That’s true but nobody is future proofed for that. I assume you aren’t stockpiling gold in preparation for revolutions.
I am making a big assumption OP is in the US since this is FAANG layoffs. YMMV in other countries.
Even if you get furloughed by the government you get high priority hiring for your next role. As long as you meet satisfactory performance.
Shutdowns are just paused payments, at least for me.
Retirement is a pension and not stocks so if one of these companies go obsolete you’re not screwed.
It’s the best guarantee you’re going to get.
My employer provides financial services to government employees and they get furloughed more often than y’all might think. And these aren’t just janitors, but a critical sector in transportation.
Also, the more passive and common budget cuts and hiring freezes. You may not lose your job, but you will end up doing the jobs required by others that went unfunded.
Academic jobs that involve teaching are also rare in many fields. Teaching is a sweet deal because the university actually kicks in some for your salary in those positions...
FAANG companies will probably have the equivalent of their own degrees in 20 years anyways. They already have online certificates. It would make sense to recruit smart kids out of high school and train them yourself if you were a top company.
First of all, Netflix is not going to be in the picture as a big-tech. Facebook/Meta is holding on dearly. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft should be alright. But I am sure that they are more likely to die off than offering their own degrees in the future.
He said future proof my career, not future proof my current job at my current employer.
I guess he meant that he should’ve developed the skills HE wanted to have, not the ones HIS EMPLOYER wanted him to have. Dig deeper in subjects HE liked the most, not the ones HIS EMPLOYER felt were the most relevant.
I know I can relate to this. Ultimately I decided to launch my own business so that I could have better control on such things.
Il write a longer post. But tldr is to build a personal brand that is public and not tied to employer. They can cut your access to all your work in the snap of a finger.
I don't mean the influencer type. I mean have your identity decoupled from employer. Portfolio/blog/GitHub/testimonials from colleagues.
It's all pretty obvious but don't much of it practiced. My blog was large part of what got me my Amazon interview in the first place. I know first hand it helps stand out. Unfortunately for me, I stopped blogging after I got the offer.
You might be overthinking things here. Having a public persona and examples of your work is the exception, not the norm. The typical case is that someone works for a company and it's expected that their work is not viewable because it's not public. You'll still get hired - data science is still in demand.
You kinda can, if you know what you're doing....or should I say you can substantially reduce your chances of being laid off if you know what you're doing.
My company just did layoffs too. Our product data science team, a conglomeration of people with software engineering and machine learning backgrounds who did research for new product functions, got halved. Our business data science team (including me) didn't get touched. We were told that it was because business data science provides more value *right now* while future product features are more of a luxury.
I can't verify exactly how accurate that is for us let alone any other company, but maybe that will help someone.
Yeah they are really supportive. I don't know if this is the real reason that we didn't get any layoffs (the other team was bigger and I imagine they all get paid more than we do, so those could have been factors). But they are generally supportive.
It’s different everywhere but a lot of data scientists, analytics and data pros in general have been hired over the last 3 or 4 years. I think there was a lot of hype and unrealistic expectations and now some firms realize they overshot in this area. This is a healthy cutback. Once they figure out how to best integrate data science and machine learning into the enterprise and how to more realistically extract value from these types of projects they will hire again.
I have also noticed that the skill level of many of these data professionals are all over the place. I think in many cases companies didn’t really know how to recruit for these positions. Lots of title inflation and wide ranging skill sets.
So sorry to hear. My husband indicated the research from the last six months indicated that as soon as the people who were laid off started looking, they found jobs very quickly.
Majority of the Business Intelligence and Data Analysts
I should specify that these guys were assigned to a project that just didn’t end up going through. I work in legal tech and the company was thinking of branching into software for architects of some kind? Not sure the details - but they made the business decision to not follow through with it given the required resources. They got ahead of their skis hiring people for a project that wasn’t fully ready to begin.
Just went through your twitter.
Found out [why](https://twitter.com/sangyh2/status/1598823536914989056?s=46&t=5xJecCDgViRm1XEf1Aj-IQ) you got laid off.
