Here in Mexico I just today made note of a phone service provider offering unlimited use of TikTok with their basic offering.
Personally I have never been anything but annoyed by the whole concept of the short videos, but my 5 year old daughter likes it. But then again I also get irrationally angry at programming tutorials in video form as opposed to text, so maybe I just don't "get it".
Those short form programming videos perpetuate the parts of this industry I really dislike, particularly the "look you install the latest dependency and things go :rocketship: :rocketship:". They never convey much nuance and are just frankly uninteresting, unless you want to just have passing knowledge of things existing.
Based on data from other "tech layoffs", very few if any core engineers will go. It'll be sales, recruitment, and an assortment of engineering-adjacent positions like solutions, industrial design, data analytics, and product.
If you look at pure software engineering, it's about 5%. When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.
This is extremely interesting data, and not what I would have expected. I'm aware HR and recruiting folks are having much much harder times than engineers in finding new positions, but assumed engineers had still been hit harder than that link shows.
For companies outside the big techs that are still wildly profitable and sitting on mountains of cash, laying off people is largely about refocusing on actual profitable activity. Keeping engineers around makes sense for them.
For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Still, 5% seems low. How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Bothering to do a layoff only makes sense if management wants to see the company survive. So, assuming that the only outcomes being targeted are the ones in which the company is still alive, consider the cost of replacing the employee later: at least right now, engineers are more expensive to hire than most other roles[0], so it could cost less overall to lay off HR/recruiting with the expectation that you'll backfill those roles in 9-18 months.
[0] for various reasons; to hire for any given role, you have to source, engage/recruit, interview (which takes up the time of the people on the team they'll join), somehow pick one or more of the candidates, make offers, and then onboard them. These costs are largely the same for any role, except that interviewing engineers costs engineering time (and it's harder to get enough quality candidates in the top of the funnel for engineers than other roles, so you have to spend more HR/recruiter time there).
> I'm aware HR and recruiting folks are having much much harder times than engineers in finding new positions, but assumed engineers had still been hit harder than that link shows.
Hardest hit positions are "tech adjacent".
> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Twitter was an example of that, but it was massively overblown by the media due to the company profile (and the identity of the buyer!).
Companies trimming senior talent are also slowing down the pace at which they can ship new features and products. That's ok short term, but longer terms, those that will be able to secure funding to keep their engineering will get ahead.
> How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
>How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications?
I did try to find data but couldn't. Pure anecdata from friends in the industry and observations from vlogs/blogs, it's very similar, maybe a bit higher - reaching 10% perhaps but not much more.
The engineers that were axed were in business units that focused on unprofitable products, and couldn't or wouldn't relocate to other engineering teams in the company. Think Amazon's devices unit. Even then, the they were mostly kept around, and administrative roles were the first to go.
I work in Big Tech. In the recent layoff, no software engineer was laid off within my org. But several program managers were laid off. I don't necessarily agree with that decision; they do the dirty work of pushing things forward, like doing cross-functional communication, thinking about timelines and milestones, organizing meetings and sometimes attending meetings on behalf of actual engineers. Without them, work is slower, more chaotic, and it is now impossible to ask a program manager to attend a meeting on your behalf. Guess what? Actual engineers' productivity drops.
There is bloat, of course, but there is also a reason why those tech-adjacent positions exist.
I agree. When I starting working we had a manager that was formerly a SWE on our team. They retired and were replaced by a series of people over the years that, for the most part, didn't have a programming background. At first I was a little dismayed over this, but I eventually realized it doesn't usually matter. It helps for them to have tech knowledge, but like you said they do things I wouldn't care for, but need to be done.
Interesting data! And very different from the anecdotes presented in another top HN discussion today, detailing fierce competition with software engineer job postings receiving 100x the number of applicants compared to just a few months ago.
As someone who has been doing primarily Android engineering for the last 7 years. I am not surprised they are still hiring Android people. It is really hard to hire Android people. Every company I’ve worked (FANNG included) at struggled to fill Android roles. TikTok has reached out to me every month for the last year or so as well.
