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Ask HN: Have you been laid off?
800 points by Peretus on March 18, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 645 comments
I work remotely as a front-end developer at a VC-funded, series B startup. Funding has dried up as investors with financial exposure to anything retail or entertainment-related are hemorrhaging cash. The company leadership told us that starting immediately, all employees (including the fully-remote workers like myself) are on mandatory unpaid leave.

Job cuts in 2019 were already up a whopping 351% from the previous year[1]. Considering the COVID-19 outbreak, I'm concerned that many other tech workers like me might be updating their resumes and entering a stagnant job market. Alternatively, organizations may view this as a great time to gain additional market share. What do you think?

If you're a tech worker, have you been laid off or do you expect to be laid off soon? If you are a hiring manager, what is the current hiring status at your company?

[1] https://www.challengergray.com/press/press-releases/2019-year-end-job-cuts-report-fewest-monthly-cuts-july-2018-yoy-10




At the beginning of the year, I decided it was time to find a new job after 10 years with my employer. I spent February doing interview prep and conducting interviews. Back then, the COVID-19 was mostly limited to China, markets and governments weren't terribly concerned about COVID-19.

I accept a job offer, put in my two weeks notice, and my last day at was last Friday. Hardly anyone was seriously concerned about COVID-19 when I gave notice. A week later, business travel was suspended and WFH policies implemented. My last day, schools were closing, and the economy tanked. This week, we're sheltering in place.

I gave myself 3 weeks in between the old and the new job, you know for relaxation and travel. Instead, I'm sequestered to my house for 3 weeks.

Everyday, the news got worse and worse and continues to get worse and worse. Now, I'm in between jobs, and am a little worried my new employer will revoke my job offer. To add insult to injury, one reason I didn't leave my previous job was job security. But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market.


I have been laid off just before 2015 and I haven't found any stable work since then. I have been under-employed for a long while before the outbreak, and I don't even know what new change-ups in job hunting I should be doing now.

For a long time, many people have said that my years of experience make me valuable so that I should have gotten offers very quickly, but the reality hasn't shown that. Heck, even the founder of the startup company has told me, when I asked for his reference, that he was "very confused" that I haven't found any work for so long. And that was only a year in.

He unfortunately can't give me work anymore as he's tied up with his business. He did consider me for a follow-up freelance job before, but that was more due to a technicality that they needed a US developer for a particular job.

After being evaluated on mock interviews, turns out I'm in the peculiar situation where I am too underqualified for my years. But at least I have some experience working remote that should make me more appealing to employers.

I just can't call it impostor syndrome anymore if I consistently fail at getting full-time offers even when the economic climate was good.


My algorithm:

1) Decide which software engineering related role you want to work on (e.g. web frontends)

2) Enumerate the top skills that are relevant to that role by visiting job postings in companies you would like to work for. e.g.: React.

3) Enumerate the subset of those skills that you have. Those are your strenghts. Work in acquiring the skills you do not yet have. Those are your weaknesses (for now).

4) Visit Linkedin profiles for random employed people in such roles in various companies you would like to work for. Compare that to your own Linkedin profile.

5) In your profile, emphasize your strengths, deemphasize your weaknesses, while working on them in your spare time. And most importantly, list your skills using the skills feature. Recruiters use that to find people.

Personally I think you should leave out all mentions to "looking for a job" and such. That is a red flag. You do not want to tell recruiters that your skills are in low demand.

Also try to keep your job descriptions consistent and relevant to your target role. Rather than "role 1/role 2/role 3", just pick the most favorable/relevant description for role and stick with that.

It usually takes me 1 month to find a job.


This is great advice! In modern tech there is nonsuch thing as "my resume" only "the version of my resume i drafted to apply to a particular position". The fullstack developer is still wanted, engineering manager just want them to be fullstack in the exact stack their team is using.


“Under qualified for your years” is ageist bullshit. You’re either a capable L3,4,5,etc. Any coupling of those achievement brackets to age ranges (which cannot be completely detached from experience level) is discrimination.


> is ageist bullshit

True. As if they expect every 80 year olds to be nobel laureates. The thing is those with power to hire are hardly smart people, they just happen to have the power to hire, by chance.


I'm not concluding that it's simply ageism, because this is feedback I'm getting from mock interviews, not real ones. Professionals tend to be more honest and open about how you interview if it's just for practice.

However the fact that you are using numbered levels instead of broader decscriptors like "junior" and "senior" means that we are thinking on different wavelengths. I guess you're talking Google-ese because it is harder to know what is "L3" without context.

I have obtained various kinds of feedback and working on some of my weaknesses, but "underqualified" and "repeating the same basic experience many times" are the most common themes.


It also depends on the level the GP is applying to. Is GP willing to take a L4 position although applied to be a L5? Of course usually that will come with comp expectations too.


Pretty sure it means "years of work" and not age.


That’s the plausible deniability part of it.


Don't take this the wrong way (I'm trying to help, might fail but intentions are good) but it seems to me that the real reason you are having a hard time finding a "job" is because you have a history of leaving jobs after a short tenure.

I wrote "job" because working as a salaried employee is not the only way to make a living, or have a successful career. Consider that the freelance/contractor career you're currently having is 1) a career and 2) might be a better fit for you. Furthermore, some contractors I know make a lot more money than most of my salaried friends. The tradeoff being, of course, that you have no guarantees wrt to steadiness of your income (protip: salaried jobs come with no guarantees either, you could be out the next day, any day) and sometimes you have to chase down projects and deal with bad customers.

Sorry if something came out wrong, English isn't my first language.


> it seems to me that the real reason you are having a hard time finding a "job" is because you have a history of leaving jobs after a short tenure.

Brevity is to be expected in contract jobs. But I don't know if you are purposely trying to discourage me from finding salaried work which is my main goal.

I actually don't like freelancing at all, I prefer lower risk than freelance, and it is not paying me well anyways. No exact numbers but I made under 5 figures last year. Not really great for a US freelancer. I only do this to make some ends meet while I'm searching for a FT job.


You seem to have skipped the first part where I said I was just trying to help.

I wish you all the best in finding work as quickly as possible, sir.


I glanced over your LinkedIn profile, to me it looks like you need to add more 'modern' tech skills to your profile. It sucks, but the industry moves to new tech quickly and unless you are an enterprise Java developer, your skills get pretty much outdated in few years and you need to catch up at a fast pace.

I would learn (or highlight it if you already know) React.js and Node.js immediately, along with Postgres and MongoDB. That should get a good boost to the resume.

If you are going full stack, you would definitely need to put in AWS, especially micro services and serverless experience along with golang if possible. You can also learn Python if you want to try your hands on Machine learning as well, but I would recommend just focussing on React and Node.js as they are low hanging fruits and there are good enough openings for those two alone..

I have been in your shoes before and I know it could be overwhelming but you can do it.

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap


I have "hobby" experience in React, Vue and Node if that counts. My resume contains a Github link plus one open source contribution on a React-based project. I just don't put them in my LinkedIn profile because it would be confusing to say "I know XYZ" in a professional profile but cannot list XYZ for something I did at work.

I think I've seen that roadmap diagram before and I notice that in every place I've worked/contracted at, their skills needs usually stop short after the "Version control" part. They don't do packages, modules and I am left in the dark about the deployment process. And I don't know if that lack of transparency of SDLC is done to me on purpose since for a long time I've been a contract dev hired to do some specific thing.

However, not everyone is privileged enough to go through the "standard techie" experience. Some of us never even heard about Leetcode until long after graduation, some of us only have experience in companies that don't believe in concepts like testing and good security.

Looks like the ideal places for me are somewhere that bridges the gap between the haves and the have-nots. A place that still has legacy work to be done but also is up to speed with newer things in other aspects. Does working at traditional F500 companies cut it?


You can put hobby experience in LinkedIn summary. Also you can make a real world project like for e.g. Covid019 tracker in React and can post it even as a professional experience.


Can confirm this too.

Adding Salesforce, Docker, AWS, PostgreSQL, mySQL, MS SQL and stuff like that sometimes get scraped as keywords.


Sincere question:

Does anyone else think it's crazy that you need to know: React, node, Mongo, AWS, the Python machine learning stack, golang, a bunch of databases, microservice patterns, serverless infrastructure, Docker...to get a job in the tech industry?

Who are the people that actually know all this stuff?


People <say> they know :-) Many hardly can write "Hello, World!".


It is crazy. I'm kind of one of those people.

Between my last two roles, familiarity and/or proficiency with the following technologies was required: React/Redux/JS/TS, Node/NPM, PostgreSQL, AWS (specifically Redis, ElasticSearch, Cloudwatch, CodePipeline, Lambda, S3, SQS, and RDS), Kotlin/Java/Spring/Maven/Gradle, C#/ASP.NET/MVC, Python, etc.

As well as testing frameworks / unit testing technologies like Selenium, JMeter, Postman/Chai, and Junit/Nunit/Pytest.

All of this hit me like a brick in the face over a 3 year period. I am NOT a master of any of them, but was definitely expected to be able to readily work with them. At times, it felt like I was supporting 5-6 different roles.

These were two startups with <100 people, so maybe that's why.


It sounds like you've gotten enough positive feedback to know you're not an imposter. Sounds like it's your interview skills or first impression?


If I consistently fail interviews then it's reasonable for me to conclude that I really could be an imposter. But I have gotten interviews from many places small and big, including some FAANGs and Bay Area companies.

If it's just first impressions then I could be like a decent TV show but with a bad pilot. Seems like I might be an "acquired taste" kind of professional.


This is immensely forward but if you would like any help with your resume or interviewing I would be more than happy to help. I am no recruiting expert I believe I have some skill that may be useful. I've changed jobs every 18 months (by choice) for the past 6-7 years or so and I've interviewed with about 10x that many companies. No pressure, just wanting to help out.


Not sure if this will help you, but just putting it out there: Getting a job via a referral will boost your chances by quite a bit.

I am not sure what your core skills are, but in my case if I want to go work for a bank, via referral I get an immediate response (and even one other bank intercepts the referral).

Without a referral I don't even get a response.


I try to use referrals whenever I can. A few years ago got one which lead to two on-site interviews. Lately though people have been giving me the cold shoulder on LinkedIn or email, understandably they are tired of being pestered about jobs.

I don't socialize often to begin with but I always separate people into "family or friend" or "professional" buckets, never mixing the two.


The company I work for is looking for software engineers in the LA or Chicago areas, email me if you want more details :). Our product isn’t the most glamorous, but we take work/life balance really seriously.


I live in Chicago, and will email you soon.


I hate to say this but working for startups really warps everyone's sense of level and career progression. Startup management cares to retain talent and they often give out titles (Senior, Director, VP) like confetti. If you really want to know where you are, the old-school behemoths (e.g. IBM, Lockheed etc) tend to have better (and more rigid) levels.


I quit my job in mid January because of burnout, left London for a couple of weeks and came back this Sunday.

I’m looking for remote roles exclusively. Now I’m not sure if the timing is perfect or just plain terrible:)

Also, I stopped reading the news. I just don’t think refreshing Twitter every 10 min whilst self isolating can be good to your mental health.


Depending upon what you're looking for we might be able to help. ML company in London that's open to fully remote people.

(email in profile)


Email field in profile isn’t publicly visible, you’ll have to add it to the about box


It doesn't seem to be (or did you have to take it out because you were inundated? :p)


Second times the charm. It's there now.


Working from remote is probably the only way for at least weeks if not months.

And yes, don't check the news too often. The real world doesn't move as fast as the refresh button.


I need to stop reading the news too, I’m in pretty deep now...


Hold together, baby, hold together.


Me too.. Read this morning where Italy wil move to in 8 days.. Yeah shouldnt have read that...

I need to quit reading news...


I think every time is remote right now, and could be for months. I'm hoping that by then everyone will be more open to keeping roles remote


Regarding Tw: as with all social media, it very much depends who you follow.


Start interviewing again. Seriously. Worst case scenario your new job works out. That's pretty good downside.


This is solid advice. If I'm afraid of losing my future job, then, better start looking now! Thanks!


Also, side note, if you already signed paperwork with the new employer, press as hard as you think you can get away with, as soon and frequently as you can.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Sometimes, there's nothing they can do (hiring freeze from the C-level); but other times, they need to turn 10 hires into 3. Those 3 typically end up being the ones who push for it.

Would definitely push on both fronts. Good luck!


It's a good idea to hedge your bets, but at my company (>50k people) we now have a hiring freeze so anybody that already got an offer is lucky to have just squeezed in. If you can get in touch with your hiring manager perhaps you could talk to them about it directly?


A lot of companies have stopped travel, interview, vendor visits.


Some companies are doing interviews fully remotely right now.


If it makes you feel better, I quite a cushy job and joined a startup a month ago. You're not the only one with bad timing :)


Same position here. Thankfully starting at a FAANG, so less likely to see layoffs than smaller more vulnerable companies. Scheduled to start on 3/30


I left work due to burnout and wanted to try my hand at doing something creative - creating a new product.

Had some time set aside for travel before I started, but then this all happened.

Could not have picked a less convenient time to try and travel and make money off SaaS / AppStore.

I remain optimistic and am expecting to learn so much more than I would have in the more comfortable market we are now leaving behind.

To health and family first though.


Actually, it's especially good timing to be starting a business during a financial crisis. I know, I've lived through 1987, 1993, 1998, 2002, 2008 and now c-19.

During these times when people are getting RIF'd (Reduction in Force), they're understandably panicked, nervous, in shock, etc. Most employees are not thinking of what service or product they can cobble together and bring to market, but how to swiftly rejoin the job market.

This leads to a shortage of new startups spinning up as well, because the economy has gone to the dumpster. Good times, bull markets and strong economies make everyone feel more confident. Who wants to gamble when the world is going to hades in a handbasket? Not a lot of people.

Then there's the cost factor. My experience during past financial implosions, demand for everything plummets. I get the idea we're living in more of a robber-baron era than even just 5 years ago, but still, you'll be able to negotiate everything from office rents to infrastructure, salaries of new hires, hotels and airfares for business travel.

Obviously, I am going to throw my hat into this ring for these very reasons. Good luck and good day!


Similar situation. DM if you want to explore a collaboration.


Could you check-in with the new company? I'm in a similar situation and checked-in with mine, and they said they were happy to onboard me remotely, no problem.


Yeah. I've checked in. They're planning on shipping my laptop to me on my start date. Everything is fine–for now. But things have changed so dramatically day by day, it's hard to know where we'll be in 2 and a half weeks. I worry when I see the markets dropping 7% every other day. I read stories how non-tech industries are cancelling job offers during this time. I think my future employer is well insulated, being a tech company. We'll see!


Ask your old employer if your role is still available. Plans change, and if you left on good terms, they might be amiable to your return if you need that option.


If my new employer bails, I might consider this. But I would probably try to find a new new job before then. Also, my boss wanted me to confirm 3 times what my last day would be, because, once he put it in the system, his hands were tied. I guess the LDO (Last day of office) process is pretty streamlined to tie up all the loose ends: halting pay checks, revoking unvested RSUs, stopping medical benefits, revoking user entitlements, etc.


Not a lawyer, but I wonder if you couldn't sue if they withdraw the offer. Seems like a case of detrimental reliance or promissory estoppel. Again, not a lawyer and surely depends on which jurisdiction you're in.

Also, you could post on HN if they do withdraw the offer during this outbreak, so other people would know they suck.


>> Also, you could post on HN if they do withdraw the offer during this outbreak, so other people would know they suck.

So every company that lays off an employee "sucks"? I guess you're welcome to stay and work for free, but if they don't have money to pay you what are they supposed to do?

I agree this situation is terrible for the OP, but I don't think we need to name and shame every company that makes a prudent decision as the world moves in a abad direction...


GP said that in reference to rescinding a job offer after notice given, new job accepted, and old job left, not a 'layoff' exactly.


Personally, I think employment in the US should look more like it does in Europe. People rely on work to survive, and shouldn’t be fireable easily, and unemployment should cover at least 75% of your previous salary.


I am in Europe; here it is common to have a probation period. After this period it is less easy to fire someone, but during the period they can do pretty much anything. So if you happen to be switching jobs right in the middle of an economic crisis there is not much security. In addition, in my country you get your salary covered up to 80% if you pay for extra unemployment insurance. I was stupid and did not sign up for this earlier - and you have to be a member for 12 months to get the benefit. If you do not have unemployment insurance or have not been a member for 12 months, you get <900 USD per month (where I live this is not enough to make rent).


Many tech jobs start with a 3 month "fire at will" period. They might just give the OP one day and then fire.

I hope it works out though.


And in most US states that never changes. You can generally be fired without cause all the time.

I've got a 4 year record of bi annual performance reviews where I've gotten 120% of the available performance based bonus, but I dont have tenure or anything. If my boss decides he hates my shoes and fires me, Im gone.


In a weird way, getting 120% of the available bonus works against you, in terms of demonstrating you're an excellent worker. Clearly, there's more "available" than the stated amount, which demonstrates the whole thing is a fiction to make people feel good. I mean, in the real world, 100% is the maximum of any thing, then there are made-up phrases like "giving 110%" or "8 days a week" or "120% of the available bonus." And of course, if you got 120%, who's to say your co-worker didn't get 150%?

Not trying to bust your balls, but it's kind of weird you felt it was necessary to randomly humblebrag about your performance bonuses.


To be fair, I dont think it's a humblebrag. If they worked at the same company as all of us, it might make sense to call it a humblebrag but, there are enough people around here in much better positions than those that get bonuses like these for it to make sense to brag about. That is, I (and probably most people on yc) would feel embarrassed talking about my best accolades when there are people on here that were able to retire by 30, work with Freeman Dyson, or found some successful company.

I think they just used themselves as an example to provide the support that their argument wasn't coming from someone who values doing the bare minimum (which I've seen argued on yc a few times).


It's not a humblebrag in terms of dollars. The idea being conveyed is that he (she?) should be unfire-able due to excellent performance (that's the brag), but that at-will employment negates the unfire-ability. I'm expressing doubt that 120% bonus is actually evidence he's such a great employee.


I think you may be missing how the bonus system works at many companies. 100% is defined as the maximum contractual bonus for consistently excellent performance but there is a separate discretionary maximum for exceptional cases beyond the contracted bonus. This discretionary bonus cap is often on the order of 50% higher than the contractual bonus cap. It is for when the maximum bonus is insufficient to reflect individual performance. A 120% bonus typically denotes a discretionary bonus beyond the contracted maximum, which almost always implies you are doing amazing work beyond the scope of your role.

Details vary by company of course but the tiny percentage of people who earned >100% bonuses at companies I've worked at were exceptional performers.


If the cap is an extra 50%, why did this guy only get 20% extra? In fact, he had 8 chances to get the actual max, and failed every time.

That's not the point. The point is performance reviews are poorly correlated with actual job performance, they aren't designed to measure job performance.

Would you hire someone knowing nothing other than they got 120% bonus at their previous job?


Yeah, once I got on the management side I learned the whole "oh you got 100% of the bonus but our numbers feel off so the bonus pool is only 75% funded so you only get 75%". It's all made up and we have to balance a dozen situations and someone is always going to get screwed. To be honest I usually give bigger bonuses to the people who are already underpaid, which is what I suspect may have happened to GP.

It's also why VP and above bonuses are written into our employment contracts -- we know better.

Also yeah, definition of "weird flex but ok".


They have shipped out the laptop I think you're in good shape. Seems like they might pay you for some down time since the can't set you up right away but you're probably be paid for all.


I was in the process of a job search while working at a foundering startup back in December. Interview processes were paused over the holidays and scheduled to resume in early January. Jan. 2, first day back at the old job, I was laid off. Had my final interview at another startup the following week and got an offer. Started end of January. We're all WFH for at least 2 weeks, and it's beginning to look like much longer than that. We've got connections to the retail sector, so I do wonder about that, but we have seen at least a short-term uptick in activity, presumably due to hoarding. Fingers crossed we all make it through this.


Sorry to hear. I'm in a similar situation. I left Microsoft and moved to a new country a few months ago without having a job lined up specifically because I wanted time off for burnout and to learn development (my background is in QA and Program Management). I'll stay the course for self-teaching development but I may need to expedite the job hunt in lieu of the recession. We can commiserate together :)


> But in February, there wasn't any sign of an economic downturn. Everyone was enjoying the bull market.

First: I’m super sorry about what you’re going through and I hope things work out with your new employer.

Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy.

On an individual level, that excuse is unfortunate, but the individual level doesn’t matter much (except for the individual, of course). On an institutional and a governance level, we’re likely to excuse the failures of our leaders because we ourselves weren’t paying attention.


>Second: I worry that “nobody could have known” will be the narrative. A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode and that the prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse. Super uncontroversial. And like, I’m just a guy.

Big same. I'm just another software engineer, albeit one with a taste for international news and a few China-focused specialists & one or two PRCs citizens that I follow on Twitter.

This was predictable in early-mid Jan. Once the pics and discussion of the overloaded Wuhan hospitals and the measures the PRC had to take hit the English language world, it was pretty bloody obvious. The news had hit the popular English language papers by Jan 27[1], although I was reading about it somewhat earlier - Jan 12 at the latest[2]. A timeline can be found in [3]. Anyway, by Feb 1, institutions with a specialty in disease control should have been going full bore to address the incoming wave.

Our public health officials, the officials they advise, and other health institutions should be held up to scrutiny and not covered with glory dust just because they had to act by the pace of events.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933719/Incredible-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/11/china-mystery-... [3] https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...


> A very large portion of my circles was aware that COVID was about to explode (...)

Your circles seem to be the exception then. There are a lot of factors that affect personal perception of such matters, like proximity to inflicted areas, professional background (ex: medical), experiencing similar events in the past, etc.

