Do Layoff-Resistant Jobs Exist For Software Engineers?

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Hey folks, it's uh Monday morning. Today is the big project wrap-up day hopefully. So hopefully things start to get back to normal. We're going to go to LinkedIn for a message. Um this one is about um finding a company with low layoff risk. Um how would you tackle getting interviews if you had a somewhat odd background? So for this person uh AAA gamedev Studios they've uh worked with but they've moved into web development and they're enjoying that more which is great. Um feeling a little bit unhappy with the compensation and learning opportunities which I think is you know a very important thing for a lot of people. Um they feel like it's pretty stable. Sorry getting some work messages. um they feel like it's stable where they're at. They're on track for promotion. So, these are all good things, right? But even with the pay bump, um it's still like not really going to be worth it.

So, I think that they're kind of I don't know. I think they're kind of approaching it the right way or asking the right questions like maybe I should be exploring something else. Give me one moment because I do want to um respond to this work message. I'm not driving yet and this is pretty important. So, you don't have to be here for this, but you are and I appreciate it. Um just on the road. Cool. Um so, I think like I said, great question. I will try to get my perspective on this. um you know there's no guarantee there's no like perfect solution to this but I think um sort of the right things to be asking so what we're going to look at is my perspective on what is lower risk in terms of layoff um and then approaching um different background because they said they're moving from gamedev into web development and then thinking about compensation.

So, with that said, we'll get on the road here. Also, I just found out from this person that they are actually local to me. They're probably like 15 minutes away, which is pretty crazy. Um, internet is a cool place. So, a friendly reminder for folks, if you want questions answered, please leave them below in the comments. Happy to try and answer. Uh, they are public when they're a comment. So, if you want to be kept private like this individual, you can reach out to dev leader on social media. That's also my main YouTube channel. Or you can send a message like this person did to Nick Cantino on LinkedIn. I guess the proof is there. The profiles premium and open, so you should be able to message me and it should just work. Okay. Um, first things first, layoff stuff. Uh, it feels like there is no good answer for this right now.

Um because I think if I were to say anything like, "Hey, this industry or this company or whatever is, you know, less likely to have layoffs, there's going to be someone that says, hey, Like here's this example, here's that example." Um I think the the feeling right now was like there is no there's no guarantee and I don't think there ever has been a guarantee that you know some some things are guaranteed stable. But um I do think that there are some some things to consider when it comes to stability. And I I don't know sometimes this feels like the stability could be at odds with how interesting the job is, like the learning opportunities. So, um I'm going to use two examples from my work experience at Microsoft that I feel like I have um quite good stability. And I'm not saying that I know like I had some comments I was responding to over the weekend where you know someone was saying nice that was pretty stupid.

Someone made a right-hand turn into oncoming traffic. I don't know if you could hear the horn through the mic, but um the uh yeah, so I was responding to someone over the weekend and you know, the comments were essentially like, you're you're dumb if you think that you are like uh not at risk of being, you know, laid off at any given time. And I'm like, I get it. I'm not, you know, I'm not saying otherwise. I'm not saying that there isn't always that risk. I think we've seen plenty of examples of that over the past few years or people like I think even at Microsoft that were posting at LinkedIn and some other big companies or they're like I've been at here for like 15 20 25 years and I got laid off. Right? A lot of the times those layoffs end up happening in a way that's like quite systematic and organizational where they're just like this leg of an organization does not exist anymore.

