The tech industry is going wild rn, with layoffs/hiring freezes in literally every other big company.

Twitter - 50% layoff
Stripe - 14% layoff
Apple - Hiring freeze
Amazon - same
Meta, Google, Microsoft- Slow hiring & cutting staff
Snap - 20% layoff

But why? Some thoughts 🧵

Basically speaking, companies hired too many people between 2020-2022, despite a significant drop in operating profit and slowing ad revenues.

Google hired 26% more workers in the third quarter than the second
Meta's employee count has been growing 28% year-over-year

And now that meta is pouring billions of dollars into the metaverse, layoffs were expected.

Apple and Amazon also hired a lot https://dhr.wtf/oFtT

And now, with each stock going down, many of these companies have no option but to step back and cut costs, including cutting down staff.

Whether this is a good thing or bad, I'm not sure.

These "big tech" giants hire at crazy rates, much more than most companies.
They hired so many in recent years, even though growth is slow, now they don't need (or well, can't afford) more employees

BUT, even though big tech isn't earning as much as they used to earlier (https://dhr.wtf/jOav), they NEED to stay competitive.

This means that specialised tech professionals will STILL be hired. AI, cloud, cybersecurity is critical talent for these companies.

Throughout the broader economy, meanwhile, tech hiring remains robust. Tech unemployment dipped to 2.1 percent in September, defying the increasingly grim headlines about economic calamity. (https://dhr.wtf/kVIO)


Let's talk about the 50% twitter staff -

- Twitter staff does not like Elon. 500 employees left BEFORE the acquisition
- ~30% of the workers that have left Twitter in the past three months have gone to Google or Meta
https://dhr.wtf/wa1F

SOO that's it lol. This was really different than what I really do and did require quite a bit of research so it would be cool if you can follow me @dhravyashah (I will make tweets like this more often, it's really fun)

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/DhravyaShah/tao3ldq

Is the tech industry really in hiring hell?

Hackathons are a great way to meet new people and learn!

I recently took part in the @frey_hacks hackathon.
Here's what I learnt (It's a wild story.)

Finding hackathons, making teams, thinking of what to make - What went right and what didn't.
Thread🧵

Finding and choosing hackathons

To find hackathons, here are a couple of websites
- devpost
- MLH
- Github Education (events tab)

I found out about freyhacks in the @aviyelHQ discord server. 

Since you're taking part in a hackathon that's gonna take a couple days of your time, you NEED to find good hackathons that YOU WANT to participate in.

Also take into consideration what stack has to be used and if you can come up with ideas beforehand; 

You also need to make sure that the prizes are good enough so you have to motivation to create an amazing hack!

Take into consideration the sponsors, more sponsors = good but at least one big sponsor should be there

Alright - back to freyhacks - The topic was "Summer". We had to create something related to summer. 

I didn't have a team yet, so I went through the # find-teammates channel and found Matt - I teamed up with him

Now, we wanted 2 more teammates - so I posted in the Aviyel discord server - and got one. That teammate kinda forced the team to use GOlang (which none of us knew) because it's a cool language.

I spent the night before the hackathon learning Golang. Also took the laptop to school so I could utilise the free time.

to be honest, Golang wasn't as difficult, but learning it one day, was. I didn't even take a bath that day.

Alright. Hackathon day. We had to come up with an idea. The guy was like, let's create a chat app. 
I didn't quite like the idea tbh, but I went with it, because he told me he had won every hackathon he had participated in...

The guy never replied to our texts after that. I decided to start writing the backend in Golang by myself, and did that the entire first day. It was quite difficult, especially because it was really my first golang project, and i was struggling to implement the websockets

After some tutorials and stuff, I managed to do it anyway. I didn't care about safety - anyone could create as many "rooms" as they wanted, and anyone could delete anyone's rooms 😵‍💫. The judges didn't know this

There was no authentication, no database nothing.

Matt tried to help - even though he didn't know any go either. I then started work on the frontend (I suck at frontend)
Now the major challenge was - how am I even supposed to create designs?! I never do that! And how am i supposed to keep it within the "summer" theme??!?!

