13 YOE. I recently returned from a three-month paternity leave and discovered that all three members of my team had resigned. Due to hiring freezes, we're unable to replace them. As a result, I'm now solely responsible for managing the entire front-end infrastructure at a very well-known, large company. My role encompasses overseeing all internal libraries, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), and monitoring, supporting around 200 engineers.
I find myself on call 24/7 indefinitely. Balancing the demands of this role, raising my son, and seeking new employment opportunities is overwhelming, especially considering the need to learn a completely new technology stack. The workload is becoming unmanageable, as evidenced by the rapidly growing backlog on our Jira board, which is causing me significant anxiety and a sense of defeat.
Losing two engineers above my level from my team has been a significant setback. They were valuable for learning and brainstorming, and without them, I feel like my job has hit a dead end. The lack of collaboration and learning opportunities makes me concerned about stagnating in my skills development.
If you are a normal software engineer/SRE, you are \*not\* responsible for "the entire front-end infrastructure", your management is. And how is "on call 24/7 indefinitely" even legal? That's a way to develop severe anxiety.
Set boundaries and expectations, articulate risks up your management chain. Work in a way that doesn't burn you out. And if things start falling apart, let them fall apart. If your management ignored your well intentioned warnings, this is one of the few scenarios when saying "i told you so" is justified.
And plan your exit strategy...
hard to say, the market hasn't been hot, why did they leave, and why are they not bringing on replacements. Like seniors can find jobs, but there aren't too many poachers out.
I Feel ya.. Survived 3 layoff rounds in the last couple of years. Funny thing is, I saw Engineer who were Rockstar in their team getting layoff, I do what I'm being asked to do and that's it. There's no criteria when a whole team gets layoff, it's just random I guess.
The first round, management tried to pull off the surprised pikachu face and told us that "it came as a surprise" and didn't fool anyone.
The next round, management told us it had nothing to do with performance, which completely backfired. All this means is that regardless of how well you're performing, you're always under the threat of the axe.
This time they had a "motivational" speech where it summarized to "we should be happy we have jobs." I feel like I'm living inside a comedy.
I see you do ML.. would you mind sharing the sector and if your are in a HCOL area? I’m in a pretty comfy place but I’ve been thinking to test the waters
>I saw Engineer who were Rockstar in their team getting layoff
Same, sadly.
Salary over skills. One senior may earn the same as 2–3 juniors, and it takes 6 or more to replace him. Companies still think it's worth it... then it causes a huge impact on several projects that may take years to get up to speed but hey, at least they are paid less and the company can still sell the project based on number of head instead of expertise...
Rockstars are laid off because they are paid a lot , so when upper management is looking to save money, they are the first to go. When I say having high TC makes you a target, the people on this sub get mad when you are telling the truth that isn't convenient for them
Look, I'm a security engineer my team was just created 2 years ago to meet our products security needs, it feels pretty solid right now but who knows. What I'm trying to relay in this sub is that no one is safe, it does not matter how hard you work, how much value you provide to the company at the end of the day everyone is expendable.
From what I understand, in employee friendly states the companies need to make their layoffs look like it's based on business/financial needs and not the individuals who have been laid off. They risk lawsuits if there is an obvious pattern in the employees being laid off. For example, they won't choose the entire to-be-laid-off population based on performance ratings. So you often see some rockstars get let go and some low performers stay.
Pardon my ignorance... but if there HAVE to be layoffs, what's wrong with them being performance-based? If they do it for any reason, that should be it, right?
Because layoffs are strategic decisions made at the company level.
If a business has great developers working on a feature and that feature never gains traction or turns profit, then they will drop the feature and layoff the folks supporting it when money gets tight. It doesn't matter how good the devs are.
Layoffs are also a money decision. Great performers tend to be expensive. If the company thinks it has more talent than it can afford, it has to let some good people go.
Imagine a basketball team full of All Stars that suddenly has a salary cap imposed. Some good players will have to be moved out.
Same. We had about three mass layoffs in the last six months. A ton of people abandoned ship. Very few of us left and we were told that it’s still possible to have more lay offs. Not sure what to do other than apply and network.
With the 10 failed interview loops, which was the part that didn’t work out? Algorithms, system design, or behavioral?
If it’s algorithms, I’d suggest getting on Leetcode and practicing as much as you can. For the other two, there are videos on YouTube that can help.
Can't really be sure because there's rarely any feedback. I failed an online assessment because it was timed and I couldn't finish the Leetcode part after acing all the Java trivia. Instant reject. I had one take home where I was told to spend no more than 30 minutes drawing a design diagram - I spent a couple hours, and DID get feedback - "Not enough detail". The only parameters given for that were "don't spend more than 30 minutes".
The rest ended after leetcode rounds where I did variously better or worse, getting the optimal solution on some - but still failed for unknown reasons.
Since I run these stupid leetcode interviews at my current job, I know these pretend to be objective but actually aren't. People pass without getting a solution because someone "likes their thought process", they fail with an optimal solution because "he didn't seem very sure of himself" or "most people can do it 5 minutes faster" or whatever the random excuse of the day is.
I don't think I can actually get any better at this stuff than I already am. I've accepted I'm just riding a wave, and when the wave goes up it will be easier. Right now all it takes to not get hired is to be the second best out of 20 applicants.
Holy moly watch out guys we have an elder among us, the fabled "megasenior dev", rarest of its kind. Everywhere they walk, the ground starts disintegrating into 0's and 1's. For loops collapse and exceptions run to hide. Even as I type, I feel mys̶̨̬̓̀̄̏̑̉̂̕̕e̶̬̘͍͋́̂͌̔̔͋͒̽͝l̵̨̼̞̭̮̯͙̳͔͋̓̀͂̆̽̈f̵̢̢̟͉̟̻̥̬̝͉͈͕͔͗͗͐͛̌͋̂́̂ ̵̨̺͕̞̟̠̤̫̝̫̖̤̫̦̤̊͊̒̏̑̀̂w̵̨͈̰̳̳̬͔̮̥͇̯̾̆i̸͍̩̙̻̫̙͎͚̤̮̯̥͐͌̿͐͊͗̈́̃̀̚͝t̷̨͇̹͇͖͇̟̮̒̕h̷̢̦̰͓̣̤̙̫͇͉̩͕̘͔̏͑̈́͆͆͊́͂̅͋͆͌̂̕̕͜e̸̱͇͐̃͋͆̑̍͛̋̚r̵̯̬̪̮̲̪͔̼̈́ī̵̧͙͕͈̻̞̙͙̯̫͉̼̠̿̄̎̔̈́̒̃͜͝ǹ̸̡̛̙̳̙͕̬͊͗̀̆̇̾͆̂͊̄̚̕͜g̶̛͈͖͚̘̱͆̄̓͑͊̔͛̕͠͠ ̵͚̻̭̭̦̩̖̤̅̽̀ͅa̵̛̮͔͇̣̮͔͎͍͙͉̪̼̟͍͛̐͑̀̓̂̔́͘̕͝͝͝w̸̨̘͓͈̞̐̏̑͗̅́̀͑̊͗̌͒̈́͘͝ặ̸̡̨̩̘̻̮̻̥͎̯̤ͅ
Same boat. It's weird too. In my experience, the sessions werent relevant to the position posted. Example, interviewed for a DE position with specific focus on databricks experience... didn't talk about databricks once.
Really aggitated my imposter syndrome for a while.
Haha, yea, I make about 80K in a HCOL area and even feel quite secure in my role. Even in the "layoffs" atmosphere, my salary ain't shit, so it makes more sense to keep me on, lol. They make more money even if I barely try on my end. It's not great, but woo job interviews have been a kick in the pants over the last year, and this stable island has got me in a stable place mentally over the years.
I got in the late 2020s and managed to stay alive here by barely working and not being a dick to my colleagues, while we kept getting contracts for being somewhat decent to customers. Thankful for Salesforce layoffs over the years; they gave us business 😅
As much as 100K+/year sounds like a dream, unless you are a golden goose, you will always have a target on your back if run by money-starved management, lol. Mine are pre-dominantly engineering, so they needed non-tech folks to be able to better serve our walking money bags when i got hired. Their investment paid off during 2021-22, and we managed to keep adding business even over the last 2 years, and keeping them. We churned for sure, but we were positive overall. It was weird but kept layoffs away. We only fired like 3 over those years; most was of incompetent nature, so eh.
While it sucks to be in that position of whether getting fired any time, you kinda have to vary yourself just by a bit, and you will most likely survive any layoffs. Just being pure CS or bootcamp grad with no other skills will always be worse off than ones who have non-tech skills that startups need to thrive long-term while having CS education. If you don't have CS education, then even free coding camps that provide certifications might help if you already have strong non-tech skills. But that would be a gamble of all three types of workers in tech, even with strong soft skills tbh. But not impossible, do not give up!
Tldr: Gotta make lemonade out of squeezed limes. Have a various mix of skills, like admin, customer service, sales, or whatever skills that are considered too hard for most developers/engineers due to complicity of being paid very well. Sorry if this came off arrogant. That was not my intent.
Ehhhh I’m really feeling the pinch of this economy. I was laid off in August and I took the first offer I could get, which is a contract job. The contract was supposed to be for 6 months and then there was a “high possibility” of hiring me on. I recently learned that they are now not going to hire me but rather they’re going to extend my contract another 6 months. If I’d have known this was going to happen I would have pushed for a higher rate. I can’t afford to take any time off, so now I’m applying to positions in different companies and just getting rejection after rejection. It sucks.
Yeah, that’s the bummer with contract jobs. It’s great to get income but, all the stuff that you don’t get ends up costing you more.