It's it's not anything to do with individuals or the people and just like this is going away. Um to be totally clear, I'm not I don't I don't like the idea of layoffs. Um and especially in a situation like this, let's let's say that that part of the organization is no longer needed from a business perspective when it's done in that way. And by the way, it was not part of that. I don't actually know how it went down. I'm very much on the outside of that. Okay. when we see layoffs happen like that and you have people saying like hey I have this so so much experience here you know clearly people were commenting back and like sharing people's profiles and saying like these are awesome developers um the layoffs are not a reflection of the individual and that's the part I really hate

is that oh my god this vehicle is going so slow um is that they end up like basically removing an organization but there's so many good people inside of it. And I've literally been in the situation where people were like, "Hey, if you know anyone from that organization, like let us know cuz we'll like try to hire them back in." And in my head, I'm like, "Why did why wasn't there some sort of like transfer thing going on?" I must acknowledge that there needs to be something significantly more complicated in terms of like a, you know, enormous scale business like Microsoft or other big tech corporations where to me it doesn't make sense. Like logically I'm like why would you let go of people and then try to go hire them back in instead of just transferring them? But that's not that's not been my role.

That's not been anything I participated in. So I like kind of have to sit here and go there's got to be a logical explanation for it even if I don't get it. Okay. Um not that I'm defending it. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying that there is a logical explanation for why they make that choice in terms of the let go and rehire versus transfer. Okay. So with my experience at Microsoft, I've been on two teams so far and I would consider them like layoff resistant. Maybe that's a good way to put it. layoff resistant, not layoff proof, because there's no such thing, I don't think. Um, and the reason I say that they're resistant is because they're like like core infrastructure.

I'm not saying that me as an individual, you know, if I wasn't performing or something, then all of a sudden like I should not expect that I'm or how do I too many negatives if I'm not performing, I should always expect that, you know, I'm at risk of being fired, being terminated. But um if I'm doing my job, you know, meeting expectations or exceeding them in these areas that I've been working in, I feel that they are layoff resistant. They have been so far, but like that's just been my experience. I'm not can't use a couple of data points to say therefore, you know, they're they're bulletproof. No. Um, but what makes them, I think, layoff resistant from my perspective is that because they're like a core infrastructure area, if you didn't have people working in these areas, like things would fall apart systematically. So to give you an example, I worked on the deployment team when I joined Microsoft.

We were responsible for deploying like hundreds of services for Office 365 across the planet. Okay. So, we're supporting hundreds of teams with hundreds of services that are all of the you know customer that serve all of the customers like across the planet. So, if deployment just stops working, right? If deployment stops working, there's a really big problem. Okay? And that means that they need people in that space to be able to support it. If you consider an alternative example where it's like we have a service that's uh the backing of a feature, like I'm not going to say like a feature is not important, right? C-Ilot is a feature. It's actually significantly more integrated, but like co-pilot as a feature would also be considered like something where they're like we're heavily investing into this. So not a good example.

If there was some feature that's not co-pilot and it's not like the center of the universe for Microsoft if they were look I don't know different organizations are looking to cut costs and whatever else like again I'm not part of those discussions that's going to be something where they're looking like if this thing's not making us money and we're losing money on it or it's not worth the you know waiting on the return for investment like cutting out a feature team like that is in my opinion significantly more likely than just like reducing the infrastructure team. Okay, it's not that it's a guarantee. It's not like a rule. I'm just saying statistically it probably makes sense you need to keep the info going versus a sort of like a individual team for an individual feature. Okay. Um, or if you had uh really large features with, you know, really big teams, they might say, "Hey, look, we're planning on reducing the scale." I'm just making this up, right?

If you had like a hundred people working on a feature team, they might say we think we think as in I don't know who's who's actually saying that, but um sorry, someone wasn't letting me on the highway. Um, like I said, I don't know who's who's saying we don't think, but if if there was some decision made where it's like we're reducing an org from 100 to 80 or something, it still might be that that's a lot of people supporting a feature, but like given the scope of the feature might be very difficult. Anyway, um, you know, I'm on the routing team right now and that's a very similar thing. We're routing requests like trillions of requests per day for all of those services. If our team stopped functioning, we would have a really big problem. When I say we, it's not just my team. I mean like like Office 365, Substrate, Microsoft would have a very big problem.