In hindsight it seems obvious that the world wasn't paying attention. But it took until February for western countries to realize the epidemic was already out of control, and the markets reacted.

> prevention measures would either drastically slow the economy or not be taken and the impact would be worse

Anyone that knew this last month without a doubt could've made tons of money shorting positions in the stock market.


He's probably talking about the rationalist community, and people did.

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1233174331133284353


I assure you I am not talking about the aggressive curve-fitting community. Just...normal people. Nobody famous, not even any Chinese nationals. Just...fairly normal, if tech-worker-y, Americans and Europeans.


By and large, both the general public and organizations were caught by surprise. If most people knew, the stocks would have tanked in January, not these past few days.

Which brings an interesting question: how many of all the people you know who knew, yourself included, put their skin in the game and are now rich from the options they bought in January? If it is not many, I would argue it is better to say people suspected or feared, not that they knew.


It's a real big stretch from "certain enough to take personal precautions" to "is a stock head and wants to throw down puts". You get that normal people don't really give a damn about the stock market, yeah? Put a gun to my head and I can't tell you how a put works and I don't really care--I'm too busy buying a house.

I did, however, rebalance almost entirely out of stocks three weeks ago and while I am not "now rich", my portfolio is doing a hell of a lot better than most folks'.


+1 to this. I'd been worrying since mid-late January, and aggressively telling people since early February that this was going to be bad... but even a week ago, tons of people that I talked to were thinking that this was such an overreaction and would blow over. Just couldn't believe it, even after seeing how it went in Italy, a majority of people said the US would never have that problem.

I didn't even know that a "put" on the stock market was a thing until last week, and am not particularly interested in figuring out how to do that... But I did back out of buying a car because I thought I'd be better off to have the cash when this gets bad, and here we are now in this thread... Maybe next time (hopefully there isn't one) I'll figure out more of what a "put" actually is and how to get one


Out of curiosity, do you have any plan when and why to go back in stocks? I'm currently 20% stocks (ETFs really), 5% bonds, 75% cash. I only plan to continue buying stocks and bonds every month, as usual (so, DCA).


https://www.capitalgroup.com/individual/planning/investing-f...


50% tends to be near enough the bottom for these kinds of things that that's when I'll rebalance my retirement fund. I'm going to keep my brokerage out longer as I have shorter-term needs for that money.


I pretty much agree with you on this, my wife is a Doctor so I got to overhear a lot of calls where the CDC and the local Doctors/Hospitals and none of them saw this as obviously exploding into a pandemic. Rather they made decisions as it progressed.

That being said, I did take what I felt was a risk at the time and shorted Royal Caribbean and Carnival Cruise lines which payed off, but I was not certain that at the time it would (if I was I would have risked a whole lot more), I went off a hunch once I started seeing them close the ports to cruise ships. I am now buying those stocks because I think their hit from CORVID-19 is priced in, but we will see. It's all a guessing game on good hunches. Hardly anybody saw it exploding (short of the doctors on the ground in Wuhan) and everyone was hoping that it was going to be contained in China just like SARS was.

The reality is, Doctors and the CDC do not make decisions on news reports they make them on papers and data from people on the ground. That data was actively being suppressed to some extent by China until it was too late. Sure there where rouge Chinese doctors in the media warning us (and they where right), but that is a thin straw to base policy on. Once the true data was out and the CDC could base guideline on it, it was already too late.

Also to note I am sorry and pray for those of you that are affected by this.


A lot of this seems to be "I told you so". And yet, I have a hard time believing anybody could have foreseen an almost complete shutdown of the global economy over this. A lot of the "we saw that coming" can be boiled down to "it will be bad".

But even if you saw it coming, how does this help now? Right, it doesn't.

That someone's circles saw it coming doesn't help. Wht you can do now helps. Unfortunately a lot of these folks are lacking in that department IMHO.


SARS1 didn't have this effect. MERS didn't have this effect. And a number of other recent viruses didn't either.

But every time there were people "predicting" the worst. This time they were coindentially correct. Not because they "knew", but because chance.


Trump announced the China travel ban on Jan 31 - effective Feb 2nd - which was over 6 weeks ago. Even then he was called names and the "it's just the flu" mantra started. Huge segments of the world saw what was coming and started moving, most didn't move far enough fast enough.

Ref: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117403/trump-coronaviru...


Trump had no backup plan for when, not if, a case went undetected in the US. He didn't start stockpiling masks and ventilators until much later.


I agree. He didn't move far enough fast enough. The public's awareness and preparation was slowed by the media (NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, others) screaming "it's just the flu!" until just a couple weeks ago so most weren't prepared. :(

My comment was in response to people not realizing this was a thing a month ago.


I think it was other news organizations than the ones you listed that were the primary culprits in screaming "it's just the flu"


Read https://twitter.com/balajis starting early February and documented many of the posts. He was one of the earliest to call out their BS and anti-scientific agenda.

And then the House tried to remove Trump's travel ban: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/12/house-committee-vot...

You can play politics or you can look at reality.


https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/fcdckgt368/econTabReport.pdf

page 9 Do you think the coronavirus epidemic is a national emergency? yes, democrats 81%; no, republicans 53%

page 18 Which cable news network do you watch the most? Democrats, 42% CNN, 48% MSNBC; Republicans, 89% Fox News

Trump himself has been downplaying it this whole time. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-statements-about-th...


That Politico article is about the travel ban involving Muslim countries, not China or any Asian country. Do you read your own sources?


Look at the date of the article very closely and realize that it covered all travel bans as noted in the subhead:

"The legislation would void all of Trump's executive actions establishing travel restrictions."


My "circles" (which include a friend married to a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor who had been in Wuhan last October) knew that COVID-19 was possibly a serious concern, but also "knew" that it could have wound up as another SARS (not that SARS wasn't terrible, but it was also very localized in terms of overall impact).

I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.


>I don't think we should excuse the many failures of our leaders, but I also don't think the now-obvious economic impact of this crisis was that clearcut even a month ago.

Good way of looking at it.


Maybe you should have told every single government in the world, because none predicted that it would have this huge of an impact. SARS1 pretty much stayed in China, MERS pretty much stayed in the Middle East. It was only when a country like Italy was caught by surprise that governments started to consider very far reaching measures.


Depending on the country and an observer’s cynicism, I think the majority of nations understood early on that it was already far too late to significantly dampen the impact of such a deadly and infectious virus.

The United States government was thoroughly informed of this risk via Operation Dark Winter but never geared up for it - perhaps this is best managed by states once the infection crosses the border, but preparations on those levels weren’t completed either.


It’s not possible to predict the future, so I disagree with your stance that it was obvious a virus could cause an economic downturn like this. It comes across as victim blaming to me.


If we had not taken prevention measures, the economic impact would be worse? I'm very skeptical of this. Keeps in mind that the disease has a 2-4% mortality rate among hospitalized patients, and the real rate is very likely to go down, not up, since most sick people do not immediately go to the hospital and there is an unknown-but-surmised-be-very-large population of infected people with mild symptoms.

There is a real chance that our lockdown will kill more people through stress-induced heart attacks, suicides, and general fallout from food and income insecurity than the virus would have.

My only takeaway from all of this is that our hospital system is really, really bad at handling any kind of temporary spike in disease or death. And I'm upset with our governor for panicking and putting the entire service industry out of a job, which may actually cause harm to them in great numbers beyond a probably sub-1% chance of dying from a flu-like illness.


2% to 4% is the number of hospitalized people that die IF they get care.

If the health system is overrun, and there are zero ICU beds or ventilators available, that number will go up quickly. THAT is the problem we are trying to avoid.


The numbers matter here. Go up by how much?


Look at the difference between Italy's death rate and South Korea's.


2-4% is huge for a novel highly infectious disease. Our healthcare system is not prepared for that at all, without aggressive measures that's potential for hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US.


Fully agreed - but I'm wondering why the solution has been less bars, not more temporary hospitals, ala China.


Temporary hospitals are being set up, but we simply don't have the capacity to build life–saving machines fast enough to handle the no-social distancing scenario. Neither did China, really.


Having live television feeds of people dying in the streets (like in Wuhan) would absolutely crater the economy and cause massive social unrest.


Free market knew of this possibility, but pocketed the profits for shareholders instead of making investments to prepare. And the government didn't intervene. This is a culture problem. We weren't listening.

SARS experienced countries made very different decisions, over the past few months, and since 2003.


Tough spot... best of luck to you. Hopefully that job still comes through.


Same boat. Don't panic. From my end, I'm due to start a new gig on monday and everyone at my new client/employer currently has out of office replies when I email them about the procedure for the first day....

Which is brilliant... :/

Fortunately they're rather a hitech company so I hope we can just work remotely.

Still have to go and collect laptop and rsa certs and such though...


I was doing drone control software (RPi based) for a startup that ran out of funding last November. They told me that they were going to keep looking for investors/funding and if they got money they'd call me back to work immediately. And there were some promising signs in December/January that they might get some funding. So, since I liked them, they liked me, and the gig was fun I figured I'd put off looking for other work until later in the Spring just to see if they get the funding. Welp, now I really doubt they're going to get that funding.


Name of startup? This sounds fun.


It was fun. But it pretty much doesn't exist in any economically viable way at this point.


I am in a similar boat. Resigned just before this hit. I am still working out my notice at my current job and my new employer assures me everything is fine, but I still feel like I picked the craziest possible time to finally move after eight years at one company! Oh well, fingers crossed for both of us.


Dejavu. I'm in exactly the same situation.


Best of luck to you; we should remember to sync up in a few months to see how things went.


I was in a similar situation. My new employer revoked my job offer on the day I was supposed to start.


I'm in the exact same situation.


This is probably a long shot - and I'm sure you'll see quite a few posts like this over the coming weeks - but I'm going to swallow my pride and ask nonetheless.

I've been a data entry clerk for the past twenty years, working for a major bookmaker in Northern Ireland. With the coronavirus pandemic hitting recently, many businesses have decided to lay off large numbers of staff. I've just become one of the unfortunate victims of one of these layoffs today, with a mortgage to pay, a wife and two young children to support.

I've also been programming, in my own time, over the past seven years or so, in Python 3, Javascript and PHP mainly. Over that time I've developed a number of tools that were used in my former place of employ, to scrape data from websites and automate the process of data entry. I've also built some online tools in Javascript and PHP for scraping/munging data. Most recently, until the coronavirus hit and unemployment loomed, I was working on a Mario/NES style level editor in HTML5 and a random tile generator for building platformer levels, while I learned C++ and wrote a platforming engine to develop a platform game for release on Steam.

I've placed a number of these tool in public repos on github. You can check them out at:

https://github.com/Zleet

I've also got a resume ready to go for anyone that's interested. What I'm looking for is any remote programming job that fits my skillset and will enable me to keep a roof over my family's head and food in the cupboard for the next few months.

I apologise for posting something like this here. I've been reading hacker news for years now. It's my favourite website. But, along with many other people right now, I'm in a pretty bad place and I've got several little people relying on me to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. Be assured that any job offer right now would be gratefully accepted.

Cheers,

Miktor


Hey Miktor,

It was quite a while ago now, but I got into software from almost the exact same place you're in now: I'd been laid off in my previous career, and I needed a job really bad. I'd been hacking stuff on the side, and I used that as my resume. I found that Stack Overflow Jobs had a lot of remote options, as well as sites like We Work Remotely. It's worth applying to a handful of companies and writing a good cover letter just telling them your story and how excited you are to move into software. I think you'll be successful.

Best of luck!


Apply for jobs at defense contractors, they're always looking for people that know C++. It will not be glamorous work, but I think it might be a good bet for you. Raytheon Missile Systems is hiring in Tuscon Arizona, inquire about remote work. Also, I recommend you learn SQL (just learn SQL Server or Postgres).


OP specified they live in Northern Ireland so it is unlikely they will be able to get a job with an American defense contractor as a non-citizen who can't obtain a security clearance.


This is correct.

I live in Tucson and am quite familiar with Raytheon (having been recruited and know numerous employees as they are the biggest employer here). They are not going to be hiring remote developers from Ireland. In all likelihood, they will not be hiring any remote developers anywhere, unless those people will be relocating to Tucson and being on premise once this calms down.


Hmm. How are environments like this handling the WFH status quo?

My completely naive/distant presumption of sites like these is that they are fundamentally incompatible with the security concessions inherent to remote work.


What toomuchtodo said. Plus, some of those places fought it as long as they could.


Critical staff live onsite. Everyone else goes home and doesn’t work.


Defense contractors are also notoriously old school in management, and remote positions are very hard to come by (also due to security concerns).


They should have various tiers for security levels. What is often the challenge is that the most interesting work requires citizenship + clearance. Since OP is fine with rote work there might be some possibilities here.


I work for a government contractor on a tier of clearance far below what's used in defense, and we are not even allowed to take any US Gov't issued equipment outside of the US, much less actually work from there.

No way in hell anyone in Ireland is going to be doing US Gov't contracting work, unless they are on the US Embassy grounds.

Sorry. (Government contracting is exactly what the original recommendation describes..unglamorous but steady, FWIW)


I know Lockheed Martin is also hiring for software developers in the East US, might be worth a look. A job is a job, and the culture at the company doesn't seem too bad.


I've never seen a job listing for C++ development that doesn't require professional experience in that language.


I've never bothered with the requirement of professional experience when applying. Still got interviews and offers.


Then the only way to get professional experience without it is to apply to them anyway and it’s a pointless qualifier.


You could check out Stripe, they are hiring for both Remote and they have a Dublin office.

https://stripe.com/jobs/search?t=engineering%2Cproduct-and-t...

Disclaimer: Just started at Stripe.


Hi Miktor,

I'm really sorry to hear about your situation! I'm in Northern Ireland too and I'm lucky to be employed (for now) and WFH. All I can do is ask around for you if you drop me an e-mail!

Cheers,

Martijn


Thanks very much Martijn. Will email my resume. Cheers.


To go with JavaScript and PHP, definitely pick up some SQL (doesn't matter much which variety, they're all similar enough). That can get you a foot in the door for "mostly premade CMS with some custom extension" jobs. It's not glamorous, but it's what a lot of local businesses are looking for (often even if they don't know it yet). My tool of choice for such work is Craft CMS (https://craftcms.com).


Well, here's a long shot for a long shot (this isn't me): https://twitter.com/johnmclear/status/1238603850417934337 Not sure if it fits your skill set but perhaps worth checking out? At least to hold you over?


As someone else posted above, I also work remotely at Stripe. I'd be happy to refer you. Send me an email if you're interested.


Hi Miktor, if you'd like to be contacted you should add contact information in your "about" section.


hi there,

Fellow NI resident here

I can recommend joining the NI tech slack if you want, there's a jobs channel and plenty of other people who'd be willing to give you advice. https://nitech.herokuapp.com

all the best in the coming weeks and months for both you and your family


Hi Reid.

Already on it, thanks. Posted something in freelance and jobs channels yesterday, going to try again today.


All: a user emailed with the brilliant suggestion that HN do a "Who Is Hiring Right Now?" thread. We'll do that soon; maybe tomorrow. This will specifically be for jobs that are ready to hire, and able to onboard, quickly.

If any of you have suggestions for how to make this most helpful under current conditions, please share them. I'll check this thread later tonight.


Very interested as someone looking to work with other HN folks, ready to hire people who could onboard and start during the work from home mandate (we had an employee onboard Monday from their home).


It might be helpful to highlight whichever of the following are feasible:

- Remote work (even across the country, with no expectation of travel)

- Short-term work (like a few months, no expectation of staying for > 1 year)

- How long the employer roughly expects to be able to provide the job in their projection of the current economic conditions

- Rough company size, given the US Congress just passed a bill concerning sick leave that might not apply to companies with under 50 or 500 employees [1]

Also, less certain about the following, but:

- Maybe highlighting contractor possibilities would be good too? In case the additional flexibility in e.g. work hours is better for workers, or in case it's easier for companies not to have to worry about insurance, etc.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/paulmcleod/coronavirus-...


Perfect time to test an alternate way to conduct interviews too. Give several of the second round candidates paid work on something you actually need to have done (perhaps pick tasks that are a sprint away). It should be a great test of both who can produce working code with tests (production code is way different than white-board pseudocode) as well as who can stay on task remotely. I can't imagine paying three people for the same work would cost more than flying them to your office and torturing them for a day or two. The one downside I can see is that currently out-of-work developers should be happy for a bit of 1099 work. Those who are looking to change jobs may not be so amenable.


This isn’t new. It’s called contract-to-hire and it’s great.


It’s now I got my last three role too. I always ask if I can do it that way to prove myself because I don’t have a traditional background (entirely self taught). I’ve had jobs say no, but I’ve had enough say yes that it got my career to a place where I’ve been very happy.


Right (I didn't say it was new). It's easier for someone who's unemployed to work under a short-term contract so I was encouraging employers to use "contract-to-hire" instead of a tech-interview.

Funny story: I actually did contract-to-hire by accident at one of my jobs. They wanted to hire me but couldn't fit me in their salary scale so I was a contractor for a while. They actually needed about three people and agreed that I could work as many extra hours as I was willing to on the other projects. So I worked 9 hours on my contract software project and most days about another 5-6 hours on the other embedded systems projects (I was young and an early riser, so I still got home before 1800 to play with my kids and have dinner). After about 2 months I got called into the presidents office and was offered a job with a better salary than the rate I'd asked for and was told I had made more than the president the last pay period and it raised the board's eye-brows. Still worked 10-11 hours a day for quite a while (and some ridiculous bursts in years after) since it was a start-up but I really was just trying to impress them enough to get hired.


As a non American, may I ask why the sick leave policy only applies to companies with 50-500 employees? I couldn't find explanations there. Exempting small companies is often done as they likely cannot pay for this measure, but why exempt large companies too?


Small companies with less than 50 employees are exempt because most of them cannot afford to pay employees for two weeks without receiving any labor and continue as a going concern. This is the same reason why most regulations exempt small businesses, because without it the only companies that could last would be mega corporations.

On to companies with more than 500 employees. They are being exempt because they are large enough to afford paying for their own employees to go on sick leave with it only affecting the profit for the year rather than sinking the company.

Now personally I think that 500 number should be 5,000 instead but at the end of the day any line you draw is arbitrarily arrived at (think some countries banning gatherings larger than 10, while others picked larger than 100).


You'd have to ask the Republicans who apparently demanded this; I don't know what logic was behind it (if any).


As the owner of a fully remote, revenue-funded, and profitable startup that wants to hire, my concern is one that won't be particularly well received. I don't want to hire people, yet, because they're still thinking that https://levels.fyi is realistic. I'd rather wait a few rough months, have the pool of talent grow rapidly and people will start realizing that maybe paying $350k to a green React dev isn't very sustainable.

We're going headlong into a recession and I imagine an overwhelming number of firms are going to take the same stance.


IMO, if you are fully remote, you might look at it the other way around. The ridiculous salaries are mostly in California and one or two other places.

Those places might realize that they can get react devs for a dime a dozen out of bootcamps all over the country for a third of that in a few months once they have let people do fully remote work for a while.

The smart thing would seem to be to hire them now before the companies with bigger pockets start driving remote salaries up in the other 45 states.


My bet: remote-only for most companies won't last. If there's one thing I've learned over the past 8 years running this company, is most people really struggle at remote. They don't have the dedicated work space, they lack the necessary self-discipline, and many people really start to falter without face time and social interaction. I suspect once this virus is solved, we'll see a flood back to in-person jobs.

React was just a glib example anyway, I purposefully stay far away from anything trendy. I'm hiring people who are data smart, can think in SQL, and fully understand that AI/ML/NLP is smoke and mirrors bullshit in the vast majority of contemporary applications.

Anyway, I guess my broader point is: When every single PE/VC is battening down the hatches, firms are preemptively laying off people by the thousands before their clients even start missing payments, and a large number tech employees are in mortgages/leases they cannot sustain without those aforementioned salaries? We're about to see a tech bust and housing crash far worse than dot-com. Things are going to get really bad. Programmers are about to be competing head-to-head with front-of-house restaurant employees for gig-economy jobs. Thus, I can afford to wait a bit to find the right people.


Haha, glib examples indeed.

I agree with you about remote reverting to a large extent.

I have been working 90% remote for a while, but most of my co-workers have not and it is driving them crazy after only a few days.

We know that a large subset of companies would prefer to have visibility and control.

I still think that even if only 5% of the tech employees forced to work remotely for the first time these next couple months get a taste for it, it will change the landscape of remote work in a noticeable way.

Even if just a few decent sized employers see and acknowledge good productivity in these next couple months and the talent pushes the issue, it could end up with a lot of 300k positions in california being replaced by 130k remote positions basically anywhere else.

After being forced to do it for a while, it's hard to imagine this not happening to some extent, especially in areas that aren't especially strongly affected by stock market news bites.


> "most people really struggle at remote"

I used to think that, but now that circumstances are forcing me to work remote, I'm amazed at how much I get done, even with the crap communication due to the overloaded VPN at work. And that's while also trying to homeschool two children.

Alright, this is a weird situation that's not comparable to anything else, but still, velocity seems remarkably high in my team.


Paying $350k to a junior just starting out isn't sustainable but those numbers look closer to what the numbers should like like or even be low. What your work is worth is a function of the level of value you produce so software developers are probably still ridiculously underpaid.

What is it that owners do that is worth billions exactly, when developers should be happy with less than the numbers you presented?


Those numbers are insane.


It’s kinda scary people with the ability to react and reduce suffering whilst also benefiting in kind are willing to exploit a global emergency and use that suffering to justify coming out a little ahead.


I see your point, but let's not attack each other like this here, especially not right now with stress and fear running so high. Better to treat this as an opportunity for an uptick in how well we treat each other.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


How is the post an attack?

He claimed his emotion (fear) towards a behavior that has been demonstrated by many in this chaotic environment.

