My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %)
Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense.
After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm. Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
You can be somewhere for 10 years. have glowing performance reviews, feel like you're making a difference, think it'll never happen to you, not even be aware the company is in shit, and then... tomorrow you're gone.
Your job is NOT safe.
I see what you are saying. I am an engineer-turned-EM and you don't know me, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt:
Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
I think a better way to put it is:
"A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. You must rely on yourself"
This line of thinking still means diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work, keep doing interviews from time to time, spend some cycles thinking about "what would I do if I where to build my own startup", etc. But it will not put you in the "oh my I need to accept whatever they offer me right now" path.
Especially on FAANG companies, it very easy to "get lost in the technical work" and to "offshore your life's direction to the company", so to speak. If you think this might be happening to you, I recommend involving someone else - a coach, a therapist, a friend, a brother or a priest. Whatever works for you. Someone from outside the company. It might be scary and uncomfortable at first, but taking the driver's seat of your life is worth it.
I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical.
The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.
But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.
People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.
This is just unrealistic. When layoffs happens, whole departments can get cut. They don’t differentiate performers.
Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.
Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.
The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.
But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.
Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
>Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern.
Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?
Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age.
This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable.
Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
There are a lot of decent programming jobs anywhere in the world too, we might not be FAANG but jobs are decent enough to raise a family and build a house.
> build a house
Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is something like 500k+.
I live in Southeast Asia, cost of living here is low.
I live in Europe :(
I agree, all of those fit in my (admittedly lazy) "and such" part of the statement. Loads of jobs for all ages
Translation:
To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.
Not at all.
Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries.
East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.
The problem is that salaries above 100K are important to live securely in many places in the US.
This would be a 66% pay cut for me. As in, it would take 3 years of that pay to match one of my current year’s pay. Investing aggressively and retiring at 50 seems like a smarter option.
Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
Perhaps in the hyper inflated SV economy, but in the rest of the world you don't get to retire until you've reached the normal retirement age (minus a few years perhaps), and that makes it quite natural to see newly employed software engineers who are in their mid or even late 50s. I've worked with plenty of them.
I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
Once you get into late 50s/60s, I know quite a few people in tech at that point who have had reasonably well-paying jobs (though certainly not top-level FAANG salaries) who have presumably managed their finances well who are pretty much ready to wind down at that point--whether forced or otherwise. They mostly haven't classically retired but they're working part-time on often IT-adjacent types of projects.
People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
Are you saying that there is no ageism in the tech industry at all ?
Well no, I clearly wasn't saying there is no ageism at all. I was taking issue with the comment regarding developers having to leave tech over 50 years old.
Within the AI bubble, I think there is lots of ageism, but in real world mission-critical i.e. "serious stuff" there is plenty of jobs for experienced engineers.
There absolutely is ageism, but it's not as widespread as many younger devs seem to think. It also tends to be concentrated in a particular segment of our industry. Big picture, there isn't enough ageism to lose sleep about it.
To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.
Must retire? No, of course not.
I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.
For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.
But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.
Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.
This is totally rediculous, I see plenty of 50+ in tech now and they're going to become more common over time.
Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.
How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age? I'm in my late 30s, starting to feel fatigue in dealing with nasty little problems on a daily basis. I can say whether an approach is good or bad, but actually coding the stuff with all the modern ephemeral frameworks and libraries is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I would want to afford to do "recreational programming" on greenfield projects, unbound by time and business requirements, but it is a luxury.
50 year old here. You replace reflex intelligence with applying wisdom.
I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.
FAANG jobs and organisational structures are not the norm across the world. The ratio between "people fixing stuff" and "old wisemen" is heavily skewed towards the former.
No doubt on the latter. I write a lot of "wisdom based code" to "fix stuff." Ideally before it needs fixing. :)
Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)
Good for you, but you are in a privileged position. Over here in grim Eastern Europe and outside a capital, your best chance is to find a remote job that doesn't actually suck and has longer-term prospects. Climbing to a managerial position means controlling people and being in touch with other managers posting bullshit on LinkedIn. Nobody will hire you to just write "wisdom-based" proof of concepts or whatever.
Sounds like you could be having health problems or just depression. You might mention this to your doctor at your next check up. What you describing doesn’t sound like normal aging for someone in their 30s.
I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.
What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.
This got me thinking, I'm wondering how this will interact with the fact that technologically, we're getting increasingly better abstractions. So there's less pressure to learn what happens physically, the way that folks like Wozniak had to.
Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.
We are getting more abstractions, not necessarily better ones. I much prefer working with people who figure out how things work under abstractions rather than relying on them blindly.
The most powerful abstractions are typically not free. The rate of performance improvement from improvements in hardware has slowed down and might continue slowing down. Thus, the pressure to learn what happens behind various abstractions might actually increase, if advantageous performance improvements can primarily be obtained by peeling back the layers of abstraction at the cost of some development efficiency, since you can't just wait a couple of years for hardware to develop to a point where it can handle your inefficient abstraction anymore.
Unlikely. Some people really just are better at low level than high level (and vice versa.) Further, I would say anyone who started after say... '97 never needed to have that layer, and '87 may be true too. The true pressure hasn't existed in over 25 years and yet we still have low level expertise because embedded will continue to be a use case.
Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
>Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.
Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.
Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.
If you've built up a 1.2M / year lifestyle on a 1.2M / year income you've made some terrible mistakes, I doubt some internet advice is going to solve that.
>If you've built up a 1.2M / year lifestyle on a 1.2M / year income you've made some terrible mistakes
You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.
I know, that's easy to laugh at. And new army recruits spend their "signing bonus" on (so-called) muscle cars like the Mustang and Charger.
I think a token of "I've made it!" is fine. Maybe we all need that once in our life.
The problem is if it persists. (Worst, if somehow gambling, etc. becomes involved.)
>And new army recruits spend their "signing bonus"
You get a signing bonus for the US militrary? Damn that's pretty sweet.
Only if you can’t afford it. If you’ve built up income streams to support it you’ve made a bunch of great decisions and inter generational wealth.
For anyone making this kind of money at an early age, don't spend it... invest it.
If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.
Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.
Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.
This is good advice. But it's worth pointing out that by default many of these people are heavily invested in GOOG. And those that aren't are probably heavily invested in market instruments propped up by the GOOG price.
So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.
I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.
If you're living this way, feel free to reach out. I have loads of advice you don't want to but need to hear.
One of the pieces of career advice I've given my kids is: when your pay goes up, be very cautious about changing your lifestyle to match it. Going up that ladder is easy -- going back down is painful.
Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.
Most devs aren't on $800-1.2M TC.
You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.
Legality just isn’t a concern when it comes to big companies. I am convinced that if someone looks at history from far away in the future, they will compress feudalism and industrial capitalism together.
These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.
Serfs being bound to the land, and power being directly held by those who provided military service are pretty stark differences between Feudalism and Capitalism. Not even Marx equated the two systems.
This is literally RTO /s
Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".
Agreed, but highly doubt the effect is nearly as dramatic as claimed. If the effect is to the extent that engineers in their 40s can never make the money they made in their 30s, that would be trivial to prove. Even a big corp would have significant trouble defending such a statistic.
Ah yes, nothing illegal ever happens in the US.
Being ready to retire at 50 would be a good thing, but getting laid off in your 40's is not a death sentence. I'm 63 now, still working as an engineer, and I was laid off in my 40's, twice. In addition to the emergency fund, another great way to build some security is to keep learning new stuff. In my experience the older engineers who get into trouble are the ones who try to rest on what they know and inhabit a niche they've built for themselves. In our business knowledge evaporates and niches crumble.
If knowledge evaporates, maybe it wasn’t useful knowledge after all. Likewise, if a niche disappears, it wasn’t a good niche. Good long term strategy in terms of developing your career technically comes down to identifying knowledge and niches that aren’t going away any time soon. A person can have more or less insight when it comes to this.
The last three companies I've worked for prefer hiring older workers. Well, they're not looking for age -- they're looking for very refined skills and experience -- but those thing are highly correlated with age.
In FAANG and hot startups, maybe.
In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.
To be a 50 year old engineer you would have had to start your career in the 90s. There weren't 10% of the number of SWE in the 90s as now. That's why you see the profession skew so young. I have seen no evidence of older engineers having trouble finding work.