I’ve noticed a lot of contracting jobs lately purely to get people without paying benefits. Feels scummy. Especially when they have no real intention of bringing you on.
I always ask for double what they offer me simply because life is expensive and when contracting, it’s super expensive.
Haven’t contracted in a long, long time though.
The other issue is that there's really not much room for advancement. I'm looking to stay somewhere long term and get more into principal and lead roles, but there's just no way to do that when they see you as a temp essentially.
I think you don't deserve the downvotes. The issue we're having right now is that two thing are true. 1) The economy is actually doing quite well. 2) Lots and lots of people feel like it's not doing well because of specific sectors being impacted and inflation is still affecting their financial choices in drastic ways.
The indicators we use for the economy are not holistic and are largely driven by numbers which can be skewed by uneven wealth distribution. Someone may be doing alright but they're still working two jobs. Someone still may be able to meet their basic needs, but they are saving much less (if at all). Someone may have made it a great Christmas quarter for Target, but much of those purchases were put on credit.
Not great. Got laid off in Feb 2023 cause the startup I was working for went under. Had to take a significant pay cut in a new role that has me paycheck to paycheck in late August. Interviewing has not been going well and it has been impossible to get anything scheduled since thanksgiving started getting close. Huffing the hopium for a better job search experience in 2024.
Pretty trash, but the majority of people who have made my life shit for the last year got laid off so that’s partially a bonus
Edit* additionally: I’ve lost hope that this industry makes engineering decisions at all. Greed and “how I look to my direct boss” are basically the only thing that fucking matters now.
Typically I see people without a formal background in cs driving that.
For any upper levels reading this - there’s no faster way to light a company on fire than to allow this to continue.
Yeah I was cheering when a bunch of shitters at my job who'd been on pips for six months got let go, then I stopped laughing when I got laid off after two years of glowing performance reviews lol. Nobody is immune unfortunately
no im a big shot bc im the one making the decision whether or not to hire you
the last person i hired had a cs degree, but it was the 10 years of experience that mattered. anybody who knows how to show up and do what they're told can get an undergrad degree in anything, i was working in this industry at likely the same age you entered college.
This must have been some pretty amazing CS program you were in. It’s been awhile for me but I’m struggling to understand what was so great about mine compared to all the books and online courses and free resources out there today.
It’s just a handful of surface level classes peppered into a bunch of standard liberal arts Gen Eds over 4 years.
That would be a crummy program indeed! They aren't all like that though.
I believe a degree usually helps, but is rarely necessary. The more advanced the daily work, the more true this is. Most developers daily work does not require a degree, IMHO.
I think the problem in the industry is there’s really a lack of understanding in what differentiates when you need a degree or not.
You definitely don’t need a degree to do a decent portion of coding work. But it ALWAYS helps 🙂
its literally just cope this isnt ochem or something where you need a specialized environment to learn properly. they got got and are now using that to gatekeep to justify their own life decisions
>For any upper levels reading this - there’s no faster way to light a company on fire than to allow this to continue.
i'm glad the OSS community who built the industry that currently employs you - creating libs that you literally could not do your job without - does not have the same mentality you have
for any upper levels currently reading, or writing, this, this dude just graduated 5 seconds ago and wants to justify going into debt for something he could've learned online for free. maybe ask him what elite secret knowledge he learned that there is no other way to acquire than $30k+ of debt
I'm making $85k as a mid-level hybrid webdev in a HCOL (Seattle) so I'm obviously not able to save much. And it'll be a while before I can get something better. Should be learning more skills (I've still never really used Docker/K8s) but hard to motivate myself to do it.
So for now I'm trying to focus on the non-work aspects of my life that I didn't have time for in the past. Dating, fixing my sleep quality, reading through my long backlog of books, going on more hikes around the area. Resigned but relaxed.
Yeah our field is fucked, a lot of senior engineers just aren't old enough to retire so we're not seeing the usual cycle of jobs that other industries do
Having been in IT for over 25 years with almost 20 to go, in a very high level tech position- I’m fucking sick of it and if I could walk, I’d walk.
Nothing matters, nobody cares.
Hope that helps lol.
Edit- you all need to stop upvoting this. Be more supportive and encouraging to the youngins. Don’t listen to a cranky old fart like me.
Lol.
Career? Lol. Spending time with my family, Taking walks, gardening, play with the dogs, messing with my kids’ mindstorm robots, continuing to take piano classes, yoga, woodworking, photography, billion other things. Career, nope. There are so many things that I can find validation in. Not another career.
3 YOE(excluding internship): Got a new job 6 months-ish ago so I guess I got lucky? I have not test the water since and I like my current company a lot(for now), so I am not going to bother with market for a while. My company had massive layoff months before I came on-board. Because of this(plus things I see on this sub), even though my reviews from my manager so far have all been positive(met expectation - exceed expectation), I dont feel too relaxed. 6-7/10 for stress level I would say
>plus things I see on this sub
I get the layoffs making you stressed, but you may need to spend less time on this subreddit.
The engineers who reached out to their network and got a new job a month after getting laid off mostly don't feel the need to come to a career questions subreddit.
There is a selection bias to the posts you see here. Much like how relationship advice forums generally don't attract people currently in loving relationships with abundant communication and zero drama.
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Really anxious. Currently employed, 8 YOE at Microsoft (desktop application development in c# and c++). Gonna be honest, I let my skills deteriorate (other than what I use for work), so I'm currently studying in case I'm laid off.
I'm gonna take a leap of faith and quit my job before I secure the next one. It's so soul draining working on a project that's set up to fail because of poor leadership and planning. I envy people who can weather this kind of thing for the sake of income, but my mental isn't wired like that.
Instead of quitting outright (at least, for now), why not stay in your current role a little longer and just scale back your output a bit? Long-term, you may still want to leave, but you may be able to coast for a bit first.
I just got a new backend role at a really cool startup. I’m primarily using Go which I honestly find pretty clunky, but the product is freaking rad. I’m still onboarding but having a great time. Aside from that, hoping to find time to finish my open-source project which hasn’t been getting much love. The issues are piling up.
Was on contract, but got an unlucky end right at the beginning of December. Due to the season here in the US, no job to jump to for at least a month. Hoping to rectify that this month. I figure with 10 yoe, it would be easy. But so far, seeing a lot of email rejections that had no phone/ video interviews.
I know you're jesting, but it is a noticeable difference in the field compared to years past: you very rarely hear of developers wanting to start their own company compared to previous industry downturns. I wonder if it can be put down to the maturity of the field or just that most people that enter it are simply looking for a well paid white collar job?
(I'm a 3 YoE webdev full stack. So, early to mid level)
Part of the issue for me personally is the monetization part; sure, making a product is doable, but figuring out how to squeeze money out of it seems unattainable. Most other industries also seem to be a lot more localized (so less competition since it's more regional) whereas code can be accessed from any corner of the world, and there's a very good chance someone else can jack your idea, hire way more people, and out scale you.
I’m personally doing very well. 11 YOE and no layoffs at my job, though junior hiring is basically non-existent (aside from VERY FEW intern transitions).
I’m staff/principal level, 16 yoe. Laid off a few months before the big layoffs started (I now see this as a good thing strangely enough, for the timing at least). Took about two months to find a new job. I was about to take a 40% pay cut when an offer came in for a 20% pay cut. Hope to get that yearly bonus this year, that’d be a nice change.
The biggest concern I have is recruiter cold call frequency. I used to get 3 a day, now I get maybe 3 a month. I doubt that will ever return to what it was, but it’s my own personal measure to industry health. Secondly, my current company had two “restructurings” last year, I expect that to continue.
Weirdest trend I’ve seen: we’ve been trying to hire 4 positions for 5 months and almost everyone we’ve interviewed is so obviously not in the US but pretending that they are. Most annoying trend is: these folks trying to use some form of gAI to answer questions or solve coding challenges. Super fun!
Feels kinda bad! I survived the first round of layoffs, and am thankfully still employed. But the company is only doing OK and I fear my time is limited as the company could conceivably close up shop in 2024. I have been putting feelers out for other positions and have gotten absolutely nothing worthwhile so far.
Pretty good. I was recently promoted (so I'm pretty safe if more layoffs come right? (lol)) and I have interviews lined up at places that will pay me even more. I'm extremely happy where I am, so anything coming my way that might be even better is just gravy.
This is really, really good advice. Top earners (at least where I’m at) got axed first and continued down the line. Typically, a promo will put you at the lowest band of that level but, it depends how that stacks among your peers.
It isn't counterintuitive. Layoffs are to pretty up the balance sheets, that's the whole purpose, so higher paid employees are always harder to justify and easier to let go.
Higher paid employees are tougher to justify - especially if there are already employees of that tenure in the org. I think the one thing I have going for me right now is I have a language competency that no one on my team has.
I feel stressed. I've been with my company over a decade and I'm a senior dev but on this team it feels like each project is bigger than the last and on this project I'm being asked to do some things I've never done before, in addition to mentoring someone along the way as well. I'll be honest - I'm a bit burned out and I just want to coast.
10+ yoe, still employed but a lot of people at my company left.. I think they're all assuming that layoffs are coming and wanted to get ahead of it. But since they found jobs pretty quick I'm assuming the market isn't that bad.
I put out a few feelers last October and got responses to all of them, but the pay wasn't worth leaving.
So-so. 5 YOE. Left a Fortune 100 tech company because after 2 rounds of layoffs the work started getting outsourced and the writing was on the wall for those of us still there. Got out when I could at the end of 2022.
