Laid off folks, are you getting hired?

Here's the flip side: I was hiring (at a stealth vc-funded startup).

I reached out to every designer and coder laid off from Twitter and Amazon (one of my investors sent me a spreadsheet that those laid off folks added their contact info to).

I didn't receive a single interested response to my reach outs. Now granted, I'm sure they were bombarded with lots of startup offers and being picky what company/stage they were responding to, or were still in grief mode and not ready to start looking, or maybe (probably!) my reach-out finesse was lacking.

But I'm just pointing out that their are definitely companies like mine who are hiring and it's not all doom and gloom for laid off folks.

I ended up hiring via ads on LinkedIn and job posts on eng message boards.

Being real for a minute: There is definitely a perspective among hiring companies that regular lay offs are sometimes packaged alongside bottom performers, but I think that is something they would just do diligence on during an interview process.

Senior SWE, 20+ years of experience, based in the bay area, laid off from Meta in November. I reached out to my network and had a couple applications in same-day. One of those panned out and I just started this week.

I also did a bunch of cold job applications, but didn't get a callback from any of them. The whole process led to a ton of anxiety and was really nerve-wracking, especially reading about layoffs from other tech firms in the same time period. I kept worrying that my new company was going to hit layoffs and that my offer would be rescinded, especially when the recruiter told me they were reducing hiring. Having it take about 3 months just drug that anxiety out.

I still have a bit of anxiety about getting laid off, but no more than I'd have anywhere else.

I was laid off in June. This coincided with my mom being diagnosed with cancer, and because I had a fair amount of saving, I took some time to support family and work on some personal projects.

I started looking again at the start of this year, and it's been rough, at least compared to my last job search where I had multiple offers in under two weeks. I've submitted ~50 applications so far, most with a non-generic cover letter. Most haven't responded, several declined to interview, and just one scheduled an interview.

Using my referral network hasn't been that effective. Most of my former colleagues are working at large companies that either aren't hiring or are in midst of layoffs themself. I was able to get 4 references at hiring companies through my network, but of those, 3 haven't responded and 1 declined to interview.

I have had a decent amount of interviews through 3rd-party recruiting agencies. I've gotten to final interview stages with a few companies, but no offers. Most of these places were very early seed-stage companies. I'm actively interviewing with a handful now.

When companies decline to even interview, it's discouraging and stressful for sure. It's easy for imposter syndrome to creep in. But overall, I'm still relatively optimistic that I will find something soon-ish.

I can see how hiring companies must be inundated now, but it also seems a bit strange that nearly every company I connect with through a recruiter wants to interview, but my success rate submitting applications myself is basically 0%.

Laid off from a US remote backend/data role in a large, FAANG-adjacent tech company in early January. I have always had a high callback rate with 20+ years of experience and a CS degree from a tier 1 university. This time, my only callbacks were through internal referrals from my network or introductions made through recruiters. I ended up with two offers by the end of January, one from a growing startup and the other from a mid-market company with a conservative business model. Given the slowdown in the market, I'm thankful to have found something so quickly.

My take is that this is not nearly as bad as the dotcom crash in the early 2000s, but the red hot tech market of 2021 where companies were hiring as fast as they could with incredible comp packages is gone. There are still a good number of roles out there, but companies are being more careful in their hiring and they are not trying to compete with (the no longer hiring) FAANGs when it comes to compensation.

I was a senior dev at a big tech and got laid off in November. I have applied to hundreds of places. Not a lot of responses. I have been doing interview preps the whole time. It has been very demoralizing and I am thinking of switching careers to something else. I have been considering skilled trades. I like carpentry in particular.

I was laid off in November. I've applied to dozens, probably hundreds of jobs. I've had two interviews (one bigtechco) and a YC startup. Both did not work out as they went with more senior candidates. I decided to take a different approach and tailor my resume to each job and narrow the types of jobs I applied too. This has led to an increase in recruiter calls and I'm setting up interviews now.

However it does seem there is still a lot of flux, especially with larger companies who are still trying to allocate headcount. I've had calls with Google that were basically like: "we're interested, but we don't know HC yet, let's circle back in 3 weeks".

