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Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions

nly
308 replies
9h8m

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.

otikik
121 replies
8h21m

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:

Your job is NOT safe.

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.

sz4kerto
73 replies
7h25m

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.

geraldwhen
61 replies
7h2m

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.

peacemaker
20 replies
6h48m

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.

FirmwareBurner
5 replies
6h12m

>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.

lawgimenez
3 replies
5h24m

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.

FirmwareBurner
2 replies
5h13m

> 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+.

lawgimenez
1 replies
5h3m

I live in Southeast Asia, cost of living here is low.

FirmwareBurner
0 replies
4h57m

I live in Europe :(

peacemaker
0 replies
5h2m

I agree, all of those fit in my (admittedly lazy) "and such" part of the statement. Loads of jobs for all ages

godzillabrennus
3 replies
6h20m

Translation:

To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.

BillTheDuck
2 replies
5h42m

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.

harimau777
0 replies
4h45m

The problem is that salaries above 100K are important to live securely in many places in the US.

geraldwhen
0 replies
4h34m

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.

Wytwwww
3 replies
6h24m

idea that you must retire from tech before 50

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...

ZaoLahma
1 replies
5h24m

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.

ghaff
0 replies
4h32m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h31m

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.

Dave3of5
3 replies
5h53m

Are you saying that there is no ageism in the tech industry at all ?

peacemaker
0 replies
5h1m

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.

hashtag-til
0 replies
4h56m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h33m

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.

WesolyKubeczek
0 replies
5h2m

The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.

To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.

JKCalhoun
0 replies
1h29m

The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.

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.

faeriechangling
12 replies
5h35m

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.

bluetomcat
6 replies
3h55m

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.

outside1234
3 replies
3h36m

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.

bluetomcat
2 replies
3h15m

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.

outside1234
1 replies
2h54m

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. :)

bluetomcat
0 replies
1h46m

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.

jibe
0 replies
3h7m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h41m

How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age?

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.

ants_everywhere
4 replies
5h8m

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?

tomrod
0 replies
4h29m

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.

ryoshu
0 replies
3h0m

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.

mostlylurks
0 replies
20m

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.

ebiester
0 replies
33m

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.

zerr
11 replies
6h38m

is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again

Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)

FirmwareBurner
9 replies
6h16m

>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.

jacquesm
4 replies
4h34m

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.

FirmwareBurner
2 replies
4h23m

>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.

JKCalhoun
1 replies
1h35m

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.)

FirmwareBurner
0 replies
36m

>And new army recruits spend their "signing bonus"

You get a signing bonus for the US militrary? Damn that's pretty sweet.

edgyquant
0 replies
3h59m

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.

cj
1 replies
5h44m

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.

ants_everywhere
0 replies
5h4m

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.

tomrod
0 replies
4h26m

If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h36m

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.

nly
0 replies
1h21m

Most devs aren't on $800-1.2M TC.

ken47
7 replies
5h59m

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.

thanksgiving
3 replies
5h39m

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.

faeriechangling
2 replies
5h30m

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.

yunwal
0 replies
4h44m

Serfs being bound to the land

This is literally RTO /s

fulladder
0 replies
3h24m

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.

faeriechangling
1 replies
5h33m

Ageism is illegal in the US

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".

ken47
0 replies
5h29m

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.

servercobra
0 replies
5h52m

Ah yes, nothing illegal ever happens in the US.

markbnj
2 replies
4h33m

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.

sfpotter
0 replies
1h17m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h39m

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.

wharvle
0 replies
1h10m

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.

fallingknife
0 replies
5h26m

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.

dukeyukey
0 replies
6h23m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h44m

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.

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.

wonderwonder
8 replies
4h39m

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.

garciasn
2 replies
4h19m

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.

notyourwork
1 replies
2h5m

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.

eastbound
0 replies
1h20m

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.

osigurdson
1 replies
4h33m

That sounds fine to me. I always found working with people much more fun than pretending to be friends with them.

wonderwonder
0 replies
4h28m

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.

pc86
0 replies
1h53m

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.

mithr
0 replies
3h35m

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.

ghaff
0 replies
4h15m

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.

tivert
0 replies
3h39m

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.

...

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.

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.

freedomben
0 replies
4h48m

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.

twh270
13 replies
6h53m

"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.

astronads
7 replies
4h31m

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.

ghaff
2 replies
4h26m

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.

vineyardmike
0 replies
37m

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.

pc86
0 replies
2h6m

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.

heresie-dabord
1 replies
1h28m

Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders

Companies pay taxes, operate in a community, and employ people. Shareholders may not care about such trifles... until the race to rot is complete.

vineyardmike
0 replies
41m

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.

trelane
0 replies
4h5m

He kept referring to employees as “resources”

The classic comeback for this is to refer to management as "overhead."

nine_k
0 replies
33m

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.

marcyb5st
1 replies
5h4m

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

seti0Cha
0 replies
12m

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.

lazide
1 replies
2h45m

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.

ebiester
0 replies
39m

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.

Frost1x
0 replies
6h2m

"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.

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).

alangibson
12 replies
7h39m

You're both right. To be fair, it reads like he was saying

Your job is NOT safe.

in service of

Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
TheRoque
11 replies
7h33m

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.

Retric
10 replies
7h12m

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.

badpun
8 replies
6h51m

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.

paulcole
7 replies
6h5m

People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

badpun
3 replies
5h8m

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.

paulcole
2 replies
4h2m

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.

badpun
1 replies
2h35m

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.

paulcole
0 replies
2h11m

I didn't say:

You can always find a reason to rationalize why you're not doing what you say you want to be doing.

I did say:

People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

That statement is true.

marcus0x62
2 replies
5h11m

It could also be possible that other people experience mental fatigue differently than you do.

paulcole
0 replies
1h26m

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that what I said is true.

People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.

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.

Retric
0 replies
3h45m

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.

lobsterthief
0 replies
6h58m

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.

katzgrau
6 replies
6h54m

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.

rkachowski
1 replies
4h32m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h26m

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.

hotpotamus
1 replies
6h51m

If this is merely the result of a change in weather, then Sundar Pichai must be the god of the winds.

pas
0 replies
4h33m

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

avensec
0 replies
2h24m

This is well-stated and appreciated positivity. It is disheartening to see the detractor/logic-leaping replies that followed. Thank you for writing it.

ParetoOptimal
0 replies
1h10m

Its not that SWE's have it so good, its more that everyone else has an unacceptably bad situation with workers rights.

The_Colonel
4 replies
7h12m

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.

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?

ctvo
1 replies
4h56m

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.

ragnot
0 replies
4h14m

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.

myth_drannon
0 replies
5h29m

Depends, in my company layoffs were based on compensation. All the high compensation locations employees were canned.

ghaff
0 replies
5h30m

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.

wonderwonder
0 replies
4h45m

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.

varispeed
0 replies
5h7m

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.

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.

tnel77
0 replies
1h6m

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!

mp05
0 replies
3h20m

"a job is not your identity"

This is so important.

mguerville
0 replies
1h26m

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"

gdilla
0 replies
2h36m

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.

game_the0ry
0 replies
3h27m

I hear you. I am also an engineer-turned-EM.

Your job is NOT safe.

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.

christophilus
0 replies
5h55m

offshore your life's direction to the company

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.

jillesvangurp
46 replies
8h37m

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.

Galanwe
16 replies
8h32m

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.

whiplash451
5 replies
7h49m

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.

ponector
3 replies
7h20m

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.

gorbachev
2 replies
7h12m

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.

rafabulsing
1 replies
6h58m

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).

whiplash451
0 replies
2h28m

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.

jokethrowaway
0 replies
7h36m

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

prox
3 replies
8h20m

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.

karmarepellent
2 replies
8h14m

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.

oblio
1 replies
7h28m

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.

karmarepellent
0 replies
6h48m

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.

lapcat
2 replies
7h46m

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.

resonious
1 replies
6h7m

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.

ghaff
0 replies
5h4m

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.

lumb63
0 replies
6h36m

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.

hef19898
0 replies
8h23m

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.

Leo_Germond
0 replies
8h14m

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.

ponector
10 replies
7h23m

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!

sjfjsjdjwvwvc
6 replies
6h37m

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.

marcus0x62
2 replies
5h6m

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.

edgyquant
1 replies
3h28m

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.

marcus0x62
0 replies
1h35m

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.

foobazgt
0 replies
5h52m

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.

disgruntledphd2
0 replies
5h23m

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.

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).

davidcbc
0 replies
2h37m

If I would really think this way I wouldn’t wanna work in this industry

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

Workaccount2
1 replies
3h56m

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.

geodel
0 replies
3h35m

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.

melenaboija
0 replies
5h7m

My advice is that if you ever feel like the poster and if you have the chance, change your job.

fendy3002
5 replies
7h3m

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.

SamoyedFurFluff
4 replies
6h42m

And this goes both ways, employees can go out as they please.

Spoken like a man who never needed healthcare, who never had dependents, who never lived under the cage of a visa.

badpun
1 replies
6h33m

Presumably, you leave to go work for another company, so none of these are a problem.

SamoyedFurFluff
0 replies
6h14m

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?

fendy3002
0 replies
4h8m

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.

beepboopboop
0 replies
4h5m

I’m not the OP, but I don’t think you understood her/his comment. People leave jobs.

refurb
4 replies
7h24m

The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter.

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.

cebert
3 replies
6h24m

If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last.

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.

HarHarVeryFunny
2 replies
3h17m

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 ?!

nly
0 replies
1h9m

Most highly compensated roles use these as stage 1 or 2 filtering due to the volume of applicants

aweiland
0 replies
2h35m

They sure are.

ChrisMarshallNY
2 replies
4h23m

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.

nathan_douglas
1 replies
44m

What sort of shock? Were you working full-time on a single application or suite of applications for that period?

ChrisMarshallNY
0 replies
17m

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.

rvz
1 replies
6h17m

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.

Many people fall for this and as long as you are an employee, no job is ever secure.

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.

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.

ghaff
0 replies
5h1m

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.

Madmallard
1 replies
7h28m

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.

sbrother
0 replies
4h10m

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.

vincnetas
38 replies
8h59m

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 :)

nly
25 replies
8h55m

TINA when CPI inflation (in the UK) is has been 18% in just 2 years.

andsoitis
22 replies
8h49m

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...

pmlnr
9 replies
7h37m

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.

latency-guy2
7 replies
6h59m

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.

ptero
2 replies
6h18m

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.

UncleMeat
1 replies
4h53m

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.

ptero
0 replies
3h5m

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.

md_
2 replies
6h41m

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.

pmlnr
1 replies
5h10m

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.

md_
0 replies
5h4m

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.

zo1
0 replies
5h40m

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.

thebruce87m
0 replies
6h37m

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.

nly
6 replies
8h33m

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.

md_
5 replies
8h25m

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.

ptero
2 replies
6h12m

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.

nly
1 replies
2h43m

Barely.

In real terms US bills have returned 0.4%/yr over the last 120+ years

md_
0 replies
51m

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).

nly
0 replies
6h39m

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

lotsofpulp
0 replies
6h34m

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.

Jenk
2 replies
8h23m

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%

andsoitis
1 replies
8h18m

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...

nly
0 replies
1h4m

I said in two years, not one.

sokoloff
0 replies
8h42m

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.

jbu
0 replies
6h50m

That's why we now have the Vimes Boot Index - https://www.vimesbootsindex.co.uk/

underdeserver
0 replies
2h4m

TINA stands for There Is No Alternative? That's a new one for me.

bluescrn
0 replies
8h37m

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'.

goodpoint
10 replies
8h33m

Your money have come a full cycle :)

Until the huge bubble around tech companies explodes.

abirch
9 replies
8h9m

Tech (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet) is pretty profitable with reasonable P/Es.

oblio
8 replies
7h27m

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.

meltyness
2 replies
6h35m

Amazon is priced for massive relentless growth.

Apple, Microsoft, Meta priced for modest growth.

oblio
1 replies
6h14m

Apple [...] priced for modest growth.

Do we live in the same metaverse?

AAPL priced for modest growth? The $3tn company???

abirch
0 replies
6h8m

Apple's PE is 30. Seems like modest growth, is implied.

lotsofpulp
2 replies
6h28m

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.

sumtechguy
0 replies
3h43m

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.

_heimdall
0 replies
6h16m

A perfect example of how the only meaningful product of a publicly traded company is the stock itself.

bluecalm
0 replies
6h7m

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).

abirch
0 replies
6h10m

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.

TaylorAlexander
0 replies
8h50m

It’s okay, if they improve profitability enough at places like Boeing our investments will be the least of our worries!

keepamovin
11 replies
8h57m

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?

nly
10 replies
8h48m

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

ngrilly
5 replies
8h40m

How different were they (your managers) before and after being laid off?

pi-e-sigma
2 replies
6h41m

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

ngrilly
0 replies
5h19m

Sounds like a very bad manager.

keepamovin
0 replies
5h47m

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

rafabulsing
0 replies
5h55m

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".

bomewish
0 replies
6h47m

+1 super curious

discordance
1 replies
4h50m

The Stanford prison experiment in action

sumtechguy
0 replies
3h17m

Was that ever replicated?

keepamovin
0 replies
7h12m

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?

johannes1234321
0 replies
8h2m

Mind that being laid off also changes them. They are also human.

azangru
11 replies
8h13m

You can be somewhere for 10 years

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.

resolutebat
5 replies
7h59m

Why? And why are you working there?

conradfr
4 replies
7h39m

On the other hand, how many times in your career have you stayed at a company more than 9 years?

quickthrower2
1 replies
7h33m

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.

trelane
0 replies
4h53m

you are a resource, and can be replaced

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.

gnz11
0 replies
6h55m

As you get older and have other responsibilities that life gives you, constant job hopping gets old too.

dathinab
0 replies
6h46m

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.

gumballindie
0 replies
6h46m

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.

dathinab
0 replies
7h0m

I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.

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.

chii
0 replies
7h24m

intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out

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.

bhawks
0 replies
7h55m

So you're leaving them right?

Why work for someone who clearly doesn't align with your professional values?

akdor1154
0 replies
7h14m

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.

SirMaster
4 replies
1h15m

Your job is NOT safe.

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...

nathan_douglas
2 replies
39m

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.

aramova
0 replies
31m

my team's contract just ended unexpectedly.

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.

SirMaster
0 replies
19m

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.

granshaw
0 replies
2m

Cause they pay 2-3x as much, that’s why.

whiplash451
3 replies
7h45m

Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest.

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.

pyrale
0 replies
5h36m

The likelihood of making real (not paper) life-changing money

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.

bluescrn
0 replies
6h4m

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.

_heimdall
0 replies
6h3m

That really depends quite a bit on how frugally a person is able and willing to live.

unsupp0rted
3 replies
8h38m

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.

TheOtherHobbes
1 replies
7h22m

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.

_heimdall
0 replies
6h4m

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.

pknomad
0 replies
7h56m

The information is not new but then there's actually internalizing that information and changing your views.

cqqxo4zV46cp
3 replies
8h45m

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.

nly
1 replies
8h43m

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.

sumtechguy
0 replies
3h15m

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.

CMCDragonkai
0 replies
8h4m

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?

agumonkey
3 replies
2h29m

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

toomuchtodo
0 replies
2h28m

The desire for meaning through their work is used against a worker.

https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e...

The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description.

The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered.

In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.

Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/

hotpotamus
0 replies
2h27m

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.

TrackerFF
0 replies
1h43m

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.

sbrother
2 replies
4h16m

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.

Ancalagon
1 replies
44m

Not going to happen in the US as healthcare is not portable and its too expensive to purchase on your own.

sbrother
0 replies
37m

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.

medo-bear
2 replies
8h39m

Hopefully cyberpunk will get an inflow out of this situation. Don't ever trust corporations, even if they promise not to be evil, Lol

prox
1 replies
8h13m

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.

medo-bear
0 replies
3h17m

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

justanotherjoe
2 replies
8h7m

"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.

zztop44
0 replies
7h38m

Say it to both :)

xoac
0 replies
7h40m

In these cases often management just wants to cut the most expensive employees which can overlap with the best.

bArray
2 replies
7h58m

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)

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.

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.

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.

Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.

Given how things are going, I would suggest tangible assets that can be easily liquefied, even if in a poor economy.

cebert
1 replies
6h12m

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.

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.

bArray
0 replies
4h58m

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.

steveBK123
1 replies
6h0m

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.

hoffspot
0 replies
1h9m

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.

rrr_oh_man
1 replies
8h52m

Management is like a guy who wants to get laid.

tomcam
0 replies
8h41m

So, all guys

osigurdson
1 replies
4h35m

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.

HarHarVeryFunny
0 replies
3h6m

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.

ken47
1 replies
6h2m

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.

HarHarVeryFunny
0 replies
3h1m

Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe.

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.

heresie-dabord
1 replies
4h30m

You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you

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.

tayo42
0 replies
1h24m

management people can't be direct, plain-spoken, and authentic with employees,

This just corporate culture though. where are you working where that isnt the case?

OscarTheGrinch
1 replies
7h14m

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.

thexumaker
0 replies
51m

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

Isn0gud
1 replies
8h7m

Don't love your job, it will never love you back.

elbear
0 replies
6h35m

love your profession and do your job professionally

xpe
0 replies
3h18m

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":

This essay examines the arguments that many self-proclaimed libertarians make against unionization. It examines whether unions could be expected to arise in a libertarian utopia; whether we could expect them to arise in both the private and the public sector; what limits, if any, we could expect to be imposed on union organizing and behavior; and specifically, whether rules that make the workplace a union shop – that is, a place where all non-management employees are required to be members of the union and contribute to the cost of collective bargaining, or whether rules similar to those embodied in what are typically called “right-to-work” laws are more likely to prevail and be thought consistent with the demands of libertarianism. Finally, I close by examining the relationship between libertarianism and some popular conceptions of liberty a little more closely and argue that, while many people who think of themselves as libertarians believe that maximizing individual negative liberty is fundamental, this is actually a mistake. Libertarianism actually rejects that concept of liberty in favor, I will argue, of a more republican conception, under which liberty is defined as an absence of domination, and a high degree of unionization and this form of liberty are totally compatible.

