Where are all the laid-off software developers going? | LeadDev’s Scott Carey

0:00Hi, I'm Scott Carey, Editor-in-Chief at LeadDev, where we help software engineers become more effective technical leaders. The tech industry is going through some major changes right now, and the skills that engineering leaders need to navigate this shift will be fundamentally different to those that you've mastered over the last decade. LeadDev is here to help you identify emerging best practices and keep up with the pace of work in a world where you're going to have smaller teams and fewer resources to throw at problems. Our carefully curated conferences in Europe and the United States support engineering leaders at all levels of seniority, helping them adapt to the new normal, sharpen their leadership and management skills, and be more impactful in their roles.

0:36Join us in Berlin on the 4th, 5th and 6th of December to supercharge your career and improve the velocity of your teams. As we take over the Estrell Congress Centre for three days of world-class talks, practical learning and lots of opportunities to meet other engineering leaders and troubleshoot your biggest challenges. On the 4th and 5th, we'll be hosting Lead Dev Berlin, which helps engineering managers learn from the best in the business. And then on December 6th, Leading Engine Berlin will bring together senior engineering managers for a day of practical, hands-on learning and networking.

1:05Visit leaddev.com for more information and tickets are available now. Last year was a sellout, so get them before they're too late and I'll see you there in December. Hey everyone, welcome in. We are back on Dev Interrupted. I'm your co-host, Connor Bronson. And today we're joined by Scott Carey, Editor-in-Chief at Lead Dev. Scott, great to have you with us. Nice to be here, Connor. Thanks for having me. You're joining us from the UK, right? That's right. Yeah, I am in a very gray London at the moment, but we have just come off a very vicious heat wave. So I'm very much enjoying the respite over here.

1:39I think I'm in the same boat. And as Lead Dev's Editor-in-Chief, I know you have an opportunity to travel around the world to meet with thousands of engineers, learn about their content, and hopefully escape those heat waves sometimes. I actually first met you when Dev & Rep had brought our podcast to Lead Dev New York to record episodes with some of the amazing speakers you had on site. And we're really excited to be joining you again, this time at Lead Dev West Coast in San Francisco, October 16th and 17th. Little pitch, there's a list of mile long of great speakers that we can't wait to meet.

2:12If you haven't already registered, especially if you're in the Bay Area, you should definitely do it. This event is not one you want to miss. We'll definitely include a link in the show notes for it. It's going to be a lot of fun. You can meet up with me and the rest of the Devon Arford crew. And yeah, go check it out after this episode or pause right now and go and register. Scott, given that you have so much access to engineers around the world and engineering leaders, the work you do to plan and program these conferences on different continents, you have your finger on the pulse of the engineering community.

2:43And in particular, I want to talk about an article you wrote in July titled, Where are all the laid off software engineers going? It really caught my attention and I think it's an important conversation because it's a confusing time right now in recruitment, particularly in tech, as there's these disparate views around what's actually happening and how strong is the market. But before we dive into that, I know we're saying this term lead dev and a lot of our audience I know know who you are. But I want to make sure that anyone who isn't familiar knows a bit about lead dev and its mission. Can you tell us a bit about it?

3:15Yeah, sure. So we're a content and conference company based here in the UK. A lot of people don't know that because, as you said, we operate conferences all around the world, two in the US, one in Berlin and then one here in London at the moment. Yeah, we have quite a simple mission. Our mission is to help software engineering managers get better at leading their teams and delivering software. So really, when this company was started a few years back, it was really at that time when engineering management as an actual kind of discipline really started to emerge and people started to apply kind of broader leadership skills and frameworks to software engineering.

3:55And we really saw an opportunity to help engineers kind of come together and learn those skills and put them into practice. So that's what we've been doing. We do it through our conferences, but also we have a big library of online content. So written content from practitioners and also from journalists covering kind of the really hot topics. And then we also have a regular series of webinars covering kind of the biggest challenges that folks are facing all the way from senior engineering managers down to staff plus. And that's definitely a mission that resonates with us, obviously. We're a show that's all about how to improve as an engineering leader, how to learn from others.

4:32And I've seen LeadDev's role in shaping the narrative of what's happening in the software industry. And in particular, as you point out, in shaping the growth of engineering leadership, which is something that, even though we don't think about it this way, is still fairly nascent as an industry. It is. And we absolutely hope that we can help in that regard. That's very much our mission. But like we, it's been a really interesting couple of years because, you know, we're coming out of this market where things were really great for a really great time. You know, it was growth, growth, growth, and people had all these resources to kind of throw at the problem.

