That layoffs have increased should not surprise anyone at this point. Unlike the dot com explosion it seems painfully difficult as a regular employee to have divested some of your equity gains mid-bubble. That makes it more painful.
However, every time there is a great deflating, it is because the market is tired and preparing to embrace something different. So far I've been through several of these, chips in the 80's dot coms in the late 90s, storage in the early 2000's, and now either web 2.0 or social (depending on how you score it). Three threads are competing for the next round, IoT, Machine Learning, and Bioinformatics. CRISPR derived technologies could be in there too but I see a lot of regulatory hurdles headed that way which will be hard to dodge.
The thing to keep in mind though if you are one of the folks getting laid off, it isn't you its them. Seriously. Layoffs happen when the world shifts and your company didn't shift with it. That said, it still sucks to suddenly be out of a job and the temptation will be to grab at the first thing that offers you something. My advice to you is to be thoughtful. Think through what you want to do, what the world is going through, and how you want to look back at your role on that. Then head for the area that best meets those needs.
The interesting thing to me is is that each of these inflection points, the industry had a set of 2-3 possible "next big things", and then none of them happened and the actual next big thing was something different.
In the early 90s, the next big thing was WebTV, VR, or PDAs. Instead, we got the WWW.
Post dot-com crash, the next big thing was P2P, enterprise software, and the semantic web. Instead, we got social networking.
In 2008, the next big thing was casual games, (micro)blogs, and embeddable widgets. Instead we got mobile and the sharing economy.
Now, the next big thing is wearables, IoT, or AI. And who knows what we're going to get?
Looking at the patterns, it looks like the mistake most people make is to extrapolate the last big thing into the next, not being willing to make a big enough conceptual jump. So enterprise software, the semantic web, and P2P are all offshoots of the WWW and all enjoyed some modest success, but a different offshoot of the WWW (social) connected it to a different area of peoples' lives. Casual games, microblogs, and embeddable widgets are all offshoots of social, but a different offshoot of these social changes was enabled by mobile, which enabled totally different ways of interacting.
I remember the layoffs right before leaving LivingSocial in 2012. A raw, human catastrophe. Watching friends pack up their things, who had been sold on the culture and vision of what the company could be, was an eye opening experience.
This is why you focus on business fundamentals. Not because it is sexy, not because you can tell ProductHunt about your run rate, and not because you want impress investors.
Because if you fuck up, everyone who depends on you gets fucked.
A few words of advice:
- Before you raise money, ask yourself if that valuation is realistic or aspirational. If it is aspirational, know that you have to reach that valuation without raising another cent, just to break even. Ask yourself if you are default dead or alive.
- Before you start a company, ask if it is solving a problem for customers or your desire "to be an entrepreneur."
- Before you hire anyone, ask if their position is a need to have or a nice have. Like customers, few businesses can afford "nice to haves"
- There is always capital available for businesses with strong fundamentals who are solving real needs.
Layoffs are like throwing up from drinking. Not fun and nearly always your (the founders/managers') fault.
- Pace yourself.
- Build a company you're proud of.
- Build something that people need.
- Growth is great for slide decks, but employees can't use it to pay rent. Don't chase hypergrowth as an end in itself.
Markets can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent, but they can also snap back to reality before you can wake-up.
Right now it seems like there are two reasons for creating a company. One is for making a profitable business that creates wealth for the people invested. Two is for creating a product or service that customers need or want. These two revolve around servicing those invested, or the consumers of the product/service, or both.
It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. A great workplace and work would be the product/service, and the employees the consumers of the product/service. Sure, you would have to have paying customers to fuel it, but that could always be secondary in some sense. Right now it seems like the workplace is secondary, so why not swap it? I'm sure there are a nice subset of people who would take less (even half) of their current salary just to work in a place that revolves around them and their experience working.. which is the majority of most of our days.
Viable? Probably not, but it's interesting to think about and trying to imagine what that place would look like for you personally.
I whole fully agree with the points you make but I want to point out that for engineers in Silicon Valley, it's less dramatic to get laid off than you make it sound (I've been a part of a couple and I've had to lay off people as well).
The reality is in that most cases, you just change a tagline here and there, recruiters call you, and you just go on and do the next great thing.