US, looking for remote. 15+ years experience been looking since early January, and I still don't feel like I have traction. Worst job market for engineers I've seen in a long time. I have hope it'll improve in March when budgets are finalized, but at the same time I'm preparing for it to be a long one. First unemployment in my career, up until now I had employers coming to me.

We're hiring at our company. We've had a lot of people come through from the recent waves of layoffs, and usually so far there has been a mix of too high expectations, remote work mismatches as well as just lots of people not making the bar (we are a small company).

Still on the lookout for senior rust engineers who want to work at a company that's remote-first with a minimal-meetings culture.

You can message me on telegram @jommi for info

I was a Staff-level engineer that a BigCo@Bay area laid off in November. My network immediately went into overdrive connecting me with great opportunities, which I am VERY thankful for. Got in pipeline for 7 companies, interviewed for 4 roles, got 3 offers (two startups and one public company), declined the other 3 interviews and decided to take the public company offer.

I recently got laid off in the UK and it was really hard to find something decent. There's jobs out there, but most aren't all that great and the interviews were much harder to come by. I was ghosted by recruiters countless times after being told I would be put forward for certain roles which has never happened to me before...

Firstly, I'm really sorry to everyone who has been laid off. It's such an awful experience, and I'm sorry you're going through it. You're not alone, and everyone is cheering for you! Take care of yourself. You'll get through this.

The macro environment looks to be improving, and companies are mostly doing this to put downward pressures on salaries or because they overzealously hired during the pandemic. There are lots of things being built right now that need to be scaled.

I hope this doesn't come off tonally bad - I'm able to contract to hire a few (3-5) folks. I'm building an at-home Hollywood studio, and I'm looking for remote engineers with the following skills:

- Rust/Actix for backend, web services (and a real time desktop app we've yet to launch). This is my #1 need.

- Unreal Engine engineers, preferably with animation and C++ experience. This will help us tremendously. Longer term we'd like to explore Godot, but that's less immediate - more Q3/4.

- ML, especially with generative media experience. We've got a good sized team, but we're always looking to expand it. Experience with audio, images, LLMs/NLP, video a plus.

I'm financing this myself, and we have considerable runway financed from my last exit. There will be equity and full time offers extended if you're interested in sticking with us.

Germany. I wasn't exactly laid off, just left in a bad time. Zero applications, just recruiters reaching out, I started 8 processes, 4 are still ongoing, on 2 I got ghosted, but got 2 offers so far which I gotta answer till next week.

EDIT: I got 18 years of experience, web full stack (react/vue/golang/rails/C#/haskell) + devops, if that matters.

I was laid off in november, in vc. Looking for PM/Ops roles. Applied to a ton of stuff where I was a great fit, no answer or immediate rejection lol. I'm 8 years out of school and am not applying for roles that are unrealistic.

I think the entire hiring/search process is so broken. Different applications, formats. Don't get me started on having to fill out sections in a form that are just resume sections (work experience, schools etc.).

Going across big VC firm portfolio openings also super fragmented. It's opened my eyes to how awful the process of hiring is from both sides.

Doing consulting/contract work, advisory, and side projects as I hang on cofounder matching and apply to jobs on workatastartup, wellfound, and linkedin. Pretty dismal job search process.

I took 8 months off voluntarily, just started applying again last week (full stack dev):

10 applications, 2 rejections, 1 initial phone screen

Anecdotally I see very few junior/low level positions open, most jobs seem to be senior+. Salary ranges are all a bit higher than I remember them being 3 years ago. I am still a long way from being scared enough to take something I don't like or that doesn't pay well, still optimistic things will swing back eventually.

Sr. Software Dev with some hardware background. Laid off in early December. Started looking about a month ago. One phone interview so far with a startup that seemed a bit sketchy (didn't know where the funding was coming from) and in a very inconvenient timezone (I'd likely have to wake up at 3AM for meetings).