So these are core teams that I'm describing core infrastructure. Um the reason I think I said it I' been a little distracted. Sorry. the um I think I had said that sometimes it feels at odds with like the learning experiences or the interest like how how sexy the technology is. Sometimes like the core infra stuff like there's just a lot more like maintenance support like you have to acknowledge that you're keeping things going like that is one of the primary responsibilities is like shit's got to keep running. There is no there is no opportunity for like oh let's just like slow down a bit so we can do this thing like nope there's no there's no stop like the service doesn't take a rest when you have trillions of requests per day or you're deploying for hundreds of services every day right there's no there's

no break so um sometimes when it's like I want to go build like some sexy new feature work with some new technology it's a lot more difficult to find those opportunities. It's not that they don't exist. It's not like there aren't tons of really cool ways that we could be using AI when it comes to um you know, routing and security and things like that. Like absolutely there are and absolutely we're exploring these things, but it's a lot more difficult to to like not be working on stuff that feels like I'm exaggerating like putting out fires. like there's just a lot more ongoing stuff that you're constantly trying to stay on top of. So, I'm calling that out because for this individual, I know one of the things that they're saying is I want to be able to make sure that I'm working in an area that's interesting with learning opportunities.

Now, in the area that I'm in, uh there are tons of really cool um how do I say this? like uh I think there's a really cool opportunity for like data structures and algorithms because some of this stuff if you were at a smaller scale you're like whatever we don't have to know the details about some algorithm or some data structures like we're using stuff off the shelf it's good enough but like when you reach a certain scale you're like look this stuff that's been designed to be general purpose is great but we're we're no longer general purpose we're like hypers scale so Like we need stuff that isn't off the shelf. We need to you know if there was something some data structure that had a couple of extra bytes along with it like you might say you know what if we were to trim off those extra bytes we could actually have a big impact in terms of performance memory allocation all sorts of things.

So suddenly these data structures and algorithms problems become very interesting again at this scale. Um, I'm historically the kind of person where like I don't really give a because I am built like I historically have been building stuff that's a lot like smaller scale. I would much rather take something off the shelf and just move on, right? Like I'd rather see the value delivered in terms of getting features and stuff together. That's where I have been most of my career. In this case, um, it's just different because of the scale. So, if you're interested in that kind of stuff, you know, all my comments about, hey, like maybe there aren't like maybe it's not as sexy. Maybe for you, you're like, hell yeah, that sounds super cool. I want to do that. So, it's going to be different for every individual. Um I think to generalize the layoff resistant types of roles or domains um and maybe even company sizes.

What I would say is um I think startups still carry a ton of risk. They always have early stage startups are incredibly risky. It's not to say they can't be successful but like statistically speaking most startups fail. That doesn't mean that you can't make money from doing it. That doesn't mean you can't learn a ton from doing it. Absolutely you can. But most startups fail. Okay, so you have that on one end of the spectrum. On the other opposite end, historically, we we've been saying like big tech is so much more stable. They pay high. Great. But like I don't know if that's true anymore in terms of stability. I think there's probably a sweet spot now. And um there's been a couple people that have commented on on videos over the past I don't know 6 months or so that have hinted at this. Um if you read the comments, I'll give a shout out to Devon.

Devon comments all the time. Devon joins a live streams on Dev Leader. Um but I think Devon commented recently and said like, "Hey, like what about these other companies instead of startups and big tech like that are kind of midsize, right? They're like I don't know. I don't know what you claim is like midsize technically, but you might have a few hundred employees, right? Anywhere from like a 100 to a few hundred employees. It's not a tiny company. You might have a a few small uh dev teams, couple different products or services. Cool. like that might be pretty stable because the company itself is going to continue to live on uh doing whatever it's doing and they need uh their dev team. Their dev team isn't like oversaturated with like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of developers, but they still need a dev team to go build the stuff.