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.

woowoowoot
0 replies
35m

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.

travisgriggs
0 replies
3h9m

“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.

theshackleford
0 replies
7h34m

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.

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.

tety
0 replies
5h21m

the overall tone and content of your post really reminded me of this song https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WngY-xti0lo

sulam
0 replies
2h12m

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!

smrtinsert
0 replies
1h47m

Time to unionize.

redwood
0 replies
6h47m

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

random11939
0 replies
42m

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.

niceice
0 replies
3h19m

Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.

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.

mptest
0 replies
46m

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?

michael_leachim
0 replies
6h37m

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.

layer8
0 replies
8h12m

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.

You can in SMEs. Avoid VC-owned or public companies. Of course, there are no guarantees.

kabdib
0 replies
6h3m

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. :-)

jmcalvay
0 replies
6h38m

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.

granshaw
0 replies
12m

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

gorbachev
0 replies
7h14m

This is why I don't work for publicly traded companies. It's like this every goddamn three months in a lot of them.

foobiekr
0 replies
1h26m

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.

eastbound
0 replies
1h28m

Never get invested emotionally.

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.

dan_bez
0 replies
3h9m

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.

coltonv
0 replies
3h25m

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?

bossyTeacher
0 replies
6h40m

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

Doesn't this apply to everyone?

black_puppydog
0 replies
28m

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

"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.

bigpeopleareold
0 replies
8h22m

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.

alsetmusic
0 replies
15m

People who made no sense.

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.

aikiplayer
0 replies
4h35m

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.

Hypergraphe
0 replies
4h29m

AMEN to that brother !

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
5h1m

""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.

FpUser
0 replies
3h14m

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.

sinuhe69
106 replies
8h6m

Seriously, why people in tech are opposed to unions? In Europe, unions and Betriebsrat (works committee) are the norm. Why not in the US?

trashtester
30 replies
7h49m

One reason is that in times of high growth, unions tend to be a limiting factor to innovation, growth and worker compensation, especially for top performers.

Another is that during layoffs, unions may force the company to lay off people based on seniority instead of competency.

If you compare salaries for developers between Germany and the US, I think this point becomes blatantly clear.

madeofpalk
22 replies
7h42m

It's not blatantly clear that US's salaries are due to lack of developer unions.

trashtester
15 replies
7h24m

Not that alone, but a lot of the factors that hold European companies back compared to American ones when it comes to innovation come from the same ideology, whether it appears as regulation, taxation or a number of other factors aimed at improving safety and comfort, even if it comes at the cost of liberty and incentive.

dns_snek
9 replies
7h5m

Have you considered that it might not be European companies "getting held back", but American companies unduly getting ahead by externalizing their negative effects onto society. Think social media and mental health, advertising and mass surveillance, Airbnb's business model vs displaced local population, proliferating gig economy vs exploited gig workers, for example.

lucumo
7 replies
6h10m

Those are very subjective "negative effects". And it is perfectly possible that the American people is perfectly willing to accept those in exchange for the 50% extra household income compared to Germany.

I know I would.

dns_snek
3 replies
5h37m

Too bad that extra income isn't reflected in national happiness scores [1], the ultimate KPI that anyone really cares about, deep down.

[1] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2023/WHR+23.pdf

lucumo
2 replies
5h8m

Would you care to precisify which part of those two-column 166 A4-pages supports your claim?

dns_snek
1 replies
4h45m

Page 36, "Figure 2.1: Ranking of Happiness based on a three-year-average 2020–2022"

lucumo
0 replies
3h53m

That chart doesn't support your claim that higher household income isn't reflected in happiness scores. Multiple factors are at play in those scores. The report mentions a few, but I couldn't find how much each correlates with the self-reported life evaluation.

As a funny BTW, the country used in this thread as a direct comparison, Germany, is indistinguishable from the US in this table.

johannes1234321
2 replies
5h54m

Well, in exchange for the lower salary I get less crumbling infrastructure, a mostly working health system, in average better schools without need for extra security, ... and I get better protection from being fired in the spot and better unemployment benefits.

All that then leads to cities without no-go areas, where kids can play outside alone.

While of course downsides are that I don't have an as big house and no big backyard.

trashtester
0 replies
5h38m

Don't forget that European media love to focus on the worst aspects of the US. Not every school in the US requires armed guards and infrastructure is pretty good in many places.

And in particular, if you have a senior position at a FAANG company, you make enough money to put away significant savings for a rainy day, you get access to healthcare that is typically more modern than what is available in Europe, and you don't need to expose yourself to those inner cities unless you want to.

And talking about no-go-zones. They're starting to pop up in Europe now, too, there are plenty of them in Sweden. I wouldn't put all the blame for them on capitalism. Rather, such phenomena seem to be more associated with cases of ethnic or social minorities that feel alienated by society.

lucumo
0 replies
5h30m

less crumbling infrastructure

German infrastructure is crumbling too. I wouldn't hold it up as some shining beacon.

and I get better protection from being fired in the spot

Yes, that's the difference in attitudes people are talking about. It's the safety of keeping what you have versus the drive to reach for better. Societies' outcomes reflect that. More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.

trashtester
0 replies
5h47m

externalizing their negative effects onto society

Those US products are in common use in Europe, too, with the same effects. It's not illegal to create the kind of products Google and Facebook sell from Europe.

The main difference is not the relationships between companies and consumers, but rather the relationship between the companies, workers and the government.

gig workers

I remember reading a book about this when in high school (in the 80s, though the book was quite a bit older), written by and from the perspective of the unions, where they argued that the during phases of growth, unions DID hold salaries back, but (according to themselves) this was more than made up for during recessions.

In the 19th century, the factory workers had a "gig economy" too, where they would often have to work on a day-by-day basis, and would show up at the gates of the factory every morning hoping to have work that day. If there were not enough workers, they could ask for very good salaries, but if there was a surplus it led to collapsing wages AND a high risk of no income at all, ie even worse than the Uber model.

This is precisely why many companies are trying to make regular dev roles as interchangeable as possible. By minimizing the dependency on individuals, they make their own bargaining position much stronger.

And when you stop being an employee that is valued for your individual contributions, and become an easily replicable "resource", it may very well be in your best interest to unionize.

However, there are externalities connected to unions, as they DO tend to stifle innovation, lowering all boats.

If worker well-being is a high priority, but a country ALSO wants a dynamic economy, one may want to look to Denmark, where most of the "safety net" responsibilities are moved from the employers to the government.

That requires a taxation level a bit higher than in Germany, but may be part of the reason why wages are significantly higher, and only exceeded by special cases like the US, Switzerland and Norway.

TheOtherHobbes
2 replies
7h11m

That "liberty and incentive" is extremely unevenly distributed, which is why this thread exists.

Besides - the US is clearly losing its reputation for tech competence.

Between some of the world's crappiest broadband (unevenly distributed again), NASA Moon missions failing to reach the Moon, Boeing blowing their own doors off, and Google's search enshitification and inability to understand what a stable product line is - among others - the US really isn't the powerhouse of progress it thinks it is.

trashtester
1 replies
7h2m

That "liberty and incentive" is extremely unevenly distributed

Absolutely. I said in high growth phases, it may be beneficial for employees to not organize. Once an industry stabilizes, that may change. The German model has certainly been working much better for automotive and other established industries.

But even developers who have not been able to get into FAANG positions, US developer salaries are still higher than German ones, as far as I can tell. And for the ones that did get into FAANG, the difference is vast, even for entry level.

Apocryphon
0 replies
1h13m

U.S. developer salaries are also higher than in Japan and over developed salaries, even if those labor markets aren't exactly known for unionization, either.

rightbyte
0 replies
7h18m

You could just as well say that US tech sector is prosperous due to using native ascii keyboards.

There is no way to get a clear picture if unions limit innovation or whatever.

dukeyukey
0 replies
5h51m

whether it appears as regulation, taxation or a number of other factors aimed at improving safety and comfort

Also stuff like being bereft of energy resources (compared to American oil/gas/solar), having fucking Russia to the East, the cost of rebuilding after WW2, having lots of languages and cultures (limiting effective market size)...

SideQuark
5 replies
5h46m

On the other hand, the highest paying professions don't have unions, even outside tech.

somewhereoutth
1 replies
5h32m

They have professional associations - the most successful unions ever, not least because they pretend not to be unions. See the medical profession as a good example.

Apocryphon
0 replies
1h12m

Doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, accountants...

trashtester
0 replies
5h35m

MD's have unions where I live. They're probably the highest paying profession in the country.

noelherrick
0 replies
4h39m

Sports and movies/TV have unions, and those are by far the highest paid individual contributors. Tech workers just have been sold a bill of goods that they will be held back by unions. Meanwhile, tech CEOs "unionized" to make sure that poaching was held back, and by extension, compensation.

maxehmookau
0 replies
4h35m

The British Medical Association would like a word. They are a union, despite the name. UK junior doctors and consultants are currently on strike!

Snild
2 replies
6h56m

during layoffs, unions may force the company to lay off people based on seniority instead of competency.

Interesting. That's the default by law here in Sweden, but can be negotiated with the union -- usually in exchange for better severance compensation.

trashtester
1 replies
6h48m

I actually had Sweden in mind when writing it.

Snild
0 replies
2h32m

Maybe I was unclear (or I'm not getting your point): forcing the company to go only by seniority is what happens without the union.

wewxjfq
1 replies
7h21m

I never heard of an IT union in Germany.

johannes1234321
0 replies
7h13m

Verdi and IG Metall represent developers. (IGM a bit more traditional, when IBM built machines here; verdi tries to take over as software development is a service of some kind)

ponector
0 replies
6h42m

Low salaries in tech in EU is not related to unions. Most software jobs are outside of unions. There amount of money in the EU industry is lower and people are ok to low salaries. It is an open market: people are getting paid bare minimum.

Covid and remote work shift changed a bit, though. Salaries in the EU tech grown dramatically.

ParetoOptimal
0 replies
10m

Unions limit the innovation the worker wouldn't have gotten proper credit for anyway...meh... Sounds like a good trade for fair working conditions.

teitoklien
14 replies
7h55m

You add unions in tech, and then wonder why dev salaries in EU and the UK are so abysmally low.

yakshaving_jgt
6 replies
7h8m

dev salaries in EU and the UK are so abysmally low

I don't think they are. I think salaries in the US are astronomical, and it boggles the mind how in California a 22 year old React nerd can command a salary five times higher than, say, a teacher.

It's all a matter of perspective. From my perspective, if you can sit on your sofa, build a website, and pull in €80k, you're doing just fine.

caskstrength
5 replies
4h27m

It's all a matter of perspective. From my perspective, if you can sit on your sofa, build a website, and pull in €80k, you're doing just fine.

Where do you put the sofa? For locals who inherited and apartment somewhere in Stockholm or Berlin, or have been living in rent-controlled apartment for 20 years, sure, 50k after-tax is fine-ish. What about expats who didn't inherit a 500k Euro apartment from their late grandma?

yakshaving_jgt
4 replies
4h0m

You can comfortably rent an apartment in most of Europe at market rates on an €80k salary.

caskstrength
3 replies
3h43m

Define "comfortably". In EU cities with developed IT job markets (Munich, Stockholm, Paris, etc.) you will be spending half of more of your after tax salary just on rent. And you won't be able to afford to live there anymore after you retire.

yakshaving_jgt
2 replies
3h29m

Warsaw is a counterpoint to that, for example.

It has a developed IT job market, and as a senior software developer you'd likely be spending ~20% of your salary on rent.

Europe is more than just the few most expensive cities.

caskstrength
1 replies
3h21m

Oh, I'm from eastern Europe myself and of course you can have quite comfortable life there for 80k gross. The counterpoint to that is that 80k is not nearly close to average salary of a person "developing web sites from their sofa" in that region.

yakshaving_jgt
0 replies
3h11m

That's my understanding of the market (from experience), and it appears to be supported here: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/levels/senior/loc...

dukeyukey
1 replies
5h50m

why dev salaries in EU and the UK are so abysmally low

American dev salaries are the exception. It's the rest of the world where they're not outstanding.

ChatGTP
0 replies
5h44m

I think they were the exception, the lay offs are likely execs realizing they can get the same or better by hiring someone remotely in a developing country to do the work.

Not saying this is a better outcome for anyone specifically, but surely it's compelling?

badgersnake
1 replies
6h24m

Unions are pretty rare in tech in the UK also. I don’t think that’s the reason.

maxehmookau
0 replies
4h32m

That's not true I'm afraid.

UTAW and CWU specifically are unions for tech workers in the UK. At big companies especially, like BT, a sizable proportion of the workforce is unionised.

oblio
0 replies
7h14m

There are basically no unions in tech in Europe. The countries where tech workers are dominated by tech unions can be counted on one hand, and they're probably the Nordic ones.

Germany doesn't really have tech unions and for sure they don't dominate the tech scene. France, neither, Eastern Europe (all of them), don't, Southern Europe, not that I know of.

Salaries are still low.

collyw
0 replies
6h45m

Nah, Spain has crap salaries, and I have never heard of unions here.

baq
0 replies
7h31m

Unions are for employees what HR is for companies and I don't see companies doing everything that's legal and some things which are blatantly illegal to prevent themselves from having HR departments

resolutebat
13 replies
7h53m

In the US, when you say "labor union", people think of a factory worker standing in a picket line outside some dinosaur car assembly plant in Flint, Michigan that's about to close anyway.

The media has very successfully demonized unions, and many skilled workers believe the company line that unions drive down average wages, make it impossible to fire useless people, charge heavy membership fees, etc.

typedef_struct
11 replies
7h30m

I usually think actors, writers, athletes, doctors, lawyers.

whstl
5 replies
6h51m

Maybe it's a marketing issues.

Actors and other have "Guilds", lawyers have a "Bar"...

(sure the other two you mentioned have unions but...)

fireflash38
4 replies
5h25m

100% Agreed, and if we can combine that with some apprenticeships and minimum quifications for membership, I'm all in.

Just name it like something you'd find from DnD.

trashtester
2 replies
5h14m

Except in real medieval Europe, guilds and apprenticeships were not about thieves and wizards, but instead smiths, carpenters and bricklayers.

whstl
1 replies
3h36m

Well, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic... and at the time this was as advanced as you get!

trashtester
0 replies
2h56m

At the time, arguably some of the most advanced technology was the Gothic Cathedral. However, it was seen as Divine, not Magical.

whstl
0 replies
4h6m

Then it's settled, it's gonna be Software Engineering Bestiary.

wil421
3 replies
5h58m

What unions do doctors and lawyers belong to? Never hear of unions for these professions in the US.

bootsmann
1 replies
5h42m

AMA is the union for doctors

capnrefsmmat
0 replies
5h29m

The AMA is not a collective bargaining association, just a professional organization. When doctors unionize, they become part of other unions: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/business/economy/doctors-...

joncrocks
0 replies
4h39m

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association - For Lawyers. A bit like for Doctors, they get themselves involved in the accreditation process of education facilities and then by extension the State Bar organizations.

trashtester
0 replies
5h17m

And teachers.

bluedino
0 replies
6h59m

The only assembly plant in Flint is the truck plant and that won't e closing anytime soon

https://www.gm.com/company/facilities/flint-assembly

laurels-marts
12 replies
7h26m

As a European I'm curious which unions and industries are you talking about? I've been working tech or tech-adjacent jobs my entire life here and I've never been in a union nor do I know any friends (developers / designers) that are in a union. And I'm going to conferences and meetups on a regular. I'm not saying unions don't exist (probably more so in certain industries), but for devs to be in a union in Europe? Never heard of it.

Extasia785
3 replies
6h23m

Unions in Germany aren't really split up by profession, but by industry. So if you e.g. work in the car or manufacturing industry, there's a good chance that most workers in your company are part of "IG Metall", which is the biggest union in Germany. And that union then negotiates the salary & working conditions for every normal employee, even if you aren't part of the union. So if you ever met a developer from Siemens, Mercedes, BMW, Bosch, etc. they are probably enjoying the benefits of a union.

carstenhag
1 replies
6h2m

As you said, they are only under that umbrella because of the sector. Outside of those companies, there's basically no unions at all in IT/Mostly-IT companies.

Zetobal
0 replies
4h51m

Atruvia, 1&1 and SAP have... and they are probably the biggest native german employers.

laurels-marts
0 replies
6h0m

Interesting. I think that makes a lot more sense for the heavy industries in Germany. I've been working for many years across the border in the Netherlands (South Holland specifically) where there's a lot of tech/design companies and studios and I just haven't come across anyone in a union or even heard of people being in a union.

speedgoose
2 replies
6h51m

It’s very common in Norway. Many IT people are member of NITO (Norwegian Society of Engineers and Technologists) or Tekna (Norwegian Society of Graduate Technical and Scientific Professionals).

trashtester
0 replies
5h19m

My estimate would be that at most 40-50% of developers are unionized in Norway (more for ops/IT-department workers). In Sweden that's more like 80%.

Even 40% makes a huge difference, though.

matsemann
0 replies
2h33m

Yeah, and Tekna a few years back was one of those pushing to get rid of the (now illegal) anti-competition contracts all employers made you sign. So while most people don't see them day-to-day (as in, they don't set tariffs and often don't negotiate your salary), they still influence a lot. And the salary statistics is very useful in leveling the playing field and getting what you're worth.

And the union deals on insurances, mortgage etc. saves me much more money each year than the union fee.

Snild
1 replies
7h1m

"Betriebsrat" sounds German to me, so possibly Germany?

And definitely Sweden. Many (most?) of my software engineer colleagues are members of either the engineering-specific "Sveriges Ingenjörer" or generic white-collar "Unionen" union.

n_ary
0 replies
1h58m

“Betriebsrat" sounds German to me, so possibly Germany?

I am in Germany and I never heard of any union for Devs, not even large firms having any specific ones for Devs. My colleagues frequently discuss about unionizing but there are huge pay disparity hence most often it is hard to get everyone on board sadly.

Most unions are intended for craftsmen, minijobs, public transports and such. There are some small employers covered by famous IG Metall tariff but that is not the norm. I know that likes of Airbus has some kind of union that covers most of the departments and hence pays insane salary but that is something I heard from friends of people who work there, so I can’t assure accuracy.

