Ask HN: Are tech layoffs happening abroad?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959617

by fny • 3 years ago

74 88 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There’s been a lot of news about layoffs in the US. How is everyone fairing from other countries?

askonomm5• 3 years ago

It's bad in Europe as well. Spotify let lots of people go last year, Pitch recently fired 2/3 of their staff. Glovo, Veriff, Xolo are just a few others I heard about, but I'm sure it's a hell of a lot more.

I'm thinking once this correction has settled we're probably left with companies that produce actual value instead of just hype, which is good, and I'd rather work for companies with real profits anyway, but it's rough to ride this wave right now for sure, especially if you get laid off and need to pay bills.

devdude13374• 3 years ago

Freelance developer from Germany here. There is a significant drop in projects and a slowdown in permanent offerings, but no layoff wave like in the US. Demand is still high but due to the current recession most companies delay hiring for now.

From my point of view there is also a skill-missmatch in Germany. While firms look for the usual most modern tech stacks, workforce is often conservative, staying years or even decades at one company with outdated technology. Hiring non-EU citizens is almost impossible because of the bureaucracy.

So, in Germany the situation is complicated and different from the US.

askonomm5• 3 years ago

Most of the remote jobs I see from Germany also hire only those who live in Germany, so it seems to me that Germans don't even want EU citizens, just Germans.

devdude13374• 3 years ago

Many managers I got to know have a hard time expressing themselves in English properly.

They fear miscommunication and the administrative work connected to non-German employees.

FirmwareBurner14• 3 years ago

That's in every EU country for tax and social security reasons, they want you to also be a tax resident there because that dicatates your tax, labor laws and employee benefits meaning it's familiar and predictable for the company.

There's no EU wide citizenship, employee regulations and tax liability for employees but are local for each country. They don't want you earning money in one country but spemding it and taxing it in another.

This is where the EU is weaker than the US and will keep missing the mark in software.

gituliar3• 3 years ago

In EU since Jul'23 cross-border remote work is free of extra taxes and similar obligation if done up to 50% abroad. One can come to Germany for 3 days and come back to his country to work for 2 days remotely and spend weekend.

More here https://socialsecurity.belgium.be/en/internationally-active/...

GrumpySloth• 3 years ago

Most of German job offers I’ve seen require proficiency in the German language. That’s unlike offers from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Israel, where you’re only required to speak English. Nothing else is ever even suggested in those offers. My sister works in Germany and says that while Germans are pretty easy to talk to in English on the street, in a shop etc., they’re reluctant to do so in a work context and she gets irritated looks when she only speaks at B1 level. Germany is pretty uniquely hostile to foreigners in that regard. I suspect that the requirement you’re speaking of is set up mainly to filter out those who don’t speak German very well.

FirmwareBurner14• 3 years ago

Hiring non-EU citizens is almost impossible because of the bureaucracy.

We want to water down the already mediocre wages even more? If you can't find workers across the whole 448 million EU block willing to work for you, you're doing something wrong.

devdude13374• 3 years ago

What makes you think that developers from Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Egypt or the US would demand so much lower wages? I helped companies onboarding people from all over the globe, and every developer (at least those we met and signed) know their worth.

drinchev• 3 years ago

Note that we also had COVID and shifted to remote gigs in Germany. This means that we compete with people located in smaller cities or even villages which probably have a pretty good pay rate bump.

jamil73• 3 years ago

I'm also a freelance developer living in Germany. I've been lucky enough to be on a fairly large, ongoing project for the last year, so I haven't been affected. But new project inquiries/leads have basically dropped to zero for me.

From work, to housing, it feels like the population is in "wait and see" mode.

oytis4• 3 years ago

What is the bureaucracy in question? Required salary for the blue card is really low now, especially for tech workers, so basically you just go ahead and hire as I understand.

devdude13374• 3 years ago

You can of course hire a contractor and tax them as usual business costs. But for a permanent position the employee needs a European Social ID, a Tax ID, health care account and a bank account. All this is needed before you can pay the employee’s first loan.

nicbou2• 3 years ago

I run a website about this for a living.

1. It takes forever to get a residence permit and get permission to start working.

2. It's increasingly difficult to find housing, which is required for the residence permit.

3. The bureaucracy is notoriously slow and outdated, and full of catch-22 situations. It's especially apparent when you need everything at once.

4. The language barrier makes everything harder.

In other words, if you meet all the requirements, you're looking at a multi-month slog before you're finally allowed to start working. People sometimes lose their job before they start due to the immigration office delays.

kypro• 3 years ago

I can only speak for the UK, but the tech market is very different here. We don't really have large tech companies like in the US. Most tech work in the UK is in sectors like finance, retail, or public sector. While our economy isn't great and there are lay offs it would be wrong to call it "tech layoffs".

We have some tech startups here too though, and those are obviously struggling right now, but startups don't normally lay people off, they simply fail, and that happens all the time anyway.