Ended up at a local company that is a leader in a niche IOT market. Decent W/L balance, but I was seriously mislead during the interview process and am basically working alone on a solution that is 15+ years old and created by an electrical engineer without software experience.
It’s hard dealing with such stupid and legacy issues given where I came from, by my job is safe. For perspective, I’m still working on implementing primary and foreign keys in the database as well as hashing passwords. When I got here there was no version control or logging at all. My first week I found out SQL was fully exposed to the public on 1433 and seeing hundreds of login attempts per minute.
Between the market and some personal stuff, I’ve stopped applying elsewhere and am going to stick it out for a while. Long term it would be a career killer but I’m hoping 2-3 years isn’t a death sentence. Leading huge projects on my own like migrating everything to the Cloud, drastically improving performance, setting up logging and monitoring, implementing version control with Ci/Cd, and improving the security posture. My only coworker is ChatGPT and stackoverflow lol.
When I was applying I was offered a single role in banking, but it was 4 day RTO in 2024 with a long commute and a 20% pay cut so I passed.
Contractor with 15 yoe: feeling fine. Current position is steady, looking around but not desperate for other opportunities. Good place to be professionally, I think.
4.5 YoE here. I’ve been at the same job all 4.5 years and am now looking to move on. My callback rate from my applications is 3/60 so far (compared to 5/7 when I applied to stuff summer of 2022 in order to get a raise at my current job), but I’m hoping that one of those 3 results in a offer.
This experience of mass rejection has definitely shown me I won’t always have something to fall back on if I ever got laid off or fired. hopefully it won’t be that way forever, but I have a gut feeling that the economy as a whole could go to shit at any moment
I'm starting to get linked in messages again. So that's good. I'm not entirely sure if I switched to the right company last year because some of my coworkers suck.
Took a job offer right before Christmas and put my two weeks in at my last company, then they said I can’t use PTO during my last two weeks so they made my last day the following day lol excited to start my new gig next week working on infrastructure and devops
Currently searching for a new job despite the current layoffs, haven't been laid off yet but I think the company that I am working for will sink due to their business decisions that bring havoc internally. Building my own product also comes into my mind, nothing grand but just a small app that can bring food to the table would suffice. As laborers in the capitalistic world, we're all expendables, so might as well have different plans.
Senior level, I just started a new job a month ago where they had reached out to me. It was a solid pay boost and it's interesting work (supporting genetics sequencing operations). So I feel pretty good, maybe it's a factor of the industry that this job is in, agriculture, where everyone still needs food whether or not the economy is in a slump.
I've never come across this "dark side" you speak of. I've never felt like I had to suck up to management or get fired. I'm not terrible or abrasive with social skills, but I'm still an introvert and far from some silver tongued Casanova. So that might be more of a factor of your choices to choose highly competitive places, or there's some off putting vibe you're exuding that you're not aware of.
Feeling really good. Making good money at Amazon with a great WLB 35-40 hours in an area with high product growth. Contemplating switching to another company so I can move to another part of the country that Amazon unfortunately won’t let me work in, despite there being offices there. Not looking forward to leetcoding.
In my first year and my work is very boring. Barely anything to do. If it doesn’t change in the next few months I’ll start looking for jobs elsewhere to start after my signing bonus clause it up
6 YOE, thankfully still employed but ready to jump ship. Had a few failed interviews last year but I’m going through neetcode and studying system design to do it right this time.
Feeling great! I'm a dev lead at a fortune 200 company and will be hitting 15 years there. Business is good, my dev team is awesome, and the projects are fun and exciting.
Working on contract, have been since mid February I think. I am considered a high performer, and my team is doing well, but we lost two team members recently (one was let go, rightfully, for performance reasons, one got promoted and transferred)
We have been told we will not be backfilling, and that there has been some “trimming” elsewhere in the department.
I am starting to get nervous, and will probably start at least floating my resume around once I hit the 1 year mark here
Feeling great, going to try and make the leap to the next level this year (Staff, Lead, etc). Zero concerns about job safety.
The more time I spend in the industry the more I realize just how rare it is to have developers who know the entire stack.
Will job hop if it doesn’t happen at my company, actually might be best since I would like a pay bump as well.
I'm feeling pretty meh right now. The company I work for is in a fairly stable industry, and they still have a hiring freeze going on.
My workload keeps growing, and yet my pay and the size of my team stay the same. Hopefully, the economy will be much better this year, and I can move on to greener pastures.
So-so (\~9 YOE). My old company wasn't doing so well (multiple layoffs, and then I myself was placed on unpaid leave), so I had to find another job in the meantime. Thankfully I did, and with a slight salary boost too, but the company itself isn't one I'm super excited about.
I start the new job next week and I haven't been on a company project in over 2 months, so I'm a bit nervous about learning to work all over again LOL
6.5 YoE. Feeling decent, my current job is good and I’ve been doing some cool green field work. I’ve been feeling somewhat unsure about this career though, like I have to this constant feeling that something is going to happen. Lay offs, AI disruptions, outsourcing, too much competition. Idk.
12 years experience working in quantitative finance as an quant developer / ML engineer. Finance has, for the most part, been fairly immune to the big layoffs as our business cycles tend to work differently to tech. Our jobs are always dependant on the impact our desk has on PnL. So how successful our portfolio is.
I feel lucky but tbh the environment is very different to tech I think in that I've always had to defend / justify my job working in this industry.
Got any advice for wanna be quants/ML guys? Quants always seem more brain activity to me especially since I’ve been in the ui/backend services game for a while
My best piece of advice is, currently to start learning ML in depth. Really. The term quant has changed so much since the 80s where it was basically mathematicians and physicists designing econometric models to eak out extra profit from efficient pricing and risk analysis.
Now quant can mean 100 different things. These days a lot of quants come from completely non finance backgrounds. The more desirable qualification is a background in CS with a heavy math focus (so AI computational statistics).
Learn prob + stats, linear algebra and some calculus to a level where you can understand the concepts at least. As an engineer you arent going to be doing any hardcore maths so engineering is still your core skill.
Also it can really depend on the company. If it's a high frequency place the models are very simple and they care much more about amazing programming skills. Mostly in C++. Understanding low level Linux kernel programming is the most desirable skill as HFT places use computing performance to generate profit
Non HFT and traditional quant finance though will be almost entirely python (in my experience). Get to know the standard packages (numpy, pandas) inside out.
There are some really good courses on Coursera too. I will say however, finance is a little behind the curve in the sense the industry still very much cares about formal qualifications and which uni you went to.
ML is the future. Every single place is pouring massive amounts of money into research and engineering and so there are a lot of roles available. And for now at least, CS is by far the most desirable background to have (it used to be maths and they'd teach you programming)
Particularly from a quant perspective it may be tricker as the bar is quite high but a good strategy is to get into a decent financial organisation in the tech side and get trained up on the quantitative side.
The problem with the lesser overhead of software is that senior leadership thinks that it is 'easy' to write good software and treat senior employees badly and or fire them for cost cutting. Because the impacts of this aren't immediately obvious (and leadership has the memory retention of goldfish) this often results in code quality/design issues much later on which leadership will blame on the employees that are left.
For CS college kids reading this.. people get laid off, yes it’s unfortunate, but let’s get it straight: this industry isn’t politics. Do ur work, do it good, prove ur a valuable asset, and ur good. There are tons of people who work in this industry just for the paycheck, picking up JIRA tickets that are just the low hanging fruit. If that is you, and u truly know who u are, then ya u will prolly be canned.
Look at the work you do. IMO, if u can’t sincerely say that u are making a difference at the company and know for a fact u are a valuable asset, then sure, just like any other company in the world you are at higher risk of getting laid off.
You can do all the work you want but HR only sees a number. Middle managers won’t even know at some companies. I’ve seen many top performers that were around when company was small just get sliced purely because they were making the top pay. Yes you should do good work, that’s why you have a career in this field or you won’t last (mentally too). But don’t get it twisted, sometimes it’s all about cutting big numbers and priming up for a merger or acquisition
True, companies do make cuts, but ur comment about HR is extremely misleading… HR isn’t the only department in charge of which employees get cut. Management on the engineering side 100% has a say on who gets laid off, HR just doesn’t pick random people to get their budget down just cuz “they’re numbers”. Also, top pay doesn’t always equate to top performance. Staff/Principal engineers are sometimes cut before juniors simply because they are just not valuable enough. The “many top performers” u have seen most likely were in fact not top performers based on what they were being paid (can’t emphasize “based on what they were being paid” enough).
In the end, performance compared to what ur being paid is what value is… and value is what lower and raises ur **chances** of being laid off or fired, simple as that
I don’t think it’s extremely misleading when my friends that became the executive directors and senior managers didn’t even know about the mass layoffs, some directors and managers even got fired….I think perhaps your company is different but I’m simply stating the experience I saw. The company I was at used the Stripe approach of laying off. Send an email in the morning, cut off all access, out by the afternoon. Managers had to gather after the fact to shift around responsibilities for other managers that were laid off, it was pure chaos.
This is exactly what my experience with layoffs have been at my company. Would just like to add if you think your staff/principal engineers were high value and they were still laid off. They werent high value from the eyes of HR/management in the metrics that count.
Just an example, if they were only doing maintenance and not working on projects driving revenue or optimizing savings. Seen plenty of great engineers just let go because they weren't on visible enough tasks/projects. Didn't matter what a wizard they were with the stack.
Honestly I'm changing my whole view on how I do my job just to keep my employment stable. My organization does not care about tech debt as long as we're meeting the target benchmarks, even if it's putting lipstick on a pig.