I can't speak for being let go past 40, but every place I've worked (including a startup) have had IC developers over 40, and all but one over 50, working there.
This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.
I don't think this necessarily holds in the world of remote work. At least for me, relationships are very surface level. Almost no friendly banter, limited 2 second "How was your weekend?" before meetings that no one cares about. Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen.
This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants.
I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.
Me and one of my employees are going through almost identical and seriously difficult personal times. Our company and the people within it have really rallied around us, providing personal and professional support in ways I could never have imagined.
I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful.
We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it.
Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.
Unicorns exist but in the job search it’s a crap shoot to find one. Nearly impossible to identify in an interview setting and likely only through world of mouth.
Impossible to diagnose during an interview… because it depends on you as well. Caring is a transient thing, I’ve had crap employees, and now we have an awesome “soldered” team, which every previous employee could have created… but didn’t.
I’m not saying you have total control over it… but it depends on how people interact.
That sounds fine to me. I always found working with people much more fun than pretending to be friends with them.
I get this, but I will admit to missing the camaraderie I got from working in person with people. I miss grabbing lunch with someone or a drink after work. But thats in the past now, and a job is just a place I exchange life hours for dollars now.
I've said it many times both here and in "real life" - teams filled with any sizable proportion of consults (15-20% and up I would say) are one of the clearest, brightest red flags you could see.
I've seen first-hand organizations shift from 100% employed teams to being majority consultants, and the majority of those consultants on 1-2 year contracts then leaving. Code quality goes to absolute shit. The name of the game is spending the first half of your contract not getting fired and the second half looking for the next contract. Zero documentation. Refusing to do turnover meetings. Not showing up for the last day/week of the contract because their next contract wanted them to start earlier so they didn't care if they got paid for this one or not. Most egregiously someone just brought in their next contract's laptop into our office with over a month left on their contract.
None of this happens with employees. Sure you'll occasionally have someone quit with minimal or no notice but that's the exception. We had to basically assume that any time we got in the last month of the contract was a bonus. Consultants work for their recruiting firm, not for your org, and they behave accordingly.
I think change in the remote work world is that we can no longer take these casual relationships for granted, or assume that they will just come into being. In this new world, we have to be intentional about building them.
Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.
In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.
I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.
This has long been true to some degree when you work with people scattered around the world. But it's a legit concern that, overall, we're probably developing much shallower relationships with the people we work with compared to when we were together in-person more of the time. Doubtless there are people who prefer just tuning out co-workers as much as possible. But it's reasonable to ask how it will affect many companies in the longer run when many co-worker relationships are very surface compared to pre-COVID.
That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org.
Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.
Agreed. So much in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look at your employer as an exploitative user of your life, then that is what you will get out of it. You will continually feel raw about things that happen, imputing mal intent where there is none. If you imagine upper management as sinister mustache-twirling villains, you are going to despise everything they say and do, regardless of its merit.
There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.
No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.
A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.
The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.
"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.
It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything.
As others have said, the employer-employee relationship is first and foremost a business relationship, i.e. transactional: you work and they pay you. When that relationship doesn't work any more for one side or the other, it ends.
It does often happen, of course, that professional friendships or even personal friendships develop. You are, after all, spending a lot of time with your co-workers. But don't think your good relationships or friendships will help if the business decides a layoff is necessary.
This is good and realistic advice. Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders and ultimately they will do what this necessary to make that happen. Layoffs are just another (unfortunate) business transaction.
I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.
Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.
I wouldn't put "loyalty is dead" so starkly. But certainly lifetime employment from either side of the fence is absolutely not the norm. I've generally stayed at places a reasonably long time (arguably too long once or twice) but I still haven't made it much past a decade.
In Japan, there are stories of business men killing themselves because they have to lay off workers. The cultural norm there is that you’re employed for life - either your life or the companies, and both parties act to ensure that’s a long life. Maybe a little dramatic, but the cultural sentiment is there.
Google is cutting a few hundred R&D jobs out of their 180K employees, and countless ventures. These people could be repositioned, these people could be absorbed elsewhere. Google is wildly profitable, with record profits, which by definition means what they’re not falling on hard times.
Loyalty is dead.
Loyalty is absolutely dead in the employer => employee direction. The second it becomes financially advantageous to have layoffs or to fire one person in particular, it will happen. Your direct manager, maybe even your skip, might fight for you to stay. But if someone 6 levels above you decides your time has come, that's the end of it. The test for whether loyalty exists in this direction is the answer to "you can keep this person at the cost of a negative financial impact for your organization - you will not make this money up in the medium term." What does your manager say? Your skip? The CEO?
There is absolutely still some loyalty in the other direction. Lots of people here would say it's misplaced. When it works out for you (cachet in the org, seniority, whatever) it can pay off, but for lots of people it only gets them burned when they get laid off with outdated skills in outdated tech because they were a "company man" for the last decade.
Companies pay taxes, operate in a community, and employ people. Shareholders may not care about such trifles... until the race to rot is complete.
I don’t know why we keep repeating the “companies exist to make profit for shareholders” line.
It’s barely real, it’s hardly law, and the more we say it, the worse companies will act because we’ve all accepted fate.
Companies exist in our society. They don’t have a right to profits. Any profits is a result of patronage and goodwill of the population. We can change laws, and cultural norms, and worker and environmental protections. We don’t need to be victims of greed like it’s some inevitable consequence of capitalism.
The classic comeback for this is to refer to management as "overhead."
A company is not your friend, or your enemy. It's a machine. See it as such, use it as such.
A particular person above you in the management chain may actually be your friend. It does not mean that that person would be able to protect you from a layoff; that could be a conflict of interest. That person might give you an earlier warning so that you could start looking around ahead of time. That person could give you a glowing review and references for prospective employers. That person might introduce you to someone who might be interested in hiring you. But that person operates the machine, and plays by the rules of the machine, to which you have agreed when you have signed your offer.
Build good relationships with coworkers; this can be helpful, and is just more pleasant. But don't try to build a relationship with a company; you can't.
I read it as: do the Barr minimum to meet expectations and nothing more because if they want to fire you your transformative impact is worth nothing
That's a bad strategy unless your highest priority is to avoid work. If you want to make more money or have more stability, you will absolutely do better on average if you do more than the minimum. While high performance does not guarantee security, and management doesn't always make the best choices about who to let go, the "do the minimum" people do tend to be the first to go. You don't have to outrun the bear, you have to outrun the slowest guy running from the bear.
A key thought as well, in my experience:
- never assume that just because it’s obvious to you (and your coworkers and boss) that it would be really stupid to lay you off or fire you, that they wouldn’t do it anyway.
A lot of what is going on IMO is burnout and disconnection from the on the ground reality at the executive layer.
That means short sighted, stupid, long term self harming decisions.
But just because what someone is doing is clearly stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. A hard lesson to learn sometimes.
Or, quite simply, the performance of an employee or division is not the only determination in layoffs. You could lay off half of teams and fill them in with ostensibly high performers in other teams, and then be worse off than before because the high performer was dependent on context and fit.
Or, you may have a division that is profitable, but it takes an outsized attention in the organization relative to its profitability and the loss of revenue is made up for focus in the rest of the organization. (Ideally, you would find a way to spin that off or sell it, but there are times where the tight integration makes this unfeasible.)
And yes, there is disconnection from the on-the-ground reality too. (and all sorts of things) - but this all goes to say that layoffs, when executed, often are not correlated with individual performance.
In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.
This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.
Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).
You're both right. To be fair, it reads like he was saying
in service of
I understand this rationale, but personally I have an extremely hard time disconnecting from work. It sucks 40 hours a week, which is most of my "alive" time, also sucks my brain stamina. Finding life outside of work is not easy, and considering that your main "alive time" activity is something that shouldn't be a pleasure, and is a f*cking battle, feels bad.
A full time job is generally under 2,000 hours a year while you’re awake ~5,840 (16 * 365) hours a year.
Overtime, long commutes, and thinking about the job at home can make it seem like all you do is work, but it’s possible to spend 40 hours a week having fun while you also have a full time job. Remember use your vacation and sick days, and say no to excessive unpaid overtime.
