That is a big lesson I learned. I worked at a job for 8 years without looking elsewhere and when I got laid off I was really stuck because the market and interviewing circuit had completely changed.
I'm not sure it's a good trade-off to interview constantly even when you have a job just to remove a bit of the learning curve if you lose your job unexpectedly.
I recommend it. For me, unused skills will become inaccessible relatively quickly, and interviews require a specific set that aren't used at all in any of my jobs over the years.
Once, I did heavy interview prep because I was bored with my job at the time, I got good at it, and landed another better job.
A year later my company deleted entire orgs of people, and I quickly realized that I was in bad shape when my third rejection rolled in.
Interviews are high pressure situations. Better to be used to the flow, coding, and conversation style (again, think "sales") than to be caught off guard, worrying about whether you've solved a Leetcode question fast enough to satisfy another human with their own grading quirks.
Oh, and that person is standing between you and a steady paycheck. That's the part I have to practice anyway, solving stupid university final problems when my livelihood is on the line.
It's a good idea to practice if you're trying to get up the nerve to make the jump to a better job. But during a job search, you'll either get so many rejections that you'll get back up to speed quickly enough without needing to also obsess about it while you're employed, or you're hireable enough that you didn't need to worry about it either way.
I wanted to get out of my office basement and into something that was close by, I went to a WeWork in my locality and while it was a nice space overall, I was astounded by both how expensive, and how empty, it was. For less I was able to find an office space that was closer to my house, owned and operated by a local company, and was larger.
Town of 40k here - we have 3 coworking spaces. I started the first one - just leased a small office building, and started subleasing spaces. Some private office space, some shared public/hotdesk seats. We're small - 12-15 people at a time, max. The others came later, and are larger, but we're all within a 5 minute walk from each other.
They're not called co-working space. They're just regular old small office building. They typically don't have a flashy website, so you have to find them the old way. They may be on CraigsList or even LoopNet
Regus is a chain that has been doing this exact thing. I worked at a startup that used one of those. A lot of the other tenants were lawyers in solo practice.
I live in a city of ~160k and there's a fair amount of them.
They vary from larger 4-5 story office buildings with some shared space, to small single story parks with no shared space - usually with a door and a garage door to the outside.
For a period of time a friend let me use the front of the space he was renting - he was using it as a warehouse for his ecommerce shop. He employed about 3 or so people who would pick & pack orders to be shipped.
Their hot-desk monthly membership is around $300 without discounts. Not cheap but probably cheaper than most dedicated office rents.
Depends. The one thing that WeWord did was locate itself in the better, more desirable, more visible business districts.
If you don't mind having a Sam Spade-style office, you can rent one far cheaper than that. I almost leased one in Seattle's Chinatown for $100/month, but ended up getting a free sub-lease from a friend with extra room at his company in a downtown skyscraper.
I'd love to move to NY but yeah, I have kids now and moving them from the acreage and amazing school district we have now is just not really an option.
Yeah, same. If you're a specialist and happen to have an in-demand skillset (backend, dist sys, GoLang), the volume of offers has been lower but still getting plenty of interest.
Meta, Amazon, hell even Twitter have reached out to me and my neighbors recently (my friend has an interview at Twitter next week). I believe even during hiring freezes these companies carry on recruitment because they're slow and can wait for the ideal role to appear in the future even if there's nothing available right now. So basically you'll get an offer without a job.
During freezes there's often exceptions for teams who've lost people, especially for critical roles. i.e. you can't increase count but you can keep it the same.
Recruiters are usually operating on weeks old info. They never find out when the freezes/cuts are coming until the day of, because any changes would tip off employees and lead to rumors/lower morale and productivity.
Not saying that the grandparent comment is confirmed, but they always keep recruiters busy no matter what until they themselves are laid off. AFAIK Google has pretty much paused hiring across all divisions.
Hiring freezes aside, it is possible to be laying off people and hiring.
Laying off your costly senior employees, while replacing them with cheaper entry-level employees, can be a huge cost saving and the loss in quality or performance may be immaterial.
This will of course depend on what the employees were doing and how many experienced/senior people you keep to supervise and mentor the new employees.
Even in "hiring freeze" situations, this can be done by replacing employees with cheaper contractors.
Yes, it sucks, but it's the reality of the market.
Sorry but sometimes the people hire are the last to know that there is going to be a layoff. Plenty of stories abound about people being hired right into a layoff.
