[mathgeek]

> It’s a tough pill to swallow but it is possible to get offers, but they might not be at the salary levels from 2-3 years ago.

This goes both ways. People teams will prefer to pay less than they have before, and engineers should usually ask for more than they currently make.

Anecdotally as a hiring manager, I would always encourage folks to have savings to cover the time it takes to avoid settling for lower salaries if they lose their role. The folks not making that much already should be moving up to those “lower paying” positions.

[scarface_74]

This isn’t mathematically logical. Every month that you are out of a job, you need to make 8% more once you are hired to make up the difference in loss pay.

While I wouldn’t have taken just any bullshit low paying full time job after getting Amazoned (full time in the cloud consulting division), I was more than willing to take a contract job and just to keep interviewing while I’m working - especially now that jobs and interviews are remote.

[dangus]

Well, not quite.

Laid off people do get paid unemployment benefits, and they also get the non-monetary benefit of not working. I don’t really consider that lost money to be 1:1 in value when considering you aren’t beholden to a work schedule.

If you have a working partner I would say it’s a no brainer to take your time. Jump on their healthcare and chill.

Oh yeah, if you have kids, you can put childcare costs on hold so you aren’t really losing 100% of your salary when you’re put out of work.

[scarface_74]

In my previous state of residency GA, unemployment maxes out at $375 a week. In Florida my current state, it’s $275 a week

To put that in context, the day I found out I was being Amazoned and a week before my last day, I reached out to a former CTO that couldn’t afford to hire me. But he did need some work/troubleshooting done in my area of specialty and I billed at $135 an hour and that was cheap. Trust me, I know how much AWS ProServe charges for consulting.

Even run of the mill enterprise dev staff augmentation W2 contracts pay $70/hour.

[selimthegrim]

Wait until you hear about Louisiana.

[mathgeek]

Apologies, but can you clarify what “this” is when you say something isn’t logical? Unclear to me if you mean taking a lower paying job, choosing to stay unemployed, using savings to cover income while unemployed, something around contracting, something else perhaps.

Contracting between full time positions can certainly replace the need for savings, if that ties into what you were arguing for.

[scarface_74]

“This” is holding out for the perfect paying job instead of taking the first thing that comes along temporarily and keep looking.

Say I’m looking for a job paying $200K and it takes me 3 months to find it. Now just to make $200K over the year, I need to have a job paying $266K.

Why hold out for the job, go through savings, and then when I finally get the job need to replenish my savings instead of just sucking up my pride taking a lower paying job and keep looking?

In my case, when I got Amazoned with a more than $40K severance package. My goal was to have some money coming in before I had to touch it.

I was willing to accept any old enterprise dev remote contract to keep the money flowing. I said in a previous reply that I did spam jobs left and right as a backup plan.

I ended up getting two offers with the type of job I wanted and my desired compensation target before even my 10 days of paid PTO (on top of the severance) was depleted. But that was dumb luck and having contributed to a few official open source “AWS solutions”

[lylejantzi3rd]

> But that was dumb luck and having contributed to a few official open source “AWS solutions”

Was it dumb luck, though? Your situation reminds me of the concept of "luck surface area." You contributed to "a few" open source AWS solutions. You've said in the past that you network well, so I imagine you have lots of other little things you do that get your name out there.

This is something I've been horribly negligent of this far in my career. I thought it would be enough just to do good work and that I would be recognized for that work via osmosis or something.

[scarface_74]

Maybe?

I knew the reputation of Amazon before I started working there and did start laying the groundwork from day one for my next job.

It’s just part of what I do to always be prepared to look for another jobs