Ah yes, you're part of the "exclusive club" of people who own an iPhone; they only added 200M members to their ranks last year. Only the smartest, tech Rockstars... or anyone with a piece of government issue id and enough credit to get a 2-year cell plan.
iOS's developers community had a head start - transitioning from Cocoa to Cocoa Touch is straightforward. Android didn't have this. Android SDK was a giant mess initially, there was no decent IDE for it initially, plenty of things that are `[something doThingWell]` in iOS are much harder in Android to implement.
Then there is fragmentation, availability of $50 devices that guaranteed to have issues with your app.
IMO iOS development is very pleasant (if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing) and Android isn't pleasant at all. Combine that with companies not caring about android apps... All of that contributes to a smaller number of good developers available.
> if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing
I hear that, though fastlane [0] makes like 1000x easier. Now my first step for any app is setting up a fastlane job to run Github Actions. My goal is to be able to push code and have an app show up in TestFlight without me ever needing to manually manage that. I can even make "blind" changes to the code and push it which is nice for old codebases or when I'm not on my main laptop but have access to my code.
It's been awhile, but I did both Android and iOS development for a product. iOS felt like a well thought out toolkit to build out very nice apps. Android was closer to here's a box of square legos, good luck. Getting to a polished app on Android was much harder [1].
Then there's the develop loop where the Android emulator is terrible, and the iOS simulator is great. So Android development meant constantly futzing with a device, which you really only want to have to do when you're ready really test.
[1] Games may be different since the game UI is often the same across platforms.
I did a minuscule amount of app development for android back in the like 4.0 days, and recently tried again, using kotlin and jetpack or whatever their UI kit is. It was awful. Everything is so hard to use. Your UI framework requires you to define completely separate """magic""" functions to preview how it is rendered, as if that makes any sense. All documentation seems to make the classic blunder of assuming you already know the answer, already are an expert in the platform, and already know what you are doing. Every example either hides some magic that they had to add, or requires you already know everything that the example should be teaching you.
I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.
> i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
It's arguably a regional/dialect distinction. Here "layoffs" is being treated as a collective noun, similar to how people say "the data is" instead of "the data are". Notice how people usually say "layoffs" when referring to the entire round.
English has less dialectal variation than most languages, so English speakers (particularly educated British or American speakers) aren't used to seeing it, but collectivization of nouns is one of the more common ones to spot. If you pay attention, you'll start seeing other examples here and there.
> I believe the rule of using "are" when following a noun that ends with "s" still applies though
Rules are dialect-dependent, though (or a better way to frame it: "rules" are observations about clusters which are used to define a dialect).
> I can't think of a collective noun that ends in S that I would follow with "is".
Sure, in the forms of American and British English that most HN readers are used to, there may not be any. That isn't universal, though.
There's a related phenomenon which may be more familiar to you: some English speakers will use a possessive form even when no possessive is being conveyed semantically, eg: "I'm going to Burger King's", or "Wal-Mart's is a good store". This particular one is fairly well-documented.
> some English speakers will use a possessive form even when no possessive is being conveyed semantically, eg: "I'm going to Burger King's", or "Wal-Mart's is a good store".
I might type "walmart's a good store" in an informal setting (not as a possessive, but as a contraction for "walmart is"), but no American / British newspaper editor would let that through. Its against the rules of english grammar.
I'm curious whether kids in Indian primary school are taught that "the layoffs is" is correct grammar, or whether its just a common mistake (like walmart's).
pretty sure this is also incorrect and something to be avoided in print, no?
"data" vs "datum" is pretty obscure. While an outfit like the New York Times may know the difference, I doubt that most people even know that "data" is always plural, since its forms are not even coming from English.
Without commenting on the correctness of the English in the article, which I didn't finish reading: when I moved to the US as a Brit, I was amused by many commercials' use of "a savings" to describe the effect of a sale or discount (e.g. "a 20% Savings!")
In this case, the collective noun "savings" is used with the singular article "a". This one shows up in both spoken and written American English.
Obviously, I can point intellectually to how and why it's correct, but it still sounds somehow weird and a bit folksy to this immigrant :)
> Indian English is just about as different from American English as it's possible to get.