The only ones for whom this is a problem are probably the ones with a "nice to have" position and they will have a hard time finding a new job. This sucks, but this is, like you said, also the founder's fault so it's up to the founder to give them a nice severance pay, great recommendations and preferably even introductions to other companies.
The leaders who fuck up and fail are very rarely in the same positions of influence ever again.
The leaders who fuck up and survive (through luck and ruthlessness) are busy inflating the next bubble believing whatever fantasy they cook up about the reason for their survival.
I disagree that it's the employer's responsibility to look out for the employees beyond paying them the agreed-upon salary. Anyone who joins a startup should know that their job could disappear if the funding dries up. That risk is a big part of why startup jobs pay so well.
Look at the company on the basis of the stuff you list. Are they spending lavishly on "nice to haves?" Do they have any customers? Does their business model seem sane? Talk to someone disinterested to try to understand if you're being attracted to hype or to a really sound idea.
Good post. Random thoughts from me on reducing layoff potential:
When hiring people, hire people that can work in many different roles/projects, think about hiring a person that will improve the business, not just someone to do a particular thing. This is not saying hire marketing/programmer/designers, but rather, know that a software developer can learn anything in a few weeks and is not just a developer in language XYZ.
Hire people when you are really hungry for people and can't handle what you need to do with the number of people you have in a particular area, and you expect that need to be sustained for the long term.
Avoid the idea that you can hire contractors for short term things, when contractors is really a euphism for disposable employees. Push management to hire full time employees.
Make sure there is available revenue and burn rate to cover people. Even if you need help, hiring people when you are in dire straits may be bad for them if finding a new job is difficult. (Still, providing jobs == good).
When projects end, give these folks new jobs and give them time to learn new things, rather than getting rid of them and then hiring new people for the next project that may be booting up in just a few weeks.
Larger companies seem rather guilty of thinking a person just is hired for a department/project, and somehow thinks it's ethical to shut down or shrink whole departments. They should instead look about how to have lots of potential ideas in the pipeline for the future and move people around better.
Wise words, I'd like to add one thing: You are doing it right only if your customers are providing most of your money - if it is VCs, you're probably in a bubble soon to burst.
There seems to be a huge moral asymmetry in your worldview between hiring and firing, which I disagree with. Yes, layoffs are very disruptive. But not having jobs (or having lower paid jobs) in the first place is also bad.
I don't think founders should go out of their way to avoid risk in order to avoid layoffs, because this would also mean employees would miss out on opportunities too. In fact, employees are already aware of the risks of smaller companies, and adjust their expectations accordingly.
Since I'm old and I went through the .com crash (I didn't get to participate in the boom) I hope my input is valid. This feels like more of a correction than a disaster.
The job market has been super easy and mediocre workers have been commanding excessive salaries because of various socio-economic forces (high valuations and cost of living). At some point there had to be a cull of bad startups and workers. It's unfortunate for the individuals and companies involved but I think in a couple years we will be through this and it won't have been so bad.
The problem is that these crashes hurt both good and bad workers.
Every week you see the nth article posted here on how hiring is broken, from HR filtering to recruiters to interviewing. So how do good developers survive, if their skills and experience are essentially worthless in an opaque hiring process?
One common answer is "networking" but that's a non-developer skill- a mediocre developer could be better at networking (maybe correlated - he's in the bar handing out business cards rather than working on his latest side project). A lot of good people get hurt in a downturn and either leave the industry or end up in low-paying, mediocre jobs just to hang on.
I wish you are right, but I have a feeling this is beginning of more things to come. These things always pan out over much longer period than people predict. Unemployment rate is at multi year low.
If I'm understanding the article, there was a net increase of 2400 jobs in the quarter. That's still pretty good. (Edit: it may seem gloomy by comparing to 2015, which seemed like an extremely good year). I googled a little because I was curious and found this:
My dad got laid off from the Fremont Western Digital location just the other day ago. He saw it coming as they were warned layoffs would keep coming (WD has been laying off workers since the middle of last year, I think). So luckily we moved to a nearby city with substantially lower housing prices than in San Jose, where we were spending lots more than we could justify on housing. If we had stayed in San Jose, we would be in some real big financial troubles- pretty much game over. But where we live now (which is actually in a house of the same size, just significantly cheaper) we are living more comfortably and happier without the stress of living in such an expensive city.