5:09And so it was all about best practice and learning from the biggest and the best companies. And all these kind of engineering management influences started emerging and writing great books on the topic. your Will Larson's, your Camille Fournier's, it started to become really clear how to do this at the best level that you can. And what we're starting to see now is a slight shift and maybe a whole new way of thinking about that. So as you know, this industry, it never lets you rest. It never lets you sit on your laurels. So that does bring something up to me, which I think is an interesting segue into this conversation around job transitions and growth.

5:48you have a background as a journalist how did you find your way into this mission yeah and like you know my role here is still like brings to bear a lot of those journalism skills but i now just have a lot more variety to my role because we're programming events we are running webinars we're doing sponsored content we're still publishing loads of written content which is you know my background that's my that's what my area of expertise but yeah really like I got into journalism not really knowing what I wanted to do I just knew that I kind of wanted to write for a living and I'm pretty nosy I like talking to people I particularly like hearing about people's jobs and at the time like this was about 10 years ago like tech was just the hot thing it just to me as a journalist getting into the world of business journalism like looking for an industry to cover like it just seemed obvious to me that I wanted to cover technology.

6:44And it wasn't that easy to get my foot in the door. But luckily, I had a friend at the time who was working for Business Insider. And I just got talking to him. And I said, is this as cool as it looks from from the outside? And he was like, yeah, he was like, it's just nonstop. You know, I was covering the travel industry before, which sounds super fun and interesting, but it's actually like, slow, like it's just a slow industry, you know, you get a new aircraft every now and then you get a new hotel chain every now and then, whereas tech, it's just something new every single day. So I was really keen to get into it.

7:15And I haven't looked back since I've just been covering this space now for a number of years. And I still love it. I still am just intrigued by the challenges people face and the stuff people build. Absolutely agree with you that growth around just new ideas, new things, new concepts is so huge. Like as someone who also shares, I'll say a non-traditional tech background. I had a career in political organizing before transitioning into tech. And I think that kind of passion as you come into it and you realize how much new is happening, how much excitement, how much potential there is, even as we continue to develop certain lines of technology, there's always the next thing, there's always the next opportunity.

7:57It really drives home the importance of some of the things we're doing. Even if all that you're doing is making one process more efficient, the reverberations of that worldwide are massive. And because of that, I think a lot of folks were kind of rocked when these massive layoffs took place at Google, Microsoft, Meta, all over the place, Twitter, obviously, not to mention scale-up startups. We've seen massive amounts of software engineers get laid off because of operating expenditure concerns or other burn rate challenges people are having or a variety of other reasons, whether real or imagined.

8:36And after this massive run-up of success the industry has experienced the last 15 years, it was a bit of a shock to the system. And you wrote a really stellar article about it talking about where all the laid-off software developers are going. Can you outline for us a bit about what the conclusions were you've drawn from your research? Yeah, and it was just nice for me to do some writing. I hadn't done any writing in a year since I started this job. and the reason I did it is because people just kept asking me they were saying you know where are all these laid off engineers going you know we just hear about this relentless stream of layoffs and it wasn't obvious um to anyone where they were landing because they're all we heard was that people were getting laid off from the big tech companies there wasn't any funding going into startups so there weren't the opportunities there they've always been there for people in technology and so everyone was like okay obviously they're all going to the enterprise But then I started talking to people and no one was going to the enterprise.

9:32So I just had to, you know, dust off those journalism skills and go out and try and figure it out again. So I spoke to a bunch of we were really lucky to have really good partners in like talent and hiring over here. So I reached out to them to try and dig in some data and see what they're seeing in data. But then also just had some some anecdotal conversations with people who had recently been laid off to find out what their plans were. and just ended up with a really kind of nuanced picture of actually where people are landing. Because when it comes to careers, there is just no singular answer to that question, where are all the laid off engineers going?

10:06I remember a conversation with a mentor from years ago where he described his career not as a path, but as an ice flow, where you are on this piece of ice and you have to make these decisions about what the next ice chunk you jump to is. but there is this impact of the currents around you, which might be economic climate or how's that company doing or who's the manager going to be. And these currents are things that you can try to project for, but you're not going to be able to fully control. And that's always stuck with me as we think about our career journeys because I think a lot of folks think, they see someone successful and they think it's a straight line because it's a lot easier for us to, and a lot more exciting for us to hear about these massive things people have done.