Most people don't have nearly inexaustible amount of energy, so they need to rest and recuperate (merely just sleeping will not do it for them). So, if they have a demanding job, the 40 hours of week of having fun outside of work will largely consist of vegging on the coach in front of some TV show, or some similar low-energy activity.
People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.
That's perhaps true, but the lack of energy is also simultaneously true. Just a tougher-than-usual week at work can give me crippling headaches from pushing myself to the brink. The time after work is definitely spent recuperating, so that I can fight another day.
No, it’s definitely true. Other things can be true as well, of course.
But if you’re not accomplishing the things you want to accomplish you should deeply consider the possibility that you’re lying to yourself before you accept that your circumstances are at fault.
For some people, yeah. For others - you don't argue with a an attack of crippling headache, you lie paralysed in a convulsive spasm, waiting for it to pass. And then you remember that you perhaps should rest more.
I didn't say:
I did say:
That statement is true.
It could also be possible that other people experience mental fatigue differently than you do.
Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that what I said is true.
Believing that's true can help you decide if you are responsible for not reaching your goals or if you truly are the victim of circumstance.
It’s also possible people are talking about mental fatigue when they’re really dealing with depression.
If you’re mentally exhausted from work then going for a walk through a park is relaxing enough to regain some energy. If you’re depressed then you would still be vegging out on the weekend.
Which isn’t to say vegging out sometimes is a bad sign. Watching TV is fun in moderation.
I refuse to work anywhere that requires me to work over 40 hours a week. You can ask up front what that expectation is and start looking for another job if they violate it.
For anyone reading this, please don’t subscribe to this level of cynicism.
For SWEs at Google and almost anywhere else, the wind has blown very favorably for you and that’s something to be celebrated.
The direction of the wind has shifted, but we can never expect it to stay blowing in one direction forever, even if others get lucky and catch one like that.
You will no doubt set your sail and take it to new and wonderful places.
Let’s take a minute and be grateful for how good SWEs have it - we are frequently so insanely disconnected from the realities and struggles of the normal working class and we should remember and express some gratitude for it regularly.
Are you seriously saying that people should express gratitude for being fired without ceremony, whilst the company at hand makes record profits?
All the "wind", "sails" and boat metaphors won't change the fact that loyalty is a virtue that fits very poorly on both sides of employment.
That wasn't how I read that comment. What I heard him say was that we should be grateful for having been able to take advantage of an unusually favorable environment, while at the same time recognizing that it's been an unusually favorable environment that will, sooner or later, regress closer to the mean.
If this is merely the result of a change in weather, then Sundar Pichai must be the god of the winds.
at Alphabet he[0] most certainly is
[0] well, probably not he alone, but he is the figurehead of a group that put him there and keeps him there, and at Alphabet that group shits the wind
This is well-stated and appreciated positivity. It is disheartening to see the detractor/logic-leaping replies that followed. Thank you for writing it.
Its not that SWE's have it so good, its more that everyone else has an unacceptably bad situation with workers rights.
Why? The lay-offs are so broad, not selective at all. You're just as likely to get cut if you're working hard or not, if you're overpaid or underpaid. It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?
Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.
The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.
All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.
This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.
Layoffs that don't target whole teams are always a mix of politics and performance. The lie that they aren't is what people tell themselves to feel better.
Depends, in my company layoffs were based on compensation. All the high compensation locations employees were canned.
When companies make broad cuts, especially if they're eliminating projects or divisions they've decided are no longer important, the reality is that they don't do a lot of micro-optimizing at the individual level about who they keep and who they shed.
Sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time--and maybe it's even the impetus to do something different.
I appreciate your view but I took OP's comment differently. "Your job is not safe" in my view means you should treat work as if you are a mercenary. Treat every role as short term, go in do the job, get paid and always be looking for the next better thing, no emotional ties. Be prepared to cut them before they cut you.
I feel like it would actually drive salaries up as people move to higher paying roles and companies scramble to keep people that they would have otherwise expected to remain for years.
For context, I once worked at company A for 2 years then got a new job offer for 20% more than I currently made. I accepted the offer and then told my VP that I got a new job and the offer was 35% more. He matched the 35% so I stayed for another year and then got a new job for 25% more than that. A little after that, Company A started doing layoffs. If I had been loyal I would have likely been laid off, instead I left with a much higher salary because I was loyal only to the money.
Companies used to be loyal but no longer are, your job is not safe.
Perhaps we actually are on the same page in principal as I agree with all of your other suggestions "diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work" just a different take on the original comment.
How is that? If a job is less secure, typically commands more pay. If you know you will be out of work in 6-12 months, your pay better include some cushion to cover time between jobs.
I think the biggest thing any one person can do (regardless of your occupation) is to build up that emergency fund. Life happens and having those funds gives you options!
This is so important.
Parts of it is that when you're cutting an arbitrary number (like 5%) just because.... you kind have to do it "randomly" so that there's no claim of discrimination. If it just so happens that all you best performers share a demographic trait of the protected or protected-adjacent kind (sex, orientation, religious beliefs, etc.) you'd expose yourself to discrimination lawsuits by people who don't match that facet.
It sucks and it's a symptom of risk management being a leading consideration to the process of a layoff, more so than performance optimization or culture change, but that's how it "makes sense"
This. Your company is not every going to fix you, optimize your life, or be loyal to you. But you can take responsibility of all those things, and never let up. Get better, look for opportunities that satisfy what you value - always.
I hear you. I am also an engineer-turned-EM.
Nothing would make me happier than to eradicate this line of thought, but laying the responsibility of that on the employee is poor management at best, malicious bullshit at worst.
We EMs do nothing to re-assure our employees that they are valued co-workers and not "resources" to be managed.
When one of my valued employees comes to me and says "I got another job offer and the increase in TC will change my life," most of the time they are a top-performer I want to keep, so I go to my manager asking to match their comp. But...they have to ask their manager, then their manager, so on and so forth. Even HR sometimes steps in with excuses why we cant. By the time a decision is made, if one is ever made, the employee I wanted to keep is already at their new employer.
So I would recommend my employees look out for themselves, bc I (and my management hierarchy) certainly won't (though they can, they just don't want to).
And if you are still looking to lay responsibility on to someone, look in the mirror.
That's a good way of putting it. I've let it happen to me in the past, and I've seen it happen many times.
Your comment is solid advice.
Better put, the relationship you have with your employer is a business relation ship. It's not personal. They are not your friends, nor your enemies. It's simply a convenient arrangement between the two of you for as long as that lasts. And it might become convenient for either side to change that arrangement at any point.
The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter. So, your risk increases with your salary. That's fine because it enables you to mitigate such a scenario by having savings.
I've been part of a big layoff round once. It wasn't personal. That was just my employer rounding up a large group of people to cut some meaningful chunk out of their salary expenses. It wasn't the last round either. The company, Nokia, ultimately got out of the phone and map business (I was in the maps unit). The final head count reduction was in the tens of thousands. A lot of those have since had successful careers and the Nokia implosion spawned quite a few successful companies.
But getting layed off is a bit of a rough ride. You feel bitter, angry, insulted, etc. But on reflection I actually got a fair deal and honestly I needed the wake up call that job security is a big illusion. I was just coasting in my career and a bit too comfortable. The moment was perfect as I was still in my thirties. This stuff gets harder as you get older, less flexible, and more dependent on job security. I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.
You should add more nuance I think.
While this is a respectable way to see employer / employee relationships, it does not apply to every company / employee out there.
In particular, I think this is very true for BigCo, where most people are seen as fungible cogs.
The smaller the company, the better.
I disagree. There is a lot of variance in small companies. There is a lot of variance in large companies as well (the famous "it will really depend on which team you belong to").
I really think there is little correlation between company size and your experience at such company. The predictive variables (if they ever exist) are elsewhere.
In smaller company you are closer to person with the decision power. It is much easier to build closer relationship and have high visibility to avoid being laid off.
Companies, of all sizes, are run by people.
If those people are assholes, the size of the company doesn't matter, your employment in that company will suck.
While that is true, if any given person has some X% chance of being an asshole, the more layers of management there are above you, the higher the chances you are at the mercy of at least one (and possibly multiple) asshole(s).