I interpreted his post as an observation and experience rather than an attack.


>How is the post an attack?

Perhaps by asserting the OP is trying to "exploit" the situation by not wanting to pay Google wage rates at their small business?

I'm not sure I understand why the business owner "deserves" to take the financial hit for the sake of a new employee. The market will sort it out.


He doesn't have to pay Google wage rates. He also doesn't have to wait it out for a bigger candidate pool so he can 'negotiate' lower baselines.

Business owner is using a turtle strategy. Opportunistic yes but also seeing people as numbers on a spreadsheet.

OP stated that he feels fear. Fear is a reasonable reaction when a Business Owner closes doors for conversation to wait out catching google 'talent' at a bargain.

Some people are in a situation where they need work now or very soon.


>but also seeing people as numbers on a spreadsheet.

Looking at numbers in spreadsheets is how you stay in business.

>Some people are in a situation where they need work now or very soon.

Then they should lower their rates until they find a market clearing salary.

I'm flabbergasted at the argument that a business should pay a potential employee whatever they demand, because that person "needs work". It flies in the face of all logic.


> I'm flabbergasted at the argument that a business should pay a potential employee whatever they demand, because that person "needs work". It flies in the face of all logic.

That wasn't the argument.


Thank you.

I think the general issue with my post is that the moderators want this to be a "place of ideas". So that tends towards the appearance of decorum being more important here than actually treating people better in the current crisis.


It will give his business a better shot of surviving. This also means a better shot to continue paying current employees


So, I am sure there are few of us that have lived through the dotcom and 9/11 bust.

That being said, if history repeats itself, there is a decent chance some of these jobs will be short-lived, then move on to the next, which also will not last, and a cooling off period.

I am not trying to be negative, I just think it is wise to consider not just the job, but the industry, its customers, and how it handles its cashflow, and how that relates to limited physical contact for the foreseeable future.


One could also call that a positive, since short-term work to bring in immediate money is what a lot of people are needing right now.


This could drive a lot of interest. I just wanted to highlight the importance of mentioning the geographical location of where the employer will be recruiting from (remote global, remote US, remote EU, etc.), because I’ve seen many companies ignore this detail and it’s a complete waste of time to write personalized résumés and letters of application, only to be told that they can’t hire outside the USA, despite the fact that I’ve incorporated myself as the equivalent of an LLC in order to make it easier for them to complete the process.


If you've incorporated as an LLC equivalent, they are no longer hiring you but engaging in a business - business transaction, which is governed by contract law instead of employment law. That doesn't always make it easier (and also usually comes out of a completely different part of a company's budget).


https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job

There is an issue in my repo with a really good spreadsheet contaning a lot of companies. I was planning to import that but havent got time and now im stuck in Japan with just my phone.


Woah, that's great resource. I just added https://remoteleaf.com and created a PR -> https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/pull/628


I would love to manual curate every remote job going to get posted on this new thread and release it for free just like I did for an earlier thread. https://remoteleaf.com/whoishiring


I would be very interest in a variant that's looking for non-fulltime. It's getting tougher as a freelancer too


Have you looked at the freelancer threads that the whoishiring account posts monthly? They don't get as much frontpage time but they're there.

Edit: if anybody has an idea about how to let more people know about those, as well as the "Who Wants To Be Hired" threads, I'd like to hear it. The problem is that frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN, and it's hard to justify using 3 of those slots for whoishiring posts.


Link for those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465475


Thank you! I hadn't seen


For those in Singapore? http://bit.ly/2WkQj45

- just a simple google form and spreadsheet?


If I can help anyway with rezi - please let me know. https://rezi.io


This would be an extremely valuable addition. Please consider it.


Just found yesterday out that I'm being laid off at the end of the month.

Sadly, I wholeheartedly believe that the owners are using the coronavirus as an excuse to close their already-failing company. The company has been in slow-motion dissolution for the better part of a year, and now they're blaming the entire thing on the virus outbreak so that they have a narrative to tell that covers up some of the mismanagement that makes the closure of their company look bad. Now they have an effective smokescreen that shows that the closure was "outside of their control".

I have no doubt that many other companies will take advantage of this opportunity to close without the shame or stigma of having closed a failing company. There is almost no downside to using this as a guilt-free chance to rapidly shut down at a time where employees need stability more than ever.

All of that said, the company was conscientious enough to give us all two weeks' notice, pay out our PTO plans (that might just be required by law, though), and additionally pay out any pending bonuses to employees that had been agreed upon. They certainly didn't have to do all of that (even if some parts are just them following the law), and I appreciate them for taking those particular steps to help all of us transition to new positions.

Luckily, I started looking for jobs nearly a month ago and had begun preparing my resume and materials back in December, so I've already had a good number of interviews and am waiting to hear back about two positions in particular.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed and doing a lot of email refreshing, but if I'm being really honest it seems grim. I've already heard that many other companies are implementing a hiring freeze with the virus outbreak, etc. I can't help but shake the feeling that I should have started applying about a month earlier.


> Sadly, I wholeheartedly believe that the owners are using the coronavirus as an excuse to close their already-failing company.

If you feel the company has been failing, then I doubt this is an excuse. It's just the straw that is breaking the proverbial camel's back.


Totally valid point. I think they were simply surviving by merit of the fact that the market was good, and really any major speedbump would have caused the company to fail. It's an excuse in the sense that they're not addressing that the reason coronavirus has destroyed the business is because it was built on a poor foundation.


Why do you think they owe you that? You think they don't cry enough when they go home to it? Of what purpose would this info help you or anyone?


I don't feel like they owe it to me at all – I'm just being honest about what I think is happening. I know that to some degree they probably even believe that the virus was the cause of the closure. This is my opinion, of course, but to me it seems clear that this is all about them having an opportunity to close that leaves them with a narrative of how it happened that lets them sleep better at night, which frankly I think is something they deserve. They've worked hard - the company has succeeded at times, but in its present form it wasn't ready to handle the relatively minor turmoil we've experienced from the virus thus far, but that's not to diminish how hard the closure is on them at all.

Sorry if I'm coming off as if I'm bitter or frustrated with the ownership. I'm truly not intending that - I just generally have found the whole process interesting, the way in which the narrative has been spun toward the coronavirus causing the closure, etc. I legitimately feel for these people who I have worked for for several years and think of as not just bosses, but friends. I might be letting some of my own personal emotions bleed into my writing since I'm frankly a little stressed about my own situation, so I apologize if I'm giving the wrong impression here.


To be a good human being? Why does every interaction have to be run through a cost benefit analysis?


A lot of weak companies will go belly up during an economic crisis. It isn’t that the crisis made them weak, just that being weak meant they couldn’t weather it.

In how they rationalize their failure, that is something people just do I guess.


Rationalizing your failure is just good marketing.


Very sorry to hear your news.

I heard from more than a few people that during the 2008 financial crisis, some strong companies laid off low-performers. They used the financial crisis as an excuse, to protect the company from potential lawsuits.


> pay out our PTO plans

https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/pto-payout-laws-by-st...


Have they confessed how they are specifically linking the hysteria with the shutdown of the company?


Not to scare anyone, but myself and many of my highly capable friends were laid off after the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000's. It took many of us 1, 2 sometimes 3 years to get back to the same level of job we had before. Prepare for a long haul. Get over your ego immediately and take whatever job you can get now, while you continue to look for work in the software industry. I drove a city bus (surprisingly to me, I loved it.)


Still, in 2000 the situation was quite different. IT companies had been hiring like crazy based on the assumption that infinite Internet growth would require infinite resources. And then, it turned out it was all a bubble and most of the IT workforce was not needed.

Right now there is not much fundamentally wrong with the economy, there is just a temporary setback because of the Corona lockdown. Things will go back to normal after the epidemic is over, provided that it doesn't last too long and except for some companies who were not doing too well beforehand already.


> Right now there is not much fundamentally wrong with the economy, there is just a temporary setback because of the Corona lockdown.

A very bold claim there. There are a lot of things 'wrong' with the economy, starting with negative-yielding sovereign debt, corporate debt, repo markets, politics interfering with Central bank decisions, PE levels and ending with 30% stock market gains in 2019.


Is it different though, if you zoom out far enough?

Raising money a year ago was so ridiculously easy, every company I had any visibility in to just threw money at every problem they encountered. Hired like crazy, to satisfy their egos, and to keep up with their peers. Growth over profitability.

I'm being hyperbolic to some degree, every company is different. And certainly no one is adding a dotcom to their name in hopes of raising more cash with less revenue. Or maybe that's exactly what Casper and WeWork and the like were doing.

I think once we get a bit more perspective (10 years from now) it'll be a lot easier to answer these questions.


>IT companies had been hiring like crazy based on the assumption that infinite Internet growth would require infinite resources. And then, it turned out it was all a bubble and most of the IT workforce was not needed.

How are you confident that this isn't exactly what's happening now, and the virus was a catalyst?

People have been talking about the froth, seriously, for a couple years. Theranos, WeWork, SoftBank, the recent IPO busts...


Oddly enough this is the story of many bus drivers I talk too.

Stressed out, changed careers, became bus drivers and _love_ it. Mostly related to meeting people and not having goals but a proper timetable to relate too.


I found something by the English philosopher Alan Watts later that was absolutely true for me:

"Imagine, too, if you were a bus driver. Bus driver is ordinarily, ordinarily considered an absolutely harassed person. You've got to watch out for all the laws, all the competing traffic. The cops, the people coming on board giving their fares and he has to give them change and if he has it in his head that this is work, it will be hell. But let's suppose he has a different thing in his head.

Supposing that he has the idea that moving this enormous conveyance through complicated traffic. It is a very, very subtle game, and he has the same feeling about it that you might have if you were playing the guitar or dancing. And so he goes through that traffic avoiding this, and avoiding that and taking the affairs like this and he makes a music of the whole thing. Well he's not going to be tired out at the end of the day. He's going to be full of energy when he gets through his job."


> Get over your ego immediately and take whatever job you can get now, while you continue to look for work in the software industry. I drove a city bus (surprisingly to me, I loved it.)

Getting over your ego is always good advice :).

I also would suggest contracting if you are interested in that. It's a different experience than just coding, but you can learn a lot about the business side of this (marketing and getting paid). That's what I did around 2002.


This should be the top post.


It's too early for people to hear it. Wait until unemployment runs out.


That is the first lesson.

If this is your first year in the work force (2020), there is no unemployment.


Sourcegraph CEO here. We build universal code search for developers. Our team is all-remote (all countries and timezones OK). We're hiring for engineering, design, and product roles (+ others):

https://github.com/sourcegraph/careers/blob/master/job-descr...

https://github.com/sourcegraph/careers/blob/master/job-descr...

and https://github.com/sourcegraph/careers#readme for a full list of roles.

We are growing quickly and have not slowed down hiring pace (and don't plan to do so based on the Covid-19 crisis). The limiting factor for us is just ensuring we're adding engineers, PMs, designers, and managers in the right ratios.

If you are interested in joining our team, we would love to hear from you. Understanding the financial stability of the company you'll join is crucial, and as CEO I always walk all late-stage candidates through our internal metrics, burn, cash on hand, etc. We are doing very well and just announced a $23M Series B 2 weeks ago (https://medium.com/craft-ventures/why-we-invested-in-sourceg...).


I appreciate the information! Really enjoy the way you and your team have laid out your company information and resources in the links above.


Oh fantastic! I'll hit you up for the Customer Engineer. Love that kind of gig.


Sent!


I am still learning go (by myself). However have professional experience of >5 years. Would you recommend me going through the application and interview process. (I am happy to do it anyways :-) )


My predictions:

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a expert wrt. any of this. Don't listen to me ;=). It's all just speculation.

Companies which plan to downsize since a will will do it now, using COVID19 as a excuse.

Companies who have shifted some "bad consequences" into the future might now book them using COVID19 as a excuse for why they exist.

Companies who are already on the last straw will end now, (Such which without COVID19 might have survived a view more month up to a year but didn't see a chance for long term survival without a wonder).

A bunch of companies will go insolvent because COVID19 or following marked situation.

Because of this investors will be a bit more careful then normal, for most kinds of "fresh"/"new" startups it likely will not be a good time.

A small number of startups will have massive opportunities.

Marked will recover after at most 5 Years more likely 3.5 Years. At least if no further crisis happens (like WW3 or one of the massive Vulcan's going off).

Unrelated tip: Be a software engineer not "just" a programmer.


I spent most of the last 4 years running a startup that has proven to be the steepest or uphill battles. Struggling to find investors willing to take a chance in our space vs the trendier ones, struggling to convert slow moving clients, struggling to find engineers willing to work in our very unglamorous niche.

We’re a platform for designing and managing digital government processes for permitting and licensing.

After for years of pain, struggle, and doubt, we’ve had more inbound interest this week than ever before, and I feel incredibly lucky to have landed in that small number of startups.


I wish you well, and wish I had money to invest. When you grow enough to be looking for devops engineers, or sooner for just software engineers, look me up?


Want to wish you well, and its quite nice after all this sorrow to see that there are still nice ideas out there that are capable to not only survive but prosper.


A remark about the unrelated tip: A good chunk of companies, if not the majority, out there are looking for "just a programmer", noted by how much they advertise and place emphasis that you must know specific languages and software tools (especially if React or Java is gonna be part of your job title), over broader concepts like design patterns and algorithms.

This can be a problem when you want to sell yourself as a proper SWE, when the people in charge of the hiring pipeline only understand simple pattern-matching for "React Wizard with 5 years experience". And you can't be too picky about where you want to work, even though they might continue to be picky for employees. It unfortunately makes it so you either already have to already be a very good match for their specific needs, or you are compelled to lie on your resume.


There really is no silver bullet. If you really want to cover most cases, you have to

- Be generalist to cover all general concepts as you outlined

- Be a "programmer". That is knowledgeable in specific frameworks and languages

- Be data structure and algorithms guy. Most technical interviews involve them even if they are not needed in job.


There’s also the situations where the pandemic makes already mad situations even worse.

My parents run a cafe/restaurant in rural Australia that was already not doing too great, and they were looking to sell. Now, they’re truly fucked.


I'm sure Australia will be locked down soon. Maybe they can switch to a take-out model. Rural areas also need more grocery stores. Maybe sell bulk dry/canned goods since they already stock that.


What's the difference between a software engineer and "just" a programmer?


IMO engineer implies the same direction of thing it implies anywhere else: a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're building, an ability to rigorously model and optimize for the key aspects of your problem space and turn them into a solid design that meets them (whether that's performance, scaleability, reliability, latency, throughput, memory use, etc)

Programmer moreso implies just making things work, like a carpenter, by putting together something good enough using existing tools, possibly constrained by the tools available to you, in my opinion.

That said, everyone's understanding breaks down at some level of abstraction, so it's a spectrum, and you can be plenty productive and useful operating at a high level of abstraction.


At university I've studied Computer Science, that's what is written on my diploma and I consider myself a computer scientist even if I do lots of engineering and programming.

And it's not because of the diploma but because I am highly interested in the fundamentals of computer science, formal languages, automas, formal semantics, algebra, algorithms, data structures, coding theory, game theory, symbolic computation, graph theory.

But that doesn't make me an efficient coder since all that is required is to know a particular framework and programming language well and have lots of experience with it.

So, while I can understand the theory better, there will be many people coding faster and better than me.

I do however have the advantage of being able to pick up and learn stuff fast. Since I like to learn about new thinks I've also fiddled with lots of tech stacks and while I didn't mastered them, I've picked up enough to know what might be the best tool for a particular job.

So, beside stuff I use currently and which I am at a decent level, I am more of a jack of all trades. I don't know if anyone ever needs a jack of all trades at a company since everybody seems to be hiring highly specialized staff.

But I think my skill set might be of value when I'll be starting my own business.


To me software engineer means being able to translate business requirements into working solutions. That would be programmer by your definition. But I think it takes more than coding to do this well. Agile prescribes a conversation between the customer and the implementor.


In reality? It's totally nebulous, the terms aren't standardized, the distinctions aren't agreed upon, and people use these words -- developer, engineer, programmer -- interchangeably and/or inconsistently. You can't actually tell anything about someone by which term they use.

But in practice, as you'll see in this thread, some people have very strong (and totally arbitrary) opinions about those words, for reasons I cannot fathom. Knowing this exists is important, I guess, because some people will (maybe silently) judge you for using the wrong one in the wrong context, and you should at least be aware that can happen.


Lately "software engineer" feels a bit pretentious to me, with all the articles about how we're co-opting the word "engineer". I've started using the word "programmer" just to avoid the pretention and because it has a nice old-school ring to it.

I kind of doubt employers read it as such a technical term that it would factor into the hiring process.


Engineer seems too pretentious. Programmer seems....low trade?

If so, why not just use developer?


> Programmer seems....low trade?

Does it though? Is there such thing as a low-trade programmer? Even at the very entry level the job postings say "Junior Software Engineer". Programmer, to me, just rings of the 80s/90s, when code was a little more gristly and our field didn't have quite such an inflated ego. It has a vintage charm.

"Software Developer" is... fine. It's accurate and descriptive, just very boring (and a bit verbose; "developer" without "software" could be ambiguous so you usually need to say both).


> Does it though? Is there such thing as a low-trade programmer?

I am not implying that programming is low trade.

It's just nowadays, some people's perception of that term is being a code monkey.


My HR friends say it matters to some. That engineer looks better


The same as brick layer vs architect.


It involves solving and creating "engines", i.e. an app framework, a development platform, a game engine.


I forgot: Small non-software companies with 1-2 People will have a large hit, and likely many insolvencies.

E.g. it looks very bad for professional flea-marked trader or the small shop around the corner.


I run a few small SaaS side projects, and most of my clients are smaller shops that do web projects. So far I haven't had any cancellations, but I'm crossing my fingers over the next month or two :/


To be fair, it’s not just about finding an excuse. A company that’s struggling can run out of cash quickly during these events. Outside of SV that usually means bankruptcy of some sort.


All of your speculations seem entirely rational to me. Good analysis.


I'm a contract full-stack web developer. I've been "laid off" in that my last remaining client, who was already behind on her bills, told me to stop all work and she has no idea if/when she'll be able to pay her outstanding bills. I have no idea where next month's rent is going to come from.

If anybody needs some contract web dev done, check out my info at https://albright.pro/ and reach out ASAP. I will cut you one hell of a deal if you can at least help keep a roof over my head.


Are all your clients technical? If not, might want to consider a revamp of your site, make it more what your work will do for them (online presence) than your specific skill set (PHP, Drupal).


and remove the comment about sneaking an easter egg in to drupal core. If I were looking to hire a web developer I wouldn't want a sneaky one.


This.

Also, I would not worry about making your site high-tech. Plain HTML is fine. A wall of text is fine. But I would focus more on explaining what you can do ("build a website supporting X", "integrate Facebook, cell phone, IoT alerts"; whatever), not the tools or languages you use. For extra credit, link to a few small examples to showcase some of the cool features you can do. My 2c.

Good luck!


Can't stand sneaky developers! They'll try to pull a fast one on you for sure!


With all the time I have now, I'm certainly planning on sprucing up the site (which is currently just a flat HTML file) in the near future. When I had client work, it was sort of a "the cobbler's children have no shoes" sort of thing - I couldn't justify spending much free time on it. Perhaps that was faulty reasoning in hindsight.


If you're looking for something easy, I recommend the Hugo + GitHub + Netlify stack. That's how I'm currently migrating my squarespace website. It's still static HTML for the most part, and loads quickly.


Maybe I’m not the target market but I think it’s refreshing. No marketing BS. Just facts and some personality.


I'm so sorry to hear that happened. Good luck, and I'll send folks your way if I come across anything.


Hey I am also a Drupal developer. Check out drupalcontractors.com.

They got me a really good long-term contract at my dream Drupal job a few months ago. Good luck!


I am sorry to hear this. Would freelancing websites like Upwork be able to help? I hope things work out soon!


So sorry to hear this. Wish I had work to hire people for but I'm just another solo dev too. Good luck.


Sorry to say, your online presence is dreadfully low for a web developer.


Whether this is true or not, there's much better ways to phrase this.

> Your online presence is dreadfully low for a web developer.

Just dropping "Sorry to say" makes it sound less condescending.

> Your online presence is really low for a web developer.

Dreadfully -> really. Could argue that this changes the meaning somewhat, but I think the change is more in tone (again, less pretentious/condescending sounding) than in actual meaning.

> Your online presence is really low for a web developer, you should consider expanding it to increase your exposure/get more interviews

Explicitly making a suggestion is more constructive and makes the tone more friendly.


Not op but I appreciate the detailed rewrite. I do find your notes confusing though.

The claim that your last sentence is more constructive seems a bit weak. what is constructive about it, you basically just derived a logical consequence that touching the website yields a result? Also, what does 'expanding' even mean in this context? At no point did you give any constructive feedback (what should be improved, why is it low, why is it 'really low' etc).

on the note of 'really'. i find 'dreadfully' much more useful than 'really'. much stronger, gives a clearer indication of how bad it really is. 'really' doesn't do anything in this context, let alone be less pretentious.


> you basically just derived a logical consequence that touching the website yields a result?

The suggestion was pretty implicit in the original comment but I think making it explicit makes the tone of the comment friendlier. It shifts the focus away from just pointing out the bad to also focusing on how to be better.

> Also, what does 'expanding' even mean in this context? At no point did you give any constructive feedback (what should be improved, why is it low, why is it 'really low' etc).

Well sure, if I was the one actually giving the feedback, expanding even more would be even better. Even just the gestural focus on how to be better still does help the tone I think, though.

> on the note of 'really'. i find 'dreadfully' much more useful than 'really'. much stronger, gives a clearer indication of how bad it really is.

