Having been laid off due to downsizing, I think everyone should go through it at least once. Sure, the first time will leave you panic stricken, but you'll come out the other side with a lot more clarity about the employee-employer relationship.
You are disposable. Even the CEO is disposable (as I've seen many times). Once you realize that, you'll stop the BS about loyalty to your company. It's a business arrangement, nothing more. Your job is to get the most you can (money, experience - whatever floats your boat). If it no longer works for you, leave. They'd do the same to you.
Agreed. I once got a call out of the blue that I was being laid off. I had always associated stability with success: as long as I was doing a good job, my job would be secure. That was not the case.
It was purely a business decision for them, but I left dazed and wondering what to do. I had always planned job changes on my terms. But it was also freeing in that I now could find opportunities I would've missed. I'm much happier where I am now.
Same thing happened to me. I was taking my first vacation in two years and I got a call just after lunch. My boss said, "I need to let someone go because our numbers are down from where we want them to be. And it's going to be you, because you'll probably have the best chance of finding a new job."
Highest grosser in the region 5 years straight. Aced the performance review. Brought in several clients, a few of which are YC graduates. But because Bob in NY wanted us to hit 25% growth for the 5th year in a row and we were only going to reach 5-10% YOY, someone had to get cut so the partners wouldn't see a drop in expected take-home payments. And I was the most expensive employee in the region.
Fuck loyalty.
On the bright side, my new job was only a small pay cut, but literally half the work load and all the vacation I could ask for. In a sick way, getting laid off worked out for the best. But those weeks between jobs were the most stressful of my life.
I would always give at least two weeks notice, and in one case interview my replacement. So while it may have been a shock, they always had time to adjust, and I didn't leave loose ends.
To put this in a slightly different perspective. Let's say you had hired a babysitter so you could go out for the evening. At the last minute, the babysitter cancels, and it is too late to get another one. Now you are either scrambling (calling relatives, etc) or you cancel your evening plans. Now let's add to this that your kids really like this particular babysitter, who has quit the babysitting business permanently, and it takes a bit of trial and error to find a replacement that will work for your kids.
So an employee leaving does have some impact. On the employee side, of course there is the food-on-the-table issue, which can be important if there isn't a safety net. Which is why it is critical to live within 75% of your paycheck, so that every year you can survive 3 months unemployment.
Throwaway account because I'm currently in the middle of being laid off ("redundancy" in UK).
I thought I always had that somewhat-cynical outlook by default, coming from a leftist family; but still, the unfairness of this process (first time for me in 20 years of work) boils my blood. Metrics massaged to target this and that, backstabbing, disrespecting people who built the company... all that will forever scar the company, no matter what. Your best and brightest don't want to live in fear, once you scare them like this they will leave.
I don't understand why companies with troubled books don't just spin off the departments they want to cut: give people a chance to fend by themselves, keeping teams together and offloading risk without losing knowledge and propagating fear.
I'm not sure how that would work. I completely agree that layoffs suck, but when a company is at that point, it's usually because other options have been exhausted. But turning a bunch of people out who have never run a company (presumably) as a spinoff seems pretty cruel in most cases. Edit: most of my experience being laid off has been at startups, where I guess it's a bit different from big companies.
>when a company is at that point, it's usually because other options have been exhausted.
Definitely not the case for me at the moment, but I won't bore you with the details.
I don't think it would be cruel at all. If a company cuts entire chunks of the business (products, departments, what have you), it's because someone made a management call that they don't want to bear the risk and/or losses associated to that particular segment, or they cannot imagine new strategies. That does not mean that such a segment is completely unviable, it might simply be that it's not as profitable as that someone decided it should be, or requires more effort that that someone is willing to invest (money, time, creativity etc).
It might still be a perfectly viable lifestyle business for the people working there, who only want to make a decent living. Giving them a choice and a fighting chance, imho, is a win-win situation: the business offloads risk, knowledge is not dispersed, relationships are kept positive. At worst, the spin-off fails, the company has executed a cheap round of layoffs with no hard feelings; at best, the spin-off succeeds, they get some service for cheap and/or dividends, everybody is happy.
I'm surprised nobody said "well, the laid-off people can still do it themselves, nobody stops them" and that's absolutely true; but doing it in an organised manner, with support from an established "mother" entity, is much easier.
Say I switch to the cloud and don't really need most of my datacentre anymore. Instead of just chucking it all away, people and machines alike, I set them up as a separate hosting company where i'm a minority shareholder, buy from them a small contract for my little bit of legacy stuff, and let them free to go find new customers or do their thing. If they fail, nothing of value is lost and I still have access to their talent pool because no bridge was burnt; if they succeed, my shares are worth something and I keep getting good service for cheap.
In a way, it's similar to what Amazon did when they first introduced AWS: they had internal overcapacity for some services and just turned it into another business. (sure, it was a new system etc etc; but when you boil it down, it's just that: they had more internal resources than they needed, and rather than scaling them down, they started selling excess.)
I did see it and a win-win, but it takes a lot of resources from the company. I don't see a say 1000 employee company in the middle of some crisis (hence the layoffs) having the capacity to execute such things. Or at least it's easy to see why this would not be a priority.
Can you elaborate on the idea that companies should spin off departments? On the face of it, I don't see how that could work, but I probably don't understand your idea fully.
I also did not understand how that could work in most cases.
I agree with allanienhuis, that it can work well for products.
I was myself working on a mobile app (before they were really a thing) at Nokia. The app was for analyzing golf swings. There was a department working on sports related products. Someone decided to streamline the company (around 2002 or so I guess - nothing major back then), and this department was killed.
We were allowed to spin off the app and related IP to our own company, and were able to continue working on it. At the time I think it was a win-win for both sides.
The idea might work better for products than departments.
I worked for an employer who did exactly that when one of the new product/business they'd built wasn't growing (enough?) to warrant more investment. So he set up a couple of the developers working on the product with the rights to the product and helped work out new contracts with the existing handful of clients (it was large enterprise software). There was enough revenue (maintenance contracts) to support the two guys, and so the existing customers were taken care of in terms of maintenance. Worked out pretty well for everyone as far as I know.
But was the alternative in that case to fire the two employees? It sounds more like the case that they wanted to cut the product.
Specifically, in the case of the article, spinning off the redundant employees leaving them in a new firm with no product and no revenue sounds like a cruelly dystopian option. And if the company was willing to put money into it, I'm pretty sure most employees would prefer that as a severance package instead.
Cutting a product often comes with layoffs. The other products may or may not be able to support the staff that were working on the products being cut. Obviously the larger the company is the more likely there are other options aside from layoffs.
In this case I expect he might have made a spot for those employees working on a different product, but that's not certain - technologies & skills were different & the vertical markets were completely different.
And in this specific case, the two staff thought it was an amazing opportunity for them - I think their short-term salary went up & they got a lot more flexibility plus potential upside if they could grow the business even slowly. Obviously some downsides in terms of benefits, etc. But even if it didn't work out it would have been a pretty good line item on their resume. :)
These seem like extremely competent developers. They could have transferred them to more important projects that had less competent developers in them, and let two or more less competent developers go.
> I'm pretty sure most employees would prefer that as a severance package instead.
Possibly, but I think the employee should be given a choice. If even just 1% of laid-off people took the choice and succeeded, the entire economy would clearly benefit.
Sounds like they should have shut down the product but kept the developers. If they were able to run the business on their own, they were probably 10x developers. Even if they lost half of their momentum by being switched to a new team, they still would have been great for the company.
