Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona. With google also slowing hiring, are the engineers laid off all going to be absorbed by facebook?
This will play our more like the dotcom burst than the 2008 crisis.
For most younger people here this may come as a shock but tech jobs can disappear, for years.
The job market in 2019 felt a lot like the job market in 1999, people rushing to get upskilled so that they could get into software and make ridiculous money. After the dotcom burst huge number of people left tech, or at least left the world of software development. Salaries also went way down for nearly a decade.
A common comment here on HN with layoffs is "well they're just getting rid of superfluous employees, so this is no big deal". This assumption is both ridiculously callous about real people losing job, it also underestimates how much work is superfluous in SV.
It is very possible that tech will take a serious hit this time, and that the total number of software engineers, data scientists, dev ops people etc will go do... for years. And likewise salaries will also drop (TC automatically does this thanks to the magic of RSUs).
Certainly people will need software and software engineers, just likely not nearly as much as they do now. Once FAANG realizes there's no longer a need to keep talent off the market, expect salaries to take a dive.
People have been calling software engineering wages a bubble for 20 years, and trying to call “the end of tech”. I just don’t see it, highly proficient software engineers are more valuable than ever. The wages are higher than ever. Going forwards, tech is really the only engine of growth in the American economy. Trying to say tech will be under for years is like saying the USA will be in a massive recession for years. I just don’t believe it.
What’s happening now is very analogous to the 2000 dot.com crash. The economy overall will recover, albeit slowly. However companies are questioning why they need 100 engineers instead of 50. That doesn’t just reverse itself overnight. As the OP said those that weren’t around the last time might find it hard to believe that tech jobs really just disappear for years.
No it’s not. The fed printed so much money and dropped rates so low, there’s a massive excess of capital looking for business opportunities. Monetary policy is what is driving the economy, and it’s making this bubble bigger than ever. You can’t ignore economics and cheap money. We will have ten more we work like companies.
Rates are low now but it will take time for this to get reflected in VC/PE/corporate dollars to invest. The addressable market of consumers/enterprises that are willing to spend money on non-essential products/services is down and will drop further since budgets are being tightened and fat is being cut. The 2008 unicorns that were born out of the last recession had to provide oversized returns to investors based on them addressing needs well beyond what cash-strapped consumers/enterprises were willing to spend on. We're in for a ride.
You aren't wrong. Most of the central banks loans went into inflating the price of stocks, bonds, and real estate. Inflation in those assets has been running over 10% a year. While goods, services, and wages has been running 2% per year. That's all due to central bank operations.
When you've got 100s of thousands of unemployed talented engineers on the market, you're not going ot be able to sustain $200k salaries for people who know how to write a yaml file for long.
I should point out, as I have no attachment to my karma, that the schadenfreude comes from the fact that those inflated asset prices were used to justify and fund gentrification and displacement. If a crash ruins a few of the entities profiting off that, well, chef's kiss.
- before Coronavirus, there was a shortage of people to work in software (if you believe BLS)
- software employment represents a very small portion of the labor force
- there are many problems that have just happened that will require software to solve
- while there are undoubtedly industries that will be hard hit, there are many software-intensive sectors that will see growth as a result of the crisis (ecommerce for one)
- the world in 1999 was much different. the internet was a curiosity, now it's essential.
- and finally, companies that are looking to implement efficiencies (read: lay people off) turn to .. software
edit, one more:
- many software positions over the past decade+ have been filled by immigrants. Going forward the US is going to be much less friendly to immigration, so competition for jobs will go down for US workers
Would this be a bad time to be in a job hunt to change companies? Anticipating that there may be a cohort of newly laid off SWEs from prestigious brand-name companies (Uber, Lyft, potentially others) flooding the market?
I'm guessing I, as a lowly, humble, SWE from an investment bank, would be easily looked over in favor of those aforementioned veterans/alumni of highly regarded Silicon Valley companies. Unless if I make a lateral jump to another bank or hedge fund, which I have no desire to do so.
You're making a sweeping assertion with zero evidence to back it up.
One obvious counterpoint to this argument is that this recession was not caused by markets realizing that many publicly listed tech companies actually had no market and no path to profitability.
Also, non-tech companies took on a large number of engineers in the late 90s to address Y2K - many of whom got laid off afterwards. Not an issue here.
> Uber/airbnb/lyft were considered in the same tier as facebook/google before corona
So was wework by many. Facebook/google cannot be more different from uber/airbnb/lyft.
FB/G are in high margin business, operating largely in virtual space, where scaling to new markets has low marginal costs.
Uber/airbnb/lyft are in historically low margin, capital intensive space, where scaling to new markets has very high marginal costs. Same as wework is an office rental with an app, so is uber, a taxi with an app. App part is cool, and gives them meaningful advantage, but it's still a taxi business, and they were not able to change that.
Odd that you say that. I got an offer from WeWork, which I declined because of weird cult-y vibes I was getting during the interview. A few months later they blew up.
I got rejected by Uber, was too scared of rejection to try Airbnb or Lyft. But I considered all three a tier (or more) above WW.
I'd have hands down, without hesitation, accepted a job from Uber even if I would have been laid off at some point down the road. Having Uber (or Lyft, or Airbnb) on the resume would open doors I imagine having WeWork (even disregarding the whole scandal) would not.
Based on what we've heard from Google yesterday, and FB's Q1 results just now, it looks like the much heralded ad crunch is turning into not much more than a speed bump.
I mean record traffic means record server usage with record low ad spend from their customers.
However, that's just a short-term hit. FB and Google may very well increase their own spending so they can capture the huge amount of people who are now using their platforms.
I'm pretty sure it was stock based. For one, Netflix is like, completely different than the rest. They only hire senior engineers and basically substitute a talent pipeline with giant wages.