There might be unions but that is not the norm except some dinosaurs.

kevsim
0 replies
6h52m

I believe here in Norway it's about 50% of devs that are in the technical unions.

gumballindie
0 replies
6h40m

Dont you just love it when people speak of their own little bubble as if it was an entire continent? I never met anyone in “Europe” working in tech part of a union.

eloisant
0 replies
6h35m

We need to stop talking about "Europe" in general for things as country-specific as labor laws and unions.

ur-whale
3 replies
6h49m

Why not in the US?

How many large tech. companies has Europe produced ?

Why would (or even: could) anyone start/build a cutting-edge tech. company in Europe given the hell that labor laws are over there ?

Labor laws in Europe are a giant hindrance to economic growth.

People in most European countries have made a political choice: safety and stagnation over wealth and growth.

That's their choice, fine, they're free to do as they please in their own house.

But when you make a choice, you can't ignore the consequences of these choices.

That's why "not in the US":

Different political choices, betting on growth, agility, innovation, running fast, and yes -- ooooh, what a terrible thing -- taking risks, and among others that employment may come and go because the world is not a static place.

eloisant
1 replies
6h33m

It has nothing to do with labor laws, it's more about lack of investors.

Many tech companies started in Europe, got successful then moved to US because they could not longer find big enough investors in Europe.

Google only did layoffs very recently so I don't see how be able to fire people at will helped them grow.

ur-whale
0 replies
3h3m

it's more about lack of investors.

And why would you say, aren't there any large investors?

If the labor market conditions were good (and taxes, and work ethics, and ... the list is very long), the investors would come, even from far away, believe me.

Money can move around the world very fast these days.

_pferreir_
0 replies
2h31m

Wow, that's a very opinionated take, to say the least. Especially when by Europe we mean three dozen countries or so, all of them with their own history, policies and laws. A little bit more nuance would help.

odiroot
3 replies
7h8m

My only experience dealing with an union as a SWE, in Germany at that, has been a negative one. It shaped my opinion on the topic.

lobsterthief
2 replies
6h54m

What about it was negative?

odiroot
1 replies
6h32m

They didn't want me to negotiate my offer, after I went through the whole interview process. Passed the message through my prospective boss: "take it or leave it, you can't have it better than people already at the company".

pbmonster
0 replies
6h5m

Yeah, salary negotiations in the context of a union contract is a specific skill. Knowing the system is absolutely essential.

The way to go would have been to communicate to your prospective boss that he needs to create a position in a higher compensation tier, or a position outside the union contract. If they want you badly enough, both are possibilities. Especially position outside the union contract are very common once you're a senior/principal engineer.

If it's only a small bump you want (not an entire compensation tier), telling your prospective boss that he needs to take your CV and convince HR that this means you have 15 years of relevant experience will also work - this will get you a high compensation level within your tier.

whiplash451
2 replies
7h42m

In Europe, unions can have devastating effects by ruining the relationships between the leadership and the rank-and-file.

We are stuck in a self-reinforcing feedback loop where unions represent a very small portion of the employees therefore most employees avoid being associated with unions because it makes you look like an activist.

intexpress
1 replies
7h39m

Google leadership has been doing a thorough job at ruining the relationships between leadership and the rank-and-file

whiplash451
0 replies
2h33m

My comment was about what is happening in Europe, not in the US.

mrtksn
2 replies
7h32m

There's this phenomenon where employees earning higher than their friends and family OR at least doing work in a clean and safe environment tend to believe that they are not workers and they oppose regulations and unions because they feel like its beneath them.

At the company of a friend of mine, the white collar employees do charity events for the blue colar ones and while the blue colar ones participate on labour day events, the white collar ones are too cool to be with them.

But when the actual non-workers(the true elite) feel like they can make more money by laying off some white collar workers, the cool white collars go through the exact same process as the blue collar ones they chipped in for.

Also, these are not even high earning white collars, they just happen to work in a pleasant environment. Many blue collar workers make more money in comparison to white them and are closer to the non-workers since they can actually do highly paid short term contract work.

There's a strong cognitive dissonance going on among white collar workers, having trouble to process the signals on if they are the cool elite or the working class. In Europe, this is not as strong because of the unions and regulations pushing all workers to earn more less the same and the work environments are safe and clean. In places outside of EU there can be workers which are 10x or 100x beter off than those at the bottom because the top can be higher but usually the bottom is also much lower and this gets the better off ones very confused.

justanorherhack
1 replies
3h59m

Nope. This is laughably out of touch -" I don't understand how certain people don't think like I do so they must be irrational." If unions were structured differently, there would be more incentives. People at large, in group form are much more rationale then academics want to give credit, they are simply following the incentives in their life and attempting to do what's best for themselves. Unions in the US are not very incentivising.

In the us, the way laws are written, unions are a political entity and basically from inception are in bed with the government. This creates a mismatch of incentives as the union is motivated to operate politically and this is reflected internally because that's how power is derived externally and thus internally. This creates a lot of odd things like the local foreman who manages the house is doing so because he has been around for 20 years or because he is friends with the guy who has been around for 20 years or because he bought in with millions to be that guy not because they are the right people for the job.

Because of these legal protections and structures unions don't have to compete against other unions and they don't have to compete for the workers membership either. For example the IATSE gets a cut of your work if you work in the industry because that's legally mandated even if you aren't a member. This encourages unions to become bloated, and self serving and it's not immediately clear their value add. Just like elsewhere in society top down structures begin to appear where a few people at the top of the union get most of the pie.

Workers are hesitate to involve themselves with unions here because they are yielding agency to a political machine in a fairly permanent way.

Don't forget some of the cons and headlines around unions here either. Some of the unions using violence, like the teamsters, here to gain power. Teachers unions trying to keep bloated headcounts in empty (by half) schools in Chicago nearly bankrupting the city. Police unions protecting their members despite obvious misconduct. Lots of police/fireman/city unions keep garenteeing investment return rates that aren't in line with the market that eventually bankrupt the city.

If the legal freedom and incentives were there people would do it, but this system is by design.

I am a soft engineer but have remained a iatse card holder.

mrtksn
0 replies
2h37m

Obviously all generalizations are wrong but this particular comment was well received. Must have rang some bells.

lgkk
2 replies
7h29m

Unions kill innovation, at least in US. And 10-20% of people do the actual work so 80-90% can have the time to complain nonstop while making 400k plus.

As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.

On the other hand almost everyone in the world uses something made by American corporations.

myspy
0 replies
7h18m

Maybe in the US, but that's a problem how you unionize.

dukeyukey
0 replies
5h48m

As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.

Keep in mind Europe exports more to the world market than America does (and more of them are goods versus services). Like yeah, if you live in the US you probably use more American-made tools - that is not true for the rest of the world.

Just looking around my kitchen now - my knives are made in Germany; my coffee grinder in Norway; my toaster in the UK. Then it's mostly made in China (air fryer, microwave, kettle, pressure cooker). The coffee roaster I have packed away is made in South Korea; the 3D printer on the kitchen table is made in Czechia.

I don't think I own a single kitchen tool or appliance made in the US.

EDIT: Actually, yeah I've got an Aeropress made in the US.

code51
1 replies
7h53m

Most probably because they think unions would standardize salaries and eliminate outlier FAANG compensation packages. Everybody thinks they are special and would get that outlier compensation after all. An idea which is not so battle-tested as we see.

danpalmer
0 replies
7h50m

Yeah the union I'm a part of said this was the major thing that people don't like at tech companies, and they explicitly say that their approach is not the same with other industries, and that they are fully on board with things like performance based compensation and keeping up with market rates.

SideQuark
1 replies
5h48m

The US also pays significantly more. Unions change the risk calculation for employers, and the result will be changes in compensation, and often increased costs to consumers.

Also unions in the US have quite often rewarded seniority over skill and effort, making them less attractive to high performers.

Early on in tech I outperformed all those I started with, and was able to make significantly more as a result. My friends in union jobs (electrician, auto plant workers, ..) did not get any such opportunity to shine, and they even had to strike (i.e., no pay) when the local shops decided they should. They're not allowed to work outside jobs, they have a terrible time starting new shops, since the existing union power brokers like the control over their employment.

I looked into moving to the UK, and saw how few startups in the EU become big, how hard it is in most countries there to make new businesses compared to the US, and decided against it. The EU is ~450M people, the US is ~330M. Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies.

Increased benefits to workers for one facet of employment is not free. Laws adding costs per employee to an employer are not simply paid out of magic money.

bradleyishungry
0 replies
4h21m

Where is any evidence to back this? How can you compare a VC funded tech job pay to a normal trade pay? Software pays a lot because its a good business. There is no physical product cost so labor can be higher, and margins are higher. Comparing the EU and US start up cultures and implying its somehow due to labor protections is disingenuous.

rmvt
0 replies
7h47m

they are the norm but not on the tech world. in my 10+ years working in europe (tech) i've never once met someone that was part of a union. i've had this discussion with my manager recently and you can see that people are starting to become aware (of unions) and see the need, after years of feeling untouchable. it's still very early though.

redleader55
0 replies
6h52m

Because a big tech company will think twice before opening o position in Europe and will consider not the impact of that position could bring, but how hard is to fire someone from that position. Some of the people targeted by the last year's lay-offs were still employed one year later and the company couldn't do anything for stupid legal reasons, like not already having a union to negotiate for 1 person. Being in a limbo for 1 year, not being able to do anything except quit and loose any potential layoff compensation package, but neither able to work for the company, nor interview and find a new job is horrible for everyone involved.

US restarted hiring quickly after the layoffs, but EU has still a hiring freeze in several FAANGS.

rc_kas
0 replies
19m

In the past Software Engineers never needed unions. We were just in super high demand at all times and we could name our price.

Yeah things have changed. It may be time for Software Engineers to unionize.

paweladamczuk
0 replies
6h0m

In Poland most people scoff at any mention of unions for software developers. I think this is because we're still in the phase of quick SWE salary growth powered in large part by the best performers in the field being good negotiators in salary talks with incoming foreign capital. They drive the companies' labor cost expectations up and it benefits everybody in the field.

There's also a huge disparity between the SWE salaries and the rest of the society in Poland, I can imagine fears that unionization overall would flatten out those differences.

Another factor is that in places where we have unions (leftover fields still highly tied to the government, e.g. teachers) they tend to not function very well in practice (not enough employee advocacy, unhealthy level of union politics affecting people's outcomes in the workplace etc.).

Lastly, we're still pretty fresh to the whole capitalism game as a country, so we're scared of anything that resembles a step backwards.

m0llusk
0 replies
4h0m

In Europe unions negotiate with company leaders to make deals that help businesses negotiate market conditions. In the US unions enable workers to gang up on management in order to increase pay. The words are similar, but the structures, operations, and goals involved are all completely different.

jokethrowaway
0 replies
7h6m

I've never heard of anyone using unions in software in europe. Maybe something popular in just one country?

The problem with unions is that if you are a top performer it's harder to get promoted, if you're crap it's harder to get rid of you.

Overall it's great for non productive people who can pay a little and coast, great for everyone else. I can understand unions for low paid jobs the should be done by machines (eg. factory workers) but it doesn't make sense for knowledge work where performance has huge impact.

Oh and they want money to do that.

johannes1234321
0 replies
7h49m

I don't think they are that common in tech in Europe/Germany as well.

SWEs are used to being in a good negotiation position and not in need for collective bargain.

My employer has a works council, but no union representation. That council is mostly occupied with dealing with compensation (provisions, product assignments, ...) of sales people, who make the largest group, thus most votes. SWE needs aren't seen.

infecto
0 replies
5h15m

I don't think its so much the industry as the geography. It is all about tradeoffs and I don't think there is a clear answer as to what the better way is. I am in the US and to me the American dream is the selling point here. While I don't think the American dream is as easy as it was decades ago, I do think its still very much a possibility when I see the number of immigrants that come either as skilled workers or labor and can really lift themselves up. I am not European but my impression is that lots of the EU advertises itself as stable.

I personally have no interest in joining a union. I don't think companies are my friend but I also know that it is bad to become complacent which I find a lot of lifers at big companies can become. I am not suggesting you need to be working 90 hour weeks but I do think a lot of individuals, including engineers, fall into the trap of doing one thing well and nothing else and stick into a single role for such a time that they lose plasticity. The employee - employer relationship is not a war against each other but a market balance, I need to be adding incremental value and the employer needs to be recognizing it and we are left to negotiate the terms.

burnerburnson
0 replies
5h24m

Google has a union. It costs thousands of dollars per year to join and primarily focuses on political issues like lobbying management not to pursue contracts with the US military.

And even if they had a good union, I fail to see how it would have prevented this.

bitcharmer
0 replies
6h57m

Because in the US of A anything that's not aligned with maximising shareholder value is communism.

amadvance
0 replies
4h55m

Well, unions tend to average the outcome. But IT positions, being on the top side of the employee distribution, can typically obtain more.

I can give you a real-world example. Our company (Italy) office was relocated, and unions entered negotiations to obtain three days of remote work for the entire personnel. However, I and others refused to sign the agreement because, with more negotiation power, our target was full remote work. However, in doing so, we were undermining the union positions, which made them unhappy. Fortunately, things ended well; all personnel got the three days, and a few other people were granted full remote work.

RedShift1
0 replies
7h56m

Indoctrinated that unions are communism and/or result in worse working conditions and wages.

ken47
69 replies
5h51m

Google is overrated. It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. You had talking heads yammering about how hard it was to get into Google, which to be honest, made the company even less appealing. Is this a software engineering company or some kind of hyped up nightclub?

Yeah, maybe it's a hard interview if you've been out of college for a while, haven't written classical algorithms professionally for years, and don't want to spend weeks or months of free time bashing your head on leetcode. What isn't pressure tested by the Google interview process? Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.

Obviously, Google has some good engineers, but my goodness was the hype around the company offputting.

hiq
37 replies
5h11m

It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class.

What would you do instead? Threads about tech interviews are always the same: we all complain about the process with no real alternative when you want to hire at that scale.

In particular about:

Just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer.

How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews?

If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested, even if they'd have to delegate some of their hiring to an external company. The fact that leetcode interviews are still so common indicates that maybe something is missing from alternatives, be it scalability, fairness or even whether they actually provide more signal than leetcode interviews.

devjab
10 replies
4h36m

In Denmark we rarely perform tech interviews the way you Americans do. Part of this is because of how available education is, so virtually everyone who’s applying for a tech job comes with some sort of academic education, meaning that they’ve proven their worth to get it. I’ve worked a side gig as an external examiner for a decade now, I’ve got good confidence in anyone I haven’t failed.

Another part is that tech interviews are often sort of useless. One of the most expensive mistakes you can make as a manager is to hire the wrong person. Even in Denmark where it’s relatively easy to let a new hire go within the first three months, you’ve still invested an enormous amount of resources into the process as well as the impact a wrong hire will have on team moral. So what we look for first and foremost is cultural and personal fit within the team you’re supposed to be working in. We’re far more likely to do some personality test on you than a technical interview, not because we believe those are a science or accurate in anyway but because they are great talking points to get to know you in a high stress situation. We do this because technical skills can also be taught, and regardless of your background, we’re going to have to “adjust” you into the way we work.

We may ask you some technical questions, but they’ll typically be on a more theoretical level than practical because we want to know how you think about tech. Again to see if your “ideological” fit is good rather than to test your technical prowess.

In my anecdotal experience this is a far better process than technical interviews. But it is made possibly by education, precious work experience and the fact that if you really turn out to be terrible then it’s “free” to let you go. It also requires direct managers and often team members to handle the process with HR on the sideline, rather than HR handling the entire hiring process… but I can’t imagine working for someone I’ve never met.

pb7
6 replies
2h40m

What are some noteworthy Danish companies that have created innovative products?

manuelabeledo
3 replies
2h20m

This has nothing to do with hiring processes.

pb7
1 replies
1h27m

Hiring talented people that will build innovative products has nothing to do with hiring processes?

ken47
0 replies
55m

Talent that is evaluated in, effectively, one dimension? Commercializing a product successfully is a highly multi-dimensional endeavor.

Even building a reasonably well functioning engineering team is highly multi-dimensional.

ken47
0 replies
1h18m

Agreed. The implication that a lack of algorithms testing during software engineering interviews has much of anything to do with successful innovation, as opposed to the infinitude of other factors that go into commercializing a product, is unpersuasive.

Do these leetcode style questions test innovation at all? I don't think they're asking candidates to invent new algorithms.

dekhn
1 replies
1h16m

Novo Nordisk comes to mind.

alephnerd
0 replies
59m

I think OP meant software. Hiring in Pharma is different.

yterdy
0 replies
1h50m

In America, there is a history of using "cultural fit" as an excuse to discriminate against socially marginalized groups (both those that have and haven't escaped economic marginalization in the intervening years). So that's another criterion that Americans will have trouble with: it's difficult to be certain that your lack of "cultural fit" is something fundamental to do with your personality or work style, or if it's some aspect of your identity that is unrelated to your work performance (something that an effective, if biased, employer and team might discover if you were given a chance).

hiq
0 replies
2h15m

That means that from the start, you rule out people who don't have this academic education. Then there's the question of the relevance of this education: either you only take CS graduates, in which case your applicant pool is quite small if you want to hire thousands of employees (but this might work if you only need to hire a few people). Or you broaden it, and you then have no guarantee that people will actually be able to write or understand code because they didn't have to to get your degree. That's without even getting into grade inflation and exam cheating.

We do this because technical skills can also be taught, and regardless of your background, we’re going to have to “adjust” you into the way we work.

The thing is, after your technical fit, if you add a leetcode easy question, you can quickly check that the person you're interviewing can at least write a for-loop. Isn't this a useful filter?

elteto
0 replies
2h16m

Cultural, personal and ideological (oof, what a word... kind of a red flag) are just proxies for "people _I_ like". Go far enough down that path and that is how you end up discriminating people for how they look/think/express themselves.

I'll honestly take Leetcode every time over this. I can grind algorithms, I can't change the fact that I'm Indian/Hispanic/Whatever.

xtracto
7 replies
4h11m

I've been interviewing people for Software Eng jobs for more than 10 years an I haven't used leetcode style problems for like 8 of those years.

Leetcode interviewing is lazy interviewing. It's for when you don't want to put an effort in your interviewing process to check if the candidates have the skills you need for the position you are filling.

