Poland.

On one hand it’s a bit slower on the other Google here hiring like crazy, Netflix opening up an office, Shopify acquiring whole companies…

To me it seems like big tech fires in the US then look for cheaper workforce elsewhere. Or maybe just a coincidence?

Can confirm. I, a software engineer (along with many others), was laid off and new teams are being brought up in Poland to do the same work.

Canada here, I think the same thing is happening.

Since the everything bubble crested, Canada has gotten pretty high up there in salary so it's not necessarily boosting our salaries too much more, but I don't think hiring is slowing down here either

Yeah, it seems that the highly paid Silicon Valley developers have effectively convinced executives that their jobs can be done remotely.

And it’s entirely their fault too if it ends up being the case.

Engineers love showing themselves the door from their work lol.

Hard to say. It might be, but I did notice some not so subtle memes posted on LinkedIn about "dont wanna come to office? lemme get someone from India; you want donuts tomorrow boss?". I am oddly inspired that the old country is getting slowly recognized as a place to pick up developers though ( it makes sense, big English speaking population, similar values ).

Slowly recognized? Indian programmers have been a constant thing for way over 10 years now.

Apologies. Clumsy phrasing. I meant Polish programmers, but comparison used in memes was about Indian programmers.

Intel Poland laid off a number of engineers, especially seniors and women.

Can confirm for Cisco India.

Google Poland afaik has hiring freeze right now.

Lithuania. There were at least 3 companies last year who reduced their IT workforce: Interactio, HCL Technologies Lithuania and Genius Sports. As well last year Uber announced that they will close Lithuanian office but people can relocate (I know people who chose to move to different companies in Lithuania). This year I heard only about TrustPilot firing someone (or everyone).

It looks like companies choose not increasing salary path nowadays. That means the only way is to switch jobs to get salary increase and I know several people who did that recently. Company I work at is looking for front end developers as well. I have direct invite to some companies and I know that in case I lose my job I will get new one next day. LinkedIn spam reduced from 2 offers per day to 2 per week but I still get them.

Brazilian here: for laid off in November by an UK based startup and still unemployed.

Local companies seemly are willing to hire but because the flood of fired workers they are offering really bad wages. I got offered work as embedded C dev for 300 USD month... I didn't accept back then because I was still working in my old job. I regret not taking that job now. 300 USD at least is more than 0 USD.

300 per month, 300*12=3600 per year, seems a lot lower than median for Brazil: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/brazil . Guess there must be a huge span between companies then.

I'm thinking that was meant to be $3,000 USD per month ~ $36K annum in Brazil (which is circa Brazil median dev salary).

No. I mean 300 USD per month. If I was offered 3000 USD per month I would jump with joy and be extremely thankful. My last job I was earning something like that and people here started to treat me as if I was extremely wealthy.

Damn.

I'm in Australia and don't expect big ticket US paychecks myself, but that does seem low for embedded C dev work - there's some skill required there.

I guess it's all relative to whatever economy you're embedded in though.

Good luck and best wishes going forward.

Levels doesn't seem to track salaries for your average "mediocre" (see, work-life-balance prioritized) developer quite as well.

In Canada their end of year report listed some cities with median salaries of 100-130K USD, but I think most Canadian devs aren't on levels, and earning a bit less.

For example, the Canadian government pretty much pays software engineers between 40K-80K USD (even for 20 YoE). They're surely a massive employer, but they're not listed on Levels

Not that working for big tech or U.S. companies is that much more desireable, but it does pay a lot more, and those people are more likely to be reporting on Levels

Interesting. 80K USD is really low in Vancouver, Canada, based on the people I talked to (limited set and all that). I thought salaries are way higher by now, even for work-life-balanced people

What would be a good rate for you atm?

2000 USD per month would allow me pay my existing bills. I wouldn't save any money, but I would be able to pay my rent and buy some crappy food.

Japan here. It does not seem to affect much. Companies look based on their performance. Interestingly, we got more applicants from the US and Canada recently. I heard multiple times that people want a "stable" job over higher comp. Especially young developers. Culture shift? Some companies actually raised salaries recently because of the cost of living (See the news about Nintendo and others). However the salaries in Japan have been stagnant for years, so this was kind of overdue.