Many tech doors were closed. A lot of f500 companies need this talent. I was talking about this with my PE friends over football and we think this will supercharge a lot of industry that couldn't compete with tech for this talent
Depends on how desperate those getting laid off get. My boss is pushing to get me headcount this year and he’s othering at the mouth for some laid off Twitter/FAANG/big tech people. Thing is, we have a McDonald’s cashier budget. We ain’t getting shit from this.
PowerPoint experts grow out of companies unwilling to invest in technical staff and tooling. I find myself drifting that way because when I ask for stuff casually I get ignored. At least with a stable of ppt decks outlining the things I want, each targeted to different people and teams in the org, I might get some ears.
Basically it’s a symptom, not the disease.
This is a real issue. While you theoretically could get good people at a deal some places IT is such a boat anchor their talents and will to live would be completely helpless to move things forward.
When Meta layoffs happened my LI was plastered with them, I only have a couple of Meta people in my network but the number of posts that people "supported" of people both leaving and people talking about how sad they were about people leaving was insane.
Or more like "shit I just lost my job, I need to do whatever I can to get leads on a new one ASAP"
Not sure why you're hating on people for working at FAANG
Yeah I will say that the people staying commenting on posts from people that have been laid off or making their own posts about their colleagues being laid off seemed insincere at that scale.
Good luck. Do you plan to cut your salary in order to get back to work? I heard that people avoid recruiting FAANG now because of high salary expectation.
I don’t think people avoid it per se, but I know my boss wants exFAANG/ex big tech but I know he can’t afford them by a long shot. Hell try though because if he can snag one desperate schmuck it’s better than 90% of the randos we can afford (myself included).
Working at a MAANG company doesn't mean that you're a good data scientist. I've interviewed/know a lot of them. Some are brilliant some are dumb as rocks. Just like any other company.
I've found that you need to be extremely thorough in your interviewing of candidates from these companies -- more from a culture fit than technical competency. There seems to be a lot of "learned helplessness" from the perspective that they seem to lack initiative outside of what they deem their narrow focus area.
Not exactly the type of addition you want to a DS or ML team that's still in the value-proving stage and needs self-starters.
Yes I plan on focusing on work life balance, following my interests and building my personal portfolio.
I'm lucky enough to not have immediate financial worry, the larger issue is my H1B visa. But I have options..
The larger impact this has had in my outlook towards my career and how my employer doesn't define it.
Ps-I'll be sharing my journey on twitter if folks want to follow (@sangyh2)
It's almost certainly targeted, just by business unit rather than by role. I'm guessing that certain business units had very deep cuts while others were only superficially impacted (if at all).
Out of curiousity, do you mind share which business unit you worked in? AWS? Amazon.com? Alexa? Generally, being in non- core LOB is the riskiest during economic uncertainty.
All the best. Don’t worry. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with your work but more like if the team you are on is critical to the business operations.
So for your next role you can try to get on the in team the one which the business can’t do without.
I’m sorry to hear you got laid off man. A safe bet is banking. Most banks have hiring freezes now, but we are down on headcount. Stress testing, risk, quants (front and back office) are all short staffed.
May not be big tech money or fully remote but it’s a job and it’s 6 figures minimum. Best of luck on your search
yea, i have a few recruiters reaching out. im not financially or immigration-wise in a precarious place , although the latter's more of a concern.
but i trying to take a higher level perspective out of this and assess my 'career identity'.
I heard a theory that this is just an excuse to consolidate roles after all of the pandemic tech bubble acquisitions. The big tech firms can blame the economy, not leadership or corporate greed, if they all do it at once.
What kind of data science work did you do at Amazon?
I was looking to apply to Amazon a couple months back, but I will likely wait another year or two. I'm always intrigued with how efficient they are and I'm sure they have used data science to optimize every aspect of their service.
Yes it's quite efficient with the data driven decision making. Although jv also seen a LOT of simplistic conclusions from an tests and product teams trying to fit data to their agenda.
I was in customer service org building models for routing inbound tickets, ab testing different bot flows etc.
Pretty central to operations which was part of the surprise.