You might say the same thing I've heard people saying about um industries or uh companies I guess that are not just like a software company first. So to give you an example, maybe it's a bank and the bank has a couple of software teams internally to go do whatever whether that's building an app or building the web portals, whatever it is, right? Um, if there's other uh sort of industries that aren't or companies that are in industries that aren't software first, those could be interesting as well because they might have a software product, whether that's internal tools, whether that's building for, you know, something specific for their customer base that supports their product. Um, there could be an awesome opportunity there. I've heard people saying too, like good work life balance that way. But again, there's there's there's so many options. The the the reality is like it takes a bit of research, of course, and there's not going to be a guarantee.

Even in the examples I gave you, you know, you might say, "Okay, cool. Nick was saying it's not a software for his company. Seems like good work life balance." Um, you know, their dev team isn't like ridiculously big where I'm like, "Oh crap, are they going to, you know, trim the dev team back? it's not so small that it's going to collapse at any given point in time under pressure. Seems like a good fit and then the company might just go under or something. I don't know like anything or they could have an acquisition and then um they get acquired and then that part of the organization gets cut out. I don't know like anything could happen. Uh so I I think that framing things around if that work is going to be critical for keeping the company afloat. I think that's interesting in terms of layoff resistance.

So, I I hope that helps in terms of that framing, right? If it's going to be key to that company staying afloat, um I think that's good. Sometimes you might have companies that are like, "Hey, we're trying to hire on a dev team to go build the future of whatever." But like the future of whatever isn't the thing paying the bills right now. the future of whatever I think is the thing that is most at risk. Going back to my point about co-pilot, you might say, "Well, Nick, isn't that kind of counter to what Copilot is?" I just think that Microsoft is so invested into co-pilot. There's no there isn't a going back from that. But if they were like, I'm just going to make this up. If Microsoft tomorrow was like, we're going to be doing the metaverse because Meta was doing it. We now think it's a good idea.

We're going to do that. we're going to start like I would say that would be like the most at risk because it's a brand new thing. It's not making the company money. They haven't invested tons into it. It would be at risk. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit to um this idea of I don't know like different backgrounds, different work experience. I made videos on this before. Um but if you're trying to switch into a different domain, right? So going from this is from game development at AAA studios to uh web development, right? I think one of the things that's super cool is when you have different experiences, whether that's from a technical background or from you know different backgrounds in general, you bring a set of skills that could stand out tremendously compared to other applicants. Okay, this is my my frame of mind for it.

If you have a web developer position that's open, okay, and there's a thousand applicants that apply. Probably what you'll see across like every single one of them is like I know JavaScript, I know TypeScript, I know React, I know Angular, I know Node, and then you'll layer in like CSS, you'll layer in like different frameworks and stuff, but for the most part, you'll see like an enormous overlap. And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing or I'm picking on these people or anything like that's I think statistically what you would see is a ton of overlap in these technologies. You might have some people that didn't have Angular or some people that didn't have React or you know some mix right but if you did a ven diagram of it I think you'd have a really big part in the middle that overlaps. Okay so you have that.

Now, when you see a thousand people that basically look almost the same, what makes them memorable? You're like, "Okay, I got to find the person with the best React experience or the best uh TypeScript experience or something. I don't know, right?" Like, you're really drilling in to go identify the best person in that space. However, I think that there's different ways that you can start looking at that, which is who else is bringing like unique skill sets. Okay? So, you're building this generalist team of web developers. Okay? And now you I'm just going to use this person as an example. You have someone who has AAA uh game studio background. And I don't know exactly like I haven't seen this person's resume. Uh maybe they have a lot of experience optimizing game engines or doing optimizations at different parts of different aspects of the game and suddenly you go wait a second this person has this work experience.