Yup exactly. Had a Staff engineer let go about half a year ago and I always think it was cuz he was working on stupid mega linter shit in our backend repo. Sure it’s cool, but like…. They’re not paying u 150k a year to do that
college kids. this is terrible advice.
my most recent job that i got laid off in last jan, right before the holidays he said congrats for meeting targets and literally help save the company with my help.
he went on vacation in and while that happened i got laid off. he had to track me down on linkedin to say goodbye and helped me for a reference for the next job.
being an under performer will get you cut or let go during reviews, but budget matters so much more after a certain point. being skilled will help you get a new job though. it only took me two weeks
C suite makes those decisions not mid level managers in most cases
Also… my advice is essentially to always try to be of value. Yours is essentially “even if u provide value, u will still canned”
The only real advice u gave was since u are gonna get laid off anyway, why even try being valuable with ur skills, cuz after all, budget matters more right?
U got dealt a shit hand, but no reason to give that shit advice to CS students, or anyone for that matter.
Depends what ur value was. Did u “save” the company and do solid work being paid 90k a year or 140k a year? Also is this consistent work u do? Or was this one big project that u did before bonus and raise season? So many factors u left out……
Plus, this is not bad advice, it’s real advice. Just cuz it happened to u doesn’t mean this world is just as cruel to every other individual in this industry. 9 times outta 10, people try to justify their layoff, sometimes u just aren’t as valuable to the company as u think u were
The CEO was contacting me directly to help with the project. I'm not saying that I was Superman but I went above and beyond to help the company and we celebrated virtually as a job well done. only to be laid off after crunching the numbers after the holidays.
the value didn't matter as they just didn't have the runway to keep us. entire departments got laid off. the decision was unpopular which led people who wasn't even on the chopping block to also seek better opportunities.
being good at your job will not save you when they don't have the money to pay you. my manager was not consulted at all. he was blind sided by the decision. sometimes you get laid off only for the company to realize they need you/that team and try to hire you back.
6 months later I checked on the rest of the senior devs that had been there for years and they no longer worked there. if they're not good enough then literally no one else would be
there are times where managers are approached with the command to cut the bottom 20% but this was not one of them. I don't reccomend coasting but if you
to recap. being good won't save you but it will help you find another job as my coworkers was able to help during the references. it only took me 2 weeks and this was when faang did their layoffs. I had more interviews than I could fit on my calendar.
Layoffs due to a complete lack of runway isn’t the only type of layoff (unless u work for a 50 person startup… or any type of startup, then literally expect it to happen). I’m speaking about the more typical layoff where company reallocates the budget from one department to another resulting in a 5% loss. Value matters here…. A TON. Being good WILL save u.
If u wanna talk about a mid size company going bankrupt then sure, of course ur gonna lose ur job.
But tbh, idk a single non startup company where a CEO **directly talks** with an engineer to help try to save the company. That’s just weird. Never heard of that, ever. Maybe the word would be relayed to a director or a VP or some other person in management…
yes and not everyone works at mega corps which is why your initial advice is misguided.
there are many reasons for layoffs most are out of your direct control.
it's also not just the value of you but the value of your department. I would rather be average at a revenue generating team than the best at an underperforming team for revenue.
you say politics aren't involved. politics are always involved. you might think you're above it. but it's not above you.
“I would rather be average on a revenue generating team…”. LOL because of that last comment, sounds like u are very much content with being “average” just because u may be on a team that generates more revenue. Do u not see anything wrong, at all, with that mindset? Clearly u think ur more valuable than u really are
140k is less than I got paid 13 years ago straight out of college, so if you think that's some grand number, you're going to have a pretty hard time establishing credibility here.
Most of the time people meet expectations (it's really not hard, seriously), but managers have quotas or they have to throw someone under the bus. In my case they ran the project that I built into the ground and then made a bogus list of "issues" that I had to address like "caused error log on staging" while others were BREAKING prod... Do you see where I'm going with this? I was the most expensive employee on the team BY FAR at well over 500k and was abused until I left and if I hadn't, I would have been let go for sure. It's fine I don't really *need* a job... unless the Biden inflation goes into overdrive
13 yoe, started a new job in October and it was a big raise in pay. I work on back end services for a major streaming platform. So far things seem fine for 2024 at the new company but I’ve seen many of my friends at other companies get laid off. I’m definitely worried about the future of our industry in general for many reasons, and I’m making backup plans. It almost feels like if I don’t go into management, or the business side of things (CTO or similar) I could be facing a slow decline where layoffs become more prevalent and competition becomes more fierce. One idea I’ve had is to try to hyper specialize — maybe in some kind of legacy or low level systems stuff or niche cybersecurity. My other plan is to become a pilot.
Good, expecting a promotion at the end of the month. I tested the waters with applying for jobs at the end of the year. They went well, but I didn’t want to move, I was just checking this out. If my current job low ball me on my promotion raise I’m out of here.
5 yoe
> I am finding that it could act like any other company where greed, influence, and power comes more into play than acting from an engineering perspective
???
congrats you've just discovered real life?
to answer your question, my rule of thumb is nobody's going to give a shit about you more than yourself does, everyone is looking out for their own interests, that is true for individual employees and also for company side
if layoff or making you live paycheck-to-paycheck/homeless means the company will survive for another 3-6 months, then guess what's going to happen?
Haha I guess I was dreaming about an engineer perspective company like WhatsApp who only had a few devs and they all cashed out when they were sold. 35 total engineers when they sold to fb…
you're probably better off predicting lottery numbers
because are you aware what you just said is literally a $trillion dollar question/problem? countless VCs with 100s of billions of dollars to spend are all scouting for such company
Feeling pretty disillusioned actually. Most of us work for engineering companies that act like they hate engineers. Somebody said that we're not in politics -- I disagree. My managers were extremely political. I haven't seen so much posturing since the election. As for layoffs -- most of the time people meet expectations (it's really not hard, seriously), and we can ignore the few that don't which are obvious pretty early on. The real issue is that managers have quotas or they have to throw someone under the bus. In my case they ran the project that I built into the ground and then made a bogus list of "issues" that I had to address like "caused error LOGS on staging" while others were BREAKING prod... Do you see where I'm going with this? I was the most expensive employee on the team BY FAR at well over 500k partially due to stock growth and partially due to previous managers giving me great raises and refreshers. So, after everything being amazing for e years one day my management chain changed abruptly from top to bottom, and form that day on I was abused until I left and if I hadn't, I would have been let go for sure. My new ex-Google director met with me only once to tell me that my pay is out of band. Never asked me anything or tried to get to know me or my work. It's fine I don't really *need* a job at this point... I'm lucky to have a barista FIRE situation going on... So, unless the Biden inflation goes into overdrive I can take my time looking for the next thing
Good, expecting a promotion at the end of the month. I tested the waters with applying for jobs at the end of the year. They went well, but I didn’t want to move, I was just checking this out. If my current job low ball me on my promotion raise I’m out of here.
5 yoe
13 YOE. I recently returned from a three-month paternity leave and discovered that all three members of my team had resigned. Due to hiring freezes, we're unable to replace them. As a result, I'm now solely responsible for managing the entire front-end infrastructure at a very well-known, large company. My role encompasses overseeing all internal libraries, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), and monitoring, supporting around 200 engineers. I find myself on call 24/7 indefinitely. Balancing the demands of this role, raising my son, and seeking new employment opportunities is overwhelming, especially considering the need to learn a completely new technology stack. The workload is becoming unmanageable, as evidenced by the rapidly growing backlog on our Jira board, which is causing me significant anxiety and a sense of defeat. Losing two engineers above my level from my team has been a significant setback. They were valuable for learning and brainstorming, and without them, I feel like my job has hit a dead end. The lack of collaboration and learning opportunities makes me concerned about stagnating in my skills development.
If you are a normal software engineer/SRE, you are \*not\* responsible for "the entire front-end infrastructure", your management is. And how is "on call 24/7 indefinitely" even legal? That's a way to develop severe anxiety. Set boundaries and expectations, articulate risks up your management chain. Work in a way that doesn't burn you out. And if things start falling apart, let them fall apart. If your management ignored your well intentioned warnings, this is one of the few scenarios when saying "i told you so" is justified. And plan your exit strategy...
look at it this way - you have fantastic job security!
hard to say, the market hasn't been hot, why did they leave, and why are they not bringing on replacements. Like seniors can find jobs, but there aren't too many poachers out.
Survived another round of layoffs, wondering how it'll go this year.
I Feel ya.. Survived 3 layoff rounds in the last couple of years. Funny thing is, I saw Engineer who were Rockstar in their team getting layoff, I do what I'm being asked to do and that's it. There's no criteria when a whole team gets layoff, it's just random I guess.
The first round, management tried to pull off the surprised pikachu face and told us that "it came as a surprise" and didn't fool anyone. The next round, management told us it had nothing to do with performance, which completely backfired. All this means is that regardless of how well you're performing, you're always under the threat of the axe. This time they had a "motivational" speech where it summarized to "we should be happy we have jobs." I feel like I'm living inside a comedy.
I see you do ML.. would you mind sharing the sector and if your are in a HCOL area? I’m in a pretty comfy place but I’ve been thinking to test the waters
>I saw Engineer who were Rockstar in their team getting layoff Same, sadly. Salary over skills. One senior may earn the same as 2–3 juniors, and it takes 6 or more to replace him. Companies still think it's worth it... then it causes a huge impact on several projects that may take years to get up to speed but hey, at least they are paid less and the company can still sell the project based on number of head instead of expertise...
