I think I understand the anxiety others are feeling, especially those not laid off but are actively interviewing. Those graphs show tens of thousands of tech workers from blue chip companies now looking for work. It's not as if the market itself is in trouble, but this temporary supply shock of high quality engineers definitely makes things different.

I personally went from 5-10 recruiter pings per week (our team just closed $___m and we need a founding iOS engineer!) to 1-2. The sky isn't falling, you're right, but I can definitely still see how this round of layoffs would be affecting a current job seeker.

This might also be related to end-of-year slowdown and budget cycle exhaustion for companies whose financial year (FY) aligns with the calendar.

There is still hiring happening between US Thanksgiving and the New Year but so many people are off (and some companies have time-off mandates!) that all internal processes slow to a crawl.

US eCommerce adoption rose dramatically because of Covid providing a fertile ground for all digital companies (SHOP, META, AMZN, GOOG, etc) to hire like there is no tomorrow. They all were wrong by assuming that this trend would continue. https://app.finclout.io/t/R18XAmX As it turns out. Humans love meeting other humans in real live way more than meeting people online.

eCommerce is what I'd consider a core value proposition though, so I would expect steady long term growth in balance with bricks and mortar. There's also lots of products and services for which bricks and mortar retail doesn't make financial sense, which provides a base level of participation from sellers (in my opinion).

> They all were wrong by assuming that this trend would continue.

> As it turns out. Humans love meeting other humans in real live way more than meeting people online.

That's one way of putting it.

But the economic implications is way more severe. This reasoning about constant economic growth has had the world fooled for way too long.

There are cases where more is not always more.

What would be an interesting metric would be # of core SRE engineers laid off vs number of "Agile Project Managers" or "Developer Advocates" laid off. My company has had 2 SRE openings all year long.

Hey there, I am on the market looking for an SRE/Cloud Infrastructure opportunity, my email is on my profile, could you please share the name of your company or a link to the job openings? Really appreciate it, thanks

Not OP but it's not actually on the profile, we cannot see it. I might be interested talking to you as well (depending on your location/timezone basically).

I agree. I think the business is trickling down to smaller businesses right now, and you'll see more hiring at smaller places.

I wouldn't be too sure. Of course this is anecdotal, but the one Startup that actually replied to my application and said that they were about to make an offer just said they were implementing a hiring freeze as well. I might just not be an attractive candidate, but I haven't recently found many of those high-paying tech jobs that were so popular in 2021.

Startups that aren't profitable (ie: most of them) are in even more trouble than large still profitable companies. There's less VC money and they need to preserve runway or they'll go out of business.

Something I regularly advocate for. I think other industries could be doing a lot more with software with embedded developers rather than relying on SaaS startups for features and automation. But that's untenable because while it would definitely be valuable, it's not always going to make financial sense with tech wages being inflated by the SV venture capital game.

Do not care. The more jobs for me ;-) I only worked about 100 hours this year and already made more than the past 3 years.

I was hiring until a few weeks ago. The market is flooded with candidates right now and it wasn't three months ago. Lower supply and increased demand means it's a much worse job market for candidates. It doesn't take much to tip an equilibrium like this.

Right but that's after bloated hirings over COVID. It will be bad for few months obviously, but it's not like that will stay

Top tech companies and VC startups will take a lot longer than a few months to resume hiring. So even when the glut of supply passes there will still be lower demand for a while. Or at least lower demand at the higher TC levels.

And yet it is still very hard to find anyone with specialist skills it seems, at least in security.

Edit: to clarify; I'm mostly advocating people look at upgrading via specialty into areas where there's clear demand, not trying to undermine marcinzm's point.

That doesn’t tell the full story:

Are you paying market rate? What roles were you hiring for? How many top quality candidates applied for your position?

I run a very small startup, and I too was hiring, albeit prior to this market correction. Even then, there was a plethora of candidates, and while most did not meet the hiring bar, one did.

I never said we had no applicants (that at least passed the resume screen) but simply that we now got a lot more applicants.

Most people aren't saying that we're looking at a 2001 situation (hopefully) in which many people leave the industry and a fair number of mid-career people never really get back on track. But most people also don't think this is a momentary blip. 2023 at least is likely to see longer and more selective hiring cycles and downward pressure on compensation. To the original point, I'd hesitate to leave a comfortable position at the moment.

Heard, chef; which is why I was curious for more details.

The business cycle has been known for a long time. Things were never going to always go up, and this downturn will end too.

Even if it is true, as another early-40s, I've got 25 years to the regular retirement age. Maybe it won't recover in a year, or even five, but 25?

Will the company keep you for 25 more years? If not, I imagine finding a job in your 40s or 50s will be quite a bit more difficult than it was in your 20s.