They've listed off like five things of impact where they were doing like really big optimizations. Interesting. Okay. Our generalist web development team has a bunch of generalists. This person also has some web development. That's good. But like they have a specialty around optimization. Like I wonder if they have a knack for that. I wonder if that's something our team could really benefit from, right? So you can start leaning into these uh I think how they framed it was like, you know, an odd background. I think you can lean into that and highlight what makes your background so special. It's not odd in the sense that like oh no it doesn't line up because if you look if you think about that ven diagram example I was giving if you can cover enough bases around like I know react I know angular typescript like pick whatever

nextjs pick your your flavors of things go get some experience in that you know if you don't have that professionally get your side projects up right demonstrate that you were learning about those things that you can actively work in them without issue and then you can lean on all of these really cool other experiences that basically none of the other applicants are going to have. This is the same thing that I would say to people who come from non-technical backgrounds where they're like, "Oh, I'm a late starter. Um, you know, I've I was I'm just going to make this up. I was working in sales or I was working in, you know, I was a project manager before." Like, I don't know, man. like a project manager could have a lot of really interesting skills to bring to a team, a lot of really interesting experiences in terms of being able to navigate difficult conversations, prioritizing things, working with different teams.

Um, so I wouldn't I wouldn't write those things off. I would lean into those as the things that make you stand out because that's going to be the biggest sort of barrier I think when it comes to job applications right now is there's just so much volume and how do you stand out amongst the Guys, um, yeah, I don't know if I have anything more to say on that. I think that's mostly it. Um the learn oh maybe we'll talk about learning and stuff right like I think in compensation even um I didn't really touch on those yet compensation is going to be tricky um because there's so much variability there's startups that are they have funding and they're like whatever we'll pay people you know tons of cash cool or like here's tons of equity right you have to make decisions about your risk tolerance with that I can't do that for you.

Um, something to think about, but some some startups can absolutely do that. Sometimes like the midsize companies, they kind of what do what do the kids say? That's just mid they might have like mid compensation too. Am I using that right? Um, so but it's not it's not like a rule. I just think you'll probably see more of that. Um, big tech I think most people uh recognize pays usually on the upper end, but it's uh something you have to go look at the job postings and stuff and see what they're offering. uh if they're not if people aren't transparent about that, I would say don't even I wouldn't personally interview with a place that like if I was doing a screen or something and they were they were like not willing to talk about compensation then I would be like okay like no thanks compensation is a pretty big thing for me if I'm going to be changing my life to go work for someone like my life too kind of want to know.

Um, let's uh I I recalled I wanted to maybe talk about um like why switching could be a really good opportunity for comp. Um, it's a pretty I don't know if it's like how well understood it is, but I you know, a lot of people do know this and some people may not be aware of it, but it's uh relatively well understood that a lot of the time if you're looking for a compensation bump, one of the most effective ways to do that is to switch companies. uh which is unfortunate, right? Because like you would think that you would be disproportionately more rewarded for staying at a place, but that's often just not the case. I don't know if that happens primarily because of like salary or comp inflation where people are like the people competing with the market in terms of hiring are like, well, we got to keep offering more and more.

Uh, but I've seen this as a manager where you'll get new employees coming in and the salaries are um they're sort of ahead of where the people already on the team are and then sometimes we have to do like catchup things where where we're doing, you know, rewards for the year and we're like now, you know, these people are starting to fall behind for where they're at. So, like it happens for sure. Um, so we end up having to adjust and sometimes it feels like people are getting a bigger boost. It's really exciting. So that's cool. But it's like we have to be clear sometimes too like this portion of it is for your performance. The other portion is just for like level setting your salary. So from my lived experience over the past 13 years, I have seen external hires like the the salary coming in higher and higher.

So, um, not a rule, but I think that's pretty pretty common. So, if you're in this person's position and you're like, okay, on track for promotion, but I know what that like promotion roughly in terms of the comp is going to look like. If you're looking at that going like, I don't like great to be promoted, of course. Um, great to have a comp boost of course, but if that's not going to cut it, then like, yeah, it probably is worth looking at other opportunities. Uh, even even a switch in teams might not do it. Um, and there's nothing wrong with like I I think, you know, I have a like a subconscious kind of thing going on where it's like, hey, like shouldn't just focus on the money, but I'm trying to be a little bit more like I think that's kind of like my mother taught me that and I love my mother and I appreciate everything that she has taught me.