Shutting down the product is exactly what they were trying to avoid. As a business owner, he made commitments to his customers to support the software he sold them. Walking away from those commitments would have compromised his reputation and hurt his ability to sell in other new markets. I think it was primarily a personal obligation he felt towards his clients, and a matter of integrity.
In the B2B space, the costs of switching vendors/products is often a really big deal. Spinning the product off released him from the obligation (allowing him to focus on more promising products), and avoided (most of?) the pain for his clients.
if this only happens once in 20 years to you, then you've been quite lucky or have done quite well. In the tech industry, companies have lay offs on average about once per year: every year your there, you roll the dice.
It's not just troubled books. Many have lay off quotas they need to fill: jack walsh style of management. It's just how modern day capitalism works.
There is however, one upside. All that laying off means they'll have to do a lot of re-hiring to replace all the employees they laid off.
I'm sure that if there's too many posts like this they'll rename it. Probably to something they perceive as better like your suggestion "people support".
But of course, it's function, to protect the firm from it's employees, won't change.
> But of course, it's function, to protect the firm from it's employees, won't change.
That's part of the problem right there:
"We only hire the best".
"We need to protect the company from the employees."
It seems like if you really did the first statement, there wouldn't be a need for the second. If you find yourself using the second statement to justify a management action, then your management (you or your company) has failed.
I was laid off once. Got a call from my VP when I was on my vacation. It was an extremely painful experience since I had been repeatedly told that I was a good performer and was critical to the team. I used that as an opportunity to reevaluate how I was operating and swore to make myself as valuable as possible. Also, I started keenly observing how the business was doing and jumped before layoffs happened. Today, I'm in a senior middle management role but still operating very cautiously and taking nothing for granted.
> I used that as an opportunity to reevaluate how I was operating and swore to make myself as valuable as possible
Isn't that just doubling down on what you were doing before, being a "good performer" and "critical" to the team? The problem is that external forces (to you, your team, division, or your company) can come in at any time and make people change the calculus to want to pay you. And there's nothing stopping them from pulling the trigger, and suddenly you're out of work. We do not have a system designed to help you, we have systems designed to save companies money. The only real solution is to constantly make sure you could move if you had to, and that you're marketable. Part of my newbie years were spent at a big company watching very competent but experienced people get the axe and be replaced by 2-3 new hires - sometimes its not even about the money they'll save.
Then, when you're out checking whether you're marketable, you can do regular checks to see if you really want to stay where you are.
In those terms, its usually a hit to reputation, though in general its RARE that a "reputation" hit will prevent an ex-CEO from getting another CEO job, but usually means they won't get a "better" CEO/Executive position.
Likewise, if you're working at a company (Facebook say) that has a scandal, get laid off, you're probably gonna be able to find another job.
Would you want to be the CEO of a large corporation? The money is great, which everyone who isn't a CEO always seems to want to complain about, but there is very little work-life balance there, and a huge amount of pressure. And you still have a boss, in the form of the board, and very aggressive, possibly unrealistic milestones to hit. And thousands of employees depending on your decisions, along with many millions of shareholders directly and indirectly via their retirement plans.
Well put. I realized that when my boss compared me to a pigeon taking a shit on the company when I am quitting. Clearly, all the "I want my employee to be happy here" talk is just BS and only fools geeks that are naive enough to believe it and actually work their ass off.
Having been laid off due to downsizing, I think everyone should go through it at least once.
I think it's mistake to recommend life-changing events like this so glibly. A given person may recover and become wiser and stronger. Another person may never recover in terms of career, relationships or mental health.
It's better to look and learn that the market is a harsh place and you should take steps accordingly. If you have to have that lesson engraved on your body, so be it but remember, each person has only so much productive career-time, some many opportunities to make and keep relationships, etc (fired-to-divorced, etc is a common path just for example).
How many here remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard Steve Jobs passed away? Almost like being able to recall where you were when 9/11 happened.
When I heard of his death I was shocked, I wondered how Apple would survive, how the world for that matter would move on? But sure enough the next day the sun still rose and and the earth still rotated. Today Apple is doing just fine without Jobs and is making record profits. Everyone is disposable and money will always make the world go 'round.
I remember the precise moment because on that day I was in my office at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino. It was bizarre. A mass of mourners swamped the building in under an hour.
I remember because I was traveling home from Adobe MAX so I heard the news at the airport. However, I totally get that many assume he's deified by all.
Numerous studies have tried to measure who generates value. Millions of dollars spent on this, cause it seems like an important question right?
The results from what I’ve read have offered no answers. One place spent $20 million trying to answer how much productivity is gained from having email. Nothing.
I suspect it’s like the food industry and fossil fuels: they are selling us on nonsense and hiding the reality.
Economics was the latest long con, like religion before it, the masses buy in hook line and sinker
But yeah we DEFINITELY need to make more phone apps and web apps! Fawk yeah!
The only person who wants to be at a company is the owner/creator/founder (in whatever role that is). Everyone else is picking up a paycheck to work on what they are skilled at and could just as easily work somewhere else ( from CEO to mailroom person.)
Can't agree with this more. Getting laid off was an invaluable experience for me in retrospect. As a young single person with money and job prospects it's basically a free paid vacation.
Author is 22 years old, and was not laid off. But, because some peers were – from Snap, a boom-times high-flyer – he's now facing a crisis-of-confidence, first in himself, and then in what feelings of security might be available from reaching "[t]he upper middle-class, the professional class, that venerable example of American wealth and mobility".
Well, of course working for a single hot company at 22 doesn't mean your career is set for life. What, did he think he was going to retire at Snap?
There were idiosyncratically high expectations here... and now there's an idiosyncratically low mood, concluding "you do not have power. Remember that, always... being a well-ground cog is exactly what sustains our machine of systemic oppression, benefiting no one but those above."
That reads more like personal depression than an accurate extrapolation of lessons from his recent experience. Wait until he sees a dot-com crash, or a 2008-recession – then some broad despair might be (temporarily) justifiable. But even then, people with skills and creativity bounce back, and thrive. Not just in tech, but other sectors, too.
But to do so, you can't let a disappointment like a layoff (of yourself or, as here, others) send you into maudlin rumination about your own inherent powerlessness, and the 'systemic oppression' that sometimes paying gigs end sooner than you'd hoped. At least you can't stay in that mindset for very long.
You can look at the same facts and instead focus on what power you do have – the time and ability to build skills, relationships and savings that can deliver security across many possible futures and industry cycles, without reliance on any single employer's choices.
The people actually laid-off here may handle things better than this author – because they have no choice but to dust themselves off and engage with a broader world. And when a few months or a year later, they realize they're in a better place than Snap, they'll have less of the "woe-is-us" hopelessness expressed by this author.
I kinda agree. The author does sound like he's basically still living in the school mentality: I do X amount of work and expect Y benefits, no matter what the economy or market is like. This seems to be his first experience with external factors almost getting to him which made him think that the world may not be so fair after all. Surprise, surprise...
Seems to be the author's awakening to that reality. I think that makes sense. Money provides you guardrails akin to the guardrails institutions like school provide.
It was an incredibly well-written piece, and I really enjoyed it, but I share the same misgivings you do. It just all felt so incredibly naïve- although, in fairness, we all have to start somewhere.
To most people, the idea of expecting to have a job waiting for you upon graduation because you interviewed in the fall of your senior year is mind-boggling. Most people, I venture to say, are lucky to have a job by graduation. I'd think it's far more normal to start looking around that time and hope to find something by summer.
The proscribed promotion and 'levels' and 'staff software engineer' titles that apparently make one impossible to fire (?) feel like something out of a fantasy. Something, by the way, this piece shares with a piece posted a few days ago about climbing the latter at FaceGoog or something to that effect, and how you're either up or out. It all feels like something out of a foreign country or planet to most of us, I venture to say.