Hardly. Indian English is not even very different from some dialects of British English (just not the one British dialect that most non-Brits are used to). Even many of the features that people commonly associate with Indian English are actually taken from British English and still present in present-day British dialects (again, just not the one that most non-Brits are familiar with).
There are other dialects of English that are far more different from Standard American English, to the point where an American speaker will have trouble understanding them altogether, as opposed to being able to understand the meaning correctly albeit with noticeable distinctions.
But you're right that there's a good chance that this is a dialect difference.
Indian English has lots of loanwords from Indian languages in it. That's the biggest difference I'm referring to. Try reading any Indian finance news without knowing what lakh, crore, and lakh crore mean, for example.
The human mind is engineered to be lazy though; we're hard-wired to look for short cuts and proof reading === quality isn't a terrible one. Why do you think we still have resumes, or equate a university degree with ability to program computers?
As opposed to what? People just showing up to interviews unannounced?
> or equate a university degree with ability to program computers?
Most of the really successful tech companies are doing this to a small degree. You're at a pretty big advantage if you try to get an early internship at FAANG if you went to Harvard or Stanford or whatnot - and you probably should be (and this is coming from someone who believes strongly those universities are mostly a waste).
The unis already did the hard work of sifting through students to find ones who are willing to work 100x more than necessary just to get into a slightly better school. If you're FAANG, that's sort of who you want to hire for a tech internship, and eventually take advantage of with an underpaying salary for namebrand recognition upon graduation.
I typically don't mind if there's small grammatical errors every few pages. But if the sentence structure is consistently confusing, and there are several glaring mistakes, it usually signals to me that the author didn't care enough to proofread/edit their own writing. If the author doesn't care why should I?
> Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."[1] The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".
The weird commas are because it's from an Indian site. Indian languages usually count by one, ten, hundred, thousand, and then lakh (one hundred thousand), crore (ten million), etc. That's why there's an additional comma just after the hundred thousands place.
I don’t work in tech (and my question here will prove that) but how does a company lay off 10,000 people without seriously harming their product or ceasing products all together? Is tech that bloated? What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?
This mentality wouldn’t have worked out for MySpace or Snapchat or Facebook and it’s probably not going to be good for whoever is momentarily king of the hill.
I wonder if there will ever come a point where the algorithms are really just that good to keep people and newer generations hooked permanently, and that currently we are still in a supoptimal local maxima. For example, people play at the same casinos for decades.
Working on R&D for anticipated features. The number of employees that work purely on KTLO is going to be under half at least. The rest are justifying the large revenue multipliers tech stocks get - from their rather high growth rates, which are from expansion and moonshots that pan out.
Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.
This is not borne out by the data. The data shows most layoffs are in recruiting, HR, product, design, data science. Yes, it’s cutting new projects but it’s also just trimming fat.
I don't understand your comment. If you're cutting back on future features, not existing operations, you'd absolutely expect product and design to take a big hit, and then of course recruiting and HR because your employee counts are down and you're not hiring.
Data science tends to span both (future product dev and analysis of existing functionality), and data science can be particularly tricky to assign a value to, so not surprised there are also significant cuts there.
This was such an unnecessary term to initialize by the parent, when it had a pivotal meaning in the sentence. I was wondering what the hell. KLTO meant and thought it was the internal codename for TikTok or something.
Maybe they had internal teams that were working on a new social network app and are now divesting from that (not working on it, not releasing it). Maybe they had a lot of smaller teams who were iterating on the experience to increase engagement, lower friction etc which they will now not pursue etc. "Bloat" is a bit naive that somehow they are just paid to look at the left corner of their office or something. The company built out teams to look into new experiences or to make the experience better and they are going to be doing less of that at least for a while
It's essentially the same as R&D layoffs in other industries, it's just that tech companies have comparatively huge R&D departments funded by outsized proceeds from other business units.
Not everyone at a tech company works on the product. It takes a ton of staff to do things like marketing, ad sales, content moderation. They may be backing away from some markets or maybe they automated a lot of the work.
1. You stop pretty much building anything new. That’s what most people are working on.
2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.
3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.
The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic
The vast majority of employees at any tech company are working on the next version of the product. So huge layoffs will not impact their ability to keep the lights on, but will likely have an impact on the product roadmap a few months or even years down the line.