For example. My interview process nowadays is one web API interaction challenge: Https://challenge.bax-dev.com (in Spanish, so you may have to do a Google translate. Use with curl)

In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email. They arrive to my email and I check the code quality of submissions with my morning coffee.

Then in the ONLY 90 minutes Interview with me, we talk 30 mins about experience in their resume, 30 mins about our company and the position, and we code the "server" side to the web client they created .

We do it pair programming style. The questions I achieve to answer are: would I pair program with thus guy? (Like, is she cool to work with?) And does she know what she is doing?

I've had very good results with this method.

And, from the code exercises I am sure anyone can guess what skills am I looking for.

There was a great circlejerk on reddit in one of the outages where people asked whither Google engineers have inverted enough binary trees to bring their systems online. Basically saying that the skills they hire for are for Algirithm competitions, not for building enterprise software.

And I say this as a CompSci PhD who did his good share of data structure and algorithms during my time in academia.

zooq_ai
1 replies
1h57m

Have you built a $1 Trillion company? No.

Has your company pioneered some great open source software (Kubernetes, Go, React, PyTorch, Cassandra? No.

How do you even know that your method is correct, scalable? Answer is you don't know.

It's mind-boggling that people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people, think they know how to hire for firms that serve 4 Billion+ users.

ken47
0 replies
1h2m

people who hire for software engineers who write CRUD apps used by 20 people

It seems like you believe that anyone who doesn't work for Google works for a boutique web design firm?

squarepizza
0 replies
2h18m

Thank you for caring about the craft.

pakitan
0 replies
1h44m

Do applicants get bonus points if they mention that your steps are incorrectly numbered? :)

mista2nith
0 replies
3h9m

.... if I use this will you sue me?

This should be the standard wtf

htrp
0 replies
3h32m

stealing your interview method, this is an amazing idea.

hiq
0 replies
2h22m

How many people have you interviewed with this technique? After how many applications will you need to change your exercise, such that it becomes expensive to put that much structure into it? How do you deal with applicants knowing each other and giving each other the challenge and tips on how to solve it / what your reactions and probes were?

The pair programming part is not that different to how algorithm interviews are conducted at least in some places. You can definitely be silent for 1h and expect the best solution, or you can collaborate with the applicant and see whether their communication is good, their thinking is structured, etc.

In that untimed challenge the candidate submits their code and email.

I expect you can't do that in companies which are highly sought after because it's too easy to cheat, and the stakes are high enough that people will do it. Yes the pair programming part lowers the chances, but people already cheat on live coding through various means, it'd be even easier if parts of the challenge are untimed.

Overall I think the difference here is that of scale: if you hire a few people in specific positions, then fine. If you hire thousands (and you can rightly question whether that makes sense in the first place but that's the assumption for many of these companies), you can't have a specific interview for each and every position, you can't reuse the same interview question after having used it for 500 times, such that you can't invest that much into it in the first place.

ken47
4 replies
5h0m

I've seen plenty of HN threads where good alternative processes were described. I'm not going to be exhaustive here: writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does, coming up with and debating the architecture of a system, mock code reviews, etc.

You might say these don't scale as well as standardized testing of university classical algorithms knowledge. The general response to that would be that if you're optimizing for scale, then you're not optimizing for quality, so stop the hype around Google only hiring "the best."

It's telling that as Google has begun to regularly lay off engineers, they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process.

trympet
1 replies
1h47m

At big tech companies, "writing a program over a few hours that is reflective of the kind of work that the company actually does" is not really a good, representative performance measure. Often times, you will be solving problems across multiple domains, outside of your area of expertise. You have to take on the role of PM, data scientist, SWE, researcher, etc.

Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases. It is expected that you re-acclimatize and learn quickly. Giving you a take-home test to write some CRUD app isn't necessarily sampling those same attributes.

p.s.: also not a fan of classical algorithm style interviews. Clearly, they also have a bias.

ken47
0 replies
1h12m

Internal restructuring of the company may even take you from working on backend web apis to distributed databases

This is a stretch. It's unlikely that an interview process would test such disparate skills directly, and a competent company will avoid moving engineers into a role that requires a drastically different skillset without separate verification that they can handle the new role.

okdood64
0 replies
2h50m

they have also begun to deemphasize classical algorithms in their interview process

Can you elaborate?

hn_throwaway_99
0 replies
2h37m

To your point, while I haven't interviewed with Google, don't they actually do a number of the things you're talking about (e.g. ask about system design or ask you to look at some existing code)? I'm guessing every interviewer isn't asking you some variation of "find a loop in a linked list".

yterdy
2 replies
2h58m

What would you do instead?

Encourage a competitive market environment where there aren't just a handful of polarized "make it" companies that everyone is applying to regardless of fit or career objective because landing a job there is a golden ticket?

hiq
1 replies
2h14m

That still doesn't mean the interview process would be any different in this different market environment you're describing.

yterdy
0 replies
1h49m

Maybe. More opportunities for job-seekers to get a Good Job might make any given selection process less cutthroat, though.

CoastalCoder
2 replies
3h59m

(Sorry for the meta-question, but I'm not sure where better to post this.)

There's a sibling comment by @xtracto that's marked "[dead]", but IMO shouldn't be.

Is there any normal means of appealing that status without bothering the admins?

mh-
1 replies
3h52m

You can click into the comment and then hit vouch if that is available to you. It's near the flag link.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
3h41m

Ah, thank you. I assumed that if I was able to vouch for a comment, I could do so from the tree view.

saiya-jin
1 replies
3h38m

Have you actually every talked about code and architecture to another peer? If levels are cca same it quickly becomes an effortless exercise where ideas flow quickly and topics are immediately picked up. Lets call it brainstorming.

Why can't we repeat that in interview? I don't care if some dev can code some method names or detailed algorithms from his head, when it takes 3 seconds to find exact solution. In other words, there is little real added value from such a skill. You get much better peek into somebody's head with above - but it requires significantly more effort on interviewee's side, heck maybe even some preparation.

You can to certain extent hack leetcode process by just doing leetcode. Its much harder to be verbally fluent about designs, concepts and libraries that you never used. And for the rest, there is a trial period, you can't skip that 3 months experience and cram it into interviews.

hiq
0 replies
2h13m

Are you referring to system design interviews, or are you describing something else? System design interviews are commonly used along with leetcode interviews, especially in senior roles.

renewiltord
1 replies
3h7m

You are absolutely correct. This discussion is pointless. When you have a 10k org you cannot allow ad-hoc methods because there are unscrupulous actors: people will sell the job, there will be nepotism, and discrimination.

Hiring at scale with some bar of quality needs industrial processes. That's a real constraint of the system.

Any alpha gets ruthlessly optimized away. Referrals? Now sold for split. GitHub Open Source? Now produced for cash or undifferentiated slop.

People who don't run large orgs don't get this. But also many people who run small orgs don't get this: you don't need to run large org machinery for small orgs. Part of the advantage is agility. Part of the advantage is that everyone is still on the same page and that it's obvious when they're not.

So big orgs have no choice. Small orgs have no need.

HarHarVeryFunny
0 replies
2h43m

Hiring at scale with some bar of quality needs industrial processes.

Sounds kinda logical, but is it really?

It's not like BigCorp only has one guy doing the interviewing for 100's of positions. You're interviewing for a job on a team regardless of company size, and presumably what matters to them is whether you are a good fit for the need they have on their team, not whether you pass some industrial scale screening test.

manuelabeledo
1 replies
2h10m

How would you assess them better than current common processes like leetcode interviews?

OP said "just about every other skill that is needed to be a good software engineer", for which leetcode is useless.

Communication skills, organizational skills, hell, even general knowledge isn't covered by leetcode-like interviews.

Personally, speaking as someone who doesn't like but has to interview potential hires, I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.

If one could do better hiring at the same cost or less, the whole industry would be interested

I think this is a naive perspective. If there is any takeaway from the recent wave of layoffs, it would be that company wide decisions may be driven by factors that have no relation with actual financial performance. Google could have kept all these engineers and still make an absurd profit.

The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.

hiq
0 replies
59m

AFAIK communication skills are routinely evaluated in those interviews: if you have the best code but can't explain how it works, you won't score highly on them. You should be able to discuss tradeoffs, how you reason, etc.

They clearly don't help to evaluate organizational skills, but no one said you should only have these interviews. I'm guessing no company does only leetcode-style interviews, at least I don't know of any.

I have found that there is zero overlap between people doing well in leetcode interviews, and hires doing well in their first year.

You could only evaluate this correlation among people who did pass your leetcode interviews and were thus beyond a certain bar, unless I'm missing something. The question is whether selecting according to this bar is useful, but it doesn't look like you evaluated this. Or did you do leetcode interviews and just hired anyone regardless of how they performed in them? I agree with you that beyond a certain bar, the signal becomes lesser. But being able to tell whether a candidate can write a for loop is a pretty strong (anti-)indicator for many SWE jobs.

The notion here is that some company, at some point in time, started putting their applicants through these kind of puzzles, and it became trendy.

I agree that there's probably some of that. But companies are made of people, and if so many are still doing that decades now after they started and don't see a competitive advantage in switching, maybe it's the best they've been able to come up with, given their constraints. Again, there's real money to be made for those coming up with an alternative that'd scale and perform better.

TheBigSalad
0 replies
4h42m

You really think this is the best interview process we can do?

lokar
8 replies
2h3m

I did over 400 interviews working there, and many hundreds more serving on hiring committees. I never gave a leetcode interview, and saw only a modest amount of them in committee.

“It’s all leetcode BS” makes a great offhand d complaint but was not the actual truth.

gregors
1 replies
43m

I personally like the story of the hiring committee that refused to hire themselves

https://youtu.be/r8RxkpUvxK0?t=531

ashconnor
0 replies
33m

I watched this a while ago and thought I’m clearly too dumb to work at Google because I’m not going to come up with convex hull algorithms in an interview room.

Apocryphon
1 replies
1h17m

Okay, then what questions did you give in interview?

lokar
0 replies
1h7m

I personally did a lot of system design, debugging (systems or code), or deep technical dive (explain in more and more detail how something works and why it works that way).

superconduct123
0 replies
6m

Then why is there hundreds of Google tagged questions on LeetCode?

mportela
0 replies
1h29m

Then I'm super unlucky because my last phone interview there 3 weeks ago was definitely Leetcode.

ken47
0 replies
56m

Google reached out to me a few times to see if I'd interview with them. On the one or two phone calls I had with their recruiters, they explicitly advised me to practice algorithms (leetcode et al) if I wanted to move forward. Perhaps what you were doing was not the norm.

01100011
0 replies
1h7m

I only interviewed once with them, but there wasn't anything I'd consider leetcode.

There was a rather aggressive interviewer who drilled me on an architectural web services question despite interviewing for a systems programming position on Fuchsia and having a resume solely in embedded/systems programming. From my limited experience I'd say the interview process is broken, but not in the way people on here think.

password54321
7 replies
4h15m

Most "leetcode" questions they ask are just easy level programming puzzles. The fact that many developers seem to hate it and even struggle with it says more about the developers applying than it does about Google.

mcntsh
3 replies
3h49m

The fact that there are whole industries built on training these puzzles is a big signal that you're wrong.

Also it's funny that engineers leaving Google, Amazon, et all NEED to practice these skills in order to get other roles because it just shows that these skills aren't needed (read: exercised, grown) working in their day-to-day jobs.

password54321
1 replies
3h44m

The fact that there are whole industries built on training these puzzles is a big signal that you're wrong.

Wrong about what? That they are easy? If you know binary search, sorting, sets, hash tables, recursion then it is easy. If you wanted to make it more aligned with what a developer does day to day the alternative is doing a small project in your own time which is more time consuming for everyone.

HarHarVeryFunny
0 replies
2h34m

Leetcode "easy" questions are just common sense application of everyday algorithms and data structures. These might make sense for an automated screening test of "is this candidate lying about knowing the language".

But, then there's the ones that are all about specific techniques such as dynamic programming + memoization, or specific graph algorithms etc, etc. Any decent programmer can learn how to do these harder problems under time pressure (interview) through practice, but this is really about Leetcode grinding prep... these are not problems you would likely encounter in most jobs, and in the real world you'd just Google for algorithms or ask a colleague if you needed help.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
3h42m

The fact that there are whole industries built on training these puzzles is a big signal that you're wrong.

I'm not sure that logic alone is a compelling: It's conceivable that this secondary industry addresses a real gap in university curricula, or a need for ongoing training of experienced developers.

But I think your overall point still holds, because there's a consensus that a large number of Leetcode-like puzzles require familiarity with problems and solutions that hardly every come up in real professional software development, and aren't even good proxies for the abilities that do matter.

superconduct123
0 replies
4m

They are literally not easy-level

Just take a look at the list https://leetcode.com/problem-list/top-google-questions/

ken47
0 replies
3h33m

Your assertion is that Google asks “just easy level programming problems.” Assuming we accept this argument, that probably tells most of us more about Google than it does about some straw-man developer.

But I’ll give Google a bit more credit than you and guess that they ask questions that are at least above the “easy” level.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
3h46m

Most "leetcode" questions they ask are just easy level programming puzzles.

As a senior developer currently looking for work, I have mixed feelings about leetcode-like questions. Here's my take:

Pro: They rule out most/all applicants who lack basic programming competence.

Con: Any timed or live programming test can make some applicants fail because of performance anxiety.

Pro/con: Some of the problems require (a) very high intelligence or (b) familiarity with how people have solved that specific problem in the past.

I think (b) is a major source of complaints, because for most people the only solution is Leetcode grinding, which outside of the interview process isn't a good use of one's professional development time.

Con: At least for timed problems on Hackerrank, you have a dilemma: A simple, straightforward solution takes little time to code, and is easy to explain. But it might also take too long to run on some of the test cases, which then requires you to guess at the source of slowness, and try to fix it.

But in multi-problem Hackerrank tests, you don't necessarily know if you have enough time to do that, because the other problems in the set might or might not require lots of time as well. And you can't revisit an earlier problem once you've submitted a solution.

kyrra
3 replies
3h38m

I joined Google 11 years into my career. So while I had taken an algorithms class recently, I just reread the algorithm book I used in college and spent a bunch of time studying all of them. I actually found it a lot of fun, as it was a good refresher for myself.

bmikaili
1 replies
3h33m

It‘s not as easy as it was 11 years ago. There‘s a whole industry behind it and an arms race between preparation and more difficult problems.

smsx
0 replies
43m

They didn't say they joined 11 years ago, but that they were 11 years into their career.

cmrdporcupine
0 replies
2h40m

The problem is it only works for a certain personality and thinking type that can do that under pressure in front of an interviewer. Most of us who have been in the industry for a while solve algorithm problems by working in an editor or REPL, and do so in a solitary way, with time to pause and think.

The Google-style process (that so many people copied) acts as if the ability to do that kind of thinking under time pressure and in front of a generally-elitist interviewer is some kind of marker of the ability to work on the job. It isn't.

Plus I worked at Google for a decade and the amount of times I had to do actual algorithm/data structure fundamental stuff was about 0. 90% of Googlers are wiring existing crap together, and if they stray outside of that they'll get spanked in a code review anyways.

HarHarVeryFunny
3 replies
2h56m

I wouldn't characterize Leetcode interviewing as being biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class - it's biasing in favor of those (of any level of experience) who are willing to spend a few months practicing Leetcode.

I thought that Google/etc had at least dialed this back a bit, or maybe just dialed back the "how many gas stations are in the US" type questions, after realizing this wasn't the best predictor of good performance.

helen___keller
1 replies
2h38m

or maybe just dialed back the "how many gas stations are in the US" type questions, after realizing this wasn't the best predictor of good performance.

These problems (known as fermi problems) have been out of vogue for over a decade now. Google is one of the companies that pioneered algorithm-centric leetcode problems as a replacement for fermi problems.

Leetcode problems are not hugely useful outside of the data given by solving a fizzbuzz. Rather, it’s just another excuse so interviewers can convince themself a person is smart, call it signal, and justify a hire.

The last time Google gave me a job offer, one of my interviews was literally a souped up fizzbuzz - straightforward imperative code with no trick, no complicated algorithms, and no fancy data structures. I suppose that may be the reason I got an offer, that I didn’t need fancy algorithms that I hadn’t prepared.

Ultimately it’s impossible to know if someone will be a good hire from an interview. Being a good engineer requires a bunch of traits that simply can’t be tested. The leetcode interview, as I see it, acknowledges this weakness and instead chooses to filter out low-effort candidates, as anyone persistent can practice leetcoding and interviewing (in theory).

Rebelgecko
0 replies
1h48m

This is pretty consistent with my experience. I had one hardcore algorithms question that I bombed, but the other ones hinged on things like "when should you use a map vs a list" that should be second nature to anyone who has been writing code long enough.

spike021
0 replies
1h59m

Last year I went through a loop and a couple of the questions I got and mentioned to friends who are SWE's at Google thought they were too hard for an interview, especially after checking their proposed solutions in the internal problem bank.

So it's definitely still happening.

No I didn't get the job because they were too hard for me to even get a brute force solution.

ChatGTP
1 replies
5h48m

I think there is some truth to this for sure, it doesn't mean you're hiring practical / driven people, it means you're likely hiring people who are good at rote memorization.

smugglerFlynn
0 replies
5h34m

It means you are hiring people who are highly compliant. Which is important when your goal is to scale whatever already works.

summerlight
0 replies
7m

Unless you're willing to spend more than 20~30% of your engineer's precious time on the hiring process (or have GPT-7 or whatever GAI lol), it will always be BS. And that's not scalable; this could work when your hiring is mostly through employee's personal/professional network since ROI will be better than average, but when you need to hire thousands new employees it will quickly become a bottleneck.

The only thing you can do is designing an acceptable level proxy done with high efficiency. Unfortunately we don't really have a good way there to figure out something more efficient than coding interview + system design interview yet. A good interviewer can still extract a surprising amount of valuable signals within 45 mins but not everyone is interested in being a good interviewer.

pompino
0 replies
10m

Ironically, many of their software products are bloated and slow as fuck. (There are some that are top class too, but just sayin.. )

devjab
0 replies
4h46m

I don’t think Google is necessarily overrated instead I think they have some issues being both an advertising company and something else.

