The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - This !insane tech hiring market (Interview)

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

This week we're back talking to Gergely Orosz — this time not quite about the insane tech hiring market, but more so the flip side, the 180, the not so good tech hiring market, the layoff market and what you can expect. There's a lot of FUD out there, so hopefully this show gives you a lens into what's really going on, and what to really expect. Maybe more so, how to keep your job or find a new job. We come to this topic with great compassion and great understanding, so please...there is a community here for you. There's a lot of people in our Slack. Call it your home, it's free to join and everyone is welcome.

this week on the changelog we are back talking to gare gay oros this time not quite about the insane tech hiring market but more so the flip side the 180 the not so good tech hiring market the layoff market and what you can expect there's a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt out there so hopefully this show gives you a lens into what's really going on and what to really expect. And maybe more so, how to keep your job or get a new job. Now, obviously, we come to this show with great compassion and great understanding. So please, hey, there is a community here for you. Changelog.com slash community.

It's free to join. There's a lot of people in our Slack. Hang out with us. Call it your home. Hang your hat. And stay a while. Everyone is welcome here. of people in our slack hang out with us call it your home hang your hat and stay a while everyone is welcome here a massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fastly and fly

our friends at fastly make sure our pods are fast to download globally because hey fastly is fast globally check them out at fastly.com and our friends at fly let you deploy your app and your database closer users all over the world with no ops required. Learn more at fly.io. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Square. Develop on the platform that sellers trust. Here's what you can do with Square. You can bridge more experiences. You can build online, mobile, and in-person commerce experiences that connect

more customers and sellers. You can build custom booking solutions. You can create and track orders. You can accept payments. You can manage and curate inventory. You can organize customers. You can manage employees. You can extend Square gift cards to your app. You can use Afterpay. And all this is powered by the world-class Square APIsis and sdks that enable you to build full feature business apps for yourself or millions of square sellers so much is available as a square solutions partner learn more and get started at changelog.com square again changelog.com square All right, Gerge, you are back for what is now, I guess, the third annual appearance on The Change Log. Welcome back, friend.

It's great to be back. Always great to be back. Good to have you back. Well, we first had you on recently after you left Uber, talking growing as a software engineer. A lot of your learnings from inside that particular tech giant were now freed and able to be talked about. And you began doing that. And then last year, gosh, we were having an insane tech hiring market. This was recorded in early October 2021 and shipped in mid-October, but not much had changed between recording and shipping. In fact, it was like the best of times to be a software engineer.

And we were talking about everybody should go out and renegotiate their contracts or shop around. And this was like huge leverage. And I think the peak of the market, the overall markets, was around November of 21-ish. It was around November, I think a little bit later as well. I think it was more January. Yeah, January there was a precipitous drop. There was still a spike and February was still pretty decent and then things got really bad really quickly.

And here we are a year later, as you said before, the show started a 180. It's pretty much the opposite of last year, isn't it? Very much so, in many ways. I think that was an unexpectedly quickly heating up market. I was also very surprised to see just how quickly things have changed. I guess now hindsight is 50-50, but we should have known that if things can heat up quickly, they can also cool down quickly. And it has cooled down very surprisingly quickly.

And we're hearing news. Obviously, there's news about layoffs, but it's not just about layoffs. There's hiring freezes. There's looking ahead. Some companies, some of big tech is not looking to hire. And a lot of the news is focusing on VC-funded companies and big tech.

There's also silent maturity that we're not really hearing too much, but there's the more kind of traditional companies or companies that were not paying the top of the market. And there's actually some good news there as well. It's just, as with any news, bad news usually trumps out good news or no news really. A lot of anxiety out there in this market here for that. What about the silent majority you mentioned? What are the details? I know you got The Scoop as part of your newsletter, but then you also scoop things on Twitter. So for lack of better terms, what's the scoop for this silent majority?

What do you know there? Well, the interesting thing is that the news has been dominated by layoffs because they're a big deal whenever they happen. And now they've just been happening initially a few and then some more. And now every week there's so many companies, small or sometimes large, doing it. But the companies that are not really affected, they're kind of hiring as always. And in fact, some are hiring more. Or the ones that are honestly just not, they were never the most desirable companies to work at.

But I think this might change it just a little bit. For example, I'll give you an example. There's a major bank in the Netherlands which saw a huge attrition at the end of 2021 because of this crazy market. Maybe also because of my articles, I'm not sure. Because a lot of people from that company went and they took offers at the likes of Twitter

or Big Tech or venture-funded startups. They just got a big pay increase and this bank couldn't move up with the market offers that, you know, the likes of Twitter or big tech or venture funded startups, just they just got a big pay increase. And this this bank couldn't move up with the market, because that's not how they're structured. They cannot respond quickly. And you know, they typically don't. So they lost a lot of people. And they got into contractors, and they have huge headcount to fill for 2022. And I talked with the hiring manager there. And they're like, this is great. Like, finally, we might actually be able to hit our headcount, but probably we won't. We'll probably still have empty headcount. So, you know, like the good news is that there are a lot of companies hiring. And

I'm also seeing, I'm running a job board where companies can pay to access either candidates or post jobs. And I vet these jobs, but I'm also seeing growth there with a lot of venture funders. So there is a lot of venture funding, especially at early stage, going on. And those companies, they want to hire. They need to hire good people. And then there are the companies that are a little bit more conservative. So a good example is Adgen. Not many people know about Adgen, but if I say Stripe, you'll know what I'm talking about.

So Adgen is the B2B version of Stripe. They're based in Amsterdam, actually their headquarter. They're a publicly traded company and they were trading at about $50 billion market cap. I'm not sure where they are right now, maybe like $40 or something like that. So they're big. And they process about as much as Stripe in terms of merchants. At Uber, for example, partially we used Adgen and I think they power eBay and Booking.com and a lot of the sites that you just don't see behind the scenes. And Stripe announced that they were doing 14% layoffs.

Meanwhile, Adyen, because they're a public trade company, you can see their financials. They're just massively profitable. For every dollar, they make 60 cents of every day profit. That's not fully profit, but it's a very strong signal. This is actually more profitable than, let's say, Google, even, in terms of the percentage amount. And they just announced that, they just sent out memos to their staff that it's not that they're not laying off,

they're actually investing because their fundamentals are strong. And the headcount is also very different. This company, Adyen, even though they process about the same as Stripe, and they have a bit lower cut rates, so their revenue will be a bit lower, but they have a lot less staff. They have half the staff as Stripe, and at lower cost locations. So all I'm saying is, these are some of the companies that I know about who are kind of just doing fine, and there will be a lot of these, but we should acknowledge that it's not the top of the market.

So the companies that used to pay the best total compensation packages in terms of high base salary, great equity, all that, those companies are now struggling. And then, you know, there are still hiring, like I just talked with someone who got an offer from Google in London, and it's a really good package. So there's all that going on. But I think the the noise of, oh, think the noise of all this bad news is really on top of people's minds. And then one last thing is, if you look at what is actually happening in the market in terms of numbers, it is a correction, but when we look at, let's say, there's a big news that Meta laid off 13% of staff or 11,000 people. It's a huge number, 11,000 people.

But when we look back at how quickly they hired those people, just this year they hired 20,000 people. They're 87,000 people right now. So they're by just, you know, laying off, they're kind of back where they were at March, which is bad, right? But it just shows how much all companies actually hired. Like, I rounded up between Meta, Microsoft and Google, I looked at their public filings of how many employees they have now and a year ago. And they went from having 400,000 employees, these three companies, full-time employees, 12 months ago, to having 500,000. So they added 100,000 in just one year.

And these are, you know, like Microsoft is a 20-year-old company. Google is a, sorry, older, like 30, 40-year-old. So in the last year, their growth was, was incredible. So we are sitting, seeing a cutback, but it goes up that crazy, like that last year when we talked about, so it seems that it's a correction and it is painful and it's not happy to see them. And honestly, I think the reason people are just really shocked, most people, and it's like, we haven't seen this. This whole market reminds me of what we've seen

in what finance folks have seen in 2007, 2008. It's kind of our version of a massive market correction in tech. And outside of tech, things are kind of going fine. You talk with other industries and they're like, yeah, it's just normal. We're not seeing any panic. Right.

