I think nearly everyone should learn how to manage their virtual environment on a technical level but idk about full on coding. Just being able to attach documents to an email or wrangle proper MFA and/or password management would be a godsend.
But now GPT can code. It’s possible the narrative is changing.
I’m NOT saying that software engineers are getting replaced, but the kinds of things you learn in a boot camp, gluing APIs together and searching StackOverflow for code snippets, seems like it’s on more shaky ground than a few years ago.
A few 100 top companies are laying off while a few million IT companies are in full swing with their hiring. So if IT means these top companies for you, yea, maybe, else nothing is ending. Everything is alive and kicking.
What does one have to do with the other? Almost no matter what your field, if your job involves sitting at a desk in front of computer for more than 10-20 hours a week, your job performance can probably benefit from knowing a bit of coding. And that is only going to be more true going forwards.
Because "learn to code" carries a hidden clause which is "learn to code, so you can get a job as a programmer". That's different from "learn to code, so you can automate some little tasks you do daily as part of your current job and make your life easier".
In theory there should be no such thing as a "programmer," programming should be a natural part of any white collar job that people use to automate their work and improve their workflow.
But since programming skills are so scarce, if you can code it makes sense to specialize in software development so you can make the biggest impact and maximize your income.
You should still learn to code, even if you're not in a programming job. It's just basic literacy, like being able to write a competent 5 paragraph essay. It doesn't mean you're going to write books for a living.
Everyone should also have a solid grasp of calculus, freshman physics and Maxwell's equations, comparative history, various forms of government, multiple models of ethics and the reasoning used to reach them, media and manipulation literacy, logistics management, and preferably a second or third language.
In short, everyone should have a classical four-year liberal arts education.
Now, excuse me while I ignore what I should do, and focus on what puts food on the table. And, unfortunately, CMPT-101 programming skills aren't going to be it - ChatGPT can do that work better and cheaper than a 'basic level' human can, just like it can produce a five-paragraph essay better than a grade school child can.
If you're going to learn programming, you're going to need to learn it to the point where you're better at it than a dumb LLM. And that bar is significantly higher than 'basic knowledge' or even 'working knowledge'.
Nobody cares about my rusty Grade 8 French skills, or my crappy hand-stitching skills in a world when Google Translate and sewing machines exist.
I don't think layoffs would be a problem in itself. Most likely smaller companies would benefit from the surge in offer and capture those talents.
The problem there is that smaller companies are suffering a capital shortage due to the raise of interest rates at the same time, so they have less resources available to capture said talents.
AWS has a ton of non-engineering staff. Ad-tech is also sales, marketing, and IMDb. Twitch has a ton on marketing and creator management roles.
Its not clear which roles will be eliminated, but I've worked in a few of those groups and I can assure you there is plenty of fat to be trimmed outside of engineering.
Yeah. This makes me really happy I did not transition to some soft-skill based job. Soft skills are really important, but if all I had going for me right now is "management experience" I'd be more worried.
Many of these purely soft-skill based jobs in tech departments are part of some agile enterprise frameworks. Yet i don't have the impression they are fading away.
Jensen H looks and sounds tickettyboo and his vision of A.I. meets physical world is spot on when you see SpaceX launch automation removing the majority of human voices out of the loop.
A lot of larger tech companies started hiring like mad during the past two years because the economy was over juiced. I work at an enterprise and was chatting with my boss about it and she mentioned that there was this idea that companies that weren't hiring were going to fall behind the those that were.
This is those companies undoing all of that panic hiring.
Using FAANG to determine the job market is like using Monaco residents to work out the state of the world's wealth. They are outliers with enormous amounts of cash and they can spend in an illogical way to reduce risk that market changes will leave them left behind simply because they can afford to. For most of us in normal businesses earning normal amounts, our jobs are as secure as ever because of supply and demand.
How much is down to knowingly recruiting people you know you might fire later, how much is incompetence on the planning teams and how much is simply that very large companies are hard to manage: that I don't know.
hmmm. Interesting. I see it the other way around. If the robot's ownership is concentrated in few hands, then there's indeed reason for the mob to arise. If the mob owns the robots instead, then there will be little reason for the mob to raise pitchforks, they'd just collect dividends. Mob can then go vacation in Florida or whatever.
I, too hope that automation will eventually help us figure out how to do Socialism that Doesn't Suck, but it's one hell of a jump to imagine that it will just happen automatically on top of existing systems given their long and well established history of relentlessly concentrating the ownership structure -- what is it, 90% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans, or something? Even if super construct-o-bots became cheap, you'd also have to unwind the private ownership of natural resources. No, I don't see any of this happening smoothly. Do you?
> Collective ownership of the means of production?
I was thinking of proliferation of existing, but still uncommon incentive structures. More stock compensation, in more industries. More co-ops for smaller orgs. More unionization, while not distributing ownership directly, at least balances board memberships. More sovereign trust funds for resource extractions etc... I wasn't thinking state-controlled production, it's been tried, and failed horribly.
One reason why US is reasonably stable is precisely because of 401ks. That is, a large middle class has a true stake in the stability of the system, and will not rock the boat. Increase that stake, there's existing mechanisms.
> I don't see any of this happening smoothly
There's no reason it needs to devolve into violence. Small example: USA-gov specifically needs to co-opt resource extraction, and setup trust fund, like Alaska. This is primarily a political program that we're being hoodwinked into not accepting. The onus is not on evil Exxon, they're not threatening to kill us if we try to (because they don't); the onus is on the american people to actually demand this from our representatives.
Violent transformation will throw away the baby with the bathwater. Take what works, dial it up. Devalue (in your heart and actions) what does not work. Vote & advocate accordingly. The doom&gloomers are missing that so many pieces are there, already, today.
I suspect we agree on policies but not on terminology; I'd describe your vision for the future as market socialism, I would agree that reforming our institutions in that direction is the happy path for the future, and I would share your aversion to state socialism. I even think it's understandable to dissociate from the terminology -- FDR avoided the word "socialism" too, just remember that the businessmen got together and tried to coup him all the same.
and yet they didn't. It famously devolved in a terror state, and a restoration of the monarchy in half a lifetime. the french revolutionary program traded aristocratic rights for bureaucratic corruption. all we really got was the metric system.
the true lesson imho is that any positive project for the future will need to reject iconoclasm, and lean into incrementalism. preserve the good, prune the bad.
The 'terror' is 'famous' only because of the ~300 years long propaganda of their enemy, the English establishment - the aristocratic establishment that hates anyone or anything that threatens the aristocracy with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Otherwise, what is called 'the terror' accounts for ~3000 people, and most of them in Paris. And it consists of aristocrats, their surrogates, their servants who aided them with their conspiring with their foreign relatives to come to France and massacre their own people so that they wouldnt lose their privileges and the 'plebs' would 'know their place'.
Conspiring against your own country in wartime in that manner still carries the death penalty even today. Even in the most democratic countries.
> the french revolutionary program traded aristocratic rights for bureaucratic corruption
Corruption existed in all eras and all societies in human history. 'Bureaucrats being corrupt' at or after one point does not invalidate a system. That system worked spectacularly well when it was first instituted, literally reforming the entire continent by removing aristocrats from power and appointing non-nobility to those positions on a meritocratic basis. It worked so well that even after the aristocrats were able to destroy the Napoleonic remnants of the revolution, they kept that 'bureaucratic' system. If it became corrupt, you can tie it to the influence of the aristocrats - not the revolution.
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No, the French did find the solution to it - the French Revolution is the unique event in human history that destroyed the elitist, aristocratic stranglehold of the minority on the society by invalidating all the historic traditions and trappings that trace back to the Agricultural Revolution and all the norms that those enforced on the people. And it set the standards for our actual modern society. It has basically created the blueprint of how we live today.
Indeed - after being on the Internet for a while, I learned that what is taught on this topic in the Anglosphere and the rest of the world !greatly! differ. In high school curriculum, we were taught what the French Revolution did, what were its principles and how it related to our current society. What is incessantly drummed up in the Anglosaxon literature as 'the terror' was just mentioned as a part of the turmoil that was the revolution and the ensuing war. But of course, its no surprise how then-existing Anglosaxon establishment and its modern contunity hated 'the terror so much':
Because 'the terror' was directed against the aristocracy. It did not matter whether hundreds of thousands of French died during the famines in which their aristocrats starved them for maximum profit to keep their luxurious lifestyle. It matters that ~3000 aristocrats and upper class were executed by those very peasants.
> The same case can be made for the american revolution, which was earlier, and which legacy is longer lasting
That is also a proposition of the Anglosaxon literature, and there is a quite different view of it outside that literature for that topic as well:
Whereas the French Revolution totally did away with all the existing political and social norms and brought an egalitarian and meritocratic format into politics and the society, the American Revolution was more a rebellion in which the elite of the colonies broke away from their motherland in a move to protect their privileges and position by incorporating some of the Age of Enlightenment principles. We see total commoners get into positions of power at the end of the French Revolution, whereas the American Revolution (or rather, rebellion) does not disturb the existing power structure in the colonies aside from ousting the parts of the elite who were royalists. There was also large scale land appropriation and land redistribution done at the end of the rebellion.
That is extremely important - because that is the reason why the leaders of the rebellion created an anti-democratic political structure: The American founding fathers thought that this kind of land redistribution could easily target themselves (and there were voices demanding it), and they wanted to protect their holdings and power. Which is why de facto architect of the American constitution, John Adams, openly and contradictorily advocated that the government should protect the society from 'the tyranny of the majority'.
The tyranny being democratically voted and enforced land redistribution, obviously. American founding fathers were rather blunt about it in their memoirs, letters and private communication. Some did openly politick against it as well.
This is the reason for the existence of the electoral college, the senate, and the 'checks and balances' in the American system - all of those were devised as ways to enable overriding or controlling the democratic majority so that they wouldnt come with pesky land redistribution schemes. So at the end of the 'revolution', we see the exact American elite occupying the same positions of power and privilege, but with the losing segments of the elite who sided with the crown removed. The actual aristocrats who sided with the rebellion kept their possesions after the rebellion, with the exception that their nobility titles not having a legal basis anymore. Which did not matter since it was the possessions that made the title.
On top of that, the Age of Enlightenment ideals were not fully materialized into their radical forms at that point. So what...
Thanks for the great read. Looking forward to delve more into the links you added.
Of the cuff, the common vs civil law issue seems more of a formal difference, rather than a difference in outcome. Interpretation of common laws changes over time as well. And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth? I lost count somewhere in my own lifetime. Laws that need rewriting every generation or so or poor laws.
Anyways, appreciate the in-depth response and sources!
> Of the cuff, the common vs civil law issue seems more of a formal difference, rather than a difference in outcome
Nope. Its fundamental. Take what happened during the BLM protests: A NY court suspended habeas corpus, the basis of all rights under common law. At that point, the authorities, including the police, could do whatever they wanted to anyone they wanted. It was reinstituted only after a higher NY court overruled it. If the higher court decided that the emergency warranted the suspension, ALL rights in NY would have been gone for the duration. Same goes for the US in general. If in the future, there is a major emergency that can 'justify' the suspension of habeas corpus and the supreme court lets it stay, all rights will be gone for whatever duration decided. In common law, the judges play the role of the sovereign monarch who owns all rights and gives them out as he sees fit. So it can 'reinterpret' everything at any given time and everyone is at the mercy of it.
Now take civil law: No such thing can happen. What rights the citizens, residents and even refugees have are written in concrete in the law, including what rights can be kept and what rights are suspended even in emergencies including global catastrophes, and they can never be taken back by anybody. The only one who can give or take back laws is the society itself, ie the people, they do that through democratic voting and proportional representation, and nothing and nobody can overrule them. Sovereignty belongs to the people.
> And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth?
The majority of the French republics were destroyed by external sources that were trying to eradicate the remnants of the French revolution. Mostly backed by (then) 'the leader of the free world', Britain. We can also include World War II in this, since Britain was trying to use Germany as an attack dog against the Soviets and therefore propping up in any way they could, especially diplomatically. (including preventing an Europe-wide attempt of an anti-Nazi alliance that could totally prevent Ww2).
Outside those cases, the people democratically changing their constitution and calling it a new 'republic' does not really make it a new republic. Its still a republic, with a changed constition. The power still resides in the people and they decide how the 'new' republic will be. There is nothing outside the revolutionary principles there.
Though, one can easily say that the latest republic was also prompted by an external intervention - namely the CIA coup attempt to depose de Gaul to prevent the French from giving independence to Algeria.
This is a very hairy affair, by the way - CIA organizing a coup in France using the military in lieu of JFK's policies and opposition, Parisians mobilizing and setting up barricades across Paris to protect the president, JFK being powerless to stop the CIA and leaking info and updates to the French via diplomatic channels to help against the coup...
> namely the CIA coup attempt to depose de Gaul to prevent the French from giving independence to Algeria.
Funny to see this called out, my father is a huge francophile and I remember him going on about this when I was a kid (tbf - he sees CIA coups everywhere in the 60s, murder of jfk, murder of lumumba, ...).
> he sees CIA coups everywhere in the 60s, murder of jfk, murder of lumumba
Considering how that is the whole business of CIA (aside from drug running to finance those and the paramilitaries, guerillas and islamists they fund), he is not far off. Solely the coups in South America would already flood the list, Africa would need a few more pages. Then there are coups in the Middle East etc. Incidentally, the later Iranian Islamic revolution is the result of the 1953 coup that CIA helped organize in Iran.
They even hired the most famous mobsters in Tehran to help with the coup. So I guess the tendency of the CIA to choose the worst type of people to work with did not originate in the 1960s, and instead it was there when it was founded...
...
The murder of JFK is very specific, btw - its very plausible that CIA did it (Dulles) because JFK has sabotaged two CIA projects - the Bay of Pigs push and then the French coup. And that Dulles was a nasty, nasty, nasty man...
You seem so poisoned with anti-English xenophobia that you are spreading disinformation.
Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.
It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".
You are way off on the death toll. The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial. Historians put the total figure at 40-50k because of there were also summary executions outside the official figures.
> You seem so poisoned with anti-English xenophobia
Even if I was, why would being so anti-French like the English establishment and its followers are be ok, but not being 'anti-English'.
> spreading disinformation
You are not the arbiter of truth. Neither the establishment that you are defending. The one that was called the 'perfidious albion' for 400~ years by now.
This is the first time I see someone talking about 'misinformation' regarding referenced historical material. It comes across extremely funny. Demonstrates how big the gap is in between how the Angloamerican world sees itself and the world and the rest of the world does.
> Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.
Aside from the charged emotional wordage used in your paragraph giving away the level of ire and propaganda levied against those who you consider to be your 'historic enemy' in line with your establishment's propaganda, nobody denies the existence of executions. ~3000 people were tried and executed in Paris.
What is 'denied' is the delirious, emotionally charged exaggeration that comes from the establishment you stan for - just like your emotional approach, that establishment has portrayed this event as if millions of ordinary French were wrongfully killed. With the judge, jury and executioner of that sentence being the English establishment, the traitorous aristocrats who escaped to England, and those who finally accomplished in destroying the French Revolution. Its like asking Dick Cheney to describe the Iraq War...
> It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".
The word 'terror' had different meanings 300 years ago. Whereas it has been made into something quite different from the usage in the period in the following centuries. Maybe they should have used the word 'fear of god' instead of the more rational-sounding 'terror'. Like how it is in the Anglosaxon literature. Then it would be all good and well.
Regardless of the propaganda subversion of a term from a different language by a hostile establishment, the incident is what it is - the execution of ~3000 people, mostly the aristocrats and their surrogates for conspiracies against their own people.
> The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial.
The Anglosaxon 'Terror' propaganda is about the executions in Paris. Its about 'blood flowing in the streets'. Guillotines. Not the events that transpired elsewhere in France, during the wars, or in the killings of the revolutionaries by the French aristocrats or the foreign armies that they have called in to murder their own people.
It is very likely that even more people died from both sides in the events during and after the revolution. But the English propaganda is not about that. Its about 'blood flowed in the streets'. Emotional manipulation to demonize. Because otherwise different sides in a civil war executing collaborators of the other faction in court martials across the countryside does not make the same emotional manipulation effect. Even more so because the English history is chock full of such incidents, and the accusation would turn against the propagandists themselves - hence, 'blood flowed in the streets - guillotines!!!'.
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There is absolutely no difference between how the French Revolution was demonized in this manner through emotional propaganda a...