You could use the exact same argument in the other direction: the more layers of management there are above you, the higher the chances a high-level managers will protect your team from armageddon. Sometimes, it's only a matter of a single email or a chat with a CxO.
I stand by my original point: no obvious correlation between company size and quality of life inside it.
True, the difference is you are more likely to get the experience you've heard from reviews in a small company vs complete unknown in a big company (may be great, may be crap depending on your line of management)
In my network we keep joining the same (relative small) companies because we roughly know the culture we can shape and create an environment
Honestly the size really doesn’t matter that much. As soon as it’s favorable you are out in ANY company. In my observational experience it’s only 10 to 20% companies who have heart and where they do actually try to maintain talent and foster good working relationships.
I think the size definitely matters, but I am not sure about the extent to which it matters.
I work at a company of roughly over 200 employees that is part of a much bigger org. Layoffs never happen where I am working. And one factor may be that HR has a different, in some cases personal relationship with their employees. That is certainly not the case in the parent org where large-scale layoffs happen every few years.
Edit: And I would not even attest that my company is one of those with a "heart", as you say.
Have you been working for this company for 20+ years?
There's a high chance you're just a "sweet summer child" who wasn't there the last time things were REALLY bad.
That is a valid point. But no, the company has been around for 31 years and I have only worked there for just over 8 years. I am confident however that no large-scale layoffs ever happened there, because I have heard all sorts of harrowing stories from "back then", abusive managers and the like, but layoffs were never mentioned.
Might be survivorship bias though because the people that could have been laid off in the first few years cannot be there to tell the tale, of course.
Don't kid yourself about small companies. Unless you're the owner, you're a fungible cog everywhere.
In fairness, anyone can leave at any time. Your employer, regardless of size, has to be prepared for the possibilty that you'll quit for a better job, or for some other reason. It would be inadvisable to get emotionally attached to employees.
The reason you're less likely to get laid off at a small company is that small companies don't have the capital to hire indiscriminately, so they're less likely to have large inefficiencies. The number of employees is already as low as they can get away with, given their current revenue, so only a significant downturn in revenue would justify layoffs.
Smaller companies also have a hard time hiring. A bad hire for your 7th employee is way more painful than for your 1000th, and you can't afford to spend to much time interviewing. If employee 7 does a good job and jives with the team, they'd be foolish to throw them out. Though I'm sure there genuinely are many small companies run foolishly out there.
Small companies (whether VC-funded or bootstrapped) have their own issues. They tend to be different from what you see at big companies but they're certainly not nirvana.
I thought this until a few days ago! At my “smaller company” of 150 or so employees, they just laid off a third of the company, and virtually everybody outside of the C suite was blindsided.
I think the posters who remind people that the employer/employee relationship is a business one have it right. We as engineers should strive as best as possible what our specific value is to a company. We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are more to the company than that. When we cease to have that value, or they cease to desire going down that path, they might end the relationship.
Smaller companies treat employees different, to an extent. Because in the end, regardless of company size, the owners expect a return of their investment. In case of owner-managed companies even more so.
To everyone their poison so, I guess. I learned that I am a large company guy, by a nature and nurture. Other people I know are the complete oppossite. One thing I learned so, no employee ever is safe. Not even lifetime employed state / public servants.
The worse relationship I've had were in small companies. "Oh but we're so small we cannot afford raises" coming from the same people that are selling it millions later in the year.
It is a business relationship, but they always trying to convince employees that it is not. That it is a family, a friendship relationship.
You should be reliable, you should help everyone in your "family". If you leave your "family" abruptly it is a kind of betrayal.
Also funny is brainwashing employees to think that HR is their fried, that HR can help with issues at work.
It is a business. Do minimum amount of work you've been hired for, get your paycheck and focus on your private life!
Honestly a very depressing outlook. If I would really think this way I wouldn’t wanna work in this industry. The only times I was really happy and motivated at work was when I was working within a team where we were really friends - I’m still in contact with most of them years after the fact and some became really close friends - this was outside of IT though.
Your line of thinking seems to be common in the IT industry and I wonder if it’s a good industry for me to be in long term. I only was at one company so far where we had a really close-knit team.
There is a difference between your colleagues -- as people -- with whom you can have a close relationship, and the entity that is your employer, which you really have to assume would jettison you at a moment's notice, because almost all companies would if the need arose.
I don't think of it as depressing to act as if a fictional entity like a corporation isn't part of your family. By all means, be friends with your coworkers, show up and work hard, but don't get emotionally invested in a relationship with an LLC or a C Corp that can't love you back.
Corporations are not fictional entities. They are real things with their own goals and decision making networks independent of, and capable of enacting larger environmental change than, any individual human.
A person cannot form a friendship or familial relationship with a corporation, which is the point I was making.
Also, you are incorrect about corporations not being fictional entities. Try googling the phrase.
The only times I was really happy and motivated at work was when I was working within a team where we were really friends
Ditto!
A business is made of employees, but the employees are not the business. Sometimes that means decisions have to be made in favor (sometimes arguably) of the business over you.
Understanding the ephemerality of the situation can help you appreciate when it's going well and the people you work with, while helping you be prepared if and when something happens. Hopefully you will have gained a lot more experience, a bigger network of good friends, and have a decent nest egg to take you to the next job.
It's important to differentiate between colleagues and the business. The people you work with can become friends, but ultimately the business will do whatever sociopathic thing makes the number go up the faster/helps to deal with the crippling emotional turmoil of the execs.
You can be friends with the people you work with/for, but if there comes a time when the business and the people's interests diverge, the business will normally win. As long as you are aware of this, you can be OK throughout it (sortof, getting laid off really, really sucks).
I've got bad news for you about pretty much every other industry. They'll throw you away at the first opportunity to make the CEO a few more bucks too. It's the Jack Welchification of the American economy
They're aren't brainwashing you, they are playing to their own benefit. In the same way that you "brainwash" them with a stretch of a resume and overly optimistic self evals.
There are people who recognize the game being played, and people who get their souls crushed because they failed to properly recognize how the pieces in the game move.
Absolutely right. I was exactly thinking in same direction as your comment. There is no "they" it is just people. Job seekers, employees, employers all get economical with truth when needed.
My advice is that if you ever feel like the poster and if you have the chance, change your job.
And this goes both ways, employees can go out as they please. The opposite party usually get hurt when it happens (either the firing or employee go out), and usually coworkers / existing workers that get the bad things.
So in my experience, don't get too attached to company (or coworker either), and go out if things start to go south or if there's better opportunity out there.
Spoken like a man who never needed healthcare, who never had dependents, who never lived under the cage of a visa.
Presumably, you leave to go work for another company, so none of these are a problem.
So you’re not aware how much a visa screws you in the job search? And you’re not aware how much time raising a family takes from searching for a job? And you’re not aware of the fact not all doctors are in network for all insurances, that your new insurance company can and will deny your dependents their medication to force them to take cheaper stuff that doesn’t work, again, to prove it doesn’t work? And you have to sit and watch your wife or your child or whatever be hospitalized and crash and know it’s just what happens when you switch jobs?
Yeah correct, my experience is just locally, and the healthcare isn't that bad here.
US is just simply has a system that's very cons for employees, especially with visa and right to work law.
I’m not the OP, but I don’t think you understood her/his comment. People leave jobs.
And it applies to everyone up to the CEO.
At my company a new CEO came in to much fanfare. A year later they were unceremoniously turfed out because the board decided they weren’t up to the “new direction” the company needed to go.
And not to mention the people under the CEO who road her coattails. They were all turfed in quick succession (or smartly saw the writing on the wall and bailed first).
It’s a business relationship. That’s all. Treat it as such. Get as much money as you can. Don’t kill yourself in the hope your sacrifice will be repaid, it probably won’t.
Basically take the emotion out of it. When management talks of “our big family” they are just saying that because people like to hear it. It’s not true.
And once you’ve gotten enough years under your belt you start to see through the talk pretty easily. Trust your gut. If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last. Or at least plan according and don’t assume your job will be there next year or even next month.