"dreadfully" is stronger than "really" but that doesn't make it clearer or more useful. "This is 5.6 bad points" is stronger than "this is 3.2 bad points", but without having any standard for what a "bad point" is, it doesn't really communicate any meaningful information. I think "dreadfully" similarly shifts the tone of the comment to being more negative without adding any real content.

> let alone be less pretentious

The pretentious-ness isn't as strong, but I think there's a hint of it that comes from using a "fancier" word without adding much actual content.


I used to think I needed an amazing online presence in order to sustain a freelance career. In hindsight, that time would have been better spent reaching out on job boards and building relationships with real people.


As a freelancer I've had zero online presence, not even LinkedIn. I have almost only ever got assignments through connections and reaching out to businesses myself.

Garret, just emailed you.


Seconding this; you don't need to pimp yourself out with a showcase, website, or linkedin (although linkedin does help you connect with a lot of recruiters and many of them will have contracts that are probably suitable).

Until a month ago, there was plenty of work for everyone. We will see what happens now, but don't waste time building a fancy website; go to some meetups (oh wait.. maybe don't) or speak with some recruiters and I'm sure the snowball will start to form :)


What do you mean by that?


Not the OP and I like your profile page. If you do find you want to mess with your profile page I personally had good luck with this theme: http://ttleadx.wpengine.com/freelancer/

Available here: https://themeforest.net/item/leadx-landing-page-marketing-wo...

I didn’t make it nor am I affiliated with it - but it was a quick and easy way of generating a polished freelancer page for myself.

Good ways to find gigs as a freelancer are toptal, moonlight, yunojuno, bark, stack overflow (get a good score by answering questions).

Bit of advice a friend gave and I have yet to try out: If you want to find local clients go to meetups, networking stuff where you would likely be the only software developer and people will likely be interested (obviously one for after this crisis has passed).

Good luck!


> http://ttleadx.wpengine.com/freelancer/

Sites that fade and pan in content as I scroll down the page can die in the hottest of hellfires. I do appreciate there are less harmful "modern" design cues I can take for the new version of my site, though.

> Good ways to find gigs as a freelancer are toptal, moonlight, yunojuno, bark, stack overflow (get a good score by answering questions).

I recall trying Moonlight a couple years ago and finding they could do absolutely nothing for me. Perhaps it's time to give them another look. I do have a SO presence, but their job board doesn't let me filter by contract positions. I will check out those other sites, though.

> Bit of advice a friend gave and I have yet to try out: If you want to find local clients go to meetups, networking stuff where you would likely be the only software developer and people will likely be interested (obviously one for after this crisis has passed).

That's a good tip. I used to be active in a couple groups around here but it got disrupted by some family stuff. I should get back into it again once this all blows over.


For what it is worth, I think your online presence is above the average.


I've lost my job as an Unity game programmer 2 months ago. I've found another one working as a C#/ASP.NET core developer for a big multinational wholesale chain. I work here since a month ago.

Payment is 2x better and I find Web stuff being more interesting and rewarding than game programming. Also it's less stressful and it's better to do something mainstream than working in a niche. It means more opportunities.

I've went through about 20 something job interviews until I had enough to chose from.

Good luck!


Thanks! And fantastic job on increasing both your salary (by 2x!) and your job satisfaction.


I stayed 6 years until the company closed. I did wanted to switch jobs since 2 years ago but I kept finding excuses.

Lessons learned both from my experience and from talking to other game programmers: working on games would not fit exactly your pre-made image of it, most jobs in gaming industry will be underpaid (my case) and require overworking (as others told me), it's fine to switch jobs if you are underpaid or bored, it's good to get out of your comfort zone, working in a large company is not as bad as it can seem for someone who only worked in small teams and the best way to get a raise is going to job interviews and trying to sell your skills the best you can.


Congrats on escaping to a context where your skills are valued & in demand!


Hah I also learned C# doing Unity programming and now work as a "enterprise" .NET developer, it's a great path if it's one you want to take...


"it's a great path if it's one you want to take" is now one of my favorite phrases ever.


I've learned C# before getting into Unity. Afterwise I kept learning and learned ASP.NET besides Unity stuff. There are lots of things you can't use in Unity or their usage is against Unity workflow: constructors, tasks, threads, dependency injection, unit tests.


I develop enterprise applications in C#/.Net Core/.NET MVC5 it is a bit boring but should be pretty stable.


Now I develop an user creation application for our data warehouse. It's not as interesting as writing the next cool trending app, but I can take what design decisions I deem necessary and I can use new technologies like.NET core 3.1 and Angular 9. That would sharpen my skills and make me more employable.

And nothing stops me to work in my free time in a more interesting project which I hope I will launch as a business in a few years. It helps that I am doing web programming at work because I don't have to jump from one tech stack to another daily and I can learn and experiment faster.


What games have you made?


Slot machines for Android, iOS and Facebook, but just for social gaming, no real cash.


what's the company if you don't mind me asking?


I worked for Pokie Magic/Ainsworth and now I work for Metro Cash and Carry.


I'm the founder of Key Values, which helps software engineers find teams that share their values. Not only do I live in the Bay Area and have many founder friends, but it is also my full-time job to connect tech startups that are hiring w/ devs looking for new roles, so I think I have a good view on this.

I'm still gathering information on how coronavirus is impacting the job market, but what I know now is that many companies have laid team members off in the last week, and I suspect many more will soon. Most early-stage startups that did not recently fundraise and do not yet have significant revenue will struggle during this pandemic. If they were planning to fundraise this summer, fall, or winter, their investors and advisors have already told them start cutting costs in order to survive. Hence, a rise in layoffs.

More stable startups may have slowed their hiring efforts (i.e. "we planned to hire 40 engineers by 2021, but after adjusting our budget, we're now looking to hire ~20"), but they've also explicitly told me that filling certain roles are more urgent than ever.

While this all sounds bleak, some companies will endure, and a smaller number will actually thrive during these times.

Several folks who have recently been laid off have reached out to me. I know that getting laid off can give you the impression that every company is laying people off, but it isn't true. Companies who need to hire in order to keep up w/ unprecedented demand are ramping up and are excited to capture talented folks who were recently let go. So stay positive, put yourself out there, and keep looking!

I'm currently reaching out to all of the companies I work w/ in order to stay on top of their hiring plans, and I hope to message what I learn in my upcoming newsletters. It is the easiest way for me to keep folks up to date on what I'm seeing, and I absolutely will not take offense if people unsubscribe. Key Values: https://www.keyvalues.com


Chiming in here with a bit of data on the hiring side of things. I'm the cofounder of SharpestMinds, an ISA-powered mentorship marketplace for data scientists. For all the obvious reasons, we track the hiring rates for our grads very closely and have been keeping close tabs on the pandemic's effects on the tech job market.

Our observations so far:

1. Hiring in tech has definitely not gone to zero, even for the junior-level roles we skew towards.

2. We're seeing more like a 60-70% drop in hires compared to our original (pre-COVID) projections for the month of March, so far.

3. Companies least affected seem to fall in two major categories: A) BigCos with deep pockets; and B) SaaS businesses with predictable revenue streams and some degree of economic insulation from the "meatspace" economy.

Many software businesses (e.g., Zapier, GitLab) are already run partly or fully remotely, so their hiring workflows can take quarantine in stride, to an extent. Many others (e.g., Stripe) are quickly adapting to these new constraints.

The effects of a global quarantine and pandemic are almost certain to propagate to all companies eventually. But some are less affected than others, economically and operationally. We're fortunate in tech that it's still quite possible - albeit measurably harder - to get hired under current conditions.


> SaaS businesses with predictable revenue streams and some degree of economic insulation from the "meatspace" economy

Those are most likely lagging by a few weeks or a month. Monthly subscriptions are arguably the easiest to cut and companies are looking to cut non-essential services.


With the majority of companies not at all well positioned for work-from-home, I would bet that many business-oriented SaaS companies (that do something useful) are going to be picking up new customers. As a result, they'll probably be hiring people esp. related to operations/customer support.


They’re likely also the smallest possible thing that a company can cut. I doubt anyone will save their company by cutting Slack.


There are two possibilities: either this is a storm to be weathered or an existential crisis.

In the former, cutting run-rate is important but you also need to look at the aftermath. Firing people now hurts you later on when the storm clears, whereas cutting Slack and switching to open source self-hosted alternatives is a cost savings that won't impede the future growth. Obviously cutting slack won't save a company with zero revenue.


Subscription models vary across SaaS vendors (and even across different offering tiers at the same vendor). At the low end of the market, monthly subscriptions are the norm. As you move up to bigger deal sizes, annual subscriptions become more and more common.


60-70% drop meaning if it was 100 roles last month it's 30-40 this month?


Correct.


>1. Hiring in tech has definitely not gone to zero, even for the junior-level roles we skew towards.

This always makes me curious. Why do companies look for junior levels instead of senior ?

It seems to me that with the choice you would want experience if it was an option.

Disclaimer : am employed not looking for work simply perspective


Experience costs $$$, and there is always some more basic or straight-forward work to do in addition to the cutting-edge stuff. If a junior-level engineer can work with the senior, they can do those lesser tasks for less money and let the higher-payed people tackle the harder tasks (and get some experience!)


I am experienced and biased because of that obviously but I have seen so many train wrecks created with this method.

The amount of waste in corporate american and startups is insane. IMO

There are solutions experienced folks know that save so much money when you look at the big picture it always baffles me when I see that..

The other thing that baffles me is when a CIO makes choices based off of things he has read online instead of taking the business need and finding the most economical solution

If you are interested in making money finding technical solutions with known failures is the key. Experience always knows those.

Just a perspective and comment to an opposing. Not arguing.


It's all a fancy optimization problem. Each project can be broken into tasks that take X amount of skill/experience and you have workers with varying skill. If you only have high-value workers, you'll be wasting a lot of skill/experience on the menial tasks. If you only have low-value workers then some projects will fail because none of them meet the skill thresholds.

As a company you want a diversity of workers to allow you to better optimize.


There is some merit to that but what I see over and over is companies try to use too much.

Most menial tasks senior guys have figured out how to automate. We hate menial repetitive tasks and find ways to eliminate them so the ROI of having a senior guy is yes payroll is higher but you have less headcount.

There really isnt anything new being done. Containers have been around for ages ( Solaris doms / freebsd jails )

What I see is companies prematurely optimizing by saying they need portability and multi cloud strategies before they have achieved profitability.

Multi cloud is expensive and difficult and if you don't have a successful business you really don't need it to be portable.

Just some observations from someone watching various business models


Another reason is 'experienced' developers can sometimes be difficult to work with. They can be arrogant and bull headed, 'my way or the highway' sorta attitudes. Negative to others with new ideas, etc. Teams that already have some vets on them like working with Jr folks precisely because they are moldable.


Good read for you

http://boringtechnology.club/

I'll leave this one alone as opinionated experienced guys get like that for a reason


I've seen that before, it has some good points. I don't think an experienced person has to - or always does - get like I described. But it does happen.

The question was "why higher less senior people?" My answer, and perhaps I wasn't clear, was that for your first 1-5 devs, you should definitely higher senior...but once you break past that then your senior devs - you know the ones who launched all that boring technology - then want Jr devs to mold into doing things the right way from the start.


> 60-70% drop in hires compared to our original (pre-COVID) projections for the month

what was your original projection


Wow, these are fantastic insights that almost exactly match the language that was used during the announcement at our company. They were planning on a raise in the next few months and this hit them pretty hard. I don't blame them for for the steps they've taken as, frankly, it's the only thing that makes financial sense.

Thanks again for this comment, and I'll absolutely be subscribing to your newsletter.


No worries! I'm sorry to hear you were laid off, but am glad you aren't taking it personally and understand the reasoning behind what was certainly a difficult and painful decision. There's a lot of uncertainty right now –– for everyone –– but I think people who are resourceful, stay positive, and take initiative (like posting this on HN to generate discussion) are gonna be A-okay.

Btw, I don't know your email, but feel free to reply to my next newsletter (goes out on Thursdays) if you have specific questions or feedback on how I can be more helpful. I sometimes feel powerless because I don't know what I can do to help during these trying times –– I'm not a healthcare professional, I'm not rich, I'm not a political leader, I'm not famous –– but I can at least (a) connect individuals and companies who can help each other, and (b) do my part to inform anyone I know about COVID-19, the job market, and/or what I'm doing/thinking. It's not a lot, but hey, it's at least a start!


I've subscribed to your newsletter and will be staying in touch. Also, in case you'd like to get in touch directly, my email is my name (Casey McNeil) at the mail service that google offers.


This project looks useful, but I don't see any conservative values. What if someone values monoculturalism?


I hope we are not conflating conservative values with monoculturalism and you meant to ask about two different values. Also, as someone who has been at the receiving end of monoculturalism crowd, I hope they find enlightenment eventually.


Why are you hijacking his thing?


As the OP, I intended for this to be more about a discussion of the current market than my particular situation. While things just became quite difficult for me personally, and I would love the opportunity to make a connection that leads to another job due to this post, things have gotten much worse for many people all together. This individual's comment was insightful, helpful, and directly answered the question I asked in my post. Personally, I'm quite glad this person added their perspective.


My heart goes out to everyone getting laid off or looking for work for any reason.

Would anyone be interested in a free "lightning round no-bs Q&A for engineering candidates webinar"?

I do interview and negotiation prep with candidates, and while there is a lot of general advice out there, I've found specific advice to be incredibly helpful to individuals.

I'm imagining a zoom call where one person at a time briefly describes their situation -- maybe with one or two clarifying questions on my part -- and then receives specific advice about what to prepare for their next interview, or how to find jobs to apply to, or what to say to that recruiter.

Let me know if you're interested, and what times would be good. Reply here or email hello@DangoorMendel.com

Adam and I have a Youtube channel here, though it so far focuses on negotiation (we've done a ton of application and interview stage work with individuals but haven't made videos about that yet, hence the idea for a live lightning Q&A): http://CandidatePlanet.com


I would absolutely be interested in this and will check out your site.


yup, I'd be interested in that. Working remotely currently so can make most times work!


Really sorry for everyone affected by the current situation.

We have open roles at DuckDuckGo for SREs and director level hands-on engineers (in mobile and frontend). There should be a senior frontend engineer role coming up soon too. Check out all open roles at: https://duckduckgo.com/hiring/#open.

We're a fully distributed team of 85 aiming to raise the standard of trust online and have been profitable for over 5 years now. Here's a chart depicting our growth: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.

If have questions, feel free to reach out via Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zbyszmo/


DuckDuckGo is a great product and it's great you're doing well, but apparently I'm conditioned now to feel sick after looking at exponential graphs.


>apparently I'm conditioned now to feel sick after looking at exponential graphs.

If it helps, all the exponential graphs of Covid-19 are just logistic curves in disguise. China and South Korea have already shed their disguises. Italy might begin to do so this week, but maybe not yet.


So is DDG. They can't grow above 100% market share and I doubt search volume overall will grow exponentially so their exponential curve is probably also a logistic curve in reality. I just hope that Corona's curve has an earlier inflection point than DDG.


What are "director level hands-on engineers"?


Something like "Principal Engineer" is usually the term for this.


I would assume that means "senior engineers looking to provide guidance to entire teams eventually, but in the near term are very hands on and would act as ICs"


Take whatever you can get, if you are lucky enough to get an offer. Look for contract work. Reduce your expenses. The gaining market share idea is too optimistic. Consider cashflow and sector and aim for stability over upside. Consider headhunters/recruiters.

Really consider your expense and have a plan if you cannot find computer work when you will look outside of that. The general employment picture is a disaster, though.

Read up on COBRA (ensure you have continuing medical coverage) and your state's unemployment benefits and how/if they have recently changed.

Personally, I experienced the .com crash and worked through the 2008 financial crisis. I am absolutely terrified right now.


> Read up on COBRA

I first read it as "read up on CORBA", but I think we aren't that desperate yet.


I would integrate systems by CORBA over the web technologies on any day if I could.

Too bad newer languages won't even support it...


One of those heavily overloaded acronyms - in the UK it's Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, which is where all the emergency briefings are done from. So "cobra committee" gets mentioned on the news a lot.


Totally off-topic, but the COBRA panel is now too big to fit in Briefing Room A, and use Briefing Room B now, hence the occasional references to them as Cobr in the press now.


LOL


Agree, I had to lay off 40% of staff during the .com crash, that was terrible. In 2008 we did not suffer much as our hiring was super conservative by then (I had learned).

Everybody should be terrified and cut expenses RIGHT NOW: don't buy a fancy car, pull the kids out of private school, cancel vacations, don't buy a house, don't enter into any kind of commercial lease (you'll find plenty of cheap leases).

If you are into consulting (front end, back end, ML, devops, ML) offer to cut your rate 50% if you can get a 12 month contract, right now.

Don't blame the virus. Sure it does not help but a lot of startups were barely viable businesses under oxygen (=VC rounds, always looking for dumb money for the last rounds). Don’t be picky (I don’t like the office culture, the market you are in, etc)

As they say get a mortgage, you’ll start enjoying your job better. Get several kids and you’ll start enjoying your boss/the founders/the market your startup is in as well.


Thank you so much for this comment and the fantastic insight that you shared. Actionable advice like this is gold.

I've been causally preparing for a market downtown for about six months, but I wish I was in a better position than I am. That being said, I'm in a lot better shape than a lot of folks are and I'm hoping things can turn around with as many lives saved as possible.


It's going to get bloody out there soon. Minimize your expenses if you don't already do this.

The market was already fairly saturated from what I inferred last year when I jumped ship during a move. Most organizations did not appear to be seriously hiring, they were hunting for a labor bargain or someone to add to their future contact list for quick turnaround when demand rose.

If you didn't think it was an employers market already, it's about to be.


>market was already fairly saturated ... did not appear to be seriously hiring ... an employers market

This was my experience in the job market last year, as well. A lot of open listings, but curiously picky requirements for who would be considered for a role. I definitely got the impression that companies were just idly trawling for fresh meat, without seriously pursuing any senior talent (read: highly experienced and commensurately compensated) for their "senior" roles.

I got my foot in the door as a contractor at a recently-acquired startup in the medical industry, considering it a safe bet against the inevitable recession. Like the economists and investors are now writing en masse on their blogs, I would never have guessed a virus would kick off that recession. =/

Advice for OP: Try finding which companies in the medical space are looking for front-end devs. There are a lot of not-exactly-tech companies that keep small groups of web developers employed.


> A lot of open listings, but curiously picky requirements for who would be considered for a role. I definitely got the impression that companies were just idly trawling for fresh meat, without seriously pursuing any senior talent

This has been my observation for the last decade or so. A lot of companies fishing but not many actual worms on the hooks. I expect it to get even worse now that we're back in a bear market.


Last year we were hiring, for both junior and senior positions, and had a hell of a time finding people to make offers to. We were absolutely serious and did end up hiring someone.

I will say though that we were definitely on the picky side. Our company tends to have a very hard time getting rid of employees that aren't working out, so we are extremely reluctant to hire a "maybe".


Local law?


Or company culture.


Entirely company culture.


>I definitely got the impression that companies were just idly trawling for fresh meat, without seriously pursuing any senior talent

Well, there are also laws to consider. I can't prove this but I believe companies put out requests for super high level roles with bad conditions purposefully so they can go to the government and say they need HB1/Outsourcing/whatever because they can't fill all these open positions.


I can second that - I'm not actively looking to move, but I get recruiters who contact me, and always tell them politely what it would take to inspire me to consider a move, which amounts to an above-market raise. A year ago, they at least would entertain my requirements and push a bit, maybe ask the hiring manager if the salary could go higher. Recently, though, I get quick replies of 'Nope, we're not a match'.


yeah, this has been my experience over the past few months. Luckily I'm only on the fence as to whether I want to switch jobs right now. I've been very take-it-or-leave it.

> always tell them politely what it would take to inspire me to consider a move, which amounts to an above-market raise

Same. Recently a recruiter really pissed me off. He flatly stated that this company was "willing to pay." There were no limits. Of course, I was skeptical. The ballpark he kept repeating to me sounded fine. Interview went great. The feedback from the company: "we're not willing to pay anywhere near that." I passed the interview apparently, but did not fall into their desired salary range. A huge WTF all around. It was their advertised range for crying out loud.

Either the company was kicking the tires and wasting my time (they rescheduled the interview twice, so I suspect they weren't interested at all), or the recruiter was a liar. It's possible they both wanted to see if I would bend and become a bargain.


Everyone will be minimizing expenses, so cash velocity is going to dramatically decrease. A recession to affect all sectors unless a miracle cure comes out this week. On that basis I expect real estate values to fall and stocks to continue to fall. Companies that are not profitable and rely on investor money to keep going will fail.


I was in the midst of several interview processes and things were looking optimistic. Everything changed literally overnight. Interviews were cancelled, postponed indefinitely, or I'd be plain 100% ghosted by a company. I'm extremely distraught because I've been looking for employment for a while now and I don't know how I'll support myself. Even my remote opportunities seem to have vanished as uncertainty increases.


I can't imagine what you're going through, but i would suggest taking a more positive outlook on the "ghosting". Some of these companies are going through some significant challenges, and priorities and attention may have shifted to their employees. There may be a chance that IF things turn around, they'll reach out to you again.

I guess what i'm saying is stay positive and don't take it personally.


Same boat, except for multiple weeks I was “offer pending” after playing hardball to get market rate (as others have mentioned, market really wanted seniors only if they were cheap). Now everyone’s on hold. I last tied up a contract nearly 6 months ago and had been eating savings since.

Good news is I’m both really frugal and willing to dig in. Not ideal, but working in an Amazon fulfillment center covers most of my fixed expenses (despite Boston not being cheap) so I start that in a week and it lets me continue to search/interview during the day without feeling much pressure.