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." - Warren Bennis
So legal and virtue signaling? It appears these positions were NOT safe, so like the others they were cut. If companies _really_ cared about DEI they would look other places to cut. I guess, unfortunately, the ROI on DEI isn't apparent.
I would not go that far.. they do serve a purpose. That said, I only interact that group about application/benefits/exit interview and the application part is almost uniformly bad in corporate world ( I effectively avoid applying blindly; I was mostly lucky that most of my recent jobs were referrals that bypassed HR screening ).
It sucks that you've dealt with bad recruiters and bad HR. I hope you get to work with really good ones someday, because it can be incredible.
One of the best things a former employer did was hire an in-house recruiter who was actually good at the job. Because he wasn't working on commission, he cared a lot more about getting the right person for your team rather than just a butt in a seat. He had enough technical background to talk intelligently about the position when I was interviewing to work there, and a year later when I ended up writing a job description, he was able to do a very good job walking me through how and why each part was there. Recruiting is really hard to do well, and lots of companies do it really poorly. But it can be done well, and it's a real pleasure to work with a good recruiter both as a candidate and a hiring manager.
HR as well, to a point. Yeah, it's to protect the company and control costs. But it can be done well or poorly, and when it's done well it can be reasonably pleasant to deal with.
HN downplays all jobs other than programming to a horrible degree.
"Why do we even need hr?"
"Why do we even need managers?"
"Why do we even need sales?"
I've seen it all on this site. It's pretty disrespectful to those professions especially when hr is on the front lines when hiring slows and layoffs take place. The talk of outsourcing in particular is amusing since HN will talk endlessly about how outsourcing programming can't possibly work.
Seems the halcyon days in tech are coming to an end pretty quickly. Maybe when the inflation starts dying down faster + the AI craze will continue to even greater heights then we'll see it coming back in full swing.
Either way it is almost certain that a large amount of people working in these companies don't contribute much to the generated income and now the executives have been given an excuse to perform mass layoffs without scaring off the shareholders.
Sure, but these things come and go. I would not be surprised if in 12-24 months Amazon has more engineers than they do today by a significant margin.
And "in tech" is right. At my current company, we have more PMs than we do developers. This leads to a really poor feedback look where the PMs are trying to justify their jobs, so they "look busy" and start generating cruft that is probably not important (like changing text without really a great reason, sure maybe it is "polish" but ... there's real things to do and it distracts the engineers).
I've worked in this environment and it's always miserable. Developers are constantly frustrated by way too much upstream information and work and PMs feel like they have no ability to do anything.
Even if a PM does the right thing by talking to customers and learning about their pain points, the giant bottleneck in dev capacity means that those customer pain points take forever to address, which often leads to more customer frustration than if you had never talked to them in the first place.
Whenever something that used to work fine suddenly inexplicably breaks here or changes and is made obviously worse for no discernible reason, the following exchange inevitably occurs…
“What the heck happened? This was just working last week! Where’s the… ugh! Where did the button for this go?”
The post was saying Slack and Meet are repeat offenders in terms of breaking users expectations or their workflows due to a change-heavy approach to product management, not that they break in the sense of going offline.
“Downtime” is a meaningless metric. Actually working is what matters. And Meet just broke for me two weeks ago; the video didn’t work. Doesn’t matter it was technically “up”.
This is not the first time, it won't be the last time. The next hype round is only a matter of time because rich people need somewhere to put their money.
Until you solve the problem of middle management status being based on the number of people you manage, you will keep getting bloated organizations. Until an organization figures out a better way to manage their dependencies on each other, every new thing an organization wants to do will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.)
Organizations are just committing on "not growing" in terms of product offerings in the next period of time. The stock market, after some time, will reward growth and the cycle will start again.
> will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.)
I understand this is signaling that the author understands technical concepts like big-O, but why use technical terms imprecisely when non-technical terms work just fine?
Considering the audience, this language is more vivid and precise than saying something like "middle management causes bloat." It puts a picture in your head of how that bloat grows and what causes the bloat (the tree structure of the organization).
It's not precise, but it's pretty close when you look at the number of management and support positions to individual contributors in many techinal organizations.
It's beyond the scope of this conversation, but the short is that it seems to become a network effect problem. Every team does not work with every other team, but it does end up in a hub-and-spoke system with matrixes over the system. Oversight (ops, security, PMO) do not scale linearly because the competing priorities make scheduling more difficult.
I've read others who have spoken about it, but I'd have to go back and find it.
>The next hype round is only a matter of time because rich people need somewhere to put their money.
They put their money in hype when the money is free or close, and putting it in those "investments" make sense. Like when you have QE and near-zero interest rates...
Tons of money funnelled into banking turned to cheap loans for VC money, however was in great supply, and this proped up stocks artificially out of any pragmatic evaluation, and hyped the public for them (with the cooperation of the media), which in turn provided further supply for the extravagance:
"even the tactical errors committed by investors were insufficient to create the bubble that burst so dramatically last year. For that, we needed a perverse private-public partnership led by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. The Fed mistakenly created too much money in the fall of 1999 in order to fend off the expected deflationary impact of the Y2K bug—effectively pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire in the stock markets—and banks and brokerage houses used some of the excess liquidity to fund the share price bubble. In the fourth quarter of 1999, the Fed expanded the money supply at an annual rate of 22% (9.6% after seasonal adjustment). In comparison, the rate of growth of the money supply in the fourth quarter of 2000 was 9.2% (–2.8% after seasonal adjustment). Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, seeing the flood of money into risky start-ups, pricked the dot-com balloon with monetary tightening in the spring of 2000. It was the dot-coms’ misfortune to be first the beneficiaries and then the victims of these larger economic forces".
In that case they didn't need "near zero interest" rates, because they were artifically promised much larger returns than the actual rates.
That is the actual key driver: easy handed loans for BS uses (to VCs, and even better the general public), and hyped returns above the rates. The "near zero" rates is not necessary, it's just the more extreme case.
In the end, a few decades on, managers still have no idea how to make software project delivery reliable and quantifiable.
And too many of these organizations still act like they think throwing more engineers at a problem makes things go faster.
And the $$ and prestige of working in tech still attracts too many people whose primary interest is not just in getting things done, but being seen doing it, and, as, you say, improving their status.
The tide is going out and we're seeing who isn't wearing bathing suits. But it might be the whole beach.
... Still though the primary thing driving investment in tech and software is the same thing that drove investment in industrialized cotton mills or Ford Model T assembly lines: mechanization makes profits, and... computerized mechanization is the most powerful cost reducing system ever known to mankind.
Software is not reliable in the same sense that mathematics delivery is not reliable. If you're doing something routine and reliable you should be automating it.
Managers usually over staff because it’s an easy lever available to them to cover their ass. If the project fails or is late, a simple criticism is, “Why didn’t you scale up the team?” They can avoid this criticism and shift the focus to externalities such as shifting requirements, late dependencies, etc.
Tech will always be on top. The only thing that will vary based on broad factors is what kind of tech. We've been in computer tech the past twenty years and are only starting to get to the interesting places biotech will take us next. Similarly, we're due a step change in materials sciences, not to mention energy generation & storage, and transportation. Envirotech will continue to thrive, and receive more investment as climate change becomes more extreme. Etcetera.
That might be the case, but the investment show itself, however, might also just be far less than what it used to be...
Plus the "deliver cheap and fast" was not just because tech was so useful and must have, but mostly because of a number of factors, like people having money lying around to put into stocks, interest rates being low, QE, and so on.
With a decline in income comes a decline in advertising, (taking "eyeball" based companies), and a decline in BS subscription spending (taking down many "real business model selling SaaS" companies, resulting in a downward spiral...
Did all these companies that are going through multiple rounds of layoffs decide specifically to spread out the pain over multiple rounds, or did they just fail to predict how many people would need to be let go?
The way it was worded—it sounds like a failure to predict how many roles they wanted to eliminate. I’m sure they also wanted to hedge—wait things out and see if conditions changed.
They're only now (when this was decided, maybe a month or 2 ago) figuring out the natural attrition in the next couple of years will be extremely close to 0%, down from 15% or even higher
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible."
This seems overly cynical. It makes a lot of sense to wait until teams have completed their planning. It allows the executives to sift through the proposed projects and decide specifically which ones to cut.
Also, it is pretty easy to confirm with anybody who works at AWS that OP2 planning process did in fact complete recently
My philosophy on multiple rounds (which I'm not attributing to big techs):
1) Any business can tolerate a 5-20% layoff without loss to business continuity.
2) A 50% layoff results in losing critical knowledge about how to keep the business working.
3) Therefore, if you want to lose 50% of your employees, it makes sense to do it in rounds.
I can give similar logic for larger layoffs too, mostly having to do with impact on employee perception. If I'm in a business who has layoffs every 3 months, I will be sending out resumes to more stable places, to the extent they exist.
> Any business can tolerate a 5-20% layoff without loss to business continuity.
Does adding 2 months between your 5-20% rounds recover that continuity?
I can't make my mind. It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep your lights on. The problem is that "keep your lights on" is the only thing people will care about while overworked looking for another job.
> Does adding 2 months between your 5-20% rounds recover that continuity?
Yes. The knowledge is consolidated in fewer people that way.
> It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep your lights on. The problem is that "keep your lights on" is the only thing people will care about while overworked looking for another job
Agreed. However, if a business is bleeding $1M per month and has $10M in savings, "keeping the lights on" for a while is considered success.
I will mention: I'm not advocating for a specific course of action. I'm merely trying to explain one way of reasoning. Personally, I think there are usually out-of-the-box solutions which avoid layoffs, especially in situations similar to big tech.
Google could, for example, spin up a consulting arm and (1) Get dead-weight people out of core operations (2) Likely, make a mint.
I am curious about these layoffs; the number impacted in the past year seems to be between 100-250,000 tech employees.
Are there that many good-paying jobs remaining within the tech industry that they can re-shuffle to? Are people finding placement? Are coders now competing for less-technical jobs as well?
I've heard stories of recruiters who were seeing 1 resume per week now seeing 300 resumes per week, but I'm not noticing any sentiment of widespread panic on HN or even Reddit.
I got laid off late January and was able to find a job within a month. I've got a senior title and 6.5 years of experience.
Like most US tech workers, I was getting paid comfortably, but nowhere near the level of FAANG/fintech/top startups. I took a small pay increase with this new job.
I've got friends who were part of the FAANG layoffs who have been struggling because they only want to work at FAANG or top tier fintech/startups. That said, they are also not trying too hard due to generous severance.
250,000 tech workers impacted sounds like a lot, but this is less than what the companies hired during the covid job boom; this can be simply (a step towards) a reversion to a more normal state of the tech employment.
I'd be curious to see how many of these layoffs are coders - I know given the scale of the layoffs the numbers in engineering affected can't be small even if the percentage is, but anecdotally I've only heard of HR layoffs among friends (anecdata isn't data but I'm an engineer so I know relatively fewer HR folk overall).
Fwiw those I do know that've been laid off have gone travelling/career break (severance helps here) or pivoted (all from HR, none from engineering).
LMAO no. Admittedly I have been out of the job hunting circus for a decade, but the number of positions I've applied for in the past few months that have resulted in a first interview is laughable. Recruiters are still useless and such an active waste of my time I don't even reply to them any more.
I'm seemingly having better luck these days getting freelance contracts through non-standard avenues (but I'm holding off from celebrating as I'm still negotiating and haven't signed anyone just yet)
All the interviews I got after I was laid off were through recruiters. I did not apply anywhere directly. I found them very helpful. However, you are not the first person to tell me this. It seems recruiters work very well for one kind of applicant and terribly for others.
There are a few very good recruiters out there, who will have you interviewing for jobs within days, and probably fielding offers within a week or two. There are also vast seas of terrible recruiters who do nothing but keyword matching and spamming your details out to anyone with a pulse, who are at best neutral in your ability to find a job, and in the worst case will actively make things harder for you because companies will be unwilling to cover their fees.
In my case, via going to meetups related to the field I'm in. There'll be one recruiter who everyone wants to talk to. Talk to them, and make it known that you're looking for work.
I regularly interview and am continuing to grab offers every couple weeks. Just make sure to bypass the application portal with inMails from LinkedIn as the recruiters are lazy and will just send you in rather than read through the pile and you are fine.
I suspect anyone with a decent network is fine. If you are applying through portals though, the competition is steep.
Anecdotally, the folks I'm seeing on LN most impacted by the layoffs seem to be more on the senior/higher paid side of things, probably more folks that chose the tech track than people management (but I'm seeing those too).
Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.
> Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.
Follow from this?
> more on the senior/higher paid side of things
Are you implying that every single senior+ person you know who got cut was worthless? Because generally, the more senior the more you contribute to a company’s bottom line.
In my experience, the more senior you are, the less obvious your contributions are to bean counters. Thus my observation that companies could be using metrics similar to tickets closed or lines of code weighed against someone's salary to determine if they should be laid off.
Yep. And companies are sharply downsizing their recruiting teams as well. At bigger companies, recruiting can be a large function.
I think there is an assumption that all of the layoffs have been engineers or engineers, designers, and product people, but a huge chunk of them have been in support roles that are less needed without big hiring demands.
If companies are cutting travel and expense budgets, that means you can cut accounting staff. If you are largely not hiring, you can cut recruitment staff. Etc., etc., etc.
I'm indeed panicking and haven't lost my job, yet, let's see in 3 weeks. I never worked at a FAANG and it terrifies me that if I'm out there I will be competing with people with big names on their resumes. This news coupled with the AI news of the past weeks is making me think about what other profession this forever developer can do to pay the bills.
I took the black pill. Maybe I can find wisdom in past professions' cataclysms, like ice harvesters and milk delivery.
Don't be terrified. People who get laid off in small layoff rounds smaller than 10% are often not that attractive in the job market. There are some exceptions like recruiters for example because usually their pie of the chart is much bigger than engineers for example.
I think you should relax. Even if this AI hype is 100% real, we will be running massive IT projects for 20 years to convert everything over to AI run. Realistically, it will probably find a use case for a few niches, but not take over all work.
Unless we invent an actual superintelligence, in which case, no humans will be needed for work ever again and you will either live out your days in some kind of early retirement paradise or be fighting over the last can of cat food.
My smartest employers always said they preferred hiring the top decile from mid level colleges rather the average ivy leaguers, or the stars from unheralded companies rather than the employee #987563 from big name logos.
Unfortunately that's not the norm, but I find branding yourself in that way can at least help overcome this challenge in the hiring process (if you get past the screener that only looks at these filters that is)
> Are there that many good-paying jobs remaining within the tech industry that they can re-shuffle to?
For FAANG-level engineering salaries, the answer is largely no, perhaps save some very specific areas like finance or extremely hot AI prospects.
There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely going away. Of course, a big part of that is due to equity values not skyrocketing every year. And of course with FAANG-level salaries going down, lots of other companies will feel less pressure to compete.
For engineers, I think a large number of those who were laid off will have difficulty replacing their level of salary for some time. I think that the past 10-ish years, with rock bottom interest rates, were really a "once in a lifetime" chance for non-managerial employees to make as much compensation as they did (again, broadly).
> There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely going away.
If those salaries go away, so will the talent. These workers will start new tech companies that either eat away at market segments or end up costing large sums to acquire. You're right that it may take time to replace the salary in the short term.
On the whole, I disagree. My primary point is the super high compensation numbers that were possible for top individual contributor engineers was largely made possible by the explosion in stock values of the biggest tech companies. That period (basically from post Great Recession until now) was largely an anomaly of 2 things that happened simultaneously: 1. Big tech vacuuming up an ever larger amount of worldwide revenue, but many of them are now hitting the law of large numbers, and 2. ultra low interest rates, which makes the present value of a future dollar (i.e. equity) worth a lot more.
Sure, some talent will leave and start new companies, but on the whole I think hardly any of them will ever be able to match top-level FAANG compensation from the 2010-2020 period. Again, there will be some outliers, but even then I think the number of outliers will be small. For example, look at AI. A lot of people freaking out the most right now are people in other areas of AI who are realizing that all of their work is being completely obviated by LLMs.
> I've heard stories of recruiters who were seeing 1 resume per week now seeing 300 resumes per week, but I'm not noticing any sentiment of widespread panic on HN or even Reddit.
I can tell you that candidate expectations have changed a lot in recent months.
For a while we had a lot of candidates applying who wanted to stretch the interview process out to 2-3 months so they could shop around, compare offers, then negotiate up as much as they could. Candidates would frequently disappear from the interview pipeline or go weeks between following up.
