1200+ tech engineers flood New York as Twitter and Meta cut
Tech engineers appear to be in high demand recently… just not for the companies they work for. Some of the biggest tech companies in Meta and Twitter have made massive cuts recently and, all of a sudden, talent is flooding the market.
Meta announced this month in their WARN notice that they would be laying off 871 employees across three New York locations, effective February 2023. Twitter meanwhile announced a plant layoff encompassing 418 employees at one New York location to begin in the same month. It appears these talented developers simply didn't type enough characters to please Elon Musk.
That means that in just over two months’ time, there’ll be a staggering 1,289 highly talented employees entering the job market and it can be presumed a hefty number of those will be engineers. With the finance industry in dire need of some quality engineering talent, they’ll be chomping at the bit when February comes around.
(That is of course just in New York. Elsewhere in San Francisco, Twitter have also laid off two high profile engineers in Ikuhiro Ihara and Ying Xiao.
Another was Ying Xiao, a senior staff ML research scientist. One colleague described him as “the best ML modeler” around. Another said “The guy personally ran projects worth more than 2m mdau in the last year.” https://t.co/EoQ18kLy0T
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 24, 2022
The former was an avid Musk fan and got fired the day before thanksgiving but has since been “flooded with exciting opportunities and invitations'. The latter has previous, though limited, experience working at Goldman Sachs. It wouldn’t be crazy to see either enter the world of finance from here.)
With few places other than the finance world able to pay the cushy salaries tech employees are used to, joining a bank or hedge fund may seem a natural next step, but one former Google employee who joined a hedge fund is giving them a word of warning.
“The market’s looking quite competitive all of a sudden,” he tells us. “If you have general engineering skills, both tech and finance will want you. But you won’t find any nap pods waiting at Citadel or Citi. The culture in finance firms is more abrasive, they’ll need to be ready for it.”
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