After received an email about Amazon cancelled their hiring event “Amazon day” on account of the Tech Industry Hiring Freeze, I felt quite depressed. Although I am doing by best to keep myself motivated and think optistically, it has became harder and harder to stay that way as I received more and more “Thank you for your interest” mails and information about the current situation in the tech industry. This is more depressing for a international student, as we only have limited time to find a job or else we need to leave the states.
Looking at the news, Twitter has laid off many of its software engineer, similar rumors also came from the tech giant Meta (update: it did.), where thousands of employers might also get laid off. The future of new grads as well as those searching for a tech job looks bleak in the United States.
How about finding a job back in my hometown? Taiwan has been a properous place for tech industry, especially for hardware related fields. However, I personally view that option as a last resort for the following reasons. Firstly, the salary difference between working at US and Taiwan is enormous. For example, job postings that I found on Linkedin, Indeed and other websites generally provide salary ranging from at least \$50K to more than \$100K. On the other hand in Taiwan, new grads are paid around \$1.2K (NTD \$38K) for undergrads and \$1.4K (NTD \$45K) for masters monthly, which translates to around \$15K and \$17K for a year. The difference is humongous that trying out everything to stay in the US will be an apparent move.
Moreover, layoffs and hiring freeze may look bad in the US, it may look even worse in other countries. At least for those companies that are based in the US. Frankly speaking, I have never been involved in human resource or large businesses, but from the arguments that I have heard from those working in related fields and those working in offices overseas of an US based enterprise, laying off oversea employers is very likely to be more aggressive. As these companies mostly having their core business and the main hub of developement in the US, offices that are located abroad will not be essential as those back in their homeland. Therefore, when a decline in revenue happenes and companies went to cut down their human resource spending, employers in those offices abroad will be the first effected as the damage will be minimum.
But what can I do to fight against this hiring freeze? I have pondered the question but nothing specific came to mind. The best I could do is to continue what I am doing right now, keep sending out job applications, do more Leetcode questions and work on some new things. For me, this new thing probably will be some web related field, as building web application is probably the most demanded for the time being. Even though I highly dislike web and any thing it relates to, such as those bloated desktop apps build on chronium (e.g. Electron apps, they are overrated bloatware). But that is just my “humble” opinion, and if I want to survive this wave of hiring freeze, I will learn it.