> My advise is to find a smaller, stable, profitable place to interview at.

This is the answer. Our organization is tiny and works in an extremely boring niche - B2B banking consultants & related software shenanigans. We've been at it since the 90s.

If you adjust your expectations just a little bit (i.e. you are now OK using "boring" stuff like .NET/Java), you might be able to get something much more quickly than otherwise.

Regardless, the market has spoken and we must all adapt.

Yes, forgot boring! We're kind of boring. Our customers are boring, our technology is boring (Java 8!), but the problems we solve are actually pretty exciting - we just solve them in a boring way :)

Right there with you. Small manufacturing company, been going steady for 51 years, boring as can be (20 year old PCB layout software and straight C on bare metal Arm Cortex), but we've found a good niche solving problems for customers that nobody else will. Being able to attract workers is definitely difficult though, as we cannot pay what the big guys around here can.

There are an incredible amount of jobs, niche jobs, that exist at companies like this all over. Small companies, in great niches, that have good industrial customers, that will continue to exist and will not be easily optimized away by some SaaS startup.

There's also good existing small companies that are in more exciting tech spaces, that are hiring, that are not startups.

Shout out to Fastmail, my former employer, as they are one of those nice small companies, seem to get lots of love here, and they're lovely people. And last I checked, they're hiring as well.

Even in the 'SaaS' space there are boring but profitable small comapnies that fulfill automation for niche use cases. I just picked up on that we are using for our CDN that cloudfront doesn't being to cover. The pricing is good, the company is small, stable, and I'll continue to use them as long as I can.

So... they're out there, but they certainly aren't FAANG and a lot of times, they aren't wild startups either.

Part of this leads to less "popularity" for potential employees. You've never heard of ABC Bearings & Co, and they haven't manufactured Bearings in 100 years, but they fulfill important roles in the roller industry. Not Boeing, but just as important.

I think this is because startups spend incredible amounts of time trying to grow and to find customers, so naturally they advertise, are in the news, on HN, etc. In a more boring economic sphere (IE: no exponential growth, a few solid players that often times are more cordial than cutthroat competitive) you may never hear of these places.

> Being able to attract workers is definitely difficult though, as we cannot pay what the big guys around here can.

Maybe visibility is an issue, too? I like boring work for a decent (not excessive, stable) wage. But finding these companies is difficult. Most of the ones I come across are rarely ever hiring because their turnover is low.

I'm a dev at a VC-funded SaaS startup in California. We're still in a growth trajectory (doubled headcount last year, on track to do so again this year, just hit a headcount of 500).

Our industry is such that we're not too worried about the recession -- people tend to buy our product because it's significantly cheaper than paying one more employee and it tends to make teams in a particular corporate department far more efficient. When COVID hit, we had a surge in sales.

My last company (larger & much older) also tended to get increased sales when the market slumped. Their product is key to helping governments, utilities, and other companies operate more efficiently.

So there are still great startups (and larger companies) that are hiring. I'd suggest looking for ones that have a recession-tolerant market or business model.

The fact that you cite VC funded and then headcount as your only metric of success is hilarious.

I wasn't trying to communicate level of success, just economic context and the fact that jobs are available there.

But since you ask: $57M ARR, 117% NRR, 97% YoY growth, 51 NPS, named a best place to work in [insert regional business journal] for the last 4 years in a row, customers really love us, and employees really love working here.

I don't know how reliable Glassdoor is considered to be these days, but we're rated 4.8 stars by employees, 97% recommend to a friend, and 92% approve of the CEO.

Your comment seems rather cynical, but I hope to at least demonstrate that there do exist good VC-backed startups.

Oh, and we're hiring! If anyone wants to know where this is, my email is in my profile.

Thanks, these are the numbers that people care about -- Nobody wants to take a job at a company that's just going to be hitting layoffs in 6-12 months, as many will do. I'll keep an eye on you guys and see how things fare over the next 18 months. Customer growth is slowing (15-20% YoY) so most of that revenue growth was from upselling and price increases, which is a a lemon you can only squeeze so many times.