I created the frontend using NextJS - It wasn't that difficult to make the UI itself, but the design, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I just used discord's colors to create a basic UI, added options to create groups etc. Then tried to create more summer-like colors 💀 I'll be honest, the frontend is really not that great, just functional

We marketed the app as "Find like-minded people to talk to this summer"

The guy still wasn't replying! It was our last day. Another person (they were a beginner) asked us if they could join our team. Me and Matt agreed, and since the app itself was almost done, I asked them if they could create the submission video by any chance

They created a pretty good video - but wait.

Remember I told you, anyone can create rooms with any name? 💀 Someone created a room with the name "Hent*i". And the teammate didn't notice it when making the video. 😂😂😂😂 

We submitted the project just in time.

While Freyhacks were streaming our video on twitch, a lot of people noticed "Hent*ai" and messaged us that we created an inappropriate app BRUH lmao

Achievements we're proud of

I created a "Fully anonymous", multi-channel chat app in 2 days with its backend in a completely foreign language that i learnt just one day before the hackathon started, with basically no teammates.

What went wrong:
Everything. 

The idea wasn't good at all
Teammate ghosted us
the only 2 teammates left - didn't know what we were doing
Frontend looks horrendous
We (obviously) didn't win.

What went right

I learnt GOlang
I decided to get really good at frontend
I met Matt, who was really helpful throughout the process
I realised that I shouldn't trust someone based on authority. even if they have won all the hackathons they have participated in

Honestly, I think i underperformed. I could have done much better even if the idea was just better, or won something if I was just a little better at design and frontend. But well, now I know what to improve so I can work on it

What is the T3 web development stack and why YOU should use it for your next project!

This is why I think the T3 stack is literally the best stack for any website. Easy, superfast ⚡and super powerful.

Thanks to @t3dotgg from @pingdotgg for the creating it

↓ Read 🧵

Before I start, I'd like to mention Nexxel's GitHub repository to create a t3 app with just one command. 

If you end up liking the stack after this thread, follow me on twitter and make sure to ⭐ this repo and follow nexxel https://github.com/nexxeln/create-t3-app

First, let's understand the stack itself.
It's called t3 because of the 3 main Ts:
- tRPC
- Typescript
- Tailwind

along with the amazing-ness of
- Next.js
- Prisma
- NextAuth.js

There are a lot more recommendations I'll talk about in the last tweet of this thread

🧵 1/8

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝘆𝗽𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗶𝗽𝘁? 
Javascript is hard. what makes it harder, is, the inability to catch errors, and the absence of type-safety. For complex projects, this becomes a HUGE problem. 
Use Typescript. It might "waste" time initially, but a must-have for the long run.
🧵 2/8

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘁𝗥𝗣𝗖?
tRPC is a library to build fully typesafe APIs - from client to server by sharing the types between the two, which helps developers to catch errors early before building.

My friend Nexxel has a fantastic blog on it -worth a read! 
🧵 3/8
https://blog.nexxel.dev/trpc

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘄𝗶𝗻𝗱
Many people HATE tailwind. And I do understand. It makes the HTML look cluttered. But trust me - I'll never, ever write plain CSS again. It makes the development so much faster, and creates a kind of "flow" while giving all the design freedom of CSS
🧵 4/8

Now, let's get to Next.js. here are some bullet points.- Easy to learn
- ⚡ Amazingly fast
- SSG, SSR support
- Auto-optimised images
- Amazing SEO
- API routes

@freeCodeCamp has an amazing article worth a read 

🧵 5/8

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/why-you-should-learn-next-js-as-a-react-developer/

Why Prisma

first, what is prisma?
It's an object-relational mapper for NodeJS. Instead of writing plain SQL, it creates a typesafe client to send SQL queries to your database. works with all SQL databases.

This means, you have code suggestions and fewer errors

🧵 6/8

And NextAuth - it's basically the best authentication solution for NextJS. It's easy to use, lets you choose your own providers, and is very secure.
🧵 7/8

But that's not it - There are some (many) recommendations I'd like to include.

For fetching and querying, use React-Query
For Analytics, use @PlausibleHQ 
For Web hosting, use @vercel 
For infrastructure hosting, use @Railway 
🧵 8/8

Ok now that's it 😄 
Again, if you end up liking this thread, make sure to follow me @DhravyaShah and Theo @t3dotgg on Twitter, and Nexxel on Github. 

Share by retweeting the first tweet ❤️ 

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/DhravyaShah/T76ssgN