Ask HN: Laid-off devs who left tech?
It's been almost 3 years since the post-covid tech layoffs began. And the tech job market has steadily gotten worse since then. So now is a good time to check in on the state of out-of-work devs. Specifically, if you have left tech as your main job, what do you do now? And do you work on personal projects or a tech-related side hustle? Are you looking to jump back into tech when things improve, or have you found something better?
I've been without an IT gig for the last year, though it had nothing to do with the overall tech market tightening.
Prior to my gig ending, I'd already made the decision to change careers (at least for a while), so I haven't really looked for anything new, I've been focusing on the career change. At 46, I just wasn't really looking forward to starting to experience the tech ageism; and, the AI craziness is really grating to me. It's feels like the seagulls from Finding Nemo except instead of "Mine Mine Mine" it's "AI AI AI". :-D
I'm about two weeks away from leaving for pilot training at a regional airline, so hopefully in a few months I'll be just another cog in a machine for a while, flying people around on jet powered busses. If the airline life turns out to be my speed for the long haul, then the goal would be to get over to a mainline carrier ASAP; if not, I can always fall back to tech later, and for now I'll enjoy the office view from 34k ft.
I'm aware that I've traded upcoming implicit ageism for explicitly regulated ageism, but if I am lucky enough to stay healthy I don't have to worry about that kicking in until I'm 65.
That's interesting. How long have you been flying?
I did a chunk of my primary training back when I was 21, but as often happens, I got to around the cross country solo portion and ran out of money and life priorities changed.. unfortunately, I then set it down for a really long time; sort of forgot that I actually really loved it, I guess.
Came back to flying in 2019 and finished up my private certificate, with no particular intention other than I wanted to fly because I enjoyed it, and perhaps instruct because I do enjoy teaching. Went on to get my instrument and commercial, and around the time I got my commercial certificate, I started toying with the idea of pursuing it as a possible career change. Went on to get my multi-engine add on, which kind of cemented the idea of trying it for a living. CFI and CFII after that, and between doing some instructing and flying a lot just because I liked flying, I started applying at airlines around December of last year and I crossed the 1500hr mark in March of this year. Interviewed at my first choice regional in May, they gave me a CJO, and training class date in mid July.
Pilot hiring right now is pretty tight, so I've been pretty fortunate to get the regional I wanted right out of the gate, and to not have a long delay for a class date. As with anything involving timing in life, I definitely timed it wrong -- my earning potential and qualify of life outlook would've been vastly improved if I'd been ready to make this jump 2 to 3 years ago, but what can you do :-D
Our tech sector in general is in hot water, but gamedevs are getting massacred [0].
The stories I hear is they're taking on contracting work to survive, risking it all as an indie, or going into manufacturing (typically as quality assurance managers.) That last one seems surprising, but it's more common than you'd think.
Source: I run a community full of gamedevs.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/topics/layoffs
I would like to know one thing about the games industry - are one reason AAA game releases dropped off a cliff is remote work?
Reason I say is that as soon as Covid hit, it seems like the triple As just stopped - which makes no sense because all they did was hire. I have to assume it's like the companies I worked at: All of a sudden people's individual life at home was more important than work - EVEN during work hours.
No one was able to get the missile shooting animation done for 8 days because their wife had tons of appointments and the dogs need walking and grocery trips... non-stop excuses. And then eventually no one wanted to work because no one else was. Hence the year of "quiet quitting".
Hiring lots of people and setting grander goals (because you have lots of money and just hired tons of people) is an excellent way of slowing development down for a while, it doesn't make things go faster.
Bigger projects take longer, and many studios chased bigger and better, instead of aiming smaller. Which then meant that these things had to be standout hits to be considered successful, which puts more pressure on perfecting everything, which takes more time, ...
Then many studios have stories of either deep direction changes or large projects being cancelled as the money wasn't as available anymore and trends shifted. E.g. Sony alone has probably spent over a billion and multiple years of work of several studios on live-service games that they then scrapped, Dragon Age Veilguard pivoted a few times (and ended up a mess as a result), ... stories like that across the AAA space.
Yeah, it's unintuitive that more people = slower, as most people have never hit that level of scale. But it means teams and managers and communication communication communication.