A lot of young people want the experience of working abroad, they just want into live in and experience another culture. Not really economic refugees (yet). I did this in china for 9 years and it was a great life experience, although my compensation lagged a bit compared what I could make in the states (now working for google to catch up).

>Culture shift?

Maybe one could call it accepting economic reality..

I don't recommend pure development as a career here for people who want to earn big money.

Firing full-time employees in Japan is quite hard. If the company is taken to court, the burden of proof is quite high.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, so all that I say here is my personal understanding, from working in Japan, but also from talking to lawyers about this.

Firing an employee due to lack of competence or bad performance is permitted by law, but practically unheard of in practice - the bar for proving this is quite high.

Firing an employee due to misconduct is possible, but the bar is quite high. Embezzlement, getting kickbacks or getting into trouble with the law (outside your job) are common causes for termination, but I've even heard of cases of embezzlement and kickbacks where the employee in question was demoted instead of being fired.

Firing an employee due to the company's financial situation is often referred to as Risutora (corporate restructuring). That's perfectly doable, but the bar again is high. If the company is taken to court, they will have to prove the economic necessity for reducing their workforce and that they tried anything they can before they resorted to firing people. This includes:

- Offering a voluntary resignation plan. This means the employee reigns and get some monetary compensation. - Cutting other unnecessary costs besides salaries (otherwise they cannot prove economic necessity) - Selecting the employees that will be fired based an objective and fair criteria, no random culling of 10% of your workforce.

Since the bar for all of these is quite high, employers in Japan will more often try to negotiate voluntary resignation plans or (unfortunately quite often) bully their employees into resignation. The bullying tactic involves demotion, changing the job's content or trying to harass the employee in various ways until they decide to quit. This can also be challenged in court, but this tactic apparently shifts more of the burden of proof to employees.

The most common tactic big companies use in Japan to avoid all this hassle is to just not hire all of their employees as full-time employees. A great chunk of the workforce in Japan nowadays are fixed term contract employees, part-time shift employees or outsourced employees of various types.

Edit: I also have to add that from my personal observation, IT salaries in Japan experienced major growth over the last 10 years. YMMV depending on the type of company and the industrial sector, but if we focus on Japanese tech-focused companies (Yahoo, Rakuten, LINE, Mercari etc.) the average yearly salary grew by a 30% or so, and on the high-end you can see international companies and some Japanese tech companies offering senior positions at 20-30 million JPY / year. That's significantly lower than US salary at tech hotspots, but seems quite in line with salaries in Europe.

https://japan-dev.com/blog/software-developer-salaries-in-ja...

They shut my office down in Canada. Lots of jobs. Most are remote for US companies though. Very few recruiters spamming me, but companies are very receptive to inbound inquiries from me.

I’m a senior eng in AI research though, which is obviously having a big moment right now.

Not in my office. No one met that description.

Wtf

ping me. i may have something..

Hi jayzalowitz,

I am a researcher in statistics and data science from university at Buffalo. Just reaching out to see if you have any potential opportunities that I might consider

I worked on a very internationally distributed team of ~50 people, and was one of the two US citizens working on the onshore US component of that team (about 14 people). Myself and one other H1B on the US team were the only ones laid off on the larger 50 person team, and the layoff decision was unilaterally made by a director in Singapore. This is at an American semiconductor company that took $40B from the government a few months ago to increase its US presence, for reference.

Australia has been fine. Amongst the big software engineering hirers (Google, Atlassian, Canva, big banks, WiseTech, AWS) only Google Sydney is known to be doing layoffs.

Zendesk (Melbourne) did layoffs last year, but this was small scale I think, and mostly driven by their company-specific troubles.

Several companies did layoffs here. Australia is not immune.

Some American companies like Google and twitter layed off etc. "Mark43, a US company that builds online platforms for public safety organisations like police, fire or other emergency services, made its entire Australian office redundant at the end of June. Former staff member Gary* estimates around 70 people were laid off, with most of them based in Sydney."

but also local companies

https://itbrief.com.au/story/one-in-five-young-aussies-in-te...