Despite the skewed expectations of tech workers due to their high starting salaries, pretty much by definition a 22-year-old cannot be upper-middle class. The most important thing about the "upper class" (in society in general) is not the money, it's the personal networking with the rest of the class. Within the tech industry, the path to security is not chasing salary. It is doing great work, making strong connections to your peers, and aspiring to enter what he calls the "protected class" of Staff Software Engineers who just need to call some friends to find a job. That doesn't happen when you're 22.
I don't exactly see a crisis of confidence. This just seems to be the first time this kid has bumped up against the real world. We were all young and naive once and sooner or later got a gut punch or two from the universe. Some people take whatever they get and use it to reinforce their world view. This person seems to have used a new realization to adjust their world view. Maybe their a little older than normal to be groking this for the first time but that's no reason to condescend.
> Well, of course working for a single hot company at 22 doesn't mean your career is set for life. What, did he think he was going to retire at Snap?
Isn't that the promise of silicon valley? That there's so much money to be made that it turns engineers into entrepreneurs in their 20's?
Or has silicon valley now gone the way the rest of society has where huge corporate profits no longer get passed to the people who make it happen on a day to day basis?
The culture difference is huge. I would venture to say that Silicon Valley is probably closer to NYC culturally (at least nowadays) than it is to LA.
But the reason I mentioned it was that you were talking about SV in the context of this article, and I just wanted to make sure that you knew he wasn't actually in SV. But yeah, I guess that's mostly relevant because they're very different areas.
I was recently job hunting and got a great job offer from a startup in Culver City. Their compensation was competitive (for LA at least) and my impression of the team was extremely good. I also liked LA the last time I was there (strangely enough, for an Onsite at SNAP) so was really excited about it.
I chose a competing offer from an SF based company in the end. But It wasn't an easy decision. So don't rule out LA without at least giving it a chance.
The author of the article is misinformed about the true landscape of wealth and income inequality.
The middle class is ultimately defined by the ability and need to build your own safety net. The upper middle class is able to do this with plenty of wealth to spare for luxuries like private schooling for their kids, income security is provided by their network. Just tap your network and find another job. The upper middle class is unconcerned with skills and only concerned with leeching off of the upper class.
The 'regular' middle class still needs to lean on their skill set and willingness to move in order to provide income security. If a layoff is enough to throw your lifestyle into disarray, you're not upper middle class, in fact you'll never be upper middle class because you probably spend too much time messing around with getting stuff done and not enough on greasing the political wheels.
The upper class doesn't need to fool around with a network, they are networks unto themselves. At this level, enough ambient wealth is floating around that you can hire professionals to manage it for you and never have to do anything you don't want to.
The difference between the lower class and the middle class boils down to whether you have enough to provide for your daily needs, much less a safety net. The lower class cannot meet expenses each month without assistance, has no ability to build a safety net and so has no safety other than what the government provides.
What distinguishes the lower middle class from the regular middle class is whether they have enough left over every month to save for the future or a rainy day.
Both the middle class and upper middle class can and frequently do operate with no "real" safety net, especially before age 40. Those people sending their kids to private school and have a nice house can and are leveraged like crazy, and can't afford a big layoff, economic downturn, or huge emergency medical bills.
Upper middle class delineation to me isn't about security, its about being able to scrounge better quality things. Sure, there's money put away in a 401k, investments etc.
> The upper middle class is unconcerned with skills and only concerned with leeching off of the upper class.
I've seen in broken down before as separate ladders according to social class - Lower class, Working class, Upper Middle class, and Elite class, with different values and principles for each. Is the successful county plumber who owns several businesses upper class, despite blue collar values? There's a delineation here between economic and social classes.
Small business owner was the original middle class, "bourgeoisie". Ben Franklin was a member of the middle class,and he believed that middle class -- where anyone could take a vacation to run for government office -- was essentially to democt
Im modern world, the working class started being called middle class so they woul stop complaining about their poor lot in life.
> Small business owner was the original middle class, "bourgeoisie".
“Business owner” was the original (well, feudal) middle class named the “bourgeoisie”, they became the capitalist upper class (with the same name.) Small business owners (more particularly, those who live by applying largely their own labor to their own capital) are the middle class (“petit bourgeoisie”) in the original descriptions of capitalist economies.
> Im modern world, the working class started being called middle class so they woul stop complaining about their poor lot in life.
No, the higher income subset of the working class got called the middle class to forestall the development of common working class identity.
Yeah that was it - I found it a really good primer for starting to think about social class as a construct, however there is a lot more inter-class mingling and subtlety that isn't covered there, which is I think why he eventually took it down, because once you really start to think about it its not that hard to pick apart, and probably doesn't reflect his current views anyway. The simplicity of only "4" ladders leaves out maybe the majority of people, especially in the US. People's and communities values just tend not to fit into those categories, and tends to be more an expression of each person's individual and group experiences.
The idea of alternate ladders based on values, how that ties into money and economics, and how groups can become inaccessible to each other, is a worthwhile and big idea I think to hold onto.
This is so horribly wrong- I've known upper middle class that get there by not spending hardly anything and owning their own business and operating it (e.g. Gas Station + Auto Repair). No leeching there. No accounting for "Luck" here or proximity to resources and opportunity. Do they actually teach this in schools or what nowadays? starting to seem prevalent. Life is what you make it, tomorrow holds no promises, opportunity doesn't knock it looks backwards through your peephole, can't take it with you, go where the food is(!!) Heh, how about some more pragmatic advice huh?
The idea behind talking about classes isn't that there aren't people who don't fit the mold, but to just discuss the broader trends. For every frugal business owner making upper middle class incomes, (and deeply concerned that the economy will continue to support their livelihoods) there's fifty filling up middle management spots in midsize organizations or upper management spots in small organizations, safe in the understanding that the firm they're working for will insulate them from market trends and confident that they can find a new berth if it doesn't.
Also, my descriptions aren't intended to be prescriptive, just descriptive. You want to know what the landscape looks like before you try to safely navigate it.
The problem is that unless I'm interpreting it completely incorrectly, your descriptions are comic book renditions based on common prejudices that don't really map to reality, which makes me question whether this is based on experience and exposure to people in the middle and upper class or just an amalgamation of memes you've been exposed to online and have taken as evidence.
Doctors and lawyers typically work incredibly demanding jobs that require a lot of up-front investment of time and money to make their outsized salaries, and they make up a huge portion of the class you called "leeches". And far from not needing to maintain their network, networking is incredibly important for upper middle and upper classes.
Why? Many of them pull down in excess of $500k/yr.
Who do you consider to be upper middle class, if not them? You mention middle management, most of whom make less than financially successful doctors/lawyers.
You're using a gradational view of class to address points made from a relational analysis.
A gradational view would be looking to sort people into grades, for example based on income. A relational view addresses how groups of people relate to each other, like one class might direct the labor of another.
Neither view is wrong, but to intelligently talk about class you should realize that it's not a two dimensional spectrum, there are probably 4 or 5 dimensions to consider.
Of upper middle class folks who own their own businesses that I have met, more of them own their parents business or a spinoff of their parents business. Those that do not, often have come from an upper or upper middle class background where it was a very low risk situation for them to spend a year trying to get an odd business off the ground - they could always fall back to their parents, or their personal network. There are a few who built their own businesses from the ground up, but many of them will tell you that it was luck at multiple points that they were able to latch onto a workable cashflow (not to discount the hard work to explore that cashflow, and smarts to recognize and expand it...).