You have the typical supply chain problems, you've got the inflation problems, you get the inflation problems, but you don't have like the fundamentals are there and things are still moving forward as normal. I wonder how much of it is maybe the unanswerable question, but how much of this was pandemic lockdown fueled? Because I mean, things change so dramatically. The hiring, right? Everybody went online. We heard tech execs saying things like this is fast-forwarded adoption by 10 years or five years and we kind of expected that to like just continue i guess even after everything goes the new normal right there was no back to normal it was the new normal

and it was going to stay like this and so the hiring did go astronomical like you cited at the big tech companies they needed it because they had this increased capacity everybody's using their services stocks are going up so they have extra funds to invest and gosh we find out that like i don't know like there was no new normal or it's kind of going back i mean it was really wasn't like a fast forward it was like a temporary fast forward at least to a certain degree yeah it's weird. It feels like the swing just swing the head and now it's swinging back. Yeah. Because like there was a fast forward, right? For a while where the whole world was locked down and digital became a lot more important. But I think a good example that I think of, and I have a bit

of insight into this company is Hopin. Hopin is this video events company. They do digital events. They were founded in 2019, so a year before the pandemic. They raised a few million dollars of funding. Then the pandemic started. Right as the pandemic started, they raised bigger funding to scale the scene because it seemed like digital events will now be a thing because there's a lockdown.

They saw huge demand in both 2020 and 2021 for their solution. You could organize online conferences with their tool. I actually helped organize a digital conference, I think it was the fall of 2020 or something like that, because it was locked down, I didn't have anything to do. I was like, let me do this. We looked at vendors and we chose Hoppin in the end. I think we paid a couple thousand for their license or whatnot. They had this licensing and we ran the event and it was a success

and people liked it. But what I noticed is, and then the company kept raising more money and at some point they were valued $7.8 billion or something. I think that was the peak, as I recall. And this was two years into founding of the company. And then what happened is, first of all, just from my personal perspective, I'm not going to represent all the users,

but I just really got burned of digital events. I went to a couple of these digital-only conferences, and after a while I just started hating it. I was doing Zooms all day, every day. So I just didn't want to go there. And as soon as the world started to open up, I've just been to my first proper conference. I love the normal conference format. And I would not, okay, maybe I would jump on to watch a video online, but I don't think it's really important.

And then with this company Hopin, they saw their growth just first stall. And the thing that might save the company is they actually bought a bunch of different companies. They bought StreamYard, which is a streaming company, and they bought a few other video streaming companies. And what I've heard from people who work there is their events revenue, that their flagship thing, is just going down because it's really hard to sell right now. People just don't need a digital-only solution anymore. And my point is they're a bit of an outlier, but they're a typical pandemic company where it seemed the whole world would change.

A lot of money went into there, and if the whole world would have changed and we would now be doing a digital-only conference, it would make sense because they would probably be market leaders. But the world has gone back, and I think we're seeing this backswing a lot of times. So I've seen a chart about e-commerce adoption where it spiked and it did look like it's jumping up ahead by five years or ten years. But then it came back and now we're just on that normal growth. So growth is back to where it was before, which means that everyone who expected that in

2022, or 2023, you're gonna have similar growth to 2021, just overhired. And now they're all correcting because, well, because also, don't forget, there's a second part here, which is not just the COVID shrinking, but the interest rates are up, which means it's a lot more expensive to borrow any sort of money, which a lot of tech companies have been doing. So they can borrow money, so they need to rein in their costs if they're not profitable.

Those are just a few things. We're not going to be able to figure out exactly what's happening. It's just so strange because for the rest of the world, take an industry like hotels or hospitality, you're working in a hotel or managing a hotel. The pandemic was terrible. You got shut down, you had no revenue, you were hotel or managing a hotel. The pandemic was terrible. You got shut down, you had no revenue, you were trying to survive.

For tech, it was the opposite. It was amazing and it was great that time because we had more jobs, more money. There were people, I think, quitting because people even had a lot of options. It was a great time to be in tech and now it's the opposite. If you work in hospitality, things are great.

More and more people are traveling. It's going up. Hopefully, you're time to be in tech and now it's the opposite. If you work in hospitality, things are great. More and more people are traveling. It's going up. Hopefully you're going to be earning more, getting more tips, whatnot. And now in tech, it's the opposite. It's just not great if you're in tech. It's not great to see the news. Hopefully this is impacting people. There's the question of how many people are really impacted

in the sense of not just being laid off but not finding a job. And I think that's where we're going to see a long tail effect or like a double down. People who are software engineers, experienced engineers who are being laid off at well-known companies, I think it's hard. I don't want to trivialize this, but they will have options to work somewhere. It might not be as great, though, as their current company in terms of maybe culture or compensation or both, but they will have options. The problem is that all of this will trickle down. We're now seeing thousands of really competent software engineers being on the market, so startups are really happy, these banks are really happy.

I have some friends at Uber, for example, former friends who... I used to work, one of my first jobs was at J.P. Morgan in London, an investment bank. And at the time, I really liked that job because it was one of my early jobs and it was a great place to be. But when I got my next job at Skype, I just realized J.P. Morgan was totally not a tech company. And I was so happy to finally work at a tech company, and I said I would never go back to a place like J.P. Morgan. Uber also had a really good engineering culture in the sense that it was one of the best places i worked at and now i have some friends and colleagues who work at jp morgan and i talk with them and i say like dude like why did you kind of take a step down and he told me like so here's the thing like two things first of all it's just

really really stable like like they have super profits i get all my compensation in cash none of that stock going up and down and mostly down. Second of all, they actually want to create a tech culture. And finally, they can hire the people into this. They have a lot of these greenfield projects where it's full of X. They have X Facebook, X Google, X whatever people. And they're like, it's actually pretty good. I think the world is changing a little bit and people are realizing

that pre-IPO companies or even any form of companies that give you stock, it has a massive risk. So traditional wisdom the past 10 years was if you're a publicly traded company, you get like half of your compensation if you're a senior engineer or a staff engineer, half of your compensation in base salary and either half in on equity that's great because equity will always go up well equity for some companies has collapsed by let's say 70 or 80 percent and i talk with people who were you know earning on paper they were earning five hundred thousand dollars in silicon valley and now it's just went down to like 350 or 300 and they're saying like what should i do should i interview somewhere else but but now there's fewer jobs or should i just stick it out and there's no good answers but the point is like

now you're really seeing those banks they're one of the reasons people are going to these banks they might pay let's say you know for a similar scale maybe they pay 350 or 400 or or less or more it doesn't really matter but it's it's fixed it just doesn't. And the people who I know who have families and they just want stability. They're like, you know what? It's a good trade-off. It's rocky time. I'm going to sit it out here. And you know what?

It's kind of nice because now those companies can hire just people who would have never considered working there. So we might see the industry transform a little bit from the unsexy companies becoming a bit more sexy. And the sexy companies, let's give you an example, Coinbase. Coinbase was such a hot company to go and work for a year ago. They're doing crypto, and if you're into that, I'm not that much into it. But again, they're doing something really interesting in that space, trying to give new financial instruments. And they were paying really, really good.

They were giving ridiculous stock packages to people who were accepting it. And now the company is not doing that great. The space is kind of, it's unclear what the future will be and their stock is not doing that great. So that company or some of these hot startups have just gone from being one of the best places to work at to, oh, it's a risky place and we'll see if they'll be able to grow. And I'm not just talking about Coinbase, I'm just talking about the hottest companies in 2021. That was my fear with, you know, last year when we talked was this insane tech hiring market and people jumping ship or not so much not being loyal, but sort of focusing on the opportunity to increase their dollars. And then

that comes with the value trade of like, okay, I'm going to be with a startup or a high growth or a innovation focused company like Hopin or Coinbase, as you mentioned, that are paying these high compensation equity. And like you said, on paper, it's a lot of money. And they jump and they, you know, not so much leave their teammates in a lurch or whatever, but like look out for themselves and earn more money. And then now the flip side is the market is now shifted. And I don't know if that, you know, is necessarily bad for the reputation, but that was my concern was like this, this sort of jump because you can, because you can make more. Is that the reason why you leave a team? Is that the reason why you pursue a new job? And I think what you described there was the opportunity to have stability but then also the opportunity to innovate. Like what engineer, what developer doesn't want to play with the fun stuff and do the fun things? And sometimes that is at Coinbase.