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/finder-staff-sh...

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/sydney-technolo...

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/me...

Australia here also.

I'm a Tech Lead with a solid CV looking for a new gig. I'm finding it noticeably more difficult to get recruiter attention (let alone interviews) than I'd expected.

My gut feeling is that there are likely more candidates applying for any given job than there were late last year.

Layoffs in Amazon Brisbane.

A few layoffs in Microsoft Sydney too.

No layoffs at WiseTech.

Ah WTG! How many soccer fields is the office now?

My company was affected.

We closed our India office, 1/3 of our global offices.

Late last year, a lot of our engineering team was let go - somewhere between 20 and 30%.

This year, between 20 and 30% of the sales / marketing folks were let go.

In my opinion, these were reasonable decisions that were brought about by poor management. New management is doing a good job, and made the hard, necessary call.

Thus, it's hard to say how much an impact the economy has had. It certainly seems to have been a catalyst, but these internal changes were also a long time coming.

Germany here. I heard that some startups are freezing hiring, especially vc-funded ones (money has become expensive on this side of the pond, too). Recruiter spam also has died down a bit. That being said, the market still seems comparatively healthy and AFAIK there have been no large-scale layoffs.

I still get a lot of recruiter spam. Maybe because my tech stack is used in slow-moving enterprises (Java, Spring Boot), not sure.

Here in Latin America, the hiring of local developers by companies in the United States has decreased. Since July of last year, it has been much easier to hire and retain local talent.

Norway here. I got laid off, but it was less of a deal because I was on my way out soon anyway, so it really worked out nicely. I got a new position relatively quick (relatively, because everything slows down near the end of the year.)

I think that the strong US dollar has put a bit of a damper on companies that have diverse cash flows in different currencies, my former employer included, particularly if their bills are denominated in dollars primarily. My new employer is international, but where I will work probably has a lot of cash flow in the local currency, so I presume things will be influenced by interest rate policy here (which stands at 2.75% now and rate hikes have slowed down significantly.)

In New Zealand - most layoffs I’ve heard about have been US companies trimming offshore staff. At least one high profile local startup has laid people off though.

Speaking as a hiring manager it’s definitely been easier to find people since around mid 2022

Apart from one high profile NZ startup (possibly the same one) most companies seem to be okay. Lots of companies still hiring although not as aggressively as a year ago.

I know someone who lost their job at gitlab and various others working remote for US companies are worried. Most NZ It jobs are at companies serving local users or smallish NZ companies serving global markets. Relatively few work for a big global company that could easily move their job elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see what happens as a result of the flooding. I imagine New Zealand's economy is going to take an extra hit with that.

It tends to release a lot of insurance money into the economy and a lot of work restoring things. Not good for inflation. A bunch of the mid/large (for NZ) tech sector companies tend to be a bit divorced from the NZ economy as many target a global audience, biggest factors tend to be the exchange rate/cost of living.

Boom times for anyone in road building and construction, probably. It's been described as a billion dollar weather event on par with the Christchurch earthquake 10+ years ago.

Why would they shut down offices in western Europe? That must be the absolute cheapest (western) region to hire for.

In Japan it doesn’t seem to have affected much, though our parent US company went through a significant round of layoffs.

Europe is actually "net expensive" because there are high payroll taxes in some countries, and then, of course, in some countries it is virtually impossible to fire.

Oh man, I hear this on every such topic. It is in no way virtually impossible to fire someone, you just can't do it willy nilly because you don't like someone's face. You just have to follow well defined procedures (pip is a thing here too)

This. It's reasonably easy to fire someone, provided you have genuine cause.

> in some countries it is virtually impossible to fire.

Compared to the US, it may seem to be virtually impossible, but people are fired here too.

You can still have senior engineers for less than 100k€ (including taxes and everything that the company have to pay for)

That’s even cheaper if you hire them as contractors

Feels like Tokyo is the new Mumbai...

Not a developer but I exited the job market completely. Not worth it.