Now that quality of resumes we receive has increased dramatically. Applicants are much more responsive and are making it clear that they're willing to do anything, as opposed to holding out for their dream job.
Meanwhile my employer is celebrating the latest salary comp data showing that industry-wide compensation has declined sharply.
There are still jobs out there, but it's no longer easy to put in a little effort and find a good job. It's now a competition.
Many interviewers can recognize when you don't have many options. The more options you have, the more confident you'll be.
Don't take rejections personally. If you're not getting rejected a lot, you're aiming too low. You should be getting rejected frequently! Use it to hone your search.
Anecdotally, my employer in telco consulting is hiring dedicated coders - first time I've seen that in this industry. We may finally be seeing a diffusion of programmers into the wider economy after the high tech companies spent some time monopolizing them.
What we are seeing is a rebalancing. The super high-paying FAANG jobs are becoming scarcer, but there is more talent for tier 2, and tier 3 employers and startups. Many companies struggled to hire in recent years, often relying on contracting, offshoring, etc.
The company I work for, a tier 2 or 3 company for tech, depending on your perspective is still hiring, although mostly not in the U.S. But if more U.S. talent becomes available at more reasonable rates, we might do more hiring here.
All the tech layoffs in the last few months make up only a small fraction of the net new additions to the industry post 2020. These companies still have way more employees today than they did in late 2019. We have a long way to go before we will start to see significant hiring (and paycheck) impacts.
A possible reason is that the layoffs are localized to the tech industry so far, but not all (perhaps even most?) tech workers don't work in the tech industry - they do tech work for other industries such as construction, finance, health etc, either embedded directly or for companies that specialize in providing tech services to them. So until those industries are impacted by the recession they won't see the same layoffs.
Started testing the waters of the job market last week. Still employed, not FAANG, but senior at a well known startup that is still healthy despite conditions.
I don’t look at LinkedIn much most of the time but I do try to connect with most of the people I work with, and I am nice to recruiters. I generally rely on my network and recruiter outreach for most of my jobs, can’t remember the last time I did a cold application.
For the past few years there’s been a layer of bottom feeder recruiters who were terrible about phone and LinkedIn spam. They made previous job hunts unpleasant. Nowhere to be found this time around, wonder where those people went.
The quality roles are still there but maybe 25-50% less abundant in terms of cold outreach from recruiters.
For someone still employed this translates to a very manageable interviewing pace that probably leads to better results in the end.
If I were unemployed I might be more anxious since you probably can’t do 3-4 interviews a day without hustling quite a bit. The pace reminds me a lot of my experience interviewing for mid-level roles a few years back, before I made senior.
Overall take, the bottom has definitely not dropped out of the market. Yes FAANG comp is less available than it used to be, but the just-below level isn’t too hard to find, and even the FAANGs are still hiring in key areas. I expect a ramp-up late this year/early next once the operational cracks start to show from layoffs and attrition.
Amazon along with Google and everyone else way overpaid for tech talent the last few years which has made it a lot harder for small companies to compete. My company lost a lot of engineers of varying quality to big tech companies.
Google famously underpays as it leverages it's name. Startups can't really compete on total compensation because so much is tied to equity which can be made liquid in the case of big tech. At the same time, startups don't want to give away their equity and are fairly conservative about it. I don't see this changing. The current situation will resolve itself in 1-2 yrs and we will be back again.
Yeah, in the past few years startups have become super stingy with equity. In the best case you end up making the same you would at a big tech company, and the worst case you end up with nothing. I interviewed at several, and after doing the math they would all need to 10x with minimal dilution, and have an exit within 5 years to make any money. Once you realize the odds of that happening, it becomes pretty obvious that you are not being given a good deal.
This 2019 discussion thread where HN was pushing back at a pre-YC head Garry Tan, especially this subthread, was a memorable example of devs complaining en masse about startup equity stinginess.
Amazon compensates your first year (the low % vesting year) with an entirely equivalent amount in full cash. Which is arguably better -- so I don't get your point.
Disclaimer: I currently work for Amazon but I would argue that their vesting schedule is their strongest selling point, especially in the current market. If you got into Amazon relatively recently, you're in a strong position for your take home pay.
The backloaded stock gives you stability up front with their high signing bonus, and high growth potential for TC assuming stock growth in two years. My pay is basically equalized over 4 years at current stock prices when I began, so my expected 4 year outlook without raises/performance bonuses/stock appreciation is:
Rough numbers, you get it. Not everyone has the same deal, but from what I've seen @ Amazon this is pretty standard and honestly significantly better than having to deal with the volatility of a 1 year initial vesting cliff like most public companies.
It depends how old you are, how senior you are, and how likely you are to switch companies in a shitty situation. It works for a specific (perhaps more stable) archetype of engineering hire for sure!
At my last company, the stock price when I joined was at $150/share, it rose to over $200/share and crashed to under $30/share by the time my initial vesting date came. I lost six figures of expected TC based on my original offer (over half my total compensation). Since it was a 1 year cliff, I couldn't do anything to diversify or limit my risk because my RSUs were not mine until they vested.
Lesson learned, but I don't think there's an archetype of engineer that prefers that kind of risk profile over large cash payments each month. My downside for Y1 at Amazon is 4% of the agreed upon TC.
Oh, I COMPLETELY misread due to my biases. My fault. You are completely right.
Perhaps I'm not as good as a negotiator as I thought (or the schedules are within the past two years) b/c I haven't ever received an offer that balances the agreed upon TC as you describe. It sounds great!
I agree, I think it's mostly framed as something Amazon does to screw over employees by dangling stock they might not ever get a few years out. I'm not even arguing about the other points for the parent of my original comment, but the vesting schedule at Amazon is severely underrated in my opinion.
Anyone who was hired over the past two years would have been more than happy to receive a large stable cash prorated signing bonus over the past two years than stock.
Equity means statistically very little in a startup. The chance of any startup succeeding where “success” means that the investors don’t lose money is 1 out of 10. The chance of a qualified person who takes a below market compensation in exchange for “equity” not being better off by working for one of the public tech companies is even slimmer.
If you can’t compete with the market rates, then maybe you underpaid your developers?
If your business can’t “buy” the supplies needed for your products - in this case development labor - and sell them at a cost where you can have a sustainable business, then you don’t have a good business model.
Companies exist to work for shareholders, not give charity to workers. If the shareholders wanted extra revenue to be given to workers companies should do it, but there's no reason to believe that's the case here.
That's not what the person I was responding to was saying here, though. They are saying that Google is "overpaying" and that its hurting their small business. They're not saying that they're shareholders wanting more value.
If Google is succeeding at attracting talent from other companies, including the company of the person I was responding to, then it's more likely that they're not "overpaying", they're just paying enough to attract the talent away from other companies.
This is capitalism working. Google has a lot of money and they're putting it towards attracting and keeping their talent.
This is not actually why companies exist. Creating profit for shareholders is a side effect and only happens for a minority of companies. The purpose of a company is to provide value based on the service it provides or products it creates.
Surprised to see cloud computing will be affected, but then again some analysts reported that AWS growth slowed to only 20% at the end of Q4. But based on what we are seeing they are still having a lot of success with on-prem to cloud migration deals (Southwest Airlines being the most recently announced one).
We've also been tracking the shift in cloud spending patterns that Amazon is describing on earnings calls and how that may be compressing margins. In Q4 this was particularly noticeable, https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report/2022-q4
cloud computings darker secret is armies of overworked sysadmins and SRE's toiling in obscurity through exhausting oncall hours behind the scenes to keep everything running despite these sorts of cuts and mountains of tech debt.. anyone whos worked for a hosting provider can attest.
Is that really a secret? I have worked both on the inside at AWS, and on the outside at groups which used AWS and Google Cloud. “They will do the huge amount of sysadmin toil” is, like, the number one selling point versus using on-prem systems, and its what justifies the prices.
The cloud providers like to pretend their secret sauce is massive scale automation. They have tooling, alerting, etc. to make this all work with no people at all. Of course it's all BS, and the people I know who came from AWS were some of the worst for throwing bodies at problems and manually tweaking shit without trying to understand or automate solutions.
It is their secret sauce and like a startup who licks and sticks envelopes initially while proving their business model, eventually it is automated.
But the thirst for growth is never quenched, so there's always new features, new services. And maintenance of that automation. The work never ends.
There's a 25-50% operations tax every AWS employee pays. But they're handling the operations load that several employees were 10y ago. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to restart individual machines. Now I'm alerted for much much more complex problems. But i'm still woken up :(
I admin a small part of our Google cloud part time and I feel I absolutely have no time and no idea how to drill deeper than clickOps. Knowing where is everything and the general risks of toggling a switch are already nerve breaking.
Sometimes I wish I could learn everything from scratch. I wish I could join an on prem team to learn all those small details slowly and painfully.
> I wish I could join an on prem team to learn all those small details slowly and painfully.
Learning "from the middle" of a tech stack outwards is the default case for everyone, so don't be so hard on yourself. There is no "from scratch", never was even in the Bombe days, just a question of how many abstraction layers you want to tackle. Give yourself time to learn and plenty of room to fail and try again, and "all those small details" will ingrain themselves into you as second nature.
They throw bodies because they have them and they are looking to solve a problem.
And they do automate, claims that a service like S3 does not have automation are totally ridiculous, and few other general hosting providers have AWS scale here.
That said, their development pace is crazy, with plenty of partially built solutions -> so yes, until something scales enough to need it I'm not surprised they have sysadmin toil. Reality is even the VMware worlds and other onprem stuff, even when "automated" have plenty of turmoil just staying fresh / current / backed up / secured etc. So that's what AWS is selling.
All of big tech is throwing bodies at problems at this point since decades of data is all rotted and programmatic solutions simply don't work. IF you stay at Amazon after all of this attrition, your life will be hell.
And yet AWS is pretty reliable overall, and certainly better than most in-house systems even at large companies.
I know multiple people who have worked on AWS. There is definitely some manual stuff going on, but there is also considerable infrastructure and automation in other areas.
The amount of sysadmin/SRE toil in some parts of the stack (all the distributed computing coordination layers) is super-linear in the growth of the system, but the nuanced version of the claim is that they can make up for it in the other parts of the stack (hardware cost and better global availability). A lot of people who have never seen these systems from the inside would be surprised at (1) how much engineering work is put into just getting things like "Postgres but it scales" and "Kubernetes but it works on our proprietary VM manager" to work and (2) how many internal incidents these cloud providers have that are quietly managed before they rise to the level where a customer would notice or care.
(opinions my own) - I actually do work for $FAANG and can confirm this statement. Mountains of tech debt, 20+ year old tech running most of the stack, most tooling written in dynamic interpreted languages, and above all else every single engineer is expected to be part of on-call rotations, even if your role is not related to infrastructure or operations whatsoever. Even if you don't touch the service(s) your team maintains because you're in a FEE role.
The SDE role at $FAANG I work at is essentially glorified tech support, which makes the leetcode interviewing process so much more ridiculous than it would be by default if you were actually writing code and solving meaningful problems most of the time.
I think you're going to find this at nearly all software companies, FAANG or smaller. The sad state of our industry is that everything is so poorly written that it's falling apart daily, and each company has an army of people trying to toss water on the last fire that popped up. This is the natural steady state of an industry that prioritizes schedule and feature cram over quality and craftsmanship, and prioritizes human heroics/toil over process and automation. Move fast and break things.
The thing about FAANG is that very few experiences can be generalized, even within a single FAANG company. These companies are so massive that culture, tech, etc. can have huge amounts of variance between orgs let alone companies.
It's well known in the ISP industry that being an entry to mid level sysadmin/network eng at a hosting provider that has large numbers of very-low-dollar-amount per month customers is a new circle of personal hell. Working endless tickets from people who pay $20 a month for some VPS. The only way to get out of it is to become senior enough to not care anymore or work for a hosting operator that specializes in only higher dollar value colo/dedicated server customers.
What's the "dark secret" exactly? The entire point of AWS is companies being able to outsource this army of sysadmins so they don't have to hire them themselves. That's also why they pay 3-5x the cost of buying an equivalent server to Amazon.
From multiple reliable sources I've heard that AWS's DynanamoDB team/ops is a meat grinder. The open tickets run into thousands with no hope of anyone getting time to work on permanent fixes.
Cloud computing can cost 3-5x self-managing with the open source versions of the standardized cloud tools that are sold to us.
One big difference working against the cloud is the same thing that worked in it's favour 15 years ago. We don't always remember why we just adopted the cloud. Linux networking at times had scaling issues, and virtualization and linux was not where it is now.
It's astounding how much more a $5 VPS can do. Imagine the medium end. Self-managed hosting tools have come so far to handle production quality, it doesn't even feel fair that it is not more well known. Whether it's Proxmox, or others, it is pretty close to most things out there. Making a tool cloud compatible, but cloud agnostic is one way to avoid a lot of technical debt (assuming it's not created another way).
It doesn't have to be for everyone, but demand is probably slowing in part because of this. In a recession cost efficiency is everything.
I wish Rancher had never stopped the development of 1.6. It was such a simple and beautiful tool to run services.
Now they moved to Kubernetes, it has added a ton of unnecessary complexity. It takes magnitude more effort to run anything on it and they call it progress...
We are a medium large company (close to 10k employees globally) and the main focus of this year of the data teams is to figure out every possibility to reduce Google Cloud costs.
The savings could be in 7 digits TBH annually. There are so many low hanging fruits no one cares when the day is good. Tables that have no partition expiration that grow into hundreds or even thousands of TBs, buckets with same amount of data that no one looks at, VMs that no service uses, large clusters well above their load (e.g. only 20% used maximum -- and a full replica too), very bad ETL pipelines that cost hundreds of bucks EVERY RUN, very costly queries generated by Looker dashboards EVERY view...there are just too many.
FinOps is definitely becoming a pretty hot topic. And, yeah, a lot of companies are realizing that they have some pretty low hanging fruit where they can cut spend significantly.
Feels like there is a startup in there? Give it your account number, and read only access keys, and it tells you what and where and how to change things.
Just a note that Google itself is doing that so one has to better than that. I think the ideal candidate is a senior data architect/ops person who has xtensive hand on experience. Sadly I'm so far from it.
GCP puts automatic analysis recommendations in the UI right next to the resources in the table of VM/etc names, and IMO the recommendations (for both upsizing and downsizing) are dramatically more accurate than what AWS gives you
Just curious what do you think about the service? Is it a lot deeper than what Google itself provides? We are just using Google own service to turn down costs.
So Apptio is a larger application for finance people, with some cloud cost management built in. They are the main users, I just have read only access an login perhaps monthly to view budgets and cloud spend.
I just have access to small bits and pieces, but what I have seen I like.
Yeah. I can think about consultants making $$ giving full analysis of cloud costs and ways to reduce them. It's actually not very technically challenging TBH. All those low hanging fruits can be grabbed by a junior enginner or even a non tech senior person who is a deep user of such services.
I've wondered how much of the cloud spend in the world is just junk like this.
I don't mean that cynically or sarcastically. The cloud makes it legitimately more easy to deploy resources; I've experienced this in my own teams. But the flip side is that it is easier to deploy things without thinking about the costs, or deploy things and forget about them, and management can just shrug and say "yes, it's cloud, it must be cheaper and better".
This is by no means a cloud-unique problem. Watch any datacenter a company has been at for a few years get shut down and moved to the cloud. The stream of "hey, who owns this?" and "are we still using this?" and "I just yanked the network cable, has anyone noticed?" is morbidly amusing. Even if you think you're tracking everything, you quite likely aren't, because the owners don't update their own tracking info very well.
But cloud makes this worse.
So I just find myself wondering how much of AWS profit is on this sort of stuff.
I myself have S3 buckets full of crap. As I do watch my spend, said buckets full of crap are in the ~10-50$/month range. At that price point it is difficult to justify engineering time to clean out the crap. But it's not hard to imagine that scaling up by three or more factors of magnitude.
Yeah exactly. I feel that recklessly opening new projects and then abandoned them, or refactored multiple times with different teams, quickly added up to the number of rss no one owns.
Last couple of weeks the whole data org underwent a forced upgrade of certain components on Google cloud and we got quite of clusters no one knows who owns.
I don't know but I'm itchy to start finding ways to build new projects because that is the best way for techy people to grab ownership and promition.