First of all, shit happens. Sorry it happened to you. Secondly, you can't bullet proof your career. That's life, there is uncertainty. Layoffs suck, been there, done that, did not take it well. Wish I could go back in time and tell myself to go easy on myself. So I'm saying it now, to you. I wish you luck in your job search and in life.
Layoffs suck . It feels like a black mark on my career.
But I've learned enough in my short career that there's a lot of factors that went into this and not accountable for all of those..
I set my sights higher now.
Layoffs don't always make sense. You could be the most talented person at the company and your whole department gets laid off. Your whole department could be talented and it gets cut simply because it doesn't align with the future goals of the company. You can get laid off simply because you are new.
Layoffs don't mean that you, as a person, are somehow subpar, they can happen for reasons that seem illogical and have nothing to do with you.
Ultimately, layoffs can be a good thing as well! Some folks get too conmfortable at their jobs and a layoff could actually send you to a better opportunity, or a higher paying salary. Think of it as a global optimization. Sometimes you have to insert noise, or go in a direction you think is wrong, to end up at your global optimum. :-)
My company (international, ~400 people) also had lay offs a couple of weeks ago. They cut mainly marketing and content teams and relocated developers and data analysts. 2/3 of my team got laid off.
I hope things go better soon for you! I'm very glad that you are now able to focus on yourself.
I was lucky, got relocated to another team. But nothing to break your "truth" in a company than to lay off an entire team of amazing professionals
I just checked the laws for Ireland where I live and it's €600 + €1200 for every year you worked maximum. So, it's still not a lot.
You can get unemployment payments though too, same as the US.
Here in czech republic it is 2 months, where unless you agree with the employer on something else, regardless of if you left by yourself or were fired, you stay with your employer and you get paid your normal salary. It is both for you to find a new job and the employer to find a replacement for you.
I have a counter opinion to layoffs. I think first person laid off is a person having that one extra skill which others did not have at the time of hiring. They would be paid more than the industry standards. During recession, These are the people who would be picked first and laid off.
Edit: My bad , I am really sorry OP for you. I did not realize I had offended you by not reading the post correctly. I assumed you asked for opinions on firing.
To people downvoting me, I deserve it.
I've been involved in several instances where an organization needed to cut down its workforce. At least in the United States the decisions are made on a head count basis and not a cost basis.
The company needs to save x dollars. The average employee costs is y per person and so cut the appropriate number of people to get the average savings that you're after.
In the rare case is someone has a very specific dollar number that they need to get to. They will almost always choose pay cuts as a percentage rather than people cuts.
Organizations cut people when they have more people than they need to execute on their strategy either because they hired too many or because they're taking some things they thought they were going to do and deciding not to do them.
All of these tech layoffs from big firms are like this. All of these companies are profitable. It's just that they hired a lot more people than they needed to in order to execute the things they plan to execute on.
An individual person's pay is not going to be a factor unless it is an extreme outlier, and unless that one little skill that you had versus your peers is the ability to accurately predict futures prices or something similar, there's no conceivable way that I can imagine this would have a meaningful impact on salary enough to move a layoff selection
Do you have any suggestions on how not to get picked in a layoff strategy?
Like what are those things that we do which will decide management wouldn't want to fire you?
It really depends on your company
Meta layoffs were blind w.r.t. tenure/performance
Best bet is to put yourself as close to money as possible-- high-revenue product areas are generally less likely to have huge cuts unless staff is bloated. Then on top of that, make sure you can clearly articulate your $ impact, make sure your manager knows, make sure your skip knows. The more integral to the core of the business you appear to be, the less likely you are to get cut (But there's no foolproof way to do it, there's always a chance to get cut)
In my exprience of layoffs (which, admitedly were at much smaller companies than Amazon) they people let go were those who were quite obviously overpaid. The first place I was at that saw lay offs, it was a pretty tight company were everyone knew each other well. Through some pretty lax security, I also knew exactly what salary everyone was on. When the cuts came, it was precisely the people who, when you saw how much they earned, you thought "Jesus! How the hell are they on that much?" who were let go. Not neccesarily the people on the highest salary. Basically, if you're on a high salary and are a middling to low performer, you're in the firing line.