For individual contributors leaving isn’t always that easy as most interviews now require Leetcode prep. If you haven’t already been practicing, it can take a few months to get prepared for the grind. This is even worse for folks who work and have obligations outside of work such as children or sick family members.
I haven't interviewed in years, but I had the impression that Leetcode interviews were mostly for FAANG type jobs. Are non-software companies (i.e. ones where software is not the product) doing this too now ?!
Most highly compensated roles use these as stage 1 or 2 filtering due to the volume of applicants
They sure are.
I was laid off my last job, of 27 years.
I didn't actually mind. It was completely anticipated, and we (me and my team) were pretty much ready. I think the company made the correct decision, but the reason they got there, was because they made a whole cascade of rotten choices, that painted them into a corner they couldn't get out of, easily.
I really wish that they would have involved me in some of the really dumb decisions they made, because I'm actually pretty good at strategic thinking, and could have easily advised them of alternatives.
But what is done, is done.
The really annoying part, was coming out of a 27-year "silo," into the current tech industry zeitgeist.
Nasty culture shock.
What sort of shock? Were you working full-time on a single application or suite of applications for that period?
We wrote image processing pipeline stuff in C++.
Backend of the backend.
The shock was encountering the value system of modern corporations and even individual ICs.
I’m not going to get more specific, but let’s just say that I have a value system that does not mesh well, with today’s tech culture.
Many people fall for this and as long as you are an employee, no job is ever secure.
This gives some hope that there are those that have learned from the illusion and are now realizing that these companies do not care about you.
And if you're not an employee, your biggest client can decide to "go in a different direction" at any time. Of course, you try to diversify but you're still subject to the economy, clients having management changes, etc.
The problem with this is if you leave awful companies after not working there for very long then new companies will not want to hire you.
It doesn't work both ways. They only get the benefits. You do not.
This is why the logical conclusion of this culture change is for anyone who can to move toward independent contracting. Like I mentioned in a different comment, I’ve had my best clients longer than any single job. But for the ones that didn’t work out, no one bats an eye at a 3 month contract.
And you know what happens with the money that you take, save and invest?
They go in to public companies, they hire MBA's, and they try to improve profitability of company by letting engineers go.
Your money have come a full cycle :)
TINA when CPI inflation (in the UK) is has been 18% in just 2 years.
The UK inflation rate was 3.9 percent in November 2023, down from 4.6 percent in the previous month. Between September 2022 and March 2023, the UK experienced seven months of double-digit inflation which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/306648/inflation-rate-co...
1L Arla Lactofree milk was £1 around 2013 in Tesco. Today, it's £1.85.
Bank of England inflation calculator at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... says it should be £1.34
So much for the inflation numbers.
Inflation measures are not across the board, they are aggregates. Similar to how pay at one company and profit is not ever the same even within the same industry or audience, different products have different prices.
Are you suggesting that while milk might have a price spike, carrots and beef would compensate?
But that's not what happens. What comes down in electronics. If you exclude food, shelter and medicine (things you need to live) the numbers are in line with govt estimates. But most people would bristle at this approach.
At least in the US, the government publishes overall inflation, inflation less food and energy, and inflation for each major category.
"This item looks different to me", "this category looks different to me", and "this basket looks different to me" are real feelings, but the government isn't straight up lying about inflation measurements.
Agreed. The government publishes the methodology and the source data the final numbers are based on are generally publicly available. However, the methodology slowly changes with time. And whatever the rationale is (there is always one that sounds good) its effect is always lowering computed inflation numbers. And lower inflation numbers give government ability to keep printing and spending money -- a dream for most officials.
So while I do not think the government is straight up lying, it is slowly twisting the methodology due to seriously misaligned incentives. My 2c.
The average male height is 176cm, but I'm 187. LIES I TELL YOU! PURE LIES!
aka, some folks on HN don't know about statistics.
Oh, I understand statistics, that's not what I'm saying: I'm plainly saying that so far, with anything I threw at it, the gov.uk inflation calculator is a plain lie.
In my experience--which is anecdotal, and thus shouldn't be trusted--nearly any discussion of inflation involves people waving around their untrustworthy anecdotal experience as evidence that the statistics are wrong.
It's just a misdirection that hides details with extra steps so we can all just argue with zero concrete steps.
But either way, I've lately become convinced to ignore inflation. The real thing we should be reducing is printing of money, no if buts or maybes.
I work with farms. Some are having to cut the number of milkings from 3/day to 2/day since the workers they would normally use are not available.
UK CPIH index value (includes cost of housing)
Nov 2021 - 114.1
Nov 2023 (latest value) - 130.0
So, 14%. 18% slightly out of date figure.
Cash in the bank, even at 5% rates, hasn't kept up.
Cash in the bank normally doesn't keep up. If it does, the orthodox view is that you risk a deflationary spiral.
Central banks want to incentivize investments.
This is a phenomenon of the last two decades. Before the fed started cutting rates after 9/11 (to support the country, the financial markets, the housing markets, etc.) both money market and savings accounts (you had to choose a good bank) usually gave positive inflation adjusted return.
Barely.
In real terms US bills have returned 0.4%/yr over the last 120+ years
Seems to me Treasury bills meaningfully outpace inflation, on average: https://www.bauer.uh.edu/rsusmel/other/lrret1.htm. But I was talking about cash accounts, which typically pay lower interest rates than T-bills or CDs (as noted on the above link).
It's not what they want. It's the mechanics of their business.
They borrow short at base rates and lend long at a margin
Owning shares in the entities for which money for goods and services pass through is the way to keep up with inflation. If I buy things from Costco/Apple/Toyota/Novartis/etc, then they increase prices, then their share prices go up accordingly.
Anything else will fall short.
Probably a confusion of what that percentage is - whilst the monthly figure is as you have said, the accumulated/aggregate percentage of inflation over those two years is probably what GP refers to as 18%
“Montly” inflation rates are usually expressed in terms relative to the prior year, not prior month.
When we look at another data source, annual inflation rates for the UK don’t appear to be 18%: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/inf...
I said in two years, not one.
I can't tell from the context of your comment whether you believe the monthly inflation figures are inflation that happened in that month (the "one month's worth of inflation was X%") or if those are annualized figures (the "one month's measure of an annualized rate of inflation").
If you are of the belief that the monthly inflation figures "stack", you are saying inflation is much higher than the 18% in 2 years that GP reported.
If you are not of that belief, then the figures you cite are fairly consistent with the 2 year rise in prices being in the +18% neighborhood.
That's why we now have the Vimes Boot Index - https://www.vimesbootsindex.co.uk/
TINA stands for There Is No Alternative? That's a new one for me.
And food prices feel like they're up 50% over the same period, especially when you start noticing the shrinkflation.
£6 for a pint of beer (outside of London) is 'the new normal'.
Until the huge bubble around tech companies explodes.
Tech (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet) is pretty profitable with reasonable P/Es.
Reasonable by 2024 standards or by 1990 standards? I'm fairly sure that the P/Es of today would have been considered overvalued a few decades ago, when profits actually meant something, dividends were handed out, etc.
Amazon is priced for massive relentless growth.
Apple, Microsoft, Meta priced for modest growth.
Do we live in the same metaverse?
AAPL priced for modest growth? The $3tn company???
Apple's PE is 30. Seems like modest growth, is implied.
Share prices increase if the supply and demand curves for the shares move accordingly.
Share buybacks decrease supply of shares relative to demand, so share prices increase.
Share buybacks are likelier to happen the more profitable a business is.
A higher share price at time t+1 than time t means the shareholder can earn a profit if they buy a share and then sell later.
Ergo, profits mean something.
Edit: as a reply to the comment below this, please take a moment to look around and identify anything providing you utility that was the product of a publicly traded company.
I think they missed the idea that everything has a market. It is more of a macro econ class idea than the micro one most people take. Stock has is a market in itself. As well as the product they sell. But so is the money. The inputs for those different markets are different. You have very nicely described the market for stock dividends.
A perfect example of how the only meaningful product of a publicly traded company is the stock itself.
Dividends are not handed out because they are a silly way to distribute profits. Buybacks are better. This way people who want money out can sell some stock and those who don't avoid a burden of reinvesting the money as well as taxes. Dividends mean a company managements thinks the stock is overvalued so it's not profitable to buy it back and it's better to pay cash out (there might be also some regulatory reasons like paying dividends to qualify for being an investment for various funds).