We saw this one iteration back with VMWare. Once it became easy to spin up a VM without getting a PO for a server and finding rack space, the number of "servers" in the org exploded. And of course we lost track of what they all did, and who they belonged to... but there was actually a healthy ecosystem of tools built for (and by) VMWare to manage this situation. The cloud providers seem incentivised to make tracking real costs as difficult as possible. At least with VMWare once you paid for it, it was yours.
There’s great tooling on cloud providers for tracking costs. The pain point is that if you never set it up it’s incredibly difficult and time consuming to add it after the fact through tagging.
I work for a tiny startup and while things are good, we are prioritizing reducing cloud costs as well. Our bill is relatively tiny right now, but as we grow it’ll become a bit more unsightly. Best to do it now and get that over with!
This, and cloud security, have become my niche at my small company. Keeping these things tidy now will save us so much headache later. It's a bit of a battle fighting product for time but these are hills worth dying on imo.
I don't really have a secret. I just have 8+ years experience with one cloud provider across 4 different companies as an SDE, so I've seen all the highs and lows that come with using it. Current company keeps bugging me to take some certs but doesn't seem worth the effort..
At a tiny startup I'd be more concerned about selling product/delivering to get the next round and keep the company running than saving few 100$ on infra cost.
Deadlines don't matter - if you're in a startup you're trying to test the market fit and iterateing to corner the market. Worrying about micro optimizing infra cost and talking about scaling in this context in my opinion is premature optimization - root of all evil.
Start by owning the datacenter. You might just as well have the data that no one looks at and the 20% load clusters in one, two, or a few 48U racks [1] in the room next to you. Keep whatever is latency-sensitive still on someone else's computer, i.e. the cloud.
But then, when uncontrolled inefficiencies need to gobble up more hardware, you would have to buy, install, network, maintain, and understand this new hardware.
I really want to learn in an on prem env (and learning on my own 32GB 2TB x-handed server is probably just scratching the surface). Sadly I'm a junior so could not make that call. I also have no idea how much cost the transfer to on prem will be.
You don't need to make a large datacenter, or to migrate everything at once. Find some low-risk services, get some consultant help you improve some room on your premises (you'll need to care about security, electricity and cooling), get a pair of network contracts and one hack of servers (or maybe even 4 servers), and move those services. Favor things that are used internally.
If you are looking for 7 figures of savings just by picking the easy fruit, you will almost certainly get positive ROI on that. Just do not move critical services if you don't know what you are doing.
I think FAANG centric folks underestimate how many fairly big orgs are in the same situation.
Big top down push to move to public cloud, basically no thought to operating expenses.. and now theres a ton of low hanging fruit. Most of these same firms have very little ability to measure their costs in a timely, granular manner, and so put in only very blunt processes to try to limit costs.
Last org I was at could probably re-allocate 10% of engineering staff using the cloud to a SWAT team finding cloud cost saves for 2 years before they ran out of stuff that costs 5x their salary to get fix/optimize/kill in the cloud.
A lot of the same orgs CTOs sold themselves on the idea that they'd need less infra people in the cloud. This really has not been the case, and more often the cloud infra people are more expensive too. Meanwhile many need to permanently maintain an on-prem footprint for latency/legal/legacy/etc reasons.. so you end up with net more staff.
I know a handful of Wall St firms that are moving a lot of "big data" type use cases back out of the cloud because its hideously expensive for their use cases.
I have been saying this for years - hybrid cloud has always been the way to go. Put your highly variable workloads in the cloud and autoscale. And anything super GPU or compute hungry that are regular workloads should be run yourself.
Bonus points if you can autoscale those same on prem workloads into the cloud provider of your choice seamlessly
Yeah also sometimes physical hardware is a constraint on waste.
Quality & performance of code often has a way of degrading to the point it saturates the available hardware.
In the absence of friction to buy more immediate incremental capacity, teams may never optimize their code..
This may be good when you are "moving fast & breaking things".
This may be bad when you are trying to operate an already-scaled business profitably.
I think that is probably the right way to go. We have a put a few things on AWS which really don't fit there too well, all on the benefits of shutting down our on-prem estate, 5 years later we still have an on-prem estate.
Ah yes.
Ours was to be a 2 year migration tour.
Then after 2 years, they said 5 more years.
I guess we will see what it looks like in 2030.
I can tell you 99% of usage is still on-prem today.
It's the way to go but the battle you have to fight is maintaining internal competency to host the infra. Especially if you have any kind of security or regulatory overlay its going to mean almost full duplication of a giant stack of processes that parallel each other in cloud / on prem. I think the key as you have outlined is to break out the simple batch compute and CPU/memory intensive or data volume heavy tasks as these are what generate the cloud bills. In general these aren't the focus of your policy constraints, especially if you can claim the data is not "at rest" within these systems.
It pains me to tell you this, but "simple batch compute and CPU/memory intensive or data volume heavy tasks " were the first ones my firm has, unsuccessfully, tried to move to the cloud, no joke.
From my experience I think maybe internal reporting fits self hosting. You don't need to scale too much, it can tolerate some fails, etc. But I guess it's still complicated when you throw a wrench called BI into the machinery.
The thing is that self hosting kind of already has cost gates.
Whenever I needed to buy another $100K of servers, we had to make a deck and have a skip level meeting 2-3 levels up to explain the capacity planning spend.
On the other hand, in AWS, at my last shop.. we were just .. doing stuff.
We at one point noticed a non-production RDS instance was going to run us $60k/year.
This was for some small part of our processing, that in on-prem land would just occupy a slice of one of our $30k servers. But in cloud, we had the pleasure of $5k/month until we noticed & turned it off.
At the scale our estate worked, we had easily 100 entities that could trigger this kind of spend.
well, its getting into the rearview mirror now, but spectre/meltdown-type vulnerabilities are a big motivator for leaving on-prem. even if you later leave the cloud for on-prem, the period without any phys infra means you can start on a clean slate with better equipment + better DC rental contracts.
oh and it really sucks when your brand new SSD's arrive at your main DC, after a 4 month wait, you open the box and the boxes are empty - someone robbed ya. Those expenses are only linked to the infra team, but the effects reverberate through the engineering org.
We did the same thing (very small company, but outsized cloud hosting costs due to the nature of our business), and frankly the biggest cost savings for us was shifting some resources off AWS and to other providers.
For us, Cloudfront was a massive expense that is without exagerration an order of magnitude more expensive than other providers, and even in the world of AWS custom pricing, it's a struggle to get cloudfront costs down to even the retail offering of other providers.
Yep I’m in the same size company and we’re doing work to reduce GCP costs. You are so right, our team did a sprint or two of work recently and shaved $100k off our monthly bill which in our company is small potatoes
Cloud computing is a massive rip off. From my experience with start ups, they were using things like AWS, because otherwise the investors would be reluctant to put their money in. As in they were afraid of dedicated hosting and something that small business wouldn't be able to handle.
So for instance company would have their hosting costs upped from £500 a month (dedicated servers) to something like £5000, so that they could "scale up", while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive. They have actually never reached the level of traffic that this old set up wouldn't be able to handle, but investors were always saying "what if we get sudden surge of users" which has never materialised. But then it was their money so nobody objected.
I can see that now that hosting costs in the cloud have become ridiculous, cash strapped smaller businesses will be looking for savings and the cloud is quite an obvious area to look for cuts.
> while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive
Sounds great, for some use cases. Particularly if you don't need multiple 9's of uptime, and just need a few 8's. Most companies don't have:
* Guaranteed sla's for replacing components when the RAM needs to be reseated, a drive fails, or the fans get too dusty and things overheat
* Redundancy set up in case the network connection fails
* Redundancy set up in case the power fails. (Many places will have a UPS for under an hour, but generators, along with a regular maintenance schedule and processes for ensuring fuel is another thing)
* On site security, to make sure nobody breaks in and does some corporate espionage
* Ultra-high-speed links to the internet
And if the little startup takes on a client with important certification requirements, it can be very helpful to have a cloud provider. A lot of contracts I've taken on over the years ask tough questions during the sales process about our practices regarding the above things and much more.
I have some dedicated servers with over 7 years uptime now. Only time they were unreachable (not down), when datacentre had a network maintenance and that was an extremely rare and short event.
The points you have listed are important, but are really non-issue unless you are co-locating servers in the utility room somewhere, rather than in a proper data centre.
This is a "you can write bad code in any language" paradigm. Doing computing efficiently takes skill, whether one does it in the cloud or on prem. Cloud solved a few common pain points and, at times of startup / tech boom, had a meteoric rise.
But now many of the companies that moved to the cloud are hitting different challenges and are stuck in a setup that is pretty expensive to maintain. I am not expecting the death of the cloud computing, but that pendulum will likely swing back a little as the companies experiment with other options. I think a company that can help medium sized businesses optimize their compute setup with a mix of on prem and multi-provider cloud will do well. My 2c.
>This is a "you can write bad code in any language" paradigm.
It's extremely true! The fun is that bad code looks totally different from each other. The "bad" Scala type astronaut code would be unrecognizable from Python raw dictionary enthusiast code.
My experience is that Wall Street loves a 1st round layoff, interpreting it as cutting fat. Anything after that they interpret as cutting into the meat of the business.
They may or may not also see multiple rounds in the same light many of us do: as incompetence in the management team.
I've been feeling a lot better about ignoring the countless recruiter contacts from the major tech companies the past couple years.
On one hand I felt like I was blowing major opportunities by not trying. But something just felt off when receiving so many sudden contacts from the largest of companies offering remote work, despite working in tech for over a decade and never hearing from them before.
That's misleading. If you're able to get an interview, the success rate is much much higher than 1%. Can you imagine the wasted effort if it was 1%? And I assume if you're getting a recruiter to email you, you can usually get an interview.
The 1% number I always see should include those who try to apply without recruiters emailing them.
You hired 1 in 50 people you interviewed? Did you have time for anything else? Were you not constantly angry at the rest of the hiring pipeline for wasting your time?
The actual hire rate was lower than that. Maybe much lower. As I said, I was one of the most lenient ones. I did my best to approve, while still remaining within calibration and hiring guidelines.
I interviewed people over the course of years. I was a developer, so interviewing was not my main role.
And I never felt angry about having my time wasted. I work for money. As long as the company is paying me, what they want me to do during billable hours is at their discretion.
I think at Google about 10% passed phone screen, and then 10% of those passed onsite.
It isn't that bad, interview one per week and you end up hiring about one person per three years (5 interviewers per onsite, so about 50 there and 100 phone screens). Most people interview 1-2 times per week there, and that was roughly how fast they grew, so the numbers adds up.
I'm also an interviewer at a FAANG. 2% is extremely low, and would be a massive waste of time. You have to interview 50 people to fill one role? Complete waste of time.
Maybe your FAANG experience is different than mine, but 2% means either you're very picky or your hiring pipeline is awful.
In my experience, FAANG leetcode questions are generally pretty easy. Once in a while, one of the interviewers just tries to flex on the interviewee and just throw out a trick question that may be easy in the right mindset, but not really a good question.
I’ll call out Google specifically for this. They seemed to just make up their own questions. Difficultly ranged from basic coding to a math brain teaser with a lot of easy graph questions in between.
For context: this was last November.
Edit: lost the point in my rant - 2% approval is probably the result of flexing.
Once again recruiters emails almost everyone with a pulse.
I met a guy on a train, who was working as a server, but just had some HTML on his resume. Like OP, most of these people wear that as some badge and can get into FANG anytime. Reality hits when they actually do reply and actually make it through phone screen
Amazon, Meta, Google were contacting people all over LinkedIn etc and everyone had an interview prep kit that you needed to study in order to get in.
The FOMO was real but it felt so weird and robotic. I rejected all of them. One meta recruiter was even offended when I said no to them. The extra € were not worth the hassle and I’m glad I didn’t going there FAANG rat race in the past 2 years.
Like 2 months ago in my circle said cloud sector going to see layoffs as most corps are very wasteful on cloud resources and they will likely to cut spending from there.
I guess they were right.
Hang in there, AI hype is just started, I think within a year things will be a lot better, assuming there's no WW3 or Credit Suisse creates another domino effect.
There seem to be non-stop AI hype since 10 years ago, but it does not seem to be a field that has high barrier of entry.
This time it does seem quite useful, but I think in a few years it will be commoditized and offered from all major cloud vendors, probably even get to choose the models.
Yes, but the most significant barrier is with the first, not for the followers.
I think it's a Tesla situation. Tesla did very well, and I believe OpenAI will be too, but everyone else will catch up and then some.
Once the first model rolls out, knowledge from that model would eventually disseminate. And it doesn't even need to be on a human level, industry and academia experts could probably make very good guesses on what's going on behind the curtains - and follow up. And we already have plenty of good models on our hands, some even open sourced.
I'm very curious about this. Amazon appears to be squeezing more profitability from existing, very successful parts of the organization. In particular, AWS, Advertising, and Twitch are not loss leaders. I'm not really quite sure what "PXT" is as a lay person, but is Amazon essentially making a serious bet on slowing growth to squeeze profit?
PXT is their tech team supporting HR for Amazon. It grew a ton of the last 5+ years, but from the outside looking in it appears to be mainly empire building. The major initiatives I was aware of from my time there never seem to have been completed.
What exactly have they accomplished? Are they genuinely not building things that could result in improvements to Amazon's bottom line? I don't have a dog in this fight, but I think Amazon is screaming to investors, "wait, we can make money at the expense of our last twenty years of growth if that's what you want." That lens makes Amazon look like a very different company..
The scale of HR at Amazon is huge. One data point was that they hired over 800,000 people in a single month. I'm sure that number is out of date.
The idea was to build scalable solutions for HR to modernizing hiring, etc. and productize those. I'm not sure the external product piece ever panned out, but they were mainly focused on eliminated manual processes for HR inside of Amazon and migrating legacy systems to modern ones.
hr cuts and cuts to other “cost center” no surprise.
from my time at amazon this feel like only small step in fixing so many issues. engineering has too many manager in promotion race..layer after layer of manager..empire building focus and not customer benefit.
step 1 to rid these “professional” managers who not understand technology, installed themself at company for cushy job title and pay. many come from other uninnovative company like ibm.
IBM has to be shittiest company I had to interact with in a professional setting.
We have an AS400 iSeries. It ran the company for many years but now we are building a lot of apps around it in C#/.net/blazor.
So, in order to use entity framework with iSeries one needs a data provider. Most of the data providers are generally "free", for example if you have SQL, Oracle, MySql, PostgresSQL you don't have to pay anything. BUT not IBM.
We tried getting a license for the iSeries data provider, and I literally gave up and said fuck them I will just use OleDb and write queries by hand. First, nobody could answer which license we needed for our use case. Then, I received a trial license, which didn't work....I spend days snooping around to realize it was for the wrong version of .Net core. IBM support was clueless. I finally received the correct version, but the instructions for the install had a link to a dead URL.
IBM forums were full of IBM employees responding with "sent you a DM" when people were asking questions....followed by many replies "i have the same problem can you share the answer publicly"....followed by "sent you a DM".
It's interesting. In the AI space all the big cloud providers are pairing off with an AI darling. Amazon AWS has partnered with Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/blog/the-partnership-amazon-sagemaker.... Microsoft Azure has OpenAI. Google has their own models for their own cloud, as does Facebook. (this makes me wonder what Apple's going to do)
You joke, but Siri could definitely benefit from the integration of a competent large language model. I have no idea what Apple's AI strategy is. Maybe they should get behind models that run locally and find an opportunity there.
I'm not convinced that going from "sorry, I don't understand" to confidently-asserted answers that seem like they're correct but are absolutely incorrect a high percentage of the time is an improvement.
I wonder if Google will seize the opportunity to leverage their inhouse AI expertise to outmaneuver the competition. In theory having inhouse AI should mean they can more quickly iterate ideas, unless they truly are the corporate wasteland people believe them to be.
The problem with Google is no one is going to build their house on Google's land because any product that doesn't make Google a super-mega-ultra-decacorn gets shut down after 18 months.
Why would someone rely on Google when everything else is either better or good enough.
Apple has a tendency to keep things close to the vest, but I am sure they have a plan. If you look at the M1 and M2, they have insane memory bandwidth that can be quite useful for running large ml models.
It would be interesting if Apple released models that can locally on your Mac or iPhone and bypass the whole only run these models in the cloud model of the other companies.
So the question on a lot of employees minds is: Do we try to relocate in time for the May 1st RTO and risk getting fired - or do we wait to see if we're part of the layoffs and then try to relocate with the remaining 2 weeks we have left.
If you’re good, you’re already looking. If you’re not good or you don’t think you’re good, you’re waiting. Severance, unemployment, etc. Broadly speaking of course, exceptions as always.