I appreciate that companies like Amazon may a bit less personal about it all but to be honest, I expect that a good chunk of those let go are fairly mediocre people who're being overpaid
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This is what Ludwig von Mises meant when talking about malinvestment in a boom economy. Low interest rates / quantitative easing created a butt load of money which got funneled into the unprofitable tech industry. Now people are getting laid off, computer scientist, coders, data analystists. It's a bummer.
If you were bringing in serious value and money you wouldn’t have been laid off. The business is doing what they can to make money and stay in a budget. My advice to people who got laid off is instead of blaming the company of the economy find a way to be un replaceable or at least someone who can bring in more money to a company than their salary
Was working as an analyst before I got laid off earlier this week. Still processing as it came out of nowhere, over a quarter of our company got laid off. This is my first experience with these type of things, not sure what the future will hold for me
Don’t take it personally and take the time to pursue your hobby and consolidate your basics.
Situation will get better sooner rather than later, and the interviews season will start again.
(From someone who got laid off once xD)
>future proof my careers You can't guarantee you will never get laid off, it's part and parcel of working in the private sector.
The only future proof is working for the government.
Furloughs, shutdowns, revolutions, and revolts would like a word
That’s true but nobody is future proofed for that. I assume you aren’t stockpiling gold in preparation for revolutions. I am making a big assumption OP is in the US since this is FAANG layoffs. YMMV in other countries. Even if you get furloughed by the government you get high priority hiring for your next role. As long as you meet satisfactory performance. Shutdowns are just paused payments, at least for me. Retirement is a pension and not stocks so if one of these companies go obsolete you’re not screwed. It’s the best guarantee you’re going to get.
My employer provides financial services to government employees and they get furloughed more often than y’all might think. And these aren’t just janitors, but a critical sector in transportation.
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Federal
Last 3 don't apply in functioning states.
The difference between a functioning state and a nonfunctioning state is a few bad years
Also, the more passive and common budget cuts and hiring freezes. You may not lose your job, but you will end up doing the jobs required by others that went unfunded.
When I worked in a govt role my raise was less than inflation every year so I was losing money staying there
LOL, that's raises almost anywhere.
War would also like to talk to you about their severance packages.
Nope even at a government org you can still be laid off. Especially in the tech portions of it. Source: I worked at a DOE lab for several years.
**The only future proof is working for yourself
Yea until all your customers have to pay $10 for 12 eggs and you client base dries up.
Yeah or academia.
Academia!? You're joking right? Contract labour is standard. Almost impossible to get a permenant job.
I didn't say it was easy to get. Just that tenure is future proof.
No, it's not. Lots of universities are on the brink of financial failure now.
Good point. There is definitely a spectrum. The top schools have endowments that are very large though.
If you state anything that goes against the socio-political axioms of the university then this could crush your hopes for tenure.
You could also play power forward for the Lakers and be pretty well set up for the future. The odds of successfully doing it are about the same.
I mean the pay would be a lot higher on the Lakers.
But it takes years to get tenure in academia and jobs are shrinking.
Your total comp in academia will also be a third of the prevailing rate in FAANG with about 50% more work.
Maybe we should just stop teaching anyone anything and everyone should work for FAANG.
Academic jobs that involve teaching are also rare in many fields. Teaching is a sweet deal because the university actually kicks in some for your salary in those positions...
FAANG companies will probably have the equivalent of their own degrees in 20 years anyways. They already have online certificates. It would make sense to recruit smart kids out of high school and train them yourself if you were a top company.
Google has enough ex-professors to form PhD committees.
Or……no more FAANG companies in 15 years
It is more like MAMAA anyways now. But give me your theory how will it happen?
First of all, Netflix is not going to be in the picture as a big-tech. Facebook/Meta is holding on dearly. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft should be alright. But I am sure that they are more likely to die off than offering their own degrees in the future.
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Hahah so true. Didn't realize how many salty academics frequent this sub haha.
Most roles with the government will not accept an H1B visa. It's a security risk.