Edit: Addendum, access to capital is key to reducing risk on the path to success, and it can be formally there or informally there. If you listen to podcasts, try "How I built this", interviewing a range of business founders. You have to listen for it, but a huge number start as, oh I worked in the financial industry and then had this idea..., or oh my parents were a lawyer and a physician... etc... The founder of Starbucks, Howard Schultz was saved from being ripped off from his business by a Seattle mogul by Bill Gates, Sr (yes father of that Bill Gates...).
> The upper class doesn't need to fool around with a network, they are networks unto themselves. At this level, enough ambient wealth is floating around that you can hire professionals to manage it for you and never have to do anything you don't want to
This is incorrect. Elites in every society are highly politically exposed. Their network is critical to maintain. America's elite also consist of a large number of self-made men and women--they don't stop fighting just because they're billionaires. And those who turn into trust fund kiddies tend to dissipate their wealth within a generation or two.
This is the difference between American and British usage of "[upper] middle class". Americans use it to mean "[upper] middle income", which unfortunately discards much of the understanding conveyed by the British usage.
The problem with all these discussions on economics involving a middle class comes back to how everyones definition of "middle class" is different. Especially when you are rich and/or poor - you might have millions in the bank but you are paid a salary so you are still "working / middle class" despite being in the top .1% of wealth. You are living paycheck to paycheck with no safety net and any illness could leave you homeless but you have the latest smartphone so you are "middle class".
Its completely anecdotal - we don't have an international standard definition of "middle class" but if you have an upper class of wealth owners who live off capital, and a lower class that has no wealth and lives off labor, middle is the hybridization of the two. To be truly middle class you would need half your income coming from investments and half from labor, which means at todays rates you would need about a million in investments to make the median salary and have the same income coming from your savings.
A lot of people do fall in that category, but I'm of the opinion nowadays that the dilution of the term is an actively intentional weapon of the globalist elite - when people admit they are poor, working class, or lower class they recognize they have much to gain and little to lose opposing the status quo of society. If you can convince everyone, including the rich (who can shamelessly exploit markets so long as they don't see themselves as the elite ownership class) and the poor (who would rather not recognize their own exploitation) to call themselves middle class you can abuse the poor as much as you want, they can never collectively act against you if you are all claiming to be in the same economic class.
A middle class does exist, but its not nearly as large as anyone - rich or poor - likes to think it is.
+ Have many of your laid off peers had trouble finding work, post-layoff?
+ Do you think you'd have a difficult time finding another job if you were laid off?
Most people in tech, who are willing to live in one of a half dozen specific cities, have job security prior generations could only have dreamed of. Tech skills are far more portable than a skilled line worker at Ford's River Rouge plant in the 1960s, where job-hopping was nearly impossible due to union senority regulations.
I work at a VC firm and every company struggles with hiring enough talented people. I don't know many, really any, people who are moderately skilled and unable to find work in this environment. That could change if there's a big macro swing.
That's not to say the broader criticism of job security is wrong. I have plenty of 50+ family members that are struggling on the finish line to retirement. Other people in my circle never had a fair shot at the start, but I don't know that there's ever been a better time to be a member of the professional class, even at a mid-skill level.
This is an important perspective to take. Getting laid off, for someone unfamiliar or unprepared, can be very scary. But I can honestly say that every time I've been laid off (4 times thus far...mostly back in the .com days when smaller companies either imploded or started trending that direction) has been beneficial to my career. The first few layoffs I was young and needed experience. Getting to experience as many different work environments and perspectives of senior engineers was hugely valuable. I saw both how to do things right and wrong and it helped me get to a senior level, both in ability and through getting pay bumps after each move.
My most recent layoff was hard personally, because I was leaving an amazing group of coworkers that I still consider friends. But it took me about a month to find another job, which ended up being a company that almost immediately got acquired. Beyond being pretty lucrative for me, the relationship with the CEO of that company has led to him now investing/advising my new startup.
It's natural that we panic a bit when circumstance takes the reins and starts to direct our lives. Being in control is just so much more comfortable. But when we learn to take a step back and see the full situation, layoffs can be a really good thing for a lot of people. Ideally, we'd all like to work at hugely successful companies. Having to look for a new job may not be ideal, but the worse situation is continuing to work at a company with limited prospects for success. Being in the group that's laid off first stings a bit, but it's usually better than being one of the the ones that's retained.
> That's not to say the broader criticism of job security is wrong. I have plenty of 50+ family members that are struggling on the finish line to retirement. Other people in my circle never had a fair shot at the start, but I don't know that there's ever been a better time to be a member of the professional class, even at a mid-skill level.
If you are one of the right sort of people, with the right skills...yes. Many people with degrees never successfully transition into being a full fledged member of the professional class. That is much, much worse than before and the cost of failure is much, much higher than before outside of tech.
2017-2018 are the high point of this particular economic cycle and we are at full employment but that does not mean people have succeeded at the level they have in the past.
> I work at a VC firm and every company struggles with hiring enough talented people. I don't know many, really any, people who are moderately skilled and unable to find work in this environment. That could change if there's a big macro swing.
Can I find work? Yes.
Have I plateaued at my current level of pay and everyone wants to try to pay me 20% less if I change jobs? Yes.
It isn't just "Can I find another job?" but "Can I find a comparable job with the same work life balance, benefits, and financial compensation?"
That is the real fear with the lack of job security for mid-level professionals as they age and don't move into management. Paycuts, relocation to cheaper regions, or work/life balance cuts have to be taken to some degree.
Sure, I'm posting on HN but it is mainly because I work 10+ hour days, 5-6 days a week. I have to break that up somehow.
I'd be curious to ask you what "tech skills" means. What's demanded by the companies you refer to is likely shifting constantly. If you're not working in the hot stack, you're not going to have job security "prior generations could only have dreamed of."
HN might not like to hear it, but what this hive mind likes to think of as "hot stack" - React, Node based software in general, etc - is not even close to the "hot stack" of almost anywhere except in the microcosm of California around SF.
At the end of the day there will still be a dozen programming jobs in .Net or Java to every one in the latest and greatest web tech. In equal parts because on one hand finding people who stay contemporary with the "latest and greatest" is expensive and because businesses don't want to use the latest and greatest if it means changing the software they already wrote twenty years ago.
> If you're not working in the hot stack, you're not going to have job security
What do you think happens to all the software written in languages / frameworks after all the hotshot devs have moved on? They still need features and maintenance, and they’re not rewritten nearly as often or as quickly as people want to think.
Totally agree, but I'm not convinced that tech job security is as solid as HN or VCs like to think. I'm trying to get at defining what "tech skills" means. It's such a broad term!
There is a lot of code written everyday in .NET and Java. No, it's not necessarily in LA, NYC, or SF, and you may not be working for a hot startup. However, you may be imminently more hirable knowing C# than React, if you're willing to work in sectors like energy or healthcare.
> Fewer and fewer careers offer a stable path to the financial and personal security that underwrote the Baby Boomers’ “American Dream.” Technology is the one career that has an optimistic future, isn’t beholden by regulation and credential inflation, and actually attempts to create some sort of meritocracy, and so, those that are fortunate enough to be in it want to preserve the one island of paradise left.
This really resonated with me, for a number of reasons. Primarily, it's because I am hyper aware of how delicate this "tech boom" really is. The good times will end, and I believe they will end sooner than most believe. I was layed off once before because the company I worked for outsourced their entire engineering department. That was a quick lesson for me early in my career that you are EASILY replaced. There are people in India, China, the Ukraine, you name it... who will do your job for half the cost.