Will Wright said that you go from 4 hours of work per hour of meetings to 1 hour of work per 4 hours of meetings. This can be scaled down with wikis and tools. Chinese companies tend to have "living documentation" aka system analysts - a person whose job is to understand everything and be asked questions whenever someone gets stuck. Western companies are very resistant to this model for some reason.
Bethesda is another way to build things at scale. Lots of isolated sections that don't link into the main thing. But it's hard to build something like Fallout 2 that way when the whole story isn't in one person's head.
Part of the reason for so many layoffs recently is because it works. It's a magic tool that increases speed and reduces costs, and you just pay for it with everyone's motivation and soul.
(edit: reading again, this is sort of besides the point of the parent comment, but whatever)
I've been wondering about this as well, here are some of my hypotheses...
Business related
* Covid did it: we are currently experiencing a delayed effect. AAA games take roughly 5 years to develop (I think?), Covid generated a lot of uncertainty and chaos and thus less games got started during this period. Supply chains and finance were in disarray and we didn't know how long the pandemic would last. To make matters worse, this coincided with the release of the new console generation, which is typically a big moment of reorganizing and new ip, so we had a double whammy in that regard. How much new consoles would get sold in this new environment of chip shortages? How long would the shortages last? Is crypto here to stay and will they keep buying up al GPUs?
* Lending has gotten more expensive and this is driving up risk perception and lowering profitability. In the aggregate this leads to less games being released.
* There's been a lot of mergers between industry behemoths, so internal strategies and reorgs might have something to do with it. There is more vertical integration. There is less competition between AAA publishers because there are simply less of them.
* Outsourcing has changed due to internal and geopolitics. Chinese game market development and government restrictions, etc.
* There's been a switch to mobile and PC gaming, the home console market has been shrinking in relative terms.
* Online game libraries on consoles keep expanding, resulting in lower demand for new games that we saw in previous generations.
Game trends related
* All AAA devs were making their variation on open world games, but there has been an increasing fatigue with the formula. I see something similar happening roughly once every decade where the AAA industry grapples to find new mechanics and a corresponding production pipeline. Like in the 2000-2010 period games became highly linear because that way you could slice the units of work in time. Then in 2010-2020 people got sick of that and the new production pipeline became one of open world freedom alongside editors and workflows that allowed the entire team to populate a single giant world. Gameplay changed from highly scripted cinematic experiences into 'immersive' gameplay systems. Player now are getting tired of this trend but we haven't figured out a new one yet. Before the 2000s this was less of an issue because dev teams were more nimble, asset creation was less of a bottleneck and technical innovations were a bigger driver in popularity and length of development.
* There's been a switch to "forever" games in AAA. Where a studio just builds one big game they keep supporting and funneling players into. These are typically multiplayer, but that leads to issues of network effects. There's been a lot of new multiplayer games over the past decade but the player pool hasn't kept the same pace, so only the popular ones and first movers survive.
* Indie games glut + higher quality indie 'AA' games causing the AAA sector to having to differentiate themselves more, which they suck at because they're all about return on investment.
You’re leaving off one important thing. It’s a lot easier to create a mobile game cheaply using a pre-existing engine that is free to play and monetized via ads and in-app purchases of loot boxes and power ups
Laid off game dev from 2024 (3D art). Looked into how I could participate in industries and economy at the county level.
Became a survey tech for a survey firm that has been around for three generations.
I’m looking to enjoying a new career where there is no homework, small supportive team, and helps serve people and businesses that are part of the community I live in
The layoffs affected mostly the US market. In EU, there never has been an excess of salaries or hiring, so it's almost just bad as usual. You don't see much "funding" and "VC"s here. If you wanna stay on the market, you better have positive cash flow. In Italy, salaries are about 1/4 of what's overseas, it is very hard to job hop, those who do are seen as opportunistic people. So, you feel this slightly less.
All this AI marketing thing is another thing that is specific about Silicon Valley and investments, and "growth". In EU, you don't have much growth, and that's all.
I guess the US tech market has been drugged on free cash for too long, to even have an idea of what the real world is.
Layoffs certainly do happen outside US and ZIRP was not uniquely American thing.