Not OP but if I may, these numbers alone also does not necessarily indicate that you can successfully weather a downturn in near future or is well on the path to future success. Your headcount doubled last year and so did your revenue, maybe you doubled your sales team and the model won't scale further (I don't know what is your industry/product is so just speculating). Your revenue per employee is ~$114K, if most of these employees are in tech, maybe there is already too much bloat that you may need to shed soon if the growth does not materialize. If half of your customers just came onboard last year, maybe you are being too quick to boast a 117% NRR. NPS, Glassdoor and best place to work can also be dismissed as easily manipulatable stats.

I am not trying to dismiss anything or being cynical but just trying to point out that a lot of things goes into determining if you are a "good" VC backed startup. In my opinion, a smaller growth in headcount (compared with revenue growth) would have been a better indicator of a healthy startup.

For context the company is Floqast, accounting software SaaS. They raised $110M in July 2021 at 40x revenue (with an aggregate $93M raised over the 4 years prior). They’re proudly waving that Unicorn banner everywhere they can. 180 employees end of 2020 and 500 today on the way to 725.

The fact he cited that they have a successful product didn't register with you?

You mean that product that had the same temporary surge in demand as everyone else?

And if it were “successful” they would be “profitable” and not “VC funded”.

FAANGs are slowing down and freezing hiring too. It's not just startups that are worried.

I hope the 3-5 emails a week from recruiters hiring for Amazon will stop then.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs had their M&A department come in as usual, working on deals all day. They didn't close a single deal in over a year. (This is hearsay, btw)

So with that being the only anecdotal data point I have, the emails won't stop until the recruiters become fewer.

I imagine that FAANGs are sensitive to offering higher and higher proportions of equity pools to keep up with total comp expectations.

I imagine FAANGs will mostly let RSU compensation drift downward as the stock market does.

It will for unvested past grants. New future grants are named in $ not shares, so have to be explicit.

My grants were named in shares.

You don’t have to imagine it. Amazon publicly said as much and I believe Microsoft made a similar announcement.

There are also recently IPO'd companies that are dependent on share dilution. This was in the Wallstreet Journal today.

Mind sharing a link to that article?

I can tell you two of the BigTech companies that are definitely not slowing down - at least in their cloud divisions.

> I've never made FAANG/startup income

> we're desperately trying to hire

Do you wonder why people aren’t joining?

Yeah. We can’t compete with the numbers I see the SV folks making. Most of our work is directly billed to the customer so we need reasonable rates if we’re ever going to win bids. We can’t just live off of monopoly-level ad revenue.

The extremely high paid FANG income is a thing of the past, already down 50% ytd. I hope you enjoyed it while it lasted.

Completely untrue. Just finished up my interview process and my experience was that comp is higher than ever at the strong FANGs (I.e not Netflix). Microsoft and Amazon just massively bumped their comp maximums. Google was good as ever. Pre-ipos cash comp is still very strong although they are currently relying on previous stock valuations so the comp isn’t as good as they claim right now

What do you mean by finished up your interview process?

And when was your experience, and what was comp for all these places?

If you think those comps were only from last two years - I suggest you go back in historical data. $400k+ wages have been a thing well before the pandemic.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. High comps have existed forever, but they have also been handed out like candy the last few years.

If you're in the bay it might be hard to see, but high comps spread rapidly across the country, to Canada and to some parts of Europe. It became more commonplace hence why everyone and their dog has been trying to get into the industry.

Salaries at FANG have been cut 50% in the past 12 months? I have to give that a massive Citations Needed.

Total comp has likely come down, not salaries.

If a significant part of your comp is in stock, then yeah, that portion of your pay is down potentially 70% or more in six months (Netflix). There’s probably some employees at FAANG that are negative on their equity.

Netflix historically paid in all cash. Recently, they started letting their employees choose.

> Recently, they started letting their employees choose.

lol didn't want to be the last ones holding the bag. What a scumbag move.

paid cash on the way up, paying stock on the way down, lol

AAPL still up 10%+ YoY. Msft not technically FANG (MAGA?) and also up YoY.

They mean total comp, which is probably true since lots of people include their stock price appreciation when they talk about their total comp.