There is an enormous, GLOBAL, influx of software engineers that is rapidly diluting the worker pool and is quickly reducing the implicit bargaining power that we've enjoyed for the last 10 years. Big "thanks" to all the initiatives by well meaning, but naïve, individuals and organizations who want to "spread the wealth" without realizing that the wealth is already spread very thin, and is being spread thinner, and thinner, every day by mechanisms outside of our control (cost of living, housing, taxes, etc.).
I am trying my best to save, but somehow the cost of merely existing seems to increase month over month. I don't have kids, can't afford them. I don't have a car payment, I bought a junker. I have minimized my expenses down to the bare necessity and even then coming up with the down payment for a home is going to take years. At my age, my parents were already on to their second home. My wife has enormous student loans that cripple her ability to save so even our dual income seems weak in this environment.
So what can you do? I'm starting a business in my after-hours and weekends, desperately trying to establish a source of low-overhead income. I'm specializing within my field, attempting to learn new skills in a niché programming field that can't be easily learned by bootcamps and YouTube videos. Above all, I'm remembering that right now things are good. This is the calm before the storm.
Tech is not a meritocracy. Many of us like to think of it that way, but the reality is that most of the jobs associated with tech are bullshit, and much of tech headcount is IT.
The last big place that I worked could easily cut tech headcount in half and hardly notice. A decade from now they can probably reduce headcount 80% in IT and 75% in the business.
The impact of global growth won’t impact jobs directly for awhile. When Chinese companies start pumping out superior product that westerners cannot even read the manuals for, that will be the big crack.
> The impact of global growth won’t impact jobs directly for awhile.
That's a definitive statement that is more nuanced than that. There are definitely people (myself included) who have been directly impacted by global tech outsourcing.
I won't get into the specifics but I can tell you that there are an increasing number of dev shops outside of the US that are specializing in solid communication. That's been one of the biggest problems and hesitations from US businesses. You need a manager in the other country, who is good. These companies are specializing in providing a excellent teams that at a fraction of the cost of a US team.
I didn’t mean to come across in such an insensitive way.
The perspective I was coming from was a little more meta. To date we’ve seen outsourcing of business functions and consolidation of job functions where technology advancements have reduced labor needs. VMWare eliminated datacenter hardware teams. AWS eliminated data centers. Modern clients eliminate all of the bullshit associated with Windows PCs.
We are getting to a point where business functions will go down the same path. This is an age of giants.
> The last big place that I worked could easily cut tech headcount in half and hardly notice.
This is sometimes true, but you have to be careful about myths about occupied capacity (of people and machines). If 100% of the people are occupied, it's very likely that the company is very understaffed and can easily get into trouble too. When xx% of the people are idle, you might look next week, or the next phase of a project and a different slice will be idle, and this may be the fastest, most efficient way to get the work done for large or complex work.
But it consumes time and effort to hire/rent people and creates unnecessary churn to have people all running at 100%. The machine version of this is nicely discussed in a book written by Eli Goldratt called The Goal with a more people & project based take on it called Critical Chain. They're in novel form (there are more serious treatments available of the general Theory of Constraints), but it discusses why running each resource, person or machine, at 100% in an organization isn't actually the most efficient thing to do for an organization.
What often happens is consultants/temps are leased to fill in temporary gaps. Short term it's cheaper (and faster) than hiring for permanent positions.
And sure, people typically don't run on 100% capacity. What however seems to happen in many bigger orgs with vague performance metrics (as much of IT work is), some people do solid 60-80% productive work throughout the day, while some barely hover over 0%. So you have a kernel of workers pushing the cart and a bigger cohort of watercooler crowd. When peak load time comes the latter don't ramp up their productivity to 100%, but instead it's expected the employer should expand the staff.
Nothing short of impending layoff rounds seem to affect this dynamic.
Tech has a natural moat in that only a small portion of the population is smart and driven enough to do well in it, so I expect decent paying jobs for the foreseeable future. And while some of high profile startups might have unviable business models, most of the established companies actually have pretty good metrics, so I don't seem them as being in danger of going out of business unless some legislation comes along that completely undermines their ability to do business.
Obviously it's still smart to save and plan for a period of unemployment though.
There's a lot of people on this rock. Even if only a "small portion of the population" can do the work, that means there are tens of millions (literally) around the world who could do your job as well or better than you.
You are the lucky beneficiary of restrictive immigration and employment policies.
1. Other EU citizens can basically move around freely, from poor paying countries (Eastern Europe) to good paying ones.
2. Even for non-EU citizens, it's way way easier to get a software job (the company can get a visa for you). There is no H1B style cap. If you get an offer, you get the visa & job. True, for the first few years the visa might be tied to the job, but this just means that you need to have a new offer before leaving the previous job.
Much less so than in the US, though. To be honest I think that's more an effect of different cultural values ("novelty" and "bootstrapping" here are not as celebrated as in the US), but there is definitely a difference.
Tech also has the benefit of the networking effect- turning once a giant appears, a whole economy sector into a black hole for any other startup.
So one company can stagnate a whole sector- basically killing off any innovation for the duration of its existance. No innovation - no coders really needed.
Maybe, but my bet is most software engineers, etc. are employed at non-tech companies. The work might not be as interesting, but they aren't all going away anytime soon.
> quickly reducing the implicit bargaining power that we've enjoyed for the last 10 years.
Why not codify that bargaining power into a series of employee-owned organizations that are able to negotiate for salaries in line with that cost of living?
There might be some growing pains, but it would certainly be better than the current trend of a few CEOs, VCs, and upper managers hoarding capital for little more than artificially expensive Bay Area real estate.
I just passed my 40th anniversary since college working in the valley. I've worked for 3 companies, the current one I'm in my 26th year. Although all 3 companies had one or more periods of downsizing, I was never a part of any of them but I did have to suffer colleagues and friends leaving because of them. It's no more fun for those who are left than for those who are shown the door. The lesson learned from that is your employer is not your friend, not your buddy. You should never expect them to be regardless of what they say in the mission statements. You're employed because you have some value to them. That value goes away, you'll be out the door. Don't ever forget that and plan accordingly.
Congrats! What do you think about the seemingly more common approach for newer grads to work 2-4 years per job and then move on? I hear MBA grads on average stay in their first job ~18 months. It's around the same length for software engineer jobs: https://deeptalent.com/blog/tenure-length-tech-titans-compar....
Where I work now longevity is highly valued, and I think leadership is disconnected with the reality of today's job market.
Not having done that, I can't speak from experience but it really is an individual decision. My first job was 6-1/2 years, the second, 9. I chose to stay because I liked what I was doing and the people I worked with, the work was nationally important (contracts with the intelligence community), I was very well paid compared to peers (according to surveys I read), and the benefits were top-notch. And, to be complete, I really hate interviewing and starting out at the ground floor in new jobs.
Why is this on the front page? A recent grad, at a startup that grew too fast taking on too many employees, and didn't even get laid off, is writing about getting laid off? This is a medium.com fluff piece if I have ever seen one.
Come back and talk to me when you have actually been laid off.
I don't get why people ever thought a job was anything other than a strictly professional relationship. Your employer is not your family, and if they say you are then that's a red flag because it means your employer will want you to give them more than they deserve.
If you are relying on a business to pay your living expenses indefinitely because you've been loyal or whatever other nonsense, that is lunacy. If you're not producing some kind of value then you are dragging your company down, and you should be let go. In my opinion businesses aren't proactive enough at firing non-contributors. Layoffs aren't great for anyone because they kill the culture, but to avoid that someone really has to pull on some pants, swallow their pride, admit to hiring mistakes and rectify them.
> If you're not producing some kind of value then you are dragging your company down, and you should be let go.