Anyone living in an expensive city with a layoff seeming imminent should really be thinking on the long term about where it's best for their family to live. Going day to day wondering if you'll be able to keep your house is not a healthy way to live.
This article is very confusing to me. If we are concluding that startups are laying off due to funding squeeze, how is that San Francisco actually saw a decrease in lay offs ? SF is where most of the startups are based. Also, it says that layoffs totaled roughly 3000 in 4 months. Which comes down to 750 a month. Compare this to what the article said later that 32,000 jobs were lost per month during the recession. Finally, I couldn't figure how many jobs were added in this period, to get a context of the layoff percentage. Seems a little alarmist
I feel similarly. However, the article points out reporting differences for differently large companies and layoffs. That might factor in heavily. Would be nice though of the article had explicitly addressed that.
"Today the Bay Area's total employment of 3,353,600 as of the end of March still reflects job growth, with 102,600 workers added from March 2015 through March 2016."
The sky is not quite falling yet. There are many parts of the economy that are stalling and the impact on that is felt in companies that sell products into those markets. How things will develop is anyone's guess. I feel "Tech" will keep growing though some areas that perhaps were historically considered "Tech" might shrink. If you look at all the great things we can do with technology I think a lot of stuff is still ahead of us. It's just the natural way that things don't always go smoothly.
The mobile wave is ending and we are in the middle of the dip preceding the next big "thing". A lot of companies are betting on IoT but these are mostly service companies pushing their own proprietary stacks, which is why I think IoT is a dead-end because there is either no demand for the hardware or the hardware is at a price point that makes no financial sense.
Start reading article, then all text pops below the fold as ads load, then the page hangs as more shit gets loaded. If I were on Firefox I'd use the Pocket Reader mode, which strips all the extraneous bs.
I have to give them props...I've been using AdBlock on Chrome, which seems to do just fine on major sites...this is the first time in a long while that I've visited a news site and seen a pop-up autoplay video ad.
How worried should an entry level developer who has been working only 6 months at his current company be? Due to an extremely high cost of living, paying all my bills and student loans and such, I have very little money actually saved up. If I lost my job I'd have to pack my bags and move out of Silicon Valley ASAP. And I really haven't accomplished that much at work during the past 6 months because I joined during holiday season and pretty much spent like 3 months training. I'd be really fucked if I got laid off now.
While it's sad to see people being laid off, on the bonus side there are jobs elsewhere in the country that could use great engineers. I know in Helena Montana there are a number of companies looking for engineers. It's a great fit for those who enjoy great beer and the outdoors.
A lot of these comments have stated the surface level of what is happening. That is, these companies have failed based on bad business tactics/marketshare, over-valuation, etc... And that the employees being laid off are just the tech-bubble fallout, but will be okay 'because jobs are aplenty' or that they'll just have to reapply themselves in some other job sector.
However, what we don't see is the terms of the layoff that the employees are forced into. Generally, employees don't have a say in what they get in their layoff package, and many times it is not a fair amount in comparison to the work they do and in comparison to what management is getting. In addition, employees generally have to sign a legal document that prevents them from defaming the work practices/management/etc of the company. Either they sign and get their package, or they get nothing at all. I'm basing this on accounts from personal friends who have worked in startups, and although I'm speaking from an anecdotal point of view, I don't see what other data points we can draw from given that no one is allowed to speak out legally.
The bottom line is, we will always be screwed over since we lack basic worker protections. We can talk about bad management and how that can be solved, but ultimately I think each and every one of us need to collectively force a set of protections for workers. Either through law or by forming a strong collective. Until then, this cycle will continue.
it's mostly Yahoo at this point, which is no surprise there. We've (I've) also seen bubbles burst a couple times in this industry, and it'll do it again. I wonder how long it will take before we figure out not to throw money at bad ideas, overhire, and value companies at much more than they're actually worth. Eh, probably never. Oh well, viva la recession!
That is a very good point. At my previous company, they had some struggles and laid off a bunch of marketing and random business people, but every single developer kept their job.