You’re likely not overpaid at Amazon vs other FAANGs based on changes to equity comp. If you’re somewhere where you were overpaid, I hope you saved accordingly now that you’re going back to a $150k-$200k/year job.
As others have mentioned, you might not be able to find a $300k-$500k/year job, but you should be able to find something.
At $150k in the Bay Area you’re going to be renting and spending 2 hours a day on public transit. Those roles made sense as a career stepping stone up to homeownership & family supporting roles. I don’t anticipate too many senior folks taking them unless they get exceptions to go remote or they already have mega home equity / rent control.
I'm curious and asking in good faith, $150k in CA seem to translate to just over $100k take home. Looking at Zillow there seem to be an abundance of places all over the bay area around $2.5k (1bdrm) and $3.5k (2bdrm) which sound not too bad on one and 2 incomes respectively, just like what everyone else is doing, around a third of your income. I don't get why you're assuming one would have commute 2 hours a day. Is transit that bad even if you're close to where you work? I honestly don't get it fully. Don't get me wrong, it sucks and I wish housing was cheaper but I think that's just the way it is now for everybody that has to work in person somewhere. And 25% of your take home income spent on housing isn't too bad at all and that's at the lower end of the spectrum GP is talking about here ($150k-$200k).
I've spent most of my career in the Bay - $150k in the Bay Area without child expenses in a single-earner household with the following common lifestyle choices will about break even month-to-month while fully funding a 401k (in the "core" Bay Area - SF, the Peninsula, parts of Oakland/Berkley):
Eats out frequently, goes out for drinks occasionally, travels a few times a year, owns a new mid-range car, lives in a modern apartment complex or small home/condo near a downtown area (with a < 30 minute commute). New electronics, big TV, minimal but high quality furniture.
Pairing back on those choices you can begin to save every month, but not at a pace to buy a home in a reasonable time frame.
On dual income assuming consistent earnings YoY you can start to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood later in life, around the time many are starting to have kids.
I have to imagine kids can put a 5-10 year delay on buying a house without various kinds of assistance.
> Pairing back on those choices you can begin to save every month, but not at a pace to buy a home in a reasonable time frame.
That’s what I’m saying.
> On dual income assuming consistent earnings YoY you can start to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood later in life, around the time many are starting to have kids.
Dual tech income folks are in a great spot, but with gender ratios as they are, there can’t be very many such couples. Also this could be a function of social circle but I find many women (even in tech) expect a husband to provide for them while the kids are young.
I don't have kids and won't have kids, but I definitely didn't have those things growing up in a suburb. It's not at all required unless you're homeschooling.
This is a case of lifestyle inflation and then complaining about lifestyle inflation. Public school is good enough, your kids aren't better than the rest of the people in SF.
> But I also live in the bay area now, and have kids, and can confidently say that it's a different experience for kids than what you are talking about.
The different experience is that you make more than your parents did at your age and thus have lifestyle inflation.
The IT guy for a car dealership in Milwaukee is allowed this kind of "lifestyle inflation" no problem. The point of Silicon Valley is that high level and differentiated computer skills can make you rich. Part of that might be slumming it a bit during the early stages of your career or startup, hence the commandment against lifestyle inflation. But in a career role, your Silicon Valley TC better give you a better lifestyle than what’s generic computer guy gets from a non-tech business in a normal metro area. And given prices here, that’s a big number.
Obviously Bay Area amenities are worth something. Are they worth descending an entire social class? Maybe to some. But I think most rational people will go fix the computers at that car dealership, and put their kids on the travel team. You are not obliged to live an austere life just because someone offered you a (locally) mediocre job in the Bay Area.
The IT guy at a car dealership isn't expecting to pay full price for private schools and then complaining when it wipes out almost all of their take home pay. That's probably because the IT guy for a car dealership is making $70k not $500k a year.
Nobody's "descending a social class" by sending their kids to public school or having them do normal stuff, this is hysterical.
I grew up on the Peninsula and my parents were not paying for any of this stuff. Public school parents organized soccer games and park days and other times we just road cheap bicycles around and went to each others houses and occasionally caused trouble.
Felt relatively safe and of course once we got older we would just hop on caltrain for super cheap and head up to SF. Told our parents we were going to "the movie theater". New Years in San Francisco at age 13 was definitely interesting
Agreed, you can buy a good 2000 sqft house on a 1/4 acre within 1 hour of the peninsula on 150k. I did it last year. My wife is just starting a bootcamp + software career and we will be quite happy and comfortable if she brings in an extra 75k/yr.
For larger lots you generally wont be looking at city centers unless you are rich, but almost all bay area cities have larger lots on the outskirts or adjacent areas.
It is all a matter of tradeoffs and the level of urbanization you want. I cant walk to a bar or music venue, but I can still walk to a grocery store and a smaller number of restraints.
Interest rates are up, but property prices are down quite a bit (my house is down about 15%). While last year may have been better, I think is a still a decent market if you have a few 100k saved from a 150k salary, better if you saved more.
It’s more than enough to rent, which is fine for folks just starting out, mid-late 20s getting their first promotions, or those who plan to move back to LCOL when they are done saving up. It’s less fine as a terminal level for someone at a homeownership/family stage of life.
Well, when I first came to US, I lived like first 8-9 years without a mattress. I found carpeted floors and 2 comforters more than enough comfy setup. I also stayed with people who had to buy a mattress before spending first night in apartment.
Point being whats luxury living for one could be basic, minimum living standard for others. And I am talking about people doing roughly same IT type jobs.
So that below living wage of 150K in bay area is from that school of thought where having single family home, 2 car garage, a bit of front/backyard and 30 min leisurely commute by personal car is basic minimum standard of living.
To be clear my spouse would also consider this as basic things despite spending far fewer years than me in US. And after decade and half in US I still think these facilities/perks are matter of great fortune that I ended up with and not just oh everyone has it type.
The point is less what's a "basic minimum" or what you "deserve" but what your alternatives are. The US is big. The vast majority of its regions are less insane than the Bay Area. All of them employ skilled-with-computers people to some degree. And in most of them, even lower-status and lower-paying computer jobs would support a comfortable house in a decent school district much better than these kinds of jobs would in the Bay Area. The reason FAANG has historically had to offer $300-500k is because that's what it takes to entice people away from those lives into this housing market. Housing prices are down a bit, but not that much.
To most people, Cisco would be considered a high paying employer. If anything, people are giving up middle class lives in other countries and relocating to San Jose for Cisco.
Living 5 adults to a house in San Jose might genuinely be better than living in India. I wouldn’t know. The point is if you have moved to Wisconsin or whatever, it would be foolish to move back to San Jose for that.
FAANG's overpay made many of the local talents leaving their long term employers in no time, nobody can resist 2x or 3x pay, per my observation, FAANG the monsters destroyed those small and middle size players too quickly.
"The problem doesn't exist for the very best" is really not much of an answer. Besides, even the best may not have much luck right now. Tons of employees from what are considered the top companies are looking for a new job. I have a very solid CV and I'm getting ghosted when applying for jobs I could have taken for granted a year ago.
I’ll give you the point of view you won’t like but it’s the truth: Candidates from “top companies” come with a lot of baggage. They’re going to expect a continuance of the massive inflated salaries they enjoyed at those top companies along with all the associated perks and amenities. They tend to be very egotistical, don’t want to be burdened with doing interview tests, white boards, or take-homes, and generally have this annoying holier-than-thou HN-level of arrogance.
So why in the world would I want to hire an overpriced ex-rest-and-vester when I can instead hire someone hungry with a track record of making a difference at small to medium companies?
I actually agree totally. My experiences doing hiring and then subsequently working alongside folks for the past decade or so have led me to view FAANG experience on a resume as a moderate negative signal. It’s not at all that I don’t think the folks who work there aren’t smart or talented- they have just disproportionately been difficult in the interview process and had impossible salary demands while being not being stronger performers than their peers.
Are those “with a track record of making a difference” also ok with interview tests, white boards, and/or take homes? I don’t know if viewing excessive tests with disdain is a characteristic solely exhibited by ex top tech; I feel like that’s a universal sentiment among top talent regardless of their background. Not wanting to be burdened with unnecessary burden is a good thing!!
I also don’t think people generally have a problem with interviews. You have to be assessed somehow, obviously, and people at top companies still get interviewed when jumping to other top companies. I’ve really only seen serious complaints (that is, beyond mild grumbling) when interviewing is a huge time sink for a specific company, especially when that company’s compensation is lower and/or the communication process is poor (e.g. ghosting).
Why in the world would anyone interview with you if your company offers less than top tech for equal or harder interviews? (Spinning your rhetoric back at you for added effect. I don’t know what your hiring is like.)
Why in the world would anyone interview with you if your company offers less than top tech for equal or harder interviews?
People who need job will apply. Its not like some one is forced to apply when otherwise they could get million dollar a year job to develop deep machine learning AI at Google.
I'm actually dealing with this right now. I have a previous-FAANG new hire into my organization and when they came for their drug test they started complaining and "providing feedback" about the package they signed (pay, benefits, WFH policies, etc.) to the poor recruiting person who was just performing the test.
If that attitude persists, it doesn't matter how good they are, their toxicity will override that skill and they'll be out before long.
I'm saying this as someone who came here from FAANG companies and put in a lot of personal effort to not become the FAANG brat.
I'm not looking, I plan to smile and do my own two things that I've been dreaming of doing for awhile (but it's somewhat hard to justify walking away from good steady pay) and now can due to financial independence as soon as either this layoff smokes me or RTO isn't rolled back.
If you have a family to look after, you cannot casually have your partner quit their job, your kids to switch schools in the middle of the year, break your lease/ mortgage and move states overnight.
There are real transaction costs for employees that do not allow for proper free market function
So were weekends at one point. No intent of derailing the thread, but everything is impossible until it’s done.
Would you have thought a few weeks ago that California and the federal government could apply enough pressure to the largest pharma companies to set the price of insulin at $35? Me neither, but here we are. Come out swinging, we have nowhere to go but up.
Edit: Looks like California has gone so far as to contract to have it manufactured and set the price at $30, even better. Thesis is “change is possible.” Please excuse the length this example took to demonstrate the point.
And it showed also how much unthinkable is possible if we want it.. however here we are already again, not being ok to give up false luxuries and who cares about the environment ;)
Remote work will drive wages down, not up. The company can get a remote worker from overseas. Remote work is to the office worker what NAFTA and container ships are to the manufacturing worker.
Organizations are currently able to use remote workers from foreign countries. The relevant legal change would mandate them to accept them from their own country.
If remote work would "drive wages down", it would already do so -- since that's an option available to employeers now
Yeah, obviously, or they'd just be offshoring whole teams/departments at a time already. The reason they don't do that is because there's a market rate for good engineering. When an offshore contractor gets good enough, they figure out the market rate and start charging it.
I've been hearing this sort of doom and gloom since the 90s, yet here I am making bank in the USA still
Cannot make generalizations, but anecdotally I have experienced situations where senior engineers have to spend half of their time to coordinate work due to this.
Things that can be resolved in 5 minutes have to wait for a day.
NDAs don't work in different countries. We've already learned what hassles there are offshoring IP to China -- who promptly stole it. Ditto for non-competes, stock grants, etc. -- these get very messy across borders. That's fine for L2 support drones or QA box checkers but no way I'm hiring anyone I care about for this purpose.
AI is coming for those roles before they end up in India or PI.
Speaking of NAFTA, that's one of the reasons we're seeing Mexico City as an offshore hub. Better timezone overlap, can usually trust that their credentials are legitimate, and it's not hard to find a (Mexican accented) Spanish speaker in much of the US.
Plus the NAFTA TN visa means if they're good you can easily bring them across the border with no H1B headaches. Cheaper flights, too.
I know you don't mean it this way, but it should right? It's fundamentally cheaper - no commute on the employee part, no office space on the employer side. Greatly enhanced flexibility all round. Both sides should definitely splitting the dividends.
I agree actually. Stated differently, commuting is a pain for workers, so they're willing to accept a lower wage to avoid it.
This also means the worker can live where the cost of living is lower, and be willing to work for less--thus pushing down wages. Arguably the worker still comes out ahead though if she can live where she wants to...assuming she likes working remotely from a low cost-of-living place. If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office, she might not be happy to see her wage go down.
> If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office
yep - in the short term there will be some discontinuities like this. But longer term - more staff working remotely is going to take pressure off real estate prices in cities, so it will actually be justifiable even there that salaries can fall. Unfortunately since so many office space leases are long term, and rezoning of land use even slower, this can take a very long time to flow through.
They're not. "Free market" is an unstable phenomenon that exists only when dynamically stabilized by appropriate regulations. Without that, it collapses on itself.
I'm absolutely serious. Try to take the things you know about the free markets, supply and demand, etc. and simulate them in your head. Like, run them in a game loop for a couple steps. It should become apparent that the ideal free market is not even an equilibrium state.
The tech labor market would not exist as it does today without substantial very specific regulations of various parties' behavior; e.g., stopping me from:
1. copying my employer's codebase, or
2. exfiltrating my employer's customer and pricing lists, or
3. holding two jobs at competing companies at the same time, or
4. shorting my employer's stock then actively sabotaging the company.
To say nothing of the even more basic stuff like squatting in my employer's office or even just using force to take what I want from the company or its executives/sharholders, for example.
Labor markets can't exist without lots of strong legal guardrails, and in the case of tech those property rights and contractual obligations are highly fictional and extremely unnatural. Intellectual property, non-competes, non-disclosures, securities regulations on insider trading, laws about industrial espionage and sabotage, the list goes on. All of it highly fictional and unnatural.
Modern markets are, definitionally, just a dynamical process playing out that is governed by an enormous collection of state-backed rules. Nothing like what you might consider a "natural" market, such as early civilized man bartering at the bazaar.
The amount of propaganda/brainwashing required to believe that something like a modern equity or labor market is a naturally occurring phenomenon... oof.
Easy. $10,000/month city taxes to the employer for each employee in office. Proceeds will be used to offset carbon emissions and fund transportation infrastructure.
The city wants people in the offices, because those workers get taxed by the city whenever they buy anything else while in the city. Having a large population of people in your city promotes commerce like nothing else. The exact last thing a city would do is deter people from coming into it.
I’m expecting to hear that a lot. A lot of people spent more time with their families during the pandemic and now they’re seeing that as a direct tradeoff for going have to work. People were used to that but now every day they’re sitting in traffic thinking that they’re doing that instead of being with their kids, just so they can sit in a cubicle looking at the same computer.
I remember a Dilbert comic from 30ish years ago where the perfect employee (cube shaped to fit into the cubicles of the time) said something like, "Having a personal life is like stealing from the company".
Or you're good, pragmatic, and riding out the storm. You can be a new guy at a tech company who will likely layoff or you can continue to do good work as an established employee who may get a hefty severance.
The sense that I got is that the whole relocation thing is on case-by-case basis. That is, it's up to your manager to work it out with you and determine whether or not this is a requirement. At least this is what I hear from someone working there. Is this not the case?
Maybe, the communication is unclear and it seems your manager doesn't get to decide. They can help you apply for an exception, but even people with medical reasons are having trouble getting approval from what I've heard. The announcement stated they expected very few exceptions to the mandate.
I believe that was the case with Amazon until a couple of weeks ago.
Now your manager can no longer approve it, and even if your manager did previously approve it you might need to request approval from a higher authorisation level.
It's on a case by case basis, but the S-team leader (one below jassy) has to approve. This kills most cases. For typical employee this means this has to go through your boss and then 3-5 other executives.
Pretty easy call I think. If you've already been protesting / walking out / going on strike - I think you look for a position at another company, avoid the RTO and avoid the stress of the firing question. I think there were up to 500 employees who were protesting Amazon continuing to carry some of the books they carry.
Otherwise if you have a family and are settled somewhere, I'd wait to find out before moving, then either commute during the week or get a temp spot once you know if you are RTO until kids are out of school where you are and you can plan a move more fully.
Most of the studies I can find on Google show that remote employees are more productive, and that management trusts remote employees less, despite more productivity.
Why are companies so interested in RTO, when the data seems to show that remote work is more productive? It seems like traditional management needs new training to sustain remote productivity gains, not that remote work should be discontinued to increase managers' trust in their employees.
It's crazy to see such a dramatic about-face. Amazon recruiters used to be banging down the door of everyone with software engineering experience not too long ago.