I think there's reason for optimism. Myself and a few former colleagues, all at different companies now, are all seeing a big uptick in usage because their product is being used more as the world goes remote. That will take some time to translate to new job openings and of course time for folks to actually get through the pipeline. Personally I've started lobbying my company to start hiring sooner than later. We have the demand and I know a lot of great engineers are in your position or will be soon.


My entire department got laid off. While some people are local, I was here on the work visa, and I was six months away from getting PR allowing free market access.

Now No one is hiring, people are retracting job offers and cancelling interviews at the last minute with no definite timeline.

Interviewing for bigN takes a lot of prep, and there is really no time, midst whatever little interviews I have lined up. This is so exhausting.

If anyone is hiring in EMEA, Canada (but would need visa sponsorship) I’m open to conversation.

6 years of work exp as backend/devops engineer. Skilled in Java, Golang, php. Worked on distributed systems, reservoir sampling on petabytes of data, Cassandra & Elasticsearch, timeseries analysis.

Thank you.


I might have an opening for you, can you email me?


Hi. Looked at your profile couldn’t find the email. Pls let me know where to send it.


Sorry - https://jumbleberry.com/ is the company You can email me at ian@jumbleberry.com


I'm one of the founders at Sympto Health - we are helping nurses and doctors communicate more effectively with patients. Nurses spend up to 60% of their day on manual patient outreach, and the vast majority of nurse's I've spoke to complain about the roteness and mundaneness of this outreach.

Our goal here at Sympto is to supercharge the role of the nurse, automating the rote and manual tasks, and ultimately allowing nurses to focus more on patients who need their attention.

As you can imagine, with COVID-19, we are facing unprecedented demand from health systems, who need help triaging the expected massive inflow of patients.

We just closed a fresh round of funding, backed by investors in Modern Health, Udemy, Guardant Health, DoorDash and Airbnb. We are looking to hire a Founding Engineer who is interested in playing a critical role in helping the lives of thousands of patients & care teams across the country.

Check out our careers page (https://www.symptohealth.com/careers) or email me at prithvi @ symptohealth.com


Khan Academy is still hiring, though our focus is backend and full-stack engineers right now[1]. I hope you're able to find new work soon!

This is an odd time for us. We're an online education non-profit. With all of the school closings[2], we're seeing a huge spike in traffic. Fortunately, our infrastructure can handle it, but we are still spending some effort staying on top of the rapidly changing traffic patterns.

Simultaneously, we're in the midst of a huge project to rebuild our backend (porting from Python 2 to Go)[3]. So we're juggling a lot right now, but will be fine.

If there are folks out there with backend skills in particular, we're hiring and our engineering team is half remote (all in the US/Canada).

[1]: https://www.khanacademy.org/careers

[2]: https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/6117702550643507...

[3]: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/goliath.htm


Say, maybe you could pass this along to the design team:

My kids all reject the current interface. They loved the interface it had a few years back. In case you need more info to identify what I refer to, I'll describe it.

I'm pretty sure there was nothing but math. Each topic was represented by a circle, and each circle was connected to prerequisites. Kids would earn points in a simple way. Kids would also earn various astronomy-related badges.

The new system simply doesn't motivate any of my kids. It isn't a change in my kids; I have enough kids (twelve) to average that out. Kids who liked Khan Academy before now don't, complaining about the interface. Younger siblings, now the age at which the older siblings liked Khan Academy, also don't like it.

Also, a completely different matter: Last time I checked, which was some time ago, the video required YouTube. If I need to block YouTube, the video can't play. Hopefully you found a solution for that long ago.


Thanks for the input! I can pass that along. I'm not as connected to the user research and design teams, so I don't have any helpful insights to provide about the evolution.

We _do_ serve the video through YouTube by default, but we have a fallback video player that should kick in if YouTube isn't available.


Always been a fan of Khan Academy, I'll try to step up the monthly donations I've been making.

Out of curiosity, are you looking for any python dev's or people more familiar with Go?


> Always been a fan of Khan Academy, I'll try to step up the monthly donations I've been making.

Thank you!

Prior familiarity with Go is not required, and Python experience is still particularly valuable because we still have vastly more Python than Go.


Just came here to say big thanks to you and everyone else at Khan Academy for the tremendous work you're all doing. As a working parent who has now been thrust into the role of teacher, it's been incredibly helpful. Thank you!


Thank you! I'm happy that we're able to help.


I have over 30 years of dev experience, full-stack with a focus on backend and preference for Go, and am currently in the progress of wrapping up a project with nothing in the pipeline.

But I'm unfortunately stuck in Sweden.


Yeah, unfortunate for us that you're stuck in Sweden, but I hope you're able to find a good next project!


Curious why you can't hire world-wide for remote workers.


A couple of things: one is that there is additional legal/compliance stuff to deal with for each additional country (EU might count as one, when it comes to that), but the bigger reason is that we wanted more overlap in working times. It's also less expensive when we do get together in person at headquarters in California (which has typically been 3-4 times a year).


As far as overlap goes, I strongly prefer working nights anyway. And you could get around a lot of legalities by hiring as a consultant and billing per hour, a friend of mine runs a company that I've occasionally worked through.

I honestly don't know why I even bothered to answer, but something about your post felt right and my intuition has served me well so far.

I'm afraid I don't have much backend stuff to show, as most of it is owned by respective customers. Privately I've mostly been designing my own scripting language embedded in Go [0] lately.

[0] https://github.com/codr7/gfoo


Neat language. Looks like a fun project, and I totally get that your previous work is generally owned by the folks you did the work for and therefore non-public.

I can ask when I next meet with my manager, but I can say from my nearly 5 years at Khan that engineering has not desired to spread out beyond the timezones we're in. I did work for Mozilla for 4 years, so I do know that it can be done and what the tradeoffs are like. This is just not a step we've wanted to take at Khan.


I did speak to my manager about hiring from Europe. She said that in order for us to ensure legal compliance, we work through a particular company. Doing so covers our legal bases, but also means it's very expensive for us to hire elsewhere.


Hiring remote workers at scale is super complex if you want to comply with local laws (and you must). Hiring contractors is easy but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee you will be in trouble one day or the other. You have to set up a legal entity in that country/state, provide workers' comp, health benefits, unemployment, comply with various laws on leave, vacation, medical, etc... This is quickly a nightmare and it is why true good remote companies hire only in handful of states/countries.


> but if your contractor should be indeed classified as an employee

What would be the reasons for that?


Many countries have laws that allow them to reclassify consultants who look like employees (ie the client dictates how to do the work, work conditions, hours of work, etc) as de-facto employees. This is why Professional Employment Organizations (PEO) have increased in popularity. They employ the 'consultant' and thus handle all local labor law, but send the consultant to the client. Typically a consultant will negotiate the hours and bill rate and the PEO will add some extra for the overhead costs.


Any Junior or non senior roles for full stack engineers?


Unfortunately, no. Just what's listed on the site.


Got let go about 3 weeks ago now, not sure if my employer saw this coming or if their timing was just spot on. No one is interviewing at the moment and it looks like it's going to be at least another 2 weeks before people are even thinking about hiring. The employment situation is going to get much worse before it gets any better. Hang tight, keep applying and hope for the best.


My company is interviewing and hiring still, depending on what you want to work on. HQ in Alexandria, VA and main other office in Lakewood, CO are most positions. Working remotely for now in all offices.

https://careers.fool.com/


I sent in an application and referenced your username. My first name is Dustin if you are able to put in a good word!


I live near lakewood and just got furloughed, perhaps I'll give I'll send in an application. Thank you.


I'll second it as an awesome place to work!


I’ve had two interviews I the last two weeks, both over VC, and both FAANGs. So there seems to still be some activity, at least. But I feel like I’m cutting it a bit short here.


Seeing as the stock market is utterly tanking, I would be very surprised if the world didn't go into recession, and consequently, if there weren't a number of people losing their jobs in order to make the businesses lean again.

This is especially true of countries like the US, where it seems very simple to fire someone.


People keep saying “recession” but that sounds like they don’t understand the implications of what’s happening to the world economy right now. “Global depression” seems like a more appropriate term but time will tell.

I’m a CFO of $300M company that employees ~2200 employees. We’re out of cash in 6 weeks if our revenue continues to decline. Down 30% vs last year this week (which is good compared to most). Doing layoffs and pay cuts right now. My network of CFO friends are all doing the same, many at much larger scale. Hard for me to imagine a scenario where unemployment is <20% in 2 weeks in the US if this continues.

At some point, the financial cost is too severe for the majority of us who will survive this thing. We need to just resume business and accept there is a death toll. This is war. That’s my unpopular opinion on things anyway.


Yeah, resuming business and being OK with the death toll is certainly an unpopular opinion. If you have hospitals overwhelmed because business just has to continue, business will suffer regardless.

I also don't quite understand how a $300M (assuming revenue, not valuation) company can run out of cash in 6 weeks. You're saying you can't make payroll in 6 weeks at the current trajectory?


Businesses suffering usually effects investors more than employees. This is different.

It all has to do with how much cash you have to weather the storm. My firms investors wanted us to be cash efficient. Meaning we don’t have much of a safety net. This is the PE mindset IMO. As CFO one may think this is my decision, but really I advise to risk and the board ultimately decides.

Bigger companies who have hoarded cash since 2008 or before will survive but still lean down.

It’s possible banks will help companies like mine stay afloat. We have relationships in place and plan to pursue capital. Not sure how that will play out.


> My firms investors wanted us to be cash efficient. Meaning we don’t have much of a safety net.

This being common or even the norm is one of the (many) fundamental problems of our current economical system.


I've seen and worked for companies in that situation, you have a 200/300M valuation on the bull market but you are running out of cash and expecting to get a new round based on great growth numbers or achieved goals. When I was there we got the round and were saved, but I can see that not happening in the current situation.


This is one of the consequences of the modern obsession with "reach for yield" or growth at any cost. Everyone feels pressure to put every single dollar "to work", because everyone else is. It's an extremely fragile modus operandi, but managers would get fired for underperforming their peers if they didn't do it, so the incentive structure guaranteed the result.


Neither valuation (which I assume was what they meant) nor revenue tells you much about a formerly-growing company's fixed costs or its reserves. Rapidly growing companies frequently have very limited reserves.

When revenue collapses, as it has for many industries, your fixed costs dwarf everything else and most businesses will be in trouble.


Bingo. Our whole business was debt fueled M&A. So opex along with interest are big nuts. Shoveled every dollar back to M&A not much safety net.


Thank you. No this is not an unpopular opinion. yes, global depression. Veteran of dot com crash here. You are spot on. I can't believe that some folks still don't realize what is happening.


Sell some stock and come out stronger than competitors. Lobotomizing hurts more if you're good. If you can't, well, that says a lot about the owners and company when push comes to shove. Not the narrative, but fundamentals.

Of course, if $300M is VC ponzi valuation money, this was 80% fake anyways, and dependent on funny math continuing until the company caught up to the hype or exited to Someone Else's Problem, but that was the game being played. Then yes, time to cut. 2K people sucks, but like Uber employees complaining about RSU devaluation.. sucks, but you are the 1% and will ride it out.


I'm not sure how this will play out yet. But even with good fundamentals; we're in a traditional industry and business model not a startup and not software. Just active in an industry consolidation thus M&A. Very predictable revenue and growth rates before now. Question are 1) for current investors, do they want to infuse more cash to avoid the total loss 2) market is crazy so who wants to invest? terms? timing? 3) how do we do it without busting our current covenants. We could probably normally sort through these but not with this time bomb stuck to our chest.


The time thing is def hard, and I empathize with employees being both a responsibility yet the no-one-blames-you lever everyone expects right now.

At the same time, your top competitors are also getting ready to lobotomize, and the smaller players too. Some of their suppliers/partners are feeling it, and the customers on your market may soon be in need of someone new. So a lot of opportunity for strong co's to come out with power moves on their market, just the $ doesn't get seen for awhile. Contractions create gaps for those who don't, esp as this isn't about industries dying but temporary cash crunches.

There is so much VC/PE money out there, that this is a ripe time for them. Their q is 'where' and 'how much of a discount'. I'm obviously quarterbacking here, but similarly as your lever being firing, bank/PE/etc is spending.


So you’re saying your company has only enough cash on hand to cover 2 weeks of operating expenses?


Roughly. In a scenario where revenue is 0 and opex is fixed


> At some point, the financial cost is too severe for the majority of us who will survive this thing. We need to just resume business and accept there is a death toll. This is war. That’s my unpopular opinion on things anyway.

I utterly hate that option. But I'm afraid that if we don't find a medicine which can help for the 1/5th with serve syndromes we might be going there. In both the EU and the USA.

Following is somewhat a Conspiracy Theory don't take serious:

I was even wondering if some of the delays in taking measurments around some countries was not incompetence but intentional to strike a heartless ugly balance between economical impact and people dying. But then they underestimated it waited to long and now regret it.

And yes dying people do have a hard economical impact anyway, but companies being closed of over a long time can become economically worse then even 5% of the whole population dying. Mainly because we have a messed up broken economical system which is completely incapable to gracefully handle such emergency situations :(


The world is already in a recession, we just can't quantify it quite that quickly.


The dominos are already falling. It just takes a while for your domino to fall (your business's customers are hurt, then your business is hurt, then you're laid off).


Recession in a technical sense, yes, but not in a societal sense. A recession typically implies that people don't want to buy stuff or don't have the funds to. This time however, consumer demand is going to be probably the highest it's ever been the moment the quarantines are lifted.


> "This time however, consumer demand is going to be probably the highest it's ever been the moment the quarantines are lifted."

With the huge number of small businesses collapsing, it seems unlikely that the immense numbers of newly unemployed (likely including myself) are going to be have any spare cash to drive demand when the quarantines are lifted.


Government is giving the businesses free money. And the newly unemployed are going to benefit from (1) free money from unemployment insurance, and (2) nowhere to spend it in the next few weeks, which means (3) lots of money to spend.


They're going to be saving up that unemployment insurance to pay their bills when the time limit runs out and their free time will be spent looking for work ... and most likely not finding any. Hiring is unlikely to rebound for 6+ months; too many businesses have collapsed already or will collapse soon before any government intervention occurs.


What? Where do I get my free money? Also, unemployment is not nearly enough for most people (it barely will cover a family's utilities and cell phones).


https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/18/trump-cor...

The federal government is planning on sending thousands of dollars out to Americans directly.

That is in addition to unemployment, which in the currently proposed bill also provides for paid sick leave

What more do you want?


not if everyone loses their jobs in the interim.


It is highly unlikely that this will happen. Temporary layoffs are extremely likely, and extremely good, because they result in high unemployment claims (which the federal gov't is now funding even more), and will mean the businesses survive to rehire them. Nothing fundamental has changed about what people would like to do. These measures are temporary. That's my opinon.


> Nothing fundamental has changed about what people would like to do. These measures are temporary.

My wife's a PhD microbiologist, and works at a $bigPharma, and she's not convinced that we will be back to normal any time soon.

I'm currently in an area where we are essentially in total lockdown. All non-essential shops are shut. Businesses are laying off staff everywhere. Hotels and restaurants are all closed. Borders to neighbouring countries are closed. Schools and kindergartens are closed. Even the local playgrounds are closed and taped up - try explaining that last one to your 4 year-old.

Recovery in six months' time? I'm struggling to see it.


> consumer demand is going to be probably the highest it's ever been the moment the quarantines are lifted.

Happy debt bubble land is over, for a long time.


My heart really goes out to employees who are about to be put through the wringer, I've heard horror stories of coffee shops and restaurants laying off 90% of staff on a day's notice - I'm sure it will quickly expand.

I work at a DC startup LiveSafe and we are still hiring. We offer a communications platform for students and employees focused around safety & security - we were founded out of the need for communities to have a quicker, more direct line to campus security following our founder being shot in the Virginia Tech shooting. I have been helping lead the expansion of our offerings into Fortune 500 corporate clients.

Many of our clients have been using our software to push outbound information to their students / employees about policies around COVID-19, as well as triage and respond to employee needs, so we are fortunate in that our product fits into the response effort for most companies who purchased us. I think we will be fine for the foreseeable future - sound financials and a generous credit line secured during good times just in case.

We are hiring for a much needed Data Science position focusing on building and deploying NLP models & products to analyze the data that travels through our platforms - plus our production stack is a dream to build and deploy on. It's a small, fun, mission-driven team granted a lot of autonomy and responsibility - I'm on phone screens just about everyday and we have not slowed down filling this position. Would love to hear from any Data Science / Engineering talent may need a soft landing in all of this - very interesting text-heavy data set.

https://apply.workable.com/livesafe/j/DA0FCE14D5/


First off, I'm sorry to anyone who's been laid off. That sucks. It's happened to me in the past so I know how it can be scarring.

My company is hiring in the US. We do runtime Linux protection & visibility. Looking for systems programmers with a background in OS development and web developers with a background in Go/Java/C# (we do Go) and TypeScript. If you're either, send your resume to the email in my profile.


Thank you so much. I do indeed have experience with Typescript and will be getting in touch.


I’ve been let go on Thursday, of a DevOps job that had started on Wednesday. I’m a contractor so I can’t really complain, that’s how the game is played. The job was in the car rental industry, they are suffering heavily so of course the contractors are the first to go. It was my first job after coming back to my home country, and that move have let me pretty dry money wise. Eh… At least they’ll employ me ’till the end of the month, that leaves me with a little something !


We are hiring, not sure where you are but we offer relocation. For now we are working from home, so for now that probably wouldn't be an issue.

https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/onAAbfws


How's working in battle.net? I interned on a dev team in 2014 and the general consensus was that work conditions were pretty rough. Is that still the case?


Oh, yeah, should have specified that, that’s France for me :).


I’m about to leave my extremely safe job for a tiny startup. I have to put in notice by the end of the week.

The startup seems to still want to hire me and is showing no signs of pulling the offer. I think they planned on getting more funding at the end of the year.

I’m at a loss for what to do. I’m excited about the opportunity but am not sure that now is the right time to leave. I plan on calling and asking for more information about the financials and/or maybe asking for a start date push back.


4 red flag assumptions: - "you think" - "they planned" - "getting more funding" - "end of the year"


Indeed, funding is going to be frozen for a while.


I don't know anything about your situation, but unless you have 9+ months of living expenses saved up, joining a startup sounds like it might be a bad idea. If you _do_ have that kind of runway for yourself, there might be other opportunities with that cash that come up as the market tanks. As always in a downturn, cash is king.


IMO this seems like an absolutely insane move. Now is not the time to take on piles of risk. Just stay safe and look around again when the world normalizes.


Be careful. Considering recent developments, it is absolutely not strange at all to reevaluate or ask for more time.


I would strongly advise you to reverse this course immediately if possible. Even if you dislike your current job, I’d stick it out until this recession has passed. We don’t know how bad it’s going to get and this startup could go bust in a month and there may not be another job to even apply to at that time.


While I agree with most of the responses to your situation, I'd also suggest this.

How much do you believe in the start-up?

How much do you want to work there?

Personally, I'd have a VERY frank discussion with the founders about the current situation. They should respect what you are giving up, and be concerned about putting you in a difficult situation.

Who knows, they may suggest that you hang onto your current position and circle back in a few months once they have funding. Maybe they offer you more equity for greater risk. Maybe they're flippant about the effect this change may have on you and ignore the risks.

Whatever the result, you'll get a better feel for where they are at, and get some answers to your current questions.

If they can't be open and honest with you now, or you feel they aren't being, would you still feel safe with the move?


Now would be about the worst time to join 99% of startups. Unless you are financially set and looking for an adventure, stick it out at the safe gig.


Advice: stay where you are now in the cushy job


Definitely push the start date back - too risky to be stuck without a seat. Try pushing it back a few weeks, continually, until you feel it's safe to move.


Yikes! Clearly I only know what you just told me, but I would be extremely careful about taking that job at the tiny startup. Winter is coming.


If you can weather 2 years of no income, probably makes sense to take the risk.


Just don't. They will lie about financials by giving empty promises.


Small startup founder here. We did a hiring freeze and cancelled our contract with a recruiter, called an oncoming employee about slight role adjustments due to company plan change, which they were cool with.

Really glad we've got a ton of runway. Keeping everyone in mind who are less burn-fortunate. My only advice, having done a few big layoffs before: Cut now, cut once, cut deep.


I'm a fully remote software developer based out of Chicago, IL working on a mobile app built with Typescript/React Native/Redux/Firebase. Just found out our small startup is shuttering at the end of the week "until the markets stabilize". We're in the events and community management realm, and mainly work with co-working space communities.

Been spending the last few days really wrapping things up with the project getting it into a more stable place before payroll stops at the end of the week. Getting my resume/portfolio up-to-date has been a priority since Monday. It's overwhelming starting up the job search abruptly and in such a turbulent time. Keeping my fingers crossed and my eyes open for opportunities, in the meantime I'll be working on a few personal projects.


I'm the OP and I had to re-read your comment a couple of times to make sure you were employed by my company. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to collaborate on anything. It looks like we both find ourselves with some free time ;)

My email address can be found in my profile.


I'm a co-founder and the VP of Engineering at ProcedureFlow. If anyone is a full stack .NET developer and lives in Eastern Canada (remote), I'm currently hiring: https://jobs.procedureflow.com/o/full-stack-developer

ProcedureFlow is like GitHub but for your company's procedures. We are hyperlinked flowcharts with pull request style approvals.

I've heard some really unfortunate stories from family, friends, and colleagues who are being laid off or temporarily laid off. Since ProcedureFlow is B2B and is part of our customers' backbone, we're fortunate in this situation. I hope all of you that are affected by this are able to get through this!


Yes, this week. Throwaway account because it's not public yet. I've been active in startup land and HN > 10 years, technical founder with one exit. This cycle looks like it will be worse than 2001 or 2008.


