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.
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.
For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 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.
Atlassian on the other hand lol.
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.
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?
I like HTTPie and HTTPie/http-prompt as well.
And also ThundeClient a VS Code extension when using VS code.
It'll do more, with richer libraries, and an obvious path towards automation into CI/CD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like C++ Staff engineers, etc.
It seems more like a realignment to shift those jobs to cheaper subsidiaries like India, Pakistan, Mexico, etc.
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.
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.