Meta was aggressively recruiting until there was a surprise hiring freeze. It wouldn't surprise me if they were recruiting one week and laying off the next.
"Companies have been pumping and dumping for years, buoyed by cheap labor, and have not been intelligent enough to invest long term. And now, they're sad."
Rich countries have had very myopic development strategies for the past thirty to forty years. I could blame incompetence but I think it’s mostly because it allowed some happy few to make good money and they don’t really care about the citizenry at large.
My own country in Europe decided they were going to bet everything on high-end services and R&D while outsourcing all production. Apparently it wasn’t obvious to them that when you don’t produce you lose the culture and knowledge base necessary to do good R&D and that the countries they were outsourcing to would develop and stop relying on us.
This is because we've decided short term local optimization is somehow optimal. Just let every business maximize profits and everything will be good. Mention externalities and people will deny they exist, or try to tell you they're already accounted for.
> Just let every business maximize profits and everything will be good
Not quite right. You should have said maximize short-term profits.
As an example from forestry. If you manage sustainably, such that cutting resembles natural loss, your forest produces high-quality wood for centuries and also provides revenue from i.e. lodges, salmon, and carbon offsets.
So profit from that land over 100 years is X
Or you clear-cut it, and realized 1/10th of X in 5 years. And make the land very low value for the remaining 95.
The issue is short-term local optimization, as you claim.
What bothers me is someone will claim that cutting the whole forest is the best thing to do, because if it wasn't, the market would have done something else, like run it sustainably.
Nobody points out that management does what it is incentivezed to do, and that those incentives ought to be fair game for negotiation. Or at least for commentary.
I’ve been in meetings where rich elders openly admit to ageism; who cares about the problems this will create, they said, they’ll be dead by then!
This was back in the 00s before the last decade plus of expanded info awareness.
Scientific measure of fossil fuels impact on environment was achieved in 1860s. How long the runway is before catastrophe has been modeled and then hidden away over and over.
There is absolutely no reason to bequeath immense influence on human agency to the aristocrats. One small time polluter in the middle of BFE has nothing on Intel and Apple.
I feel exactly zero sympathy for companies at this point. Y'all have spent years suppressing wages, making candidates jump through all kinds of hoops, and encourage a "fake it 'til you make it" culture among founders.
Now someone pulls some dirty, saucy tricks on you and you're crying about? Cry me a fucking river. Boo hoo.
> That seems like a pretty whacky theory to me because it assumes that companies only increase prices when forced to do so, and not just because they can.
It comes across especially wacky to me as price hikes have outstripped wage hikes. Considering wages and purchasing power has flatlined for workers, but productivity has greatly increased, seems like there's a lot of people getting fleeced.
> The truth is a significant portion of managers, in my experience, are not particularly well suited to the task or are incompetent on some level.
Competent managers are few and far between, Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.
I count myself as a good manager, and I believe my staff would agree, from what I can tell. I know I'm not perfect. I'm slow to act, I'm way too able to see both sides of every argument, and I want to make sure all of my ducks are in a row before I make noise across the institution based on what my team needs.
But, my secrets:
1. I didn't want to be the boss, I just absolutely HATE being told what to do. The only way to not be told what to do, then, is be in charge.
2. Be open and honest in everything. If you don't know what they're saying to you, say that out loud. If you can't get any traction for whatever the thing they need at the institution, tell them and troubleshoot what comes next. If you really, genuinely understand the individual's complaints, but know that it won't go anywhere, be up front about that, and the reasons for it if you are able.
3. Let the experts be experts, support them, believe them, but also ask questions and do your research so you can (a) call out their bullshit if necessary and (b) not sound and act like a complete moron. In other words, trust, but verify.
4. Do not ignore inter-personal conflict. It will only fester, it will never get better. Your job is to manage the people, including their relationships. Nobody says you have to be friends, but you better f**ing believe you have to work together.
5. Buy drinks if the office does an after-hours, and then leave so they can shit talk you if they want. Even if you're great, they'll shit talk something about you; it's human nature.
Again, I'm not perfect, but these things are 99% of successful managing. I see my job as insulating my staff from the bullshit that flows down from on-high, that way they can actually do the important work.
I loved WFH. My staff were happy, they were productive, and they were productive in FAR less time. But, alas, the executive team here is stuck in a 1950's factory mindset of 'presence is productivity'. It's infuriating.
> 5. Buy drinks if the office does an after-hours, and then leave so they can shit talk you if they want. Even if you're great, they'll shit talk something about you; it's human nature.