Go check what I say if you don't believe me. Ask ChatGPT for sources, check Reddit or official statistics. It's been like 10% of what is in the US. Here finding a job has ALWAYS been a problem, not just now. https://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-layoffs-meta-snap-a...
I haven't heard of anyone being laid off in my circle, no newspaper talking about that. Sure there must have been some Microsoft or Google employee laid off, but they do not represent big numbers here, so it's totally different. There are also almost no startups here.
Some quick examples:
Bosch: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/11/business/bosch-germany-jo...
Panasonic: https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/panasonic-layoffs-con...
SAP: https://www.thestack.technology/sap-layoffs-cost-3-billion-l...
Cisco: https://www.brusselstimes.com/1328320/us-company-cisco-to-sh...
Telia: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/swedens-telia...
Sure, numbers are lower, but tech downturn is a global thing.
P.S. No moral judgement intended. Just different context, different bubbles and conditions.
I was ready to go into construction (which I actually enjoy) but I just got an offer today for a lower pay remote tech job. The only reason I got this job is because the company can only hire US citizens.
I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of devs have gone hard nationalist after Biden's tech layoffs. (Zirp ending + S174 left to wither during Biden)
I don't think people are really going hard nationalist. But it does seem like the offshoring has increased over the past 5 years. Im probably going to lose my job in part because offshore has essentially eliminated the internal job moves available to me so I can't get off a shitty team.
Everything keeps getting automated or shipped overseas. It's hard to be optimistic for my kids to have good job opportunities when they grow up.
Genuinely curious – what do you think the solution is?
Personally I think labels like "nationalist" are unhelpful, but regardless what you label it what I do believe is that there needs to be a genuine conversation about whether it's better to have more expensive goods and services if it means people have jobs and opportunities.
I'd be fine with iPhones costing 2-3x more if I knew they were built domestically. Those who couldn't afford them could always buy second hand or hold on to them for longer. And historically of course this was often how things worked... People brought quality clothes or quality furniture and looked after them for years – decades even. Whereas today because we can exploit foreigners for super cheap goods we don't really care if we need to buy a new pair of shoes every 6 months – it's created a completely different economic model and one that a skilled worker cannot compete with, at least on price.
Perhaps the economy on the whole wouldn't grow as fast if there were more protectionist policies, but at the same time I'd be amazed if it didn't significantly improve job prospects and inequality.
That said, we almost everyone in the middle-class deserves to lose their jobs to foreign workers for how awful they've treated those below them for struggling to find good work in the era of globalisation.
I think we can still have some eprotecrionist policies while partipating trade. We can even have some tariffs if they're well thought out, such as anti-dumping or on certain sectors (Trump 1 and Biden). Protectionism might not be the biggest factor in economic growth. It feels like the tariffs haven't changed much from a personal perspective. Im more concerned about unemployment due to rates and the section 174(?) changes. The tariffs have nothing to do with all the layoffs. It also feels like AI and automation have a lot of companies just waiting to see if they're really need to hire more people if if they can just use AI. Seems like lots of people are filling multiple roles right now.
I get that the economy is measured by GDP and we did see it shrink in Q1. However, it doesn't feel like a good measure due to all the inequality. It feels like stuff like credit card balances, mortgage defaults, and unemployment are better numbers. Those don't look good but haven't skyrocketed either... yet.
Yeah, the middle class has been shrinking for years. I do think some of the absolutist free trade stances we had played a role. I'm probably going to lose my job soon and if feel like I'll just end up working at Walmart. I've never understood how the candidates that say they're pro labor are also the ones pushing for absolutist free trade and environmental restrictions. Some of these are at odds. If you're free trade, you're just shifting those jobs to the cheaper markets. That's also where the environmental and worker protection seem to be weakest.
> I'd be fine with iPhones costing 2-3x more if I knew they were built domestically
This is easy to check!
Pretend they are built domestically and give 2x the cost of it to a charity you love the next time you buy an iPhone.
Charity isn't the same as a functioning domestic economy which is what he and everyone else saying this want.
The key word in my comment is “pretend.”
There is some situation in which he is claiming to be happily spending 3x on an iPhone.
He should pretend that situation exists to see if he will actually spend 3x on an iPhone before being so confident that he actually will happily spend 3x on an iPhone in some uncertain future.