I look at them from an EU enterprise perspective. Back 10-15 when the big move into the cloud started Google was ahead of their competition. They had online office, and they still have some excellent services that are sort of unmatched by both Amazon and AWS in terms of managed backends like Firebase, but today they make up almost no enterprise sales. This is largely because they never managed to transition into a world where they could sell their products to enterprise. One part is their data and privacy policies which are an obvious issue the other part is support. One of the most important things Microsoft sells to Enterprise is support, and I don’t mean the stuff you and I get as private persons, I mean how their headquarters will call your CTO with updates when something goes down, how you have direct channels to get things changed like when teams was turned on by default instead of something your IT department controlled, or how you can even visit their Azure server centres and look at “your” server if you’re a big enough customer. This is why AWS sort of “lost” in the EU, because when they first entered the market they had the automated support similar to what Google has now, where you can talk to a useless chatbot and never get anywhere even if you’re paying them millions of dollars. Unlike Google, Amazon quickly adjusted and suddenly they had better support and EU compliance than Microsoft (who still can’t guarantee that only EU citizens ever work on the maintenance of their data centres where your data is stored).

The one place Google was a little different was in Education. They actually seemed to know how to sell that, but even here their advertising roots are now losing them deals. Because now there is a focus on how everything in Google education is shared with Google, and while that data might be valuable to Google it’s losing them all their sales in education, which also means they lose the data…

Unless Google somehow changes course, and becomes both an advertising company, and, a tech company, they are just never going to be relevant outside of advertising again. At least for Enterprise, but even as a private customer, you’re probably thinking twice about their products considering how many of them they shut down.

I think it’s a shame considering a lot of their products are very good and affordable, but is what it is.

cmrdporcupine
0 replies
2h43m

Having worked there I agree on some points. I thought the interview process was bullshit.

But, people generally work there for two reasons:

Pay and benefits top-knotch. I made two times there what I'm making now, post-Google, and I'm still making more 30% than my peers who work in-office for local companies do. (I work remote). Free food and other perks were also amazing.

Exposure to really large systems and scale. A lot of people really get off on building systems that scale as big as some of the Google stuff.

And honestly the internal engineering quality at Google is excellent. But conservative, and bespoke. They build their own everything, which they can do because they have buckets of cash. And what they build is mostly superior, and more consistently engineered. The internal code quality is generally meticulous.

mindwok
57 replies
8h30m

I'm surprised to see so many comments here taking layoffs personally, or talking about how layoffs are stupid.

Layoffs are not personal, and the corollary to that is that you should never treat your company as a friend. It's a company trying to maximize value.

Also, layoffs do work. Almost every large, successful company has done them at some stage. They are an expected, and necessary, part of operating a company and responding to changing market conditions.

Yes, it sucks. They are not nice. But it's expected and it's helpful to remember that.

oaiey
13 replies
7h17m

It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it.

The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on the backs of the employees. These layoffs are often bound to the goal to have a return like Apple and not like General Electric (company examples are educated guesses).

In the end, the employees have a miserable life and products of the company are a shit show.

happytiger
5 replies
6h18m

It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on.

For example, Google:

https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/

Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have used a cycle of expansion and contraction to crush the working people’s power in the interest of controlling inflation (which is really largely the direct result of excess government money printing as a result of imbalanced spending), all the while consolidating more-and-more wealth in smaller and smaller circles of people. It’s an absolutely psychotic way to run a business cycle, and it kills a great many people directly:

https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-austerity-ki...

The latest deleveraging of worker cries and demands for better conditions and pay comes as workers are asking for more work-at-home and flexibility, a more balanced work/life balance, and focus on similar health and wellness goals, as well as demands for salary raises to keep up with the ongoing inflation.

For three decades worker pay has been dropping. The gap between the growth of productivity and that of a typical worker’s pay has grown quite extreme, and continues to grow through the application of austerity principle:

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

While it looks like “inflation and interest rates are causing the problems,” it remains easily predictable economic theory that we would find ourselves here. People may not realize it, but since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.

This of course causes “inflation,” which is in no small part what the news likes to call “excess corporate profits.” Basically inflation benefits those that hold real assets and are closest to the money printers, while crushing those who don’t and are the furthest (often the most marginalized).

And again, austerity is applauded:

https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/marc-benioff-salesforce-earni...

Consider that the market rewards these companies handsomely for their layoffs:

- Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.

- Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.

- Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.

- Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.

https://www.business.com/finance/big-tech-earnings-and-layof...

So it’s unfortunately financially rewarding to lay people off, and it’s a measurable economic impact you can show the board and your investors…

Meanwhile there are some CEOs who have figured out how to keep everyone employed, and it points to the fact that this model isn’t the only possible way for businesses to operate:

https://www.benefitnews.com/news/a-tech-ceo-avoided-mass-lay...

There will come a day when the current management ethos becomes unfashionable and mass layoffs become a sign of failure and poor executive management, but unfortunately the market rewards it right now, and ultimately products and employee quality of life are secondary concerns to our rather sociopathic business cycle.

Forgive my diatribe. I have developed quite a passion for this issue over the years, as my training taught me all about layoffs and how to do them, but after running companies for a long while, I’ve become quite unhappy with “business as usual.” This system sucks, and it’s causing massive breakdowns in trust between employees and employers that ultimately cause irreversible harm to actual global competitiveness. The system people live and work in has to be in those people’s best interests to proliferate and ultimately needs to align profit with the best interests of society.

In my mind, the long term concequences of the current system’s breakdown of trust is devastating to everyone involved and counterproductive to lasting global competitiveness (which requires cooperation, teamwork and a growth mindset these adversarial conditions cannot foster), and yet we happily pedal along as if everything is fine.

It’s not.

matwood
1 replies
4h8m

Companies aren't charities. Just because they can afford to hire or keep an employee doesn't mean they should or have to.

You're also forgetting that raw dollars are not how companies are viewed. Every company is viewed on how it performs agains the risk free return rate. The rate going from 0 -> 5+ means companies must now generate returns in excess of the RFR in line with their generally accepted risk. This is the ultimate outcome of raising rates to reduce inflation - across the board layoffs lowering averages salaries.

ParetoOptimal
0 replies
14m

Companies aren't charities, but if they don't act charitably towards employees it's a bad deal for employers and employees.

I think that was their point. To not be taken advantage of employees are incentivized to do as little work as possible.

xdavidliu
0 replies
4h40m

what do you mean by “earnings per staff member laid off”? are you dividing their total earnings by number of staff laid off? if so, then Apple earning 100 billion while laying off 10 employees would be “earning 10 billion per staff laid off”, or am i misunderstanding?

shenberg
0 replies
58m

"since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation" - I've seen this notion repeated and I assume it's a reference to M1 as published by FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL

The actual story, as far as I can tell, is that money that had previously been considered as M2 (=less liquid) is also counted as M1 due to rule changes regarding savings accounts.

To see this is the case, you can plot both together. If in fact, new money was printed, you would expect M2 to have the same jump as M1, as M2 is M1 + more stuff. However, you see a much smaller jump:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1dwhY

The rule-change coincided with COVID relief measures which did include money-printing, but at a much smaller scale than implied.

deelowe
0 replies
4h9m

Wow... This all seems a bit cherry-picked...

- The google metric doesn't make sense. In fact, the graph tells sort of the opposite story. Revenue per employee shot up and then they did layoffs in response... huh? My guess is that this graph is missing the forecasts that are being used to make these decisions. Google likely has a similar chart, but one that goes out 5-10 years and is showing a concerning trend (that was certainly the case when I worked there).

- Austerity is a government thing. I'm not connecting the dots between deficit reduction and corporate layoffs...

- I thought the money supply calculations changed recently which is why the metric shot up in recent years.

- How are you getting Microsoft was rewarded with 9.8M per employee for their "layoffs?" They cut 10k people, so wouldn't this mean if they had laid off 1 person, they would have earned 98B per layoff? This metric doesn't make sense.

- The "other CEO" you link to runs a company with 200 employees. I'm not sure this is comparable to a company the size of Google.

somedude895
3 replies
6h6m

and products of the company are a shit show

I guess we'll see if this turns out to be true. If it does, they'll realize their mistakes, and the competitors that didn't let people go should outperform them. If it doesn't, then it'll show that many tech companies simply overhired, which I think we all know they did over the past few years.

I myself work at a telco where business has stagnated over the past decade, due to market saturation and new, cheaper competition. We've had layoffs each year since I started since that's the only way to keep increasing profits. One day it'll probably hit me, but oh well. I know our company has fat to trim and if I'm actually not making any real impact, then I'm fine with looking for a job where I do. Efficient companies are important for a healthy economy.

pyrale
2 replies
5h32m

I guess we'll see if this turns out to be true.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

asadalt
1 replies
5h7m

surely you don’t want google to maintain 100s of experiments indefinitely.

x86x87
0 replies
3h3m

It's not about killing experiments. It's about things that were advertised as the next big thing with fanfare to not be properly maintained and eventually killed even though they had a lot of users. That's the problem.

closeparen
2 replies
1h31m

By any reasonable metric, Google SWEs are "the rich man" in American society.

rvrs
0 replies
1h13m

This isn't the right way to view it -- it's not necessarily about a dollar amount. People making 6 figures and people making 5 figures are not enemies. The segmentation is between those tho provide work and those who perform it, with the former profiting off the surplus value provided by the latter

mcmcmc
0 replies
1h0m

The "little man" is the line employee, vs the machinations of the boardroom and the demands of the stock market. The salary level isn't that relevant.

alecco
10 replies
7h34m

Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring (management's fault) or there was a big revenue downturn (market forces). This time it was because of over-hiring at the COVID mania. People left safer jobs to join FAANGs tempted with higher salaries and a prospect of improving their CV. And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years.

This is totally a fault of management and none of them are losing their jobs! People have a good reason to be pissed off.

oblio
7 replies
7h18m

I really don't agree with this line of thinking.

Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring

Ok, let's define "over-hiring".

Google...

had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023.

and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023.

They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hiring??? Each person added as much revenue as the ones before them.

Over-hiring would have been if post-Covid business would have dropped, which, guess what, did NOT happen for FAANG. It was, in the worst case scenario, stable (even then, slightly growing).

ponector
2 replies
6h52m

Don't forget there are also hundreds of thousands of external people. Bodies bought from different vendors, doing pretty much the same job as internals but with lower pay and almost no benefits.

They've been cut a lot last year, but no news about it.

Also there are cuts in high cost of living locations. Why to keep people in California if you can hire in Warsaw and pay x0.25 of US rate there?

asvitkine
1 replies
6h0m

Is there a source for higher cost locations being affected more than lower cost ones? I didn't get that impression.

disgruntledphd2
0 replies
4h31m

I suspect that more of these layoffs happen in the US, both because it's the most expensive location, has the most staff and has the least friendly redundancy laws (for employers, that is)

larschdk
1 replies
6h35m

Revenue per employee is never a goal in itself. Only revenue, expenses, and strategic goals. If they can meet their strategic goals with less resources, they over-hired.

oblio
0 replies
6h15m

Yet they're hiring 1600 people as we speak.

Again, this is just callous.

earthnail
1 replies
7h4m

Not necessarily. If your revenue curve is trailing your hiring curve by N years, you need to stop hiring N years before your revenue curve plateaus.

oblio
0 replies
6h42m

Yes, you need to stop hiring, great call.

Have they stopped hiring? Uhhhh...

That really tells you all you need to know about the cynicism.

nerdponx
0 replies
5h35m

It's wage suppression.

bogomipz
0 replies
3h5m

"And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years."

Is this the consensus then that is really rough out there right now? I know that big tech has been hit hard the last year but is the outlook equally bad for startups, enterprise etc. as well?

offices
6 replies
8h18m

When a company has embedded itself so deeply in public life - globally - it's reasonable to have strong feelings about its actions.

When we say layoffs work, are we considering the way the same companies overhired just a few years ago, harming the rest of the employment market? Do we remember this in later discussions when we treat these companies as prescient hiveminds, in spite of them using overtuned bang-bang control for their hiring? Do we remember it in discussions about workers rights and the things we tie to employment in the naive assumption that only those who deserve it lose their jobs?

killerstorm
5 replies
5h54m

I find it a bit hilarious that programmers feel entitled being employed for life in one company. Did you ever consider finishing the project? Getting it done and delivered?

My first paid job as a programmer was like that. We made an exam software for university, a complete package covering the process from authoring test questions to making reports.

We made it in 6 months and it was done. Finished. Working. There was some maintenance/improvement, but that was a separate deal. We did not expect university to employ us for life to maintain it.

Shouldn't that be a norm?

Like, yeah, obviously Google has a lot of projects, so they can allocate programmers to do something different after something is done. But they didn't promise employment for life, did they?

Obviously, people like being securely employed. But, perhaps, that should be addressed at societal level - e.g. unemployment benefits.

lazyasciiart
3 replies
5h44m

You’re suggesting that Microsoft should be done with Windows by now, are you?

killerstorm
1 replies
4h56m

I'm suggesting that it's up to Microsoft management to decide what software they want to develop, and programmers should expect they are hired to develop a product. Downsizing should be considered a norm.

People came to assume that a total comp >$100k is a norm, but it's really not.

E.g. engineer working on research projects for INRIA in France might get up to $3000 gross a month. (And you might get better job security in France but it comes with a bit of total comp hit, as you see.)

That's the reality for most people on Earth. Salary >$100k should be considered an insane arb opportunity, not a stable job expectation.

Microsoft makes a shitload of money selling Windows to billions of people, and is able to pay a lot to devs? OK, good for those devs. But would that last? Uncertain.

ngai_aku
0 replies
4h11m

People came to assume that a total comp >$100k is a norm, but it's really not…. Microsoft makes a shitload of money

Who should receive the shitload of money that these companies make?

ifyoubuildit
0 replies
4h57m

If only. Circa windows 7 era would have been a perfect time, just keep adding security updates and we'd be golden.

Zetobal
0 replies
4h55m

You are describing contract work... maybe look into it if you like it other people don't and thats also ok.

yreg
4 replies
6h2m

How does it make sense for Google to keep laying off people (many of them skilled overperformers) while continuing to hire? It seems they have alienated a large part of their workforce with these decisions. Plus they are running into legal fights in Europe where it's not so easy to randomly fire employees.

I would truly like to understand this, but I haven't heard an explanation of why the actions make sense for the organization as a whole.

It makes me worried about investing in GOOG.

t8sr
2 replies
3h37m

The people they are hiring are probably cheaper than the people being laid off. The costs of the layoff are massive in morale, lost know how, missed opportunities, etc. But to the finance people, that's just as well because it's not their problem to deal with.

yreg
1 replies
3h19m

I understand it might make sense for specific managers who meet some goals and get bonuses, etc.

But I'm asking for an explanation of why it would be reasonable for the organization as a whole and for its shareholders (the ones who understand what's going on).

t8sr
0 replies
3h0m

Managers are basically never consulted on layoffs. At a high enough level in the organization, you might find out a week or two before everyone else and mark some people as critical, but that's about it.

Basically every company I've worked at can be roughly divided into the finance side and the business side, and IME all the important shots are called by the finance people. The business side has to justify itself in terms the finance people set, not the other way around. As for how it makes financial sense, I can't speak to that, but things do tend to work out the way the CFO predicts. That's hardly surprising, because the other finance people working on Wall St. are looking at the same spreadsheets and following the same economic theory.

By the way, I don't think this is a good way to run companies. But it's the way I think almost all of them are run.

pompino
0 replies
9m

It makes me worried about investing in GOOG.

If you have a lot of money, you have their ear..

knallfrosch
3 replies
7h30m

It's even more surprising since SWEs coming from Google don't really have problems finding new jobs or staying afloat until their next job anyway.

jack_riminton
2 replies
7h25m

And a lot have sailed by doing very little work compared to other jobs

bqmjjx0kac
1 replies
3h52m

I have never personally met a "rest and vest" person in bigtech. Is this opinion based on anything?

jack_riminton
0 replies
51m

I have.

Plenty of people here have too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146

whiplash451
2 replies
7h44m

"Layoffs do work" will require a little bit of proper evidence. With long-term effects if possible.

sgt101
1 replies
5h7m

Well, it worked for the Telecom's industry.

yup.

wesselbindt
0 replies
1h27m

I think what your parent meant was that, instead of just asserting that something is true, you provide some peer reviewed research or something like that which supports your assertion. For example, you might want to include a link to some article pointing to research which supports your assertion. For example, you can add something like

https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...

to your comment. Of course, this link points to two decades of research showing that your assertion is wrong, so you probably don't want to include this specific link in your comment, but you get the idea I hope.

speleding
2 replies
6h10m

Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers. By forming a collective bargaining position the workers can prevent that from happening. With the tight labor market there are very few places where employers are able to exploit anyone, people can just move to another job. And in many European countries there are already strong worker protections in place through legislation. (I would argue too much, where I live).

So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers. I think being a member of one signals to an employer you may want to exploit them, rightly or wrongly, at least where I live it's often understood membership will hurt your chances of getting higher up in the organisation.

xpe
1 replies
2h51m

Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers.

This is an overly narrow definition, so I label it is largely incorrect.

Think of it this way: society involves dynamically-shifting power balances. To the extent the goals of a society include:

(a) standardizing certain rights and norms

(b) providing checks and balances so the powerful have less temptation and ability to exploit the less

We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.

So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers.

This statement is silly and ignores the realities I've seen. Sure, a union left to its own devices might be tempted to push too far. But given the dynamic one tends to see in western economies, there is always some kind of negotiation with the associated corporation. Such negotiation is quite similar to parties in the legal system hashing it out. Both may start off far apart but the negotiation tends to lead towards compromise. In the United States, unions that push to far face public backlash and even Presidential action.

I'm not making any dogmatic claims here. I'm simple rejecting overly simplistic arguments against unions. I will readily accept that unions are not silver bullets and there are documented cases of corruption and misaligned incentives. But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world. I laugh at people who aren't even trained economists who interpret their models as some kind of reality -- or worse, some kind of normative specification.

Very few dogmatic claims pro- or anti- union survive contact with reality.

pompino
0 replies
4m

But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world.