Many recruiter pings/week, but mostly not great fits (they glom onto a keyword that doesn't mean what they think it does) and often it's easy to tell that several emails from different recruiters are for the same exact job. Hardware verification and FPGA seems to be in great demand, but it's been too many years since I worked in that space so I don't feel like my experience would still be relevant for those.

Talked to a recruiter today who said things are starting to slow down on his end - not getting as many jobs to recruit for. This is to be expected, I think.

So far it's pretty easy to make my 5 contacts/week as required by the unemployment dept.

I was laid off in early December. I applied to a couple hundred positions, interviewed with around 10%, and received two offers at the beginning of this month.

The market is pretty rough. I had a lot of good interviews fizzle out into rejections after the final round. I assume this is because I was competing with several other recently laid off engineers. My new salary is 33% less than my previous and I’m getting much less equity. It sucks but I’m happy to be employed.

Laid off Jan 18th from Microsoft, not really the unicorn type I would say but well above average in my field (imo)

Applied to a couple positions ~5-6 and got a couple automated rejections, no interviews or initial calls through this process. I think not having a degree makes it difficult to get past the initial screening

About 2-3 recruiter messages per day on linkedin. I responded to around 10 or so, of which 7 I had initial interviews with the company after my resume was passed up. Had 2 rejections and 3 offers, only 1 of which was under my current salary. I interviewed for mostly 100% remote, I think only 1 company of the ones I was looking at required 2-3 days in office

Not laid off but I've just ended a year long sabbatical. Looking for work now is a terrible experience. A lot of ghosting, recruiters absolutely useless, agencies not looking for new talent. I have done two dozen interviews, twice as many resumes sent to interested recruiters, and only one offer, which I was not very excited about and declined.

I'm focusing on my SaaS project, and trying to market myself outside the box instead of the old resume as my 16 years long career doesn't seem to impress anyone. Sorry, I will not elaborate further as you're all my competition here.

I wasn’t laid off but was bored enough at my job to be looking. Interviews dialed back in quantity around august but I was able to find and interview with another company or two every week and accepted a position in December(was waiting to come across the right job, not just any job). We’re still hiring too and not just for technical positions. I have friends at several other companies who are as well.

The FAANGs gobbled up so much talent just to deny it to their competition that it sucked all the oxygen out of the industry and now that the people are available there’s still companies desperate to hire even with the higher cost of capital and inflation

I’m based in SF Bay Area and I was laid off from my Engineering Management position in October. I had MAANG offer at the time which took about 2-3 months when the process started in July. But as they started reviewing budgets it was cancelled even though Recruiter verbally agreed on the number. Then I interviewed with several companies in Oct-Dec. One startup was willing to proceed with VP/Director level offer but the President said he needs to wait until January to get it approved from the board. But they never got back to me. The interviews dried up since mid-Dec and I am still looking. I’m also on H1B so that makes it more challenging.

I feel like such a loser with so many people having competing offers. I've never had competing offers. Like people getting to choose their own destiny and I'm just taking whatever shit I'm lucky enough to get.

I think these layoffs are particularly hard on "non-technical" people: marketing, customer service, customer success, professional services, implementations, people who have built a career in customer operations roles.

My experience so far is that most companies who seem to be hiring for these types of roles aren't actually hiring. Some of the positions I saw last year in June are still listed on careers pages, some applications are met with an instant auto-decline (maybe gathering resumes?), some companies have swapped hiring managers mid-interview process, others seem to burn through one idiot recruiter after the next. I don't think most companies know what they need when they hire for "customer experience" or "customer success", so roles and job descriptions are poorly defined and the business need is unclear, but that's a discussion for another day.

The current market doesn't have a lot of opportunities for the post-sales customer facing crowd. I've toyed with the idea of a highly curated job board that is specifically for this group.

Weirdly, a senior dev from my company was recruited by another company and will be changing jobs in a couple weeks. And to be clear, he is not a unicorn type. He's a good senior developer in a common language.

It's hard for me to understand recruiters "fishing in the neighbor's pond" while there are plenty of unemployed, qualified senior devs out there right now.

