Re:Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
by fzeroracer on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:11PM
(#34796916)
What are you referring to? We've gone through multiple cold cycles already. 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Some engineers may have gone through these cycles without issue, but everyone was acutely aware of the layoffs when they were occurring and if you graduated during those times it was especially hard to find a job until the job market resumed.
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Re:Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
by timr on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:18PM
(#34796991)
> 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons.
Everything is relative, I suppose, but those are the sorts of things a person might say if they've never actually seen a downturn.
When I say "downturn", I mean: 2001. 2008. Compared to that, 2012 was boom times. I was running a startup then, and hiring was a brutal competition. Maybe not compared to 2020, but again...that's not normal.
In 2008 we were hiring Ivy-league grads into hourly customer support roles. Circa 2000, programmers with decades of experience were going on unemployment.
Re:Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
by fzeroracer on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:32PM
(#34797174)
I mean, 2001 and 2008 are all 'boom times' compared to the great depression and other periods of severe economic downturns if we want to be relative. I'm not sure that really matters though to a new grad that took 6+ months to find a job during one of the period of lean times I mentioned in my prior post however.
It can always be worse, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.
Re:Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
by timr on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @06:03PM
(#34797490)
The point is, I lived through the times you're citing as "a time of large layoffs". I was hiring in at least one of them (actually, all of them, in different contexts). It was very hard to find engineers. By no even semi-objective measurement were 2012, 2016 and 2017 lean times for the industry. Virtually every tech company was hiring like crazy.
Maybe they were bad for someone, but that's always true. I'm sure a brand-new coding school grad has a hard time in most markets, for example.