10:52And we ignore the pitfalls and the side projects and the odd pathways people took to get there. Even now, after trying to recognize that more. And you had a lot of great personal anecdotes from engineers in that article about how individuals experienced these really challenging layoff circumstances and the factors that heavily influenced their next career move. What kind of factors were you seeing affect these decisions the most? Yeah, I think the thing that surprised me the most was just how much kind of personal circumstances played into this decision. Like that seems silly to say, but like, back in the day, it was really just I'm going to keep moving up the ladder.

11:30And you don't really have to think too much about this stuff. But when those decisions become a bit more fraught, because, you know, that you might have to go down a salary level, or you might have to change industry, or you might have to take on a new challenge that actually requires a lot more hours from you than you were used to doing. And you've got two young kids at home, you know, these, all these circumstances really play into that decision. And that was coming up time and time again with the folks that I was talking to, because the people who were further along in their career weren't really willing to take that step back to move forward again.

12:01So, you know, I spoke to one person who had worked in kind of what we would call big tech, or maybe more on the scale up side, but you know, they had a really good salary and a really good role. And they just kind of knew where they stood in the organization. whereas if they wanted to then go and go to a scale up and kind of work really long hours to try and get that company to where it is and build a team and change the culture like at their point in life like they just weren't up for that challenge and that's fair like they were planning for retirement they just needed to work five or six more years at the like salary they were working at just to kind of you know fulfill their plans and so like that was like that was a story i heard a lot.

12:43And then there were other people that were the other side of the spectrum where they're like, right, this is an opportunity. I've just left Google. I've left Facebook. I knew exactly what I did there. I was a cog in the machine. And now actually I've learned all these skills and I want to go and bring them to bear on somewhere where I can make a real impact. I think the only thing that really hit home when I was having those conversations with people is that those opportunities now are much fewer and far between because there aren't this wealth of startups coming through because of the funding landscape, because of what's going on in the world, where those opportunities are not just swimming around.

13:20So it is difficult for people to find that next step. And so I found a lot of people are sitting tight and just waiting for the right opportunity, which is an absolute privilege for engineers, because a lot of them have earned very well for a number of years. And you can't do that forever. But it is a privilege to be able to sit there and look for the next opportunity. It definitely speaks to the importance of pertaining some savings, having an emergency fund, because even when we think these boom times are going to continue, there are these risks and we don't control these broader economic conditions that affect us.

13:53It is also interesting to see what's happening in the funding landscape at, say, the seed, pre-seed, Series A level versus Series B, C, D onwards. Because I'm happy to say we're seeing less of a slowdown, if not very minimal, at seed level, where it's like very new startups are still getting funded. But the problem, to your point, is that they only do a small portion of the hiring compared to the folks who are scaly and getting those large Series C raises. And that's where we're seeing a major slowdown is those scale ups, those folks who are maybe meant to be the next unicorn or were considered a unicorn and now probably would have to raise a down round.

14:31Yeah. And honestly, like if you're not kind of playing in a really sexy area right now, like that funding isn't really there. So like unless you are super interested in Gen AI or one of these other areas that's kind of hot right now, there's not those opportunities out there. So it's interesting, I spoke to a few engineers who were transitioning about three, four years ago, and they landed at the exact right time. And they know how lucky they are, because they landed in something they were really interested in, a time when they'd just got some fresh funding that was going to give them enough runway to get through this.

15:01But there's plenty of other horror stories on the other side of that that didn't go that way. And I know there are trends that show a significant portion of laid-off engineers are actually looking at industries outside of traditional tech. So finance, healthcare, manufacturing. What do you see that meaning for these industries in terms of digital transformation and talent acquisition? Yeah, I mean, that stuff has never gone away. And I used to work at InfoWorld and we covered enterprise. And this has been the big story even before the layoffs is that how do I access that talent? How do you compete with Google?

15:37That would always be the bogeyman. How do you compete with Google where you don't have the same money? Well, now you do. like maybe now you do because you know they're freezing hiring and there's all this talent out in the market the only thing is like that's a really neat and simple narrative but actually when i was talking to people like it's not quite happening in the way that people and the way that those organizations maybe thought they maybe thought they could just get out there and just hoover up all this talent but actually the the more conversations i had with people who were trying to do that they weren't overly enamored with the people that were available or they weren't quite sure whether it was the right thing to be doing right now to be kind of povering up loads of talent and making the mistake that those companies had just made but a couple of years further down the line despite the temptation so i think it's they're in a really interesting spot you know they've been kind of waiting for this opportunity and in different organizations so you know i always think of like finance and insurance and companies that have really big interesting challenges and plenty of money to pay engineers but also like it's a lot tougher to work in those regulated industries.