Sometimes that is at Hopin or these future innovative places where they're like really pushing the boundaries with front-end frameworks or infrastructure or just new ways of doing things and sure, that's fun. But that was my concern was like, you know, this jump, was it worth it? Is it worth it? Do you talk to anybody that made those jumps? It's like, man, I kind of regret doing that because now this. Yeah. So, so I actually talk with, like, I have a few stories here and like, first off the, I think jumping for doing something fun is good. And like, if, like, if you take the money out and you're doing it not because of the money,

that's a great thing because that's more of an interesting motivation. The problem is if you were doing it mostly for the money, I think what was missing until now, and I think this is being corrected, where I feel every 10 years there's some sort of event in the world that shakes things up a little bit. In tech, there was a little bit of contraction in 2008. It was bad, but not as bad as potentially now. I heard in 2001 I wasn't around, but I heard it was really bad.

But then tech was a lot smaller. Tech has become massive since 2001. But what I think people forgot, or they just didn't see because they only saw the positive stories, is the risk that any startup has. The fact that these are super risky. And they're so risky because they can absolutely go bankrupt. Your equity will probably just not be worth anything.

And this is, by the way, interesting. I'm based in Europe, and in Europe, people were always super skeptical about stock. At Uber, when we were hiring people, we told them, here's this much stock. And they were like, could I just get half of it or no stock? And could I get like 5,000 more in base? And we're like, no, no, no.

But it's really, you don't understand. This could turn into a lot of money. And they're like, I know what I know. It's money. That's not money. Or these things. But now that's actually turning to be very much true. So take Hopin.

A lot of people were given options at later stage companies, and if you're given stocks like double-trigger RRTs or something like that, it might be worth still something, even if the company is worth little. With options, they're just worth nothing because it's all underwater. I think people thought that because a company raised a lot of money and it worth billions,

it must be something valuable, and they were already assigning a number to it. So going back to specific stories, I do know people who left publicly traded companies and they were offered a similar compensation package at a private company, which was just a startup that had a high or medium valuation, and they thought that they were 10x.

A good example is Fast. Fast was a company that I covered. They were the company who famously raised $100 million in 2021. And then 12 or 14 months later, they burned the whole thing. They spent it all, and they went bankrupt, and they closed shop. And I've seen the chart on how they closed. They hired from people from everywhere, from Uber, from Google, from Facebook, you name it, like all the companies. And the way they hired these people is, first of all, they paid the same or a little bit higher base salary

than, let's say, Facebook did for the same level. And we're talking about Silicon Valley people, people based in the US or New York or these things. So they paid a little bit more in cash. But the big part of the compensation back was just stock. And then they show people, they're like, we're giving you this much stock, which today, on today's valuation, if the company grows by 10% or 20%, it's going to be worth as much as your current stock.

But I think they were saying that Fast was valued something at, I think it was valued at close to a billion. But if it's valued at $13 billion, which is how much their competitor Bolt was valued at their latest valuation, basically you're going to be a millionaire or even bigger. And they just showed those numbers in a spreadsheet that showed it. And they were telling the truth in the sense that if this happened, that stock package would have been worth. And most people in their minds calculated that,

oh, it's going to be for sure worth $13 billion. Right. Counting chickens that didn't hatch. And then a lot of people just left a lot of real money on the table to join the the risky thing but this risk was not really added there so like if you ask me like just from a pure financial perspective if you join the startup that's early stage you might actually just want to ask for like rationally you might want to ask for a premium like you might want to ask for more base salary because it's a risky place which could shut down and this could be worth nothing, which is obviously not what's happening, but that would be

the rational thing to do. But we forgot about this risk. So there's a big risk with the startups. And one story of a software engineer who just got really unlucky because they misread the market. So this person was working, I think it was, I don't want to say the specific name of the company, but this is a real person. They were working at one of the, okay, I'll just say like one of these three, DoorDash, Roblox, or Pinterest.

I just don't want to like narrow it down. So one of these three companies, they were working there. And they joined in the middle of 2021, where I think it was a new grad, or maybe software engineer, too. So someone pretty early career. And they got a package where it was base salary and then a bunch of stock, like really good stock package. And six months later, by the end of 2021, the stock has already gone down for all of these companies by about 50% from just the middle of 2021. It was like the six months were so their soft package was worth like half. And I think it was down even like

55%. And this person was like, Oh, man, I'm only six months in. I haven't even invested my first best which will be at a year. But you know what, like this is this is just like, I didn't sign up for this, like my composition went down. And here's this cool thing called Web3 that is doing really well. So this person joined the Web3 company and negotiated his original package, but in Web3 tokens, or maybe not even tokens, but like equity in that Web3 company.

So this person got really unlucky, and this is an actual true story. So four months later, or five months later, around April 2022, the Luna token collapsed, there was a stable coin, which was an algorithmic stable coin, which somehow some bad actor exploited. And as a result, there was this anchor protocol that yielded like something like eight or 10%, or I think 18% interest, supposedly risk-free. And the startup of this guy held all their treasury in this anchor protocol. And so they just went bankrupt overnight.

So there was this guy who left a company that the stock was going down, and it was a rational thing to do. Why would you stay? You can just make more money taking a bigger risk. They just took a bigger risk, which went absolutely to zero. And I don't know what actually happened with them if they went back or if they went somewhere else. But it was just a chain of bad events. And then another person, there are some, these people find me online. There's a person who was at Fast, which went bankrupt and then joined the competitor Bolt, which then had layoffs. I think they managed to miss that. But it just shows that it is now hard to find a company

that will definitely not be doing any layoffs. It's a market we've not seen. I don't think anyone has been used to it. The most common question I get these days, a year ago it was like, hey, which company should I join that pays the most? Now the most common question I get these days, a year ago it was like, hey, which company should I join that pays the most? Now the most common question I get is, how can I evaluate companies

that don't have a list of layoffs? This last question is hard to answer because I, for example, really thought for a long time that Meta will not do layoffs because I looked at their bottom line, their profits, their money printing machine. They still are, and they still did layoffs because, I mean, we can go into that, but their profit was just dropping because their revenue was flat and their costs were going up. And shareholders

will not take any of that. And their stock price was collapsing, which if they would have not done layoffs, they would have seen a lot of attrition because a lot of people are just, people I talk with meta, they're just really unhappy. they're going to make a lot less money in 2022 than they did in 2021. Because of their outside stock packages. This episode is brought to you by Sentry. Build better software faster, diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of your code. More than a million developers in 68,000 organizations already use Sentry, and that includes us. Here's the easiest way to try Sentry. Head to Sentry.io slash demo slash sandbox.

That is a fully functional version of Sentry that you can poke at. And best of all, our listeners get the team plan for free for three months. Head to Sentry.io and use the code changelog when you sign up. Again, Sentry.io and use the code changelog when you sign up. Again, sentry.io and use the code changelog. So there's a phenomenon in inflation. I think it's called spiral inflation. I'm not sure if that's the term. What is this idea of rising prices?

And when you're running, let's say you're running a convenience store, and regardless of whether or not your supply costs are going up, which they probably are if there's inflation going on, you see everybody else raising their prices. And so you say, I'm going to raise my prices. And then the next person sees you raise, and so they raise. And so that's kind of the spiral effect. And I wonder if there's something like that going on with the layoffs.

Perhaps it's a timely opportunity to also do layoffs, even if you don't really need them, because you're never going to get a better opportunity and everybody's doing it. Do you think there's some of that going on? Oh, totally. Absolutely. So at the first few layoffs, I think Fast was the first big layoff story. And it's interesting how it impacts people as well. So Fast shut down and it was a big story because it's also very, it's just a very, you can imagine yourself being that CEO and every person who's listening would think that they would do a better job with $100 million than just burn it over a year. So that's kind of it. It's a sticky thing, even though I'm sure there's a lot more nuance to

it. But they were the first one who just let the whole company go. And this was extensively covered by the press. I actually covered it a lot because it was just an interesting story where like, hey, can we learn some lessons? And there were some lessons. But I talked with the engineers who were laid off and they were bombarded with so many messages and every single one of them got a better job or a similar job. Most of them got actually a higher base salary than they did at Fast, which already paid very well.