Twitch being impacted is interesting. YouTube is foaming at the mouth to eat Twitch's lunch, and Twitch seems to be doing everything imaginable to make that easier for them.
I remember in amateur sports, often keeping the ball in play was a winning move. It kept it going to have the opponent make a mistake. More, it wasn't about not making mistakes, as you did nothing but. You just didn't want to make the last mistake.
More than a decade ago I was hanging out with the CEO and a few engineers from a startup I was working at. I don’t remember why but we started estimating what portion of Google’s revenue came from advertising. We settled on our estimates and then looked it up, and were surprised to find it was something wild like 95% - I don’t remember the exact number but essentially it was all of their revenue. We realized they could run every other Google service at a loss indefinitely, and started theorizing what this could mean.
“Eventually, Email = Gmail” was one conclusion: their email offering was not just “the hardware resources of a paid product (gigabytes of storage, etc) for free”, but also “the feature development velocity of a paid product (teams of full-time well-paid engineers) for free”. So essentially, other email providers wouldn’t last very long being undercut so heavily, and Google’s ad revenue allowed them to undercut forever. One of us pointed out that you might not even get other email providers in the first place, since Google could just hire all the email developers to work on Gmail. Even if they didn’t add any value - even if they subtracted value - as long as AdWords kept ticking along Google could still afford to keep them on payroll at a higher rate than any competitor could offer.
Our sobering conclusion was that Google could be this gigantic elephant sitting on top of dozens of different product markets, squeezing them all out by undercutting revenue streams and hiring all the talent - an elephant that would stay perched there based mostly on whether people kept buying ads elsewhere, and based not at all on whether they did a good job on the product or not.
Things didn’t quite turn out like we worried (it became FANG/FAANG instead of Google, for instance) and it seems like our pessimism was somewhat unwarranted, although writing it out now, parts of it do certainly ring true.
But! One thing we absolutely didn’t expect was that Google/FAANG would one day voluntarily decide to shed tens of thousands of “captive” developers! Many of these devs were doing no work, busywork, or redundant work, so these layoffs represent a huge and very real injection of talent back into the tech sphere (e.g. they were building a redesign of Gmail, but are now building the first design of a new product).
I know there’s an impression that many of the layoffs are “people in tech” non-developers (talents in their own right, to be sure, but somewhat less relevant for engineer-hungry startups), but many of the layoffs are developers, and they will find work building new competitors instead of rebuilding/maintaining existing market leaders. Something to be happy about at the birds-eye view of tech progress, even while the layoffs themselves surely suck for the individuals affected.
Better than RTO, an annual or six monthly team meet up. Its enough to catalyse new and boost existing relationships without the pointless grind of daily commutes.
I'm sorry this just reads like a pile of sad excuses for being bad at human resource management. (And I use the dehumanizing term "human resources" on purpose here...)
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted. "
So people [Amazon employees, the market] are just supposed to just excuse them not just for being crappy at analyzing project costing and the market and overhiring like crazy last year.. but also being crappy at their job at managing the layoffs this year, too?
... We're overstaffed... but we can't tell you who we're overstaffed with. (So just a hunch then?). But we have to do these layoffs. We, uh, just didn't want to rush who they, uh, were, uh, back then... before... so, trust us, we need this number of people gone. So we'll announce this, to put you on the edge of your seat that it might be you... because, y'know, it'd be rude to, announce who, uh, before we're ready?
Barely even trying to hide that it's really just about making Stock Price # Go Up (it didn't go up enough with the last round, I guess) and keep employees on their toes.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 382 ms ] threadI’m NOT saying that software engineers are getting replaced, but the kinds of things you learn in a boot camp, gluing APIs together and searching StackOverflow for code snippets, seems like it’s on more shaky ground than a few years ago.
In theory there should be no such thing as a "programmer," programming should be a natural part of any white collar job that people use to automate their work and improve their workflow.
But since programming skills are so scarce, if you can code it makes sense to specialize in software development so you can make the biggest impact and maximize your income.
In short, everyone should have a classical four-year liberal arts education.
Now, excuse me while I ignore what I should do, and focus on what puts food on the table. And, unfortunately, CMPT-101 programming skills aren't going to be it - ChatGPT can do that work better and cheaper than a 'basic level' human can, just like it can produce a five-paragraph essay better than a grade school child can.
If you're going to learn programming, you're going to need to learn it to the point where you're better at it than a dumb LLM. And that bar is significantly higher than 'basic knowledge' or even 'working knowledge'.
Nobody cares about my rusty Grade 8 French skills, or my crappy hand-stitching skills in a world when Google Translate and sewing machines exist.
Engineers, programmers, hackers on the other hand are gonna be just fine. Same as the past 50 years.
and yet this is exactly where the layoffs are happening...AWS, ad tech, twitch
The problem there is that smaller companies are suffering a capital shortage due to the raise of interest rates at the same time, so they have less resources available to capture said talents.
Its not clear which roles will be eliminated, but I've worked in a few of those groups and I can assure you there is plenty of fat to be trimmed outside of engineering.
you can't wish this away
A lot of larger tech companies started hiring like mad during the past two years because the economy was over juiced. I work at an enterprise and was chatting with my boss about it and she mentioned that there was this idea that companies that weren't hiring were going to fall behind the those that were.
This is those companies undoing all of that panic hiring.
How much is down to knowingly recruiting people you know you might fire later, how much is incompetence on the planning teams and how much is simply that very large companies are hard to manage: that I don't know.
Collective ownership of the means of production?
I, too hope that automation will eventually help us figure out how to do Socialism that Doesn't Suck, but it's one hell of a jump to imagine that it will just happen automatically on top of existing systems given their long and well established history of relentlessly concentrating the ownership structure -- what is it, 90% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans, or something? Even if super construct-o-bots became cheap, you'd also have to unwind the private ownership of natural resources. No, I don't see any of this happening smoothly. Do you?
I was thinking of proliferation of existing, but still uncommon incentive structures. More stock compensation, in more industries. More co-ops for smaller orgs. More unionization, while not distributing ownership directly, at least balances board memberships. More sovereign trust funds for resource extractions etc... I wasn't thinking state-controlled production, it's been tried, and failed horribly.
One reason why US is reasonably stable is precisely because of 401ks. That is, a large middle class has a true stake in the stability of the system, and will not rock the boat. Increase that stake, there's existing mechanisms.
> I don't see any of this happening smoothly
There's no reason it needs to devolve into violence. Small example: USA-gov specifically needs to co-opt resource extraction, and setup trust fund, like Alaska. This is primarily a political program that we're being hoodwinked into not accepting. The onus is not on evil Exxon, they're not threatening to kill us if we try to (because they don't); the onus is on the american people to actually demand this from our representatives.
Violent transformation will throw away the baby with the bathwater. Take what works, dial it up. Devalue (in your heart and actions) what does not work. Vote & advocate accordingly. The doom&gloomers are missing that so many pieces are there, already, today.
Of course it won’t work in a fake democracy where corporations are allowed to buy politicians.
the true lesson imho is that any positive project for the future will need to reject iconoclasm, and lean into incrementalism. preserve the good, prune the bad.
The 'terror' is 'famous' only because of the ~300 years long propaganda of their enemy, the English establishment - the aristocratic establishment that hates anyone or anything that threatens the aristocracy with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Otherwise, what is called 'the terror' accounts for ~3000 people, and most of them in Paris. And it consists of aristocrats, their surrogates, their servants who aided them with their conspiring with their foreign relatives to come to France and massacre their own people so that they wouldnt lose their privileges and the 'plebs' would 'know their place'.
Conspiring against your own country in wartime in that manner still carries the death penalty even today. Even in the most democratic countries.
> the french revolutionary program traded aristocratic rights for bureaucratic corruption
Corruption existed in all eras and all societies in human history. 'Bureaucrats being corrupt' at or after one point does not invalidate a system. That system worked spectacularly well when it was first instituted, literally reforming the entire continent by removing aristocrats from power and appointing non-nobility to those positions on a meritocratic basis. It worked so well that even after the aristocrats were able to destroy the Napoleonic remnants of the revolution, they kept that 'bureaucratic' system. If it became corrupt, you can tie it to the influence of the aristocrats - not the revolution.
...
No, the French did find the solution to it - the French Revolution is the unique event in human history that destroyed the elitist, aristocratic stranglehold of the minority on the society by invalidating all the historic traditions and trappings that trace back to the Agricultural Revolution and all the norms that those enforced on the people. And it set the standards for our actual modern society. It has basically created the blueprint of how we live today.
> It has basically created the blueprint of how we live today.
The same case can be made for the american revolution, which was earlier, and which legacy is longer lasting.
But yeah, point taken. Any book recommendations on the topic?
Indeed - after being on the Internet for a while, I learned that what is taught on this topic in the Anglosphere and the rest of the world !greatly! differ. In high school curriculum, we were taught what the French Revolution did, what were its principles and how it related to our current society. What is incessantly drummed up in the Anglosaxon literature as 'the terror' was just mentioned as a part of the turmoil that was the revolution and the ensuing war. But of course, its no surprise how then-existing Anglosaxon establishment and its modern contunity hated 'the terror so much':
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/989759-there-were-two-reign...
Because 'the terror' was directed against the aristocracy. It did not matter whether hundreds of thousands of French died during the famines in which their aristocrats starved them for maximum profit to keep their luxurious lifestyle. It matters that ~3000 aristocrats and upper class were executed by those very peasants.
> The same case can be made for the american revolution, which was earlier, and which legacy is longer lasting
That is also a proposition of the Anglosaxon literature, and there is a quite different view of it outside that literature for that topic as well:
Whereas the French Revolution totally did away with all the existing political and social norms and brought an egalitarian and meritocratic format into politics and the society, the American Revolution was more a rebellion in which the elite of the colonies broke away from their motherland in a move to protect their privileges and position by incorporating some of the Age of Enlightenment principles. We see total commoners get into positions of power at the end of the French Revolution, whereas the American Revolution (or rather, rebellion) does not disturb the existing power structure in the colonies aside from ousting the parts of the elite who were royalists. There was also large scale land appropriation and land redistribution done at the end of the rebellion.
That is extremely important - because that is the reason why the leaders of the rebellion created an anti-democratic political structure: The American founding fathers thought that this kind of land redistribution could easily target themselves (and there were voices demanding it), and they wanted to protect their holdings and power. Which is why de facto architect of the American constitution, John Adams, openly and contradictorily advocated that the government should protect the society from 'the tyranny of the majority'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
The tyranny being democratically voted and enforced land redistribution, obviously. American founding fathers were rather blunt about it in their memoirs, letters and private communication. Some did openly politick against it as well.
This is the reason for the existence of the electoral college, the senate, and the 'checks and balances' in the American system - all of those were devised as ways to enable overriding or controlling the democratic majority so that they wouldnt come with pesky land redistribution schemes. So at the end of the 'revolution', we see the exact American elite occupying the same positions of power and privilege, but with the losing segments of the elite who sided with the crown removed. The actual aristocrats who sided with the rebellion kept their possesions after the rebellion, with the exception that their nobility titles not having a legal basis anymore. Which did not matter since it was the possessions that made the title.
On top of that, the Age of Enlightenment ideals were not fully materialized into their radical forms at that point. So what...
Of the cuff, the common vs civil law issue seems more of a formal difference, rather than a difference in outcome. Interpretation of common laws changes over time as well. And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth? I lost count somewhere in my own lifetime. Laws that need rewriting every generation or so or poor laws.
Anyways, appreciate the in-depth response and sources!
Nope. Its fundamental. Take what happened during the BLM protests: A NY court suspended habeas corpus, the basis of all rights under common law. At that point, the authorities, including the police, could do whatever they wanted to anyone they wanted. It was reinstituted only after a higher NY court overruled it. If the higher court decided that the emergency warranted the suspension, ALL rights in NY would have been gone for the duration. Same goes for the US in general. If in the future, there is a major emergency that can 'justify' the suspension of habeas corpus and the supreme court lets it stay, all rights will be gone for whatever duration decided. In common law, the judges play the role of the sovereign monarch who owns all rights and gives them out as he sees fit. So it can 'reinterpret' everything at any given time and everyone is at the mercy of it.
Now take civil law: No such thing can happen. What rights the citizens, residents and even refugees have are written in concrete in the law, including what rights can be kept and what rights are suspended even in emergencies including global catastrophes, and they can never be taken back by anybody. The only one who can give or take back laws is the society itself, ie the people, they do that through democratic voting and proportional representation, and nothing and nobody can overrule them. Sovereignty belongs to the people.
> And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth?
The majority of the French republics were destroyed by external sources that were trying to eradicate the remnants of the French revolution. Mostly backed by (then) 'the leader of the free world', Britain. We can also include World War II in this, since Britain was trying to use Germany as an attack dog against the Soviets and therefore propping up in any way they could, especially diplomatically. (including preventing an Europe-wide attempt of an anti-Nazi alliance that could totally prevent Ww2).
Outside those cases, the people democratically changing their constitution and calling it a new 'republic' does not really make it a new republic. Its still a republic, with a changed constition. The power still resides in the people and they decide how the 'new' republic will be. There is nothing outside the revolutionary principles there.
Though, one can easily say that the latest republic was also prompted by an external intervention - namely the CIA coup attempt to depose de Gaul to prevent the French from giving independence to Algeria.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/20/jfk-assassination-plot-mirr...
This is a very hairy affair, by the way - CIA organizing a coup in France using the military in lieu of JFK's policies and opposition, Parisians mobilizing and setting up barricades across Paris to protect the president, JFK being powerless to stop the CIA and leaking info and updates to the French via diplomatic channels to help against the coup...
Funny to see this called out, my father is a huge francophile and I remember him going on about this when I was a kid (tbf - he sees CIA coups everywhere in the 60s, murder of jfk, murder of lumumba, ...).
Considering how that is the whole business of CIA (aside from drug running to finance those and the paramilitaries, guerillas and islamists they fund), he is not far off. Solely the coups in South America would already flood the list, Africa would need a few more pages. Then there are coups in the Middle East etc. Incidentally, the later Iranian Islamic revolution is the result of the 1953 coup that CIA helped organize in Iran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
They even hired the most famous mobsters in Tehran to help with the coup. So I guess the tendency of the CIA to choose the worst type of people to work with did not originate in the 1960s, and instead it was there when it was founded...
...
The murder of JFK is very specific, btw - its very plausible that CIA did it (Dulles) because JFK has sabotaged two CIA projects - the Bay of Pigs push and then the French coup. And that Dulles was a nasty, nasty, nasty man...
Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.
It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".
You are way off on the death toll. The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial. Historians put the total figure at 40-50k because of there were also summary executions outside the official figures.
Even if I was, why would being so anti-French like the English establishment and its followers are be ok, but not being 'anti-English'.
> spreading disinformation
You are not the arbiter of truth. Neither the establishment that you are defending. The one that was called the 'perfidious albion' for 400~ years by now.
This is the first time I see someone talking about 'misinformation' regarding referenced historical material. It comes across extremely funny. Demonstrates how big the gap is in between how the Angloamerican world sees itself and the world and the rest of the world does.
> Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.
Aside from the charged emotional wordage used in your paragraph giving away the level of ire and propaganda levied against those who you consider to be your 'historic enemy' in line with your establishment's propaganda, nobody denies the existence of executions. ~3000 people were tried and executed in Paris.
What is 'denied' is the delirious, emotionally charged exaggeration that comes from the establishment you stan for - just like your emotional approach, that establishment has portrayed this event as if millions of ordinary French were wrongfully killed. With the judge, jury and executioner of that sentence being the English establishment, the traitorous aristocrats who escaped to England, and those who finally accomplished in destroying the French Revolution. Its like asking Dick Cheney to describe the Iraq War...
> It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".
The word 'terror' had different meanings 300 years ago. Whereas it has been made into something quite different from the usage in the period in the following centuries. Maybe they should have used the word 'fear of god' instead of the more rational-sounding 'terror'. Like how it is in the Anglosaxon literature. Then it would be all good and well.
Regardless of the propaganda subversion of a term from a different language by a hostile establishment, the incident is what it is - the execution of ~3000 people, mostly the aristocrats and their surrogates for conspiracies against their own people.
> The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial.
The Anglosaxon 'Terror' propaganda is about the executions in Paris. Its about 'blood flowing in the streets'. Guillotines. Not the events that transpired elsewhere in France, during the wars, or in the killings of the revolutionaries by the French aristocrats or the foreign armies that they have called in to murder their own people.