Japan. No significant layoffs in tech afaict. The large companies are being urged by the govt. to raise salaries (as historically they base salaries are low in comparison to peers in other G7-G8 nations in similar roles).

That's so weird that layoffs have primarily been in the US, the most expensive labor market. It's almost like the layoffs aren't really out of any necessity in most cases but are just an attack on labor and labor costs.

That aside, it is worth noting that a lot of other countries make it a lot more difficult to lay people off and when you do there are more protections, greater notice periods and so on. So it may just be that layoffs are happening overseas and we haven't really heard about them yet.

Also, most non-US offices of big tech companies tend to e a lot smaller. London is a bit of an outlier.

> That's so weird that layoffs have primarily been in the US, the most expensive labor market. It's almost like the layoffs aren't really out of any necessity in most cases but are just an attack on labor and labor costs.

I can give my CFO perspective on this having been through it from that position. It's not that you had that plan, but often when faced with questionable shift in business strategy, you look for the "low hanging fruit" and often just start with a number in mind, Eg. need to trim $x million of cost. From there, there may be complete teams or products that get cut (business decides to cut loss and divest of that product/service/etc), and/or at some point you often do sort by cost and make cuts towards the top first. There's usually a lot of conversations amongst management about which folks are mission critical and who is expendable (there's usually a middle bucket of folks that are neutral, "keep if we can").

This allows you to get to $x million by cutting the least number of headcount. Obviously, with hindsight, it would make more sense to just hire from lower-cost-of-living regions to begin with, but that assumes a level of planning that's rarely in place. Most hiring is done optimistically. For this reason, tech follows a boom/bust cycle just like the oil industry.

> Eg. need to trim $x million of cost.

Let's start with that: the "need" to reduce costs. In another comment I used Google as an example so I'll do so here too. Google is specatacularly profitable on an overall basis and a per-employee basis.

Layoffs as a cost-cutting measure are largely virtue signaling than true cuts in costs, for several reasons:

1. Once you factor in severeance costs, it takes a long time to realize any of those savings;

2. Those layoffs assume those laid off were providing no value. It's hard to believe that 10K+ employees were providing no value. Whatever value they were providing is also lost, further defraying any supposed cost savings;

3. Mass layoffs tend to be hugely destructive to culture and have a long-lasting impact on those who remain; and

4. By the time any benefits are realized you're probably hiring again anyway.

The point of layoffs is to virtue signal to the market that they're "serious" about cutting costs and to depress compensation. These companies won't be getting inflation pay raises. They'll probably be getting minimal bonuses and 0-2% pay raises, if that. Refresh grants will be less.

But the real kicker comes from doing more work for the same pay. Whatever the laid off people were doing will become the additional responsibility of those who remain. Sundar Pichai has come out and said he's aiming for 20% increase in "productivity" (ie 20% more labor for no increase in compensation). Zuckerberg has said similar about Meta.

You see with inflation that there is fairly rampant profiteering: raising prices because prices are rising while reaping record profits. These mass layoffs are largely the other side of that coin. Wages are being suppressed due to some largely invented (to this point at least) "recession".

Now there are some other commpanies who truly do have to cut costs. They don't have a profitable business model and because of rising interest rates, the cheap VC money well is drying up. But all the FAANG companies are doing just fine but have seen (or arguably created) an opportunity to attack labor costs.

Time will tell. But it’s possible that this is being treated as a complete transformation/releveling of the business and how work is done. Was the rampant hiring even rational to begin with? Did the projects have any path to value? Profit? Google has had a hard time profiting off most of their portfolio of products over the years, so probably not. That’s not a reflection of the individuals working on those products. It’s also well known that inefficiencies are rampant in these companies. Maybe the intend to reevaluate how decisions are made and work is done so that the 20% productivity gain is from people actually being more productive with the hours they already are working.

You are right that “need” isn’t always a financial need. It’s doesn’t make it less of a need though. If the board told Sundar to trim $x million, and X is significantly large, he can’t do it without trimming headcount.