And I talked with someone who said they got about 100 reach-outs and they just narrowed it down. They were selecting, they only talked with 20 companies, only got five offers and they you know negotiated and took the last over and this was the first one and everyone paid attention and everybody paid attention to the next few layoffs this is when i actually on twitter i started to cover some of these uh layoffs because they were so rare and now they became so common that i think there's a layoff numbness i stopped a week ago on my Twitter.

I just said that I'm not going to cover any more layoffs as they happen because I'm getting a lot of these people reach out to me and they say, oh, my company is doing layoffs. Here's all the details. Please don't share anything that could identify me. But they're now so frequent that, first of all, it feels like I'm bringing attention to so many companies having pain and it's just a bit of a negative thing to do.

But as you said, I think people, at least in tech, are kind of checked out. In the first few months, you could tell exactly the few companies that did layoffs because they were all over the news. And as a CEO, it's a very convenient way to just put it in there because you don't even need to justify it. You just say economic conditions, like half of the announcements from CEOs

come and say macroeconomic conditions. And when you look around, a lot of the layoffs are not big ones. They're not like companies fighting for their life. They're just conveniently laying off between 6% to 15% of staff. Often, usually not many software engineers. Some companies do.

But at this point, I feel even employees are not really surprised or they're a lot more empathetic. And this is a comment I read on Hacker News. There was a comment of meta doing layoffs because that was a huge layoff. And someone on Hacker News said, hey, I've been around for the dot-com bust and here's what I can tell you. If you've been laid off in this round, know that you're the lucky one

because you've got a really good severance package and companies are still paying a lot of attention. But I can tell you that layoffs will keep happening and the next round they're not going to be as generous

because no one's going to pay attention. I know it's counterintuitive, but you were actually, companies still pay a lot of attention and they want to look in good color. So that's a little bit of the depressing news that this might keep happening for a while. And which I actually, you know, I guess it does bring back to like, you know, what are the things that you might be able to do personally to get on the better side of all of this? Yeah. So gosh, that's the kind of a weird silver lining there is your severance package might to what are things that you might be able to do personally to get on the better side of all of this. Yeah, so, gosh, that's kind of a weird silver lining there,

is your severance package might be better than other folks who get laid off later. Also, I guess, you're first one back on the market, so maybe you have more opportunities than later on. That as well. The market is still better than it will be likely in, let's say, six months, just the way things are trending, honestly. So, you know like the

when fast late people off so the first company is actually to lay off they get bad press but you don't know until you look back but it's but it is a usually a good market and people pay attention you can all the fast alumni got hired like every single person like they the only people who had a gap is the people who wanted to get a gap it'll probably be a little bit harder for people now and if this cycle continues a bit hard to predict the future, but I don't see why it would stop for the next, let's say, three to six months for sure. While interest rates are high, VC money is tight,

inflation is going to hit, so consumers and businesses are going to start looking on how to save. So everyone's tightening their belts, and eventually everyone will feel it somewhere. So there's probably our listener in a few different situations. The first one is, I haven't been laid off, but I know that cuts are coming. What can I do now, perhaps, to help avoid the axe? And then there's also, like, I have been laid off, and now what do I do?

Like, what's my next best move? So maybe, do you have advice for people? And you can't say, you know, don't make fun of Elon in public because you're certainly going to get axed if you do that. But aside from Twitter, whose offerings are quite public, a lot of these companies, I don't know. I don't know how they make their decisions. Again, lines of code. That's another easy one. But like, what can you do to avoid being laid off at this stage of the game like can you impress a certain person can you change the way you act now is it inevitable it's just going to happen what do you think yeah so uh on the layoffs actually one of my good friends uh karthik uh

harry haran his he's uh i know karthik used to work with him really mm-hmm pure charity awesome yeah karthik is a good friend. Yeah. Well, we know each other from Uber, mostly actually after Uber. We talk a lot. He's now a senior engineering manager at Roblox. He was an engineering manager at Uber as well. And he has some really good career advice. And he actually had one of the best advices. He actually said, here's my advice for everyone who's not been laid off, but knowing that things are happening.

And he said three things. We can find a tweet and we can add it to the notes here. I'll find it. He said, number one is just cut your expenses. Now is not the time to buy the new car, to go on the holiday. Build up Nestec. If you're working in tech, you are probably making more money than some of your peers who are working in other industries.

Just cut your lifestyle, like start saving up because the reality of layoffs is that you cannot control it fully. It can hit you, you can do your best job, but if you're at the wrong team or your CEO decides you're not going to do it, so just prepare for that, like have a few months of savings and build that up.

So maybe for now, for holidays, again, just be a bit conservative because this is a little bit like inconvenience right now, but it could actually make a big difference later for your mental health or knowing that you're there. The second thing that he said, which I absolutely agree with, is just work to be in the top 25% in terms of performance. Now is actually the time to do great work and put yourself in there.

Because when people are laid off, unless it's a massive layoff like 50% or something, the crazy stuff that we've seen at Twitter, most of it is not like that. They're going to lay off 10% or 20%. And they'll typically look at the people who are just not doing great work, so the lower performers. They might look at teams who they can miss, but the rarest thing to lay off is the high performers, the people who are known like, these are doing great work and they're flexible.

Now is the time to do great work, to say yes to additional things. It's a little bit like when you're new at a company, like you want to prove yourself. Now is actually the time where, if you want to guarantee this, then prove yourself. The third one, I'm not sure what he said,

but my third advice is just be a little bit aware. Look around, figure out, are you in a profit center? In companies, every company, including tech companies, there's cost centers and profit centers. Profit center is the one that brings the money in. For example, at Google, it's the ads team. If you work around ads, you are generating money. If you are working at customer support, it's a very important thing to do, but it's a cost center which the company typically wants to minimize its expenses on. Actually, Google historically does not have

that much customer support. For example, at Uber, this was the same thing. I was working in a profit center. I was working on the payments team, which is a little bit both. But when my team owned projects, if we shipped it we made more money for the company, that's a profit center.

And if your work is about minimizing costs or compliance or those things, that's a cost center. So try to figure out where you are, and if you have an opportunity later to move into a profit center, think about that. But that's something that might be out of your control. And finally, switching jobs is a lot more risky, because tenure is also important in layoffs often. It's rare to have the longest timer person be laid off. So plan your steps carefully if you do it. And this goes back, I guess, to one last advice is your network. Now, this is something you cannot like. If you have a strong network, you'll be fine.

Even if you're laid off, you can talk to people who know you and then they'll they'll probably refer you now this is something you cannot change overnight it's not a month or two but just show up every day and do do good work help people even when when you don't need to you know like if someone is having some something to help them just be a great colleague because this is stuff that this will come back years later it's not going to be right now so it's going to be honestly it's just going to be a bit of tighter market. It's not going to be right now. So it's going to be, honestly, it's just going to be a bit of a tighter market. I think everyone's going to be more paranoid. The number one thing that you can do is,

I think that's the biggest thing in your control, is get a nest egg. Get those savings going if you don't have it. If you have six months of savings or a year of savings, you're going to be way more chill. If you have experience on this market, you're not going to have trouble finding another job. The question is, will you find the job that you'll want?

Or will you settle midway? And one last thing is just be realistic. Now is a time where you probably just want to sit out this storm. There's always cycles coming and going. So we've seen there was this amazing surge of tech now. It seems it's a downturn or a winter or however you call it. This will also pass, but it's a good time to just wait it out at a place where you feel secure.

This might be your current team, might be your current company, or if you have to change companies, this is where the previously non-sexy companies are becoming sexy because stability is actually a really good selling point right now on which company to join. Stability is sexy. Stability is sexy.

And again, if you're 20 and you don't care that much, maybe you don't care as much about it, but when you have a family or when you're in that stage of your life, stability is now becoming a selling point. Like I said, that was my fear with last year was just that movement and the tenure you mentioned like if you made those moves during that time which is great if you made them for the right reasons the right circumstances and you

didn't burn bridges and you maintain your network or maintain being i guess a a good person during the process then you know that still doesn't change your tenure. And this just reminds me so much, you did say this by the way, I think I wasn't paying as much attention to how things could, I was really just focused on how well things are going. I was really happy actually that the market was there. But it reminds me of if you did not burn bridges, so there's a Silicon Valley episode when they go fundraising and initially no VCs take their calls and then Ehrlich starts to insult them. And the more he insults them, the more they take their calls and the higher offers he gets. And then there's this final scene where they just walk out and they say, did you really put your privates on the table?