It is very likely that even more people died from both sides in the events during and after the revolution. But the English propaganda is not about that. Its about 'blood flowed in the streets'. Emotional manipulation to demonize. Because otherwise different sides in a civil war executing collaborators of the other faction in court martials across the countryside does not make the same emotional manipulation effect. Even more so because the English history is chock full of such incidents, and the accusation would turn against the propagandists themselves - hence, 'blood flowed in the streets - guillotines!!!'.
...
There is absolutely no difference between how the French Revolution was demonized in this manner through emotional propaganda a...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_and_His_Dog_(1975_film)
I did not expect to learn the film was set in 2024 and found it oddly coincidental.
I haven't seen many pitchforks about it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/diversity-roles-disappea...
https://www.businessinsider.com/layoffs-diversity-department...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...
One of the best things a former employer did was hire an in-house recruiter who was actually good at the job. Because he wasn't working on commission, he cared a lot more about getting the right person for your team rather than just a butt in a seat. He had enough technical background to talk intelligently about the position when I was interviewing to work there, and a year later when I ended up writing a job description, he was able to do a very good job walking me through how and why each part was there. Recruiting is really hard to do well, and lots of companies do it really poorly. But it can be done well, and it's a real pleasure to work with a good recruiter both as a candidate and a hiring manager.
HR as well, to a point. Yeah, it's to protect the company and control costs. But it can be done well or poorly, and when it's done well it can be reasonably pleasant to deal with.
"Why do we even need hr?"
"Why do we even need managers?"
"Why do we even need sales?"
I've seen it all on this site. It's pretty disrespectful to those professions especially when hr is on the front lines when hiring slows and layoffs take place. The talk of outsourcing in particular is amusing since HN will talk endlessly about how outsourcing programming can't possibly work.
Either way it is almost certain that a large amount of people working in these companies don't contribute much to the generated income and now the executives have been given an excuse to perform mass layoffs without scaring off the shareholders.
And "in tech" is right. At my current company, we have more PMs than we do developers. This leads to a really poor feedback look where the PMs are trying to justify their jobs, so they "look busy" and start generating cruft that is probably not important (like changing text without really a great reason, sure maybe it is "polish" but ... there's real things to do and it distracts the engineers).
We don't need more PMs than we have engineers!
Even if a PM does the right thing by talking to customers and learning about their pain points, the giant bottleneck in dev capacity means that those customer pain points take forever to address, which often leads to more customer frustration than if you had never talked to them in the first place.
“What the heck happened? This was just working last week! Where’s the… ugh! Where did the button for this go?”
“It got Product Managed.”
Google Meets and Slack are repeat offenders.
Until you solve the problem of middle management status being based on the number of people you manage, you will keep getting bloated organizations. Until an organization figures out a better way to manage their dependencies on each other, every new thing an organization wants to do will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.)
Organizations are just committing on "not growing" in terms of product offerings in the next period of time. The stock market, after some time, will reward growth and the cycle will start again.
I understand this is signaling that the author understands technical concepts like big-O, but why use technical terms imprecisely when non-technical terms work just fine?
It's beyond the scope of this conversation, but the short is that it seems to become a network effect problem. Every team does not work with every other team, but it does end up in a hub-and-spoke system with matrixes over the system. Oversight (ops, security, PMO) do not scale linearly because the competing priorities make scheduling more difficult.
I've read others who have spoken about it, but I'd have to go back and find it.
With more typical interest rates, rich people will make more typical investments.
They put their money in hype when the money is free or close, and putting it in those "investments" make sense. Like when you have QE and near-zero interest rates...
"even the tactical errors committed by investors were insufficient to create the bubble that burst so dramatically last year. For that, we needed a perverse private-public partnership led by Wall Street and the Federal Reserve. The Fed mistakenly created too much money in the fall of 1999 in order to fend off the expected deflationary impact of the Y2K bug—effectively pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire in the stock markets—and banks and brokerage houses used some of the excess liquidity to fund the share price bubble. In the fourth quarter of 1999, the Fed expanded the money supply at an annual rate of 22% (9.6% after seasonal adjustment). In comparison, the rate of growth of the money supply in the fourth quarter of 2000 was 9.2% (–2.8% after seasonal adjustment). Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, seeing the flood of money into risky start-ups, pricked the dot-com balloon with monetary tightening in the spring of 2000. It was the dot-coms’ misfortune to be first the beneficiaries and then the victims of these larger economic forces".
In that case they didn't need "near zero interest" rates, because they were artifically promised much larger returns than the actual rates.
That is the actual key driver: easy handed loans for BS uses (to VCs, and even better the general public), and hyped returns above the rates. The "near zero" rates is not necessary, it's just the more extreme case.
https://hbr.org/2001/05/whos-to-blame-for-the-bubble#:~:text....
And too many of these organizations still act like they think throwing more engineers at a problem makes things go faster.
And the $$ and prestige of working in tech still attracts too many people whose primary interest is not just in getting things done, but being seen doing it, and, as, you say, improving their status.
The tide is going out and we're seeing who isn't wearing bathing suits. But it might be the whole beach.
... Still though the primary thing driving investment in tech and software is the same thing that drove investment in industrialized cotton mills or Ford Model T assembly lines: mechanization makes profits, and... computerized mechanization is the most powerful cost reducing system ever known to mankind.
Agreed. WeWork being the prime example of something that was evaluated as "tech" despite being anything but.
Plus the "deliver cheap and fast" was not just because tech was so useful and must have, but mostly because of a number of factors, like people having money lying around to put into stocks, interest rates being low, QE, and so on.
With a decline in income comes a decline in advertising, (taking "eyeball" based companies), and a decline in BS subscription spending (taking down many "real business model selling SaaS" companies, resulting in a downward spiral...
We might never see it "back in full swing", the same way cobblers never did came back in full swing...
https://novum.substack.com/p/what-if-worldview-zero-interest...
(More technically, they aren't shareholders until it vests, but they are long the equity)
Usually layoffs include accelerated vesting anyway.
Did I wake back up this morning in November 2001?
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible."
(From the announcement.)
Also, it is pretty easy to confirm with anybody who works at AWS that OP2 planning process did in fact complete recently
who is to say the reason why? maybe Andy Jassey just went for a long walk and came back and decided 9k more were out the door
for all you know he may want 25k more gone and is just figuring out the how/when
1) Any business can tolerate a 5-20% layoff without loss to business continuity.
2) A 50% layoff results in losing critical knowledge about how to keep the business working.
3) Therefore, if you want to lose 50% of your employees, it makes sense to do it in rounds.
I can give similar logic for larger layoffs too, mostly having to do with impact on employee perception. If I'm in a business who has layoffs every 3 months, I will be sending out resumes to more stable places, to the extent they exist.
Does adding 2 months between your 5-20% rounds recover that continuity?
I can't make my mind. It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep your lights on. The problem is that "keep your lights on" is the only thing people will care about while overworked looking for another job.
Yes. The knowledge is consolidated in fewer people that way.
> It still looks like an incredibly stupid thing to do, but it will spread enough knowledge to keep your lights on. The problem is that "keep your lights on" is the only thing people will care about while overworked looking for another job
Agreed. However, if a business is bleeding $1M per month and has $10M in savings, "keeping the lights on" for a while is considered success.
I will mention: I'm not advocating for a specific course of action. I'm merely trying to explain one way of reasoning. Personally, I think there are usually out-of-the-box solutions which avoid layoffs, especially in situations similar to big tech.
Google could, for example, spin up a consulting arm and (1) Get dead-weight people out of core operations (2) Likely, make a mint.
Are there that many good-paying jobs remaining within the tech industry that they can re-shuffle to? Are people finding placement? Are coders now competing for less-technical jobs as well?
I've heard stories of recruiters who were seeing 1 resume per week now seeing 300 resumes per week, but I'm not noticing any sentiment of widespread panic on HN or even Reddit.
I don't think we'll ever be there yet. Tech people are still one of the richest in the US and the Earth.
Like most US tech workers, I was getting paid comfortably, but nowhere near the level of FAANG/fintech/top startups. I took a small pay increase with this new job.
I've got friends who were part of the FAANG layoffs who have been struggling because they only want to work at FAANG or top tier fintech/startups. That said, they are also not trying too hard due to generous severance.
Fwiw those I do know that've been laid off have gone travelling/career break (severance helps here) or pivoted (all from HR, none from engineering).
LMAO no. Admittedly I have been out of the job hunting circus for a decade, but the number of positions I've applied for in the past few months that have resulted in a first interview is laughable. Recruiters are still useless and such an active waste of my time I don't even reply to them any more.
I'm seemingly having better luck these days getting freelance contracts through non-standard avenues (but I'm holding off from celebrating as I'm still negotiating and haven't signed anyone just yet)
I suspect anyone with a decent network is fine. If you are applying through portals though, the competition is steep.
Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.
> Seems like companies are focusing on cutting folks that don't contribute (code, reports, something tangible) directly to revenue streams.
Follow from this?
> more on the senior/higher paid side of things
Are you implying that every single senior+ person you know who got cut was worthless? Because generally, the more senior the more you contribute to a company’s bottom line.
Happy to be wrong here.
Whether there are 250k open positions at suitably-high levels is less clear, but there are more than twice that many open positions.
Of course, people used to making $300k+ might balk at positions offering half that or even less, but they're out there.
I think there is an assumption that all of the layoffs have been engineers or engineers, designers, and product people, but a huge chunk of them have been in support roles that are less needed without big hiring demands.
If companies are cutting travel and expense budgets, that means you can cut accounting staff. If you are largely not hiring, you can cut recruitment staff. Etc., etc., etc.
There are lots of tech openings these days in non tech businesses. Of course these don’t pay the top of the market salaries.
I took the black pill. Maybe I can find wisdom in past professions' cataclysms, like ice harvesters and milk delivery.
Unless we invent an actual superintelligence, in which case, no humans will be needed for work ever again and you will either live out your days in some kind of early retirement paradise or be fighting over the last can of cat food.
Unfortunately that's not the norm, but I find branding yourself in that way can at least help overcome this challenge in the hiring process (if you get past the screener that only looks at these filters that is)
The problem with hiring from the ivies is these are people who got into ivies. They know how to game the system.
For FAANG-level engineering salaries, the answer is largely no, perhaps save some very specific areas like finance or extremely hot AI prospects.
There is going to be a broad leveling of engineering salaries in my opinion. The engineer with 8-10 years experience making north of 500k at FAANGs is largely going away. Of course, a big part of that is due to equity values not skyrocketing every year. And of course with FAANG-level salaries going down, lots of other companies will feel less pressure to compete.
For engineers, I think a large number of those who were laid off will have difficulty replacing their level of salary for some time. I think that the past 10-ish years, with rock bottom interest rates, were really a "once in a lifetime" chance for non-managerial employees to make as much compensation as they did (again, broadly).
If those salaries go away, so will the talent. These workers will start new tech companies that either eat away at market segments or end up costing large sums to acquire. You're right that it may take time to replace the salary in the short term.
Sure, some talent will leave and start new companies, but on the whole I think hardly any of them will ever be able to match top-level FAANG compensation from the 2010-2020 period. Again, there will be some outliers, but even then I think the number of outliers will be small. For example, look at AI. A lot of people freaking out the most right now are people in other areas of AI who are realizing that all of their work is being completely obviated by LLMs.
I can tell you that candidate expectations have changed a lot in recent months.
For a while we had a lot of candidates applying who wanted to stretch the interview process out to 2-3 months so they could shop around, compare offers, then negotiate up as much as they could. Candidates would frequently disappear from the interview pipeline or go weeks between following up.
Now that quality of resumes we receive has increased dramatically. Applicants are much more responsive and are making it clear that they're willing to do anything, as opposed to holding out for their dream job.
Meanwhile my employer is celebrating the latest salary comp data showing that industry-wide compensation has declined sharply.
There are still jobs out there, but it's no longer easy to put in a little effort and find a good job. It's now a competition.
Any pointers?
Many interviewers can recognize when you don't have many options. The more options you have, the more confident you'll be.
Don't take rejections personally. If you're not getting rejected a lot, you're aiming too low. You should be getting rejected frequently! Use it to hone your search.
There is still plenty of work to find, but it all depends on how much people built their lives around their income level
The company I work for, a tier 2 or 3 company for tech, depending on your perspective is still hiring, although mostly not in the U.S. But if more U.S. talent becomes available at more reasonable rates, we might do more hiring here.
That's because companies announce layoffs but they usually don't announce mass hiring.
While cloud sectors are laying off, healthcare and defense are hiring tons right now
A year ago I submitted to one job post and got a full round of interviews from it, which ultimately I decided wasn't a fit.
Over the past two weeks I've submitted my resume to 80+ jobs, and so far have had a handful of declines and no interviews.
So, yeah, it's a different market than it was, for sure.
I don’t look at LinkedIn much most of the time but I do try to connect with most of the people I work with, and I am nice to recruiters. I generally rely on my network and recruiter outreach for most of my jobs, can’t remember the last time I did a cold application.
For the past few years there’s been a layer of bottom feeder recruiters who were terrible about phone and LinkedIn spam. They made previous job hunts unpleasant. Nowhere to be found this time around, wonder where those people went.
The quality roles are still there but maybe 25-50% less abundant in terms of cold outreach from recruiters.
For someone still employed this translates to a very manageable interviewing pace that probably leads to better results in the end.
If I were unemployed I might be more anxious since you probably can’t do 3-4 interviews a day without hustling quite a bit. The pace reminds me a lot of my experience interviewing for mid-level roles a few years back, before I made senior.
Overall take, the bottom has definitely not dropped out of the market. Yes FAANG comp is less available than it used to be, but the just-below level isn’t too hard to find, and even the FAANGs are still hiring in key areas. I expect a ramp-up late this year/early next once the operational cracks start to show from layoffs and attrition.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866560
Amazon's vesting schedule is so toxic that 90% or more google engineers have higher total comp, better benefits, and better WLB than Amazon.
The backloaded stock gives you stability up front with their high signing bonus, and high growth potential for TC assuming stock growth in two years. My pay is basically equalized over 4 years at current stock prices when I began, so my expected 4 year outlook without raises/performance bonuses/stock appreciation is:
Y1: ~70% Base, ~26% Bonus, ~4% Stock (5% total initial grant)
Y2: ~70% Base, ~18% Bonus, ~12% Stock (15% total initial grant)
Y3: ~70% Base, ~0% Bonus, ~30% Stock (40% total initial grant)
Y4: ~70% Base, ~0% Bonus, ~30% Stock (40% total initial grant)
Rough numbers, you get it. Not everyone has the same deal, but from what I've seen @ Amazon this is pretty standard and honestly significantly better than having to deal with the volatility of a 1 year initial vesting cliff like most public companies.
- Year 1: base + high prorated signing bonus + 5% stock vest
- Year 2: base + slightly lower signing bonus + 15% stock vest
- Year 3 and 4 - base + 40% stock vest
If the stock doesn’t move, you should make about the same amount Years 1 through 4 or slightly more.
Lesson learned, but I don't think there's an archetype of engineer that prefers that kind of risk profile over large cash payments each month. My downside for Y1 at Amazon is 4% of the agreed upon TC.
Perhaps I'm not as good as a negotiator as I thought (or the schedules are within the past two years) b/c I haven't ever received an offer that balances the agreed upon TC as you describe. It sounds great!
Anyone who was hired over the past two years would have been more than happy to receive a large stable cash prorated signing bonus over the past two years than stock.
If your business can’t “buy” the supplies needed for your products - in this case development labor - and sell them at a cost where you can have a sustainable business, then you don’t have a good business model.
Google is massively profitable. That money has to go somewhere. Why not the workers?
If Google is succeeding at attracting talent from other companies, including the company of the person I was responding to, then it's more likely that they're not "overpaying", they're just paying enough to attract the talent away from other companies.
This is capitalism working. Google has a lot of money and they're putting it towards attracting and keeping their talent.
We've also been tracking the shift in cloud spending patterns that Amazon is describing on earnings calls and how that may be compressing margins. In Q4 this was particularly noticeable, https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report/2022-q4
But the thirst for growth is never quenched, so there's always new features, new services. And maintenance of that automation. The work never ends.
There's a 25-50% operations tax every AWS employee pays. But they're handling the operations load that several employees were 10y ago. I used to wake up in the middle of the night to restart individual machines. Now I'm alerted for much much more complex problems. But i'm still woken up :(
Sometimes I wish I could learn everything from scratch. I wish I could join an on prem team to learn all those small details slowly and painfully.
