As a person actively applying in EU... the market reeks candidate desperation. Salaries remained constant or even decreased in numbers despite over 10% inflation. Zero flexibility on the employer side "need 5 years of SRE experience for SRE position, need 5 years of DevOps experience for DevOps position, etc". WTF is going on. With the perspective of mangling my brain on the "next cool" Angular stack I'll remain working on personal projects, thanks.
I just got a job in the EU by watching on my desired commute path for new company signs I hadn't noticed before, then researching them. I found a startup in an industry that interested me, made an effort to network my way into the eyes of the CEO, and then made myself available when he had work available.
The whole process took 9 months.
The front door of companies is always locked due to the unintended consequences of trying to scale up HR and recruiting. Hang out by the side door, and an insider will let you in. (Remember that "bad recruiting" is a problem insiders are trying to solve, just as you are.)
I've generally taken at least that long looking for new jobs.
It depends on whether you want /a/ position, or /the/ position. My past few jobs have been perfect fits for my background and interests, and I genuinely enjoyed work.
A random SWE position is petty fungible. Perfect fits are rare. Markets are pretty inefficient too, so you can command better salary or benefits, if you want.
Agree with all of the above. Currently in a stable job and 6 months and counting into my job search.
Absolute desire to leave but not for some rubbish compromise out of desperation. It can be frustrating but I believe it will be worthwhile to get the right role. And, importantly, I'm in no despeate rush.
9 months is a typical amount of time it takes to network your way into a company.
The key is patience, persistence, keeping multiple options open, flexibility, and understanding the needs of your future colleagues. When it works it looks lucky, but you can't rush "luck" of this type. :)
EU is pretty big and varied, the markets in Spain, Slovenia and Estonia are probably quite different, let alone per city. I can assure you none of what you said applies to France (at least Paris but many of the jobs i see/saw/interviewed for were fully remote, so I don't see why they wouldn't accept people from other areas of France).
France resident here, anecdotal evidence, but Paris (and IDF) companies tend to only accept +100% match (close to 100% requirements + big chunk of the "nice to haves") for remote positions. If you miss anything from their stack they just pick someone else since the pool is much bigger. If you live in IDF they seem to care less about you being a perfect fit.
The Airtable table has a UX quirk that I find rage inducing.
When I click on a column header to sort the data, a "sorted by 1 field" dropdown opens and covers the top rows of the newly sorted data. Then if I click the x in the corner of said dropdown, it removes the filter (and doesn't close the dropdown). Clicking outside of the table doesn't close it either, since the table is embedded.
I too had the same issue, I figured you must click the "Sorted by 1 field" badge. I wanted to sort by # of employees and I couldnt see the first few rows.
More interested in how it works than what it does later with that mechanism.
Also, this is great but it'd be helpful to add "employees hired" (not necessarily by the same companies that are laying off) since March 2020 too to calculate the net impact instead of having a linear metric that just grows.
That's what I'm saying. In the terminology of systems theory, the value of a stock over time tells you rather little about what's going on in the system compared to knowing both inflow and outflow.
True. There should be a simpler mechanism.
In case of stocks, there exists the balance sheet but there should be something simpler yet more informative. For instance, the regular watchlist we have (on Yahoo Finance) with a couple more datapoints from the balance sheet.
Note that I used the word "stock" in its system-theoretic meaning, i.e. an accumulating quantity whose level depends on inflow and outflow. Not in the financial equity sense.
Keep in mind that these communities are affected by what I call a "reddit effect" - they tend to be negative, so only people who dislike the company go there, creating a toxic negativity feedback loop. Same as many major subreddits which thrive on negativity and outrage. Take whatever you read there with a grain of salt.
The chart gives an impression that most of these happened in Q1-2 of 2020 and everything has more or less settled since then. Or am I missing something?
That's what I see. Many employers were very cautious, often with good reason, in the early days of the pandemic. Right now the market doesn't look bad at least here in the UK and going by the level of recruiter spam I get.
Some of the more recent names I recognise on the layoffs.fyi list are Zillow, Peloton and Robinhood. These have all had unique, headline-making difficulties so perhaps they don't reflect the market as a whole.
It's hard to believe the good times will continue to roll even in the tech sector though. The boost that some parts of the industry received from profound lifestyle changes on a societal scale caused by COVID is history and the boom in tech stocks is long past with widespread and sometimes very large corrections since.
Now the entire global economy is surely going to take a big hit. Some sort of normal life returns but the costs of the economic damage from the virus itself and the huge support schemes many governments put in place come due. The actions of certain belligerent leaders aren't helping. All of this will surely dampen investment so say goodbye to the kind of crazy startup that gets way more funding than it really needs and goes on a huge hiring campaign because it doesn't know what else to do with the money.
I'm afraid some relatively young people in the software industry who think it's normal to job-hop every few months for a double-digit salary raise and to double-or-more their base through stock and bonuses may be about to learn a brutal lesson just as some of us older devs did in the GFC or dot-bomb eras before.
Amazon is down 30%, and the sorts of tech companies that will be populating this list are already down anywhere from 50% to 90%. However, the biggest pain to come is private market startups. An easy call to make, simply because you can't directly profit from it, which lets the inefficiency persist. For now.
We only need to go back a couple of years to mid 2020 when every company was laying people off. Layoffs.fyi was tracking multiple new rounds every day. I fear what is coming is going to be that or worse.
- hoard cash, i.e. don't spend it on things you don't need right now, you might need it a lot more in 6-12 months just to pay the mortgage
-do anything and everything you can to have a nest egg that will give you 18-24 months of living expenses; 6 months won't be enough for a lot of people. Not easy for everyone I know, but if the SRHTF, it might take you that long to find a new job - and that new job might not pay as well as your old one.
-get out of debt if you can. Again, not easy, but owning a house and car free-and-clear is an awesome feeling when the economy goes into a bad recession and you don't risk losing your house as long as you can pay taxes and insurance.
-get a side-gig or two on top of your job if you can, having a few irons in the fire is never a bad idea if you can handle the extra work.
-not a good time to switch jobs to a risky small tech company (or even a big tech company) if they never, or rarely make money - sooner or later VC's will stop writing checks to companies that don't have a prospect of becoming profitable - in a severe downturn, VC's will cut their losses and move on; these types of companies will be hit the hardest.
-if you are working at mega-corp, try to get on - or stay on a team that supports or develops projects that are really important to the core company functions and/or makes them money. Not a good time to be part of a 'special group' exploring some new technology pr product that might not ever pan out - when big corps tighten belts, look for those types of projects to get shut down.
Have enough cash to keep you afloat for at least 6+ months of unemployment.
If that's not currently the situation try to cut back expenses where you can to reach that state (to a reason), and imo even on the expense of 401k contributions (but please remember to start again once you have enough cash).
Would the OP or someone else familiar with the site be able to provide more insight on the data? The site also allows users to submit layoffs so the data is crowdsourced too:
Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act says layoffs of >100 FTE within a 30 day window have to be reported 60 days in advance. California state law is even stricter at >50 FTE.
