This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Atmospheric and Oceanic science has been heavily defunded this year. A quarter of my program at NOAA has been laid off this year.
If I lost my science job, I was planning on going into tech. Now where do I go??? It feels like the walls are closing in.
I should have gone to a trade school instead :/ STEM was a bad choice.
unironically, just leave the US. plenty of countries/international research orgs are pouching all sorts of US-intelligencia right now.
This is not entirely true and blown away out of proportion by the writers of all the articles you're seeing. For example that big one that got a bunch of attention in France was only for 15 applicants. Also outside of a few exceptions, most STEM workers lack the resources to pick up and leave where they are at.
I left and got two Sr SWE positions within 3 months. It’s like the 90’s down here
Where did you land? How much paperwork was involved in the transition?
Dual citizen with Australia, sorry. Though it is fairly light paperwork for Americans who are in tech - as in the U.S., the best chances are to get in stateside with a big company that has an Aussie HQ (Atlassian, Xero, Canva, FAANG, etc.) and then transfer
Tech is a field where there's always infinite work to do, and it's always only limited by the budget.
We had very low interest rates for over a decade, which made investments more profitable and thus there was always a ton of money to go around. The current financial downturn is the main reason of all the tech layoffs with no budget there are no jobs.
The upside of that: Even with all the talk of AI and stuff, once the interest rate goes down and investments go up, all the jobs will be back.
IDK. Tech companies are bringing in more revenue than ever. The trend seems to be companies reporting great revenue growth, then laying off shortly after, to which the investors seem to reward. In the past, layoffs would usually bring stock prices down, since they have less human capital to generate profit from.
The layoffs are usually due to a race to meet quarterly projections; when the projections slip, the fastest way to match them again is layoffs. And for companies to keep their stock prices up, quarterly numbers have to keep climbing.
Don't wait, go straight into training in another field. Send out your resumes for a tech job, but start working on a backup.
That's a good idea! And if I get rejected, at least I'll know which new skills to focus on. In the meantime, I'll try to figure out what other career besides tech would fit my education and skill set.
I have a master's of science in atmospheric and oceanic science, which unfortunately is a very niche field. I made a miscalculation that my field would grow due to the increase in severe weather and negative affects from climate change.
Thanks for your advice :)
Globally, there’s going to be continued need for your skills.
Locally, it may vary.
Look globally. And good luck with finding your path. I have done the unemployment track and it is unpleasant.
Tech companies don’t innovate anymore. Their Wall Street string-pullers demand reliable profit growth so they kill innovation through buyouts and are left with stale products they can only make worse and/or charge more for. Layoffs are a direct wealth transfer from working class labor to wealthy shareholders and the street rewards execs for it every time.
And if you’re thinking AI is innovative, it’s got executives in a fever pitch for the same reasons - so companies can fire expensive labor and big tech can become even more monopolistic, shove more ads, push more propaganda, and control the internet. It’s fortunate it doesn’t work that well so far. Bubble can’t pop soon enough.
At this point for people who lost their jobs it would be much better for all of us to make new companies together that are not on stock market also unionized, cooperative, or unionized cooperative.
Coming back to the same companies who will just fire us for more profit is not a sustainable cycle for anybody. Yes apply for jobs if you really need it but let's want better for ourselves.
We can release Open source/documentation/procedures/business documentation/management documentation etc to collectively make it easier to create different new tech companies for specific things.
We can spin up an opensourcebusiness community here on Lemmy to do it together (Have no idea how to make/manage Lemmy communities and have projects already if any people would like to pick up this initiative. I can assist however I can in spare time)
Have you talked to a lot of tech workers? I feel like there's a set of left wing ones, a larger set of libertarian types, and an even larger set of people who are shockingly ignorant of politics and history.
Might not seem like it in recent years, but there are still tech workers with standards and morals
I think a lot about the guy I worked with that said he was going to Palantir. We were like "but what if they have you doing awful things?" He was like, big shrug. He was always friendly to people in the office, but I guess that's as far as it went.
We would need capital and we would be competing with people that practically own politicians.
Free market capitalism!
it would be much better for all of us to make new companies together
Companies need clients. That's sort of the secret sauce in business. If you don't have good relationships with the management at your client firms, you can't win the contracts that give your work recognizable monetary value.