And then they get the biggest check from there. And this all looks really good until, fast forward, I think, just a few weeks later in the show their funding falls through and no one wants to fund them and now they need to go back to all of those vcs and they get the exact same insults back including on the last meeting the vc says like i remember what you did here last time i'm going to do this exact same thing to you so going back to burning bridges you know like in the good market for example example, this is not the biggest one, but I now hear a lot of people trying to go back to, well, some people trying to go back to older companies.

For example, they do a startup from, let's say, Google or somewhere, and now it didn't work out. They want to go back to stability, which is Google or some other companies. And if they lived in a good relationship, sure, that's probably no problem. Their manager would try to do it, but not everyone did. Some people did burn bridges, or when they negotiated their offers,

how respectfully they treated hiring managers. When you had multiple offers open, and you rejected, let's say you had three offers, you rejected two, did you leave it on good foot, or were you just really snotty about it? Because if you were snotty when you're going back, or if that company is still hiring, you don't really have a contact. So I think it's a great reminder that no matter how the world is, especially when it's really good, you really want to treat people with respect.

And this goes back to your network. If you treated those hiring managers with respect and when you turn it down, you actually told them all the things that you liked about them, you were open about, you didn't try to do all sorts of sneaky things. You probably increased your network is that hiring manager might now remember you fondly of like, Oh, I remember it. Make perfect sense that the person turned us down and it wasn't just for the money. It was a better fit when they chose this other company.

Be a good person, man. Be a good person. The shoe is, is always, you know, swapping feet, you know, it rolls reverse. And I think above all, just do your best to be a good person in any process. Treat people with respect, explain, you know, defend your reasons for your change or whatever, but do it respectfully. And my gosh, do not burn bridges. See, when you're younger, you, not that like it's a, I did this when I was, I burned a few bridges when I was younger.

And I learned like, gosh, you know, in hindsight, that was the worst way to do these things. Why would you do that now that I understand that the shoe does move to the other foot and things do change? But do your best to learn that lesson. Learn it from me or not at all, but do not burn bridges the best you can. Maintain relationships. Leave on good standings. Be kind. the best you can. Maintain relationships, leave on good standings, be kind, and somehow, some way, you'll get a chance to serve them again in the future or have them serve you if you've been

generous, kind, et cetera. It's short-sightedness, right? And this is just, I think, a natural thing, but when times are good, it's easy to think about today and tomorrow and not think about down the road. I had grandparents that went through the Great Depression, and just the way that they looked at life after having that experience was way different than beforehand, being born into it or going through it as an adult. And like you said, Gergay, we've never been through this. Like, if you entered the tech industry in the last 15 years even, if you don't count 08, I mean, 01, like the dot-com

bust was really the last major, major correction. And it was so much smaller back then. It's been good times for at least a decade, probably 15 years. And then you had the pandemic outlier, turns out, right? You had the lockdown, which looked like it was going to be a new normal, but it turned out it's a statistical black swan event that kind of reverted. We haven't seen this before, and so you tend to think differently when it's always been up and to the right, pretty much. And it's not always going to be that way. It's also really interesting because the last decade,

from 2008, which is actually when the financial crisis ended, and it did hit tech a little bit. It depends on what region, but for the most part, it wasn't as bad as it is now. But that was combined with the revolution of, there was still the internet boom going on, the internet was still spreading. I remember the stats every year,

more and more people were on the internet. And the mobile smartphone revolution started. So those things drove, companies like Facebook, Facebook was founded in 2004, Snap was founded later, Dropbox, Pinterest, maybe not Pinterest, but Airbnb, they were all founded around like 2008. And there's this wisdom, I think Paul Graham likes to say, that the best time to start a startup is during a recession.

And he kind of referred to how many great companies were born. Y Combinator was also, I think, started around that time or started investing. But I think what everyone conveniently figures is that there was a technology revolution going on and there was a whole new host of companies. Uber was actually started in 2010 off of iPhone. And so there was this huge demand to get people to build things that did not exist at a new scale. Distributed systems, mobile, web, you name it. It was on fire.

But what I'm a little worried about is, I look ahead for the next 10 years. Do we have a similar technology revolution? And internet is everywhere, mobile phones are everywhere. The metaverse, actually, and argumentative reality is, I think metaverse is investing so much because they hope that this will be the next revolution but it seems that it will be a lot smaller if anything.

There's AI that's kind of spreading but it's not taking the whole industry by as much force as we've seen. I'm kind of wondering if we're going to look back are we going to say that this was a golden decade for employees in terms of there's such incredible demand that just being an employee and taking

very little risk you could make outsized income if you were in the right place at the right time at the right companies, but even working at these big companies. And we might see now that the market is cooling that there will be just fewer of these opportunities and it'll be more niche areas. Like, again, I'm seeing, I looked through the public reports of Meta, Facebook, Google, and I looked at what is the one thing that they're all saying that they're investing in, which is their fancy way of saying, we're going to put a bunch of money and we're going to hire people and we'll pay them well. And the only thing that they all

mentioned was AI. That's the only one, but I don't think AI will be as big as let's say generic software engineering was, or, you know, there was a mix up. We needed everything. We needed back and we needed mobile. And also realistically, those skills of building large-scale distributed systems or large mobile apps or large web apps, they're a lot more common today than they were five or ten years ago. And now there's a lot of infrastructure. You no longer need to build and manage your server fleet. You just use AWS and they use their service that just auto-scales it for you.

So I feel there has definitely been a commoditization of skills that used to be very unique and is going to continue. And the only way I think we would see this golden decade continue after this bounce back is if there was more areas that are just new that you need to learn and a few people know it, where you need to hire these people who keep doing it. And, you know, data engineering is a little bit of this right now. Machine learning, AI.

I think it's only around AI that I'm seeing a large pull right now. Yeah. Where will that next platform come from, if it will? Will it be, you know, Apple's next entry into the mixed reality space? I think they're supposed to be launching their glasses next year, perhaps. Will that be as big as a mobile phone? Hard to believe that it would be. The metaverse, I think even Zuckerberg saying this thing is like five or 10 years out, if it ever comes to fruition in his vision of what that is. Self-driving cars are going a lot slower as well.

The one thing that I do see that I think is a little bit more realistic, and again, it's hard to predict the future, right? But we can always try. One thing I'm kind of seeing is the sure thing that I think is happening is these niches, these industries. Tech is everywhere, but it hasn't conquered a lot of areas. Online shopping, done. Amazon has done it with a mix of technology and hardware and logistics. But there's a lot of industries which

are up for grabs. There's this company called Steady who are trying to revolutionize the EDI system, which is this when you're ordering parts from each other, there's this electronic device or something identifier where these big manufacturers do it. It's like a super unsexy business. And the person who's doing it, the founder, only knows it because he ran his shop, I think,

where he sold very specific parts. And he was like, this is so outdated. So they're trying to bring technology to that sector and that looks really promising. Wedding planners, or funerals, or local restaurants, or all of these businesses that are operating, helping them do things more efficiently with technology, because that is still there.

If you're going to go into a restaurant and you're going to see how can we make this run more efficiently, either make more profit or have less cost? Technology is still kind of an obvious answer. The question is, can you actually put it in place? I think we're going to see a lot of these, the real world meets technology in a way that you have a domain expert,

someone who's been a chef or has a restaurant or ran restaurants and they have this idea and eventually they do a startup but it's no longer just a digital only thing it's a real world and a digital thing which means that software engineers will not be like fully in charge you now need someone who knows this business but i think there will be some really good opportunities that just they just might not be unicorns but they will be places that are good businesses they're honest businesses so we might actually just take a step back from this,

like, oh, I'm 20 years old, I just graduated, I joined this company called Snap in 2008, and five years later I'm a millionaire. That probably will not happen as much, but there will be a lot of things where I love software engineering and I love using it in the real world, and I'm actually helping change this small industry, which actually is really interesting when you look into it. And I'm helping the lives or I'm helping people

make more money or do things better, et cetera. And maybe one more thing is just an interesting one to just keep coming back to. I sometimes think of it and I talk about healthcare. So there is a lot of investment going in. These big pharma has poured a lot of money for like five to 10 years to try to bring technology that will help people result in better care or better prescriptions or whatnot.