If you were working on some small product, your job was never guaranteed and likely highly reliant on the success of that product. If they decided to shut down the product, you’re likely laid off. Likewise, if their core/go forward products has reached a “maintenance mode” it makes sense to reduce headcount - Profitability isn’t even part of the equation, sure it’s a secondary effect.

Furthermore, the trend to remote/WFH was always going to accelerate the shift of labor to lower cost. It often makes no sense to pay someone 2-20x more to do the same job as another person in another region. The main reason was because the norm was meetings/collaboration that occurred in person.

Just pointing out how much armchair quarterbacking is being done. We know nothing about these things and their future strategies. But there are a lot of scenarios where these cuts make good and obvious business sense and the management team gets judged on that just like anything else.

I hear a lot of what sounds like rent seeking behavior on this topic. Like because they can afford it they should perpetually employ all these people forever. It’s hard for me to support. I’m aware capitalism isn’t perfect but nobody was complaining when they were making the Google compensation, which were/are inflated like a roughneck’s usually are (to use the oil industry analogy again).

Well said.

Also, for more sales/ops-heavy companies, their sales teams are likely getting killed on reups, revenue/unit projections are cut, meaning that both their sales/ops teams are overbuilt purely because the customer base themselves is cutting costs.

This is how disinflation works really, and is what the Fed is trying to make us all do. The rate cuts increase a company's cost of capital (effectively the interest rate, fundraising environment, etc.) which then increases their "hurdle rate" - ie the ROI a project needs to have in order to be justified, and (in an explicit / implicit sense) the marginally low ROI projects, people, etc. are then not justified.

This is such a bizzare take. If a company was looking to cut costs, why would it start anywhere else but the largest and most expensive part of the business?

So at the end of 2022, Google apparently had 190,000 FTEs. The 2022 FY income statement lists revenue of $238B and cost of revenue of $126B. Those costs aren't really broken down so we have to guess.

According to [1] the median employee compensation in 2021 was $296k. Now that's not a mean and it also isn't speific about what's included (eg perks, health insurance, retirement savings, food, etc). Once you factor in office space an average of $350k/employee as a baseline cost probably isn't too far off the mark.

At 190,000 employees times $350,000 that's a cost of $66.5B/year, which is more than half of the cost of revenue.

Labor is the biggest expense.

It also echoes "investor" concerns about how the cost of revenue is rising faster than revenue is increasing (ie lower profit margins).

Or what are you arguing is a bigger cost?

[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

I don't understand. You agree that labour is the biggest expense. So why do you think it's bizzare that companies trying cut costs are laying off people?

Singapore here: lots of layoff. My current company is effected. Layoff over 90%.

Most of my friends are okay in their current jobs. When I apply for new jobs, mostly crypto companies are replying.

Most companies stop hiring.

- US companies are less likely to offer 15K/month, whereas before it wasn't uncommon

- Local Latam companies are having an easier time retaining talent

- Devs in Latam have lowered their salary expectations and often are putting regular salary increases on pause

- There's less job hopping between firms now

How common are/were 15K/month salaries in Latam? That's a good money (180K/year) even by US standards, not mentioning other parts of the world.

In the last 4 years of operations in Latam we saw it a handful of times, all during the last 1.5 years of the Covid hiring mania. Mostly by big companies.

What’s telling is that we haven’t seen those offers since.

In fact we’ve seen rates negotiated down unfortunately.

Not even sure the US layoffs are really impacting US developers. The US unemployment rate keeps going down month to month despite big tech layoffs. The devs getting laid off are being snagged by other companies almost right away.

All that talent centralization at large tech companies had to come from somewhere - it’s not like 100k devs magically just appeared from college. They finally got what they wanted after 15 years of talent wars and now they were happy to toss it aside.

My guess is small and mid-cap companies have a lot of open positions still from the great resignation.

it should only affect USA. most companies depend on investor money (some to live, like tsla, uber. some because of bonuses tied to stock prices)

those companies know that investor money is directly related to FED rate. if its zero, they get invested, if its high, people will put money to work elsewhere.

they only lever they have to control fed rate is unemployment. they know they are hurting their business by laying off people they fought to acquire, but their incentives for investor money is higher than anything else.

so their plan is to increase unemployment in the USA so fed lower rates so investment money keeps flowing.