Maybe things are not as bad in Europe. We do not make FAANG Palo Alto money but that also means we are not expecting to continue making FAANG money in situations like these. Decent backend developer, ~8 years of experience. Laid off beginning of December, sent out about 18 cold applications since then. I did not hear back from 5 companies, I was rejected (when this happened, usually very early in the process) from 10 companies, and received 3 offers. Ended up with a ten percent raise and five more holiday days than my previous position. Only remote positions.

Remember that there are many reasons why someone would not get hired despite having top work experience.

I have seen people out of FAANGs with 10+ years of experience sharing their CV after being laid off and some will struggle to get any interview, let alone get a good job, just because the format of said CV was absolutely awful.

If you aren't getting interviews, it's your CV that is the problem.

I’m a product designer. Contract expired, and it seems really hard to find another. LinkedIn shows me most of the roles have 150-250 applicants… Getting silent treatment even for roles where I seem to be 100% perfect match to their requirements, even overqualified :-) Not trying to brag, but realistically I’d estimate my work & experience puts me among top 10% of product designers. But the market seems to be tougher than ever before. Lots of designers better than me in the market.

I'm an independent contractor, I thought lay-offs would translate into lots of small contracts but it hasn't, in fact, my existing co tracts have dried off and not finding any new ones right now.

Laid of from Meta with 10+ years of experience. Very low and slow response rate from big tech, but fintech and startups are replying pretty frequently. Most startups are willing to discuss higher roles. It's still a pay cut, but it's not too bad.

Not a single interview so far since a November (albeit I paused looking around the holidays figuring it was out less but didn’t get started again till a bit into January. Going to attempt to pay for a resume rewrite and see if it helps any.

Not part of the “layoff” group, I left Netflix after burning out.

But I do consulting for platform engineering and site reliability engineering. I haven’t had problems paying the bills over the past ~year.

With all the copy-cat layoffs going on, I wonder how many people have been laid off, found a new job only to be laid off _again_!

Laid off in December. Applies to ~10 companies, and about 10 other companies reached out. 9 rejections, 2 in advanced stages, and 9 haven't heard back from them.

I got my first fulltime job ever in 2019, got laid off in 2021, and had no issue getting interviews and finally landing another job. In 2021 the process was surprisingly easy, fast and without much input from my end. I never really did leetcode exercises, so it was quite a shock to find so many companies do them.

Serious question for the folks who are not getting many callbacks. Are you looking for remote-only work, or are you looking at both remote and on-site opportunities?

Not a single interview since mid november.

edit: this is rapidly becoming an interview about my job search and I don't really have the energy for it. I've answered the questions I feel like answering and I'm good for now.

Engineering manager, 10 years experience robotics

I had multiple concurrent interview tracks start pretty quickly, and ended up with 5 competing offers. I was lucky to be able to tolerate that many interviews, and it worked out for me. Though I think I disappointed some employers by being honest about how many I had going concurrently.

I moved back to hands-on work as well, which has been really nice.

My contract was just cut early at a large corp. So, this is awful. Second time I have lost a gig in the past 2 years. I can't take this biz anymore. About time to jump off a friggin' cliff.

I think remote work has definitely changed the game (not in a bad way). I was working remotely at a YC start up since the start of the pandemic and they never really figured out their business since I've been there. I've been looking around for new work and my job search has changed drastically from pre-pandemic.

I've reached out to my network and found some success there but I've also been shotgunning out applications on LinkedIn to any "close-enough" remote role that had easy apply (I'm saving a ton of time on resume customization and cover letter bullshitting). That's resulted in a lot of rejections which is demoralizing - but it's a numbers game at this point.

No new job yet - but definitely some good responses and intro calls after only 2 weeks of searching.

(Background - 10 years experience/full stack and marketing/college drop out/LA)

If you’re posting please include the location as well.

I was laid of in November, started interviewing a week later. I got about 50% response on my applications; I bombed most of them at various stages (I should have increased prep time by another week or 2). I got an offer in early January and started last week.

My compensation dropped by 30-40%, but I figured if I'll probably spend more than 30% of the year waiting for an offer close to what had before. Considering my poor interview performance, I did not want to compete with a glut of engineers I had a hunch would be let go in the new year (which turned out correct).