And there's an aging population. So that is also there. So I do think, you know, there's a lot of like, I just gave a bunch of examples here. I think there's a lot of things to be excited about. But I think we just need to be a bit more grounded because the whole, like, you know, from zero to billion dollar company is not going to happen. In fact, these billion dollar companies just are, in hindsight, were probably highly, highly inflated and we should just set our expectations.

Yeah, I was talking to Jared before this call. There was something I didn't share in Change the World News because I was skeptical of some of the details behind it, but it was this. The title says, which one of these will be the biggest unicorn failure ever? And it cites all these larger companies. Uber was one of them with little to no profits, and they're 10 years old, 20 years old, and it's a small swath of them. But there's also tons of opportunity in the boring business sector. I mean, I've been turned onto this more half-tempted just to buy a bunch of laundromats, you know, kind of thing. But like, think about the innovation if you're a software developer, right? I was telling Jared this, like, this is a sort of a silly kind

of crazy idea. There's a lot of boom happening in the RV space, but there's no Tesla in the RV space aside from, say, Airstream. And they've been around for a very long time, and it's mainly their quintessential, you know, external design with good taste on the inside. Most RVs are kind of ugly, but almost none of them have a LAN network. Almost none of them have high quality software. Almost none of them have a lot of thought put into people who are younger and into more smart things or automation things. It's kind of like an untapped market. If you can do electrical engineering and mechanical engineering and software engineering and all these different things come to play in these boring sectors or even recession resistant places like laundromats,

elder care, healthcare as you mentioned, storage facilities, there's a lot of automation that can happen there. If you own an RV park that was automated fully by software, it takes land, which appreciates, software, mostly automated, maybe one operator. If you're a software engineer, it might be time to follow, I think, what was her name?

Jared Ann's advice from Wired. She was saying in the article you posted, Amanda Hoover, there's a couple different directions you might go, and one might be just to take that big risk and start your own company, but my advice on top of hers would be consider boring sectors or Amanda Hoover. self-driving cars, AI and things, which that area is growing, but it's being sort of laser focused in this online only space where maybe the riches that can be found are in this mixed medium, this in-person brick and mortar, you know, physical places where technology just hasn't been brought to the forefront there. I don't know what kind of advice that is there, but there's a lot of

opportunity out there in spaces that you just may have not thought of. I feel also that going forward for the next couple of years, the mainstream advice might apply less. The mainstream advice until now, if you wanted to have a really successful and profitable career in tech, was learn how to code. If you have the opportunity to go to university just because now you have a pedigree, try to get into one of these big techs as soon as you can and then jump around from there. If you cannot get straight into Facebook or Google, try to go at a tier lower, like Foursquare or Yelp, who have really good cultures, but they're not as well known as some of the others. And then try to hop your way up. and once you're there and you made it as a staff engineer at Facebook, you're probably making so much money that if you're spending it all, you're crazy

because you should have just saved some of that for a time like now. And then the advice kind of ends there and I do talk with people who are five or ten years into their career, or let's say more like eight to ten years, they made it as a staff engineer to one of these companies and they're like, what next? Because I'm now making so much money, I cannot go anywhere.

Which, I mean, it's not a bad problem to have, but they just feel a little bit trapped because they went there so quickly. And compare this with people who kind of got there after 30 years, like in the past, I know people who retire from similar situations, like at the end of their career as a staff or a principal engineer, as well. So this used to be the traditional advice. And it kind of worked for so many people, because big tech was hiring so many people. This was kind of achievable for most people. And this route will always be there.

I've seen this in the investment banking. So when I joined J.P. Morgan in 2010, I worked on the front office, and banks are really good. They have front office, middle office, back office. It's based on how much money you make. The front office is making all the money, middle office is supporting the front office, back office is just cost center, clearing stuff.

I work with traders, and what I noticed is, I was on a desk, we had 10 traders that we were supporting, we were building software for them. When I joined, we had 10 traders. A year later, we had six, and they never got backfilled. These were the traders who were making the millions in compensation per year, at least a million. They were making these outside bonuses.

I asked the traders, how was it like? And they were like, oh yeah, back in the day, this desk used to have 30 traders. And I asked, what is it like? But we're just kind of getting fewer. Because when they let people go, they actually hired two software engineers to do algorithmic trading, or just the same thing but for cheaper, or similar stuff. And then they told me that to become a trader, it used to be pretty easy back in the day. rhythmic trading or just like you know the same thing but for cheaper or similar stuff and then they told me that to become a trader like it used to be that it used to be pretty easy back in the

day like or not that easy but you just need to go to a good school but now you have to go to a good school you need to have the connections they will tell you what the interview is like and some of the interviews ridiculous back then they claimed that there's like some reflex tests and all that they will tell you what it's like so you can prepare. So basically, to get that job, you need to have pedigree. You need to have connections, often family connections. And then you had a chance at an interview where you had to do really good. You needed to be really good. So I think this is slowly going to happen with, let's say, big tech,

where they will be hiring, but you will need pedigree. They're not going to hire you off of a boot camp or nothing or a previous company. And then you'll also need to do well there. So it's just going to be a lower funnel. And the other advice, so this advice will still be there, but it'll be harder to do. But the other advice that no one will talk about is what you said is, ignore the mainstream and look into interesting sectors. And this will be hit or miss, but there will be some people who will do great at these no-name companies that no one knows about. Some will be absolute flaws, but some will be just really fun where you get to grow, you get pretty good compensation,

and you grow with the company, and you're solving for a really interesting challenge. Maybe that also gives you ideas to potentially start your own company or partner with something, or just stay at a company for a long time. I'm now into the industry long enough that I have these weird reflections. When I worked on industries or areas that I might have

looked down a little bit on, for example, the government sector. When I lived in Edinburgh more than 10 years ago, it was more like 13, 14 years ago, I built an app called Edinburgh Bus Tracker on Windows Phone because I went every day to work and there was an app for iPhone and one for Android, but none for Windows Phone. I just wanted to know when my bus would arrive.

So I built this, but in building it I had to reach out to the local council and they had a tech team who were building this API. I kind of talked with them and they made some changes to their API and I just built it, I forgot about it. Now, just six months ago, a guy wrote to me API, and I just built it, I forgot about it. And now, just six months ago, a guy wrote to me saying, hey, I think I tweeted about this app that I did. And he said, oh, I'm still here, and I'm still building the API,

and it's really cool. And I was like, hold on, you've been there for 12 years, working at the council on the API team? And I started just talking, and he was like, yeah, it's actually really good. It's just a really friendly place. It kind of feels like family, and we get to experiment a lot and we do these things.

In my mind, if you would have asked me, I was always someone who just wanted to climb subconsciously the ladder. I always wanted to not climb, but I wanted to prove myself that I'm good enough for the next thing. But now I'm re-evaluating of like, hey, this person is a software engineer. He works at a job which pays the bills. It is really important for the community.

He gets to have a lot of professional freedom. People are using it. So you know what? There's not just one way to have a fulfilled professional life. And I think that's what a lot of the career advice focuses on. Just go higher and higher and higher and more and more and more. And that person is definitely not afraid of any layoffs. Everyone else who's stressing, that's going to be the last place that is impacted for

obvious reasons. So I think one thing that I'll take away from this is try to talk with other people outside of your bubble, other software engineers, or if you're an engineering manager, other engineering managers, and just approach those people with curiosity. Because I think this is how my world view is changing a little bit. I get more empathy. And you also just build up a better network, right? You just get to know those people,

and I think you'll be a bit more grounded. Tech is still really big, and there are so many people doing so many different things. And this is actually, by talking with these different people, this is how you might find out that absolutely boring industry that is actually really exciting. And now is a good time to jump into it. And now that, you know, big tech is just really, everyone is focusing their attention right there. This episode is brought to you by Influx Data, the makers of the InfluxDB time series platform,

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on any dimension without sacrificing performance and more options than ever to query data including native SQL support. If you want to learn more and see how the new InfluxDB engine works, sign up for the InfluxDB beta program at influxdb.com slash changelog. Again, InfluxDB.com slash changelog. I always say if you're going to take on risk, take it on your own terms. That's kind of one thing as well.