So your saying that at a bunch of publicly traded tech companies the csuite gathered in secret meetings and the conversation was?

CEO while shining his monocle: "what can we do to lower the fed interest rate?"

CFO: "We can fire a bunch of our employees"

CEO: "But Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 517,000 in January even with all the tech layoffs. We wont even make a blip "

CFO while twirling his mustache: "yes but us firing 10,000 will make us feel better at the country club and its sending a message that I'm positive the board of the Fed will listen to because we are very important"

CEO: "You're right, lets do it!"

Head of HR: "I'm asking this question while sitting on stolen land. How does firing 7% of the poors sound?"

Come on man.

Are you seriously implying that the few 10’s of thousands of people laid off in big tech is some kind of conspiracy? Do you know how little impact that has on the nation’s overall unemployment numbers?

Rising interest rates is not just an American phenomenon. The European Central Bank is raising rates as well, as are many central banks around the world.

I think another component is that lowing costs will have an immediate impact on quarterly financial reports while firing devs will mostly have a delayed impact on revenue.

When many companies are juking the stats by lowering costs with layoffs then it puts pressure on all other companies to do the same because they are all competing for finite investment dollars.

1. Most large US companies have developers outside US too.

2. Inflation is high the world over and central banks have hiked rates everywhere.

3. An individual company has a negligible impact on unemployment figures. If you're thesis was actually true, it makes no rational sense for a company to layoff workers.

Currently the US is at a 53-year low in unemployment.

There is definitely a re-balancing of the employment market. I assume its because of capital drying up. Tech workers labor is more to build things that pay off in the long run (in theory) I think the lower minimum wage jobs tend to be more operating costs.With interest rates rising there is less capital to build stuff that will take years to pay off. More focus on just keep things going as is by throwing bodies at the problem. Im not sure. Honestly I would have thought that tech would have come in more demand as salaries rose to make the people you are paying for more efficient.

Great comment, spot on. Incentives drive behavior. This explains it correctly and cogently.

What impact does an individual company have on unemployment figures? If the only point of layoffs was increasing unemployment, what incentive does an individual company have for laying off employees?

It wasn’t just one individual company in this case, but a seemingly coordinated cabal like industry-wide action. Strength in numbers. A “corporate union” action if you will. All highly profitable companies sitting on mountains of cash. The layoffs were an exercise in capital asserting dominance over labor and financial engineering.

Again, all the tech layoffs ammount to a drop in the bucket in terms of overall jobs.

Rapacious capitalists acting in the interest of their class to their own detriment is certainly a take.

Words of wisdom!

Don't want to jinx it, but I haven't heard of any Sydney-based startups doing layoffs. I have heard about Sydneysiders from Microsoft, Google and such who were hit by layoffs though.

I recently changed jobs in Melbourne (senior frontend developer). I was told by multiple different people that the average market salary has dropped by about 5-10k since this time last year, but I didn't struggle to get interviews and I was able to accept an offer for what was apparently last year's market salary. Some of the larger companies weren't hiring but in general the market seemed pretty steady.

What is considered a good SFE salary in Sydney now? Thanks!

During the pandemic I was regularly seeing $170k AUD ($116k usd) + super (10% pension contributions) + equity if available, fully remote or 1-2 days a week in the office for senior/staff/principal roles.

I’m now not actively looking but when I’ve had a quick browse on LinkedIn I’m seeing similar jobs now advertised at $140-150k. All now marked as “Hybrid” or must be in the office, remote has backtracked massively. Looking at the Hybrid definition a lot say 3-4 days in the office.

For senior / staff / principal roles I won’t look at them if less than $170k which is still a huge pay cut on my current role, admittedly I got lucky with.

Sydney-based seed round startup, ~40 people. From last month some folks started getting cut (mostly permanent senior engs) to be replaced with temporary 6-12 month junior/mid-level devs. Rumor is it's done to reduce the headcount "on paper". Might be just a "regular" optimization, we do payroll automation and with these AI tools popping up every day we might get out-competed soon.