You can say that about any topic, but what specifically are you proposing? Or do you just want to talk about stuff?

whstl
1 replies
7h31m

Yeah, layoffs is possibly the least personal way to get fired.

I remember a recruiter recommending a person who was laid off to me: "Oh, he was was part of a layoff, it's not like he was fired or something".

Of course it still absolutely sucks to be laid off, but everyone knows there isn't much rhyme or reason to them other than "companies want money".

pm90
0 replies
3h12m

We should be clear that this isn’t a uniformly held attitude. Before the recent layoff wave started in late 2022, losing your job, even for layoffs raised eyebrows and questions. This has definitely changed the past year but im not sure the stigma is gone just yet.

xtracto
0 replies
4h9m

If you don't want to be laid off, don't get hired. It's just part of the process. Or get a government job. I hear people can last dozens of years in those.

noelherrick
0 replies
4h47m

Layoffs don't work long-term, especially for healthy companies looking to cut costs (Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...)

muraiki
0 replies
6h40m

Research has long shown that layoffs have a detrimental effect on individuals and on corporate performance. The short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are often overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation — all of which hurt profits in the long run. To make intelligent and humane staffing decisions in the current economic turmoil, leaders must understand what’s different about today’s larger social landscape. The authors also share strategies for a smarter approach to workforce change.

https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...

lazyasciiart
0 replies
8h7m

I’m surprised to see even one comment that appears to be arguing that a layoff cannot be stupid or have a negative effect on the company value.

fullshark
0 replies
4h55m

A lot of people here have never worked in an economic downturn, and workers WANT to believe their job is more than a job. Why else would they devote so much time and energy to it? It may just even represent their self-worth.

alemanek
0 replies
4h37m

For me it is the cycle of over hiring and layoffs that make me mad. Executives bear no consequences for their decisions instead the consequences are borne by the lower level employees.

What I would like to see is senior and executive management (Director+) bonuses cancelled for the year a layoff occurs. If they aren’t willing to cancel bonuses company wide then a layoff is really just stock manipulation. By making sure they bear some of the consequences maybe they will make better choices in the future.

TheBigSalad
0 replies
4h41m

Nobody wants to work at a company that does layoffs after a huge year.

Buhuhhuhu
0 replies
5h1m

For me this is very offputting and definitly makes me move faster out of that system.

I can either work for the next 30 years 40h a week and create some 'value' for companies like google and have nice holidays, etc. OR i don't.

And yes i can afford a very basic version of not working anymore already or at least no longer playing the game in some companies.

Wasn't there some Gen X/Z meme about quite quitting? Guess what could incluence this? Having an appreciation for your company and your companies management style.

ricardobayes
41 replies
9h30m

Layoffs are always counter-productive as going forward employees take fewer risks, to evade being the one laid off. Layoffs kill innovation.

faeriechangling
17 replies
9h27m

Intel is only around today because the leadership was decisive enough to lay off most of the company early in its history, and they then proceeded to release a whack of innovative microprocessor products after these massive layoffs.

kqr
5 replies
9h23m

I don't know whether your comment is true, but the way to do layoffs while keeping innovation as high as possible is to do one round that is big enough that you can and do give guarantees to the employees that are left behind that they have jobs for life. Multiple rounds of layoffs is what really takes your innovation to zero.

hirako2000
1 replies
9h11m

Dell has a talent to do the exact opposite. HR should hire your service. But they would fire you since they wouldn't like your advice.

For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list.

CEO? He also has to follow orders.

Who's to blame then? I wonder.

The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.

kqr
0 replies
8h26m

From what I understand, the modern Dell (much like many airlines, for that matter) is in a sort of weird banking/finance business rather than technology and innovation. They are really good at managing capital and that is how they derive much of their profits.

al_borland
1 replies
7h52m

I’ve been through dozens of rounds of layoffs. That part I almost got used to. Staying innovative, and being seen as innovative by my boss, was the way to ensure I wasn’t on that list.

What killed it for me was when new management came in, refused to talk to anyone internal, brought in outside hires to be the innovators and change agents, and then shut down any of the legacy employees who tried to speak or bring ideas to the table. A lot of really talented people have left, and maybe that was the goal, as it avoids having to pay severance.

trashtester
0 replies
7h45m

I wonder if those new coworkers came from the same place as the new management, and were already their "loyal wingmen"....

faeriechangling
0 replies
9h20m

Well it is true and there's a book which goes into the details, Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive", and it's a fantastic page turner.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66863

ChatGTP
4 replies
9h19m

How is this comparable to Intel? Is Google struggling financially ?

andsoitis
3 replies
8h55m

Their profit has been declining rapidly the last two years, so they’re cutting costs to turn things around. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38949755

faeriechangling
1 replies
8h37m

Funny. Here I was abandoning their products because they don't SUPPORT them. I dare say Google could have easily used their laid off staff to better maintain their existing products and through that restore confidence in their products and be able to achieve higher sales and profit margins.

andsoitis
0 replies
8h27m

Maybe. Of course it is up to them to decide strategy.

oblio
0 replies
7h11m

Compared to Covid boom years... let's normalize the Covid years to their past trend and add the 2022 and 2023 data points as regular years. I'm sure they'd look just fine.

bdd8f1df777b
3 replies
9h26m

Is that sarcasm?

pavlov
1 replies
9h22m

It's what happened. Intel was primarily a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips in the early 1980s. They pivoted hard to CPUs instead when it started looking like the IBM PC clone platform is a winner and their 386 chip could define the industry.

pi-e-sigma
0 replies
6h10m

So what is Google pivoting from? They are laying people off from various divisions, it's not a strategic shift

ffgjgf1
0 replies
9h22m

What do you mean?

UncleMeat
1 replies
4h41m

There are definitely cases where companies have true existential risk and layoffs can help get them through that.

That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway.

I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.

htrp
0 replies
2h17m

I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.

Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.

steveridout
12 replies
8h56m

Interesting point but I don't think it's that clear cut. Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and incentive structures.

sabellito
7 replies
8h52m

Twitter has lost 70% of its value since Elon took over.

tgma
2 replies
7h59m

According to rando analysts who don't have a stake. Note that Twitter pre X as a business was unsustainable and I don't think it ever made a net profit in aggregate over its lifetime. It was all selling the dream even before the acquisition.

oblio
1 replies
7h6m

According to rando analysts who don't have a stake.

Says another rando who doesn't have a stake.

It was starting to be sustainable: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

I don't know exactly what they did in 2020 to mess up their numbers, but 2017 - 2021 shows a company that was stabilizing at ok profit margins.

tgma
0 replies
1h44m

You state that as if your link does not substantiate what I said earlier. For the benefit of the people who don’t click on the link you cite, it simply proves as I said, that they never made an aggregate profit over their lifetime and you are linearly extrapolating the past (“starting to become…”) coming into the high interest rate environment where peers like $FB and $SNAP crashed and Twitter would surely have too.

infotainment
2 replies
8h30m

Important business lessons from Twitter: try not to antagonize your biggest customers, because they might stop buying your products.

In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.

trashtester
0 replies
7h42m

Another lesson: Don't ignore the users, as one of them may get angry enough to buy your company and fire you and most of your peers.

baq
0 replies
7h24m

Another important lesson: do your DD when you buy a company

baq
0 replies
7h25m

Which it only had because Musk thrown out a number and people fought very very hard to make him stick to it. If he wasn't such a dumbass and forfeit due diligence, this wouldn't be the story.

nusl
1 replies
8h21m

Twitter laid most of their staff off then Musk gave them an ultimatum of: commit every day, all day, sleep at the office, to Twitter, or get fired. I wonder why there was more work produced in that period.

fifteen1506
0 replies
7h27m

Maybe because most are on H-1B and thus have no other option than to sacrifice personal life to have a job and not be deported?

lapcat
0 replies
6h3m

Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over.

Changes? Yes. Often superficial changes. Change "Twitter" to "X", change blue checkmarks to yellow or gray or whatever, and sell blue to the lowest bidders. As for improvements? No, I haven't seen Twitter improve much if at all since the acquisition. In fact, the removal of third-party clients for example was a gross vandalization of the service.

Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation.

This quip misses the biggest part of the story, which is that Apple didn't cut its way to success but rather acquired NeXT for over $400 million, a massive investment at the time, and Steve was merely replacing the old guard with his people.

kalleboo
0 replies
7h40m

Both of those examples started with laying off basically all of top management.

If you’re just laying off engineers to meet some profitability measure for Wall Street then you’re not going to fix innovation. You need to replace all of management who are the ones who are in charge of what the engineers are doing.

Google is completely lost and doesn’t know what it does. Management launches new products just to look good and shuts them down a year later, and still the only thing making money is search and ads. That’s not going to be fixed by laying off engineers.

tgma
2 replies
8h52m

This is patently false. Tons of empirical evidence of organizations that have improved and innovated much more effectively.

The world’s most valuable company comes to mind.

okokwhatever
0 replies
8h43m

The guy is talking about slow dead. The kind of company dead IBM or Oracle? are facing since decades.

oblio
0 replies
7h9m

The world's most valuable company (Apple, I assume?) wasn't the world's fifth most profitable company in ANY field when they did that, though.

tarruda
2 replies
9h19m

employees take fewer risks

Like going to the masseur during working hours?

rrr_oh_man
1 replies
9h8m

Like working on things for internal visibility and ad revenue, not because it’s a good idea

cqqxo4zV46cp
0 replies
8h39m

That is an issue of maligned incentives, not layoffs. This community is utterly insane sometimes, and I say that as a staunch unionist. This is literally Google, a company with an insanely large number of engineers, doing an insanely large number of different things, due to massive and clearly-net-bad-for-society consolidation, and there’ll still be hoards of people that’ll claim that the layoffs were the wrong thing to do.

zensayyy
1 replies
7h42m

must disagree. A bloated company is the killer of innovation. Job security is no indicator for innovation. In fact, the most unsecure job produce the most innovative Tech (see Startups).

lobsterthief
0 replies
6h42m

This viewport is very misleading. Startups don’t produce the most innovative tech _because_ they’re less secure.

ndepoel
0 replies
8h54m

Not just innovation, but layoffs are also devastating to the morale of the employees who are allowed to stay. This I feel is a factor that managers tend to grossly overlook when planning mass layoffs.

karmarepellent
0 replies
8h38m

I am not advocating for this but you could turn that argument easily around: Not laying off people makes them feel very secure which does not incentivice them to take risks and innovate either. At least when they are no inherently driven to push their careers forward.

Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.

NorwegianDude
34 replies
9h38m

laid off employees who worked on ... the Pixel phone.

That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.

BikiniPrince
9 replies
9h17m

Yet everyone I know that owned a pixel despises it.

__alexs
2 replies
9h16m

I've owned 3 generations of Pixels and they've all been great ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

DeathArrow
1 replies
9h12m

Maybe the parent doesn't know you?

__alexs
0 replies
8h8m

Do you ever really know anyone?

afsag
1 replies
9h12m

I've owned several Nexus and Pixel phones and they universally sucked. Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Pixel 2. I think that's all of them. I sent the last one to be fixed under warranty and they basically ignored me for six months (which I spent with no phone) until I threatened to get consumer protection from my country involved.

Yeah yeah, why did I keep buying them? I have no idea. I guess I assumed the rest of Android phones sucked more.

Pufferbo
0 replies
9h10m

After what they did the the Nexus 6P, I jumped ship to Apple.

tauntz
0 replies
9h11m

I've owned 3 pixel phones and have loved all of them. Wife has owned 4 different ones and they have been all perfect, no complaints.

sergiotapia
0 replies
5h34m

Count me as one anecdote that I love 'em! Best cameras I've ever used, paired with Google Photos means my wife is a happy camper and I get to look like a wizard fixing photos easily right on my phone. I can also install any .apk I want (hint: free youtube premium), why would I ever use a much more expensive, worse product like the iphone?

dekhn
0 replies
1h9m

I've had very good experiences with all my Pixels. Only phone that was better was a high-end Samsung ($1000) and I sold that and replaced it with a cheap pixel.

(I've had various android phones going back to the T-Mobile G1).

antonp
0 replies
9h11m

I've owned 3 phones starting with nexus iirc. Looking forward to getting a refresh when current one gives out.

mutatio
6 replies
9h6m

I wonder what the reality is regarding Pixel's success; they lost me as a customer this year after it turns out the "free" Pixel 2 watch is mostly a paper weight because Fitbit and its new unified Google account requirement doesn't support Workspace custom domains. I pay for Workspaces, I paid for the device(s), but the penny has finally dropped in regards to their real motivations, they can't allow Workspaces to mingle with the private data regular accounts give them access to when it comes to Fitbit. Hopefully this will finally give me the motivation to wean off Google completely.

flurdy
5 replies
9h0m

Pissed me off when I realised you could use not Nest cameras nor doorbell if you have a Google Workspace account. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

sokoloff
3 replies
8h39m

Cannot use them with a Google workspace account? Or cannot use them if you merely have a workspace account?

The former seems like it might be reasonable (and I wouldn't want to lock a piece of home infrastructure to a workspace account anyway); the latter seems utterly insane.

pretext-1
0 replies
7h52m

Google marketed Google Workspace (called “Google Apps” at the time) as a solution for individuals and families with custom domain. People still have these accounts and there is no way to migrate (e.g. purchases on Google Play, reviews on Google Maps, notes in Google Keep, etc.).

niklasrde
0 replies
8h0m

For Nest Protect (the smoke alarm), if you try logging in with a workspace account it just won't let you. Had to resurrect a very old, unused Gmail account just for that.

flurdy
0 replies
5h22m

Not a work workspace but our family workspace, so very unreasonable. They forced us all to migrate to that...

For many years Google Home with all the Nest speakers and displays have worked fine. But you are not allowed to use the nest cameras, thermostats, doorbells, etc with workspace accounts. Hence I regret buying those.

whstl
0 replies
5h30m

The Nest Speaker also pisses me off. It requires a Google account for activating the Bluetooth functionality.

I got one as a gift. It is a good looking door stop, though.

HackerThemAll
5 replies
9h4m

Pixel is not officially sold and supported in a substantial number of countries. It results in many issues, such as 5G not working when traveling from country to country. Or in case of Chromecast dongle, 5GHz Wi-Fi not working. Which makes my head explode, considering that they employ only "top talent" and has considerable resources to properly catalogue and implement all radio frequencies of the world.

Google cannot release any product worldwide. Their knowledge doesn't go too far beyond US market. You can call it Americentrism or just lack of competence of the ones in charge.

wayfinder
3 replies
8h34m

Google is good at making algorithms and tech but product development and long term vision have never been its strong points.

freetinker
2 replies
8h15m

Institutionally, Google has the attention span of a Goldfish. Apple will continue to entrench their position as a leader in edge computing. Apple deserve their success; I hope they don’t get complacent once the Pixel division implodes.

mapcars
0 replies
6h49m

Even if technically Apple is capable their predatory business models will never make me consider any of their products worth it.

herval
0 replies
7h48m

Was Pixel ever a big player in the Android market? I get the feeling Xiaomi and Samsung are the actual competitors Apple cares about

lawgimenez
0 replies
6h34m

I have been waiting my whole career to get a hold of their previous Nexus line. Then their Pixel line. Still no luck. It has been over a decade. Now it’s too late my whole family is now deeply invested in Apple’s ecosystem.

madeofpalk
3 replies
8h50m

Google sells approximately zero Pixel phones.

Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.

alangibson
0 replies
7h33m

They sold one to me since OnePlus fell off.

NorwegianDude
0 replies
8h27m

Google has grown their marketshare a lot during the last few years.

They sell a lot of them, very very far from zero...

JonChesterfield
0 replies
7h31m

I like my pixel. Guess I'm going back to Samsung, sad times.

mnbion
1 replies
8h9m

Google is increasingly treating Android as an iOS alternative for the developing world and outsourcing core Android development to its Indian offices.

The reason they are doing this is probably because the non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones.

conscience
0 replies
7h13m

Were you like I have nothing useful to add, but while I'm driving by why don't I just fart on India...

The market share speaks for itself.

For what it's worth, India with over a billion people is a large market for Android.

Anyway, the iOS market share seems to be increasing rapidly in India. See https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/devices/ip...).

troupo
0 replies
8h49m

There are continuous internal wars that we don't often see. You can get a glimpse of those in most of Google's hardware products (from Pixel phones to hubs to tablets) when they seem to be randomly prioritised/de-prioritised/re-prioritised every year.

It seems that this year Pixel lost.

scopeh
0 replies
9h11m

Has this ever stopped google from killing a product?

nikanj
0 replies
9h32m

Google ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

borissk
0 replies
9h22m

Google has been cooperating with Samsung very closely lately. Maybe there's a pressure on Google from Samsung and the other big Android vendors to scale down the Pixel effort.

_giorgio_
0 replies
7h42m

Seems like a good news?

Maybe resetting the engineering department is the only chance of innovating, when the company is so big and the (maybe bad) culture is so pervasive?

Apple has fired Jony Ive, and nothing bad had happened (quite the contrary).

Google has fired the head of computational photography, and nothing bad had happened.

borissk
22 replies
9h15m

That's bad news for the IT jobs market. The big tech companies are firing people - those people will have no problem finding another job, but that's a job taken away from more average folks.

Combined with high interest rates, that prevent businesses from starting new projects financed through credit. Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work. Probably demand for IT roles in 2024 is going to be lower than previous years and salaries may stagnate or go down.

AnthonyMouse
13 replies
8h53m

IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well, so if salaries go down then people change careers. For example, most people who can do IT could also become an electrician, for which the demand is currently high.

Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work.

This is the sort of thing that increases demand for IT. Company had 40 artists and two IT staff, now they can get by with 10 artists but three IT staff, because IT has more work to do supporting the AI stuff.

medo-bear
3 replies
8h46m

Most people who do IT can become an electrician ? Im curious why you think that. Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble

AnthonyMouse
2 replies
8h5m

Most people who do IT can become an electrician ? Im curious why you think that.

It's fundamentally the same kind of mix between following bureaucratic rules and manipulating man-made technology.

Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble

Real estate prices are still incredibly high, driven by undersupply of housing, which is unlikely to abate soon. As long as prices are high, construction will be profitable. If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.

There also seems to be some political support for doing something about the high housing costs, like relaxing zoning rules, which would allow new construction in places it's currently prohibited.

medo-bear
1 replies
3h19m

If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.