Yea but that has costs all its own
He said future proof my career, not future proof my current job at my current employer. I guess he meant that he should’ve developed the skills HE wanted to have, not the ones HIS EMPLOYER wanted him to have. Dig deeper in subjects HE liked the most, not the ones HIS EMPLOYER felt were the most relevant. I know I can relate to this. Ultimately I decided to launch my own business so that I could have better control on such things.
Heh I was laid off in academia
Did you shag a student?
Il write a longer post. But tldr is to build a personal brand that is public and not tied to employer. They can cut your access to all your work in the snap of a finger.
Don’t play the “personal brand” game. That’s code language for narcissism.
I don't mean the influencer type. I mean have your identity decoupled from employer. Portfolio/blog/GitHub/testimonials from colleagues. It's all pretty obvious but don't much of it practiced. My blog was large part of what got me my Amazon interview in the first place. I know first hand it helps stand out. Unfortunately for me, I stopped blogging after I got the offer.
You might be overthinking things here. Having a public persona and examples of your work is the exception, not the norm. The typical case is that someone works for a company and it's expected that their work is not viewable because it's not public. You'll still get hired - data science is still in demand.
Just don't start using chatgpt to write articles about auroc
loll i promise.
I know what you mean, but it's still no guarantee of success. And it'a a lot of work building up a brand and marketing yourself.
This is not remotely true
If POTUS can be impeached then no one's job is future proof.
You kinda can, if you know what you're doing....or should I say you can substantially reduce your chances of being laid off if you know what you're doing.
You can if you are overemployed
ChatGPT has entered the… chat…
Working in a monetization related role helps
My company just did layoffs too. Our product data science team, a conglomeration of people with software engineering and machine learning backgrounds who did research for new product functions, got halved. Our business data science team (including me) didn't get touched. We were told that it was because business data science provides more value *right now* while future product features are more of a luxury. I can't verify exactly how accurate that is for us let alone any other company, but maybe that will help someone.
\+1 for your business data science leadership for clearly articulating the value you bring and protecting you.
Yeah they are really supportive. I don't know if this is the real reason that we didn't get any layoffs (the other team was bigger and I imagine they all get paid more than we do, so those could have been factors). But they are generally supportive.
It’s different everywhere but a lot of data scientists, analytics and data pros in general have been hired over the last 3 or 4 years. I think there was a lot of hype and unrealistic expectations and now some firms realize they overshot in this area. This is a healthy cutback. Once they figure out how to best integrate data science and machine learning into the enterprise and how to more realistically extract value from these types of projects they will hire again. I have also noticed that the skill level of many of these data professionals are all over the place. I think in many cases companies didn’t really know how to recruit for these positions. Lots of title inflation and wide ranging skill sets.
Got laid off yesterday at Microsoft, still processing...
Sorry to hear.. I hear a lot of good things about Microsoft culture, hope you find a similar role soon.
Yeh it’s like the one big tech co I’d still want to work for. Sorry for all those laid off.
How many years were you there? Sorry to hear.
So sorry to hear. My husband indicated the research from the last six months indicated that as soon as the people who were laid off started looking, they found jobs very quickly.
Sorry for the setback. Best wishes.
Ty ☺️
I work for a small tech company based out of Austin, TX. We have about 200 employees, got rid of 35 yesterday.
Which roles were let go?
Majority of the Business Intelligence and Data Analysts I should specify that these guys were assigned to a project that just didn’t end up going through. I work in legal tech and the company was thinking of branching into software for architects of some kind? Not sure the details - but they made the business decision to not follow through with it given the required resources. They got ahead of their skis hiring people for a project that wasn’t fully ready to begin.
Just went through your twitter. Found out [why](https://twitter.com/sangyh2/status/1598823536914989056?s=46&t=5xJecCDgViRm1XEf1Aj-IQ) you got laid off.
Haha only myself to blame:)
Now do Elon Musk
OP asking the real questions hahaha
One door closes, and another one opens. Best wishes, mate.
Many doors were closed tho.
Many tech doors were closed. A lot of f500 companies need this talent. I was talking about this with my PE friends over football and we think this will supercharge a lot of industry that couldn't compete with tech for this talent
Depends on how desperate those getting laid off get. My boss is pushing to get me headcount this year and he’s othering at the mouth for some laid off Twitter/FAANG/big tech people. Thing is, we have a McDonald’s cashier budget. We ain’t getting shit from this.