In what is interesting, TikTok / ByteDance was on an absolute hiring spree for devs October to January for sure, while most other tech companies took the back seat or did cuts. Here’s data I got my hands on, comparing the number of “software engineer” positions at companies and ByteDance stands out unmissably:
Makes me wonder how they missed the memo that Meta got by October/November, Google and Amazon also by end of year: that the market is slowing.
I assumed Bytedance had just as good - if not better - data on the market than eg Meta, but Meta seems to have responded far far earlier to what looks like a stagnating market for as spend, than TikTok.
I wonder if it’s TikTok vs ByteDance. From my friend at the former, they are growing rapidly and understaffed vs the teams in China which are bloated and looking for projects. Also seems like they may need to sever the corporate structure and tech architecture which may also reduce the need for headcount in China.
Tinfoil hat: the cuts have nothing to do with market fundamentals, but are rather collusion by the big players to drop tech salaries. Bytedance is outside the clique.
I've heard this theory a number of times. I'm not against it. I just don't understand how it would work. Wouldn't salaries just increase again once everybody starts hiring? If this theory is true, all these layoffs are leaving these companies understaffed. Meaning they need to hire everyone back eventually.
1. layoffs make people desperate and reset the expectations. Eg I made 300k at Google but when unemployed I’ll take a job for 100k at a random company. Then Google can hire back at 200k and be the top salary again.
2. Layoffs make the employees scared of being laid off. They don’t expect raises, just employment. They work harder for less just to keep a job. Look at Amazon announcing most people won’t get a raise or even a stock refresh with the stock crash.
This works at scale even as some individuals and companies don’t comply.
Bonus: layoffs (somewhat) reset the cost basis of the company and save a ton in a long term downturns. It gives cover to kill that blockchain department that everyone realizes they don’t need.
1. There are a finite number of software engineers capable of competing with FAANG.
2. You outbid outsiders. At times, talk to your friends and tell them not to gum up intra-clique recruiting.
3. This continues for a long time, but at some point, salaries get a little too high.
4. Flush everyone all at once... resetting the baseline of what a tech salary "should be." This resets expectations for all the new talent coming in that might compete with you.
5. After the tech salary "should be" a few tens of thousands less... quietly start (2) again.
If you time it right, (2) happens when money is cheap and it's easy to found a competitor, while (4) happens when there is a "tech downturn" and VC are scared. What a tech salary "should be" is quite sticky, it takes a few years of (2) to actually change baseline expectations.
The existing cultural understanding of what tech workers "should be making" influences: what do the most promising new hires demand? how aggressive are your existing workers in asking for a raises, promos, etc? what do people take as a "given" and what do they think is a reach for them? These things operate as a sort of piggy bank. Every time you outbid a startup for promising talent, you are drawing from the piggy bank; that person tells their friends, makes a post on linkedin about it, which causes subsequent outbiddings to cost, pound for pound, ever so slightly more. When the piggy bank is empty, you refill it again by traumatizing everyone with a big, industry-wide layoff. But: you can only do this if you have a big hammer to wield.
As a bonus, if you can be a little bit discerning in your firings, you actually can shed dead weight in the process.
This is still taking a pretty big bet that hiring won't cost them more in a few years with inflation anyway, compared to retaining employees and just giving them the expected yearly payraise
> just increase again once everybody starts hiring
How long until that? 12 months, 18 months?
If you got fired from your $180k/yr job in 2023 and inflation is another 6% this year (after being 8% last year), you need a $190k/yr job in 2024 to have broken even, right?
> 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action ... Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
had colluded to not hire workers from each other, to suppress salaries. Facebook actually didn't play along, ultimately leading to the decade's compensation explosion.
I doubt it's conscious collusion, it seems more like network effects: if everyone around you is dropping employees, it makes sense to do so at the same time so you don't get negative media coverage were you to do it independently. If you do it now, it just seems like you're following the crowd.
So while it might seem like active collusion, it's more than likely just emergent game theoretic behavior.