My personal favorite. You buy the first round and then you leave.
I don’t know precisely why I think this advise is so amazing but this brought a (wry) smile to my face.
I think it’s similar to good parenting for sleepovers. Pop in, let them know that you’re there and glad they’re there and that you want them to have a good time, then give them space / go to sleep. Ideally, they won’t even be aware that you went to sleep, but do think that you’re willing to give them space.
This might be my most rambly comment on this site, but genuinely appreciate this comment.
> Do not ignore inter-personal conflict. It will only fester, it will never get better. Your job is to manage the people, including their relationships.
And this is why I was a bad manager. I'm bad enough at managing my own relationships let alone other peoples.
I wanted the position. I thought it would be a very different experience than it ended up. I had no idea how much of my time was going to be taken up by people complaining about other people's seemingly minor actions. I am not the right person to deal with that.
Most stressful year of my life, I hope to never have to go back to management.
Honestly, though, I wish more people had the self-awareness that you had. That's a good first step to becoming a good manager. I also wish more technically minded people would get into management. It's all systems, when you boil it down.
I would also ask that you not rule it out. Honestly, if managing relationships was the only part that you had a hard time with, you can learn that. Overcoming the stress and anxiety of managing conflict and confrontation is all about exposure to it.
My work life, in managing all of the (in my opinion) petty nonsense, helped my home life. It certainly prepared me for having open and honest conversations with my children about playground nonsense.
Not only inter-personal conflicts, but the higher you go on the reporting hierarchy, the more your task becomes managing the institutional politics. And the more your task becomes telling people what to do and requesting they get it done.
There's a kind of person that is good on those three things. I am not that kind of person; I imagine I can learn it, but it will never be easy.
> 1. I didn't want to be the boss, I just absolutely HATE being told what to do. The only way to not be told what to do, then, is be in charge.
I'm surprised you say that this is the #1 secret to your success - in my experience, the worst managers I've ever had were people who became managers just because they wanted to be in charge and "make hard decisions".
The best managers have been the ones who leave product decisions to product specialists and engineering decisions to engineers.
I didn't want to be in charge. I didn't want to be the boss. I didn't want to 'make hard decisions'. I love the front-line work.
But I also hate, hate, HATE being told what to do. I hated having shitty managers who had no idea what life was like for me, professionally or personally. I hated getting mandates from the company with no context.
So, the only way I saw to fix that for myself, and the people I work with, was to be the guy in charge.
I hope that clarifies. Because, I'm 100% with you. The worst managers I've ever had have been the people who absolutely, no question, wanted to be nothing but a manager for the title or responsibility and ability to be in charge.
I don’t think anyone likes being told what to do. A good manager explains why things need to be done. If it’s necessary to “pull rank” often, suggest re-examining the approach.
> the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager
There's some truth to it. In the sense that I think best managers are not seeking power or "being a leader" for the sake of it. However, there are also a lot of managers that did not want to be managers and are miserable because they'd rather be doing sw engineering and as a result they're shit at their management jobs. Many do not realize it until years into the role and some cannot let go of the 'status' of being the manager and are trapped in a job they do not like, mistakenly afraid of "stepping back" on their careers.
> Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.
I wonder if he read Plato's Republic, because that's the same idea behind the philosopher kings.
That those who desire political influence or power are precisely the ones from whom it should be kept has been known and understood since at least Ancient Greece.
> Competent managers are few and far between, Steve Jobs said/did a lot of stupid crap but one cogent point he made was that the best managers are the ones who never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers.
It's worth noting that a lot of terrible and mediocre managers also "...never wanted to be a manager, they just went and did it because they were sick of dealing with incompetent managers."
Reluctant managers don't do it because "wooo, no more managers - I'm free!"
Reluctant managers do it so that they can fix some of those things that everyone was complaining about before. They do it because they want people to stop suffering so much and they see ways to make that happen.
I don't think that could possibly describe a terrible manager.
No, I just think it's a quote that (if true) is easy to misinterpret, e.g.:
1. The best managers may have been reluctant managers, but that doesn't mean all reluctant managers are the best or even good.
2. The changes that reluctant manager may want to implement may not actually be good ones, because of concerns outside of their previous lower-level scope.
3. A reluctant manager may not actually have the personality for being a manager, and may become mediocre to terrible because what they have to do to be a manager is a heavier burden on them than it would be on other people.
