🧑💻 Tech Layoffs. Is it going to be hard to find a job as a generalist?
Undoubtedly, being laid off as a Data Scientist from Big Tech is very different from being laid off from a startup
💡 Welcome to our first official post of The Generalist Engineer! We are Alberto Romero and Daniel Garcia, giving you concise information about what it’s like to be a founding engineer or an early-stage startup employee. We share tooling, practices, and opinions about the tech industry and our experiences working in it. Please subscribe to our newsletter if you want to get notified of our new posts.
We have been tracking the number of layoffs in the past months within Layoffs.fyi, sadly some of our friends have been affected. It's been years since we thought tech would keep growing like it used to, but now facing the current situation, what can a generalist engineer expect from the market? Will it be harder to find a job, even if they didn't get laid off? Does it make sense to look for a new role with the current situation?
Do the Layoffs affect more the specialists or generalists?
Undoubtedly, being laid off as a Data Scientist from Big Tech is very different from being laid off from a startup. We are talking about two very different archetypes of people:
The Data Scientist was probably in charge of a very specialized ML/AI model training, which served as an in-depth core part of the functionality, and had access to tons of in-house resources (papers, codebases, internal tooling). This profile would struggle a bit more, especially in the long run, as they would need to adapt to what the market needs are and try to understand where they are located to deliver impact to businesses, as they were Specialists in their field.
An engineer fired from a startup was most likely building tons of functionalities, fixing bugs, talking to users, and getting involved in multiple activities that made that person very adaptive to the business needs. This profile is good at doing various things but probably doesn't excel much in a particular area. That's what we call a Generalist.
With both archetypes described, we should think more about their chance of getting a new gig moving forward. As a Specialist, the most probable thing is that they will try to land another Big Tech company, say FAANG or Fortune 500 companies.
But what about an ex-founding engineer or a generalist? Fundraising has become a lot harder since the "non-official" recession hit. Would they be able to find another startup to work for? Would they need to look at other opportunities in huge companies like the ones we described above, where they would expect them to be Back End/Front End/DevOps, but it might be outside their standards because they were generalists?
There are different angles from which we can analyze this.
Big Tech job positions might require specific tech as mandatory requirements.
There is a big chance that generalists do not have a specialization in particular technologies, So when they start their job hunting, they run into a wall of mandatory requirements for 5+ years of experience using Python, React, Scala, or any new front-end javascript frameworks created while you have been reading this newsletter. In those cases, recruiters will most likely filter out resumes if they don't fill the X amount of years of experience, which doesn't make sense, right?
But this is a good thing for you as Generalist; it just means there's not gonna be a good fit for you within because of the high expectations using specific technology, but that also means it was not going to be fun anyways, as generalists enjoy getting across the whole product ideation and implementation.
One thing to note is that, as one might be rejected in these particular roles because of a lack of specialization, there's always gonna be a startup or a project where being extremely flexible is something they love. They would hire that person without a doubt.
The startup market is looking for its first engineers.
While several companies are laying off employees, many look for their first engineers to build a product. I realized that when I (unfortunately) got laid off at Pesto (shutdown on Nov 12), but I had many emails reaching out for founding engineer positions. I have just received a set of offers and lookups to my profile. Our CEO received 84 messages from different companies looking for engineers (no kidding, that happened in just a week).
Being well-connected matters most now than ever
As a fact, if we consider that people we might have worked with have been hired as referrals from another person, we can think that in these uncertain times, connections matter a lot. Let's say that you saw layoffs at your company and are looking for a Plan B in case something goes wrong. A potential referral from an ex-coworker or a friend of your friend can be crucial; even if they are not working in a company that excites you, they might know a person, and that person might know another one… you might miss good opportunities if you are not connected (we are gonna talk more about this in our next posts)
Where are the founders looking for engineers?
We want to share our list of favorite job boards.
workatastartup.com by Y Combinator
angel.co/jobs by Angelist
remoteok.com by @levelsio
peoplefirstjobs.com by PeopleFirst
The Pragmatic Engineer Job Board by Gergely Orosz (we love his content so go check it out)
And actually, we saw that Gergely Orosz published a list of 750 companies looking for engineers, which was also our reaction when we saw that the market is still looking for newcomers to join their missions. Hiring is slowing down in some places, and there might be a lot of overwhelming layoffs, but we are also seeing a continuous hiring trend from many startups and mid-sized companies.
Conclusion
Amid the bad news we’ve been hearing, there are still many opportunities for professionals in the tech industry. We believe people should not have much trouble finding their new gig regarding the number of opportunities. Still, sometimes it’s even more complicated if one wants to stay in a target market or develop specific products.
Quite an optimism here; feel free to leave us your opinions in the comments below! And, if you are looking for new job opportunities, we are always happy to make intros within our network or beyond! Don’t hesitate to reach out at hello@generalistengineer.com or via LinkedIn to Alberto or Daniel.