16:40You have to kind of pick up a lot of those kind of difficulties with developer experience, with things being a little bit slower, a little bit more red tape. It's like, as an engineer, are you willing to do that? And I saw a lot of engineers blanching at that side of the job, where it's like, I really don't want to be hamstrung. I really don't want to constantly be banging my head against these kind of old systems when I'm used to working with the latest and greatest tech. So I think the challenge for those organizations remains kind of the same, even though the circumstances have changed a lot.

17:12But the talent is out there, but the kind of sell for them is maybe slightly less about the money and less about the big challenge and more about giving them the experience that they kind of want. That's super interesting to consider because, I mean, we talk a lot about developer experience on this show and recently it's becoming more and more of a topic of conversation for engineering leaders. But I think we don't always see such stark examples of its impact on hiring and retention. We talk about it. We'll say, oh, it helps me retain engineers. And I think we're seeing it here on hiring, to your point of, oh, companies that have good devx are more likely to land top engineers.

17:52So it's a great reminder of that importance. And it's interesting also because those companies are often major tech companies, the Microsofts, the Apples, the Amazons, the Netflixes. And not only do they have the advantage of having incredible platform teams that they've invested billions in that they can leverage in hiring retention and speed up the processes. They also have an outsized impact, as you mentioned with Google, on job market dynamics. How are you seeing those major tech companies impact the dynamics of this job market currently for engineers? Yeah, I mean, it's caused a massive shockwave.

18:30As I was saying, it's put this flood of talent on the market. And I think a lot of people are struggling to work out what to do with it. They're trying to work out how to kind of sift through that talent and working out if, you know, if they're the right people for them and if they have the skills that they want to be a little bit more entrepreneurial or kind of be a little bit more outside of the box. And a lot of the folks I was talking to, they just weren't seeing what they wanted from that talent pool. So that initial excitement kind of got tempered quite quickly in terms of what was available.

19:03I do just to go back to the last point i do think that these enterprise organizations need to rethink the way that they try and attract engineers a little bit like i think that a lot of it has always been based on the finances and i think that now because like i'm seeing suppression of salaries i think that they can pay them but actually what they really should be focusing on is what's the cool challenge i have and how are you going to be able to solve it like i think that a big insurance company like it seems really unsexy from the outside but if they start to talk more about the fact that they have this wealth of data and they've got all these exciting ideas.

19:38But you can get engineers excited about that stuff. But I don't think they do a great job of telling those stories and really talking about what they're doing inside their engineering organization because they're so conservative about sharing stories all the time. So I think that that's really what's hamstringing them more than the finances. A lot of companies are still trying to stick with this tried and true recruitment strategy. And the market has shifted. that dynamics have shifted and the needs of developers and the desires of developers have certainly shifted so are there other areas where you think companies should be adjusting their recruitment strategy as they approach this yeah i think that like focusing on the challenges the differences and the and the devx as well i think are things that i just don't see these organizations do but outside of that it's you know this is the time for them to to try and do that like they've been waiting for this opportunity to have more talent available to them and to miss it would be would be a real shame because the market will bounce back right tech isn't going anywhere but yeah i feel like they're kind of missing that opportunity at the moment you mentioned earlier that the majority of laid off candidates or at least a large plurality are not looking to downgrade their positions what do you think that says about the value proposition and resilience of software engineering roles even in challenging economic climates they know their value software engineers know their value and that hasn't changed like i was really like glad to see that that even in this market like people weren't really willing to make that step back like some of them are going to have to because like there's lots of circumstances where maybe your visa requires you to get a new job or you might have a financial situation where you really need to do it and i think those people will be fine like they they will get back to where they want to be it's a shame like you never want to make that step back in your career.

21:27But in the broad, in like the broadest sense, like most engineers know that their skills are still very in demand. As you said, like the demands of digital transformation have not gone anywhere. The demands to deliver new technology has not gone anywhere. We know that engineers who are left behind are absolutely feeling the crunch because they're getting asked to do the same amount of work with smaller teams with less colleagues. And like they, so they can see it. They're not, they're not stupid. Like they know that these skills are still going to be in demand. So a lot of them are willing to sit tight and just wait for the market to bounce back so they can get back in there.