Have you worked at big companies? This has nothing to do with producing value. It has to do with whatever "strategic direction" the company wants to take. You can be profitable, but your whole division will be cut off if there is a conflict with whatever a more powerful exec is doing.
Layoffs are different from firing "low performers".
> Technology is the one career that has an optimistic future, isn’t beholden by regulation and credential inflation, and actually attempts to create some sort of meritocracy
One the one hand, tech might have less regulation than others - you can call yourself a "software engineer" and work as one without any formal credentials.
But on the other hand, plenty of other fields have optimistic futures and good guarantees of employment, the exact things the author is worried about (and the regulation in those fields often helps achieve those goals).
For example, nurses need to be certified but then they work in a field with good salaries and plenty of jobs in a rapidly growing market:
Tech is an ok industry to work in, but there are others. Anyone that says "tech is the only good career" is either uninformed, living in a bubble, or a snob.
The thing about owning a business is you never hire someone unless you absolutely, positively need to. This apparently wasn't the case at BigCo. Maybe they're the ones that never owned a business.
Well, it's Snap, so that means they were pumping that sweet VC cash roll into headcount (like any similarly funded startup). Then one day they realize that doesn't deliver the desired growth, and they cut headcount. I've said it before, and I know it sucks, but startup layoffs are often the result of letting go of people that in a normal business probably shouldn't have been there.
This is how it always has been in the tech industry. It is just that the last few years been very prosperous that many recent graduates have not even experienced the down sides. Best things to do is keep building your skill sets and maintain relationship and help out coworkers so that they are there when you next need referral for a job.
> My first thought was relief. But that relief quickly turned back into fear. How disposable I was, I thought. How bound I was to the whims of others.
This is why I think we need to build more communities around cheap housing (think manufactured homes) and shared agricultural space. At least if you lose your job in that type of community you won't have to worry as much about homelessness or starvation.
We're far too dependent on others for life's basic necessities, and that drives millions of people to work themselves to death doing jobs that make them miserable for employers who don't care about them.
In another context I went through that same realization of powerlessness myself and even today I'm still surprised how we first-world people are raised so we think so invincible about ourselves. And it's not just about our position in society. You could just as easily die any minute. Accident, natural disaster, world war 3, crazy coworker, jealous ex-wife. The options are unlimited.
It shouldn't change that we take risks. Taking risks is important. But it should make us more aware about which risks to take (e.g. waiting might be a risk too), and how to approach risky situations.
Ugh, that layoff process sounded amateurish. Tapping people on the shoulder? So snap basically called in people one at a time leaving people who were not going to get laid off thinking they might for hours? They should have separated everyone at the beginning into two groups, those who were getting laid off and those who weren't so that the people who stay aren't left with such a terrible experience.
After layoffs the company's priority should be to reassure their remaining workers that they're OK because a shocked, shattered workforce is not a productive one. Employees are humans and they should be treated that way, and that should have been their priority. Snap seems terribly run based on this post. If I had experienced this I would be looking for new work. As long as the same people remain in charge who made those bad decisions, more bad decisions lie on the horizon.
I think is is maybe more of a personal realization for the author, but a job isn't security. Saving an 6-18 month buffer of expenses is a better level of security, having a marketable skill set is some level of security.
I am one of those weirdos, that change jobs so often, I do contracting often enough, that I get fired quite often, or quit.
I remember when one big corp I had long term contract decided to 'trim the fat' and laid us all. My neighbor felt bad and wanted to make lunch for me. I explained her that the same day, I went to another big corp (pretending to be startup) and got much higher rate I always wanted.
That lasted a year, then I was on my own again.
It really makes you stronger, your wife more stressed out, but my skills are way more awesome, I contribute way more and I don't care if you need to fire me. It will make me sad for sure, as I care about people I work with.
Anyhow, this is still true. I would love to have a place I can stay for 10-15 yrs like 'normal people'.
I went a similar route (contracting) but you seem to have more resilience. I recently went a couple of months in between contracts after a long-term one ended and started panicking after 2 months, jumping into something that wasn't ideal. It's feast or famine with contracting, which I'm still getting used to (hint: the feasts are easier to adapt to).
I had those. Definitely should count on those. I don't have any good advice. In the past I had recruiters and contacts that I could get work within days. It gets harder.
The problem is that too many people in tech think that their financial security comes from their job and don't concentrate on learning marketable skills.
I was at a company from 2008-2011 that went through quite a few rounds of layoffs until they finally shut the door. Without fail, everyone who was laid off had another job within a month.
We all knew the writing was on the wall in 2011. Management was completely honest with us. When the day came, we all went out to lunch after our layoffs joked around and from looking at everyone's LinkedIn profile, everyone had a job within a month - we all got a months severance.
I'm in my mid 40s and have no desire to start a company or go into management. I never want a job that doesn't involve hands on coding. These days I go back and forth between contracting, full time "senior software Engineer" and "architect". But I am aggressive about learning, I keep my resume up to date and I'm always networking.
I don't expect any loyalty from a company. I do my best work while I'm there and all I expect is a check twice a month. I know they will let me go if it's best for their business and I'll leave if I can get a significantly better offer or if I'm not growing and keeping my skills marketable.
It's never in 20 years taken me more than a little over a month to get a job making more money from the time I've started looking - and that includes a two week notice. I'm not bragging. In my market (not on the west coast), most developers who know current technology can say the same.
this is why i don't move out of Bay Area - me and my acquaintances have been through lay offs here at various years, during the booms and busts, and nobody had any significant issues promptly finding a new job (with a salary increase usually :). Compare that to, for example, the next best thing in US tech - when AMZN says come to Seattle i always imagine being laid off from it few years down the road (with a non-compete on top of that :), and if for any reason i don't get a job at the only other game in the town - MS - then what? Probably move to Bay Area :)
I left Microsoft a couple years ago, with no desire to work at Amazon. I had no problem finding interesting companies in Seattle for interviews. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter are all here. Not to mention a bunch of startups that are generally run by people with experience at those larger companies.
- a 10%, 4K layoff from AMZN would present a high, by tech standards, unemployment situation of 4% (4K / 90K of the rest of tech capacity in WA with almost half of it - 40K - being just one employer - MS). So it would be very hard to choose and pick and negotiate on a new position, if any.
- a 10%, 4K (judging by various sources, 4K is probably a bit more than 10% of Google employees in CA) layoff from Google would just result in a hiring frenzy by the rest of the 500K industry trying to fill the positions.
We have a 4% unemployment rate locally and there are signs everywhere for all sorts of jobs - its pretty damn good. Most common complaint of any company in Seattle is they can't find enough people to hire. Even a 4k layoff would easily get absorbed (though at different rates, and many would probably get worse pay, since AMZN is at the top of the pay scale here).
Amazon's only at the top due to stock appreciation. Lyft, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, and Uber (all of which have offices of varying sizes in the Seattle area) pay better than Amazon.
Agree overall, but there are a LOT of other employers in Seattle, including lots of the big guys. In general, a layoff would be similar to the bay area experience for a talented dev.
Yeah- I know very few people who lost jobs in '99, even fewer who lost jobs in '08. At least of people who are in tech roles, as opposed to on the periphery. But everything slows down. Everyone stops looking for a better job, people stop quitting and people stop hiring. Hunker down for a year or two, weather the storm, then carry on.
Important point here is that WA and almost all US states do have it while CA (pretty much an exception) - doesn't. Specifically to AMZN - i remember some horror story mentioned here on HN, and googling also brings some stories.
There is always a lack of empathy in these discussions. If the world looks different depending on the situation you personally find yourself in it can't lead to any productive discussion.