I’d suggest that it looks worse because it’s more sudden, and it’s more sudden because it wasn’t going to be bad, it just got all triggered “ahead of schedule” by COVID-19.


I disagree for the following reason: Unless we get terribly lucky we are going to have a prolonged period (6-18 months) of social distancing and travel restrictions. There's no fast rebound from that so not a big win even for those of us holding enough cash to buy the bargains (real estate etc).


I was laid off in 2018 because I took a generous 5-month paternity leave. 2 months after my leave, I was given the pink slip. Contacted a lawyer and was pretty much told "you have no proof it was BECAUSE you took the leave." Based on my conversation with my boss, I know for a fact that's why. His quote: "H1B's are cheap and loyal. The mere fact that you committed to taking the full 5 months showed 0 loyalty." This was a DJIA credit card company.


No lawyer worth his salt will take a wrongful termination case without the prospect of being awarded punitive damages and that is a very high bar to clear.


You'd be surprised. The onus of "wrongful termination" is on the employee. I had no justification to show why I was "wrongfully terminated" amongst 100 others across the larger organization. I was just an easy target.


Not yet but I'm terrified.

Most of last year was me trying to land this job, my first as a dev. So far this year my company has had a massive layoff, that resulted in the team I started on disappearing six weeks after I joined it. I was shuffled from full stack web work to seo data pipeline work. I have no idea what I'm doing or least that is how it feels. I didn't know PHP before starting, with most of my past experience being in React. Now I'm supposed to be doing SQL, Hadoop, and all these other things. I am trying my hardest but...

Our stock price went down like a rock after the layoffs, after the earnings call, and now with all this mess. I'm worried that my inexperience puts me in a position where if another layoff were to happen I worry I would be a target.

I know I should be thankful that I still have a job. That I am a citizen of the country I'm in. But I'm scared, and don't know what will happen if the job ends.


Yes, I was part of the massive Expedia Group lay-off last month. I’m finding out that a lot of the managers I reported to are becoming individual contributors again as they wind up the department.

I’m a DevOps/Linux Systems Engineer/SRE with 20 years in industry, about 5 as a developer and the rest as operations. Looking for anything remote, or possibly in Austin, TX. I have worked remote before. Besides AWS and Linux, I’ve got experience implementing incident management practices, agile/scrum for infrastructure teams, and have worked remote for over a quarter of my career.


Did you work at Homeaway?


Yes, but renamed to Vrbo and then my team was merged into Expedia Group but not re-tasked. The last six months before I was cut was an incredibly confusing time because we couldn’t even figure out how we were supposed to sign emails.


Interesting. Sorry to hear about the layoff, hope you land on your feet!


I have been told I will be laid off this month end. I am on H1B and am completely freaking out because I have only 1 year experience and a student loan. To be honest, I kind of saw this coming a month ago and started applying. But, I have had no luck. I even submitted an ask HN yesterday to discuss and get ideas.


The good thing is you already have the H1B, so it's easier than having to go through the lottery.

My advice would be to hope for the best but expect the worst. In other words, keep applying to jobs super aggressively, but at the same time, start packing to leave, if there aren't other options.


Does anyone have advice from 2000/2008 about what happens to immigrants on visas? When the work dries up do we all just have to leave and go home?


I am not an immigrant myself, but I worked with many in the mid 2000s. My experience was that direct hire H1Bs did fine. The company is already shelling out lawyer fees for you, so presumably you're important enough for them to hang onto unless the situation is dire.

The company I worked for did also have H1B contractors whose contracts were terminated and some of those people left the country.


If you are on H1 then once you lose your job you'll be immediately out of status. Now being out of status is not a very big deal, but it does mean you'll need to find a new employer willing to sponsor you as soon as possible. USCIS is generally forgiving if your out of status period is not too long (they might require you to leave and then re-enter the country to get back to status though). Also living out of status is not fun - in addition to loss of income you'll have difficulty with things like renewing driver license or traveling out of country.


IANAL.

This is not correct. If you leave/lose your job, you have a 60-day grace period where you're not considered out of status. You need to find a new employer willing to petition a new I-129 for you.

Please check the specifics with a lawyer. Immigrations laws keep changing in very subtle ways.


>> traveling out of country.

not to be glib, but this would be a one-way trip for the near to mid future. Any rquirement to leave and return to the country is also a non starter


As far as I'm aware, that is only true for L1, not H1B, which has a 60 days grace period. I don't know how it affects folks with AOS to an I-485, though.


I believe it's like this:

L1 - if you lose your job and you have no other status (ie have not filed for green card or have your H1B), that's it. You have to leave within 60 days and you cannot work at another company in the US.

H1B - you can switch to a new company and they port your H1B with USCIS. Otherwise, 60 day grace period to leave.

Adjustment of Status to 485 - if it has been pending with USCIS for more than 180 days & you have your EAD, you can port to another company under the AC-21 act.


I was on H-1 in 2002 and lost my job. I was in the US for almost a year before I found something again . There was no problem for me. But things may be different now. I am also from Germany which makes things a little easier compared to what I hear from people from India or China.


My understanding (I’m a former H1B myself) is that if you lose your current job and sponsor you have some time (don’t remember exactly how many months) to find a new sponsor otherwise you need to leave. Didn’t happen with me, but I had a couple of coworkers that came to work for the same company and were let go and had to leave the country because they didn’t find another sponsor.


Yes. On a H1B, you might have 60 days to find a new employer or change your visa status. https://www.murthy.com/2017/03/06/grace-period-nonimmigrant-...


Probably yes, most likely for small companies.

Prepare for the worst.


I suffered pay cut due to outbreak affecting my company. It was profitable and growing steadily, but due to outbreak people stopped using it (and paying). Right now we're in the red, this is not sustainable, so I think in a couple of months I will be laid off (unless situation stabilizes by then).

It's a bit scary to be in this position, as I know most companies here stopped hiring, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to find a new job quickly.


Sorry to hear this, I dug through your profile to see if maybe I can help. I can't guarantee anything, of course, but we're hiring Go developers at Sourcegraph and are 100% remote so if you meet the other qualifications here please do consider applying with us: https://github.com/sourcegraph/careers/blob/master/job-descr...


Thanks, I've applied. Didn't know Sourcegraph is a remote company. BTW, I've used it on one of my projects before and it was really easy to set up and proved great for onboarding new developers, so thanks for developing it :)


Glad to hear it :) If you have any feedback we'd love to hear it, as well.

We went 100% all-remote at the start of the year, and historically over 50% of over our team has always been remote. This has been a really good boon for us as we started writing down and documenting even more of our processes, etc. in a handbook: https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook


What sector is this in, if demand changed so quickly? I hope the crisis is short enough, that your job survives.


We're providing services for people organizing events (weddings, conferences etc.), that is probably one of the most affected sectors right now.


I haven't been laid off but I voluntarily quit my job in Jan when COVID-19 looked like China would handle it by themselves. I went solopreneur fulltime on https://boomadmin.com but everyday I question myself whether it's a good idea.

Had about 3 years of savings, now only 1.5 years. The stockmarket wiped out a huge part of my runway. I can live like a cockraoch, but let's see what happens. Tough times. I'm optimistic of a rebound once there is a vaccine.


If your savings are diverse stock, you'll probably get your value back just fine in 3 years if you go long.


anyone without a job here right now: does somebody have a zulip, discourse, slack whatever, where we can all hang out? I think it would be generally a cool concept to have a HN-job-seekers chat site where smart people can network. People in-need might be able to help each other with ideas and / or work together on cool side projects while also looking, or maybe just learning cool concepts from each other ...

Anything really that allows people to focus on solving this problem for longer than the life-time of a HN post being on the FP. I think it might also be good for mental-health. E.g it seems there are lot of us here who are struggling with ageism, discrimination or for other reasons finding a job/gig so this could be a better alternative than refreshing twitter and focus on helping each other?

Burnout is also a real kicker. I went through this in 2013 and it had cascading effects on other areas of my life that caused an absolute meltdown. It took me 3 years to get back on my feet and after 5 years I could still notice that the experience changed me. I'm OK now but I'd imagine having a place where things like these could be discussed in an environment with intelligent people would have helped. I really haven't thought this through but just want to put this out there. Maybe should start a new Ask HN, idk

How this could work is post your nick that is used on the site also in the HN about profile as proof. Or make it open to others too idk, haven't really thought it through lol.

Anyone interested in this?


I've been laid off yesterday. One of the biggest networking HW/SW vendors, SF area.

This thread is soothing. I owe you, OP. We all do.


WTF? I would not expect large businesses to start lay offs immediately. These are troubling times indeed. All the best of luck to you.


Hopefully after this settles down a bit there will be a boom in remote work positions as so many companies will now be both setup for it and seen that it is effective.


> seen that it is effective.

I'm curious if this is why we'll actually learn. Reading r/sysadmin this morning was fun, a lot of stories about companies realizing that people who have been "remote working" a few days a week for years don't know how to sign into the vpn.


Or the opposite, companies get even more restrictive with it.


I don't think they will find remote work effective. So far this is a bad working from home experiment. People are stuck at home stressed. Parents need to take care of their kids all day. Very hard to focus and be productive.


Sensible, the situation should leave room for such a paradigm shift.


Just got my first job offer and excited to start! (In Italy!)


Wow! It's good to hear that at least some business is still able to occur there. All the best!


International media is probably not talking too much about it, but we are really trying to do our best! Universities are helping with the production of hand sanitizer and mask production, startup companies are building systems to manage the after-outbreak with the government and the entire education domain is being really productive with online lessons! And, lot of (tech) companies are still hiring!


At least partly because of the current “situation”, I’m actually looking for a person/people who can help bolster a client’s (very) small team (to clarify: I am the tech lead of the team, not a recruiter)

For the backend, PHP & SQL experience is a must, and realistically some ops/infra is pretty essential too.

We “self manage” most parts of our stack so some experience with at least some of keepalived/haproxy/stunnel/percona cluster/redis/shell script would be very beneficial.

For the front end, it’s essentially just HTML, CSS and some ‘vanilla’ js w/jquery. Moving to SCSS is on the roadmap so knowledge there may be helpful.

We’re completely remote, but mostly (except me) in US time zones.

If either of the above sounds like you, and you’re looking for work, drop me a line. My email is in my profile.


I should add - if it wasn’t clear above, a person needn’t have experience in both the backend/ops areas and front end.


I'm betting the best places to target for individuals who have been laid off, for the next 6-12 months at least, will be organizations who serve higher education.

When the economy hits the shit, higher education booms. This is absolutely true for tech programs and community/junior colleges, less so for 4-year colleges/universities.

Source: My experience with the 2001 bust and immediate higher ed boom, 2008 bust and immediate higher ed boom.


I don’t know. Alot of these schools have been on real estate development binges for the last 20 years, and there is alot of physical space that seems like it will remain unused for the foreseeable future.

I see telemedicine finally becoming viable.


I'm not sure what physical space has to do with a boom in education. The long term trend is that economic downturns lead to a boom in higher education. That's just a fact of life.

Schools, right now, are being forced online with all goods and services, which is uncharted territory for most of them. Whether it's old-timey faculty dragging their feet because in-person is better than online (it is, by the way), or because some classes just can't be offered online (without critically thinking about it I would argue), or because we've just done things this way forever. Whatever the reason, higher ed is being forced to think about things in ways it never has before. Institutions are desperately snatching up online resources right now like crazy.

My argument is that when the boom comes in the next six months, all colleges and universities are going to look to build resiliency and responsiveness in certain areas related to critical student facing infrastructure. This means online. This means external services.

We're big, we're slow, we're out of touch with reality, but one thing we don't do, in individual institutions in higher education, is make the same mistake twice. That, at least, we're good at.

None of this has to do with physical space?


Effectively, yes.

I run a two-person development company that contracts for tech companies.

Out of the five projects we had in February, two have been canceled, two have been put on hold indefinitely, and the remaining contract project is only part-time.

Yes, I'm negligent about sales and marketing. I am the epitome of the "technician" (in "E-Myth" parlance). I don't expect things to dramatically turn around very soon.


2 people I know lost their jobs today. I expect more to come in the coming weeks.


Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange (Boston, MA https://poloniex.com/) is still hiring, crypto markets are doing fine - we make money whether it goes up or down. Interviews over Google Hangouts. http://poloniex.careers/


Crypto seems like the replacement for casinos gambling away your life savings at a desperate time.

I don't have a beef with you but the whole crypto crapto markets really need to calm down and stop stealing money from naive people especially at this sensitive time. Lack of regulation helps launder money even easier.


  Crypto seems like the replacement for casinos gambling away your life savings at a desperate time.
I was thinking the same about the stock market. Most launderers use overseas bank accounts.


Not quite. Stock market has real value. People buy things, consume goods, sell tangible useful things. The market is a reflection of that.

Crypto crapto is the reflection of a giant random number generator that is operated by both VCs and nefarious entities at the same time. It's a competition to see who wins this random number generator...


Being able to launder money is valuable. You've just shown your mental deficit.

Also, the crypto market reflects its value as well. You're playing yourself with your own argument.


Thank you so much! I'll pass this along to some of the members of the programming team at my company who just became available, and I'll also be submitting an application myself.

It's fantastic to see some of the responses here indicating that companies are still hiring. Even though though the retail and entertainment industry have been hit hard, it seems some portions of the job market are still going strong.


Is Poloniex remote or is everything onsite in BOS?


Remote right now but we are onsite company during non-pandemics.


I resigned from my current role because the office culture is terrible, and I hate being around pretty much all the people outside of the IT team.

I was offered 6 figures as a counter offer for the first time in my career, which I turned down.

That was last week. New Zealand (where I'm from) hasn't shut down yet, but everything is so bleak, and I'm regretting turning down the offer. I start working from home tomorrow for my final 2 weeks here, and I can't help but feel regret. Being in the office was the one thing I hated, and now we don't have to do that.

Whats worse is I emailed the new job asking if we're still going ahead with me starting, and there was no reply.


If they offered you a good counter offer, ask them if there is a similar offer still on the table. Their IT challenges are probably only just ramping up and they will need you as people shift remote.

I'm also in NZ. SO happy that our GOVT takes this so seriously.


> SO happy that our GOVT takes this so seriously.

Can you elaborate? Don't know much of what's going on in NZ at the moment.


For some time now, all incoming visitors have been required to self-isolate for 14 days. This means that any incubating virus runs its course without further incident.

https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...

If any symptoms are shown, patients get tested. This is generally done in the carpark of their preferred Doctor (GP).

Positive tests are contact traced. In most cases there are very few potential people they could have infected, since they were isolated.

All businesses have been putting place COVID-19 plans and stepping up things like cleaning and moving workers remote.

Any school with infections possible is immediately closed, close contacts of the infected are put into self-isolation.

After some tourists failed to follow the 14 day quarantine guidelines, NZ has closed all its borders to non-residents.


> I'm regretting turning down the offer

Ask them if it's still on the table. I know you're going to feel terrible asking that, but you have to realize that you are probably a very valuable employee to them, who knows their systems well. Considering you might be leaving in 2 weeks, there is nothing to lose in asking (other than maybe pride).

> Whats worse is I emailed the new job asking if we're still going ahead with me starting, and there was no reply.

This is extremely messed, and a huge red flag. It's extremely unprofessional and rude to offer someone a job, and then not even have the courtesy to communicate if the offer is being rescinded.


I'm a (hiring!) tech director for Singularity 6, a game studio startup on the west-side of Los Angeles.

We're actively hiring. If anything, we're trying to be _more_ aggressive in our hiring. There's some concern that talent will, understandably, want to hunker down and stay with what's known and safe than risk jumping to a new job.

On the plus side, everyone's at home, so it's a bit easier to get in touch with candidates!

Our available roles are up at www.singularity.com/careers. We're all work-from-home for now, but expect folks to eventually be on-site in Los Angeles when life returns to "normal."


Oh! Yes. Doesn't seem like I can edit the comment any longer. The URL is:

https://www.singularity6.com/careers


I think you meant https://www.singularity6.com/careers (left out the 6!).

Cheers and stay safe out in sunny LA!


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We've got a hire freeze as the business is sizably impacted. This could be a long recession if this virus is not stopped quickly. Could be a depression.


I work a company that acts as an ISP, managed services provider and data center operator.

Unless the whole economy tanks very badly, I don't expect any layoffs.

Right now, companies are buying VPN concentrators and the likes like crazy to support remote work. Supply chain delays do delay new projects that involve new hardware though.


Barely hanging on at the independent news organization where I work. Lost a lot of colleagues to layoffs last week.

I'm super worried about the coming year.


I feel like this cost is being badly underestimated.


I would be quite surprised if this doesn't turn into a depression. The Fed has essentially already exhausted their options, and we're only a week in to this. Fiscal policy is the only real policy remedy, and capitalists hate that.


> Fiscal policy is the only real policy remedy

The only real remedy is economic activity. That can't happen until people can start spending money again.

There is a huge opportunity in thinking about when things go back to normal, what things will remain permanently changed.


> There is a huge opportunity in thinking about when things go back to normal, what things will remain permanently changed.

I started a thread about that the other day; let's collect some more ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587052.


I think there's a sense that this time it's different. When you lose your job because the government decrees that your company shut down... well, it seems pretty clear that the government should have to help.


They seem to be falling all over themselves trying to help since (almost) everyone thinks it isn't such a good idea to send all the old people off to the woods to get eaten by wolves.

Probably the one time in human history the evil bankers can actually point and say "it wasn't us this time, really!!!"


Seems like a good time for people with ideas who can't code to team up with people who can code but don't have a good idea. To take a chance on an app/idea what we wouldn't normally want to quit our day jobs on. Are there sites that team people up like that?


Well, that's pretty much any job board. AngelList's jobs area [0] in particular has good deal of equity-only positions - no pay, but a share in future earnings (which, it can't be overemphasized, are entirely theoretical). Unfortunately, my landlord and debt-owners do not accept hope for the future as payment.

0: https://angel.co/jobs


I guess I meant more like, short term, not a real job. I'm stuck at home for a few weeks (through end of April likely), so why not try some random idea? Keep my skills up, have something to do, etc.

If anyone has a halfway decent idea for an app or website, I'm a UI guy with a lot of time on his hands.


I have been watching Picard (the new Star Trek show) and came to the realization that all the greatest sci-fi interfaces do not have keyboards. Searching for a person? Tap here, tap there, swipe up, and push forward and BAM “looks like person of interest was on goobazoar on the night in question”! Anyways, I’m in the security space and have been doing lots of HackTheBox [0] in prep for the OSCP [1] this year. With active boxes, they kind of just throw you in the deep end and you just google tools and exploits to see if they work. After a few boxes you start using the same tools over and over again (enumeration mainly) and they are all command line based. there is this tool called metasploit [3] that is labeled a skiddy tool (script kiddy AKA run stuff without knowing what they do). it let’s you type in software/OS name, lists the exploit, add a few parameters and BAM! (Usually). In fact On the OSCP you can only use metasploit once because it’s so easy. We have metasploit pro at work and it’s GUI based and even easier! You can integrate it with their scanner (Nexpose) and make the whole process pretty streamlined from enumeration to exploitation. The problem is their pro tools are very expensive and all the FOSS stuff is command line and not integrated. You also have to use the keyboard! I have been imaging an interface where everything is touch based - a screen filled with little cards with pictures on them that do things. Click on one picture, does an action, and populates other cards on the screen. You drop these new cards in colored circles on the screen where it either turns green, yellow, or red. If a circle goes green the action worked and it becomes a gold card. You stack the gold cards together for an exploit chain and a successful stack means you rooted the box (or whatever goal you had). A lot of time paths you take seem promising but then don’t produce fruit so you would have to try different combinations of the gold cards. The ultimate skiddy tool! On mobile so apologies for the formatting.

[1] https://www.hackthebox.eu/ [2] https://www.offensive-security.com/pwk-oscp/ [3] https://www.metasploit.com/


Although actually, that's an interesting proposition. Offer your landlord a percentage of your equity in exchange for reduced rent. Who knows, you might find a well-financed investor who's willing to take a risk on you.


I've actually considered something like this. An idea of my own is creating a true marketplace for talent where everyone starts at a $1/hr for contract remote work, but the rate goes up by $x/hr for every hour that's booked in advance. Things would eventually balance out where there would be a balance of the rate with the 'pre-booked' time. Even if a person were to start at $1/hr, their hourly rate would either stall out or reach $40/hr by the end of the week.

If anyone would like to work on this kind of thing with me, feel free to get in touch. Who knows, it might actually get some traction.


Like always, getting funding is the problem.


Depends on the idea. Side-project type ideas would be good to start now and get off to a quick start before we have to go back to our day jobs, then it becomes a side job.


I already posted my experience from 2008 somewhere else for anyone concerned about a recession. No two crises are equal, but might give you some pointers.

My personal perception of the 2008 wreck is the following: a some people got royally screwed, many people got screwed, some people didn't feel a difference, and a few people actually thrive. I was in the second category.

First, my company imposed a hiring freeze. This included both hiring new people or renovating temporary contracts. Then, they relied in natural attrition to shed people. Since many people were contractors, those were the first ones to let go. When that wasn't enough, they started laying off full time employees.

I was lucky since my team was left mostly untouched, while other teams were dismissed entirely. We did get our bonuses cancelled and salary frozen for a few years, however. That, coupled to higher taxes and inflation, means that my income went down over the years, but at least I had a job.

My biggest takeaway is that YMMV (duh!). Many people are concerned now about losing their jobs. In my opinion, companies (particularly large and stable ones) will rely on hiring freezes and attrition to curb their numbers. If it comes down to it, you are more likely to see teams being fired wholesale rather than each team bleeding a bit.