Who was the first person to kick it off? Microsoft? Google? Meta? Meta had a reason because their stock tanked due to Apple's privacy changes or whatever.
what's your personal take: we're in a recession (the beginning, the middle, the end?) or it hasn't even started yet? how long until it starts? how long will it last?
A couple of months back I posed the same question, and a mob came out of the woodwork denying any recession.
Then we started having news of thousands of layoffs every couple of weeks.
I too wonder how the perception has changed in the meantime - and what the effect of a tech recession/layoffs spree will be on the general economy and real businesses.
We are in the recession but the media and political world are so scared of it they keep saying we're on the verge of it, for months. Or they blame COVID or the war in Europe.
So everybody now believes that until it is called as such, everything is fine.
Isn’t TikTok still growing like crazy? I don’t see why they need to layoff now - that’s like OpenAI saying they’re laying off 10% because the market is so tough.. not for you it isn’t!
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadhttps://careers.tiktok.com/position?keywords=android&categor...
Wonder if Android people will be laid off.
Personally I have never been anything but annoyed by the whole concept of the short videos, but my 5 year old daughter likes it. But then again I also get irrationally angry at programming tutorials in video form as opposed to text, so maybe I just don't "get it".
The tech is made to be addictive. You shouldn't let children use such a thing IMO.
Chances are those openings are just bait, permanently there regardless of whether they actually need people.
100%.... most firms will have permanent reqs open just to see if there are outstanding candidates available.
I quite like this article from interviewing.io on the make-up of most layoffs by position based in LinkedIn data: https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...
If you look at pure software engineering, it's about 5%. When we say "tech layoffs" we default to thinking "technical people", but that's not really the case.
For companies outside the big techs that are still wildly profitable and sitting on mountains of cash, laying off people is largely about refocusing on actual profitable activity. Keeping engineers around makes sense for them.
For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Still, 5% seems low. How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
Bothering to do a layoff only makes sense if management wants to see the company survive. So, assuming that the only outcomes being targeted are the ones in which the company is still alive, consider the cost of replacing the employee later: at least right now, engineers are more expensive to hire than most other roles[0], so it could cost less overall to lay off HR/recruiting with the expectation that you'll backfill those roles in 9-18 months.
[0] for various reasons; to hire for any given role, you have to source, engage/recruit, interview (which takes up the time of the people on the team they'll join), somehow pick one or more of the candidates, make offers, and then onboard them. These costs are largely the same for any role, except that interviewing engineers costs engineering time (and it's harder to get enough quality candidates in the top of the funnel for engineers than other roles, so you have to spend more HR/recruiter time there).
That's what they want you to assume, that way us engineers feel pressure to fall in line. Welcome to the disinformation era.
Also, tech does have a lot of people on visa compared to other industries, who need to find a job within 60 days of termination or leave the country.
Wouldn't HR and recruiting folks be able to look for work with companies the broader economy?
Hardest hit positions are "tech adjacent".
> For companies that are on the cusp of profitability, or still actively burning through money, layoffs seem to be more about reducing burn, which means you're more likely to lay off highly paid engineers.
Twitter was an example of that, but it was massively overblown by the media due to the company profile (and the identity of the buyer!).
Companies trimming senior talent are also slowing down the pace at which they can ship new features and products. That's ok short term, but longer terms, those that will be able to secure funding to keep their engineering will get ahead.
> How do you square this with the observation that every open SDE role at a company that pays at least somewhat decently seems to have hundreds of applications? If so few SDEs were really laid off, I wouldn't expect the SDE hiring market to have turned as drastically as it did since last summer / fall.
How many serious applications?
This has always been the case.
The engineers that were axed were in business units that focused on unprofitable products, and couldn't or wouldn't relocate to other engineering teams in the company. Think Amazon's devices unit. Even then, the they were mostly kept around, and administrative roles were the first to go.
It sounds a little callous but the way I make the distinction is working _in_ tech vs working _on_ tech.
There is bloat, of course, but there is also a reason why those tech-adjacent positions exist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34913015
Why is that? Does iOS present similar hiring challenges?
I would actually argue the opposite. Any techie that loves to tinker on things will probably prefer an andriod phone over an apple one.
Then there is fragmentation, availability of $50 devices that guaranteed to have issues with your app.