A lot of decisions that can impact the lives of many are often made for short term self interest of a few. And upper management who make these decisions or run companies to the ground keep floating from one high paid job to another.
The 2 senior most execs of Well Fargo for instance responsible for the fraud and a $1 billion dollar fine get a golden parachute of around $250 million between them. Who is going to pay for this? Customers or job cuts? And this is not an exception. There seem to be a huge dissonance between idealized values and reality in upper segments of society.
Ultimately as a society you commit to a set of values. These values are reinforced by politics, media and your own experiences. Maybe you have a great life and you don't question them, maybe you are born privileged and your perspectives and life experiences are by definition different. But as educated adults its your job to understand and define your society. You make the bed and you have to lie in it.
To comment on one of the sentiments in the last paragraph. I often find myself wondering about the people doing the bidding above them where they are the last one compensated on a middle-upper class level before the VP or CEO or whoever that makes the 100X worker salary. What motivates that person? I’m sure they are compensated very well but at an exponentially lower rate than the will they are serving.
You seem to imply that those top people receiving these large compensations are obviously unfairly and massively overpaid, and that this is an uncontroversial fact.
This clearly isn't the perception at that level. At least some number of people at the board level, as well as presumably these top people themselves, probably don't share that view[1]. This probably extends to the layers immediately beneath them.
I know from my own work that I'm not bothered by the fact that other people I sometimes interact with (I'm not the last layer before them nor do I think "doing their bidding" accurately describes my relationship with them) are paid significantly more than I am. I can plainly see that they are bringing skills and experience to the table that I or others at "my level" simply do not have.
1: Never mind the fact that the market also doesn't agree. The departure of a good CEO can move the market cap by a substantial multiple of the CEOs compensation.
> Through the 1970s—when the ratio of CEOs’ pay to that of the average worker was much lower, at somewhere between 20:1 and 30:1—the lodestar was “internal equity,” or how an executive’s pay compared with that of other employees in the company. A nascent industry, executive-compensation consulting, changed this. Consultants recommended switching to “external equity,” meaning compensation would be based on what other CEOs were paid. This was merely a useful sales tool—even though the consultants didn’t have solid evidence or theoretical justification for this method, they could attract business by vowing to set ambitious goals for their clients. Still, corporations adopted the standard of external equity, and CEOs got a lot richer.
It is an uncontroversial fact - or at least it should be, because it's an objective fact that productivity capture has slanted towards the highest pay levels over recent decades, with devastating effects on economic security lower down the ladder.
Why should your personal opinion - "I'm not bothered" - be a political universal? The reality is that there are increasing numbers of people who used to have steady jobs, and now have gig economy pseudo-slavery which barely makes rent, if at all. This is an unstable basis on which to run a large economy.
Market cap is not the only measure of economic effectiveness. If all the rhetoric about "highly paid job creators" doesn't lead to the creation of real jobs, what use is it?
After having worked at large companies and startups including founding a few of my own it is clear that job and financial security is about equal between the two. The last Fortune 100 company I worked for would cull thier workforce including whole teams often regardless of individual performance every March. If you had just happened to work on the wrong team for the wrong director too bad for you. All to often I saw dedicated people who had sacrificed years and long hours just get laid off seemingly out of nowhere. Directors seemed to have the worst longevity as when a VP was let go they often got rid of his or her management team as well.
The days of company loyalty are long gone. If you work at a large company and have been there over a year keep actively looking for the an even better position. You are expendable and therefore owe your employer nothing more than what you are paid to do today. I hate being so negative but sadly this seems to be the state of affairs these days
Not sure if any job or career exists that is impervious to some kind of replacement / oversupply. Maybe doctors, but the barrier to entry is almost stratospheric.
Ultimately, to paraphrase Machiavelli, our ability to thrive rests on our own prowess. I only wish such statements were immediately useful instead of requiring lots of introspection, filed-testing, etc.
Yeah, I've been lucky as well. Got laid off shortly after 9/11 from a company that had been a really bad fit. But got a job with another quickly. Things ended up being a bit rough financially because of industry events but it wasn't terrible and I liked the work. Then when the writing was on the wall for that company I ended up with a new employer. It's been great across all dimensions and probably only happened because of what I was doing previously.
I remember those days. The worst layoff I remember, I was at an ACS meeting at the SGI booth when word of layoffs came. They nuked something like 1/3 of our team there.
I escaped all of the layoffs, and finally had my fill of the VP Eng who told me that Linux clusters had no future, and big SMPs were how SGI was going to rise again.
I turned in my resignation a week later (early 2001).
This was one of the reasons I made the case to my wife that, at the time, we should be in control of our own destiny. No corporation would have my families best interests at heart. No one would be looking out for them when they swung their axe.
So, I argued that I should form a company, start working on selling, marketing, developing, etc.
I used my layoff severance, loaded up credit cards to buy what I needed. Built a business that survived for 14.5 years. Generated millions a year in revenue. Had a small team working for me.
Until a bank came along and shot us in the head over an out-of-formula LOC.
So I am back working for the man. But I have so much more experience now. Much richer in business, in management, in sales and marketing, in addition to engineering and support. I would have done a number of things differently.
This said, having the control over your own destiny, to some degree, as much as your customers allow, was fantastic. You winning or losing was predicated on how hard and smart you worked.
The article is fairly accurate. Coding tests have become a thing. I've noticed that some places ask esoteric irrelevant questions specifically to stump people. Others are genuinely interested in your experience.
If only there was a way to avoid wasting time on the former to spend time with the latter.
Rich Dad Poor Dad has some interesting concepts. The book actually is really poorly written (and a bit scammy) but these video synopsis actually do a decent job of describing the concepts of passive income and differentiating between employee, self employed, business manager and investor:
I like to think in a small way if you own any stocks/bonds, you are in a sense hiring employees (indirectly at arms length of course).
If you are buying SNAP, you are giving Evan Spiegel, the employee, his own business unit and promoting him. If you are holding SNAP and not buying more, then that's like putting Evan Spiegel on a PIP. If you are selling it, its basically like firing Evan Spiegel for poor performance.
I'd recommend to the OP spending any remaining time after your side coding projects learning about businesses/cashflow. To just blindly hold S&P Index funds in your 401K is a bit a kin to hiring never doing an initial coding review and never doing an annual perf review on your employees.
Survivor Syndrome to the T. It's a part of our modern life I'm afraid. It could be a lay off. A car crash. Any event of trauma where you didn't feel in control. I've been laid off 3 times now - there's not a lot of ways to spin it. Rather than trying to find it as an opportunity or BS any it all it's just best to say it really sucks that are minds can mess us up that way. It just sucks. Leave it at that.
It's good that they realized that doing your job does not guarantee anything. Going far and beyond you job description also doesn't guarantee anything, although you may increase your changes of survival. There are probably diminishing returns here.
Networking inside the company, if it is big enough, will also increase the chances of survival, as you may be able to jump ship to another group, or even get some advance warning.
Still, the best insurance is to stash money for rainy days and have the resumé up-to-date. As soon as the weather starts to turn (which you can detect in many, but not all cases), jump ship. Company has zero loyalty to employees, so theirs should not be much higher than zero either if they want to be fair.
One job means you get fired and you're looking for a new boss.
10 clients means if one fires you, you still have 9 you're hopefully keeping happy.
I try to follow what I read about Gates starting Microsoft in some Biography. He tried to keep 2x the salary of all the employees as cash on hand, so if something went bad, they could try to weather the storm as long as possible.
So before hiring anyone as an employee (including myself), I do this with my startups. (I work 1099 in the beginning as well and I fire myself [work without pay] first).
