But aren't sales and account management precisely the people who are client-facing or related to e-commerce?

Yes but they're the easiest to ramp up and wind down. Certain segments of the economy as devastated right now. Would not want to be a flight attendant, but airplane engine mechanics are probably still in demand as cargo flights replace passenger traffic (since we're ordering everything online now).

Logically, that would extend to people whose job revolves around signing up restaurants to marketing portals. The restaurants that have an online business are already there. Those that don't have an online business are already closed.

According to flight aware, global air traffic is down 75%. So I'd bet mechanics aren't doing so hot either unless they were dedicated to cargo.

Programmers arent as easy to replace because they already understand the system. Training takes time, and if there's not enough documentation then you'll end up contacting the previous programmers for help (I've seen it happen) anyway.

Yes. But now they have no one to call.

Marketing and SDRs are really easy to scale up/down; there are some things that are specific to each product but generally it doesn't matter what you are selling it is the same soft skills. Account Executives and Sales Engineers who provide long term support are a lot harder to replace though.

Execs are even easier to fire as they are the furthest away from the front lines, but they're the ones doing the firing so too bad for everyone else.

Realistically I would say a lot of engineers are easy to fire. You only need a certain amount of engineers to do maintenance.

Engineers are easy to fire, but incredibly hard (and expensive) to hire, especially if you become known as the company that'll fire people immediately in a crisis. There's a fine line between saving money now and spending it later, and I'm sure Yelp - just like every other company out there - is trying to figure out where does that line lay.

I don't think engineers have this as a specific trait. Every worker in any occupation has the attitude you describe above.

The thing that truly influences "hard to hire" is supply and demand. With the influx of bootcamps Software engineering supply has increased and with COVID-19 decreasing demand Engineers may no longer have the luxury of picking and choosing like they used to.

I'm an engineer btw. Just viewing the situation from a realistic lens.

I am an engineer too. I've helped hire engineers at two pretty big companies before and have done all the hiring for my current company.

While the supply has increased, the number of senior engineers hasn't grown at the same pace. I know of companies who've fired even their senior engineers, but they've been hit particularly hard by this crisis (think 'business model is literally rendered invalid' level of affected). Most people who think they'll be able to weather at least the next six months will be reluctant to fire more experienced engineers, because they know how hard it was to hire them to begin with.

While some of the options might be gone, chances are people who get laid off or are still in the market will look for companies with better chances of surviving this (think Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.), so the pool of experienced talent might actually be reduced for startups.

In other words: people with 5 years of industry experience are playing in a completely different arena than more junior engineers, who are unfortunately in a more precarious situation.

>In other words: people with 5 years of industry experience are playing in a completely different arena than more junior engineers, who are unfortunately in a more precarious situation.

The logic is sound, you have a point. But I think it doesn't play out this way in reality. Maybe it's like this for your current company, but is that the general trend?

I know that during the dot com bubble bursting many years ago what you said was not the case. Could be different now but do you have any other supporting evidence?

Were engineers incredibly hard and expensive to hire immediately after the dotcom bust or the 2008 financial crisis?

That's actually a good data point I'd like to have. Unfortunately I wasn't in Silicon Valley at the time, but at least where I was, it didn't affect my opportunities of finding a job at all.

I was born and raised in silicon valley. It was pretty bad across the board. Tons of good programmers got killed including ones that were really solid.

Mind you the situation is different now so what you say could be right in a certain way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21318704

I think they mean easy to fire in the sense of "easy to go through the process of firing and deallocating tasks/knowledge/etc.", not "easy to justify firing."