Working in a fortune 500 company. Am on a team that was developing a new product for them. Had been doing that for little over a year. Had our product killed just before going public with it. I speculate it was because of the falling stocks in the company (which got worse amidst fears of COVID-19).

Nobody in my team has been laid off so far. However we have nothing to work on, and we most of us believe it is only a matter of time. We are sort of stuck in a limbo at the moment.


I founded my last company, AppNexus, in 2007, and we were out trying to raise our series A round in 2008 just as the world was falling apart. I pitched 40+ VCs, got nowhere, and was about to sell the company when we finally got a term sheet from Venrock and were able to keep going. By having the funding to survive the crisis, we built the company over a 10-year bull market, and ended up selling to AT&T for $1.6 billion in 2018.

Last year, I decided to start a new company, CMDTY, and raised $10MM from Venrock and Rucker Park with the intention of having plenty of money in case the world fell apart again (not really thinking it would, to be clear). I think we are going to be impacted by the global recession like everyone else, and at the same time, I think our product - a platform for supply chain management - is going to be extremely valuable as things pick back up again.

While we are going to be cautious given the uncertainty we face, we plan to hire 3-5 people over the next few months, and we're open to remote work (that feels funny writing, given that nobody is in the office!). https://cmdtymkt.com/careers


What say you to this, Bokelley?

https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/at-ts-ad-exchange-is-ove...


Not laid off from this, but I was last Oct. Unemployed for three months, started in January. Realized I didn't fit with the team and just took a new short term contract. That caused me to burn through some of my savings. It's been one thing after the other recently.

I'm really nervous after this contract is up. I already didn't see anything in the market. Most recruiters, and even jobs told me I was too senior for what they were looking for, or to expensive. Even cutting my rates drastically and going for mid level / entry level engineering positions. Or reducing my resume.

I'm looking at my burn rate and have about four months, right now. Honestly I was looking at getting out of software all together after last October. Every project I've been on is shuttered due to budget, or outsourced. Every six months or so looking for new work, now this.

My inbox is still being hit up with roles in NYC, San Fran, Seattle on site / on premise. I don't know if they'll come to fruition. I just worry about volatility. I just find it odd to see people still hiring.

Hope everyone is safe out there, and can keep the bare essentials running.


Expecting to likely get laid off (if I should even care now, having pay dropped below $2/hour as a full time backend dev). But I'm more worried that here in Russia this situation unties hands for the government to close off the borders permanently, and then quietly isolate the internet access.


Our leadership announced the possibility of paycuts in the near future. The company I work for had some pretty aggressive hiring targets for Q1 and I'm one of those hired, so naturally I expect that, should things get worse, they will follow a FILO staff-reduction strategy.


Probably FIFO :(


Finally, being bang average pays off


Friday will be the day we find out how much boards are asking their companies to reduce burn. The first large wave of layoffs will probably happen this Friday and then it will be a nervous few weeks. Much more similar to 2001 than 2008.


what’s special about friday in particular? i know it’s the end of the quarter but aren’t the earnings announcements etc spread out over a few weeks?


You want to stop the bleeding as soon as possible, but you don’t want to lay anybody off during the week, so they have time to collect their thoughts over the weekend.

Whereas, if you fired them on a Monday, they may show up Tuesday and cause issues.

Salary is probably the most costly expense.

In the early 2000s, the warning sign was reducing the cleaning staff, and having developers empty the trash.


Exactly. It also takes a couple of days to make plans, consult the lawyers, do the calculations and have payroll ready. This has escalated so fast it will probably take until Friday for companies to act.


Just signed a lease for a larger apt with twice the rent. Got laid off within the hour. The new landlord is not wanting to let me out of the lease. They already accepted the deposit and first months rent. Really bad timing.


Talk to a lawyer ASAP and see if you can get out of the contract.

https://www.justia.com/consumer/consumer-protection-law/canc...


Gosh, sorry to hear that, friend. I hope your situation stabilizes soon. Depending on where you live, a lot of municipals are suspending evicts, asking land lords to forgo collecting April rent, and considering giving citizens cold hard cash to help weather the COVID-19.


Move in and don’t pay anymore rent.


Hah, yeah it's occurred to me. I'm hoping they see the light before then.


Can you stop payment on the deposit check?


Too late.


Though I saw it coming, I was laid off recently (last week). The layoff was unrelated to COVID-19, but laid off none the less. Luckily I have enough saved to not be too burdened by it. I have an interview tomorrow and Friday, but I see it more as an opportunity for something else. In my spare time I have been working very hard to build a startup in the Insurance Tech space. Though I have been looking for jobs, part of me keeps wanting to see this as an opportunity to do what I really want which is to start my own business. Having thought about it, I think I will be looking for freelance/contract work instead of another full-time gig so that I can focus more on my company.

With that being said, the job market is going to become much more brutal very soon, which slightly terrifies me... but I'd probably regret not at least taking a chance working towards my dream, even during these uncertain times. I did panic a bit when I got the news that I'd be losing my job, which lead to the frantic job applications and reaching out to my network. After I took a step back and thought about it though I was able to see this as an opportunity.

To anyone else out there who recently lost a job and is panicking, try to take a step back and evaluate your current situation. It might actually be setting yourself up for something better. If nothing else, take the time that you have to sharpen your skills or learn some new ones. Make the most of a bad situation.


My s.o. just got a dev role in January, first job she hopes to keep, first job in the west, to start 2 March. We moved across the country for it. A few other hires were due to start a bit later in the month.

I was a bit nervous looking for a place to live in an incipient pandemic (cases were already reported in the wild here at that time).

But from the coronavirus, the two hires due to start later in the month got canceled - only my s.o. got taken on. I really hope they hadn't quit jobs in far off lands to relocate :/


Really sorry for everyone affected.

EdgeDB Inc (of which I'm the CEO) is hiring. We're well funded early stage startup with a mission to build the next generation database. We're looking for engineers with extensive knowledge of nodejs/typescript/react and cloud engineers with knowledge of rust/python/k8s/golang. Email me at yury [at] edgedb.com. See also https://edgedb.com/careers/


A few months back, I launched a side project that builds a professional profile from your daily todo list (www.komplish.com). The idea is you can use it to track side projects and even your tasks at work, and build a profile from that to help you find work. You can also find others through the app for smaller jobs that may not be big enough for a full time job posting. I’d love it if anyone wanted to give it a try and let me know your thoughts! Hopefully it can be helpful to some!


Would you consider making it available in Canada? Just tried to download it, but am north of the border.


I am a software engineer and I work remotely for a US company. We are in telecommunications and our main products are callback service and scheduling a callback over phone or messaging. Over the couple of weeks we have started seeing some interest from big companies in healthcare and insurance that want to use our products for their customer support during COVID-19 outbreak. So for us it's more job opportunities there.


Not laid off, but I quit my job several years back to go to grad school. Finished up my degree, did a bit of followup research, and now have been in the job market for several months.

The job search has been seriously demoralizing.

There have been three separate companies who have department heads saying they want to hire me, one from the R&D department of a large conglomerate even. After several rounds of discussion and a code test each, they express enthusiasm to work together, at which point the discussion pretty much stagnates.

This has happened three times, and atop the background gruel of cold application submissions, I am lost at what I must be doing wrong. Everyone I talk to in person reflects back very positive sounding impressions: clear communicator, keen analytical skills, impressive knowledge, blah blah. However, since this never materializes into anything, I am beginning to wonder if those are just polite ways of brushing someone off.

I just want to find a good (remote) team to work with and add value to. This job search stint is making life bleaker by the day.

Anyway, enough whining, I guess. Many of us are in similar boats it sounds like. Feel free to PM if you just want someone to talk to.

Cheers,


We’re hiring at Tellus App, Inc. Currently, we’re prioritizing those who are looking for non-remote jobs (people who can relocate or already in the Bay Area), but we are also open to hiring fully-remote. We’re growing quickly and aren’t looking to slow down the hiring pace.

We’re an ambitious Silicon Valley FinTech startup founded by serial entrepreneurs in 2016 to become the most innovative real estate investing platform for all. This unique sector is riddled with extreme fragmentation and plagued by uninspired product offerings — yet at the same time, real estate contributes up to 18% of the U.S. GDP. We’re a team of seasoned operators and developers with a home base in Silicon Valley who love to move fast and want to do something no one has figured out.

We have several developer roles open which you can check out here: https://angel.co/company/tellusapp

If you’re interested in joining our team and for the right opportunity to dive into the FinTech space, we’d love to hear from you! Email us at recruiting@tellusapp.com.


Yep. Events industry; entire company basically shut down.


I wasn't laid off, it was worse.

The last startup I worked for turned out to be a Theranos-in-miniature, and after 11 months (after solving the puzzle) I had to recuse myself to the VC who brought me in. Made me take a long pause/sabbatical to decide if I want to be in startups anymore, and I worked on my music for awhile.

Being in the midst of an intense job search before all this broke, I'd been blocking out the news. Coronavirus was peripheral to me, at best. I was just starting to gain traction on a job search, when Covid-19 lock-down happened.

The moment I realized (my weak knees broke the news) this was real: Trader Joe's, where all the aisles—normally so well-appointed, were empty. I've never seen anything like it, except in a Walking Dead episode.

After successfully exiting the store without fainting, I said, you know that silver lining? It's going to be huge.

In times of crisis, humans tend to go bigger. We discover how powerful we really are. It's going to become crystal clear what's important and what's not. We're living in the golden age of opportunity in so many ways it's not even funny.

Just because I haven't solved my own personal crisis doesn't mean I won't. It's going to push me out of my comfort zone even further, into a world suddenly in exactly the same place. The way forward is focusing on others.

Since last week, I've had two interviews go dark due to hiring freezes, but 3 dozen meaningful conversations with people over the internet that never would've happened otherwise. Some of them are afraid. I tell them about the silver lining.

Before Covid-19, I felt a lot more alone. Now it seems like everyone is freaking out right along with me, except I'm not anymore.


Syllable.ai is hiring across the board. We are a healthcare company and are currently slammed with requests from healthcare syatems for automated web and phone bots. They are crippling under the demand of unprecedented customer information requests. Our bots drive down their call volume significantly, freeing up their call center operators to help the most critical information requests.

Please email andrew@syllable.ai


Andrew, thanks for commenting and I'll definitely be getting in touch. Can you post a few lines about what kinds of skillsets you folks might be looking for, or what your tech stack is?


Senior full stack engineer, data scientist, Dev ops. All on-site in Sunnyvale CA or Seattle WA. AWS, Python, Postgres, machine learning and large data pipelines, real time natural language classifier running in production. See an example of our product at www.syllable.ai/covid19-coronavirus


on-site even right now? Isn't everyone in CA or WA supposed to be WFH and shelter-in-place?


Presumably they are hiring for jobs that will exist even after the quarantine is lifted.


just wanted to say that rather than updating resumes, update your linkedin profile. most opportunities i have gotten has been through linkedin. also, once you have a linkedin profile completed, you can import it into indeed and import your indeed profile into ziprecruiter.

also, there are many services out there that will export your linkedin profile as a resume.

good luck everyone, i might be joining you guys soon enough :P


Seconded. LinkedIn is a pretty good ressource if you invest some time developing your connections. A lot of SW recruiters but also small businesses for people looking for both employment and contracts (I found both through it).

Anybody interested, feel free to add me, my LI is in my profile.


If you don't mind me asking, how many more opportunities came from Linkedin? Last time I was looking, I was getting about 2 new interviews per week from sending my resume through Indeed and about 1 interview per month from Linkedin.


LinkedIn really depends on your resume/skills and geographical area.

In the Bay area, I passively get at least two recruiter reach outs per week and when I was set to actively looking, it was more like several per day. Some of them are highly targeted. For example, I've had a company reach out recently based on previous distributed column store experience.

Triplebyte is also pretty good, although it's heavily skewed towards startups.

Both of those options are pretty high return on little investment (a few hours).


Thank you for responding and providing as much information as you did. That's pretty impressive; if I have to start looking again, I'll have to focus more on the LinkedIn side of things than I previously did.


Thanks so much! This is fantastic advice.


Laid off since 2002. Became disabled in 2003. Nobody wants to hire me because of my disabilities.

Since then I've been working on getting better, but tech has passed me by to where my skills are all retro and legacy tech. I kept up with Windows and Office but did not learn C# and Python yet. I know the foundations and fundamentals of programming. Just that I am 51 now and ageism sets in.


I work as a PM in a pretty big tech company, and I’m a cofounder of PrepTick (an interview prep startup).

Here’s a rundown of what we’ve been seeing in the tech job market. Situation’s super fluid, so it’s quite likely a lot of this might be inaccurate a week from today.

  -Big companies (FAANG, Microsoft, Uber etc) continue hiring unabated. It looks like any contracts made are being honoured.
  -Medium and smaller companies seem to be pausing hiring. A lot of scheduled interviews cancelled. Some candidates told us they were informed these companies would get back in 6-8 weeks.
  -The majority of venture funded startups seem to have entirely stopped hiring, or seem to be on the verge of doing so. Some relatively urgent roles still remain open. Anecdotally, reasons seem to be either runway extension (defensively, or rarely - explicit guidance from investors), as well as a sheer lack of time, too many key people involved in firefighting expected changes in revenue/demand
Some incidental observations we made that might be useful for recently unemployed engineers/analysts: Lots of Banking tech roles still open, inspite of the pounding their stocks have taken. Banks pay decently, work environment is rarely as awesome as Tech but it’s a living. Accounting tech and Consulting tech seem relatively unaffected.

As an interview prep company, we know we can do a lot to help folks affected by this situation. Up until now we’ve focused on 1-1 coaching/practice simply because it’s proven to be incredibly effective. We really want to do something that can help a winder audience given the situation - and until things stabilize, we’re probably going to do it for free (think webinars, interview content, videos - we’re brainstorming a bunch of ideas)

If anyone has thoughts, or might be interested in helping/collaborating, drop me a note at [redacted]. We’re going to do whatever we can :)

PS - first post here, bad formatting, edited to try and fix it.


I'm a French freelance developer - working from France - and until now I had an Australian company as my main client. I got a call at the beginning of the week from the CTO telling me that after almost 2 years that was it. The company suffered a lot from the economic situation because of the COVID-19 crisis and thus could not longer afford my services. The R&D team was split-up between remote contractors and based in Sydney people. All the remotes have been laid off. My situation is not that bad currently: I still have another client I used to work for 1 or 2 days a week, I hope they will have enough work for me to work 3 or 4 days a week. I have some savings as well. I'll wait for the end of all of this before taking any decision (go back to a classic full time job maybe ?). Cheers


Wow, my heart goes out to you people, in my mind the tech industry was safe but apparently I hadn't thought this through.


The AI startup I was with just informed me that there's been a change of business directions and they needed more salespeople than a DevOps engineer so I got the ax.

Unemployment doesn't have to be bleak and depressing. With the downtime, I'm going to try to knock out two AWS Associate certifications, Solution Architect and DevOps. Got inspired by Adrian Cantrill. No affiliation, I'm still in awe of his level of detail and clarity. I would highly recommend it if you are planning on taking SAA-C02.

Hiring in Singapore for DevOps/Cloud in startups has been pretty good from my experience these past few weeks. Got more than a few interviews lined up from startups in different domains, fintech, and travel just to name a few.

It's not what you know but who you know. I still stand by those words.

Lately, Roselinde Torres, a leadership expert asked it the best. What is the diversity measure of your network?


For anyone looking for something right now we are very much hiring over at https://snyk.io/ for engineers and more in Tel Aviv & London. All interviews are remote at this time but we are not stopping hiring.

Here is a small description of what we do: Ecosystems Group My team is responsible for introducing support for new Languages, Build Tools and Package Managers to help Snyk users test & fix their projects. We do so by understanding the language rules & dependency resolution rules for each tool and building libraries & services in TypeScript that can extract project dependencies so that they can be tested for known vulnerabilities. Expect to learn a lot, pair a lot and be challenged while delivering incremental value to our users

We use Node.js with Express & Typescript.


I've been on the opposite end of this. We're a small startup that's vc backed but cashflow positive and we're hiring a new frontend dev for our next project, full-remote globally possible. We've received a ton of applications, put a lot of effort in whittling them down to a final candidate, who could only start in April. This was a bitter pill for us to swallow but she was head-and-shoulders above the rest so we decided to keep the position open and wait for her.

Yesterday I received the mail that because of COVID-19 she wants to stay with her current employer as she doesn't want any additional uncertainty in her life at this moment. I totally understand the sentiment, but now our project timeline is hosed and I have to start the recruitment process from scratch.

Sadly our conservative budgets don't allow for hiring multiple people for this position.


My team at Apple is hiring two software engineers to work on WebKit Web Inspector.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200129232/web-developer...


CrowdStrike is hiring aggressively.

My team managers the physical and virtual server infrastructure.

I'm looking for:

Data Center Technicians (non remote) Power Analysts (looking at server, pdu, DC power - remote) HW Performance Testers (server, cpu, disk performance analysis - remote) Linux Automation (remote) VMWare Administrators (highly advanced in large scale environments with high complexity and throughput - remote) Project Managers with experience deploying telecom and circuits (remote) Network Engineers (remote) Storage Engineers (familiar w/ ZFS, iscsi, nfs, complex storage analysis - remote)

If interested, please mail me aXlaXn@crXowdstXrike.com (remove the "X"es) with your resume and a brief introduction - please put 'remote HN post' in your subject.


I'm the sole IT tech for a small manufacturing facility - I was already part time and just got the request to reduce my hours even further for now. The local job market is already subpar here, so I'm definitely concerned about the months to come.


As someone who went through the last downturn, this isn't looking good in the same ways. Back then I was on a contract that had just completed and as soon as the housing market collapsed all the VC money dried up, established companies did some purse-tightening which included layoffs, and there wasn't a job available to even apply to for almost 6 months.

I work in a more downturn-resistant company now and I should be alright since we were going to be working on some internal projects for the next 6 months or so anyways. But you never know. Any expenses I have at this time are being heavily scrutinized because, like last time, things are going to take 6 months to shake out.

God speed, everyone.


I'm probably too late to this topic: but if your skills are related to Robotics and you were laid off let me know at mat@weeklyrobotics.com and I'll share your profile with all the readers of Weekly Robotics newsletter.


I’m personally unaffected and unlikely to be for a while longer because my SaaS serves a class of businesses that will be remaining open during quarantine. We’re pretty slim as an organization and fully remote so I’m hopeful we’ll be fine through this.

However, my SO is a physical therapist and several of her colleagues at other businesses have been laid off as people stop coming to appointments (rehab not being acute care and many patients being elderly or otherwise vulnerable). All of my service industry and entertainment industry friends are unemployed for the foreseeable future. The knock-on effects of even a short shutdown are likely to be significant.


Seeing a lot of folks getting worried about layoffs but haven't heard of anyone being let go first hard yet. Nonetheless, I think this is an important time to understand how layoffs work, what is negotiable and what to sign/ not to sign if it happens to you. I warmly recommend this short read, even if you're pretty confident you won't be affected: https://candor.co/guides/layoff/


Sad to read about some of these stories of hardship that people find themselves in. If you are based in Melbourne, Victoria we currently have an opening for a web developer to help with our frontend as well as a business development role based in the states. You can check the job description on our careers page:

https://mod.io/careers

Remote work is potentially possible for the SE role depending on the candidate, but on-site is preferred.. that being said we are all working remotely for the meantime given the current situation.

If you are interested please drop me an email at pat[at]mod.io


No layoffs in Dailymotion. We're in fact having an opening for a junior/mid-level (~1-3 yrs exp) JavaScript developer role, for my team in south-east France. Due to the outbreak though, interviews will be via Zoom.

Contact info in my HN profile.


Sent you an email


Two companies that I was in the process interviewing, cancelled the interviews this week. I am thankfully employed but I was thinking of leaving the company I work for. Having said that there are other companies still willing to hire.


No, but I picked a very bad time to quit my job and move from one hotspot to another.


I really feel this. My partner just got a great opportunity so we jumped on it but I had to leave my job. Now I'm worried it'll be a few months before this settles down enough for hiring depts to want me and by then who knows what the market will look like...


I got lucky. I started a full time remote job in an edtech platform, and this one has some capability for supporting distance learning.

A friend of mine started a new full time remote job several months ago at a 12-person startup doing telemedicine and remote patient onboarding.

I think it depends on what it is. I would have expected Slack to be launching like a rocket ship, but they are actually have an in-office-first culture and resisted the transformation into a fully-remote culture.

I'm still wondering where all those VR startups and entertainments platforms are. I haven't been hearing anything from Second Life, for example.


I am the Founder/CEO of SimplyWise. We are hiring a tech lead based out of NYC. We are well capitalized and have plenty of runway to get through the the next few years.

SimplyWise is empowering better decisions for modern retirement. As the US population ages, more retirees are faced with difficult decisions around how to generate income, reduce debt, navigate healthcare and minimize costs. Be a part of the team that is helping 55 to 70 year olds navigate some of the most anxiety inducing decisions they face right now.

For more information about the position contact me at sam<at>simplywise.com


Not talking about today's situation, but I've been laid off during the crisis in 2008. I was in a small startup that cut its workforce in half (because VCs wanted it to stay afloat longer with the same amount of money). Many other tech companies did massive layoffs.

There was still plenty of jobs in companies who were not affected by the crisis as much and used the opportunity to recruit talent that is very hard to attract in normal time.

So if you're in tech, it's unlikely that the job market will dry up to the point it becomes hard to find a job.


I'm a Contractor focusing on technical support for eComm sites (Woocommerce, Shopify, Etc). and overall helping with the technical needs for companies that can't do it in house. A few clients have indefinitely suspended work, We'll see what happens when I send invoices at the end of the month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

If your looking for a stateside contractor at rates of around 90$/hr I'd love to talk! My portfolio is here https://talleycodigital.com/


I work for an airline. Leadership is saying pretty much every day that employee layoffs aren't planned currently but they sound less and less confident about it every time they say it.