So, I am graduating next year and I have no internship experience (wasn't able to get one for this summer for whatever reasons). How doomed am I? Hopefully, by the time I am done, there is still at least one job left :(
Although, I guess finding a job might be easier since I am willing to relocate etc.
My internship experiences made me a more confident programmer.
My advice is start working on a personal project that you can show you're knowledgeable and passionate about. Differentiate yourself from your peers.
I really loved iTunes, but wanted to be able to stream my music wherever I was. I built an iTunes clone as a web app. Simple web design, CRUD app, but the fanciness was what I learned about codecs, transcoding, and streaming. https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/audiostream/blob/master/r...
The folks who interviewed me at Mozilla loved it and hired me. My current boss at Google loved my technical blog.
* Find a area you want to live and contact recruiters there.
* Don't be afraid to contact Google, Microsoft, or other large employers.
* Press the flesh: go to industry meetups, visit with people who are in the industry, work the old professor network, try to find alumni who might give your resume an extra look. I can NOT stress this enough, by the way. Getting your face in front of someone who can hire you - or who knows someone who can hire you - is basically the best way to get hired.
* Get a job this year in college related to your degree.
* If you're a coder, put up your favorite non-class codebase on github and have that link in your resume. My controversial opinion: portfolios are a very strong signal that the candidate is to be given at least a phone screen.
* Don't take extra classes when you could be networking; applying for jobs; etc.
You're not doomed imo. If your aim was to work at the next $coolStartup in silicon Valley then I'd say you have a good reason to be worried.
There are still plenty of businesses hiring developers all over the country (I know of a lot here in MA and keep getting recruiter emails).
You can always get an internship after gradutation, or an entry level role as a developer, or even an entry level role as a non-dev but still in a technical role to give you some experience.
Play your cards right, reach out to several companies and you'll like be fine
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
However, every time there is a great deflating, it is because the market is tired and preparing to embrace something different. So far I've been through several of these, chips in the 80's dot coms in the late 90s, storage in the early 2000's, and now either web 2.0 or social (depending on how you score it). Three threads are competing for the next round, IoT, Machine Learning, and Bioinformatics. CRISPR derived technologies could be in there too but I see a lot of regulatory hurdles headed that way which will be hard to dodge.
The thing to keep in mind though if you are one of the folks getting laid off, it isn't you its them. Seriously. Layoffs happen when the world shifts and your company didn't shift with it. That said, it still sucks to suddenly be out of a job and the temptation will be to grab at the first thing that offers you something. My advice to you is to be thoughtful. Think through what you want to do, what the world is going through, and how you want to look back at your role on that. Then head for the area that best meets those needs.
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
In the early 90s, the next big thing was WebTV, VR, or PDAs. Instead, we got the WWW.
Post dot-com crash, the next big thing was P2P, enterprise software, and the semantic web. Instead, we got social networking.
In 2008, the next big thing was casual games, (micro)blogs, and embeddable widgets. Instead we got mobile and the sharing economy.
Now, the next big thing is wearables, IoT, or AI. And who knows what we're going to get?
Looking at the patterns, it looks like the mistake most people make is to extrapolate the last big thing into the next, not being willing to make a big enough conceptual jump. So enterprise software, the semantic web, and P2P are all offshoots of the WWW and all enjoyed some modest success, but a different offshoot of the WWW (social) connected it to a different area of peoples' lives. Casual games, microblogs, and embeddable widgets are all offshoots of social, but a different offshoot of these social changes was enabled by mobile, which enabled totally different ways of interacting.
[+] [-] tyre|9 years ago|reply
I remember the layoffs right before leaving LivingSocial in 2012. A raw, human catastrophe. Watching friends pack up their things, who had been sold on the culture and vision of what the company could be, was an eye opening experience.
This is why you focus on business fundamentals. Not because it is sexy, not because you can tell ProductHunt about your run rate, and not because you want impress investors.
Because if you fuck up, everyone who depends on you gets fucked.
A few words of advice:
- Before you raise money, ask yourself if that valuation is realistic or aspirational. If it is aspirational, know that you have to reach that valuation without raising another cent, just to break even. Ask yourself if you are default dead or alive.