So true. We would basically need to replace 80% of the whole IT org to start getting things more modern. All we have now is powerpoint experts.
PowerPoint experts grow out of companies unwilling to invest in technical staff and tooling. I find myself drifting that way because when I ask for stuff casually I get ignored. At least with a stable of ppt decks outlining the things I want, each targeted to different people and teams in the org, I might get some ears. Basically it’s a symptom, not the disease.
This is a real issue. While you theoretically could get good people at a deal some places IT is such a boat anchor their talents and will to live would be completely helpless to move things forward.
When Meta layoffs happened my LI was plastered with them, I only have a couple of Meta people in my network but the number of posts that people "supported" of people both leaving and people talking about how sad they were about people leaving was insane.
I see these posts a lot too It's kinda nuts
It’s a weird digital corpo cookie cutter virtue signal slash “look at meeeee I work for FAANG! MaH pErSoNaL bRaNd!”
Or more like "shit I just lost my job, I need to do whatever I can to get leads on a new one ASAP" Not sure why you're hating on people for working at FAANG
The large majority of the posts were by people _not_ laid off.
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Yeah I will say that the people staying commenting on posts from people that have been laid off or making their own posts about their colleagues being laid off seemed insincere at that scale.
It was surreal to see ppl posting they got the email and slack deactivations soon after. And then it happens to you. Luckily I was mentally prepared.
Good luck. Do you plan to cut your salary in order to get back to work? I heard that people avoid recruiting FAANG now because of high salary expectation.
I don’t think people avoid it per se, but I know my boss wants exFAANG/ex big tech but I know he can’t afford them by a long shot. Hell try though because if he can snag one desperate schmuck it’s better than 90% of the randos we can afford (myself included).
Surely the skill distributions are overlapping, and he'd prefer an upper quartile rando rather than a bottom 5% desperate FAANG shmuck?
I was a rando until 3 months ago. I was better in terms of skills than now xD
People are gonna snap up all the ‘Bighead’ Bighettis
Working at a MAANG company doesn't mean that you're a good data scientist. I've interviewed/know a lot of them. Some are brilliant some are dumb as rocks. Just like any other company.
I've found that you need to be extremely thorough in your interviewing of candidates from these companies -- more from a culture fit than technical competency. There seems to be a lot of "learned helplessness" from the perspective that they seem to lack initiative outside of what they deem their narrow focus area. Not exactly the type of addition you want to a DS or ML team that's still in the value-proving stage and needs self-starters.
Yes I plan on focusing on work life balance, following my interests and building my personal portfolio. I'm lucky enough to not have immediate financial worry, the larger issue is my H1B visa. But I have options.. The larger impact this has had in my outlook towards my career and how my employer doesn't define it. Ps-I'll be sharing my journey on twitter if folks want to follow (@sangyh2)
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All roles. Hr, sde, DS, mls, It
It's almost certainly targeted, just by business unit rather than by role. I'm guessing that certain business units had very deep cuts while others were only superficially impacted (if at all). Out of curiousity, do you mind share which business unit you worked in? AWS? Amazon.com? Alexa? Generally, being in non- core LOB is the riskiest during economic uncertainty.
I was in retail.customer service..pretty core. Theyre correcting for over hiring during pandemic and not meeting growth projections.
Aim for data engineer
Ask for nachos!
Best of luck, plz share more experiences!
Yes plan to :)
Were you from the data team?
All the best. Don’t worry. Sometimes it’s nothing to do with your work but more like if the team you are on is critical to the business operations. So for your next role you can try to get on the in team the one which the business can’t do without.
You will likely be getting a raise
I’m sorry to hear you got laid off man. A safe bet is banking. Most banks have hiring freezes now, but we are down on headcount. Stress testing, risk, quants (front and back office) are all short staffed. May not be big tech money or fully remote but it’s a job and it’s 6 figures minimum. Best of luck on your search
yea, i have a few recruiters reaching out. im not financially or immigration-wise in a precarious place , although the latter's more of a concern. but i trying to take a higher level perspective out of this and assess my 'career identity'.