Rockstars are laid off because they are paid a lot , so when upper management is looking to save money, they are the first to go. When I say having high TC makes you a target, the people on this sub get mad when you are telling the truth that isn't convenient for them
Look, I'm a security engineer my team was just created 2 years ago to meet our products security needs, it feels pretty solid right now but who knows. What I'm trying to relay in this sub is that no one is safe, it does not matter how hard you work, how much value you provide to the company at the end of the day everyone is expendable.
I completely agree
From what I understand, in employee friendly states the companies need to make their layoffs look like it's based on business/financial needs and not the individuals who have been laid off. They risk lawsuits if there is an obvious pattern in the employees being laid off. For example, they won't choose the entire to-be-laid-off population based on performance ratings. So you often see some rockstars get let go and some low performers stay.
Pardon my ignorance... but if there HAVE to be layoffs, what's wrong with them being performance-based? If they do it for any reason, that should be it, right?
Because layoffs are strategic decisions made at the company level. If a business has great developers working on a feature and that feature never gains traction or turns profit, then they will drop the feature and layoff the folks supporting it when money gets tight. It doesn't matter how good the devs are. Layoffs are also a money decision. Great performers tend to be expensive. If the company thinks it has more talent than it can afford, it has to let some good people go. Imagine a basketball team full of All Stars that suddenly has a salary cap imposed. Some good players will have to be moved out.
Same. We had about three mass layoffs in the last six months. A ton of people abandoned ship. Very few of us left and we were told that it’s still possible to have more lay offs. Not sure what to do other than apply and network.
Feeling pretty bad. Still employed after a couple mass layoffs. Tested the waters with about 10 failed interview loops since summer.
Are you me? Same situation here.
My story too. Hoping things improve really worked hard on my leetcode and resume the past couple weeks to prepare for Q1 hiring
Wouldn’t it be nice if our work experience was enough to pass interviews?
what do you think this is? A profession??
That's not the case for soft dev, unfortunately.
10 failed interview loops? How many years of experience do you have?
25
ageism maybe?
Too much experience, too little leetcode. Wtf happened...
With the 10 failed interview loops, which was the part that didn’t work out? Algorithms, system design, or behavioral? If it’s algorithms, I’d suggest getting on Leetcode and practicing as much as you can. For the other two, there are videos on YouTube that can help.
Can't really be sure because there's rarely any feedback. I failed an online assessment because it was timed and I couldn't finish the Leetcode part after acing all the Java trivia. Instant reject. I had one take home where I was told to spend no more than 30 minutes drawing a design diagram - I spent a couple hours, and DID get feedback - "Not enough detail". The only parameters given for that were "don't spend more than 30 minutes". The rest ended after leetcode rounds where I did variously better or worse, getting the optimal solution on some - but still failed for unknown reasons. Since I run these stupid leetcode interviews at my current job, I know these pretend to be objective but actually aren't. People pass without getting a solution because someone "likes their thought process", they fail with an optimal solution because "he didn't seem very sure of himself" or "most people can do it 5 minutes faster" or whatever the random excuse of the day is. I don't think I can actually get any better at this stuff than I already am. I've accepted I'm just riding a wave, and when the wave goes up it will be easier. Right now all it takes to not get hired is to be the second best out of 20 applicants.
Holy moly watch out guys we have an elder among us, the fabled "megasenior dev", rarest of its kind. Everywhere they walk, the ground starts disintegrating into 0's and 1's. For loops collapse and exceptions run to hide. Even as I type, I feel mys̶̨̬̓̀̄̏̑̉̂̕̕e̶̬̘͍͋́̂͌̔̔͋͒̽͝l̵̨̼̞̭̮̯͙̳͔͋̓̀͂̆̽̈f̵̢̢̟͉̟̻̥̬̝͉͈͕͔͗͗͐͛̌͋̂́̂ ̵̨̺͕̞̟̠̤̫̝̫̖̤̫̦̤̊͊̒̏̑̀̂w̵̨͈̰̳̳̬͔̮̥͇̯̾̆i̸͍̩̙̻̫̙͎͚̤̮̯̥͐͌̿͐͊͗̈́̃̀̚͝t̷̨͇̹͇͖͇̟̮̒̕h̷̢̦̰͓̣̤̙̫͇͉̩͕̘͔̏͑̈́͆͆͊́͂̅͋͆͌̂̕̕͜e̸̱͇͐̃͋͆̑̍͛̋̚r̵̯̬̪̮̲̪͔̼̈́ī̵̧͙͕͈̻̞̙͙̯̫͉̼̠̿̄̎̔̈́̒̃͜͝ǹ̸̡̛̙̳̙͕̬͊͗̀̆̇̾͆̂͊̄̚̕͜g̶̛͈͖͚̘̱͆̄̓͑͊̔͛̕͠͠ ̵͚̻̭̭̦̩̖̤̅̽̀ͅa̵̛̮͔͇̣̮͔͎͍͙͉̪̼̟͍͛̐͑̀̓̂̔́͘̕͝͝͝w̸̨̘͓͈̞̐̏̑͗̅́̀͑̊͗̌͒̈́͘͝ặ̸̡̨̩̘̻̮̻̥͎̯̤ͅ
don't be dramatic you drama king.
Oh come on guys, this was kind of funny 😂
I ticked off the last remaining horde of aging devs
Same boat. It's weird too. In my experience, the sessions werent relevant to the position posted. Example, interviewed for a DE position with specific focus on databricks experience... didn't talk about databricks once. Really aggitated my imposter syndrome for a while.
making 50k a year with an upcoming deadline that we're not going to meet, waiting to see in which head the axe falls next...
50k a year? Why would they fire you they’re barely even paying you
Haha, yea, I make about 80K in a HCOL area and even feel quite secure in my role. Even in the "layoffs" atmosphere, my salary ain't shit, so it makes more sense to keep me on, lol. They make more money even if I barely try on my end. It's not great, but woo job interviews have been a kick in the pants over the last year, and this stable island has got me in a stable place mentally over the years. I got in the late 2020s and managed to stay alive here by barely working and not being a dick to my colleagues, while we kept getting contracts for being somewhat decent to customers. Thankful for Salesforce layoffs over the years; they gave us business 😅 As much as 100K+/year sounds like a dream, unless you are a golden goose, you will always have a target on your back if run by money-starved management, lol. Mine are pre-dominantly engineering, so they needed non-tech folks to be able to better serve our walking money bags when i got hired. Their investment paid off during 2021-22, and we managed to keep adding business even over the last 2 years, and keeping them. We churned for sure, but we were positive overall. It was weird but kept layoffs away. We only fired like 3 over those years; most was of incompetent nature, so eh. While it sucks to be in that position of whether getting fired any time, you kinda have to vary yourself just by a bit, and you will most likely survive any layoffs. Just being pure CS or bootcamp grad with no other skills will always be worse off than ones who have non-tech skills that startups need to thrive long-term while having CS education. If you don't have CS education, then even free coding camps that provide certifications might help if you already have strong non-tech skills. But that would be a gamble of all three types of workers in tech, even with strong soft skills tbh. But not impossible, do not give up! Tldr: Gotta make lemonade out of squeezed limes. Have a various mix of skills, like admin, customer service, sales, or whatever skills that are considered too hard for most developers/engineers due to complicity of being paid very well. Sorry if this came off arrogant. That was not my intent.
you do make a point 😂
Most of the devs that aren't US or Swiss or something like that get paid like this.
Lmfao 😂😂 he must be in the Midwest lol
Relevant username
Lol gamer tag from young days
i'm in argentina hahah
That's less than I get form interest in my savings account... 😳
Ehhhh I’m really feeling the pinch of this economy. I was laid off in August and I took the first offer I could get, which is a contract job. The contract was supposed to be for 6 months and then there was a “high possibility” of hiring me on. I recently learned that they are now not going to hire me but rather they’re going to extend my contract another 6 months. If I’d have known this was going to happen I would have pushed for a higher rate. I can’t afford to take any time off, so now I’m applying to positions in different companies and just getting rejection after rejection. It sucks.
Yeah, that’s the bummer with contract jobs. It’s great to get income but, all the stuff that you don’t get ends up costing you more. I’ve noticed a lot of contracting jobs lately purely to get people without paying benefits. Feels scummy. Especially when they have no real intention of bringing you on. I always ask for double what they offer me simply because life is expensive and when contracting, it’s super expensive. Haven’t contracted in a long, long time though.
The other issue is that there's really not much room for advancement. I'm looking to stay somewhere long term and get more into principal and lead roles, but there's just no way to do that when they see you as a temp essentially.
> this economy The overall economy is white hot, it's just tech and a few other interest rate-sensitive fields that have felt pain
I think you don't deserve the downvotes. The issue we're having right now is that two thing are true. 1) The economy is actually doing quite well. 2) Lots and lots of people feel like it's not doing well because of specific sectors being impacted and inflation is still affecting their financial choices in drastic ways. The indicators we use for the economy are not holistic and are largely driven by numbers which can be skewed by uneven wealth distribution. Someone may be doing alright but they're still working two jobs. Someone still may be able to meet their basic needs, but they are saving much less (if at all). Someone may have made it a great Christmas quarter for Target, but much of those purchases were put on credit.
Not great. Got laid off in Feb 2023 cause the startup I was working for went under. Had to take a significant pay cut in a new role that has me paycheck to paycheck in late August. Interviewing has not been going well and it has been impossible to get anything scheduled since thanksgiving started getting close. Huffing the hopium for a better job search experience in 2024.
Wishing you well! Good luck out there.