IMO iOS development is very pleasant (if you have someone other than you to deal with code signing) and Android isn't pleasant at all. Combine that with companies not caring about android apps... All of that contributes to a smaller number of good developers available.
I hear that, though fastlane [0] makes like 1000x easier. Now my first step for any app is setting up a fastlane job to run Github Actions. My goal is to be able to push code and have an app show up in TestFlight without me ever needing to manually manage that. I can even make "blind" changes to the code and push it which is nice for old codebases or when I'm not on my main laptop but have access to my code.
[0] https://fastlane.tools/
Then there's the develop loop where the Android emulator is terrible, and the iOS simulator is great. So Android development meant constantly futzing with a device, which you really only want to have to do when you're ready really test.
[1] Games may be different since the game UI is often the same across platforms.
I literally feel like I understand the Windows Win32 dev ecosystem, and I've never written a Windows app in my life.
That's about 40% of GOOG - which prints $60B per year. TikTok makes nothing.
It's only growing revenues at 53%, and they're massively decelerating.
It's going to be hard to IPO for anything near that without ZIRP when they don't have profits and their growth rates are declining...
Easiest way to make the numbers look better for IPO is fire half the employees and make the other half work 3x as much.
Alphabets revenue in 2022 was $280B, with ~$60B profits.
ByteDance info is harder to find, but in 2021 it was ~$60B revenue, with $7B loss. [1]
https://musically.com/2022/10/07/bytedance-2021-financials/
i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
> i'm no English expert, but I can't take seriously an article with grammar errors :/
It's arguably a regional/dialect distinction. Here "layoffs" is being treated as a collective noun, similar to how people say "the data is" instead of "the data are". Notice how people usually say "layoffs" when referring to the entire round.
English has less dialectal variation than most languages, so English speakers (particularly educated British or American speakers) aren't used to seeing it, but collectivization of nouns is one of the more common ones to spot. If you pay attention, you'll start seeing other examples here and there.
I can't think of a collective noun that ends in S that I would follow with "is".
Rules are dialect-dependent, though (or a better way to frame it: "rules" are observations about clusters which are used to define a dialect).
> I can't think of a collective noun that ends in S that I would follow with "is".
Sure, in the forms of American and British English that most HN readers are used to, there may not be any. That isn't universal, though.
There's a related phenomenon which may be more familiar to you: some English speakers will use a possessive form even when no possessive is being conveyed semantically, eg: "I'm going to Burger King's", or "Wal-Mart's is a good store". This particular one is fairly well-documented.
I might type "walmart's a good store" in an informal setting (not as a possessive, but as a contraction for "walmart is"), but no American / British newspaper editor would let that through. Its against the rules of english grammar.
I'm curious whether kids in Indian primary school are taught that "the layoffs is" is correct grammar, or whether its just a common mistake (like walmart's).
pretty sure this is also incorrect and something to be avoided in print, no?
"data" vs "datum" is pretty obscure. While an outfit like the New York Times may know the difference, I doubt that most people even know that "data" is always plural, since its forms are not even coming from English.
In this case, the collective noun "savings" is used with the singular article "a". This one shows up in both spoken and written American English.
Obviously, I can point intellectually to how and why it's correct, but it still sounds somehow weird and a bit folksy to this immigrant :)
Hardly. Indian English is not even very different from some dialects of British English (just not the one British dialect that most non-Brits are used to). Even many of the features that people commonly associate with Indian English are actually taken from British English and still present in present-day British dialects (again, just not the one that most non-Brits are familiar with).
There are other dialects of English that are far more different from Standard American English, to the point where an American speaker will have trouble understanding them altogether, as opposed to being able to understand the meaning correctly albeit with noticeable distinctions.
But you're right that there's a good chance that this is a dialect difference.
The issue with critizising someones grammer are that it always slips in an error or two.
Nothing is perfect. Get over it.
*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
As opposed to what? People just showing up to interviews unannounced?
> or equate a university degree with ability to program computers?
Most of the really successful tech companies are doing this to a small degree. You're at a pretty big advantage if you try to get an early internship at FAANG if you went to Harvard or Stanford or whatnot - and you probably should be (and this is coming from someone who believes strongly those universities are mostly a waste).