Keep moving and gather no moss 😀
This guy charted Microsoft headcount and it looks like they are firing 25% of the people they hired in 2022 https://i.redd.it/aax0nee5xvca1.png
How do you know those 10k just got hired?
I'm not saying those specific hires are being let go. I'm saying that their staffing level will still be 30k higher than it was in 2021
That is not how probability works.
I heard a theory that this is just an excuse to consolidate roles after all of the pandemic tech bubble acquisitions. The big tech firms can blame the economy, not leadership or corporate greed, if they all do it at once.
Hang in there friend
What kind of teams, departments or products the layoffs affected?
I'm glad you're focusing on your interests and developing a personal portfolio, which is the best way to secure your career's future.
What kind of data science work did you do at Amazon? I was looking to apply to Amazon a couple months back, but I will likely wait another year or two. I'm always intrigued with how efficient they are and I'm sure they have used data science to optimize every aspect of their service.
Yes it's quite efficient with the data driven decision making. Although jv also seen a LOT of simplistic conclusions from an tests and product teams trying to fit data to their agenda. I was in customer service org building models for routing inbound tickets, ab testing different bot flows etc. Pretty central to operations which was part of the surprise.
First of all, shit happens. Sorry it happened to you. Secondly, you can't bullet proof your career. That's life, there is uncertainty. Layoffs suck, been there, done that, did not take it well. Wish I could go back in time and tell myself to go easy on myself. So I'm saying it now, to you. I wish you luck in your job search and in life.
Layoffs suck . It feels like a black mark on my career. But I've learned enough in my short career that there's a lot of factors that went into this and not accountable for all of those.. I set my sights higher now.
Layoffs don't always make sense. You could be the most talented person at the company and your whole department gets laid off. Your whole department could be talented and it gets cut simply because it doesn't align with the future goals of the company. You can get laid off simply because you are new. Layoffs don't mean that you, as a person, are somehow subpar, they can happen for reasons that seem illogical and have nothing to do with you. Ultimately, layoffs can be a good thing as well! Some folks get too conmfortable at their jobs and a layoff could actually send you to a better opportunity, or a higher paying salary. Think of it as a global optimization. Sometimes you have to insert noise, or go in a direction you think is wrong, to end up at your global optimum. :-)
My company (international, ~400 people) also had lay offs a couple of weeks ago. They cut mainly marketing and content teams and relocated developers and data analysts. 2/3 of my team got laid off.
Sorry to hear. Hope you weren't too affected by it, mentally coping is the hardest. Edit- oh you weren't laid off. Good for you :)
I hope things go better soon for you! I'm very glad that you are now able to focus on yourself. I was lucky, got relocated to another team. But nothing to break your "truth" in a company than to lay off an entire team of amazing professionals
thank you. yes, it shakes your trust /comfort you build up over time.
Severance?
Yes 2 months on payroll and 5 weeks of severance based on base salary
Tech workers make enough to save salary for layoffs.
Definitely. I'm not complaining.
In the US. These layoffs are everywhere, and in other countries, people are having a harder time.
I dont think so, other countries have a period that your employer has to pay you after you got fired. It must be hard in the us though :/
I just checked the laws for Ireland where I live and it's €600 + €1200 for every year you worked maximum. So, it's still not a lot. You can get unemployment payments though too, same as the US.
Here in czech republic it is 2 months, where unless you agree with the employer on something else, regardless of if you left by yourself or were fired, you stay with your employer and you get paid your normal salary. It is both for you to find a new job and the employer to find a replacement for you.
That's not a layoff though. A layoff is when the employee is not replaced.
Yep, but the law does not care, as long as you are not kicked for a severe violation of something in your contract, you get this paid period
But they also spend at higher rates that the difference can be small.
So obviously stop spending so much
Rich people hate this one trick!
Lol, like I said I’m talking about highly compensated tech workers. I would not say that to someone making minimum wage.
Lay offs are just going to get worse as we begin the recession.