I registered a Delaware LLC for $200, my current job is not as remotely challenging as my FAANG job so I have plenty of mental energy at the end of my 8-hour(!) work day, even when I go out of my way to add tasks outside of my duties. I just haven't thought up a lifestyle-business idea to run with.

I'm from Italy, and here usually things happen few months after US. And, btw, it is much harder to fire due to bureaucratic stuff.

Honestly, I don't see anything changed that much here. I got hired during this downtrend from an US-based company and, although some slightly more pessimistic speeches from CEO, everything seems just fine. Hires have been slowed down, but not really freezed.

As other mentioned, it seems harder for people who just graduated to enter their first job. But actually, the companies that were used to hire young people (e.g. my first company, 'cause they like cheap workforce, or many consultancies since they just always need fresh workers), are continuing to get them. Their trick is just to pay the same salaries as before: inflation-free!

I'd be curious to know how self-employed workers are doing instead. From one side, the risk should be higher for them, on the other side they should be preferred from companies to compensate for hiring freeze while still pushing on projects, right? I'm seriously thinking about making the switch, as this industry downturn has also brought a new sense of awareness in workers, and thus in me too...

I work at a company that did layoffs. I wasn't affected, but I happened to be looking for a new role anyways. I've had two positions get to the offer stage so far, fully remote. For mid-career devs there doesn't seem to be any shortage of work.

A few senior friends got booted and are starting to be panic after a few months of doing nothing

It reminds me of 2008. I switched during the covid boom expecting the obvious crash after governments run out of excuses

I started looking this week. Getting called back at least but haven't even started the leetcode boogey portion of the evening yet so no idea how actively they're actually hiring.

Senior Product Designer with 8 years of professional experience, 9 years of freelance experience. Got laid off Thanksgiving week and applied to about 35 jobs but did end up landing a new role that I started on the 30th of January. Took about a 10% base pay cut but there's also a 10% bonus that if eligible, will put me close to my previous role. 9 rounds total and took about a month but this included time off for the holidays. Funnily enough it was one of the first jobs I applied for.

I was searching starting in October, but not laid off. I applied to ~20 places, didn't hear back from any of them. I turned on #OpenToWork on LinkedIn and got ~150 recruiters reaching out per month, of which <4% were offering competitive compensation. I got to the hiring manager stage for 75% of the ones I responded to, and failed 100% of the leetcode style programming challenges I was given. Two companies didn't have that round, so I made it to the offer stage on both of those, and accepted one in December. I didn't use my network at all.

Recruiter outreach has dried up significantly on LinkedIn, so I'm not sure this is still valid, even though it was <2 months ago.

Not laid off, but I have noticed that the volume of emails I get from recruiters dried up in December and January.

If you are a Senior Backend Engineer interested in work with Elixir, please apply here, we also have many other open roles: https://boards.greenhouse.io/fireworkcareers

If I can add to the original question - anyone starting their own business since getting laid off?

It’s interesting to hear about the 100 job applications needed to land a spot, is hired.com or some other site like that worthwhile? Seems like there’s a huge duplication of effort. I’m more specialized and doubt I would even find 100 job openings to apply to!

The startup I was at had a ~10% layoff mid last September that I and several other senior (i.e. expensive) folks were caught in. I started a new, equivalent job in mid-November. It probably would've been quicker but my family and I have some somewhat edge case circumstances in play at the moment that mean I needed a job that'd let me be remote outside of the US. Some of that time too was choosing between two pretty compelling offers, so.

My deepest sympathies to anyone else facing this process right now. Even in a reasonably healthy (if not wildly overheated) hiring market, facing a layoff sucks. Best wishes to everyone out there.

For comparison, same thread topic from two and a half months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755531

I just got back into the market after taking a hiatus to write a novel (finished it, deleted it afterward cus I'm not proud of it) and work on my music,(more success but I'm not good enough to think I can make a career out of it).

There's a definite hiring slowdown due to current market circumstances and the fact that "Senior" really doesn't mean what it used to, so there's a lot more competition for those roles now.