The unis already did the hard work of sifting through students to find ones who are willing to work 100x more than necessary just to get into a slightly better school. If you're FAANG, that's sort of who you want to hire for a tech internship, and eventually take advantage of with an underpaying salary for namebrand recognition upon graduation.
> Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."[1] The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".
Other sources say they have around 150k employees. With 10k laid off, that would indeed be about 7%
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34515267 (407 comments)
Robot voice and pointing at things while making dumb faces or dancing
https://wallaroomedia.com/blog/social-media/tiktok-statistic...
Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.
Data science tends to span both (future product dev and analysis of existing functionality), and data science can be particularly tricky to assign a value to, so not surprised there are also significant cuts there.
Yes
>What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?
They're probably in meetings, while a fraction of their time is actually spent doing work.
2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.
3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.
The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic
https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1628831860611506178
Makes me wonder how they missed the memo that Meta got by October/November, Google and Amazon also by end of year: that the market is slowing.
I assumed Bytedance had just as good - if not better - data on the market than eg Meta, but Meta seems to have responded far far earlier to what looks like a stagnating market for as spend, than TikTok.
1. layoffs make people desperate and reset the expectations. Eg I made 300k at Google but when unemployed I’ll take a job for 100k at a random company. Then Google can hire back at 200k and be the top salary again.
2. Layoffs make the employees scared of being laid off. They don’t expect raises, just employment. They work harder for less just to keep a job. Look at Amazon announcing most people won’t get a raise or even a stock refresh with the stock crash.
This works at scale even as some individuals and companies don’t comply.
Bonus: layoffs (somewhat) reset the cost basis of the company and save a ton in a long term downturns. It gives cover to kill that blockchain department that everyone realizes they don’t need.
There goes Web 3 (and 2.5). I guess we'll be stuck with sucky Web 2 for a while still, while all the aunties are onboarding.
1. There are a finite number of software engineers capable of competing with FAANG.
2. You outbid outsiders. At times, talk to your friends and tell them not to gum up intra-clique recruiting.
3. This continues for a long time, but at some point, salaries get a little too high.
4. Flush everyone all at once... resetting the baseline of what a tech salary "should be." This resets expectations for all the new talent coming in that might compete with you.
5. After the tech salary "should be" a few tens of thousands less... quietly start (2) again.
If you time it right, (2) happens when money is cheap and it's easy to found a competitor, while (4) happens when there is a "tech downturn" and VC are scared. What a tech salary "should be" is quite sticky, it takes a few years of (2) to actually change baseline expectations.
The existing cultural understanding of what tech workers "should be making" influences: what do the most promising new hires demand? how aggressive are your existing workers in asking for a raises, promos, etc? what do people take as a "given" and what do they think is a reach for them? These things operate as a sort of piggy bank. Every time you outbid a startup for promising talent, you are drawing from the piggy bank; that person tells their friends, makes a post on linkedin about it, which causes subsequent outbiddings to cost, pound for pound, ever so slightly more. When the piggy bank is empty, you refill it again by traumatizing everyone with a big, industry-wide layoff. But: you can only do this if you have a big hammer to wield.
As a bonus, if you can be a little bit discerning in your firings, you actually can shed dead weight in the process.
How long until that? 12 months, 18 months?
If you got fired from your $180k/yr job in 2023 and inflation is another 6% this year (after being 8% last year), you need a $190k/yr job in 2024 to have broken even, right?
> 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action ... Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
had colluded to not hire workers from each other, to suppress salaries. Facebook actually didn't play along, ultimately leading to the decade's compensation explosion.
So while it might seem like active collusion, it's more than likely just emergent game theoretic behavior.
Who was the first person to kick it off? Microsoft? Google? Meta? Meta had a reason because their stock tanked due to Apple's privacy changes or whatever.
I think the economy didn't go as bad as they thought though.
Then we started having news of thousands of layoffs every couple of weeks.
I too wonder how the perception has changed in the meantime - and what the effect of a tech recession/layoffs spree will be on the general economy and real businesses.
So everybody now believes that until it is called as such, everything is fine.