- Before you start a company, ask if it is solving a problem for customers or your desire "to be an entrepreneur."
- Before you hire anyone, ask if their position is a need to have or a nice have. Like customers, few businesses can afford "nice to haves"
- There is always capital available for businesses with strong fundamentals who are solving real needs.
Layoffs are like throwing up from drinking. Not fun and nearly always your (the founders/managers') fault.
- Pace yourself.
- Build a company you're proud of.
- Build something that people need.
- Growth is great for slide decks, but employees can't use it to pay rent. Don't chase hypergrowth as an end in itself.
Markets can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent, but they can also snap back to reality before you can wake-up.
[+] [-] DarkTree|9 years ago|reply
It's surprising to me that no one starts a company solely for creating an amazing place to work. A great workplace and work would be the product/service, and the employees the consumers of the product/service. Sure, you would have to have paying customers to fuel it, but that could always be secondary in some sense. Right now it seems like the workplace is secondary, so why not swap it? I'm sure there are a nice subset of people who would take less (even half) of their current salary just to work in a place that revolves around them and their experience working.. which is the majority of most of our days.
Viable? Probably not, but it's interesting to think about and trying to imagine what that place would look like for you personally.
[+] [-] melvinmt|9 years ago|reply
The reality is in that most cases, you just change a tagline here and there, recruiters call you, and you just go on and do the next great thing.
The only ones for whom this is a problem are probably the ones with a "nice to have" position and they will have a hard time finding a new job. This sucks, but this is, like you said, also the founder's fault so it's up to the founder to give them a nice severance pay, great recommendations and preferably even introductions to other companies.
[+] [-] je8|9 years ago|reply
The leaders who fuck up and fail are very rarely in the same positions of influence ever again.
The leaders who fuck up and survive (through luck and ruthlessness) are busy inflating the next bubble believing whatever fantasy they cook up about the reason for their survival.
[+] [-] ams6110|9 years ago|reply
Look at the company on the basis of the stuff you list. Are they spending lavishly on "nice to haves?" Do they have any customers? Does their business model seem sane? Talk to someone disinterested to try to understand if you're being attracted to hype or to a really sound idea.
[+] [-] mpdehaan2|9 years ago|reply
When hiring people, hire people that can work in many different roles/projects, think about hiring a person that will improve the business, not just someone to do a particular thing. This is not saying hire marketing/programmer/designers, but rather, know that a software developer can learn anything in a few weeks and is not just a developer in language XYZ.
Hire people when you are really hungry for people and can't handle what you need to do with the number of people you have in a particular area, and you expect that need to be sustained for the long term.
Avoid the idea that you can hire contractors for short term things, when contractors is really a euphism for disposable employees. Push management to hire full time employees.
Make sure there is available revenue and burn rate to cover people. Even if you need help, hiring people when you are in dire straits may be bad for them if finding a new job is difficult. (Still, providing jobs == good).
When projects end, give these folks new jobs and give them time to learn new things, rather than getting rid of them and then hiring new people for the next project that may be booting up in just a few weeks.
Larger companies seem rather guilty of thinking a person just is hired for a department/project, and somehow thinks it's ethical to shut down or shrink whole departments. They should instead look about how to have lots of potential ideas in the pipeline for the future and move people around better.
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlg23|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyclone_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] force_reboot|9 years ago|reply
I don't think founders should go out of their way to avoid risk in order to avoid layoffs, because this would also mean employees would miss out on opportunities too. In fact, employees are already aware of the risks of smaller companies, and adjust their expectations accordingly.
[+] [-] beachstartup|9 years ago|reply
just remember, sometimes that capital comes from customers, not investors.
[+] [-] bladecatcher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eva1984|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lanestp|9 years ago|reply
The job market has been super easy and mediocre workers have been commanding excessive salaries because of various socio-economic forces (high valuations and cost of living). At some point there had to be a cull of bad startups and workers. It's unfortunate for the individuals and companies involved but I think in a couple years we will be through this and it won't have been so bad.
[+] [-] zeemonkee3|9 years ago|reply
Every week you see the nth article posted here on how hiring is broken, from HR filtering to recruiters to interviewing. So how do good developers survive, if their skills and experience are essentially worthless in an opaque hiring process?