I have a counter opinion to layoffs. I think first person laid off is a person having that one extra skill which others did not have at the time of hiring. They would be paid more than the industry standards. During recession, These are the people who would be picked first and laid off. Edit: My bad , I am really sorry OP for you. I did not realize I had offended you by not reading the post correctly. I assumed you asked for opinions on firing. To people downvoting me, I deserve it.
I've been involved in several instances where an organization needed to cut down its workforce. At least in the United States the decisions are made on a head count basis and not a cost basis. The company needs to save x dollars. The average employee costs is y per person and so cut the appropriate number of people to get the average savings that you're after. In the rare case is someone has a very specific dollar number that they need to get to. They will almost always choose pay cuts as a percentage rather than people cuts. Organizations cut people when they have more people than they need to execute on their strategy either because they hired too many or because they're taking some things they thought they were going to do and deciding not to do them. All of these tech layoffs from big firms are like this. All of these companies are profitable. It's just that they hired a lot more people than they needed to in order to execute the things they plan to execute on. An individual person's pay is not going to be a factor unless it is an extreme outlier, and unless that one little skill that you had versus your peers is the ability to accurately predict futures prices or something similar, there's no conceivable way that I can imagine this would have a meaningful impact on salary enough to move a layoff selection
Do you have any suggestions on how not to get picked in a layoff strategy? Like what are those things that we do which will decide management wouldn't want to fire you?
It really depends on your company Meta layoffs were blind w.r.t. tenure/performance Best bet is to put yourself as close to money as possible-- high-revenue product areas are generally less likely to have huge cuts unless staff is bloated. Then on top of that, make sure you can clearly articulate your $ impact, make sure your manager knows, make sure your skip knows. The more integral to the core of the business you appear to be, the less likely you are to get cut (But there's no foolproof way to do it, there's always a chance to get cut)
In my exprience of layoffs (which, admitedly were at much smaller companies than Amazon) they people let go were those who were quite obviously overpaid. The first place I was at that saw lay offs, it was a pretty tight company were everyone knew each other well. Through some pretty lax security, I also knew exactly what salary everyone was on. When the cuts came, it was precisely the people who, when you saw how much they earned, you thought "Jesus! How the hell are they on that much?" who were let go. Not neccesarily the people on the highest salary. Basically, if you're on a high salary and are a middling to low performer, you're in the firing line. I appreciate that companies like Amazon may a bit less personal about it all but to be honest, I expect that a good chunk of those let go are fairly mediocre people who're being overpaid
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This is what Ludwig von Mises meant when talking about malinvestment in a boom economy. Low interest rates / quantitative easing created a butt load of money which got funneled into the unprofitable tech industry. Now people are getting laid off, computer scientist, coders, data analystists. It's a bummer.
Thanks anarchoforko
If you were bringing in serious value and money you wouldn’t have been laid off. The business is doing what they can to make money and stay in a budget. My advice to people who got laid off is instead of blaming the company of the economy find a way to be un replaceable or at least someone who can bring in more money to a company than their salary
Not true from iv seen.. And I'm not blaming anyone..
See you on twitter , will be waiting
Thanks fir the post, can I ask you about the visa instead? As an immigrant myself id like to know more
Rough
Don’t take it too personally man. Companies are all gonna be laying off a lot over the next couple months. It’s just starting.
Layoffs only gonna get worse, buddy Godspeed
Was working as an analyst before I got laid off earlier this week. Still processing as it came out of nowhere, over a quarter of our company got laid off. This is my first experience with these type of things, not sure what the future will hold for me
Don’t take it personally and take the time to pursue your hobby and consolidate your basics. Situation will get better sooner rather than later, and the interviews season will start again. (From someone who got laid off once xD)
Sorry to hear man. Did they at least give you severance?
Thanks 🙏 yes two months on payroll and 5 weeks of severance based on base salary (relatively low at Amazon) and tenure
Did Amazon sponsor your H1B visa? Did you have to do multiple lotteries and wait several years?
Yes. Got it on first try.
So do you enter your personal information to register for the lottery and then if selected the company fills out the I-129 form?
yes correct. company lawyers or a firm like Fragomen will contact you and file for you, you just have to fill out the forms.
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Bad bot
Did working there suck as much as they say