I’ve found out last Friday that I have to fire 2/3 of our engineering team. I work for a R&D “lab” inside a corporation, inside market research industry. Reason that I’ve got is that company hasn’t reached its expected growth and there is no budget to continue development in such size. I had to let my friends go... It’s gonna be really really though to stay.

So, if you need remote Senior Ruby, Senior Scala, Senior OPS, Senior Front-End (Angular), Senior iOS/Swift, or certified product managers, ping me.


My intuition is that layoffs will be limited to speculative ventures; i.e., startups that aren't profitable yet and/or are highly dependent on outside investment. Risk is suddenly very unattractive, which is a major turnaround from 6 months ago.

I don't think tech in general is in trouble. As a whole it's probably one of the least in-trouble sectors as the world moves online. We'll just see a lot of developers shifting from moonshots to projects that create real value, which may not be a bad thing.


Alternatively, lay-offs could be focused in companies who are profitable but with poor cash flow and who suddenly become insolvent. Earlier stage companies typically rely less on incoming cash from revenue and more on cash reserves from investment. Plus, investors have targets to meet on investments. They’re going to get more risk averse but they can’t stop investing for 6 months entirely.


Reading this thread I think you're mostly right, but there are stories here of people in established companies in hard hit industries (event planning, hospitality, etc) that are also getting laid off.


Tens of thousands of people were fired in my country just this week, across all industries.

While this periodic restructuring of the economy is probably healthy in the long term, I wish well to all individuals and families hurt by this crisis. Some people I know won't recover financially.

One consequence of this crisis, IMO, will be that people will focus on their fellow nationals for a while, and globalism will take a hit. When resources are scarce compared to the scale of the problem, you have to prioritize.


A little off topic but can we start a thread for people who have been displaced by coronavirus seeking work? There sure to be many great people who will be looking for work now, or will be shortly.

I haven't been displaced, but I am a Data scientist seeking work. I'd particularly like to jump on projects which can help deal with this virus. But I'd work take any honest work.

I have the usual DS experience Python, TF, sklearn, stats, Postgres, AWS, scala/spark pipelines, etc. Contact is in the profile.


I am in the same fate. My company has teams in Melbourne and San Diego. The whole team in Melbourne office get laid off just 2 weeks ago.

I am working in Australia but with working visa. So it is urgent for me to find a work within 60 days. Getting a job will be harder this time due to the fact that not all the companies I applied can sponsor visa for applicants.

But I am still keep my faith. There will be jobs available and even in the worst case, I could take a time off to spend more time with my family.


Academia.edu is still conducting interviews (now remotely) and hiring at full speed. It's on solid footing financially, it's adapted well to remote work, and for the last three and a half years I've found it to be a really fun workplace. I can't recommend it enough without sounding like a recruiter. Here are the openings: https://www.academia.edu/hiring


I accepted an offer with a pharma tech company last week am am super nervous about putting my notice in this week at my current job. I have verified that everything is good to go multiple times and am now being shipped my machine to begin remotely. This has to be the most nerve wracking decision I've made in my adult life (solely due to timing). I've been told over and over by people close to me not to worry about it, but I can't help but worry.


Remote Leaf[1] founder here, I would like to offer a free month of Remote Leaf membership to people who lost their job during this crisis, that might help you land a remote job. We hand-pick thousands of remote jobs from tons of job boards and only sends the ones that apply to you. Just ping me on Twitter(@abinaya_rl) and send me an email to avail this :)

[1] - https://remoteleaf.com


It seams to me that this bust of economy that is rolling has potential to be even more destructive than previous one of 2008. Brace yourself. Here is good list of advices in case of layoff, it was posted in HN few days ago https://jacobian.org/2020/mar/13/layoffs-are-coming/


The company I work for is hiring in San Francisco, New York and Bengaluru. We're doing remote interviews. If interested, my email is in my profile. Cheers!


I’m graduating in May, and accepted a return offer at a company I interned at last summer. I’m reeeeally nervous they’re gonna cancel that offer before September.


Same boat, but I start in July.


Sorry to detract when I'm lucky and have not been laid off but I feel it's relevant.

I just started a new gig a month ago. I feel it is stable and was a good move, but who knows in these uncharted waters.

My wife is 12 weeks pregnant. I haven't told my manager or anyone else. Should I tell them or wait? We're on her healthcare and she is a nurse so high job security. Happy to add more details and thanks for your advice.


Hello all,

we are actively hiring. We are Myriad Genetics -- Biotech giant from Salt Lake City, Utah. Take a look at our openings, apply and let me know if you need assistance.

https://myriad.com/working-at-myriad/joining-the-myriad-team...

i can be reached at: alex.bec@myriad.com


Flipdish (food-tech / online ordering for restaurants) is hiring remote developers (.NET)

https://www.flipdish.com/careers/

Mention HN in the application and I’ll make sure it’s prioritised.

I’m totally biased, but I think we’ve a great culture and lovely and friendly tech team who love solving problems together and getting stuff shipped.


> Flipdish is based in Dublin, you will need to be currently eligible to work in Ireland without the need for sponsorship.

How does sponsorship work for those in the US?


I work at Flipdish and I have to agree, best company culture I have ever experienced, great people and product.


I was laid off in December… from my job researching the origins of pandemic diseases and developing mitigation methods. ¯\(°_O)/¯


Basically.

I was actually laid off last year and had been searching for a new gig.

Finally made some progress on finding two companies I really liked and made it to the final interviews. One company’s business is in jeopardy and the other has paused hiring.

If anyone needs a full-stack marketing leader with digital, offline and partnership experience, I’m here! Full or part time at any level or consulting. Let me know!


I'm a full-time software engineer in Seattle and I got laid off today. I have been with the company for about 8 months only. There given reason was re-org. Looking for an opportunity during this rough time, my resume here http://0sl.in/aboutme I appreciate any referrals


Does anyone know how important it is to look for a job immediately if you don't think your job will exist for much longer?

I have the funds to last about a year unemployed + I wanted to work on my own software projects for a few months. However, I'm concerned that if I don't hop back in the job market quickly enough, the decent paying jobs might dry up.


If you only want a two month break start looking now. It will take about a month to two months to get a job and then you can push back your start date for another month. You can also go slower in the job process which will let you be picky and negotiate better.


I've considered this myself-- investing my time in my own projects while trying to lower expenses to the absolute minimum.

It makes sense, in a way. If the market is valuing your labor less than it was yesterday, your opportunity cost is lower and it might make more sense to invest in yourself.


Working in mobile gaming my whole life, and it's one of the few industries that's experiencing a a sharp upturn – but I'm still very nervous. Although big companies and publishers might be enjoying increased revenues, it's still not obvious how will small studios that are cash flow negative and rely on investment survive.


We are hiring at Myriad Genetics. If you are interested in software engineering roles or any roles, please visit our website at

https://myriad.com/working-at-myriad/joining-the-myriad-team...


If you were laid off with an excuse related to coronavirus, I'd be willing to bet that you would've been without a job in the near term no matter what.

This is a short term issue. Once everyone returns to their normal routines in the next ~2-3 weeks, there will be a surge of spending and businesses won't be able to keep up with demand.


Yes, from my part-time food service job. Luckily I have a place to stay and just got my tax refund but I'm a poor college student so the worries I'm having are with internet access at my familial home. I'm waiting on a refund from my college for the unused rent after they kicked us out of the student living.


https://rezi.io

We've made our resume software totally free for anyone that is affected by the virus.

We are headquartered in Seoul and as a result, my first-hand experience with the virus comes from a place of less concern than most North Americans and Europeans.

This is the one way I feel like we can help out


Does anyone have advice on what to do if you think your company will lay you off? For example, would it be best to get laid off, then immediately seek unemployment? Or, best to negotiate NOW for a severance package that includes healthcare in hopes of your boss thinking that is a better option for them? Or, resign for some reason?


If you think you're at risk for being laid off, attempting to renegotiate your contract is probably not a good idea. I also don't think resigning makes any sense.

I would say your best bet is to cut expenses and start saving up. Cut out unnecessary entertainment expenses, cook at home more often, trade in your car for a used beater if you have an outstanding car note, etc. Take it from me, it's more painful but more rewarding to do this sort of thing before it becomes absolutely necessary.


Can't agree more.


I left my job & bootstrapped my startup for the past year. It is an Augmented Reality product with location-based functionality. We had it tested, refined & ready. Now I don't think I can release it in the near future. I do not apply for EI or SMB business credit as well. Well, it is an adventure - isn't it?

www.mani.ai


Any JavaScript/React or Scala engineers in NYC (and some remote opportunities). Looking for a job my company dv01 has a lot of open roles. Currently doing interviews over hangouts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22618788


Running a small consulting firm. Taking the financial temperature of the startups we service.

If this turns into a many month or year long downturn, I suspect many of our contracts which are on a monthly basis will come to an end. Trying to re-enter the job market at my age is going to be extremely difficult.


I'm interviewing right now... Wanted to "switch up". Now I'm not so sure anymore.

Even though they are pretty big, i have no idea how they woild handle 20 percent jobless and an economy in the shitters... Seriously. No company and job is save. The big ones will feel the lower sales too.


I'm not being laid off. Well, I will be in a few months, but also the opposite; I'm a freelancer currently working for a major bank, and they will soon run into the limit of how long they're allowed to hire me according to their rules, so they announced my contract will end in the summer. But if I'm open to it, I could get a permanent position there. It's unrelated to the pandemic, though.

I need to consider whether to take them up on that. I like the freedom of freelancing, and it will undoubtedly be an effective pay cut, but I do really enjoy the project I'm working on, and other teams within the same department are also working on interesting things I'd like to get into, like Machine Learning. And some job security might be nice if the pandemic hurts the job market. So in a way the pandemic may force me out of my current freelancing business. I'm totally aware I'm in a very comfortable position compared to many others, though.


We're still hiring, and are trying to help where possible to combat covid-19 (We are a "cloud lab" that gives programmatic control of lab equipment to scientists via the internet)

https://strateos.com/


I have. It was the best thing that could have happened. I've got 2 months to sit at home while being paid. The 2 months are soon over and I'm flooded with freelance work. So now I work 40-50% less for roughly the same amount of money. I should have done this earlier.


How did you find freelance work?


Not a hiring manager, but I will be hiring more cs people for my team soon. We wanted to hire people anyway, but this virus will probably expand the candidate pool since most of the gorillas will have trouble hiring now. Adtech is about to face a harsh reality check.


We are hiring at Myriad Genetics.

https://myriad.com/working-at-myriad/joining-the-myriad-team...


Not yet, but as a contractor-to-hire employee I expect that the latter part of the equation won't be happening at absolute best.

Anybody looking for a FT remote senior designer with heavy component library, react prototyping and sketch/figma skills?


What human-capital organizing platforms do we have, or can we stand up in short order? Linked and Indeed are overly spammed and enterprise, I don't expect them to pivot quickly.

Surely we can make a matching platform for and by tech.


This is probably the best time for some businesses like Airlines to upgrade and migrate their legacy software foundations. I hope they see it that way. But unfortunately that's not how investors look at it.


SharpSpring is hiring. We're a marketing automation company. Fully remote--for the moment at least. Hiring fullstack devs (TypeScript & GraphQL). Email travis [at] sharpspring [dot] com if interested.


Not exactly laid off recently, but I've been on a sabbatical after being laid off 18 months ago.

I'm about at the end of my sabbatical and was going to start looking for a new gig soon. Worst timing ever.

Not sure what to do now.


I was layed off before corona. Although I have been interviewing at 2 companies, both of those have frozen hiring and the positions have been cancelled. So still in a way affected which sucks!


I'm a frontend dev. I do not expect to be laid off anytime soon. Our company was planning to double in size this year, we were hiring quite a lot, and now we're just slowing down hiring.


No. My company was already 70% remote and our customers and users are in the US healthcare system. I consider myself extremely fortunate, because my wife worked at a restaurant and lost her job.


I'm a hiring manager and we're hiring engineers: senior frontend and backend. Interviews are over Zoom; they're a bit choppy but people seem to be bearing with us.

If you work for a company funded by SoftBank or your company is chasing froth, I'd start making plans that involve your current employer no longer paying you.

I'd be remiss if I didn't say if you need a job, meet the above qualifications, and are willing to work in SF 4 days/week only -- comment below this. (Though obviously we're fully remote until at least April 7; I expect after that it's going to be fully remote at your choice for probably another month minimum. More depending on if / how Trump bungles the covid response further).


Thanks for posting. What's the backend stack look like?


we are actively hiring -- virus or no virus -- Biotech giant in Salt Lake City Utah -- Myriad Genetics -- Take a look and apply! https://myriad.com/working-at-myriad/joining-the-myriad-team...

i can be reached at: alex.becz@myriad.com


I lost my contractor assignment this morning. It seems like companies here in Sweden are preparing for tougher times ahead.


Not laid off but about to have a third interview with my ideal company and was told they were starting a hiring freeze.


Not laid off but was just put on furlough


did they tell you when they expect to recall you? what is that communication like?


Hey fam, if you haven't noticed - the entire world just went work from home. Have faith. Don't despair. This too shall pass. Use this time to brush up on skills, do some side projects, learn new things. Have confidence in your abilities, recognize where you can use some guidance and don't be afraid to ask for it.

Look after yourself and your loved ones. Be kind to people.


What skills do you have outside of front-end development? How many different frameworks do you know?


I had a decent amount of contracting work going before accepting the position that I had most recently, so I will probably start offering that again, depending on what kind of response I get from the applications I submit. This most recent job I got from posting in the monthly `Who's Hiring` thread back in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17205867

As far as frameworks, I'm quite familiar with React and React Native (app in Google Play and App Store), Redux, Angularjs, etc. I haven't worked with Vue yet, but I'm looking forward to trying it now that I've suddenly found myself with some free time!

The remote team that I have been working with most recently are all updating our resumes. A portion if the fully-remote engineering team is located in Europe while a couple of us are located in the USA.

If you or someone you know is hiring, feel free to send me an email at the address in my profile and I can put you in touch with a few fantastic remote developers who I happen to know are available and who do great work.


We're not hiring, but I would encourage you to add at least one backend language to your repetoire, and some ops (like basic AWS, Docker, etc). Flexibility is what will make you valuable, and tbh, in a downturn I think front-ends will be deprioritized.


That's great advice. I don't usually choose it to show off in interviews as it's not my strongest skill, but I currently work full-stack across an app with Rails backend and Angular/React front-end. I also have experience with Express, but haven't worked with it for a couple of years.


my new company just withdrew their offer (I started in a couple weeks) and I just left my previous gig (AV startup). backend+infra full stack python/go stuff

the new company's revenue went from 7 figures+ a month to 0 because of the virus and they are rightly freaking out


What market are then in that went from 7 figures a month to zero?


Hotel industry for example.


What's the difference between "mandatory unpaid leave" and "laid off"?


With unpaid leave they are saying they will still have a job for you at some point. It probably means you still have benefits.


Consultant. Projects seem to be drying off (Same story for a couple of other friends as well).


My employer (Notion Labs, Inc) is trying to hire in this climate and finding it difficult.


we are hiring at https://getcloudapp.com. Looking for a strong ruby and rails developer who knows devops pretty well. Email is in my profile.


>mandatory unpaid leave

What does this mean, precisely? How is it different from firing staff?


When you have a layoff, the former employee can file for unemployment. Which is money that comes from the company (through a circuitous route). So it's cheaper to go "mandatory unpaid leave".


So this is a scumbag move by the employer then? They don't want to lose the employee, they don't want to pay them, and they don't want to pay for unemployment?


The unemployment has already been paid for (in most states it comes out of every paycheck).


Well, that depends. On the one hand, maybe it means that they are expecting to be able to survive long enough to bring everyone back and are wanting to cover insurance benefits a bit longer. Or perhaps it means that they are trying to use the current bank account balance (presumably a few months worth) to stay solvent a bit longer, hanging on to the point where they have absolutely no money left-- when of course everyone's unused PTO would disappear.


> How is it different from firing staff?

Staff are still on the books so that the business doesn't have to go through all the paperwork of firing (and possibly re-hiring when business resumes).


In addition to the cost of paperwork, there's also the issue of paying out unused PTO. In many cases like mine, this can add up to many thousands of dollars per employee.


I assume it may make a difference with unemployment payments.


I left my job, bootstrapped my startup (an AR Product). The product was tested, refined & ready by the end of February. The core of the product expects people to move & has significant location-based functionalities. I can't release it in the near future.


Not laid off, but I have been held back from a planned role transition (Agile Team Facilitator) so that I can continue contributing towards developer resource in the interim.


Come join us! mural.co/jobs


Tray.io | London | Backend Engineer (Scala/Java) / Security Engineer / Frontend Engineer | Security Engineer| Site Reliability Engineer| Technical Support Administrator| Full-time | Onsite | https://tray.io

Tray is a visual programming platform. It’s a low-code user experience that allows anyone to build business logic that precisely defines how data flows through their organisation.

We’re a well-funded startup with a team in San Francisco and 100+ in our London Engineering HQ. We have secured a huge Series C in November this year, at over 8.5x the valuation of our Series A in March 2018; we’ve worked hard on creating a fantastic support layer for our technical teams and now we’re expanding. We’re small (approaching medium sized) and dynamic, very open to new ideas and the work you do now will have a big impact on shaping how we grow our team and our product.

We aim to pick the right tool for the job, and currently use: Typescript, React, Redux, GraphQL, and our toolchain includes Webpack and PostCSS. On the backend, our APIs are built in Scala, with Go and Java powering some of our custom services.

We are excited by people who want to constantly innovate; borrow from other industries, experiment with new tools and pool their knowledge with other solution seekers; people who have shipped entire projects with ownership and autonomy; people who take pride in what gets built, all the whilst balancing day-to-day pragmatism with building for the future.

Current open roles:

- Backend Software Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4586921002

- Systems Software Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4370269002

- Security Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4629664002

- Frontend Software Engineer (Performance) https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4363932002

- Frontend Software Engineer (Design system) https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4655086002 -Site Reliability Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4370269002

-Technical Support Administrator https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4675597002

Tech stack: Scala, Go, GraphQL, ReactJS, TypeScript, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, MongoDB, DynamoDB, AWS SQS, AWS Kinesis, Docker, Terraform, AWS Lambda, Serverless Framework, Jenkins, Grafana, Prometheus, AWS & Linux.

Apply: https://tray.io/jobs or get in touch with london-talent@tray.io


Tray.io | London | Backend Engineer (Scala/Java) | Security Engineer | Frontend Engineer | Security Engineer| Site Reliability Engineer| Technical Support Administrator| Full-time | Onsite | https://tray.io

Tray is a visual programming platform. It’s a low-code user experience that allows anyone to build business logic that precisely defines how data flows through their organisation.

We’re a well-funded startup with a team in San Francisco and 100+ in our London Engineering HQ. We have secured a huge Series C in November last year, at over 8.5x the valuation of our Series A in March 2018; we’ve worked hard on creating a fantastic support layer for our technical teams and now we’re expanding. We’re small (approaching medium sized) and dynamic, very open to new ideas and the work you do now will have a big impact on shaping how we grow our team and our product.

We aim to pick the right tool for the job, and currently use: Typescript, React, Redux, GraphQL, and our toolchain includes Webpack and PostCSS. On the backend, our APIs are built in Scala, with Go and Java powering some of our custom services.

We are excited by people who want to constantly innovate; borrow from other industries, experiment with new tools and pool their knowledge with other solution seekers; people who have shipped entire projects with ownership and autonomy; people who take pride in what gets built, all the whilst balancing day-to-day pragmatism with building for the future.

Current open roles:

- Backend Software Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4586921002

- Systems Software Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4370269002

- Security Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4629664002

- Frontend Software Engineer (Performance) https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4363932002

- Frontend Software Engineer (Design system) https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4655086002

-Site Reliability Engineer https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4370269002

-Technical Support Administrator https://boards.greenhouse.io/trayio/jobs/4675597002

Tech stack: Scala, Go, GraphQL, ReactJS, TypeScript, JavaScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, ElasticSearch, MongoDB, DynamoDB, AWS SQS, AWS Kinesis, Docker, Terraform, AWS Lambda, Serverless Framework, Jenkins, Grafana, Prometheus, AWS & Linux.

Apply: https://tray.io/jobs or get in touch with london-talent@tray.io

The interview process happens completely remotely, and you will stay remote until the outbreak ends


NAN


I was trying to get back into the job market and was scheduled for my 3rd and final interview tomorrow. They canceled it and apologized. Told me hopefully they'll call me back in a month... I doubt they will.


Laid off:

No, I'm self employed (software business). That does not mean that I'm impervious to macroeconomic conditions, but it does mean I have developed a forecasting mindset that generally keeps me ahead of downturns.

Hiring:

No, not at the moment. But that doesn't have anything to do with COVID. I tend to hire very little and no one permanent.

Honestly, I struggle with tech people who run out of cash or say they can't get hired. I understand that not everyone can ace an interview or makes enough to save up a large cushion -- at the same time you have one of the most valuable / sought after skills in the market today.

A little late for this advice, but:

MAKE SURE YOU GET PAID WHAT YOU'RE WORTH AND SAVE SOME CASH. SOME AS IN MONTHS' OR YEARS' WORTH.

Really, you don't have to be "rich" to have a 1% level of financial stability. It's really about having enough cash to have enough time to weather a downturn or move into a new area without pooping your pants.

The response I usually get is "but x happened!". Yeah, no shit, that's the whole point. We can't see into the future but we can buffer cash.

If this downturn ends up hurting you -- learn from it!




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