What do you do during mass layoffs?

Hi everyone,

My Twitter feed in the last few days has been flooded with now-former Google devs being laid off. This is on top of all the layoffs that have happened in the last year. I’ve been on this self-taught journey for about 6 months now (mostly MERN, a little AR/VR and machine learning). As someone looking for their first position, all this news is a little destabilizing.

Experienced devs, have you ever been through layoffs at any of your companies? How did you respond? Do you have some practical / realistic advice for finding a new job at your level or at an entry level, based on your experiences?

Junior devs / those still searching, how are you processing this news? What steps are you taking if any to avoid being laid off?

I’m concerned about where all these jobs are going to be reabsorbed. Also how these layoffs are happening so close to developments in AI and automation … would love to have discuss with others how they’re moving through this!

2 Likes

These are faceless shareholder driven decisions affecting masses of people, which are dictated by wider industry trends. They’re not based on individual employee performance. Failing companies and business models are the driver.

Unfortunately it’s not within your hands to determine whether you remain employed. I’ve seen extremely competent and valuable employees be made redundant en masse for no other reason than cost cutting.

4 Likes

I will answer from Indian mind set.

During my father’s or grand father’s time, we didn’t have layoff culture here in India, majority try to join government jobs as they have job security ( even when you don’t work and do corruption ) and other were doing traditional small businesses.

Private sectors use to pay less salary but never fired someone until and unless company itself was shut down or employee does something really bad.

Now with IT sector everything changed ( in India ), it gave lots of money and money spending opportunities as well, with that it had brought hire and fire culture as well to India.

If you’re one of those show off person who takes loads of EMI for big house, big car without doing min. 50% saving then you’re in big trouble. It’s totally your fault.

I feel layoff are going to stay here forever ( because of various economical reasons ).
But I feel one shouldn’t take it personally and feel bad about him/her self.

If that person is good at coding there are literally thousands of new jobs across globe. Google “Y Combinator startup jobs”

Keep saving → keep learning → keep yourself relevant → read HOW TO STOP WORRYING AND START LIVING by Dale Carnegie

Check out below 2 articles about scientific studies of happiness

Money: The Real Truth About Money

Happiness Viewpoint: A Deeper Sense of Happiness

God bless us all.

1 Like

This is a red herring. Have you personally experienced a mass layoff? I can tell you first hand that talented, hardworking and experienced engineers are being laid off, en masse, due to reasons connected with the company’s performance, not their own.

thanks all. I think I was just shocked at how casually these layoffs have happened. It doesn’t feel ideal that we are in this position as workers, but the general advice of being prepared for similar curveballs in the future sounds realistic. we obviously can’t control shareholder decisions but we can focus on building our own knowledge of relevant tools and expanding our relationships / networks to be more resilient

1 Like

Yes. I was laid off from Hewlett Packard Enterprise about 3 years into my career.

Job-hunting became my full time job. Because my whole team was laid off, we created a support network for each other.

Yes. At the request of fellow campers (this was in the very beginning of the forum) I wrote this post.

The job market of the last few years could happily absorb tens of thousands of experienced developers. Many companies (including the one I work for) have been operating at a talent deficit for years. The significant thing about these public layoffs isn’t the number of people on the job market. It is an indication of an overall trend in how that market is going to change. As others have said, there has been a glut of hiring tech talent for many years due to the cheapness of debt. People have also mentioned previous cycles or a pendulum effect in tech jobs. That’s likely part of what we’re seeing here - after years of aggressive hiring companies are now (over)correcting to trim down. In this case, we’re not just talking about a change to the technical job market, but a massive economic recession. That being the case, we shouldn’t ascribe too much significance to the fact that these newsworthy layoffs are happening at technology-based companies. It is, overall, a bad time to need things like food, shelter, and medical care.

I’m not sure I understand the connection between layoffs and AI or automation.

I’m being more conscious of maintaining enough savings to support me through a potential months-long job search. I’m also adjusting my plans and expectations around changing jobs. I’ve been considering leaving my current job in the next few months, but I now expect that the interviewing process might be more frustrating and the offers less enticing. Part of that is that I expect companies to leverage the anxiety caused by these news stories to manipulate tech workers into accepting lower compensation and higher demands (such as off-hour availability and in-office requirements). I am not concerned about my ability to provide for my family, but I am concerned about the effects that this climate will have on the emotional wellbeing of myself and my friends.

1 Like

A couple of days before also Dell announced layoffs (about 5% staff)… I agree that the best solution would be to study some new areas and develop some skills - personally I’ve decoded to dive deep into AR solutions for education benefits

1 Like

It’s really important to remember that most programmers do not work for these big tech companies.

1 Like

You’ve got to bear in mind we’re in the middle of a worldwide economic downturn exacerbated by the effects of two years of pandemic + the massive war that’s currently going on + various other bad things all hitting at the same time (Brexit + incredibly high energy prices + a cost-of-living crisis in the UK, for example).

If there is a global recession, then by definition everyone will stop spending, that’s just what a recession is. And because it’s currently unclear whether that will happen, people aren’t willing to spend money until they’re confident it won’t (which in turn surely makes it more likely there will be a recession, but anyway…I dunno).

So it’s neither unexpected that there are layoffs (there’s less money available) in some places, nor that nothing much has changed in others.

The companies with the big layoffs are big companies and they’re quite specific – it is either financial giants or tech giants. Everyone else seems to be tootling along much the same (YMMV). Companies of that vast size do this periodically, they always have, they aggressively slash loads of jobs when all the shareholders are worried. They can afford to: they have thousands and thousands of people on the books and losing a chunk of them is going to make little difference. Smaller companies (as in most other companies) just can’t do that, they still need the same amount of workers. Eg if you owned a moderately successful tech-driven business with a single product with thousands of customers & had say a hundred engineers doing all the necessary jobs, you can’t just sack off half of them, because you’d immediately stop making money. And you can’t stop hiring because some of the engineers will leave/retire/move into management/etc. But if you’re Mr Google then whatever, who cares, only beholden to shareholders so just close a few divisions that aren’t making money and put skeleton staff on some others, still got hundreds of other divisions and products.

Yes, it’s a bad sign, but you can’t read a huge amount into it at the minute. Ask again at the end of the year, I guess is the only sensible answer.

The issue is that if there is a global recession, yes it will be harder to enter the workforce for a time. But that is very much an if at the minute.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.