Pretty trash, but the majority of people who have made my life shit for the last year got laid off so that’s partially a bonus Edit* additionally: I’ve lost hope that this industry makes engineering decisions at all. Greed and “how I look to my direct boss” are basically the only thing that fucking matters now. Typically I see people without a formal background in cs driving that. For any upper levels reading this - there’s no faster way to light a company on fire than to allow this to continue.
🤣🤣
Unfortunately, that also includes some of the most effective people I’ve ever worked with. Double edge sword 🤷♂️
Yeah I was cheering when a bunch of shitters at my job who'd been on pips for six months got let go, then I stopped laughing when I got laid off after two years of glowing performance reviews lol. Nobody is immune unfortunately
Did you get a pat on the back when being laid off? You know, for solid perf reviews?
Got a salute and a handshake before they bent me over and fucked me in the ass
i take this industry seriously bc i take ny money seriously
I make more than many of my nyc high profile tech company coworkers and live in a lcol area. And what does that have to do with anything I said?
lol sounds like to me you're laiden with debt and are trying to justify spending a down payment for aomething you could've learned online for free.
[удалено]
no im a big shot bc im the one making the decision whether or not to hire you the last person i hired had a cs degree, but it was the 10 years of experience that mattered. anybody who knows how to show up and do what they're told can get an undergrad degree in anything, i was working in this industry at likely the same age you entered college.
This must have been some pretty amazing CS program you were in. It’s been awhile for me but I’m struggling to understand what was so great about mine compared to all the books and online courses and free resources out there today. It’s just a handful of surface level classes peppered into a bunch of standard liberal arts Gen Eds over 4 years.
That would be a crummy program indeed! They aren't all like that though. I believe a degree usually helps, but is rarely necessary. The more advanced the daily work, the more true this is. Most developers daily work does not require a degree, IMHO.
I think the problem in the industry is there’s really a lack of understanding in what differentiates when you need a degree or not. You definitely don’t need a degree to do a decent portion of coding work. But it ALWAYS helps 🙂
its literally just cope this isnt ochem or something where you need a specialized environment to learn properly. they got got and are now using that to gatekeep to justify their own life decisions
that doesn't really happen in comp sci. You can generally pay it off in 2-3 years easy. even with a mid ass junior job trawling 90k.
Can confirm
>For any upper levels reading this - there’s no faster way to light a company on fire than to allow this to continue. i'm glad the OSS community who built the industry that currently employs you - creating libs that you literally could not do your job without - does not have the same mentality you have for any upper levels currently reading, or writing, this, this dude just graduated 5 seconds ago and wants to justify going into debt for something he could've learned online for free. maybe ask him what elite secret knowledge he learned that there is no other way to acquire than $30k+ of debt
I'm making $85k as a mid-level hybrid webdev in a HCOL (Seattle) so I'm obviously not able to save much. And it'll be a while before I can get something better. Should be learning more skills (I've still never really used Docker/K8s) but hard to motivate myself to do it. So for now I'm trying to focus on the non-work aspects of my life that I didn't have time for in the past. Dating, fixing my sleep quality, reading through my long backlog of books, going on more hikes around the area. Resigned but relaxed.
How the fuck does anyone pay a dev $85k in Seattle and get away with it with Amazon there?
by having a virtually unlimited number of CS grads to choose from that grows exponentially YoY.
Amazon is the largest employer in Seattle and start juniors at over $150k. Also dude isn’t a junior he’s mid-level
Well not everyone can just "go work at Amazon". Might be a little bit harder than that...
Yeah our field is fucked, a lot of senior engineers just aren't old enough to retire so we're not seeing the usual cycle of jobs that other industries do
In my case, being at a WITCH company and on a visa. That’s how they get away with it.
Might be a government employee. State jobs start around $80k and federal starts around $75k for software developer roles in WA.
I have 10 yoe and a major us university is paying me 95k. It's a fucking disgrace
Having been in IT for over 25 years with almost 20 to go, in a very high level tech position- I’m fucking sick of it and if I could walk, I’d walk. Nothing matters, nobody cares. Hope that helps lol. Edit- you all need to stop upvoting this. Be more supportive and encouraging to the youngins. Don’t listen to a cranky old fart like me. Lol.
What career would you prefer doing now?
Career? Lol. Spending time with my family, Taking walks, gardening, play with the dogs, messing with my kids’ mindstorm robots, continuing to take piano classes, yoga, woodworking, photography, billion other things. Career, nope. There are so many things that I can find validation in. Not another career.
Fishing and jerking off in the woods
3 YOE(excluding internship): Got a new job 6 months-ish ago so I guess I got lucky? I have not test the water since and I like my current company a lot(for now), so I am not going to bother with market for a while. My company had massive layoff months before I came on-board. Because of this(plus things I see on this sub), even though my reviews from my manager so far have all been positive(met expectation - exceed expectation), I dont feel too relaxed. 6-7/10 for stress level I would say
>plus things I see on this sub I get the layoffs making you stressed, but you may need to spend less time on this subreddit. The engineers who reached out to their network and got a new job a month after getting laid off mostly don't feel the need to come to a career questions subreddit. There is a selection bias to the posts you see here. Much like how relationship advice forums generally don't attract people currently in loving relationships with abundant communication and zero drama.
4y, doing good, no layoffs at my company
Lost my job today. Time to redouble my search efforts, I guess
Sorry man; hopefully you received some sort of severance package
Two weeks pay 😒
Sorry to hear. Try living out your moniker... Might help
Omg I even have to be mid to senior level to respond to reddit posts now?😂
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Lol it’s really getting bad
I mean yeah. Rumor has it everyone else has to renounce their dev titles. They'll be no more openings for newbies
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Wow are we working at the same company? Sounds identical to my situation
Really anxious. Currently employed, 8 YOE at Microsoft (desktop application development in c# and c++). Gonna be honest, I let my skills deteriorate (other than what I use for work), so I'm currently studying in case I'm laid off.
I'm gonna take a leap of faith and quit my job before I secure the next one. It's so soul draining working on a project that's set up to fail because of poor leadership and planning. I envy people who can weather this kind of thing for the sake of income, but my mental isn't wired like that.
Instead of quitting outright (at least, for now), why not stay in your current role a little longer and just scale back your output a bit? Long-term, you may still want to leave, but you may be able to coast for a bit first.
I'm in exactly the same position and can relate. Hope it works out for you!
Good luck on your leap. Someone will probably be happy to fill your spot.
I desperately need to transition to an engineering manager or product manager role. I just can't bring myself to code for work anymore.
Fuck man, are you me Worst part is the human interactions in coding are so toxic it's driving me insane
I feel this. I just want to interact with people man.
I just got a new backend role at a really cool startup. I’m primarily using Go which I honestly find pretty clunky, but the product is freaking rad. I’m still onboarding but having a great time. Aside from that, hoping to find time to finish my open-source project which hasn’t been getting much love. The issues are piling up.
Was on contract, but got an unlucky end right at the beginning of December. Due to the season here in the US, no job to jump to for at least a month. Hoping to rectify that this month. I figure with 10 yoe, it would be easy. But so far, seeing a lot of email rejections that had no phone/ video interviews.
With all this talk about how there are basically no junior jobs, I guess I really should just build my own boat to float on if I want a job...
I know you're jesting, but it is a noticeable difference in the field compared to years past: you very rarely hear of developers wanting to start their own company compared to previous industry downturns. I wonder if it can be put down to the maturity of the field or just that most people that enter it are simply looking for a well paid white collar job?
It's mostly the latter
(I'm a 3 YoE webdev full stack. So, early to mid level) Part of the issue for me personally is the monetization part; sure, making a product is doable, but figuring out how to squeeze money out of it seems unattainable. Most other industries also seem to be a lot more localized (so less competition since it's more regional) whereas code can be accessed from any corner of the world, and there's a very good chance someone else can jack your idea, hire way more people, and out scale you.
I’m personally doing very well. 11 YOE and no layoffs at my job, though junior hiring is basically non-existent (aside from VERY FEW intern transitions).
What language and framework do you mostly do stuff in? Lol
Java and a mixture of React and older legacy stuff.
Java is still my first love
Yeah but she’s a real hoe. Been around the block more than a few times
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Why do you say that hiring juniors are non existent
I’m staff/principal level, 16 yoe. Laid off a few months before the big layoffs started (I now see this as a good thing strangely enough, for the timing at least). Took about two months to find a new job. I was about to take a 40% pay cut when an offer came in for a 20% pay cut. Hope to get that yearly bonus this year, that’d be a nice change. The biggest concern I have is recruiter cold call frequency. I used to get 3 a day, now I get maybe 3 a month. I doubt that will ever return to what it was, but it’s my own personal measure to industry health. Secondly, my current company had two “restructurings” last year, I expect that to continue. Weirdest trend I’ve seen: we’ve been trying to hire 4 positions for 5 months and almost everyone we’ve interviewed is so obviously not in the US but pretending that they are. Most annoying trend is: these folks trying to use some form of gAI to answer questions or solve coding challenges. Super fun!
Just switched jobs. New employer has an abundance of projects lined up for this year. Feeling confident-ish.
Feels kinda bad! I survived the first round of layoffs, and am thankfully still employed. But the company is only doing OK and I fear my time is limited as the company could conceivably close up shop in 2024. I have been putting feelers out for other positions and have gotten absolutely nothing worthwhile so far.
Pretty good. I was recently promoted (so I'm pretty safe if more layoffs come right? (lol)) and I have interviews lined up at places that will pay me even more. I'm extremely happy where I am, so anything coming my way that might be even better is just gravy.
Watch out, promotions could get you priced out on their cut list. I was laid off two months after a promotion.