21:58Sounds like you don't think AI is replacing developers anytime soon. I don't see it. I don't see it. I really do think that whenever these things come up, they have this miraculous ability to somehow actually increase the amount of work that people end up doing because there's now an increased expectation. I was reading a thing in HBR the other day about the rise of citizen development now that AI is there. And I was always so bearish on no code low code i just never saw anyone give me a good example of like a citizen developer in an organization that actually launched something that people use and i'm sure they exist but i just i just never really saw it whereas with ai now like i think that there is a much more opportunity for someone in your finance department to build a very quick app that solves a really annoying pain point for them but as the piece said by someone's got to manage that like bigger now estate of applications like i just feel like it's somehow like every one of these technologies that says it's going to save us time and make give us a four-day working week it's somehow going to give us more work uh well i'm still holding out hope for the four-day work week i have to say uh that sounds pretty nice sometimes i know there are other entrepreneurs and you know software engineers who are taking the opposite direction saying hey we want to double down, want to work more.

23:14Maybe I was a staff software engineer at Meta. I'm going to go found something now. To your point earlier, I have these skills I've built up. I have these connections. What are you seeing on that side of things where software engineers are maybe going to be co-founders or early employees at some of these smaller startups? Yeah, I was amazed actually by the numbers here. The amount of software engineers that were kind of looking at this market and losing their jobs or leaving their jobs and deciding to go and start their own business is just a level of kind of ambition and bravery that I do not have.

23:49Like, I absolutely take my hats off to them. Yeah, I was working off this piece of analysis by BizReport and it said that 13 of every 100 people who recently lost their jobs had started their own companies. And like most of those, so most of those founders, so nine out of every 100 startups being established was by a former software engineer and what it like what it told me was just like this has always been the case like a big successful startups have always bred more entrepreneurs like you get like the classic example that i'm loathe to use but i can't think of a better one now is the paypal mafia but here in the uk we have the go cardless mafia so go carless was a fintech uh company here but like five of the found founders or people who came on pretty early all went on to found companies like Monzo, which is a really big challenger bank here and other companies that you may not have heard of, but like who have been very, very successful.

24:44So I think it's always happened. I was just really surprised to see software engineers doing it now in this like situation where there isn't a lot of funding out there. But it just shows you that like there's still that kind of bullishness on new tech ideas and building a business around it. So I'm really happy to see that that's not completely gone away. I just really hope that they can find a way to get these ideas funded because that looks like a real challenge right now. It's definitely exciting. I'm hopeful that in the next year or two, we'll see that funding market open up a bit more for them outside of the AI space, which doesn't seem to be having any problems.

25:19But just do what was it, Sundar, during the Google conference, just saying everything's AI. That's how you get your funding now. Yeah, just add doanot.ai domain. You're good to go. I am curious, were there any other surprises or takeaways that you had from the research you did? Yeah, not a lot of other surprises. I just think that, as you said, knowing of their value from software engineers, that was quite surprising just how much they could see that and weren't being kind of cowed by what was going on in the market. I think a lot of people outside of tech look at it and see a bloodbath. But actually, a lot of the folks I was talking to were like, we're not too worried.

26:00like we know it's going to bounce back it looks like it's a temporary blip and you know a lot of these folks haven't lived through this before like and we really like tech tech rode out 2008 pretty pretty well like the last one would have that would have really felt this way would have been the dot-com bubble and there's a lot of folks in engineering that weren't around for the dot-com bubble so yeah me included myself if you're not watching on youtube we both raised our hands just now um yeah not to brag but uh not around for that so yeah i think that it's it's a bit new for some people but i think anyone who who has been around for that stuff is is going to be kind of sitting there and saying don't worry son like this is it this is all going to be okay i think that's a inspiring note to kind of end that conversation on and zoom out a bit because as we alluded to at the start of this episode you've got great insight into what's happening in software engineering leadership and software engineering broadly.

26:58Obviously, one of the major trends that we've been dealing with is what we just talked about. These major layoffs, the impact they're having on the industry, how folks are adapting, huge concern. But there are also other major trends that we've seen this year. Can you talk a bit about what you're seeing and what you expect for the next year or two? Yeah, I think the layoffs element of this is a symptom of the broader thing that we're seeing, which is just this kind of feeling of unease amongst the software engineering community that like this is the end of boom times and like that feeling is completely warranted because as we've been talking about like the economic situation out there is different like we haven't actually hit a recession but like it it definitely feels like one money is not as cheap as it was no it is not and i think that like seeing like when i was doing the research for that piece like the thing that really crystallized for me was just like the way that the whole market is being crunched in the middle.