Question for those who got laid-off from tech recently (say since Aug last year): how hard did you find it to get another tech job?
Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited:
If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true then the consequence to the macro environment could be substantial and not in a good way. Basically the fed will probably need another round of hikes to really bring down unemployment to bring down core inflation. Since it would imply that (ironically) the recent fall in unemployment is "transitory" and not sufficient to bring down inflation.
I had a new job lined up roughly a week after they broke the news to me. The tradeoff is that I took a 37% reduction in salary.
Easily worth it. Everyone else is being laid off all around me, while I kick back and fire up a bunch of A100s for ML research. The best part is that I didn’t have to do any damn leetcode interviews.
I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant. But fwiw, I haven’t heard any stories among friends and colleagues of them getting laid off and finding it hard to find work. Devs seem safe, at least till GPT comes for us.
Sure, if you think it’d help. Here’s the message I sent that got me the new job. The context is that they were pushing back a little bit during salary negotiation and asking for a resume, so I channeled my Jewish ancestors and went into full salesman mode:
- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027
- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)
ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”
They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.
That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.
I love your background. I'm trying really hard to get my work with getting LMs to be able to write with syntactic constraints (like banning the letter E) to convert into a dedicated ML research role for awhile now. Seems it's relatively easy to get a fat title and money but harder to get a mandate to do research fill time.
I got gwern to pick up my paper about this, so someone with influence saw my work and cared.
But being the first to get LMs to play chess is a pretty big claim to fame. I hope history remembers the pioneers.
Keep it up! I believe in you. Keep trying to do research that yiu personally find interesting; doesn’t matter if it’s small, just that you’re into it. That’s always worked like a compass for me.
And keep in touch. Feel free to DM on Twitter or anywhere else. It can get lonely when it feels like you’re laboring in obscurity, so I’m happy to cheer you on or give feedback.
Tier 1: Outrageous comp and difficult interviews.
Tier 2: Great comp and medium level difficulty interviews.
Tier 3: Companies that pay at or below average for an engineer and sometimes don't even have a coding interview!
for the tier 1s I was outright rejected my application twice as often as before. I also noticed that they are more selective. I've passed "high bar" technical interviews before, so have some understanding of what it takes. This time around I thought I did pretty well, but didn't get an offer (coincidentally at Google). More candidates + focus on cost cutting has made things much more competitive for really high paying jobs.
For those tier 2/3 jobs they are exactly the same as before. Recruiters constantly messaging and got an offer after only being on the market for a couple of weeks.
Unironically where's this tier 3? I got leetcoded at an interview for what I thought was a sane employer when trying for what amounted to a K8S position. Not developing K8S but setting up a rather elaborate database system on it, LOL.
I was all wondering what they're going to ask questions about optimization strategies WRT their business requirements and instead they roll up with "lets reverse a string in python". Wait what? This isn't a programming position as per the job req?
I think some of the lower tier companies get the idea that they should copy what Google was doing a decade ago, regardless if it makes sense or not.
This. People talk about the job market as if it were a monolithic entity, but there is so much nuance by types and by regions that it is hard to make concise statements
Headhunters are incentivized to chase you constantly, regardless of how many positions they are hiring for. The positions may soon exist, may have already been filled, getting advertised by multiple agencies - doesn't matter. These people are going to reach out, get you booked in and even if that specific position does not work out, they will be hopeful to get you into something else. Observe the same with Estate Agents - they will continue advertising already let/sold houses, just with motivation of getting you into their contact list hoping that it will be useful very soon.
When there are too many recruiters in the industry for the amount of positions that need to be filled, the remaining recruiters need to work their butts off. For some of them, this looks like emailing more people.
Recruiters often hound even when there aren't many jobs available. After all, they aren't paid to sit around and do nothing when there are lulls in hiring...
I am still hounded by recruiters but the quality of the positions they are hiring for are definitely much worse than, say, a year ago.
Loads of temporary contracts on terrible salaries in obscure places with mandatory on-site attendance.
Most local companies have started to demand employees back in office full time also.
Which tells me that management in tech where I live ( nordics ) is generally bad and they just want to see bodies in the office, under the guise of teamwork of course, more than anything.
The international companies that have offices in multiple countries do not bother with mandatory in-office nonsense nearly as much. My guess is they are the ones picking up all available talent at the moment.
I'm from the UK. I got laid off in the first week of Jan and accepted a new contract role yesterday. The market was extremely quiet last week, but it seemed to pick up quite a bit this week. I'd guess it depends on experience and stuff, but there does seem to be stuff out there...
What I did notice was less tech companies seemed to be recruiting. Almost all of the roles I was approached for were in industries like finance, retail, healthcare, etc.
New listings on job boards, inbound calls from recruiters, the number of people responding to my emails, recruiters themselves telling me that things are picking up since the Christmas break.
I included the word "seemed" for a reason. It wasn't intended as an objective statement, but a response to someone asking for anecdotal experiences. I'm sure others may have a different experience depending on where they live, their experience, their CV, the type of companies they're applying for, etc.
It's still quite a defective system because Recruiters are so ruthless since so much money is made in commission. What this causes is the creation of fiefdoms and Recruiters trying to convince organisations or individuals to be exclusive with them, like it gives us any benefit.
The truth is that the noise that Recruiters generate means that most of the time, we only deal with a handful at a time, which means it can be pot luck whether your recruiter places you in our role.
Highly recommend that people do their own searching and apply direct, where possible, to the roles they want to do. I place a lot of kudos in a direct application compared to the Recruiter pitch about their latest "high quality candidate".
Your mileage may vary with this one. Companies sometimes get so much inbound email to careers@ourco that they stop opening any of it (while leaving that as the contact us link on their website). A recruiter is then someone whose email might be read by someone at the company.
I'm in the UK, but quite rarely contacted by recruiters, once a month perhaps. I think I have a decent resume (many years in a FAANG), but maybe I'm too senior/specialized?
It might be because there are fewer companies that hire at your current level of compensation - a few international big tech companies and some trading firms - and all of those are clearly slowing / freezing hiring or laying people off. Most cold messages from recruiters right now will be for positions that pay less than half of what you're making.
If you haven't changed jobs many times in the past (and dealt with recruiters), you're probably not on their radar. Most of the messages I get are from recruiters I talked to in the past, and they added me to their DB (with or without my permission).
I've noticed a small uptick in the number of messages, but I attributed that to being in my current role for about 18 months so I'm coming up to the point where other people start to look for a new job.
Really? Where are you located in the UK? In London I have noticed a definite reduction in recruiter reach outs in comparison to 2022 (and even then it was mainly finance companies)
Pretty sure the Fed "wants" to bring up unemployment. I.e. make wage inflation decrease. To put it another way, they want everyone to feel more poor so they spend less frivolously.
Would be interesting to get some anecdotal evidence to shed light on the following WSJ article which claims laid-off tech workers are finding it easy to get re-recruited:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-f...
If the phenomena described in the WSJ article is true then the consequence to the macro environment could be substantial and not in a good way. Basically the fed will probably need another round of hikes to really bring down unemployment to bring down core inflation. Since it would imply that (ironically) the recent fall in unemployment is "transitory" and not sufficient to bring down inflation.