For those reasons avoiding companies that pay significant dividends is a superior investment strategy (because it means more competent management or management that doesn't consider the stock overvalued).
Stock buy backs are a tax efficient dividend. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/warren-buffett-explains-the-...
Google's PE is 25 today compared to the S&P of the 1990s 15 https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio/table/by-year
That said in the 1990s the US had access to a huge new market (the USSR market), something that US companies don't have today.
It’s okay, if they improve profitability enough at places like Boeing our investments will be the least of our worries!
I don’t think you can generalize from one manager or even a team of management to all managers in every company.
But still your point about the absurd uncertainty of big company roles, even under glowing performance gauntlets as you so aptly say is well taken.
you highlight a paradox between the values the company espouses, and the ones they actually keep. In where it appears that, no loyalty is returned to the employee from the company in which the employee invested their loyalty so heavily.
Indeed, folks may quibble with this characterization, or even strongly disagree, but when cuts are made like this, even when valuable people could afford to be kept, that’s what it really comes down to.
Poor Google. The pain! What have they done to deserve this, oh heavens?
Wait until your manager is laid off and you're talking to them afterward.
This has happened to me twice in my career and both times its like you're talking to a whole different person.
In my cynical opinion, being that different person is the number 1 trait companies look for when selecting managers
How different were they (your managers) before and after being laid off?
Being an asshole while in charge and then back to nice, empathic person once he doesn't have any power over other people any more
Sounds like a very bad manager.
it's funney yeah. lack of empathy is correlated in psych studies with increase in power over others. people with less power need to be more empahtetic / in tune with other's feelings in order to get their needs met. makes sense. can realted from my childhood! :) haha
This episode of Planet Money is a good demonstration of that: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/08/28/435583328/epis...
In summary: Patty McCord helped create the company culture in Netflix not ever holding on to people, if your position becomes slightly redundant or your performance falters for a bit, you're out. She apparently called herself "the queen of the good goodbyes". She says that she does not like the word "fired", that people are just "moving on" and that this is good for everyone involved. At one point in the interview, she gleefully recounts admonishing an employee she let go for crying about about it.
The twist being that she herself was eventually fired as well. The interview does not go very deep into this because "she doesn't like to talk about it", and just says that leaving Netflix was "terrible, painful and sad".
+1 super curious
The Stanford prison experiment in action
Was that ever replicated?
Nah, man: totally agree wif dat. But even that can express differently, there's a lot of boxes for that different person to fit into!
I mean, is this impostor syndrome or is it something else?
Mind that being laid off also changes them. They are also human.
Our organization has a policy that it hires developers on 3-year contracts, and renews them no more than two times. So when you have reached 9 years in the org; when you have become intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out.
I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.
Why? And why are you working there?
On the other hand, how many times in your career have you stayed at a company more than 9 years?
Doesn't matter. It is a lopsided relationship. As an employee, it is massive portion of your life. From the employer perspective you are a resource, and can be replaced (not making a moral judgement, just saying that you can...). So the fact that someone can leave after 2 years is less impactful on the company than a company that forces you to leave after X years.
If on the other hand you are just saying "well it is unlikely you will get to 9 years" the problem with that thinking is that the closer you get to 9 years and the more you have invested the more likely you will want to stay for 9 and being forced out for no reason is silly. It is a job, not the presidency.
This is exactly the disconnect between people's salary expectations and their actual salary. It's not really based on how valuable your work is, but how easily replaced you are.
As you get older and have other responsibilities that life gives you, constant job hopping gets old too.
Honestly as long as a company has enough variety internally I (slightly) prefer staying with until they "go bad".
Now I also prefer startups and my carrier isn't yet that old (like ~8 years) so never is still the answer.
Through companies being often way less likely to give a trusted long term employee a payrise or trust them with more responsibilities then they are to do so with a new hired employee they have hard times to properly judge the skill of is still an (absurd but not IT specific) issue.
Not that I am insensitive to one’s predicament, but who takes 9 years to become familiar with a domain? Unless it’s some kind of software that runs a special kind of nuclear submarine that no one knows how it works and no one want to change more than one line of code per year.
I'm not I have literally heard a software engineer which was since recently responsible for hiring just saying just a few sentences apart:
- oh we shouldn't hire this person they only ever worked for the same company so they must not interested in learning and improving themself
and then
- oh we shouldn't hire that person they have switched companies every 2-3 years so they must be bad at their job and jump companies before they get fired
... wtf
and that person didn't get that opinion due to being crazy or so but from spending ~2 days to read up on what you need to look out for when hiring people, i.e. from other software enginers, software project managers and people which founded startups
the problem is not only is there a lot of nonsense out their there are multiple different conflicting engineering cultures out their each insisting only their way is the right way and convincingly pursuing people why the other way is supposedly terrible. Not few of them also pushing a rather toxic culture or a live style which only work for a singles with workoholic like traits or people which at some point in their live had the luck to get rather wealthy and no assume any software enginer in the world is in their position. It's just shit.
the idea, i suppose, is to prevent anyone from becoming so integral and important that they will have negotiating leverage over the business.
Cogs needs to be replacible. It's also the core reason why thorough documentation, procedures and runbooks are encouraged.
So you're leaving them right?
Why work for someone who clearly doesn't align with your professional values?
Honestly that sounds fine and quite honest to have such a policy. I think in my career I've met like 2 or 3 engineers who would have been at one place longer than that.
Maybe your job(s).
But there are certainly companies out there that actually care about the welfare of their employees. Usually family owned and such.
That's where I choose to work and they have always taken care of my needs and listened to me.
I never really understood why people have such a desire to work for these big companies that don't care about you. I guess it's just different strokes...
I definitely try to pick jobs based on vibe, but that's still not 100% safe. I adore my current employer. Best place I've ever worked. But we're contractors, and my team's contract just ended unexpectedly. I trust they respect me enough to rotate me to another team, but I gotta sweat bullets and send out résumés nonetheless.
Is it really a contract if it can end unexpectedly? I know it is, but really the original purpose of a contract is to set the terms and conditions, so nothing was surprise when it happened.
We really need a better term for these one sided work agreements.
Yeah, places that I'm used to working do things like: when covid hit and work dried up, the company told employees to go out and find charity work and the company would pay your full salary to do the charity work.
They share in the profits with the employees and such.
I mean sure, it's not 100% a save job. If something truly terrible happened and the company went bankrupt etc, then of course you can still lose your job.
But no time have I ever seen or felt like they would ever lay off people unless the company literally couldn't go on to survive some other way.
Cause they pay 2-3x as much, that’s why.
Very sane advice, but unfortunately not always an option.
The likelihood of making real (not paper) life-changing money in a few years has considerably decreased in 5-10 years.
It will only come back with a good pace of IPOs and investor-positive acquisitions.
There is a difference between "save, build an emergency fund" and "get into some get-rich-quick scheme".
The goal of emergency funds and saving, for most people, is to prevent life-changing events, not create them. You don't need a ludicrous paycheck to have a rainy days fund, and to put money aside, and you shouldn't count on IPOs and acquisitions to build it.
Push for IPOs -> 'growth is all that matters' -> future redundancies.
The world needs sustainable businesses, not IPO jackpots for a few and looming redundancies for the rest.
That really depends quite a bit on how frugally a person is able and willing to live.
I find it shocking that this is news to anybody, or that this has ever (in the last n generations) not been the case.
Your advice is sound: exchange your expertise for money, invest the money, leave.
Quite a few BigCos had a genuine job-for-life culture until the 70s recessions hit. A few managed to keep it going until the 80s.
The big cultural change happened in the early 80s as MBA culture became the norm, with a shift towards zero sum neoliberal extremism and the uncoupling of pay from productivity.
We can thank Milton Friedman and Jack Welsh for much of that shift.
Friedman popularized an idea that shareholders should be prioritized above all else and Jack Welsh implemented it at GE, showing just how much profit can be made when you care only about the money/stock.
The information is not new but then there's actually internalizing that information and changing your views.
