I find it funny that every layoff announcement has a similar comment at the top, as though this were an isolated incident, rather than a fundamental shake up in the industry. This isn't even the only layoff article on the front page of HN right now.

I think it's fair to say that virtually every company right now has been "a bit over bloated for awhile".

Even as someone that foresaw pretty much what we're seeing now roughly a year ago, I still find it shocking to watch the slow unraveling of our industry.

My company hasn't had layoffs yet, but it's painfully obvious to everyone that they're coming (but just not obvious enough to create maximum anxiety from the uncertainty). Because of this I've put my feelers out to see what other options are out there and... it's bad.

It will be a blood bath.

Postman "Labs", a company that produces a glorified cURL UI and some incoherent most likely useless tools around it received $433M investment at valuation of $2B and apparently has hundreds of employees. Current state of tech is not sustainable.

As always you have to remember that the public UI of a SaaS business is rarely telling the whole story about why the headcount is what it is, and without significantly deeper knowledge of everything the business is doing, including future products in development, it's really hard to say if there are too many people or not.

Most engineers are not in a business to support the day to day running of an app. They're there to build new things to provide growth and support change. This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately. That strategy even works in the long term if you're happy to scale back future ambitions and focus on a single app. It wouldn't work for most companies that are constantly fighting for market share though.

That's why I mentioned "incoherent and probably useless other tools". Apparently, they launched some sort of no-code tool for stringing APIs together but still not ready with their GraphQL client.

For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 2000 employees.

Margins are still very high for a tech company, so the business can be sustainable even with high R&D costs. What’s happening is the end of a cycle where everyone pulled back on their spending and companies try to keep the same margins by managing their expenses as they cannot attract more revenue.

I can't tell where you're driving with the JetBrains comparison. Truthfully, I'm a little surprised they only have 2000 employees.

They have a suite of IDEs supporting a multitude of languages, that are almost universally considered best in class. IDEs are not an easy thing to build. They developed and maintain the Kotlin language which has all but become the standard for Android dev. And they have integrated team collaboration tools that range from project management to CI to cloud dev environments.

I am not surprised. Hire carefully with specific requirements in mind, stay hyper-focused on your product(s), and eschew corporate trends towards bloat, fomo, and "feel good" initiatives.

Isn't it obvious? Postman Labs is bloated and overvalued, compared to what JetBrains does their product is just nothing.

But JetBrains has a whole suite of tools, supporting many plugins, creating their own jvm lang, with support team who actually respond and verify tickets.

Atlassian on the other hand lol.

> This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately.

It is to be determined if "doing an Elon" will work out for Twitter in even the short term. Give Twitter 1-2 years of "doing an Elon" before we judge the success of this approach.

Oh, man, I guess you are just repeating the point that every company is bloated.

The public UI (and performance) of a SaaS business is the one thing that adds value to society and is valued by its customers. Yes, new products development is a really great place to put some people, but how often do you see those large companies develop something good by themselves?

wow. i usually push back against the mindless "that's too many engineers what are they all doing XDDD" meme. but this is actually insane, i can't believe there's more than a single person working on postman.

They do have other tools with the word API in them but I kinda doubt their usefulness because of gems like "it will move you left on Gartner quadrant" all over Postman "Labs" website. Another reference point - WhatsApp had around 50 engineers when it was sold to Facebook.

postman, another shit product.

I actually find postman quite useful for the work I do (heavily api-related) - if you work in that space, what other tools would you recommend instead?

IMO Postman is a good tool. On alternatives though, https://httpie.io/ is pretty nice too.

I use insomnia after the stunt postman pulled with pricing.

Insomnia seems like a good replacement for web devs who don't want to rely on proprietary tools as part of their core workflow, as well.

I like HTTPie and HTTPie/http-prompt as well.

I use https://hoppscotch.io/ as a replacement for postman

And also ThundeClient a VS Code extension when using VS code.

Honestly? Jupyterlab with python and requests.

It'll do more, with richer libraries, and an obvious path towards automation into CI/CD.

The problem I've had with Postman is the sharing between team members. Everyone needs to add new requests, edit (locally) but sometimes sav the edits back to the collection.

Someone has to modify the auth script and have it update for everyone.

I thought this is what the tool is designed for, but it's been a nightmare. Team members have to wipe their environment and start again regularly. I want to think that we've completely mucked up using it but I'm not sure it's us and not the tool.

I use Postman all the time for work and it is definitely useful.

But it seems to be getting worse not better as they tack on more features and make it more complicated.

It seems like it's been years since they added anything I need and instead it has just gotten harder to use due to extra fluff. And it's buggier than it's ever been.

Apparently, they decided that selling merch is more important than implementing gRPC support.