> Don't want to jinx it

I think it's coming. Australia is always lagging behind. All indicators (RBA rates, etc) point that it will hit. Might be closer to winter.

Also Sydney, also not heard anything. It felt stable enough to take some extended leave to see family overseas and as far as I know business has carried on as usual.

Poland. Amount of recruiters on LinkedIn decreases but they still exists. Heard of 0 layoffs whatsoever though.

Here in India most of the VC funded startups and large international tech companies are laying off people left and right. Most VCs are funded from international clients, who are fleeing with their money for good reasons; the grow-at-all-costs model hasn't worked out yet, and time is up because interest rates.

Hiring also seems to have been paused. I used to get recruiter inmail at least three times a week, but have only received 2 in the past three months.

This has not impacted other sectors outside IT/tech/startups. If you are currently a developer in a decently sized company in a different sector, you're likely fine. Non-software firms will obviously use the opportunity to lowball you on further salary growth, but it's unlikely that you'll get laid off soon.

I just hope people didn't go end spend all of their massive salaries they earned in the last few years since it's going to get even more difficult in the near future.

Interestingly no comments from anyone in India considering that is the largest tech market outside the US and where majority of jobs are moving to and India seems to be one of the few countries growing and projected to do well in this economic slump environment. I guess all their developers are busy working so no time for HN.

India.

Was laid off in August while working for a US-based company. My first layoff in a 10-year career. Still looking for a job. I'm broke. As in "can't pay my bills next month" broke. People are hiring but remote jobs are hard to find. (I have family responsibilities and cannot relocate)

I did find jobs. People who took 7 rounds of interviews then never released an offer letter. AFTER verbally confirming that I'd gotten the job. This has happened thrice now. I started with asking for $5000/mo (last drawn). But now, I'm willing to work for anything that pays the bills.

I'm in dire need and at my wit's end.

One of my Indian coworkers mentioned once in passing that he could cover his living costs for the year using 2 months' salary (we work for a US company, yearly salary is below 6 figures).

He implied that he could stop working and live comfortably for 20+ years using what he had saved in the past 5 years. Is your situation special, or are your monthly expenses that much higher?

Probably the latter. Must have bought a fancy house, kids go to the best schools in the city etc. I’m not saying this in a disparaging way, but the fact is that cost of living in India is still pretty low if you settle for 2nd or 3rd best.

OP here. Not true.

[Saying anything further will probably lead to a tangential debate. Will digress from root Ask HN]

I'm interested in your answer, not because I'm looking for a debate, I'm just curious about the situation in general.

But I also understand if you don't want to go into it. In any case, I wish you the best.

[edit: removed: probably will invite debate on a tangential issue]

India:

Layoffs are happening more in the startups here. A lot of startups in the past few years hired like crazy and salaries also went through the roof. Established companies had tough time retaining people. Service companies are scaling down hiring, reducing the salaries for freshers and delaying onboarding.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...

The thread was posted 3 hours ago when it was 5:45 AM in India.

Eastern Europe here, local full time offers are down, US remote freelance offers are up. Not sure what to make of it yet.

France. The cryptocurrencies startup are failing. The startup ecosystem was less crazy than Us/Uk/Germany, and seems still going as it was (minus crypto, plus AI). Embedded is still going strong. Lots of opportunities for devops here in banking/insurance.

Spain. Data Eng. manager. I switched jobs a week ago. Although there are some startups with a freeze (because of failed investment rounds), the hiring market looks healthy: same salary ranges, recruiter spam with same frequency.

Sweden.

A lot of layoffs here as well. I wasn't affected but know devs that were. My understanding is that the most senior the dev, the easier it is to bounce back. Know people that got another job within 2 weeks with higher pay.

Germany

Local small social network startup’s main investor decided it’s not worth it, probably due to money being not that cheap now.

Fired 30ish people, left a skeleton crew of 2 people. Abandoned the 100k MAU Android app, iOS only now.

Germany too here.

I interviewed at a company in Dortmund with international customers that paid really well and passed the technical interview, salary was very good for europe, but I am on hold for maybe weeks or months because the customer has not approved new requirements and even current devs are in danger of being let go.