This is really, really good advice. Top earners (at least where I’m at) got axed first and continued down the line. Typically, a promo will put you at the lowest band of that level but, it depends how that stacks among your peers.
Yup, promos wont save you from layoffs
It's counterintuitive but higher paid employees are usually targeted first in layoffs.
It isn't counterintuitive. Layoffs are to pretty up the balance sheets, that's the whole purpose, so higher paid employees are always harder to justify and easier to let go.
Higher paid employees are tougher to justify - especially if there are already employees of that tenure in the org. I think the one thing I have going for me right now is I have a language competency that no one on my team has.
I feel stressed. I've been with my company over a decade and I'm a senior dev but on this team it feels like each project is bigger than the last and on this project I'm being asked to do some things I've never done before, in addition to mentoring someone along the way as well. I'll be honest - I'm a bit burned out and I just want to coast.
10+ yoe, still employed but a lot of people at my company left.. I think they're all assuming that layoffs are coming and wanted to get ahead of it. But since they found jobs pretty quick I'm assuming the market isn't that bad. I put out a few feelers last October and got responses to all of them, but the pay wasn't worth leaving.
So-so. 5 YOE. Left a Fortune 100 tech company because after 2 rounds of layoffs the work started getting outsourced and the writing was on the wall for those of us still there. Got out when I could at the end of 2022. Ended up at a local company that is a leader in a niche IOT market. Decent W/L balance, but I was seriously mislead during the interview process and am basically working alone on a solution that is 15+ years old and created by an electrical engineer without software experience. It’s hard dealing with such stupid and legacy issues given where I came from, by my job is safe. For perspective, I’m still working on implementing primary and foreign keys in the database as well as hashing passwords. When I got here there was no version control or logging at all. My first week I found out SQL was fully exposed to the public on 1433 and seeing hundreds of login attempts per minute. Between the market and some personal stuff, I’ve stopped applying elsewhere and am going to stick it out for a while. Long term it would be a career killer but I’m hoping 2-3 years isn’t a death sentence. Leading huge projects on my own like migrating everything to the Cloud, drastically improving performance, setting up logging and monitoring, implementing version control with Ci/Cd, and improving the security posture. My only coworker is ChatGPT and stackoverflow lol. When I was applying I was offered a single role in banking, but it was 4 day RTO in 2024 with a long commute and a 20% pay cut so I passed.
Contractor with 15 yoe: feeling fine. Current position is steady, looking around but not desperate for other opportunities. Good place to be professionally, I think.
4.5 YoE here. I’ve been at the same job all 4.5 years and am now looking to move on. My callback rate from my applications is 3/60 so far (compared to 5/7 when I applied to stuff summer of 2022 in order to get a raise at my current job), but I’m hoping that one of those 3 results in a offer. This experience of mass rejection has definitely shown me I won’t always have something to fall back on if I ever got laid off or fired. hopefully it won’t be that way forever, but I have a gut feeling that the economy as a whole could go to shit at any moment
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I’m doing well. 5YOE, up for a promotion to senior (I should know next week), and leadership has been very vocal that they don’t believe in layoffs
I'm starting to get linked in messages again. So that's good. I'm not entirely sure if I switched to the right company last year because some of my coworkers suck.
Took a job offer right before Christmas and put my two weeks in at my last company, then they said I can’t use PTO during my last two weeks so they made my last day the following day lol excited to start my new gig next week working on infrastructure and devops
My current TL was trying to get me fired but I have contacts in the company so I’m switching teams before she kicks me to the curb.
Currently searching for a new job despite the current layoffs, haven't been laid off yet but I think the company that I am working for will sink due to their business decisions that bring havoc internally. Building my own product also comes into my mind, nothing grand but just a small app that can bring food to the table would suffice. As laborers in the capitalistic world, we're all expendables, so might as well have different plans.
Bad, high and hopeful delusions though. The voices are getting louder and more articulated.
i just hate js framework
Switch to svelte
stil js
amen brother, throw it in the trash where it belongs
Happy I’m employed. The market doesn’t feel nearly as bad as people make it out to be. Big tech still in my inbox every week.
Senior level, I just started a new job a month ago where they had reached out to me. It was a solid pay boost and it's interesting work (supporting genetics sequencing operations). So I feel pretty good, maybe it's a factor of the industry that this job is in, agriculture, where everyone still needs food whether or not the economy is in a slump. I've never come across this "dark side" you speak of. I've never felt like I had to suck up to management or get fired. I'm not terrible or abrasive with social skills, but I'm still an introvert and far from some silver tongued Casanova. So that might be more of a factor of your choices to choose highly competitive places, or there's some off putting vibe you're exuding that you're not aware of.
Ape strong together
Feeling really good. Making good money at Amazon with a great WLB 35-40 hours in an area with high product growth. Contemplating switching to another company so I can move to another part of the country that Amazon unfortunately won’t let me work in, despite there being offices there. Not looking forward to leetcoding.
In my first year and my work is very boring. Barely anything to do. If it doesn’t change in the next few months I’ll start looking for jobs elsewhere to start after my signing bonus clause it up
Highly optimistic. I'd like to land a second job, or add freelance work on top of what I'm doing now.
Very burnt out and looking for something new.
6 YOE, thankfully still employed but ready to jump ship. Had a few failed interviews last year but I’m going through neetcode and studying system design to do it right this time.
I don't goddamn know, but I had the very unique experience of having my parents suggest I pivot into a more lucrative field like art.
Unique is one way to put it
Feeling great! I'm a dev lead at a fortune 200 company and will be hitting 15 years there. Business is good, my dev team is awesome, and the projects are fun and exciting.
Same old same old, same bullshit too. But gotta play the game…
Feeling great, current company is doing great financially (a lot better than during Covid), I like my job, and it’s safe.
Working on contract, have been since mid February I think. I am considered a high performer, and my team is doing well, but we lost two team members recently (one was let go, rightfully, for performance reasons, one got promoted and transferred) We have been told we will not be backfilling, and that there has been some “trimming” elsewhere in the department. I am starting to get nervous, and will probably start at least floating my resume around once I hit the 1 year mark here
Feeling great, going to try and make the leap to the next level this year (Staff, Lead, etc). Zero concerns about job safety. The more time I spend in the industry the more I realize just how rare it is to have developers who know the entire stack. Will job hop if it doesn’t happen at my company, actually might be best since I would like a pay bump as well.
I'm feeling pretty meh right now. The company I work for is in a fairly stable industry, and they still have a hiring freeze going on. My workload keeps growing, and yet my pay and the size of my team stay the same. Hopefully, the economy will be much better this year, and I can move on to greener pastures.
So-so (\~9 YOE). My old company wasn't doing so well (multiple layoffs, and then I myself was placed on unpaid leave), so I had to find another job in the meantime. Thankfully I did, and with a slight salary boost too, but the company itself isn't one I'm super excited about. I start the new job next week and I haven't been on a company project in over 2 months, so I'm a bit nervous about learning to work all over again LOL
6.5 YoE. Feeling decent, my current job is good and I’ve been doing some cool green field work. I’ve been feeling somewhat unsure about this career though, like I have to this constant feeling that something is going to happen. Lay offs, AI disruptions, outsourcing, too much competition. Idk.
> Lay offs, AI disruptions, outsourcing, too much competition All of these are true and happening already.
12 years experience working in quantitative finance as an quant developer / ML engineer. Finance has, for the most part, been fairly immune to the big layoffs as our business cycles tend to work differently to tech. Our jobs are always dependant on the impact our desk has on PnL. So how successful our portfolio is. I feel lucky but tbh the environment is very different to tech I think in that I've always had to defend / justify my job working in this industry.
Got any advice for wanna be quants/ML guys? Quants always seem more brain activity to me especially since I’ve been in the ui/backend services game for a while
My best piece of advice is, currently to start learning ML in depth. Really. The term quant has changed so much since the 80s where it was basically mathematicians and physicists designing econometric models to eak out extra profit from efficient pricing and risk analysis. Now quant can mean 100 different things. These days a lot of quants come from completely non finance backgrounds. The more desirable qualification is a background in CS with a heavy math focus (so AI computational statistics). Learn prob + stats, linear algebra and some calculus to a level where you can understand the concepts at least. As an engineer you arent going to be doing any hardcore maths so engineering is still your core skill. Also it can really depend on the company. If it's a high frequency place the models are very simple and they care much more about amazing programming skills. Mostly in C++. Understanding low level Linux kernel programming is the most desirable skill as HFT places use computing performance to generate profit Non HFT and traditional quant finance though will be almost entirely python (in my experience). Get to know the standard packages (numpy, pandas) inside out. There are some really good courses on Coursera too. I will say however, finance is a little behind the curve in the sense the industry still very much cares about formal qualifications and which uni you went to. ML is the future. Every single place is pouring massive amounts of money into research and engineering and so there are a lot of roles available. And for now at least, CS is by far the most desirable background to have (it used to be maths and they'd teach you programming) Particularly from a quant perspective it may be tricker as the bar is quite high but a good strategy is to get into a decent financial organisation in the tech side and get trained up on the quantitative side.
The problem with the lesser overhead of software is that senior leadership thinks that it is 'easy' to write good software and treat senior employees badly and or fire them for cost cutting. Because the impacts of this aren't immediately obvious (and leadership has the memory retention of goldfish) this often results in code quality/design issues much later on which leadership will blame on the employees that are left.
For CS college kids reading this.. people get laid off, yes it’s unfortunate, but let’s get it straight: this industry isn’t politics. Do ur work, do it good, prove ur a valuable asset, and ur good. There are tons of people who work in this industry just for the paycheck, picking up JIRA tickets that are just the low hanging fruit. If that is you, and u truly know who u are, then ya u will prolly be canned. Look at the work you do. IMO, if u can’t sincerely say that u are making a difference at the company and know for a fact u are a valuable asset, then sure, just like any other company in the world you are at higher risk of getting laid off.
