Opinion : Being at a higher level is vulnerable to Layoffs

As AI comes to coding arena, so no need to pay fat salary to sde3 folks..a fresher sde1 guy can deploy a clean code with the help of ChatGPT.

I'm at the highest level, just did shrooms. No possibility of me being laid off because my design skills just went through the roof.

Depends on the company's employee bloat profile tbh. 1 SDE-3 can definitely be many times more impactful and productive than a bunch of SDE-1s. But if the company has more SDE-3s than required (if SDE-3 level scope projects are limited), they will fire SDE-3s.

😂 It doesn’t it all depends upon your level vs TC.
If you are above Market reference point then highly likely to get your name in next list.

Also, there are other few factors such as WFO policy, SVP not in good terms with your skip etc.

Not necessarily. While the goal for layoffs is to cut costs, the new structure post-layoff has to align with future strategy. Each company has a unique situation and the outcome at various levels varies by a great degree. Most companies have roughly a pyramid structure. Depending on the quantum of cost to be cut, you can expect a slice of pyramid to go away. This typically may mean 1-2 VP/DoE, handful of EMs and proportionally SDEs across the ladder.

Unfortunately, this was true at FAANG companies. People are higher levels were likely to get laid off as that is a bigger cost for companies and middle management were quite bloated :/

These layoffs makes no sense there are literally so called (non-tech) managers who are nothing but waste to company resource and many people like these can be easily kicked out

Related: https://www.teamblind.com/us/s/ZorOeBUc

This opinion is 100% true

This was true across all companies

If salary and thus cost cutting is the primary concern then yes