However, where it is like the US is in the way tech hiring has dropped off a cliff. So if you're working at a startup and the startup fails, or if you're a contractor and your contract isn't renewed then you're going to find it extremely hard to find work right now. I'm getting a lot of messages from ex-colleagues at the moment struggling to find work but thinking about it I don't know anyone who actually got laid off unless you're talking about long-term contracts not being renewed.

The only sector that seems completely fine is public sector work, but there's just not enough public sector work to go around.

FirmwareBurner14• 3 years ago

We don't really have large tech companies like in the US.

No, but you do have the governemnt, HFT and banking industry which pays contractors well, plus local branches of many top US companies which is still a leg up on the labor market comapred to most EU memebers, meanign salaries at the top end are much higher than most of the EU.

Look for jobs in countries without top banking and no branhces of top US companies and see what salaries are like. UK will seem like a paradise.

peblos• 3 years ago

I don’t think this comment is disputing any of that.

It did mention the financial and public sector industries, which you call out, and only being able to speak for the UK however.

While it didn’t include HFT, that doesn’t employee the same number of heads as the others

badpun• 3 years ago

In my experience, average contracting rates are not that different between UK and mainland Northern Europe. It's around 500-600 GBP in UK, and 500-700 EUR in Northern Europe (or local equivalent in SEK, DKK etc.). Southern Europe is much worse, and Eastern Europe also pays less, but in EE the money goes much further, so you might actually be better off than a contractor in London City.

BerislavLopac• 3 years ago

Well, this says a lot: https://hnhiring.com/trends?locations=london

petrusnonius2• 3 years ago

There are big tech companies in the UK and they've done layoffs just like in the US. Plenty of companies still hiring though and overall tech workforce is much higher than pre-pandemic.

Kuinox• 3 years ago

In France I didn't heard a lot of layoff. It's recently way more difficult to find a good job, but you can still find a shitty job overnight at consulting companies

summerlight• 3 years ago

Heard that S. Korea tech scene is in a similar situation. It's much harder to do mass layoff in the country, but many people are leaving their companies in a form of "voluntary resignation". Also hiring slowdown is happening as well as project cancellation.

bdcravens• 3 years ago

We are hearing about tech layoffs in some of the largest "tech" companies, but I'm not sure that we're seeing that in the many companies where tech serves the needs of the business.

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

I haven't heard much this year in New Zealand but '21/'22 was pretty bad for Xero and a handful of smaller companies. But overall companies here didn't see the insane 2020 growth of American firms. Hiring has slowed across the board, hugely.

jamiepenney• 3 years ago

Yeah I would say the same thing. Slower hiring overall but less big layoffs. I'm a contractor and haven't had much of a shortage in work for a while now, but we did have a big contract drop off in 2022 when the company went through a double-digit layoff.

ManBeardPc2• 3 years ago

Germany: as a senior the market looks ok, although a bit slower and customers seem more hesitant to start expensive projects/hire additional contractors. I get a few job offers now and then, enough to not be unemployed long if I wanted/had to switch my employer.

nicbou2• 3 years ago

From my (limited) perspective in Berlin, I see much more layoffs than previously, and a lot more friends looking for work for a longer time. It's especially hard on tech-adjacent roles like UX design.

ManBeardPc2• 3 years ago

Yeah, sounds about right. Companies try to save money by hiring more juniors and skipping roles like UX. Rarely works out though.

For some reason, there seems to be enough money for AI, wast amount of meetings and convoluted interviewing and vetting processes.

konraditurbe• 3 years ago

Layoffs are bureaucratic in Spain, needs to be approved by unions and sometimes government too (EREs) (1)

Considering how lowly paid SWEs are in this country, I'd imagine the company would be better off keeping them on payroll.

1: https://www.wolterskluwer.com/es-es/expert-insights/que-es-u...

Archelaos2• 3 years ago

According to Bitkom, the German IT trade association, there are 149,000 open IT positions reported in Germany as of 2023-12-13, which is 12,000 more than one year ago.[1] The absolut numbers are not so significant here, because this is only what is reported and a lot of IT positions exist outside of the IT industry in the narrow sense, but the trend is quite meaningful.

[1] Source: https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Rekord-Fachk... (in German)

probably_wrong• 3 years ago

As someone who had a difficult time finding a job last year I took a look at press release and I found exactly what I thought I would find: 61% of companies say that the applicants' salary expectations "do not match the company's established salary structure", 35% of them see poor German language skills as a difficulty, and 48% are putting their hopes on AI to solve the skilled workers' shortage.

To my cynical eyes this looks like "we want skilled workers, we want them to speak fluent German, and we want them cheap". And as the saying goes, you can choose two of those things but rarely all three.

mertbio• 3 years ago

One of the biggest public tech companies in Germany announced a layoff today, 400 people effected: https://new-work.se/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-ad-hoc-E...

petrusnonius2• 3 years ago

I thought laying people off was basically impossible in Germany.

lm284695• 3 years ago

It's just very well regulated and you fall on the very comfortable safety net of 12 months of unemployment benefits (a bit more than 60% of your salary).