Getting laid off lets you know where your loyalties should lie. The circle of you, is what I call it.
Each circle goes out from there. For me that's the circle of my wife. Then my immediate family. Etc.
If I knew how to find consulting/contract clients for non-third-world-peasantry rates, I would quit my FT job today. My employer bills me out at ~$150-200/hr, so I know it's possible, I just have no idea how to get started.
Have a whole team of eager engineers ready to go for the next big project. That's 90% of the reason your company gets the contracts they do; they (claim they) can get 5-10 qualified engineers in the building by next Thursday. Which is something you obviously can't do.
It's hard to find good work as an indie dev unless you have a skill-set that works well in that setting. Either you're an industry specialist in a field, or you're awesome at stuff that small companies need. And the market for the latter is getting tighter every day.
Everyone I know that makes a good living as a indie contractor has themselves as an employee, working on apps or niche websites to pay the bills during the lean months. The outstanding ones I know can learn a new technology by creating a marketable product from it. As in, their very first iPhone app / website made them money.
The reason your employer can bill you for ~$150-200/hr is that they're also selling a peace of mind that the project is going to be on track, even if you get hit by a bus one morning. Getting that rate individually is certainly possible, but you'll have to justify it harder.
I own my own business, which is kinda the same thing as working for yourself.
Two bits of advice:
1. The first check you don't write is usually the one to yourself. You're the only worker that will show up for free.
2. The problem with being your own boss is that your boss is always around.
I've never known stress and uncertainty like being a business owner. But I feel like I've learned a lot and am better for it. And if I ever work for anyone else again, I'll be a much better employee as a result.
I guess I'm well rounded so that doesn't really apply to me. I hire for roles that consume my time but still provide value (the necessary busy work).
I'm a much worse employee as the proud failure of 7 startups (on #8 at the moment). So much bullshit, waste, politics, needless meetings, etc., that working for a company again is one of the most painful things I've ever had to do besides death of a family member or divorcing my first wife (that was #1 BTW).
I will agree with your #2, work life balance can be hard. But if you find yourself not wanting to work on a Wednesday, you can just not work that day. If you're particularly inspired on a Saturday, you can go all in.
My biggest issue was around this (startup #3, first fully self funded). I felt if I was not working every waking moment, I was failing. I learned my way out of that one eventually.
Discipline is the key in working for yourself. I'm lucky that my parents were both entrepreneurs. I saw them fail and succeed (and fail and succeed again...).
Your employees will rarely show up if they don't get paid and if they do they won't stick around for long. If you run a business and face a cash flow dilemma the easiest thing to not pay is yourself.
>Because you do not have power. Remember that, always. When you get promoted, when you enter management, when you get a stellar performance review, you are simply fulfilling the whims of someone else.
I hope the author learns about labor unions some day, hopefully soon.
It's quite telling of HN that this perfectly reasonable comment is the most downvoted.
I also enjoy the ignorant response implying governments are responsible for worker protections, not the organized labour that pushed for those regulations in the first place. The same meager protections that the current anti-labour government would love to roll back.
If you look at the advancements in worker protections in recent years, they do not come from unions. Paid maternity/paternity leave, higher wage floors, pay equality, paid sick leave... these are all being mandated by governments and they apply to all workers, not by unions that represent one industry.
Those advancements that you speak of were all pioneered by labor unions. And in most states they were also negotiated by labor unions, who negotiated directly with legislators.
>And in that sense, I was as trapped as every other person who’s forced to work for an income. My job offered shallow perks and self-affirmation, and that gave me the feeling that somehow I deserved anything I’d achieved: that I was, in any sense of the word, “successful,” and that working at a tech company was something more than just a paycheck. I was nothing, I realized, and in my hopes of actually accomplishing something, I’d deluded myself into thinking I already had.
Well, sort of. At 22, and in IT, still way better off than any single mother, non-college educated, or 40+ yo laid off person, in any other industry.
The harsh truth: you may be an excellent engineer. But your company can probably make do with a mediocre engineer for half the cost. You may write superb quality thoroughly tested code. But your company just needs something that mostly works most of the time. You might be able to implement that feature in a week, your company would be happy to have it in 6 weeks or even months. Talent is no guarantee of job security.
A fair severance package is 1 months salary per year of employment.
I'm not certain what he expects: lifetime risk-free employment? Yeah, there's stress involved with risk. But the risk one has as an upper-middle-class American is tech is nothing compared to the risks that others alive today face, and less than nothing compared to the risks that others in the past have faced.
Nothing last forever. Not a job — not even one's life. Make the most of it while you can.
Author here. Not sure why you're being downvoted, I completely I agree with this. The fact that even upper middle class doesn't guarantee any real security was a huge wake-up call for me, and I can't imagine what it's like for everyone else.
'The best security is insecurity.' -- a concept that became apparent to me early on, and has served me well.
To realize that whatever security there once was on corporate jobs is at best a vanishing illusion. To realize that the way forward isn't to build on a rock that will likely be flooded at some point, but to realize that you must surf.
While that doesn't mean that it'll all be great, it does prepare you for when the wave does crash down on you and pummel you into the sandy bottom -- you get back in the mix a lot faster and more capably than those who bought into the expectation of stability.
Also can lead to a much more interesting career, even if not as consistently lucrative.
I think as you gain more experience and perspective you will look back and realize that you simply weren't upper middle class yet. It's not about income (which is just a point-in-time metric that can change in an instant), it's about assets.
Programmers have a much better shot at establishing this kind of security than most people, because you should be making 2x to 3x median income for your area, which means you can live on 1x median income and invest the rest.
A lot of the people I've worked with as a programmer over the past 14 years have done effectively that, so by now they have a lot of assets. That is what upper middle class security looks like.
I think this is a fallacy of immigrant parenting. While I was growing up, my mother's mantra was always: "Go to college, get a good job, you will make money and everything will be perfect for you."
In her mind, success could ONLY come from a) college and b) a good job (doctor, engineer).
But here's the thing -- white collar jobs are just as subject to cost-cutting and instability as any other job. And perhaps, in the end, a "perfect" job in which you work yourself to death for a paycheck is hardly a happy or rewarding way to live.
Open your mind. Life is insecurity. Be open to change and you will thrive.
I can tell you exactly why they kept you and not someone else: you're the most junior developer. The senior ones are more expensive. I've seen it before- to make the profit margins look better in preparation for a sale they axe all their most experienced people. It's possible that snap is about to get purchased.
Tech and security are uneasy bedfellows. Just look at what GE is going through now, before that Nokia and before that Northern Telecom among a lot of others. If you want security find a profession that requires a license to practice.
The real myth is that your job is going to make you who you need to be and provide for you.
The only thing that will make you who you need to be is you, and that is going to require hard work to determine who you want to be and who you are capable of being.
The only entity that can provide for you is yourself, and your determination and willingness to work hard and take advantage of the environment you are in to the best of your ability.
TL;DR: a 22 year old CS grad gets a job and learns that vanila software development career is not going to be as exciting and rewarding journey as he'd imagined. Good for him; for some people, it takes much longer to figure this out.
I can't help but wince when I read this. This guy got laid off from his very first job. He is young -- in his twenties -- and has no family to support. He likely got some sort of bonus/severance. He's not the LEAST bit in any sort of dire straits...
Did he need to get laid off to realize that a) no job is forever and b) doing all "the right things" won't ALWAYS lead to success.
You are disposable. Even the CEO is disposable (as I've seen many times). Once you realize that, you'll stop the BS about loyalty to your company. It's a business arrangement, nothing more. Your job is to get the most you can (money, experience - whatever floats your boat). If it no longer works for you, leave. They'd do the same to you.