This is kind of silly. You probably chose to work at a company that “made billions”. You probably sought some perks related to doing so, be it remuneration, prestige, whatever. This is in part a game you choose to play, and the company that’s making billions is acting like a company that makes billions. You may in the future choose to make a different trade-off and work elsewhere? And I don’t mean some grow-or-die VC-backed startup.
I've worked across the spectrum from 8 people companies to 20,000 employee multi-nationals. From companies 30 years old to startups. It doesn't make a difference.
You likely won't see redundancy coming. Chances are you'll be dismissed out of the blue one random day.
Similar to me. The bigger the org the less likely you are to see it. My first one I see it in hindsight at a small company. They actually asked how many pens and pencils I had in my desk.
I have a hard time believing faang employees won't just drop the company they are working for if they are offered a 15 percent payrise from a competing company. Employees don't have to be loyal to their employers, why do employers have to be loyal to employees?
Who else here feels that humans have an innate need to be emotionally invested in their daily lives ?
- goal of your company / values - need to grow - need to perform and be seen as such - need to belong
so often we can read warnings about not falling for this, but it's so common .. it's wired in us it seems
The desire for meaning through their work is used against a worker.
https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e...
Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/
Well most humans do, but psychopaths (and I speak from personal experience) probably do not, and the smarter among them tend to do really well in the American corporate context.
It is even worse in certain Asian countries. Your entire identity and self-worth is defined by your work.
I'm just glad that I'm being able to completely disconnect from work, when I check out. My tittle means nothing. Where I work means nothing. I do enjoy my co-workers, that's about it.
The easiest way to follow this advice is to take it to its logical conclusion and just offer your services on a contracting basis, as a single member LLC or a small partnership. At this point in the US tech industry the relationship between employers and FTEs is so tenuous that there isn’t much difference between the two legal arrangements in terms stability. I’ve kept my best clients much, much longer than my longest tenured FTE jobs.
And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.
Not going to happen in the US as healthcare is not portable and its too expensive to purchase on your own.
Well, this is one of the reasons you charge more as a freelancer. It's ~$2k/mo for a family; even if I charged exactly the same as my market rate as an FTE, that would be less than the tax benefit I get from operating through a properly set up LLC taxed as an S-corporation. LTD and E&O insurance are other big expenses, but they're not prohibitive given the delta in hourly rate between FTE and C2C.
Hopefully cyberpunk will get an inflow out of this situation. Don't ever trust corporations, even if they promise not to be evil, Lol
Cyberpunk is hypercapitalism with less ethics and even more survival of the fittest, plus cybernetics… and apart from the cybernetics part is actually not that far from some societies already.
Social resilience and social welfare have been vilified enough that I see just enough blanket downvotes in some social fora, as if its an icky subject or an allergy. Those who are at the top benefit from it, as long as as they have enough lackeys to do their bidding.
To me cyberpunk is something entirely different. To me it just means going back to "the garage", inventing cool shit, not worrying about making +200K per year while being your bosses toy, and sticking it to The Man
"Those that I respected the most." I always say this, but if you appreciate someone at work, dont say it to them. Say it to management. Managements face an impossible task of appreciating every single employees' worth. You can help.
Say it to both :)
In these cases often management just wants to cut the most expensive employees which can overlap with the best.
I've seen a manager at a large company make "once in 10 year cuts", then the next year make similar cuts. This was maybe 5/10 years ago and they still cut like this today - how on earth they are still operating I don't know.
One of the tricks they pulled was to sack a senior role and simply add the entire senior role to a junior role, but keep pay, etc, the same. The sell the idea to the junior employee they told them that it would help with promotions. 5 years of no promotions and insane stress they were out.
They are also legally required to have some positions filled with qualified people, but they have unqualified people working those positions with "on the job training".
The company itself has declared internally it will be bankrupt as early as next year without some form of financial assistance. COVID just about killed them with excessive borrowing to make up for missed revenue, to survive and come back into a poor economy.
I know two people working for this company, one is looking for another job, the other is stuck in the company as they did a deal with University support in return for being retained for some years.
How many people work for a company now that they believe will be around in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time? There's an extremely high chance you will far outlive the company you work for.
Given how things are going, I would suggest tangible assets that can be easily liquefied, even if in a poor economy.
I’ve worked at the same company now for 14 years. If I chose to, I feel like there’s a good chance I could work another 15-25 years at the same firm. My company sells software to local, state, and federal government customers. There are competitors in this space, but no company dominates any particular sector. There’s ample room for growth. Our software is critical to government operations and is necessary even during economic downtimes. Working with employees who have been at the company for 30-40 years isn’t uncommon. I work on 911 systems and find the domain interesting, rewarding, and important. We can help save lives and help government work more effectively.
The company I'm speaking for is one of these government customers - and they are absolutely necessary with no competitors. I still think that given all that, they may be allowed to go bust simply because it is run so poorly and it might actually be better to start again.
Be loyal to people, not to companies.
Companies will cut you in a random layoff at the drop of a hat. I've seen this enough times in my career. It doesn't matter if they promise its the only/last/whatever cutoff, or it was for performance only, or whatever..
People in your network will pick you up and refer you / hire you on at the next gig.
My prior employer just did a wave of deep cuts and the stories I heard out of management were pretty crazy. Directory level people were basically given an hour to cut $X Million off their people budget from their directs and all their skip level staff. They then begin laying them off the same day. This was not a well planned or thought out process. So obviously the people I saw getting laid off were a mix of underperformerss, great-but-expensive, random personal grudges from the director, and unfortunately biased towards a lot of "lifers" who'd been there a long time.
Excellent advice. Time invested in cultivating your relationships and network is invaluable for generating opportunities. If people have a good experience working with you and understand what you are capable of, they will bring opportunities to your door throughout your career.
Management is like a guy who wants to get laid.
So, all guys
I think it is a misconception that if a company does well, it will hire more people and pay more. It is purely a supply and demand situation. The ideal number of employees in a company is zero.
I think that depends on the type of business. If the company sells software then they are more likely to consider good developers as an asset, but if the product is something else that just has a software component, or for software jobs unrelated to the product (accounting, etc), then you are just a cost to be reduced, not an asset.
Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe.
The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine who to lay off?
If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is simply bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.
No, because when large corps want to reduce head count/payroll, it often comes as a top down directive for every group to trim by X%...
In this type of environment being good at your job doesn't help - after a few cycles of these types of layoff all that are left are the better people, and the next X% layoff will be them.
See a recent HN thread: "Signs that it's time to leave a company" _ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38943040
When you see that management people can't be direct, plain-spoken, and authentic with employees, you should realise that there is a cronyarchy... and you are not in the special club.
This just corporate culture though. where are you working where that isnt the case?
Ossified tech companies who fire their talent are quite literally sewing the seeds of their own destruction.
I expect in the next 2-5 years to see a dynamic flourising of innovative companies started by these unshackled workers.
Let’s be real the majority of these people getting laid off aren’t gonna grind for 2-3 years with low odds of succeeding. Same thing that happened with Twitter layoffs and any covid layoffs.
People wanting to build stuff to their hearts desire long left or didn’t start at google in the first place
Don't love your job, it will never love you back.
love your profession and do your job professionally
I'm not a libertarian, but since there are many people here tempted by its simplicity and claimed intellectual elegance [1], I want to share "The Libertarian Argument for Unions":
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/in-the-name-of-libe...
[1] I personally reject "elegance" as the driving first principle when weighing ethical and normative theories. There are higher standards to seek: most importantly, a rejection of dogmatism and the embrace of continual learning. Any calcified definition of "elegance" cannot stand the test of time; what is elegant to one generation may be deeply immoral to the next. To be clear, I don't mean to say that notions of ethics must be left ambiguous. I certainly do not defend ethical "systems" which amount to little more than evergreen debates over weighing contradictory principles. Rather, I mean ethical systems must improve as our intelligence and awareness improve.
Managers will never be honest. Managers are modern practitioners of Taylorism(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management). They have to see you as a number and a resource in order to do their jobs and fit in the hierarchy. Thats why you never trust them and always reverse manage them.
“Your job is NOT safe.”