The average Joe will have a much better time being fired in Germany than in countries like the US or Switzerland

riley333• 3 years ago

Haven't heard much from my family in Japan. Layoffs are rare in Japan in general and unemployment is generally always in the 2% range there. I'm sure startups are struggling there though as that seems to be the global trend, but the software engineers I know there at bigger companies haven't mentioned anything about layoffs and seem to be doing fine.

yterdy• 3 years ago

I have no direct experience with the situation in Japan, so take with a grain of salt: my understanding was that, as with much of Asia, the issue is not so much layoffs as burnout and the difficulty of getting one's foot in the door. "Low unemployment" where a significant portion of the youth population is working one or two arubaito or has landed a plum corporate gig that requires 12 hours in the office a day. I don't know how much I'd trust casual conversation about the situation, since it's not kosher to complain so forwardly.

Aachen• 3 years ago

No layoffs among the (tech or otherwise) friends and family I know in the Germany/Netherlands/Belgium area

spacemadness• 3 years ago

I know the answer is “because neolibs,” but I think at least one politician might want to campaign a little on how companies are replacing US employees with cheap labor abroad. I don’t even need to take a side on the matter. Objectively it seems they’re dropping the ball rather hard.

popey• 3 years ago

When this topic comes up I usually check https://layoffs.fyi/ which typically has roughly up to date data, but isn't 100% accurate of course, because it relies on submissions.

tkgally• 3 years ago

Japan: It's very hard for companies to lay off employees here, and I haven't seen any reports of large layoffs in the Japanese business press. However, a lot of IT work is subcontracted to smaller companies, and cutbacks in subcontracting might not make the news. Employment cutbacks by smaller IT firms might fall under the media radar, too.

The picture of the overall employment situation as conveyed by the news media here is of a tight labor market and of difficulty for companies in finding and retaining employees.

ayuhito• 3 years ago

Also I think Japanese companies are super risk-averse in general anyways. Not many of them hyperexpanded and overhired in COVID, so there weren’t many extra employees to layoff anyways.

henlo• 3 years ago

In Indonesia, I’ve heard that several big startups/companies are laying off their employees almost every month. Some have suddenly announced that they're closing their business too.

giantg2• 3 years ago

Not sure how it is in other countries, but my department is hiring more internationally than domestically this year. Seems to me the pattern is layoff domestically and hire internationally.

muzani• 3 years ago

SE Asia had been hit hard for a while. The thing is we never really had a dot com bubble. Unicorns were raising hard, selling $1 stuff for $0.90, outsourcing everything, skyrocketing growth, raised billions, repeat. VCs would frown on companies that were raising money to use it as a warchest, YC style.

It choked out funding for cautious YC style growth especially after Grab acquired Uber operations here. So everyone else did it too, the fake it until you make it mindset became prominent. Eventually everyone runs out of fund sources and have to become profitable, but it's hard when you're now public and used to losing millions every quarter. The costs is often in employees, so waves of layoffs it is.

A lot of it isn't American money, but it's bad timing.

givemeethekeys• 3 years ago

The layoffs aren't bad in the US (yet). Hiring has slowed down considerably, but we're not seeing massive layoffs yet.

For those in the Bay Area. Remember, you'll know that things are bad when rush-hour commute looks like non-rush-hour commute.

curious_baldy• 3 years ago

Haven't seen tech layoffs in Turkey yet.

filedottsx• 3 years ago

I work in the financial sector in Ireland. Afaik, my company is not doing any layoffs.

botten• 3 years ago

In Sweden, there has also been a notable tech downturn, with layoffs, etc.

cpach• 3 years ago

Yep. For example Spotify and Klarna.

frje1400• 3 years ago

I'm at a mid sized SaaS company in the Nordics (European). No layoffs, but hiring has slowed down and we no longer actively try to recruit junior devs. We used to have lots of active job ads, now they're reduced to only the most in-demand roles. The company is profitable and we have big important projects going on so not too worried.

ian0• 3 years ago

Indonesia: Huge layoffs from the unicorns correcting their valuations and a large number of earlier stage startups shutting down. Lots of disillusionment from tech workers over whats been happening, many are trying to move to large corporates / banks, many are struggling to find work.

Theres some sectors doing well, some new fundings happening, but overall slow and layoffs continue.

thewileyone• 3 years ago

Google is laying off 1000 in Singapore.

Lazada and Shopee, online marketplaces, are also reporting double-digit percentage layoffs. For one of them, more than 50% of the C-suite was let go.

palashkulsh• 3 years ago

India- multiple companies are laying off . First 1000+ laid off from payment unicorn, then Google lays off. From what I can see( collecting job data) slowness is there and companies are letting people go and will hire again in few months ( Google tech)

Ask HN: Are tech layoffs happening abroad?

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