The Fed? Not everyone lives in the Empire

AnthonyMouse
0 replies
2m

The Empire is global. If the Fed lowers interest rates, not only can foreign nationals borrow at lower rates directly or indirectly from US banks, because of that the central banks in other countries tend to follow suit.

kypro
3 replies
8h0m

IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well

True to some extent, but IT salaries are high in my opinion because until recently there was a very limited tech talent pool but huge demand for IT talent. I mean IT was only really seen as a good career around 15-20 years ago.

We just got lucky. We had the right skills at the right time. We rode the wave of big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook growing into the most profitable companies in the world. With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some and with plenty of freshly well educated IT talent entering the market there's really no reason to not expect this high salaries to continue. In my opinion they'll most likely fall to what your more typical middle class job pays.

trashtester
0 replies
7h38m

Actually, IT was seen as a good career from around 80-87 and from around 95-01. It comes in waves. Then there is a bust, and those who went into IT just because it was seen as a "good career", not because they love coding, are weeded out.

And with only the passionate developers left, the cycle starts again.

dukeyukey
0 replies
5h42m

Compilers did the same thing. But over time, as more ways to apply code and software got found, demand massively increased beyond what it was previously. This will probably be the same, at least if AI doesn't completely upend every single knowledge job there is.

AnthonyMouse
0 replies
7h51m

I mean IT was only really seen as a good career around 15-20 years ago.

It has been seen as a good career ever since it started employing a significant number of people.

With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some

That's the thing that happened 15-20 years ago.

Mashimo
2 replies
7h55m

At least where I live it takes ~4 - 5 years education to become an electrician.

Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?

AnthonyMouse
1 replies
7h44m

At least where I live it takes ~4 - 5 years education to become an electrician.

That's about the same as it is for IT, isn't it? Most decent IT jobs wanting a four-year CS degree.

And changing careers has retraining costs but not for some 18 year old who hasn't picked one yet. Which can balance out the supply and demand five years from now just as well as a 30+ year old changing careers.

Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?

Do you know a lot of people in IT whose salary got lower?

Mashimo
0 replies
6h53m

: but not for some 18 year old who hasn't picked one yet.

Ah ok. I though you where talking about people currently working in IT switching over to become an electrician.

Vespasian
0 replies
7h58m

II'm fairly certain I could learn the theorethical, physical background required to be an electrician pretty quick but that leaves me with precisely zero practical experience of actually pulling cables or building a switchboard without killing myself/others and/or buring down the building.

Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.

UK-Al05
0 replies
8h35m

Becoming an electrician is hard the UK, because you need to get that initial work experience, which experienced electricians are reluctant to do.

themoonisachees
5 replies
9h7m

Aren't googlers famously burnt out and only know how to use Google products because of dogfooding? I don't mean to demean the people just laid off, surely some of them at least know enough to operate other software suites, but hasn't this been identified as a common problem?

akoboldfrying
2 replies
8h41m

Don't know about burnout, the dogfooding is very real though.

OTOH, they're pretty smart.

vintermann
1 replies
8h1m

I wonder if the well-documented nihism of Google, coupled with how all the marvellous internal Google tools seem to work a lot less well without their product teams running them, is secretly an employee retention strategy.

akoboldfrying
0 replies
7h52m

Feels like a stretch to me, I have to say. The only tool that comes to mind is Blaze/Bazel, which I haven't tried outside of Google, but the friction people experience is likely down to the fact that, outside of Google, you have to deal with a world that's more complicated than a single giant monorepo.

alecco
1 replies
8h56m

CEO/HR people get the tingles with FAANG resumes. They don't know any of that.

AnthonyMouse
0 replies
8h48m

That was when they were the darlings who did nothing but grow and snagging one of their employees was a stretch. Doing big layoffs kind of tarnishes the image.

jongjong
1 replies
8h45m

Yep, not to mention that many of these engineers were already paid a fortune and are extremely over-hyped as they were basically just tiny cogs in a huge machine and they can't actually build anything on their own... Which is what is required for building software outside of big tech.

35775436
0 replies
8h3m

I agree. At the end of the day, FAANG engineers are just employees. I never understood the hype or the prestige they get. Also, unrelated but I've read your other comments and they are on point, you're too smart for HN. I say this unironically.

This place can wear a man down fast.

RishabhKharyal
14 replies
9h7m

AI has increased productivity which might be a reason for it

ndepoel
6 replies
8h57m

AI has increased the perception of productivity to unwitting managers, which is a dangerous pit to be falling into.

It's like a lot of those fabled 10x engineers that I've run into over the years; they may seem like they're incredibly productive and managers love them, but in reality their work is so riddled with issues and rushed half-baked ideas, that they end up costing the other engineers on the team 10x the amount of their time to review and fix it all. And it's those other engineers who do all of the invaluable but underappreciated cleanup work who are getting the boot right now.

JohnMakin
3 replies
8h52m

Is your assertion that 10x engineers don’t exist? Because I assure you that is false, regardless what your personal experiences may be.

xyzzy123
0 replies
8h31m

I think a sizeable % of engineers can be 10x-ers as ICs / leads - but it's kind of an "in the zone" thing, when they're experienced in the stack and the product, can navigate the org, are motivated and aren't held back by issues with team or management (or personal issues etc).

But it's like growing plants, in the sense that it only takes one crucial element to be missing to limit growth (or "output").

I've met a few ppl who were _reliable_ 10xers (could navigate a much wider range of techs / domains / situations than others) but I've seen even the best crash and burn at times when the circumstances aren't right.

trashtester
0 replies
7h30m

There are also 100x engineers and probably even some 1000x+ engineers.

These are the kind of people who cook up something like git when they take a one year sabbatical from their main project.

Or even hardware people like Jim Keller.

10x engineers are plentiful if you define the median engineer as 1x. There are a LOT of mediocre engineers out there to draw the median down.

ndepoel
0 replies
8h43m

Oh I'm sure they exist, that's why I said "a lot", not "all". My point is more about how managers perceive the employees they manage. They all want to believe that they found the goose that lays the golden eggs, but in reality so many perceived rockstar engineers are just over-confident or over-eager people mass producing garbage.

That's the important parallel with using AI in production: on the surface it may seem like the solution to all productivity problems, but in reality it still takes a lot of human brainpower to review, assess, fix and maintain whatever the AI model spits out. Especially since generative AIs like to present their work with supreme confidence, and it's getting increasingly hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.

cqqxo4zV46cp
0 replies
8h37m

Widespread use of tools like Copilot hasn’t been happening for long enough for you to draw these generalisations with an appropriate degree of confidence. This just comes across as you misrepresenting your personally-aligned hypothetical as reality.

collyw
0 replies
6h32m

I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the 10x developer stuff is basically down to the 10x person being the original author of the code.

Every other developer on the project has to do at least 3 times as much work, they have to read through the original code and try and understand what the original person was thinking of when writing it before even getting to solving the problem at hand.

A true 10x developer would write code good enough that every other developer could maintain it as easily as the original author.

wegfawefgawefg
3 replies
8h39m

I feel I am one of those developers that codes 100 times faster since ai tools came out. I was not slow before by the way. But now I can take a well defined interface and class example, ask gpt4 for a new well defined variant, and out it comes. one tweak and a test later its done.

Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours.

Novel work can't yet be automated. But... most of the work I do is not novel, and theres files and files of preexisting context for copilot to consume.

As for this effect being widespread and noticed enough to be related to the firing. I dont think its the case.

The people I work with don't seem to get nearly as much out of the tools as I do, and not for lack of trying. They're constantly using the tools too. Even if companies are considerably more productice with the tools, I do not think management would have been attuned enough to performance and costd to have instigated layoffs from it.

collyw
1 replies
6h30m

How much better do you find ChatGPT 4 compared to the free version?

tlivolsi
0 replies
2h59m

It's far superior.

ChatGTP
0 replies
8h32m

You’re benchmarking yourself based on your own experience of course. Not to say this is horribly wrong but yeah, doesn’t tell the rest of us much about productivity.

Like saying that you run faster after a cup of coffee, cool ?

password54321
0 replies
4h30m

Anything to back this up outside of tweets from "influencers" that tell you they are 100x more productive?

collyw
0 replies
6h35m

I have only used the free version of ChatGPT and I'll admit that it has been helpful, but only for maybe 50% of the stuff In ask it.

Maybe 15% of the time it has been a hindrance by making up stuff. It's basically a faster version of Stack Overflow / web search.

A lot of IT work is maintenance work, and it knows nothing about those systems. It's good for me for JavaScript as I spend 80% of my time on the backend. I know enough JavaScript to debug other peoples work, or to add some simple jQuery / vanilla JS to an HTML page (which is all that is needed in the majority of cases), but if I was to build a React App from scratch, it would likely look like beginner level stuff.

Has anyone had experience with the paid version of ChatGPT? How does it compare?

billy99k
0 replies
8h6m

It's starting to replace some low-level jobs, like copywriting and art-based positions. For development, the only thing I've found it good for is giving me example usage for custom Apis and other things that I can't just Google/download.

It's marginally better than Stackoverflow (which I've only ever used to give me an idea that I then turn into my own code, usually written from scratch, because most code is littered with security vulnerabilities).

It's a long way from replacing developers or increasing productivity on a measurable level. It's also like building your business on quick sand. Some feature you use today might be put behind a higher pay-tier (or removed) at any time.

whatever1
12 replies
8h48m

The masks have finally fallen.

Vote with your labor and be willing to change immediately jobs (that is why remote is great). If you did not like what the manager said in a random meeting quit on the spot, find another job online. No more notice courtesies.

It's gonna be great.

hasty_pudding
11 replies
8h45m

There's going to be no tech jobs in America is what's going to happen. That's where this is headed.

taopai
7 replies
8h8m

Why? You think they'll outsource work to foreign countries?

billy99k
4 replies
7h55m

They have already started outsourcing to Canada at 60% of the cost.

One of my clients outsources all large projects to a company in Ukraine (The HQ is there, but the developers are in other parts of Europe). The time zone isn't too bad, their English/communication is nearly perfect, and it's at a fraction of the cost here in the US.

A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.

cbg0
2 replies
7h35m

A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.

Sounds like complete BS. Even just taking in salaries, that's $9K/year/dev - even living in Ukraine you would make more than that. If you've moved out of the country and are in Poland for example, that's not a livable wage.

billy99k
0 replies
1h43m

I Oversee the project and can see all invoices from the contracting company. Even so, This is the cost of one developer in the US, which would never be able to complete this project in a year.

BazookaMusic
0 replies
7h14m

They were probably not full time on that project. Since it's a contracting company, contractors can be assigned to many projects.

whatever1
0 replies
4h53m

So you want us to believe that the same managers who could not manage remote US employees and started crying for return to office will suddenly be able to run a tight ship with overseas freelancers?

Boy, they are in for a treat.

KeplerBoy
1 replies
7h56m

Why would they continue to hire in the most expensive labor market?

whatever1
0 replies
4h12m

Because it also happens to be the best talent pool. And because US happens to be the market that every company dreams to dominate.

whatever1
2 replies
8h40m

Yeah this is what Amazon said about warehouse employees and now they have to pay them $25 per hour and offer free tuition programs in addition to fat sign up bonuses.

Workers have the power. They just need to remember it.

hasty_pudding
1 replies
4h6m

Warehouses have locality.

Digital jobs dont.

whatever1
0 replies
3h53m

I don't see OpenAI hiring for the digital jobs of engineering and research in Slovakia or Thailand. Weird, they probably missed the memo.

qaq
12 replies
8h22m

Someone should start an massive incubator that takes in top laid off employees and gives them resources to build a competing product. They will be motivated as hell and have a ton of domain knowledge and generally have a good idea on how to do things in way more efficient way than what their former employer did. For kicks and to save money replace most of mngmnt roles with AI model.

DrBazza
10 replies
7h54m

There are often non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Depending on the country, they're not worth the paper they're written on sometimes. In others, legally binding.

JonChesterfield
4 replies
7h32m

I don't think you get to non-compete people you fire. That's an on-resignation constraint.

flawn
1 replies
7h17m

I'd be genuinely interested what the legal situation here would be, if that's true...

tauntz
0 replies
7h3m

It would be rather interesting if it would be legal for me to hire somebody, then fire them the next day and they couldn't compete with me for some period of time. But then again, US employment law is rather different from EU so maybe that's possible there?

mathgeek
0 replies
6h59m

Non-compete clauses are often part of severance packages. You can choose not to take it, naturally.

deelowe
0 replies
4h5m

A layoff isn't a firing unless you choose to not accept the package. Accepting a severance is considered voluntary separation. You sign a document stating this.

madeofpalk
3 replies
7h43m

Illegal in California.

dukeyukey
2 replies
5h45m

Most people don't live in California.

madeofpalk
0 replies
5h39m

Google has some employees in California.

dymk
0 replies
2h42m

Most people do actually live in California (by plurality)

alangibson
0 replies
7h35m

Are there any examples of companies successfully enforcing non-competes against rank and file employees? (I'm excluding high value targets like Jeff Dean here where it might actually make sense to put millions in lawyers behind a suit).

rixrax
0 replies
1h37m

Or having only ever worked at FAANG(s), many of them completely lack the skills that would make them effective as an entrepreneurs and it would be nigh useless to try to incubate new businesses out of them. Maybe. Not all. I am thinking of traits and skills such as actually talking to your users, selling product to customers, doing things small scale, being able to work without huge back office support, not having KPIs to game, and such.

throwaway13394
10 replies
4h24m

I work in Core Eng at google. Woke up this morning and saw my director - who we all loved and had been at Google for 20 years - is gone.

One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.

throwaway_iusa
6 replies
3h58m

I work remotely for a big US company and I have heard talk of similar plans within the company, offshoring entire products' engineering work to India. Luckily my work is very niche (vuln research). I can only imagine the subpar and vulnerability ridden code we'll be seeing over the next few years from all the offshoring + irresponsible overusage of AI tools.

dodiggity32
5 replies
3h16m

Why would the code be subpar? Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India? What you are thinking about was outsourcing which is very different than Google hiring in India. Just because you are paid more you are not a ‘better’ programmer

asylteltine
2 replies
2h4m

Quality from India is awful. Both from functionality and just… caring. They don’t really care as much it’s always just good enough. They are generally very difficult to work with.

aelzeiny
1 replies
30m

Give Indians US salaries and see if they're "difficult to work with".

dijit
0 replies
2m

It's not a cost thing, it's not solved by salary.

It's a culture mismatch, I am certain that Indian SWE's think that American SWE's are difficult to work with.

In India "work is god" (as a report of mine has once said), and perception is reality. You do as good as you can and hide your mistakes.

America is aggressively: Pro-failure. In which I mean American SWE's will fail and move on with the idea that they've learned and grown.

It's just a different mindset, and while you probably agree with the American mindset, they'll be similar to each other in reality.

The reason that people dislike working with Indians is:

A) A communication issue, which is exacerbated by not writing specifications properly.

and

B) Indians wanting to go slower and with proper specifications and strictly adhering to those specifications.

Germans are also somewhat like this, so Indians and Germans tend to work significantly better together than Americans and Indians.

mu53
0 replies
2h41m

if you hyperfocus on one aspect, sure, they have a bad argument

Its not like this off-to-on shore oscillation has never happened before

gopher2000
0 replies
1h15m

Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India?

Broadly speaking, I would argue yes.

tomComb
0 replies
21m

almost entirely Indian, all the way up.

Only one of the trio that effectively run the company are Indian

lgleason
0 replies
4h12m

I think it's safe to say we are on the downward slop of peak Google.

cvhashim04
0 replies
3h42m

On visa? Curious because that makes a big difference.

tucnak
6 replies
9h28m

“Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our co-workers while making billions every quarter,” the [union] group said in a post on the social media site X.

I mean no disrespect, but fundamentally a company is only able to do one of the two things: either hire, or fire people. Nobody is taking this away from them, and why would they? Once the leadership has spoken, it's up to employees to either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say. The union statement reads awfully like "We refuse to believe."

I'm not sure that's helping anybody!

superb_dev
3 replies
9h22m

A company can do a whole lot more than hire or fire people

pauljurczak
1 replies
9h6m

A bit of evil now and then, perhaps?

leosanchez
0 replies
6h34m

*Every* now and then.

wkipling
0 replies
9h15m

Yeah option C and D. Both or neither...

ffgjgf1
0 replies
9h19m

I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say, unions shouldn’t ever comment on decisions they disagree with because they are not helping anyone?

either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say

Or openly criticize those decisions if they have the guts for that?

cdata
0 replies
9h12m

One of the motivations to unionize is to ensure that access to labor is mediated by the laborers collectively. This often manifests negotiations between leadership and the union over topics like the one under discussion.

I take their words as a call out to the aspirational future where the union gives employees a voice in the discussion about these kinds of hiring and firing decisions.

paxys
5 replies
4h14m

Are layoffs becoming an annual thing in tech now? Last year there was the "macroeconomic conditions" excuse that every company used. How are they justifying this round?

mc32
4 replies
4h9m

It’s still macro.

The media has been peddling the idea that things are rosy economically but that’s not people are seeing and experiencing. December’s CPI is through the roof. The economy has been soft and with ZIRP gone, things are adjusting accordingly.

We’re now paying the piper —a little.

HDThoreaun
2 replies
2h43m

Inflation ticked up to 3.4%, it's not through the roof. Real wages are up. The economy is absolutely doing very well for some people.

mc32
1 replies
1h31m

Are you guys and gals checking your grocery receipts? Eggs have doubled over the last two years. Milk, meats, fruits and veggies... I can't think of much that hasn't gone up at a higher rate than before the pandemic.

I applaud the Fed for hiking interest rates, free money can't go on forever if you want to avoid the fate of Argentina, but c'mon, the economy is not good. It's not bad, but it's not good.

Laid off people and those fired are finding it harder to find equivalent employment like they did before.

