Comment by leptons
7 months ago
What's happening now is similar to what happened during the 2000's "dot-com bubble burst". Having barely survived that time, I saw this one coming and people told me I was crazy when I told them to hold on to their jobs and quit job-hopping, because the job-hopper is very often the first one to get laid off.
In 2000 I was moved cities and I had a job lined-up at a company that was run by my friends, I had about 15 good friends working at the company including the CEO, and I was guaranteed the job in software development at the company. The interview was supposed to be just a formality. So I moved, and went in to see the CEO, and he told me he could not hire me, the funding was cut and there was a hiring freeze. I was devastated. Now what? Well I had to freelance and live on whatever I could scrape together, which was a few hundred bucks a month, if I was lucky. Fortunately the place I moved into was a big house with my friends who worked at said company, and since my rent was so low at the time, they covered me for a couple of years. I did eventually get some freelance work from the company, but things did not really recover until about 2004 when I finally got a full-time programming job, after 4 very difficult years.
So many tech companies over-hired during covid, there was a gigantic bubble happening with FAANG and every other tech company at the time. The crash in tech jobs was inevitable.
I feel bad for people who got left out in the cold this time, I know what they are going through.
Those are some great friends. Aside from job hoppers, I noticed there are a lot of company loyalists getting canned too though (i.e worked at MSFT 10 years)
It's not exactly the same this time around, the dot-com bubble was a bit different, but both then and now were preceded by huge hiring bubbles and valuations that were stupid. Now it's a little different 25 years later, tech has advanced and AI means cutting the fat out of a lot of companies, even Microsoft.
AI is somewhat creating a similar bubble now, because investors still have money, and the current AI efforts are way over-hyped. 6.5 billion paid to aquihire Jony Ive is a symptom of that.