If there's going to be a risk in the market, take it on your own terms. And don't be afraid in that front. But at the same time, I do have a lot of empathy for people with change. Change is super hard. Jerry, we got the mention. I'm not sure if it'll make it onto the air because I'm not sure where we talked about it at, but we mentioned who moved my cheese recently when we were in the hallway track at All Things Open. And, you know, this is the time of change and resilience. You know, find if things are moving and changing, then you got to change with it.

But at the same time, like a lot of people just want to have impact. And maybe the best way you have an impact is with people you enjoy working with for 13 years, you know, with no concerns or no stress. And maybe you're not getting paid the most, but maybe that's not even a concern for you because what you're optimizing for, which I think is a big key for a lot of people, they're not really sure what they're optimizing for. Like you had said, you were optimizing for, you know, personal satisfaction and the fact that you could grow and you could do and you could reach, which is great and there's nothing wrong with that. If that's what you're optimizing for, then you take the path you took. But if you're optimizing for

enjoying the people you're around, the impact, maybe even community, maybe you don't jump around like most people do every two or three years to different companies, maybe even less than that.

That's also a market condition, but also a personal condition you choose to take on. So what are you optimize them for? And then what you optimize for, there's this really interesting mental model that one of my former colleagues at Uber, she's a really, really good engineering manager. Now she's actually a VP of engineering at Mali. Her name is Anna-Laure. And we were just having dinner the other day. We got back together with some of the engineering managers at Uber. And I was just talking about this on how there's money, there's also career.

And she said, I got a really simple framework that has worked really well for me. And it's three things, challenge, environment, compensation. And figure out which one is the most important to you and which one is the least one. There's going to be one that you don't really, because what that means is if two of these are good enough, then you'll actually take that position or opportunity. So for example, let's say if you're someone who cares about, like a lot of software engineers will care about interesting problems, which is challenge, and then you need to decide

what is the next most important thing. Is it the environment, that you're at a friendly place and all that, or is it the compensation? If it's challenge and compensation, then you'll probably go for places that have go-go-go cultures, but they pay well and it's a really interesting challenge. If it's environment, then you might be okay taking a pay cut or something that is a lot less competitive or maybe more local, but they're working on this really interesting thing,

or potentially even, depending on where you put compensation, or how much you might consider non-profit, etc. it's really interesting and this changes over time so it can change based on obviously competition is a big one because that's the only one that you can really quantify i think that's why people focus on it like you talk with people you can compare composition you know above or under but you cannot really compare your environment or your challenges because it is subjective at all times. Well, Gary, it must be kind of a bittersweet time for you, because while you're covering all of this downer news and a lot of your friends are seeing layoffs or cuts and there's just lots of bad going on, you personally, it seems like your business is booming, your

efforts with the pragmatist engineer. There's lots going on there. A year ago now is when we last talked and you were kind of forging this newsletter, this business around it. I don't think you had a job board back then. Maybe give us a quick rundown as it seems like you're doing very well,

which is awesome. Tell us what's been going on. Yeah, so it just comes to show that doing your own business can, well, first of all, starting my own business was a little unexpected, or how I started was unexpected. And maybe I dodged a bullet here,

because my plan was, when we talked a year ago, I already started my newsletter, but my plan was originally quit Uber, live off my savings for six months and finish a book, because as we know, books don't really make any money, but I wanted to get that book out. It's called The Software Engineer's Guidebook, and it's still not ready, by the way.

But I wrote some other books, and then my plan was to raise venture funding and start a company and do a startup and do some cool stuff around platform engineering. I had a bunch of different ideas to do. And in the end, that didn't happen. When I got to the decision in time, I was like, do I want to raise venture funding

and start a company, or do I want to keep doing this, what I'm doing, which is writing, and actually start to make some money online and it seemed that just writing books would be able to cover my basic cost of living. I decided, all right, let me try to give this a go and let me just try to do a paid newsletter. And this turned into a very viable business very quickly,

which is it turns out there is a demand for people to pay for more in-depth insights into how software engineering works at big tech startups. And then later this expanded. So over the past year, I iterated on the format of the newsletter. I now have two articles. One is a more timeless article of how different things work in software engineering from engineering efficiency to, let's say, how you deploy to production or how certain companies do this or that.

And then there's more of a reflection that is called the scoop of what's going on in the tech world where I try to stay away from covering most of mainstream, although I do slide into that every now and then. But I'm trying to just give a sense of what are people, software engineers, talking about or caring about. Unfortunately, a lot of it has been layoffs, but I'm also trying to look for more positive things that are happening. And as you said, this business is doing great. More and more people are signing up, both in terms of there's a free mailing list, there's a paid one.

The paid one actually, I was giving out badges, and I just crossed 10,000 paid subscribers, which is an incredible milestone. And now they're advertising it everywhere with the verified badge. Very cool. Good for you. You pay $8 a month for that, or how does that work? Yeah, exactly. It's the opposite, but it's absolutely booming. And there's a job board that I

also started, which despite all of this gloom and doom, more and more companies are signing up who I vet, so I don't approve all of them. I need to keep it high signal to noise. So that's also going up in the middle of a market that shouldn't be. My business personally is going well.

It's probably a mix of timing or demand, or maybe this is a timeless demand. It feels like it was probably a niche that was waiting to be filled, potentially, by someone. I don't like to talk specifically about my business as much because this is just one specific business. People often, I find software engineers love to pattern match, and a lot of people ask me,

how can I do exactly what you're doing? And I don't have an answer to that, but what I can do is give some generic things of what helped me build this business and actually run it pretty well. And there are two things that actually helped me with this. One is I always use side projects on the side. I posted on Twitter, I have a spreadsheet of all the side projects I started

since I left college on the side of work. And there's a lot of them. At some point I had this flashlight app that had 14 million downloads on Windows Phone. It was the most popular flashlight. And I built apps and I built websites. This is my third blog, actually, my current software engineering blog. So I just did a lot of things on the side. And I just got a is my third blog, actually, my current software engineering blog that kind of grew into this. So I just did a lot of things on the side.

And I just got a bit of a sense. I had this entrepreneurial spirit. So I got a sense of building. And I got a sense of figuring out what works and what doesn't at a small scale. And I made some money online with the Flashlight app. I sold some ads. So I had a sense of making my own kind of income. But all of this was, I guess, not deliberate looking, but it was practice. So now that I'm running my own business, I take a lot of the lessons that I did back then that I kind of learned the hard way.

Because I think it's relatively easy to start a business. But just like when someone is a second or third time founder, VCs will more likely to give them money because they learned on someone else's expense. There's this joke of why does Adam Neumann get another investment round, which I think A16C gave him another how many, and there's a lot of outrage on that. A hundred million or something like that is a lot of money. Yeah, but there's a point there, well first of all, it's not really cool that they don't fund a lot of really capable entrepreneurs. But there's a point that he spent, I don't know, like a few billion of the other investors' money learning how to actually run an empire or a big company, making a bunch of mistakes that he's like, assuming he's intelligent enough, he's not going to do those same mistakes,

which you cannot say for everyone. So anyway, I'm giving a bit of benefit of doubt. Like I still don't, I still think it looks very poorly on A16C for putting a lot of their money into these ones. But there is a point there. So going back to my point, by doing side projects on a site, even if they're just absolute side projects, you kind of build that entrepreneurial muscle, which you need to do to run your own business.

The other advice is just, my advice is forget about this whole creator economy thing. Everyone's talking about the creator economy and everyone's fantasizing about having an audience of so many people who they will, I don't know, everyone wants to build an audience, even when they're at a, I meet people who are like, all right, my plan is I build an audience

on LinkedIn or Twitter, et cetera, and then I can leave my job. And well, I mean, Audience is a distribution channel, and distribution channels are important, but making that your main goal, it's kind of like a bit of a moot point. I happened to, I guess, build an audience because what I was doing was writing,

and I started sharing my writing. My main thing was I was writing, and it kind of helped that I was sharing this out. But the way I look at what I'm doing is I'm running a business, and for a business, things like distribution matter, things like who are your customers matter. What I find misleading is just copying what you think is successful, because I know some of these people who are making YouTube videos and they have millions of views and they don't

have a business. They have sponsors, they're stressed all the time because it goes up and down, but it's not a stable business. My business is actually pretty stable and pretty honest because people pay for value. I actually don't have any sponsors. Your business is a good example as well, where you also have a business that is very viable. Your business, the change log, will have a mix of sponsors, a mix of people paying for the premium, etc. Treat it as a business. That's my second. My first one is do side projects. paying for the premium, et cetera. So treat it as a business. That's my second. My first one is do side projects.