But part of me is like again like like money does matter because that's going to be my livelihood. I don't want to have to be working my entire life just to be able to like do normal things. I would like to be able to retire. I love working though. So, I'd love to be able to retire early and just kind of build the stuff that I want to build because I like doing it. So, money is really important for me. That is going to make a difference in the quality of my life. And I have not reached a point of income where I'm like, hey, like an extra 50%, an extra 10%, whatever, isn't really going to make a difference at this point. An extra anything is going to make a difference. So, I think it's totally fine and to, you know, to be considering different opportunities because the pay is more.

Um, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I'm just I'm kind of highlighting this because again, if you're if you were raised like me, your mother or father was like kind of instilling that like, hey, money's not everything. Like, it's not, but it's a pretty big part of it. It's a pretty big part. So, don't uh don't beat yourself up for it if that's what you're you're thinking. Um but yeah, like when I I moved from let's kind of what's a good way to explain this? So where I was working before I had uh stock, but it's like kind of it's from being there early, right? So it's not like it's not like performance rewards or things like that. It's not like, hey, this year you did good. you met, you're exceeding targets or whatever, therefore we're giving you like performance stock. It was like stock, hey, like you've been here at the beginning, like here's some some equity.

So, when it comes to just like looking at year-over-year compensation, when I went from where I was working before to Microsoft, including the exchange rate, I almost almost tripled my income. which is like pretty nuts. Don't get me wrong, like cost and stuff different here. Like I'm paying in US dollars, too. But if you were to keep it in Canadian dollars, like yeah, like almost triple my income. So you have the exchange rate. There was uh performance rewards every year. Yes, those are vesting and stuff like that. Um so that's a dramatic difference. Now, it's not all like a direct comparison like that, right? Because in terms of learning opportunities, um I have different learning opportunities where I'm at, but um my rate of growth and learning uh was far far greater where I was at before. Full transparency, right? I'm not complaining. I'm not up in arms about it but like just the the pace at which we were moving rate of learning was way faster kind of forced into different things.

Um so that's a factor and that's worth considering for this person too and um the other thing like I was saying like I had equity that company had not gone public yet. So, when I was saying earlier about the startups and stuff, I'm like, "Yeah, it's a gamble." I should have leaned into that gamble probably a little bit harder where I was at because would not be working right now uh or wouldn't have to work. I would be working still. But that's uh I think that's an outlier statistically. So, yes, there are places there are startups you could be working and having equity that do very well uh and then you can do well as a result. But um you have to there's there's just no one-izefits-all answer for this unfortunately. So lots of things to consider, but I think that means that you can consider a bunch of different things, weigh them out.

That doesn't mean you have to lock yourself into startups or lock yourself into big tech or just midsize. You could explore a bunch of those things and then when you have different opportunities in front of you or even they might not even be um like offers I mean but like different paths you could go down you could say hey now that I'm weighing these out like maybe this would be a worthwhile tradeoff right um pay isn't crazy but like this could be fastpaced good for learning uh this one could be good for my career growth in terms of what that looks like on paper could be a bunch of different things but um I wouldn't I wouldn't lock yourself out of different options at this phase. So hopefully that was helpful. Talked about some of the layoff resistant dynamics from my perspective. Um talked about different background trying to use that as a strength.

And then this last part was just comp and learning, right? So anyway, uh hope that helps this individual. Uh thank you so much for the question. Again, if you have questions you'd like answered, comments below or send a message to Dev Leader on social media. Thank you so much. I will see you next time and hopefully the burnout starts to go down after today, but we'll see. Catch you