I do work in that space. I build APIs and I use them. I built a springdoc for php so I know a bit about what I am talking about: https://github.com/cnizzardini/cakephp-swagger-bake

The Postman UX is not good on it. It's easy to get lost in tabs, they should ditch the tabs and categorize requests under the actual endpoint. There is also no way to easily save like requests and give them better names that is also searchable. It's also built on electron which means its slow and clunky.

There is nothing good in this space. Swagger would do it if they let you save requests to local browser storage and just added a history dropdown to the endpoints. I use swagger and save common requests to a file system and open them in sublime. if its just JSON payloads I am working with it does the job.

Their focus group seem to be rather big enterprises, not indie devs/small teams like with insomnia so it's not surprising.

Selling developer tools to corporate managers is an interesting idea let's see how it works out. Reminds me of Rational/IBM.

Most companies overhired and would have been punished if they didn't. Now they will be punished if they don't shrink. Public companies have to follow the market or their shareholders will slap them down. The real villain is the Federal Reserve, because their policies created a bubble.

We should also keep in mind that quite a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs if it wasn't for the massive hiring spree in the past few years.

The industry is not unraveling. It's just reeling from an economic bubble. Despite the layoffs few companies are shrinking back down to the size they were in 2020.

> Most companies overhired

how is it possible for most companies to overhire? where did all those hires come from? maybe facebook doubled by poaching non-faang people, but where did the non-faang companies get all these extra hires from?

> a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs

since tech layoffs mostly affect eng, pm's, hr and a bit of management, it seems strange that these mostly well-trained people were just idling around without a job until a couple of years ago by tens of thousands.

Did you not notice the explosion in bootcamps and online programs? Not to mention the huge expansion of existing CS programs. Tens of thousands joined the industry.

I admit I don't know the industry-wide data for that. I have not encountered a bootcamp person in a professional setting in over 5 years, but maybe im not a part of most companies.

Agencies are completely full of them.

How would you know they are a bootcamp person? Technically I'm a "bootcamp person" since I went to school for EE and not CS (so I'm mostly self taught when it comes to programming anything that isn't C), but that isn't something you would ever know about me without asking. I would imagine there are a ton of people in the industry with similar stories.

Bootcamp people being easily noticeable would seem to require them to be noticeably terrible in some way. I'm not sure you break into tech that way. My projects and technical interview skills were way ahead of the average CS graduate at the time precisely because I was a "bootcamp person" and couldn't rely on the degree.

Next week I've got a call with an applicant to an open position in our company. He did one of those bootcamps, too, that's all he got as experience. I'm really curious how that will turn out...

Depends on the boot camp, but in my experience the juniors that come out of them have been considerably better than other applicants when it comes to things like TDD and security. That’s been drilled into them.

Where they typically fall down compared to juniors with CS degrees is a couple of years later, when the practice doesn’t make up for less fundamental knowledge. But that can be easily overcome with good management.

Have recently worked with a bootcamped guy (although I should admit he had an engineer degree first) but my impression of that boot camp program at least is very good:

They had worked on some serious case studies with real version control, real databases, real bugs and he basically came ready to solve real life problems.

And yet we know for sure that many companies doubled in size in the past few years. Including really big companies.

A lot of startups probably didn't get founded. And CS enrollment has probably been up (haven't checked).

And a lot of startups that shouldn't exist got financed.

Obvious answer - unemployed.

so you go from perpetually unemployed to engineer at Atlassian for a couple of years, then back to perpetually unemployed? ("never would have had jobs" according to the parent) is that typical, for most companies?

Everyone moved up a pin, and the lowest ranked company got a bootcamp grad. Now everyone moved down a pin, and the bootcamp grad wont get a job. That is roughly how this works, not as clean but the end result isn't far off.

A lot of the lay-offs were senior technical staff though, at least at my company.

Like C++ Staff engineers, etc.

It seems more like a realignment to shift those jobs to cheaper subsidiaries like India, Pakistan, Mexico, etc.

Most companies with lots of cash during the inflation years overhired, those workers left smaller or less profitable companies that do not pay as much. The population of engineers did not grow that significantly IMO.

Yes the offers going around in the last few years for developers has been bullshit. It forced a lot of smaller shops to overpay to retain engineers, because of bullshit VC money backed competition. Then the VC money washes away and suddenly the market crashes... This isn't a good way to operate as an industry, and all that money produced what in terms of actual innovation?

This is actually the second half of OPs comment. Fed greases the wheels, distorting the market. Those who can take advantage of it (VC funded companies) do so, which propagates the distortion. Everyone else pays up to find / keep talent, or closes shop. Fed reverses trend, the bubble bursts. Now we watch the market slowly correct.