Second is when you do a thing, don't think of creator economy, think about as a business. And I have an article on that. And the last one is, this is a little bit like, if you want to do something a little bit similar to what I'm doing, which is I think of,

I'm educating people in many ways, work in industry and do interesting things in places where it's hard to get into. Because the reality is that the reason a lot of people pay attention to what I say, because I've done it, I've done a lot of the things that are not as trivial. I happened to be there when we rewrote the whole Uber app in three months, and I was one of the very many people, but I kind part of that experience, and it was a rare thing to do. But I really went and worked in the industry, and I didn't go and work there because I wanted to do this.

It was the opposite. I worked there, and I just learned a lot, and I became good at certain areas. It's a lot easier to teach once you've done it. A lot of the things I do is teaching. That's just generic advice. It's counterintuitive, but be good at your job. Be really good, because if you're not good at your job,

you'll have a hard time launching a business that has to do with something with sharing. You might be able to launch something else, by the way. And then just do side projects, because you'll figure out what you do. The Pragmatic Engineer came about because I was blogging on the side for a long time. I just loved it.

I just liked doing it. I learned that I loved writing, not because I ever thought that it would turn into business. And okay, last advice is save up. So you know, like just to summarize the advice is it was do side projects, like understand that a business like what businesses are even your current business, work in the industry and get that expertise and save up enough savings that you can actually take a risk. I would have never done the pragmatic engineer if I didn't have like a year or two of savings. And I was able to quit my job. And I said, I'm not going to look for anything for six months. I'm just going to do me. I'm just going to write this book. And I said no to all of the recruiter

reach outs, because obviously, when you're experienced, people come your way, they want to recruit me for this or that or have a coffee or give me the advisory. I said no to everyone because I was on no one's payroll anymore. And I just chilled and kind of the inspiration came. If I didn't do this, the pragmatic engineer would not exist as it does today. Well, they say step away to get unstuck or sometimes step away to find the direction that you need to go. Not so much get unstuck, but find the path that you want to take. I so much get unstuck, but find the path that you want to take. I think you do a great job with writing. I think one thing that you do really well

is you shine a light in an area where it's very hard to quantify the details and share the details of a very just hard to understand world. And not a lot of people have the trust and the access that you have, and then also the background that you have so i think that you do a great job of like demystifying and clarifying a lot of things that are just challenging to have visibility into and you've gained the trust of many people because you write honestly you you were in the right place at the right time but you were also there with passion and preparation you know so you can't discount that ability which is it takes time to get that passion well i guess passion can kind of come at any point but the preparation is you know so you can't discount that ability which is it takes time to get that passion well i guess passion can kind of come at any point but the preparation is you know it's

timely it takes time to get that yeah and i guess the last one it just reflects on me i think you just be curious and this goes back to what we're talking about the boring industries like one of my best reasons i feel i was successful in my career and now in my new career as well i'm just really interested in stuff and people. Maybe this comes from interest, and maybe you cannot do it. I don't know, but I'll tell you, at Uber, for example, one of the things that I thought helped my success is when I would sit down to have lunch,

I would try to just go to someone and say, hey, do you mind if I have lunch with you? Let me just introduce myself. Where do you work? What do you do? Oh, customer support. Tell me about that if I have lunch with you? Let me just introduce myself. And where do you work? What do you do? Oh, customer support. Tell me about that. I have no clue. In my mind, customer support is this boring thing,

but I'm sure it's really exciting. So can you tell me? And I just shut up and listen. And I actually met a lot of people. And later, just at my job, something came up. And someone was like, oh, something customer support. There's a customer support agent sending us a ticket. And I was like, oh, hold on, I know a person from there.

Let me just ping them. And they're like, oh yeah, I know what's going on. And people were like, oh wow, you are so connected. And I wasn't trying to be connected, I was just really curious. I was really interested in what does your world look like? And when I was in London actually for some time, I reached out to a few fellow tech leads or senior software engineers. I said, like, hey, I'm working at Skyscanner as an iOS engineer.

You're an Android or iOS engineer at this other company. Do you want to just have coffees on me? Like, do you want to just meet? Because I would love to learn, like, what you are doing. Like, you're in this different company, and I want to get a sense of what are your challenges. And maybe we can learn from each other. And if not, just, you know, coffee was on me. So I did this for a few times

and I stopped doing it after a while because I met enough people. But this curiosity of, again, just especially if you're feeling smug about how good you are at your company or how great of a place you are, just talk to someone else because it'll, first of all, get you grounded

and you'll learn more. And I think a lot of, potentially, maybe one of the things that people might like about writing, I'm super curious. And this is one of the reasons i love doing it i get to talk with so many people now the news that is a little bit better known most people respond if i reach out to them but i have a long list of things i'd love to learn more about because i think the whole industry is fascinating i think we don't know what we don't know and we don't know a lot of things one of the things on my bucket list i'll just put it on here and if someone works there they can contact one of my things on my bucket list is which is just

hard to do is at some point try to get either on the record or off the record people who who build spaceships at the likes of spacex or nasa or the european space agency to talk about like how they do that stuff and the reason is hard i don't know how confidential all this is. And I'm not interested in confidential details, but of how is that world different? How can you get in there? What are the differences, for example, when you're building a social media app or just something that is a little bit more

traditional software engineering? So yeah, I think the world is super interesting, super exciting. And they're actually, what I've noticed, software engineers never get asked, or even most people in the business is super interesting, super exciting. And they're actually, what I've noticed, software engineers never get asked, or even most people in the business you work at, someone who works in customer support operations, they never get asked by a person who's not a manager.

They don't walk up to them and say, hey, I'm interested in what you're doing. Can you tell me? And I'm also a software engineer, so happy to trade notes. Yeah, for sure. Get humble, trade notes. Yeah, for sure. Get humble. Be curious. But you got to pragmaticengineer.com is where people can go to find all the stuff you do, right? Exactly. I appreciate you coming back for this annual trip down.

What's going to happen next? Maybe should we say you're coming back next year? Should we predict that? Is it a possibility? I'm going to come back next year. Now, I love being on the chain. I love catching up with all of you. It's also, it seems every year is different.

So, you know, let's try to predict what might happen next year. Although predictions are a little bit off. Let's see if this ages well. Are you predicting something now? Well, let's see how it ages. I do hope that in a year when I'll come back on the usual fall catch up, I hope, you know, this is not a prediction, but more of a hope. I hope we'll be through the most rocky part of this market and I hope we'll just be like, there's just not much to talk about.

The market, it's not great, it's not bad, it is. I'd be very happy with that. This is something that is hard to predict. I would hope that we're seeing a few more interesting areas that these are areas that we think are going to be, they're more likely that they'll be big. And this might be that, we'll say that AI, ML, or data engineering gets bigger, or there's something,

or maybe we're seeing that front-end and mobile is moving closer together, something like that. So it will be cool to see a little bit of movement because I feel there's a lot of small wounds here and there, but I'm not seeing a trend change yet. Maybe next year we'll have GearGate AI or something like that, where we can just train a model on your writing style, and you can just stop doing what you do.

Since you mentioned Silicon Valley, it's like Dinesh and Guilfoyle, when Dinesh was chatting with Guilfoyle all day, but it was actually Guilfoyle's AI, and he was like, oh my gosh, that was the coolest part. But maybe we actually Gilfoyle's AI. Oh, yeah. He was like, oh, my gosh. That was the coolest part. But maybe we'll have a GearGay AI or something like that next year. That would be cool.

That would be cool. Well, this was awesome. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming, man. Thanks again for coming on the show. We always love having you. Appreciate it. Okay, that's it. Thank you for tuning in. Hey, if you've got some thoughts some tips some ideas some anythings shout out in the comments the link is in the show notes we want to hear from you have you heard hey there's new t-shirts do stock in the merch store merch.changelaw.com

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