We can spin up an opensourcebusiness community here on Lemmy to do it together (Have no idea how to make/manage Lemmy communities and have projects already if any people would like to pick up this initiative. I can assist however I can in spare time)
:-/
The company I work for, which is a large publicly traded tech company, feels like a Darwinian hell right now. There’s an internship and a handful got hired out of it, but that was more the exception than the rule.
Honestly same thing here. They didn't even do internships anymore.
They don't seem to be hiring anyone that's not a senior engineer either.
They also have been regularly laying off folks every year or more than once a year but not backfilling. So workloads are up.
Couple of this with them freezing promotions and now they're risking high performers leaving because they aren't being considered and rewarded for their contribution levels and engagement.
So plenty of turnover.
It's always the fucking suits.
Everyone else are constantly laid off and have to find work again. And again. And again.
The working class is getting raped by people who went to business school.
Both literally, and figuratively.
The working class could stand up for themselves any day now.
My office just ditched it's Wednesday work from home policy. I mentioned to a co-worker that we could start a petition and vocalize our displeasure as an office wide unit.
She shot it down, because so many of her co-workers were insisting "actually this is great, we love being in the office" in front of management. And the more unreliable folks were consistently the biggest kiss-asses.
Office politics is a bitch.
They tried making us come in one day a month so me and the other developers just wouldn't work when we were in the office while we were "planning". Then it became "we need the day before to plan what we're going to talk about tomorrow" and "we take the day after an office visit to go over what we talked about". So 3 days out of the month where nothing got done and it made enough of a difference the office days lasted maybe 3 or 4 months before they fizzled out
My entire web team got laid off from a major car company. Right before we got paid our yearly bonus and right before I went on my paternity leave.
I work for a European company, and we had a major US car company as a client. 6 month ago they abruptly stopped working with us and fired a bunch of their engineers, and now they hired again and are trying to negotiate a new deal with us.
Your story might be an answer to why
Should I give up on finding a tech job? Surely my resume won't stack against all these laid of people. I mean, it's not bad, and I've scored great jobs before it was as stacked as it is today. Been unemployed for over a year and a half, haven't looked too much.
It's probably worth it to look into changing fields entirely, but honestly so many industries in the US are hurting right now, IDK which ones would even be a good option...
I just finished my associates in something called "industrial maintenance." A degree that is a little bit of electrical, HVAC, Circuits, & machining. I have not been accepted to the 20 "entry" level jobs I found (also went to a career fair). And everywhere I look for related fields or anything people say there's too many people in the business. It's like every job field has "too many people"
Shit, I'm sorry to hear that. Sounds like we're all in the same boat...
I switched careers from logistics (office) to IT a couple of years ago. Logistics was notoriously badly paid and it was hard to find a job that's not temporary for a year amd then they throw you out. Everybody kept telling us for years to go to IT, because that's where the money and the non-temporary contracts are.... But that's only true for people who've worked there for decades.
It really does feel like no field is left where you can have a stable career. Accounting, sales, hospital, no matter where you ask, it's temp contracts and shitty wages.
Any chance you're good at making guillotines? One can hope they become high demand.
Man, I'm not good at anything except making an occasionally funny snarky comment
Don't underestimate that skill. Helps people make it through the day.
Everything to make sure the shareholders are fucking delighted.
Which is weird because if you're actually trying to get shit done, you get much more value out of someone with experience in your ecosystem than someone you've just hired, and it's astonishing how low you an keep those ppls salaries compared to new hires who're much less effective. Hire+fire is shit for everyone. Except, I guess, idiots who can only think 2 months in either direction.
Hmm. Uhoh.
I'm out on FMLA. Am I even going to have a job when I get back?
Oh, oh, my turn: I was fired on my first day of FMLA for a mental break caused by the ongoing discrimination at my workplace. Woohoo!
Edited to add: your job is protected for 12 months on FMLA. Your specific position is protected for 3 months after which they either have to give you a job, but not necessarily the same position you were in previously.
This absolutely has to do with AI. If 1 tech worker now has the productivity of 2 tech workers, then they only need to hire half as many workers. Junior developer positions don't really exist anymore. If we want new jobs, we need new businesses that try to solve the problems that still exist, like the lack of recycling. I'm lucky to have a job in the refurbishment industry, but I'm starting to strongly believe I'm going to need to start my own business next year.
Yes, that is what the clueless executives think.
I've never worked with a junior developer that was worse than AI is now. It's often confidently wrong and can do so much damage, all while winning the politics battle without trying.