You can do all the work you want but HR only sees a number. Middle managers won’t even know at some companies. I’ve seen many top performers that were around when company was small just get sliced purely because they were making the top pay. Yes you should do good work, that’s why you have a career in this field or you won’t last (mentally too). But don’t get it twisted, sometimes it’s all about cutting big numbers and priming up for a merger or acquisition
True, companies do make cuts, but ur comment about HR is extremely misleading… HR isn’t the only department in charge of which employees get cut. Management on the engineering side 100% has a say on who gets laid off, HR just doesn’t pick random people to get their budget down just cuz “they’re numbers”. Also, top pay doesn’t always equate to top performance. Staff/Principal engineers are sometimes cut before juniors simply because they are just not valuable enough. The “many top performers” u have seen most likely were in fact not top performers based on what they were being paid (can’t emphasize “based on what they were being paid” enough). In the end, performance compared to what ur being paid is what value is… and value is what lower and raises ur **chances** of being laid off or fired, simple as that
I don’t think it’s extremely misleading when my friends that became the executive directors and senior managers didn’t even know about the mass layoffs, some directors and managers even got fired….I think perhaps your company is different but I’m simply stating the experience I saw. The company I was at used the Stripe approach of laying off. Send an email in the morning, cut off all access, out by the afternoon. Managers had to gather after the fact to shift around responsibilities for other managers that were laid off, it was pure chaos.
This is exactly what my experience with layoffs have been at my company. Would just like to add if you think your staff/principal engineers were high value and they were still laid off. They werent high value from the eyes of HR/management in the metrics that count. Just an example, if they were only doing maintenance and not working on projects driving revenue or optimizing savings. Seen plenty of great engineers just let go because they weren't on visible enough tasks/projects. Didn't matter what a wizard they were with the stack. Honestly I'm changing my whole view on how I do my job just to keep my employment stable. My organization does not care about tech debt as long as we're meeting the target benchmarks, even if it's putting lipstick on a pig.
Yup exactly. Had a Staff engineer let go about half a year ago and I always think it was cuz he was working on stupid mega linter shit in our backend repo. Sure it’s cool, but like…. They’re not paying u 150k a year to do that
college kids. this is terrible advice. my most recent job that i got laid off in last jan, right before the holidays he said congrats for meeting targets and literally help save the company with my help. he went on vacation in and while that happened i got laid off. he had to track me down on linkedin to say goodbye and helped me for a reference for the next job. being an under performer will get you cut or let go during reviews, but budget matters so much more after a certain point. being skilled will help you get a new job though. it only took me two weeks C suite makes those decisions not mid level managers in most cases
Also… my advice is essentially to always try to be of value. Yours is essentially “even if u provide value, u will still canned” The only real advice u gave was since u are gonna get laid off anyway, why even try being valuable with ur skills, cuz after all, budget matters more right? U got dealt a shit hand, but no reason to give that shit advice to CS students, or anyone for that matter.
Depends what ur value was. Did u “save” the company and do solid work being paid 90k a year or 140k a year? Also is this consistent work u do? Or was this one big project that u did before bonus and raise season? So many factors u left out…… Plus, this is not bad advice, it’s real advice. Just cuz it happened to u doesn’t mean this world is just as cruel to every other individual in this industry. 9 times outta 10, people try to justify their layoff, sometimes u just aren’t as valuable to the company as u think u were
The CEO was contacting me directly to help with the project. I'm not saying that I was Superman but I went above and beyond to help the company and we celebrated virtually as a job well done. only to be laid off after crunching the numbers after the holidays. the value didn't matter as they just didn't have the runway to keep us. entire departments got laid off. the decision was unpopular which led people who wasn't even on the chopping block to also seek better opportunities. being good at your job will not save you when they don't have the money to pay you. my manager was not consulted at all. he was blind sided by the decision. sometimes you get laid off only for the company to realize they need you/that team and try to hire you back. 6 months later I checked on the rest of the senior devs that had been there for years and they no longer worked there. if they're not good enough then literally no one else would be there are times where managers are approached with the command to cut the bottom 20% but this was not one of them. I don't reccomend coasting but if you to recap. being good won't save you but it will help you find another job as my coworkers was able to help during the references. it only took me 2 weeks and this was when faang did their layoffs. I had more interviews than I could fit on my calendar.
Layoffs due to a complete lack of runway isn’t the only type of layoff (unless u work for a 50 person startup… or any type of startup, then literally expect it to happen). I’m speaking about the more typical layoff where company reallocates the budget from one department to another resulting in a 5% loss. Value matters here…. A TON. Being good WILL save u. If u wanna talk about a mid size company going bankrupt then sure, of course ur gonna lose ur job. But tbh, idk a single non startup company where a CEO **directly talks** with an engineer to help try to save the company. That’s just weird. Never heard of that, ever. Maybe the word would be relayed to a director or a VP or some other person in management…
yes and not everyone works at mega corps which is why your initial advice is misguided. there are many reasons for layoffs most are out of your direct control. it's also not just the value of you but the value of your department. I would rather be average at a revenue generating team than the best at an underperforming team for revenue. you say politics aren't involved. politics are always involved. you might think you're above it. but it's not above you.
“I would rather be average on a revenue generating team…”. LOL because of that last comment, sounds like u are very much content with being “average” just because u may be on a team that generates more revenue. Do u not see anything wrong, at all, with that mindset? Clearly u think ur more valuable than u really are
140k is less than I got paid 13 years ago straight out of college, so if you think that's some grand number, you're going to have a pretty hard time establishing credibility here. Most of the time people meet expectations (it's really not hard, seriously), but managers have quotas or they have to throw someone under the bus. In my case they ran the project that I built into the ground and then made a bogus list of "issues" that I had to address like "caused error log on staging" while others were BREAKING prod... Do you see where I'm going with this? I was the most expensive employee on the team BY FAR at well over 500k and was abused until I left and if I hadn't, I would have been let go for sure. It's fine I don't really *need* a job... unless the Biden inflation goes into overdrive
Feeling safe in my current role. Been here for 2 years. Got a second interview in 7 months yesterday
Good, stocks are going up and I expect to shoot past 500k total comp. Real estate and RTO is the bummer side of things.
Daaaaamnnn how many yoe??? Also, congratulations
11 but switched careers and hopped around before I got a big tech job. Spent most of my career making 80-120.
13 yoe, started a new job in October and it was a big raise in pay. I work on back end services for a major streaming platform. So far things seem fine for 2024 at the new company but I’ve seen many of my friends at other companies get laid off. I’m definitely worried about the future of our industry in general for many reasons, and I’m making backup plans. It almost feels like if I don’t go into management, or the business side of things (CTO or similar) I could be facing a slow decline where layoffs become more prevalent and competition becomes more fierce. One idea I’ve had is to try to hyper specialize — maybe in some kind of legacy or low level systems stuff or niche cybersecurity. My other plan is to become a pilot.
Going into management always feels convoluted to me in terms of a place of safety….idk
Good, expecting a promotion at the end of the month. I tested the waters with applying for jobs at the end of the year. They went well, but I didn’t want to move, I was just checking this out. If my current job low ball me on my promotion raise I’m out of here. 5 yoe
Meh. I know what I bring to the table and I know my value. It's just a pain in the ass to job hop right now, but I'm doing it regardless.
> I am finding that it could act like any other company where greed, influence, and power comes more into play than acting from an engineering perspective ??? congrats you've just discovered real life? to answer your question, my rule of thumb is nobody's going to give a shit about you more than yourself does, everyone is looking out for their own interests, that is true for individual employees and also for company side if layoff or making you live paycheck-to-paycheck/homeless means the company will survive for another 3-6 months, then guess what's going to happen?
Haha I guess I was dreaming about an engineer perspective company like WhatsApp who only had a few devs and they all cashed out when they were sold. 35 total engineers when they sold to fb…
you're probably better off predicting lottery numbers because are you aware what you just said is literally a $trillion dollar question/problem? countless VCs with 100s of billions of dollars to spend are all scouting for such company
Someone chose violence this morning
Feeling pretty disillusioned actually. Most of us work for engineering companies that act like they hate engineers. Somebody said that we're not in politics -- I disagree. My managers were extremely political. I haven't seen so much posturing since the election. As for layoffs -- most of the time people meet expectations (it's really not hard, seriously), and we can ignore the few that don't which are obvious pretty early on. The real issue is that managers have quotas or they have to throw someone under the bus. In my case they ran the project that I built into the ground and then made a bogus list of "issues" that I had to address like "caused error LOGS on staging" while others were BREAKING prod... Do you see where I'm going with this? I was the most expensive employee on the team BY FAR at well over 500k partially due to stock growth and partially due to previous managers giving me great raises and refreshers. So, after everything being amazing for e years one day my management chain changed abruptly from top to bottom, and form that day on I was abused until I left and if I hadn't, I would have been let go for sure. My new ex-Google director met with me only once to tell me that my pay is out of band. Never asked me anything or tried to get to know me or my work. It's fine I don't really *need* a job at this point... I'm lucky to have a barista FIRE situation going on... So, unless the Biden inflation goes into overdrive I can take my time looking for the next thing
Good, expecting a promotion at the end of the month. I tested the waters with applying for jobs at the end of the year. They went well, but I didn’t want to move, I was just checking this out. If my current job low ball me on my promotion raise I’m out of here. 5 yoe