I would bet a good roll or money that if the opposition were in the whitehouse, we'd be hearing about how shitty the economy is right now. It may not be shitty but it's not rosy like they pretend it is.

aaronsimpson
0 replies
20m

This is often brought up and I'm fully willing to be shown that I'm out of touch, but where are people buying these supposed "expensive" eggs and groceries? I'll literally share my last grocery receipt (admittedly smaller due to already having most ingredients):

- Chicken thighs $6.24

- Ground beef $5.97

- Feminine items $9.97

- Bell pepper $0.82

- Lettuce $1.77

- Celery $2.98

- Shrimp $7.92

- Tortilla soup $3.82

- Yogurt (single) $0.64

- Diced tomatoes $0.96

- Black beans $0.82

- Yogurt (pack) $2.47

- Andouille sausage $3.94

Total: $51.24

Sampling from other receipts I've got milk at $3.33, lunchmeat $4.46, my last gas bill was $18.65 to fill up. So far in January, shopping at Walmart and with a crockpot, I've been able to feed myself and my girlfriend for around $139. Fair disclaimer I live in a LCOL metro but was it ever really cheaper than this?

gumby
0 replies
3h58m

The media is peddling the opposite, that “things are still tough.” The numbers are clear: December CPI was hardly “through the roof”, wages ant anll levels are still growing faster than inflation and consumer behavior (spending) is robust. Most people are acting as if the economy is strong.

This is the USA: poor people continue to suffer and governments at the state and federal level are increasing their suffering, especially kids. That is also getting reported.

It’s like the crime stats: people believe crime is raging “elsewhere though not here” even though trends are down mostly across the board.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf

billy99k
5 replies
8h22m

This is why I hate working as a regular salaried employee. After this happened to me a few years after college, I spent over a decade building up a consulting business. I always keep multiple clients at the same time and I'm not devasted if one chooses not to renew my contract.

profstasiak
1 replies
6h6m

anything you recommend to read on how to start consulting practice?

wnolens
0 replies
23m

One anecdote: contracts fell on my lap, via natural conversations with friends who work as full-timers in the industry (their employers needed help).

So in my case, it was having a network and connecting across it regularly.

kypro
1 replies
6h37m

It's interesting that you think this is lower risk. Maybe that's a US thing? Typically employees are harder to cut than simply choosing not to extend contracts with consultants.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
6h16m

There are different kinds is of risks, but generally, earning $100k each from 5 customers is less risky than earning $500k from 1 customer.

Whether or not it is extra work or if it is worth the extra work is dependent on the individual.

alecco
0 replies
7h31m

Consulting can be pretty stressful and needs good social skills. It's not for everybody.

TrackerFF
4 replies
9h1m

Well, hopefully there's a silver lining to all this: Talented and underappreciated engineers (or those just caught in the crossfire of shitty policies) will go on and start new, more exciting companies.

jongjong
2 replies
8h48m

Then they will realize that the media has been fully monopolized and can't find get any users and that it's not so easy outside of the cushy confines of Big Tech.

jocaal
1 replies
8h30m

And then they will realize that the people complaining about big tech monopolies and their rent seeking behaviour were maybe not so crazy after all.

mista2nith
0 replies
1h47m

Isn't Google the largest DNC donor? Pretty sure we can trust them if so

okdood64
0 replies
2h42m

and start new, more exciting companies

Which what money?

With these interest rates and Section 174, it's pretty rough out there to start one as compared to ~6 years ago.

rmrfchik
3 replies
7h41m

Fire engineering since it is expenses. Hire sales since they earn money.

collyw
2 replies
6h43m

I don't see this comment going down well here regardless of how much truth there may be to it.

rmrfchik
0 replies
3h17m

jeez, i didn't know humor is not welcome here.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
5h8m

Probably won't go down well because it's clearly overly simplistic.

If taken at face value, software companies should simply have 0 software developers.

rednerrus
2 replies
3h16m

This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion but these huge salaries of the past 5 years have really hurt technology. Instead of the best, hungriest minds working on the best problems in the most agile way, they're languishing in one of these gigantic megacorps working at a molassess pace on some improved way to sell you ads.

okdood64
1 replies
2h35m

This is not a hot take at all. Especially on HN.

P_I_Staker
0 replies
2h13m

The part about huge salaries being involved is

lgkk
2 replies
7h37m

It’s just business. And it’s not like swe aren’t making 400k or more at least in bay area.

People need to understand that just because you have a little bit of RSUs and a 200k base doesn’t mean you’re God.

You’re an asset like a machine. And you’re expensive to the bottom line.

This is literally explicitly laid out now with section 174.

If you’re taking this personally ask yourself why you’re even working for arguably some of the best most efficient capitalists on the planet. Maybe you should work for a government agency or smaller company. But you want that 400k plus right?

ngcazz
0 replies
1h45m

That salary is a reflection of market forces.

The fundamentals remain the same: they are workers who support families of arbitrary needs and complexities and not just themselves. Are they expensive to the bottom line? Good -- they _allow_ the bottom line because they are the ones generating value.

Not the shareholders and upper managers calling for layoffs to maximize their stock prices who you seem to appreciate more.

GoToRO
0 replies
4h59m

But we are a family!

RayVR
2 replies
8h10m

It seems Google cut several hundred roles…out of how many? Don’t they employ more than 25k engineers?

I don’t want to make light of anyone losing their job, but this just doesn’t seem meaningful at this scale

s_dev
0 replies
7h15m

It's news because it's been repeated ad nauseam only recruitment, HR, sales and other non tech roles will be affected by layoffs in big tech companies. The numbers aren't important just that there are numbers because it relates to engineering and it's something the tech community didn't expect.

huppeldepup
0 replies
7h20m

The meaning is found in the combination of the name and verb in the title, afaik the first occurrence.

ChrisArchitect
2 replies
12h3m
hnfong
1 replies
10h4m
alecco
0 replies
8h58m

Both threads out of the first page even though having 211 and 166 votes this early. Positions 58 and 86.

There are dumb stories on the first page even with 3 and 4 votes. HN ranking is seriously broken.

I don't buy the "it's users flagging, bro" excuses anymore...

10xDev
2 replies
4h3m

What is interesting is that now with all the layoffs we also have more CS graduates than ever [0] who were told that tech companies are struggling to find candidates to fill their vacancies. We are reaching a point, if not already at the point where we will have bunch of unemployed CS grads who will have to make a pivot into something entirely different.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_322.10.a...

gopher2000
0 replies
1h16m

Are you sure we're reaching that point? The market has certainly cooled but tech jobs are still available. I do think that many new grads will have to adjust their expectations from high 6 figure jobs in FAANGs to normal-but-still-fine compensation in tier 3-4 companies.

I would also argue that it's hard to predict what the market looks like 4 years into the future. That's a reality people should acknowledge when they start a CS degree, etc.

clusterhacks
0 replies
2h48m

You may be interested in looking at the current Taulbee survey[1] - it surveys PhD granting CS and CE programs and collects MS and BS degree numbers as well.

I also found [2] that shows "computer and information science" graduates having a higher-than-average unemployment rate than other degrees. In 2018.

My anecdotal experience over the last 15 years as a person on the hiring side of the table is that my organization has received multiple qualified applicants for our open positions, several of who are almost always new CS grads looking for their first job. And my organization is in an area with multiple companies that hire software engineers and we typically pay somewhat below market. That experience makes me question if there is now (or even has been in that 15 years) an actual shortage of candidates for these types of jobs.

  [1-pdf] https://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2023/05/2022-Taulbee-Survey-Final.pdf
  [2-pdf] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_sbc.pdf

wt__
1 replies
8h2m

In relative terms, it's not huge - NYT is no more specific than hundreds, so let's say 500, out of 182,000 - that's 0.27% (though obviously a higher impact on engineering - you might that would be what they'd cut last).

fluidcruft
0 replies
4h49m

And it seems to be layoffs in hardware which, frankly, Google is not great with. Yes, Pixel has improved vs previous years. But Pixel is mostly US, Apple owns the US market and Pixel is not making any inroads (at best it is eating other Android devices). Google has no real runaway hardware hits. It's had a few promising launches but then they manage to take them in bad directions (Google WiFi going from a simple focused thing to becoming this giant Google Home mess that's a pain in the ass to use, Chromecast devices losing functionality, etc, etc). Google support documentation has been 100% useless every time I've had an issue (to be fair: so is Apple's).

Amazon's hardware (Alexa) is the market leader I think and even it was hit with layoffs last year wasn't it? Even specifically Alexa which Google's Assistant hardware line tries to compete with.

It's probably extremely rational to step back and conclude that Google sucks at hardware. I do like Google WiFi (it frustrates me but it is fairly set-it-and-forget-it for my parents/non technical friends) and Pixel (because I hate iOS).

williamcotton
1 replies
8h2m

Two words: managerial accounting.

And the lack of this practice across an entire industry. Margins are getting smaller and smaller and the successful companies will use such practices to inform all sorts of decisions, from building in house vs 3rd party vendor, to hiring, to R&D, etc.

The days of YOLO moonshots are over for our industry. Of course venture capital will continue to exist but perhaps directed to new industries.

lobsterthief
0 replies
4h51m

I definitely wouldn’t say the days of YOLO moonshots are completely over (just look at the current level of investment in AI startups). Those days will return when the investment climate is improved, as it was prior to this recession and will be afterwards.

tagyro
1 replies
7h13m

Just a day ago I was reading a comment from a - funnily, google - engineer gaslighting another engineer that had a hard time finding a job in this market.

kypro
0 replies
6h22m

I'm seeing so many people doing this at the moment. "Maybe you need to reskill". "You need to work on your interview skills". "You're not applying to the right positions". Etc...

You can't know what the market is like until you're looking for work, and as someone who's been in this industry for 15 years and has been applying to roles recently, I know it's really rough out there regardless of what some are saying. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. I'm getting messages from colleagues every week who have been recently laid off and can't find work. Some are now getting desperate.

We did some hiring where I work in Dec. We had over 150 candidates and only extended offers to 9 candidates. Your chance of being hired was literally only 5% IF the recruiter thought your profile was at least good enough to send over for consideration. I'm guessing the actual number that applied was likely 300+. That's absolutely brutal compared to anything I've ever experience. Typically if I applied for a role in the past I might have a 20-25% chance of getting an offer, and during the last 5 years that was probably as high as 40-50%.

People in jobs need to consider themselves extremely lucky right now. In this market a good developer probably only as a 2-3% chance of getting any job they apply for and will likely need to take a decent cut in pay too.

jmyeet
1 replies
5h59m

5+ years ago, Big Tech was desperate to retain employees. This of course increased wages. Google, in particular, was always insanely profitable on a per-employee basis, at times exceeding $1 million in profit per employee.

The pandemic was really a perfect opportunity for these companies to reset the relationship with their employees. Layoffs weren't an issue if everyone was doing layoffs. Making people afraid for their jobs suppresses wages. All of this is just to increase profits.

This is going to backfire. Google, for example, allowed people to work on things. If it didn't work out, you'd go work on something else. Gmail famously came out of this approach. Google even studied this dynamic and determined psychological safety was key to success [1].

The lesson now? If you work on a project that fails, you may get laid off. The success or failure of that project will have almost nothing to do with your individual input yet you will still suffer the consequences. So employees will stop taking risks.

The other way this will backfire is that Big Tech employees are discovering they aren't above the same forces that dominate the existence of every other working person, namely that there is an adversarial relationship between employer and employee and the employer will seek to get the most work possible at the lowest cost.

What this will lead to is labor organization and collective bargaining. It will take awhile. White collar workers, and Americans in particular, generally have zero class consciousness. Collective action in general has been successfully demonized through decades of propaganda and a cult-like following of objectivism. But it will happen.

[1]: https://allwork.space/2022/10/psychological-safety-is-the-ke...

karmakurtisaani
0 replies
3h57m

Don't forget that at Google promotions were based on successful launches, leading to multiple competing chat apps and a mountain of ther abandoned products. The company has been successful seemingly put of pure luck, and we're about to see how long they can milk the few cash cows they created.

Also, the employees at Google are compensated with stocks, so they see their fortunes rise as their ex colleagues leave the building in layoffs. This makes unionizing all that harder.

formerlurker
1 replies
7h1m

The timing coincides with layoffs at the company I work for, Aurora Innovation. I assume it’s done on purpose to be overshadowed by larger layoffs.

TheArcane
0 replies
2h1m

How big was the layoff?

drdrek
1 replies
5h42m

Not that I particularly love the big G but why are top comments taking this seriously? Google grew in 2022 from 150,000 to 190,000 then down to 170,000 in 2023. What are couple of hundred down in such a large company? This is just some FUD piece.

wffurr
0 replies
4h14m

Nothing FUD about highly respected engineers I know personally getting fired when the company is immensely profitable. The FUD is created by Google’s senior leadership.

cromka
1 replies
4h3m

Google confirmed the Assistant cuts, earlier reported by Semafor, and the hardware layoffs, earlier reported by the blog 9to5Google.

Nice. So one can reasonably expect the Google Home device et all to get even worse at all the basic functionality it used to be quite good at as far as 2017.

Rebelgecko
0 replies
1h41m
benreesman
1 replies
8h17m

I refuse to hoist the guillotine when the time (seems sooner every day) arrives. But I also refuse to stand in the way either, or at least more than I'm already doing by incessantly badgering the kleptoclass that they will get tennis court-ed if they keep this shit up.

Posting beat after beat and carpet bombing Sunnyvale like fucking Curtis LeMay at the same time is offensive to everything about being an American, and a hacker, and really just a human.

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=GOOG&p=d

Layoffs happen, markets go dry, the world moves on. But stuffing your pockets until it's spilling out while walking around the Bay Area with a Samurai Sword drunk from Fucki Sushi?

I won't help them drag you out of your Tesla and beat them to death with your own iPhone. But let's quit while we're ahead assholes?

isuckatcoding
0 replies
3h59m

Are you…okay?

xpe
0 replies
3h5m

It is striking to me that a vast majority of comments here amount to i.e. "every person for themself" -- or at best i.e. "build relationships with individuals". If you are reading this, step outside your usual mindset. Can you see the individualistic bias in the comments here?

One need not be a pro-union progressive to simply recognize that we would all benefit from considering other alternatives. Hard-nosed libertarian economists who study game theory know it isn't a complete accounting of human interactions. Collaboration and alliances are worth seeking out. It doesn't _have_ to be a race to the bottom where employees all scurry around terrified, meanwhile hoping they claw their way up into management.

vhiremath4
0 replies
1h5m
taspeotis
0 replies
8h34m

Google Scroogles Xooglers

smeagull
0 replies
8h33m

Does this mean my phone will stop trying to interrupt and "assist" me despite disabling Google Assistant?

pkilgore
0 replies
5h27m

This is how you get tech unions.

nemo44x
0 replies
1h38m

Companies are hiring right now (it has picked up) but it's very competitive as well. A recruiter friend of mine told me that they are getting more good candidates into the final interview stages and that it's definitely a buyers market right now.

So it makes sense in some ways for companies to cut out a percentage of the more expensive staff and reallocate to other teams and hire new people at better rates.

ilc
0 replies
3h28m

There's an old Bob Seger song I quote about work:

"I used her, she used me and neither one cared. We were getting our share." - Night Moves / Seger.

In a sense, that's how I view work. I'm there to get a check, they are there to use my labor and make money. As long as we're both happy. It is all good. But... never forget we are using each other.

"Ain't it funny how the night moves

When you just don't seem to have as much to lose

Strange how the night moves"

Ain't it?

htrp
0 replies
2h9m

The Silicon Valley company laid off employees in its core engineering division, as well as those working on the Google Assistant, a voice-operated virtual assistant, and in the hardware division that makes the Pixel phone, Fitbit watches and Nest thermostat, three people with knowledge of the cuts said.

Why would this hit core engineering if the company needs to focus on AI ? I'd imagine these people would be ever more valuable

hawthornio
0 replies
1h11m

Form/join a union

fractalb
0 replies
7h14m

Why in this particular time frame? Just before the performance reviews?

filedottsx
0 replies
9h44m
dragontamer
0 replies
2h27m

@dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947580

Can we get a merge? There is a lot of discussion in this other topic.

dcrow0
0 replies
3h9m

i mean, you will get a solid severance package

collinglass
0 replies
51m

Canadian Ex-Googlers, we are hiring full stack engineers. Email me at collin at autocorp dot ai

boilerupnc
0 replies
7h10m
ants_everywhere
0 replies
5h20m

I feel like layoffs are like a lot of bad habits. Once you break the seal, it becomes easier and easier to give yourself permission to do it again and with more frequency.

SubiculumCode
0 replies
4h31m

An early effect of AI programming "efficiency"?

Nimitz14
0 replies
4h21m

500 comments not a single one is interesting.

John23832
0 replies
3h16m

For context: Google One Year Stock Chart https://www.google.com/finance/quote/GOOGL:NASDAQ?sa=X&sqi=2...

These companies are companies. Meant to maximize profit.

We've also gotten to the point where we're pursuing Capitalism for Capitalism's sake. The idea of how layoffs affect people doesn't matter. That's for society to figure out.

Oh, and these companies which have high earnings (I avoided the use of "profit" because these companies often shuffle money around to manufacture or negate profitability), a also pay some of the lowest marginal taxes by entities in our society. Sucks, that's not their problem... they're hear to maximize shareholder profit.

Just an ouroboros of capitalistic sociopathy.

JaimeThompson
0 replies
7h15m

Once again demonstrating the difference between leadership and management.

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
4h58m

SWE no longer a safe space. Now what?

I would ask about second careers to get away from SWE.

But to do what? What job is safe now? Safe and pays.

Doctor? That would be a tough second act.

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
4h50m

Any thoughts on this is simply a 'pause' because of the unknown.

Corporations hate hiring when going into the unknown time period.

For better or worse, managers don't understand AI, and it is pretty hyped.

There could be hiring freezes just in anticipation of 'some change is coming so we should pause hiring just in case'.

AlbertCory
0 replies
44m

My dad worked for Swift & Co. for 45 years. Nonetheless, when I first switched jobs, he applauded me, with "They're not loyal to you, so why should you be loyal to them?"

A corollary to what everyone said here is: always be thinking about the value of what you're doing to someone else. They always give the big rewards to people who happily take on "relevant to this place ONLY" tasks. You get promoted if you suck up to the middle managers and acquire skills that absolutely no other company values.

So if you pursue skills that are strictly "looking out for ME" you can expect some blowback. Ignore it.

23928539
0 replies
7h46m