I'm guessing it will be less bad 2nd quarter, but prolly not back to, erm, "normal".

I'm looking for > mid backend folks right now, kotlin + spring boot/micronaut. preferably rhein-main area/Germany or remote in Germany. Just hit me up ;)

Good luck to everyone else.

Company I was with went through a very strange aquistion for the brand, with a layoff of all of the staff in November. Since I was leadership -- ended up working my network to land my entire technical team at a different company by mid-December, which worked out, so seven people hit the new year with fresh jobs. As for myself - had a few bites via my personal network but decided to strike out solo and build something from scratch for now, because I can afford to.

Related question, how's the SW contracting market right now? Been thinking about quitting my full time and picking up jobs here and there as my expenses are very low.

Been working in Data Analytics for 10 years now. Been trying to look for another job myself.

Much different than it was a few years ago. I had a response rate of about 60% and had multiple interviews each week. Now I would say my response rate is about 10% at the moment.

I think there should have been a poll for this question to quickly gauge. 1. When people were laid off? A. Before Q4 2022 B. Q4 2022 C. Q1 2023 E. My job is fine 2. Were you able to find a job? A. Yes B. No 3. How long did it take to find job? A. < 1 month B. 1-3 months C. 3-6 months D. > 6 months 4. How many offers did you get? A. 1 B. 2-3 C. 4+

I know no one gets a CS degree dreaming of working for Walmart, but they have over 1100 openings with the word “software” in the title

https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r...

I'm doing consultancy (mainly becz I haven't found a startup that I'm interested in joining) and I'm find the hourly rates (in the US) are really low (below FTE).

Not sure if it's because of all these layoffs or just yearly budgets haven't been done yet. (I'm generally looking for react/nodejs/rest/graphql type 1099 roles).

I got hired after 11 weeks of interviewing and a significant paycut.

I'm helping place people at my friends Seed and Series A companies if anyone is interested. VC money is still there but pumping into Seed/Series A companies with more upside now rather than insane B, C, D companies that have no profitability in sight.

email me at j{at}markovmanagement.com if interested :)

I'm a contractor and my existing contracts have all been cut almost in sync with the layoffs. I'm actively looking for a FT role now and it's been hit and miss with inbound (recruiters) and outbound (applications) leads.

laid off in November. Applied to ~80companies. got 1 job offer but they lowballed me

Can anyone share how compensation packages look like in these post-layoffs days?

No, and there are far more disingenuous engagements from recruiters and startup founders. It seems like a perceived 'glut of senior talent' is driving this behavior, at least that is my conclusion.

Yeah, i just signed a contract for a senior engineering role, starting at the end of the month. It wasn't hard for me to find, either. Competitive pay and benefits.

Laid off in Jan 3rd. Still doing interviews. Anyone else thinking that hiring has become more strict and companies with open roles are more "cautious"?

I'm not looking right now (fingers crossed!) but still get recruiters sending me stuff. Not as many as in the past, but they're still out there.

Personally I find it amusing watching tech workers who were resting and vesting from the 2016 to 2022 period find out how broken the hiring system is. Here's a tip, it always was. I struggled to find a job for years and the only advice people in tech were willing to give is that I should have gone to Standford (Washington State University for life) or I should just try harder. Eventually I got a job in a call center and worked myself up the ladder into an amazing IT career. I hope you all suffer like I had to suffer.

I was hiring for a startup 2 weeks ago but was laid off last week and looking for new jobs. Haven't received any response yet.

Laid off 10 January, had a few interviews at startups but no offers yet. Seems like there are positions in the robotics space.

Got the first verbal offer 3 weeks after getting laid off. Market is still hot for data people here in DC.

Not so far. There are lots of positions open, but not sure how many of those are actually being hired for.

I just had my first week last week. Took a startup first engineer position and I’m not regretting it!

[Ireland] In process of getting laid off, 2 interviews. Applied for about 30 roles.

So all this workforce is set to a mission to colonize mars or what?

New York here. Been just over 2 weeks since getting laid off. I'm getting calls from recruiters and have interviews lined up, but it's been tough.