I read once somewhere that the phrase “my job”/“your job” is one of the biggest oxymorons ever termed in America. You do not possess the job. You do not own it. You never did. There never was a time where anyone did. The “job” is owned by the employer. You may be assigned it. It may be unassigned by the employer. Or reassigned by the employer. Or redefined by the employer. “Your job” never was.
On the flip. It’s your life. Own that. We came up with the ideas of continuous integration, apply that to the relationship. Constantly renegotiate how your life overlaps with your employers job.
I've been an executive and every position along the chain in the lead up to that within my industry. If I took anything away from my time in it (I have since moved back to practical hands on roles) it is that your above statement is sadly, quite accurate.
My time as an executive has left me soured on the industry full stop long term now i've realised its shit all the way up. I just kept thinking i'd get high enough to find people who like me, had morals or beliefs which they may apply to their decision making. But no, morals have no belonging it would appear in the executive class, which to be fair, I should have known about in advance, but my continued promotions were really quite accidental over the years and I am obviously niave.
the overall tone and content of your post really reminded me of this song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WngY-xti0lo
You should immediately flip the bozo bit in any leader who tells you that layoffs are done and you don't need to worry. That is a bullshit statement that no manager with any experience would ever say. It's so bad, I honestly question if that's what they actually said and I have no basis other than experience to believe that!
Time to unionize.
Re "we have access to top line numbers".
Consider that that's only a part of the picture. Revenue minus costs, combined with the growth dynamics and constituent nature of both tell a fuller picture. Top line alone is almost meaningless
My ex-firm (an healthtech company in the US) is doing well.
I was a manager there. I was demoted while my newborn was in the NICU (neonatal ICU) at the beginning of my paternity leave. And my position was eliminated a few weeks after I came back to work. As a condition of getting severance, I can't officially talk about it.
That is the culture of tech companies today.
That will lead you back to the same place when the fund runs out.
Invest in yourself instead of Google. Especially as a SWE. It's never been easier to start your own company.
Gee if only there were a way to organize labor so we have more collective protections.... i Wonder if any sv startup has thought of that?
Some time ago when money were cheap it made sense to grow, now when money are expensive it makes sense to shrink.
I don't get why people get offended by it. we are not living in a "fair world" whatever that means.
You can die tomorrow or live another 50 years, nobody knows why. All of it is just luck.
You can in SMEs. Avoid VC-owned or public companies. Of course, there are no guarantees.
Software guy with 40+ years in the biz here.
Your job never has been safe. Well, not in "big tech firm" territory anyway. I've not gone more than 3 years without seeing some kind of downsizing or shift in strategy or whatever. I swear that companies are like dogs, they roll over and scratch every once in a while, and have layoffs.
Sometimes it's just a distant boom over the horizon ("I hear they're getting killed over in Consumer"), sometimes it's like they line everyone up everyone in your division and boop! every fifth person and it sucks pretty hard.
I won't pontificate on another boring survival strategy, except to observe that I've nearly always switched jobs and technologies after five years anyway. I would be scared for my career if I spent ten years working on one thing.
Sometimes you're saved by smart, sometimes you're saved by lucky, and most of the time you'll be wrong about which one it was. :-)
Perhaps this is a non sequitur, but I've been writing Django & HTMX as well as using LLMs to the end of creating an automated circuit board factory. Previously, I co-founded a company that went public in the space. If you think any of the "best engineers, those that I respected the most" might be interested in working together with me, please send them my way - I'm hiring.
jeff+hn AT nimbleprecision DOT com
To your point, I can't make any promises that folks will be able to work at the company forever, but I can say that the ambition is to build a company for the long term and I do think there's a lot of value in having a long tenured engineering team insofar as the context folks build up for the problem set, the code base, and the team can be immense.
Unless you’re truly special, The days of multi hundred thousand total comp packages are over - you’d better learn to live as though you’re on a ~175k salary, and if that’s too low, start taking steps on cutting NOW
See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering
This is why I don't work for publicly traded companies. It's like this every goddamn three months in a lot of them.
Look, all sentences in any language implicitly start with or end with the words: "For now." The sooner you incorporate that into your beliefs, the better off you will be. It isn't about "trust." Trust is conditional and blind trust in statements that cannot be true under all circumstances is something you just need to grow out of; circumstances change and intents change.
As you gain experience, you get really good at parsing and identifying axes of flexibility in statements from the power structure. In general, professional managers in a power structure will always distort or mislead with any statements they make to turn any announcement into a steering opportunity. This is just how it is and it's really not about "trust", it's about manipulation.
Manipulation is _everywhere_ in the tech companies. Nothing is more amazing to me than an experience I had early on that woke me up: the day after I attended a meeting about how the company was working on a project that was incredibly unethical (think google's china search engine-level unethical or worse, like Nokia's building anti-dissident features into their 3g networking for Iran), I attended a company all hands where the entire message from every exec, including those that were involved, was about how we were a force for free speech, freedom, etc. I already knew but it was stark.
They also engage in constant attempts to blur things. Google, in particular, spends a lot of money to help muddy the job-vs-personal waters because it gives them power. For their first decade and a half, at least, they ran the whole company like college - extracurricular activities, etc. This wasn't just because the founders had no professional experience prior, it was strategic to make it very hard for people to leave (and when they started leaving for FB, that was to another place that was similar).
So forget about "trust" - start thinking in terms of "what is this person not saying, what is this person trying to imply without putting it in words, what flexibility are they reserving for themselves with their statements" etc.
And yet, like in love, the trick is to love again.
Sure, be wise and have high standards about money. But there are some good entrepreneurs here. I was employee #250, it went IPO, became a millionaire. And now that I’ve created a startup, I try to pay it forward.
Large corporations, of course no.
I do not perceive transactional relationships as a tragedy. It's the best feedback loop there is.
You achieve the goals that are aligned with the business - business pays you.
I've been a contractor for 10 years and never took a dollar unless the goal is achieved. Ended up getting full-time position as a head of engineering hefty compensation by one of my clients.
There are a lot of hackernewsers frothing at the mouth for layoffs, so excited that all the engineers they don't think are good are gonna get laid off. This right here is the thing they don't understand: companies are typically incompetent when it comes to performance measurement and there's a good chance they'll lay off good people and leave the suck ups who don't do anything. After all, if you're so confident that you're company has been incompetent enough to make a bunch of bad hires and keep them to this point, why would you be confident they'd suddenly get it right this time?
Doesn't this apply to everyone?
"no longer" -> this might be the time to seriously talk about unionization. Programmers used to have a huge advantage at the bargaining table, going in as an individual. If parent is correct (I tend to agree) these days are over and they're not coming back. In that case, collective bargaining promises better results.
I see a lot more unionization efforts in software lately. Maybe it's just my own confirmation bias but maybe it's just that others are coming to the same conclusions.
As long as you can get another job and can get severance pay, a layoff feel like an achievement than a loss. That happened me in my last company, one that I was very attached to for what I now think was irrational reasons. I wanted to leave anyway, but having it just happen and getting a nice severance pay was a perk. I am treating my new job as the complete opposite and the feeling is cathartic, which allows me to focus better on my work instead of worrying about the maintaining the illusion of identity in the company I work for.
My company made some bad decisions and had two rounds of layoffs as a result. I was cut in the first round. My boss is also a friend and confirmed over beer that the highest paid of us were the first to go.
I had negotiated higher pay based on past experience when I joined. So it goes.
I’ve been in several different orgs that held a lot of layoffs and they’re sometimes performance related but other times just wrong place, wrong time as others have commented.
I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.
Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.
AMEN to that brother !
""Never get invested emotionally.""
Second this, because it so hard. You pour yourself into something, and then management changes, direction changes, and suddenly your baby turns into crap. Your creation probably isn't even put out of its misery, it is allowed to live, but gets tortured, and mangled into some unholy abomination.
It can be very upsetting. I still dwell on a big project, get angry, tense, it is very unhealthy, and also difficult to let go.
Not sure why one would be "attached" to a company. It is a friggin business. You exchange your labor for money. That is all about it. Yes some projects can be exciting and mentally rewarding, especially in the initial stages but never forget that you are not the one running the show. Worry about yourself first. Owners of the company do just that and act accordingly. There are exceptions here and there but never rely on those. Hope for the best prepare for the worst.