers with high job security maintaining legacy applications.
In 40+ years in the industry, I've only been unwillingly unemployed for about a month, when the startup I was at imploded (frankly, much to everyone's relief).
Doesn't mean it won't get really bad, or that you'll be happy with what you find.
Your first job would have been at the tail end of the dot com bust. That was a fairly tough time to start. By 04-05 tech was back and has been ever since. Tech didn’t see layoffs, like we are seeing now, in 2008.
I would anticipate it's less that people won't find jobs and more that they'll get worse ones that they wouldn't have accepted before... but then again if you were already in the lower rung you're now competing with ex-FAANG guys
I think that scenario is increasingly unlikely. Unlike the past two downturns, there are vastly more mature companies with devs essential to their business models.
> Software engineers are needed all over the place and thus are often easily employable.
Needed as in must have or nice to have?
There are tons of devs creating tons of tech for the sake of creating tech. Cryptocurrencies come to mind, or all those half baked government automation projects where the digital version is in the end slower and more error prone (plus with limited or no recourse in case of failure).
And secondly, sure, they are, but what happens when you have 10 million devs and 8 million dev jobs? Past success is not a guarantee of future performance. Detroit and the car company cities and towns were amazing places to live in, and car engineer jobs were great, decades ago. Until they stopped being great.
> Sure, you can code, your algorithms are efficient and your CV is impressive, but...
it sucks and is unfair, and I might suffer from that myself, but isn't this the very essence of capitalism? if I'm ridiculously good and there are 10 more people who are also ridiculously good, it's going to come down to nitpicking, because we all compete in a market for this same req.
Calm down. Demand is super strong, even right now. It's almost impossible to get a decent software engineer who has a strong command of the English language and can articulate himself.
Most developers hitting the market with CVs are bootcamp generated and they don't have the slightest idea (and neither the interest) of what they are doing. They'll disappear as soon as the money does.
Unless you have a family and live in the Bay Area, you should always be able to move to a low cost of living and wait for the recession. It'd cost much less than $30k/year to spend a year in Kuala Lumpur with all your food delivered.
Note that for some people being laid off and not quickly finding a job can mean being kicked back to whatever possibly authoritarian country they came from.
A 5000+ person company I have consulted for is hopelessly unable to find anyone who has advanced Python ecosystem experience for less than $200k. There's lots of boring companies that pay competitive-ish salaries ($140-180k), but most people gravitate to the shiny big companies that look good on a resume.
The funny thing, it's a +5000 persons company. If this Software Developer is instrumental for the company, you'd think he'd be worth $40/employee. So there are developers, just companies not willing to pay them enough (even though we established that it's not really that high).
I was mentioning small companies in my previous post (think 4-6 devs and maybe a dozen other employees). $100k/yerar can sometimes make it or break it. Tech developers remain inaccessible for these companies making them disadvantaged in this market.
This might explain the crazy seed rounds the eco-system has been going through in the last few years. $3 million seems be the bare minimum for any startup looking to do something technical now.
To back this up: I'm an unemployed Python dev in the U.S. with a credible resume and GitHub profile, actively looking for something remote. $140k would be absolutely fine, no interest in FAANG or shiny companies, in fact for various reasons I've been looking primarily at smaller places. I'm not really worried yet and I've had some luck, but it's definitely not the case that anyone skilled can count on just walking into a job. I've been rejected out of hand where I met the essentials of the posting and had no doubt I could do the job.
I'd like to hear the aforementioned spiel about the "advanced Python ecosystem," which to me could mean anything between "knows what a virtual environment is" and "ML/TensorFlow expert."
At risk of ruining a great spiel, I’d assume it boils down to “it’s amazingly foolhardy to target the candidate pool of people who have already done what you’re trying to do, when there’s a much larger pool of people who haven’t already done that thing but are readily capable of doing it”.
Tech skills and domain knowledge are transferable and learnable. So if you’re targeting hires, maybe aim for people who excel in non-transferable skills and then just teach them (or pay them to learn) the domain skills.
There’s also the side benefit that if you hire a person and ask them to repeat something they’ve done before, you still need to figure out a growth path for them. But if you hire a person and ask them to do a new-to-them thing, you have the bones of a growth path baked in.
Do you mean being able to follow the tutorial at https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/packaging-p...? I've never needed to do that before but it seems pretty straightforward. So far I haven't seen anyone specifically request that skill in a job posting and I'd consider that a strange question to ask in a skills test for a general developer position.
What does “advanced Python ecosystem experience” mean? Are we talking someone who contributes to the packaging tools themselves or just a competent release manager?
Are they insisting on full-time in-person with in a high cost of living area? (Or a dress code?)
Do they have a policy preventing employees from working on open source software?
Do they have a reputation for requiring things like mandatory overtime or off-hours availability?
I have trouble believing this is true unless they’re answering yes to at least a couple of those questions. If they aren’t, have they considered changing how they’re looking? It wouldn’t be the first time bad leads are due to a recruiter who just isn’t the right person for the job.
Sure if you are a FAANG, hot startup with funding or offering $300k/year. But if you are a regular company with a normal budget, you are left with nothing.
And I understand this is the market. I'm just pointing is that it's not as near bad as the previous poster has claimed.
Does the ordinary company need professional Leetcode player that FAANGs are looking for? Or does it need someone who is about average on web development and willing to work for about average salary? Not every guy should aspire to date a supermodel and not every company should cargo-cult FAANG interview process.
Fair enough. You should be fine if you are doing regular REST/React stuff. But if you want to work on something like WASM, Rust, fine tuning Web Sockets over GraphQL, etc... then suddenly, you need an "above average" developer.
I can not understand how your comment relates to the parent in any meaningful way. The tech hiring boom that occurred with Covid was certainly one contributor to over-staffing.
The parent is simply stating that market conditions are changing and that it might not necessarily a given that it will be so easy to find something new if we continue to see layoffs. That all seems pretty logical. However your response seem to be two links that are now a year out of date and a bizarre statement to "Stop believing the bullshit you're being fed"?
Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.