Even so, a 50% decline over the last 12 months is impossible. Of the FAANG companies, only Netflix is down more than 50%, and Netflix is notable for compensating people in mostly cash. Someone's compensation would have to be 100% stock and even then it wouldn't be down 50%.

I have yet to see comp go down at the high end.

High end tends to be equity heavy, and equity has dropped in value massively this year. Not sure how common it is to issue refresher grants of RSUs to top up the total comp.

Source?

The salary also depends on where you live. If you get a salary from a small company in a place where is cheap to live, you might have the same level of living as someone working for a FAANG in The Bay Area.

for FAANGers, how does everyone feel about their wild comps now that the stock prices have come back to earth?

Back down to whose earth?

Even if you’re only making $250K, that puts you well within the top 10% of earners in the US.

I think Amazon has seen the largest drop out of the BigTech companies and it is down 30% year to date. Amazon has been adjusting SDEs cash component up even before the crash.

Netflix should have never been put in the same category as the 1 trillion+ market cap companies.

I work at one of these companies and we're hiring https://activatedinsights.com/jobs/software-engineer-remote/

100% accurate. If you want to work at companies that don't make anything people buy, aren't profitable, and where the CEO's singular focus is raising another 18 months of runway, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

But, if you work for employers like mine (we're hiring for multiple senior positions, by the way) all this is going to do in the short term is make hiring a bit easier. Honestly, I'm looking forward to the market getting a little more sanity in it. Bootstrapped or reasonably invested (e.g. non-VC) companies haven't been able to compete on comp in years.

There are hundreds if not thousands of positions at boring old big profitable enterprise shops like banks and government jobs that are humming along fine. I barely knew there was a dot com bust in 2000. I was working for a bill payment printing company.

I wrote about this just a couple of days ago! Our investors have been warning of a looming bear market for many months and now financing another round anytime soon looks rough.

If you want personal advice check this out:

https://www.towardssoftware.com/blog/economic-environment-fo...

> we're desperately trying to hire

Perhaps this is a good place to leave a link to your hiring page...

We’re small enough that it would tie my account to me. Not wanting to do that. Maybe the next Who’s Hiring I’ll have a throwaway ready and do that.

You'd be surprised by (probably) how easy would be to tie your account to you. But I respect the care to your own privacy.

If I _really_ cared, I'd never post publicly at all. Just trying to not be obvious who I am in real life. Every night when I plug in my phone and go to bed, I always say "good night NSA" because I assume I'm always being tracked :)

Yeah, totally agree you don't need to make it obvious.

But any smart, motivated actor can probably derive who you are from your posts.

You probably give away little hints about yourself, interests, tech you use, etc. Cross referencing with data leaks, public Github commits, LinkedIn profile, the time you usually post here (tells your TZ), etc, it's not far fetched to determine who you are...

I’m sure you’ll get some interests folks if you post where you work here on HN!

I’d like to. I’m always caught off guard when the Who’s hiring comes around and most of our HR dept isn’t on HN to make a post. I need to make a throwaway some time and post an ad here (not looking to tie my account to real life right now)

I am slightly amused your account name appears to be your real name =)

It’s not :). Its from when I was a poor grad student. I filled out a survey to get free stuff and purposely wrote very sloppy so they wouldn’t be able to send me follow up mail (back when people would send you real mail). They were able to decipher my mailing address but they got the name really mangled and sent it to Michael R. Peskin. So I use that as my pseudonym now.

Well played, didn’t see that one coming. =p

What are the pay ranges for the roles you have open?

It’s a pretty wide range. For juniors just out of college, I think we’re near 80-100, I’m at a principal level and am close to 200. We’re looking mostly for junior to mid. We’re a bit top heavy right now. It’s not SV levels plus equity like they get, but we don’t have unlimited budgets like the FAANGs. The owners just take a normal salary and all of the profits go to the employees as year end bonuses. So it’s pretty fair, I think.

My entry-level base salary, admittedly at a FAANG, ignoring equity/bonus, was $127k real.

So on the one hand, that you say you're doing $80-100k sounds low, to me. But $200k for a principal eng. sounds not too bad¹. So IDK.

¹it sounds "inline with what I'm making now, adjusted for experience / title differences. But it's crap compared to the current housing market.