- Much of Big Tech’s workforce is temporary, but full-time startup jobs aren’t so permanent, either.
- A tech contractor who got laid off from the startup Oyster says job security doesn’t exist anymore.
- In less than a year, Oyster went from celebrating $150 million in funding to conducting layoffs.
In spring 2022, a tech employee who was previously contracted to work in marketing at a large tech company found what he believed to be his ticket off the temp-gig hamster wheel. He landed a full-time job at Oyster, a human-resources tech startup that had recently become a unicorn, meaning it had been valued at $1 billion or more.
But after being lured to the startup by remote-work opportunities and promised pay raises twice a year, he was laid off in January, less than a year after he thought his time as a temp worker had come to an end.
In his view, both startups and Big Tech companies have ample drawbacks in today’s job environment.
“Tech is kind of brutal,” he said. “There’s a lot worse places to work, but yeah, it’s not great for workers.”
Much of Big Tech’s workforce consists of contractors who hop from company to company in periodic stints. For these temporary workers, job security has long been illusory.
But the former startup employee, who spoke with Insider on condition of anonymity because he’s not authorized to publicly talk about his time at the company, doesn’t believe a full-time role at a startup is much more secure these days than being a temporary worker.
Now he’s back working as a contractor at a public tech company, where he believes his role is likely more secure.
‘Happy to break out of that contractor cycle’
When he was a contractor, he sought out a new role as he approached his second work anniversary. He had a strong hunch that his time at the company was almost up, since he had seen only one contractor get hired as a full-time employee.
A marketing position at Oyster caught his interest, with the job listing touting the company’s strong dedication to remote work as a way to open up job opportunities to people around the globe. When he got the job in March 2022, he was thrilled.
“I was happy to break out of that contractor cycle,” he said.
Oyster was expanding its head count rapidly. About a month after he joined, the startup announced its Series C funding, and within the span of two months, his department had doubled in size. The vibe among his colleagues fully reflected the startup boom. It certainly didn’t hurt, he said, that the company gave its employees raises twice a year.
He did notice a few cracks underneath the surface. For instance, while the company professed a commitment to eliminating salary disparities according to geography, he said he and his colleagues noticed significant gaps in pay depending on where employees worked. In a statement, an Oyster spokesperson said the “compensation policy is not location agnostic, but it enables us to offer highly competitive compensation based on local costs of living and salary norms across disciplines.”
Overall, though, Oyster offered good salaries and benefits, he said, so there wasn’t much to complain about — until the company canceled a previously scheduled pay-raise and promotion cycle. That’s when, he said, the mood within the company began to shift.
The ax finally falls
The former Oyster employee said that even though the mood at the company had soured over the past few months, being laid off still felt abrupt. He said he later found out that his direct supervisor’s manager hadn’t even known about the job cuts until the day they happened.
He said the company locked him out of most of his work accounts within hours and gave him two weeks of paid time off to last until his official end date, January 20. Though executives spoke of trying to place employees whose roles were eliminated into other positions, there were few options for him, he said.
An Oyster spokesperson said the company offered all impacted staff the opportunity to apply for any role opening in the first half of 2023, before becoming publicly posted, which included positions in the sales, legal, product, and customer success teams. A number of impacted staff found a new role and stayed at Oyster resulting in only 8% of staff leaving the company, the spokesperson said.
But the former employee said he was happy with his severance package, which gave him more than enough money to last through his job search, which was just over a month long.
Now he’s a contractor again, but doesn’t necessarily see the temporary role as a bad thing. Oddly enough, he said, contractors may be more likely to be spared as tech companies slash costs, since they aren’t given benefits such as health insurance.
“I don’t think the general public realizes with these Silicon Valley tech companies just how much of their workforce is load-bearing contractors,” he said.
Have a story to share about your time at a startup? Send April a message securely through Signal at 646-287-8761 from a nonwork device. Her DMs are also open on Twitter at @aprjoy.