One common answer is "networking" but that's a non-developer skill- a mediocre developer could be better at networking (maybe correlated - he's in the bar handing out business cards rather than working on his latest side project). A lot of good people get hurt in a downturn and either leave the industry or end up in low-paying, mediocre jobs just to hang on.
[+] [-] pcurve|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedevil|9 years ago|reply
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/percapita
San Jose #1, that looks good. Although San Francisco....
[+] [-] justinsingh|9 years ago|reply
Anyone living in an expensive city with a layoff seeming imminent should really be thinking on the long term about where it's best for their family to live. Going day to day wondering if you'll be able to keep your house is not a healthy way to live.
[+] [-] tostitos1979|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kinnard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajmurmann|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YZF|9 years ago|reply
The sky is not quite falling yet. There are many parts of the economy that are stalling and the impact on that is felt in companies that sell products into those markets. How things will develop is anyone's guess. I feel "Tech" will keep growing though some areas that perhaps were historically considered "Tech" might shrink. If you look at all the great things we can do with technology I think a lot of stuff is still ahead of us. It's just the natural way that things don't always go smoothly.
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
https://github.com/datahoarder/ca-warn
[+] [-] sickbeard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 20years|9 years ago|reply
I would be interested in hearing from some of you that have been laid off. Have you found another job in the Bay Area or did you have to leave?
[+] [-] dexterdog|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badloginagain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] green_lunch|9 years ago|reply
I've seen the signs and gone through multiple layoffs over the years.
[+] [-] icdxpresso|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m1117|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] client4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordxenu|9 years ago|reply
However, what we don't see is the terms of the layoff that the employees are forced into. Generally, employees don't have a say in what they get in their layoff package, and many times it is not a fair amount in comparison to the work they do and in comparison to what management is getting. In addition, employees generally have to sign a legal document that prevents them from defaming the work practices/management/etc of the company. Either they sign and get their package, or they get nothing at all. I'm basing this on accounts from personal friends who have worked in startups, and although I'm speaking from an anecdotal point of view, I don't see what other data points we can draw from given that no one is allowed to speak out legally.
The bottom line is, we will always be screwed over since we lack basic worker protections. We can talk about bad management and how that can be solved, but ultimately I think each and every one of us need to collectively force a set of protections for workers. Either through law or by forming a strong collective. Until then, this cycle will continue.
[+] [-] motolouda|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grimmdude|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliotec|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisper|9 years ago|reply
Although, I guess finding a job might be easier since I am willing to relocate etc.
[+] [-] ndesaulniers|9 years ago|reply
My advice is start working on a personal project that you can show you're knowledgeable and passionate about. Differentiate yourself from your peers.
I really loved iTunes, but wanted to be able to stream my music wherever I was. I built an iTunes clone as a web app. Simple web design, CRUD app, but the fanciness was what I learned about codecs, transcoding, and streaming. https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/audiostream/blob/master/r...
The folks who interviewed me at Mozilla loved it and hired me. My current boss at Google loved my technical blog.
[+] [-] pnathan|9 years ago|reply
* Don't be afraid to contact Google, Microsoft, or other large employers.
* Press the flesh: go to industry meetups, visit with people who are in the industry, work the old professor network, try to find alumni who might give your resume an extra look. I can NOT stress this enough, by the way. Getting your face in front of someone who can hire you - or who knows someone who can hire you - is basically the best way to get hired.
* Get a job this year in college related to your degree.
* If you're a coder, put up your favorite non-class codebase on github and have that link in your resume. My controversial opinion: portfolios are a very strong signal that the candidate is to be given at least a phone screen.
* Don't take extra classes when you could be networking; applying for jobs; etc.
[+] [-] Infinitesimus|9 years ago|reply
There are still plenty of businesses hiring developers all over the country (I know of a lot here in MA and keep getting recruiter emails).
You can always get an internship after gradutation, or an entry level role as a developer, or even an entry level role as a non-dev but still in a technical role to give you some experience.
Play your cards right, reach out to several companies and you'll like be fine
[+] [-] mulcahey|9 years ago|reply
There are still TONS of places hiring that just aren't big sexy brands.
[+] [-] imron|9 years ago|reply