The worst part here is a lot of companies were making real products, that customers really wanted and really paid good money for. But if those customer companies were VC reliant / vaporware, then even that strategy won't pan out. Only by predicting that and actively working to skip easy money and find more durable businesses, pivoting quickly, or having extra cash reserves.

Haven't seen a mention for immigration and work visas.

I interviewed several people that had switched from the travel and hospitality industries during the lockdowns.

It's a shame that many companies could have benefited from utilizing these talented employees more effectively, rather than overhiring.

What? Name one product better than JIRA.

Emacs.

emacs has org-jira, which is how I interact with jira. As you can imagine it’s incredibly fast.

Linear

Linear is complete trash.

Linear is unfortunately too opinionated. At my last gig my manager wanted everybody to be using the same task tracker (understandably) and I wanted our team to move to a Kanban process because we evolved into the Infra/DevOps/IT team and ended up doing very little product work. At the time there was no way to operate in this paradigm as Linear forced you to use "Cycles" (a proprietary term for a time box) and it meant that we had to keep doing faux-Scrum.

I'm no particular JIRA fan and have had the misfortune of having had to administer an on-prem instance of it but the people who complain about it have clearly never used TFS or the bespoke solutions hacked together from off-the-shelf software (Domino, Sharepoint, Notion) that I've been exposed to. JIRA's a solid 6.8/10 and has always been far down the list of things that I'd change at any job I've had that uses it.

As a counter point, I've used several and have found them all more or less fine. It's always been the quality of the lead / PM that mattered _far_ more, and I've never seen bike shedding / switching around tracking tools to offer any value. Old (extremely slow) JIRA was the only time I felt the tool was really affecting the team's productivity, but the last several years JIRA cloud has seemed fine too.

I can appreciate preferring customizable tools, but if I were to personally choose for the company I'd prefer a constrained and opinionated one. Not coincidentally, this is analogous to the choice many companies make in their programming languages / linters the team's use.

Linear definitely does not force you to use Cycles. Cycles aren't even enabled by default. You have to specifically go into your team and enable it. It isn't a global setting either. It's a per team. So one team can do it while another doesn't have to.

My guess is you wanted a Kanban board but didn't realize you can change the standard ticket view to a board view? If you're in the Active issue view for your team you can click the boxes icon at the top right (or hit cmd-b) to get a kanban view.

I can be pretty thick sometimes but I _am_ smart enough to be able to change views in task tracking software ;-). If Linear supports disabling cycles then that's a new development... when we tried we had two others plus myself look at it and it simply wasn't an available option. Whether this was due to us not having a feature flag turned on or the wrong tier plan or what I can't say. Their method [1] specifically speaks to being rigid and working in cycles so I'm inclined to believe that this is a semi-recent change.

[1] https://linear.app/method/introduction

Haha sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate that. It's a tiny button though and not obvious. Was just taking a guess because it can be easy to miss and some of our users did at first.

I first opened my personal Linear account in 2020 and the default was no Cycles. I created a new team in that account today and it's the default.

I opened new one somewhat recently (2 months ago) for my company and the default was to have them off too.

The docs for Cycles say that here too: https://linear.app/docs/use-cycles#configure

Maybe you didn't have admin permissions on your team? Not sure.

Strongly agree with this one. If you can move do it now. It only becomes dramatically harder to move away from Jira as time goes on.

Linear is essentially a mildly opinionated and hyper fast version of Jira. It will be immediately familiar to anyone coming from Jira, which is a really great thing for adoption.

Don't underestimate the speed feature. The effect here has been that people stop using Jira and only use it at a bare minimum as required by management. People end up moving all of their planning and notes to things like Google Sheets, random docs, or just Apple Notes. Linear is so fast and easy to use I found I was back to doing planning and notes live in the tool because it was easier.

Highly recommend you give it a try. My company is unfortunately already heavily entrenched in Jira and I found a vast amount of work to move us all so I had to abandon our move.

Edlin

That’s a joke, right? Right?

jira is a product that i'd describe as "best of the worst"... i'm totally open to a better ticketing system but they all seem to suck in one way or another...

You're right. Companies still use and will continue to use jira whether hn's people like it or not

They have doubled in size since 2020, but before that they were appropriately sized.

Last month I read an article saying they were still hiring big in R&D. I don't know what their financials are like but it still seemed odd for them to bucking the trend.

They did recently kill off their option to run on-prem, so that probably reduces the support burden.

It also massively reduces their potential customer base in all the industries that are typically more resilient to recession.

True, though I know of stodgy places that are staying with Jira despite having to move from on-prem to Saas. The on-prem part is part of why they pick things like Jira. But I think the overly-customizable workflow/customization is a bigger driver.

You’re talking about their products now, right?