In Munich it seems I am crazy to have a salary expectation of over €100k/year. Only have been offered positions to lead teams for €80-€90k. Individual contributor positions seem very hard to get at least at those salaries, plenty of IC positions for €45k-€60k.

Google here ghosted all my applications since last year.

It is also my experience that somewhere between 80k€ and 100k€ there is a magical barrier for 99% of all companies in Germany. Even if you are a senior. The only real chance to go above is a leading role. Of course there are some (but very few) exceptions.

Vietnam.

The hiring market for programmers isn't as hot as it was say, a year ago. However, none of my colleagues have lot their job and the overall sentiment from people I know is that it's business as usual.

UK. I was looking for a job last month. It was harder than it typically would be. A lot of recruiters were talking to me, but then not getting back to me. I doubt it was an experience thing either.

I think it really depends on what you're looking for. There's stuff around still, but it seems salaries are generally lower and interesting jobs are harder to come by. Then when you do find something there seems to be more competition and it's harder to secure an interview.

Brazil

The big international companies here are not layoffing many Brazilian teams AFAIK. There are many reasons for that and we can discuss that further if someone wants.

The national unicorn startups are layoffing a lot. As they need to cut costs, they don't have much choice.

About the small/medium size companies, it's hard to talk about because some of them were smarter and stop hiring before this create a problem for them in the future. Others just follow the flux and now are firing people too.

-- South Korea - naver - kakao - huyndai - samsung - all hiring like crazy for developers - if you're a developer in south korea finding a job is very - very easy --

Netherlands

I haven't heard about layoffs. I'm currently looking for a position of a .Net senior dev/tech lead and the market here has cooled down. There are almost no positions for 85+k. Number of positions is considerably lower than it was a year ago. Year ago I was also applying but the war changed my plans.

Not an individual, but an agency working with international clients from India on team augmentation/ build your team basis.

In last June - we had 6 clients for whom 30 engineers were working. All our clients downsized on external consultants & we had to let go some of the people.

I am hiring out of Mexico and India. But mostly Mexico. Lots of software jobs are moving there.

Mexico here. I work for an American company and they just recently laid off about 16% of their staff, including 49 engineers and product managers. It was pretty harsh. They fired contractors from Latin America and full time employees from the states.

Indonesia got hit pretty hard. Someone event made a tracker for it [1]. Currently at least 42 companies have been affected.

[1] https://ecommurz.com/layoff/

Denmark.

Business as usual. Only layoffs seem to be the bubbles that we expected to burst anyway.

I work for a Danish startup. Can't comment on the market, but we're looking for another round of funding and oh dear was this a whole lot more fun two years ago when we got our for pre-seed.

UK has been unaffected it seems. Lots of companies hiring right now.

UK has a lot lower % of VC funded startups. Would be interesting to see the stats on that. Most UK IT is directly servicing customers through consultancies or inhouse. UK recession/inflation is bad at the moment, but almost everywhere seems to have a hiring issue as well, which started around Brexit/Covid and has only got worse recently.

I second this - there's been a bit of budget cutting at my current company but really nothing has changed. Not sure why we're so unaffected here (touch wood). Perhaps there is less work on "bubbles"

Still going through a talent drought. Has barely made any impact.

I just got promoted. Without a salary bump. ):

Is that really a promotion?

I am from India BTW

The amount of spam I get from recruiters in the US hasn't decreased either, and yet I'm at ground-zero of the layoffs.

Just because a job gets posted doesn't mean it is actually available to be filled. The barrier to posting jobs to LinkedIn or other hiring platforms is extremely low.

Don't let yourself be fooled into a false sense of confidence, you'd really need to test out the process to see if it can produce a real job offer! Doubly so in the current climate..

My point was the same as yours. Recruiter spam isn't really a good metric.

Recruiters are always selling and networking, regardless of the number of openings to fill. If there are few jobs every reference call is vital sales call to fill the account managers funnel. This is why, especially in slow times like this, you don't give references until after the technical interview.