Learning "from the middle" of a tech stack outwards is the default case for everyone, so don't be so hard on yourself. There is no "from scratch", never was even in the Bombe days, just a question of how many abstraction layers you want to tackle. Give yourself time to learn and plenty of room to fail and try again, and "all those small details" will ingrain themselves into you as second nature.
And they do automate, claims that a service like S3 does not have automation are totally ridiculous, and few other general hosting providers have AWS scale here.
That said, their development pace is crazy, with plenty of partially built solutions -> so yes, until something scales enough to need it I'm not surprised they have sysadmin toil. Reality is even the VMware worlds and other onprem stuff, even when "automated" have plenty of turmoil just staying fresh / current / backed up / secured etc. So that's what AWS is selling.
I'd look for other reasons..
I know multiple people who have worked on AWS. There is definitely some manual stuff going on, but there is also considerable infrastructure and automation in other areas.
The SDE role at $FAANG I work at is essentially glorified tech support, which makes the leetcode interviewing process so much more ridiculous than it would be by default if you were actually writing code and solving meaningful problems most of the time.
I don't think you're generalising to all FAANG, just whichever one you work at.
That said, this has not been my experience at all at another FAANG which doesn't use the TLA "SDE".
Which one do you work at so I can go there?
Or at least appear to have those hobbies if you do not.....
One big difference working against the cloud is the same thing that worked in it's favour 15 years ago. We don't always remember why we just adopted the cloud. Linux networking at times had scaling issues, and virtualization and linux was not where it is now.
It's astounding how much more a $5 VPS can do. Imagine the medium end. Self-managed hosting tools have come so far to handle production quality, it doesn't even feel fair that it is not more well known. Whether it's Proxmox, or others, it is pretty close to most things out there. Making a tool cloud compatible, but cloud agnostic is one way to avoid a lot of technical debt (assuming it's not created another way).
It doesn't have to be for everyone, but demand is probably slowing in part because of this. In a recession cost efficiency is everything.
Now they moved to Kubernetes, it has added a ton of unnecessary complexity. It takes magnitude more effort to run anything on it and they call it progress...
Sometimes it can be both but not always.
The savings could be in 7 digits TBH annually. There are so many low hanging fruits no one cares when the day is good. Tables that have no partition expiration that grow into hundreds or even thousands of TBs, buckets with same amount of data that no one looks at, VMs that no service uses, large clusters well above their load (e.g. only 20% used maximum -- and a full replica too), very bad ETL pipelines that cost hundreds of bucks EVERY RUN, very costly queries generated by Looker dashboards EVERY view...there are just too many.
Sigh, I'm late for everything in my life.
https://www.apptio.com/products/cloudability/
I just have access to small bits and pieces, but what I have seen I like.
I don't mean that cynically or sarcastically. The cloud makes it legitimately more easy to deploy resources; I've experienced this in my own teams. But the flip side is that it is easier to deploy things without thinking about the costs, or deploy things and forget about them, and management can just shrug and say "yes, it's cloud, it must be cheaper and better".
This is by no means a cloud-unique problem. Watch any datacenter a company has been at for a few years get shut down and moved to the cloud. The stream of "hey, who owns this?" and "are we still using this?" and "I just yanked the network cable, has anyone noticed?" is morbidly amusing. Even if you think you're tracking everything, you quite likely aren't, because the owners don't update their own tracking info very well.
But cloud makes this worse.
So I just find myself wondering how much of AWS profit is on this sort of stuff.
I myself have S3 buckets full of crap. As I do watch my spend, said buckets full of crap are in the ~10-50$/month range. At that price point it is difficult to justify engineering time to clean out the crap. But it's not hard to imagine that scaling up by three or more factors of magnitude.
Last couple of weeks the whole data org underwent a forced upgrade of certain components on Google cloud and we got quite of clusters no one knows who owns.
I don't know but I'm itchy to start finding ways to build new projects because that is the best way for techy people to grab ownership and promition.
[1] Get a "server as they should be", https://oxide.computer (no affiliation)
But then, when uncontrolled inefficiencies need to gobble up more hardware, you would have to buy, install, network, maintain, and understand this new hardware.
Real inefficiencies do, but then you will have the more detailed data the GP is talking about.
You don't need to make a large datacenter, or to migrate everything at once. Find some low-risk services, get some consultant help you improve some room on your premises (you'll need to care about security, electricity and cooling), get a pair of network contracts and one hack of servers (or maybe even 4 servers), and move those services. Favor things that are used internally.
If you are looking for 7 figures of savings just by picking the easy fruit, you will almost certainly get positive ROI on that. Just do not move critical services if you don't know what you are doing.
Big top down push to move to public cloud, basically no thought to operating expenses.. and now theres a ton of low hanging fruit. Most of these same firms have very little ability to measure their costs in a timely, granular manner, and so put in only very blunt processes to try to limit costs.
Last org I was at could probably re-allocate 10% of engineering staff using the cloud to a SWAT team finding cloud cost saves for 2 years before they ran out of stuff that costs 5x their salary to get fix/optimize/kill in the cloud.
A lot of the same orgs CTOs sold themselves on the idea that they'd need less infra people in the cloud. This really has not been the case, and more often the cloud infra people are more expensive too. Meanwhile many need to permanently maintain an on-prem footprint for latency/legal/legacy/etc reasons.. so you end up with net more staff.
I know a handful of Wall St firms that are moving a lot of "big data" type use cases back out of the cloud because its hideously expensive for their use cases.
Bonus points if you can autoscale those same on prem workloads into the cloud provider of your choice seamlessly
In the absence of friction to buy more immediate incremental capacity, teams may never optimize their code..
This may be good when you are "moving fast & breaking things".
This may be bad when you are trying to operate an already-scaled business profitably.
On the other hand, in AWS, at my last shop.. we were just .. doing stuff. We at one point noticed a non-production RDS instance was going to run us $60k/year.
This was for some small part of our processing, that in on-prem land would just occupy a slice of one of our $30k servers. But in cloud, we had the pleasure of $5k/month until we noticed & turned it off.
At the scale our estate worked, we had easily 100 entities that could trigger this kind of spend.
oh and it really sucks when your brand new SSD's arrive at your main DC, after a 4 month wait, you open the box and the boxes are empty - someone robbed ya. Those expenses are only linked to the infra team, but the effects reverberate through the engineering org.
For us, Cloudfront was a massive expense that is without exagerration an order of magnitude more expensive than other providers, and even in the world of AWS custom pricing, it's a struggle to get cloudfront costs down to even the retail offering of other providers.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
So for instance company would have their hosting costs upped from £500 a month (dedicated servers) to something like £5000, so that they could "scale up", while their dedicated servers could have easily served almost any traffic thrown at them and be more responsive. They have actually never reached the level of traffic that this old set up wouldn't be able to handle, but investors were always saying "what if we get sudden surge of users" which has never materialised. But then it was their money so nobody objected.
I can see that now that hosting costs in the cloud have become ridiculous, cash strapped smaller businesses will be looking for savings and the cloud is quite an obvious area to look for cuts.
Sounds great, for some use cases. Particularly if you don't need multiple 9's of uptime, and just need a few 8's. Most companies don't have: * Guaranteed sla's for replacing components when the RAM needs to be reseated, a drive fails, or the fans get too dusty and things overheat
* Redundancy set up in case the network connection fails
* Redundancy set up in case the power fails. (Many places will have a UPS for under an hour, but generators, along with a regular maintenance schedule and processes for ensuring fuel is another thing)
* On site security, to make sure nobody breaks in and does some corporate espionage
* Ultra-high-speed links to the internet
And if the little startup takes on a client with important certification requirements, it can be very helpful to have a cloud provider. A lot of contracts I've taken on over the years ask tough questions during the sales process about our practices regarding the above things and much more.
The points you have listed are important, but are really non-issue unless you are co-locating servers in the utility room somewhere, rather than in a proper data centre.
But now many of the companies that moved to the cloud are hitting different challenges and are stuck in a setup that is pretty expensive to maintain. I am not expecting the death of the cloud computing, but that pendulum will likely swing back a little as the companies experiment with other options. I think a company that can help medium sized businesses optimize their compute setup with a mix of on prem and multi-provider cloud will do well. My 2c.
It's extremely true! The fun is that bad code looks totally different from each other. The "bad" Scala type astronaut code would be unrecognizable from Python raw dictionary enthusiast code.
AZ could have very well gone nearly 100% remote for SDEs and slash the office costs without messing up teams and deadlines.
RTO is about control.
They may or may not also see multiple rounds in the same light many of us do: as incompetence in the management team.
On one hand I felt like I was blowing major opportunities by not trying. But something just felt off when receiving so many sudden contacts from the largest of companies offering remote work, despite working in tech for over a decade and never hearing from them before.
FANG still has a very low (<1%) success rate.
So, don't assume that just because you got a recruiter email you'd be qualified to make it
That's misleading. If you're able to get an interview, the success rate is much much higher than 1%. Can you imagine the wasted effort if it was 1%? And I assume if you're getting a recruiter to email you, you can usually get an interview.
The 1% number I always see should include those who try to apply without recruiters emailing them.
Nope.
I was an interviewer for one of the FAANGs. My approval rating was around 2%. And I was one of the most lenient ones, at least in my org.
The actual hire rate was lower than that. Maybe much lower. As I said, I was one of the most lenient ones. I did my best to approve, while still remaining within calibration and hiring guidelines.
I interviewed people over the course of years. I was a developer, so interviewing was not my main role.
And I never felt angry about having my time wasted. I work for money. As long as the company is paying me, what they want me to do during billable hours is at their discretion.
Time spent interviewing has an opportunity cost in terms of learning new things or working on promotion-grade projects.
I studied new things on the side (very important for switching jobs).
It isn't that bad, interview one per week and you end up hiring about one person per three years (5 interviewers per onsite, so about 50 there and 100 phone screens). Most people interview 1-2 times per week there, and that was roughly how fast they grew, so the numbers adds up.
Maybe your FAANG experience is different than mine, but 2% means either you're very picky or your hiring pipeline is awful.
I approved about 2% of candidates.
The actual hiring rate was much lower, meaning that even when I approved them, they ended up being rejected anyway.
Either your org was way too picky, or your hiring pipeline was absolutely awful.
There's no real reason to interview 100 people and only hire 0-2 of them.
But I didn't make the rules, I just worked there.
I’ll call out Google specifically for this. They seemed to just make up their own questions. Difficultly ranged from basic coding to a math brain teaser with a lot of easy graph questions in between.
For context: this was last November.
Edit: lost the point in my rant - 2% approval is probably the result of flexing.
I met a guy on a train, who was working as a server, but just had some HTML on his resume. Like OP, most of these people wear that as some badge and can get into FANG anytime. Reality hits when they actually do reply and actually make it through phone screen
Amazon, Meta, Google were contacting people all over LinkedIn etc and everyone had an interview prep kit that you needed to study in order to get in.
The FOMO was real but it felt so weird and robotic. I rejected all of them. One meta recruiter was even offended when I said no to them. The extra € were not worth the hassle and I’m glad I didn’t going there FAANG rat race in the past 2 years.
I guess they were right.
Hang in there, AI hype is just started, I think within a year things will be a lot better, assuming there's no WW3 or Credit Suisse creates another domino effect.
This time it does seem quite useful, but I think in a few years it will be commoditized and offered from all major cloud vendors, probably even get to choose the models.
Yeah for inferencing, sure. Try designing and training the models. It takes whole organizations to do that effectively.
I think it's a Tesla situation. Tesla did very well, and I believe OpenAI will be too, but everyone else will catch up and then some.
Once the first model rolls out, knowledge from that model would eventually disseminate. And it doesn't even need to be on a human level, industry and academia experts could probably make very good guesses on what's going on behind the curtains - and follow up. And we already have plenty of good models on our hands, some even open sourced.
The idea was to build scalable solutions for HR to modernizing hiring, etc. and productize those. I'm not sure the external product piece ever panned out, but they were mainly focused on eliminated manual processes for HR inside of Amazon and migrating legacy systems to modern ones.
And that's revenue. We still don't know about profitability.
from my time at amazon this feel like only small step in fixing so many issues. engineering has too many manager in promotion race..layer after layer of manager..empire building focus and not customer benefit.
step 1 to rid these “professional” managers who not understand technology, installed themself at company for cushy job title and pay. many come from other uninnovative company like ibm.
IBM has to be shittiest company I had to interact with in a professional setting. We have an AS400 iSeries. It ran the company for many years but now we are building a lot of apps around it in C#/.net/blazor.
So, in order to use entity framework with iSeries one needs a data provider. Most of the data providers are generally "free", for example if you have SQL, Oracle, MySql, PostgresSQL you don't have to pay anything. BUT not IBM.
We tried getting a license for the iSeries data provider, and I literally gave up and said fuck them I will just use OleDb and write queries by hand. First, nobody could answer which license we needed for our use case. Then, I received a trial license, which didn't work....I spend days snooping around to realize it was for the wrong version of .Net core. IBM support was clueless. I finally received the correct version, but the instructions for the install had a link to a dead URL.
IBM forums were full of IBM employees responding with "sent you a DM" when people were asking questions....followed by many replies "i have the same problem can you share the answer publicly"....followed by "sent you a DM".
Seriously screw IBM, awful company.
and add another $15B of revenue growth
Why would someone rely on Google when everything else is either better or good enough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Giannandrea
Apple has a tendency to keep things close to the vest, but I am sure they have a plan. If you look at the M1 and M2, they have insane memory bandwidth that can be quite useful for running large ml models.
It would be interesting if Apple released models that can locally on your Mac or iPhone and bypass the whole only run these models in the cloud model of the other companies.
So the question on a lot of employees minds is: Do we try to relocate in time for the May 1st RTO and risk getting fired - or do we wait to see if we're part of the layoffs and then try to relocate with the remaining 2 weeks we have left.
But.. where do you go as an overpaid FAANG employee? Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc all have layoffs
As others have mentioned, you might not be able to find a $300k-$500k/year job, but you should be able to find something.
Eats out frequently, goes out for drinks occasionally, travels a few times a year, owns a new mid-range car, lives in a modern apartment complex or small home/condo near a downtown area (with a < 30 minute commute). New electronics, big TV, minimal but high quality furniture.
Pairing back on those choices you can begin to save every month, but not at a pace to buy a home in a reasonable time frame.
On dual income assuming consistent earnings YoY you can start to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood later in life, around the time many are starting to have kids.
I have to imagine kids can put a 5-10 year delay on buying a house without various kinds of assistance.
That’s what I’m saying.
> On dual income assuming consistent earnings YoY you can start to buy a house in a cheaper neighborhood later in life, around the time many are starting to have kids.
Dual tech income folks are in a great spot, but with gender ratios as they are, there can’t be very many such couples. Also this could be a function of social circle but I find many women (even in tech) expect a husband to provide for them while the kids are young.
https://sfist.com/2022/05/24/sf-still-the-most-childless-cit...
This is a case of lifestyle inflation and then complaining about lifestyle inflation. Public school is good enough, your kids aren't better than the rest of the people in SF.
The different experience is that you make more than your parents did at your age and thus have lifestyle inflation.
Obviously Bay Area amenities are worth something. Are they worth descending an entire social class? Maybe to some. But I think most rational people will go fix the computers at that car dealership, and put their kids on the travel team. You are not obliged to live an austere life just because someone offered you a (locally) mediocre job in the Bay Area.
Nobody's "descending a social class" by sending their kids to public school or having them do normal stuff, this is hysterical.
What city has 1/4 acre lots? (11000 sq ft (1020 m^2))
It is all a matter of tradeoffs and the level of urbanization you want. I cant walk to a bar or music venue, but I can still walk to a grocery store and a smaller number of restraints.
Interest rates are up, but property prices are down quite a bit (my house is down about 15%). While last year may have been better, I think is a still a decent market if you have a few 100k saved from a 150k salary, better if you saved more.
I think the parent commenter might be eating a lot of garlic since his move. :)
If you don't have a down payment and cant save one, you are in for a bad time everywhere.
Point being whats luxury living for one could be basic, minimum living standard for others. And I am talking about people doing roughly same IT type jobs.
So that below living wage of 150K in bay area is from that school of thought where having single family home, 2 car garage, a bit of front/backyard and 30 min leisurely commute by personal car is basic minimum standard of living.
To be clear my spouse would also consider this as basic things despite spending far fewer years than me in US. And after decade and half in US I still think these facilities/perks are matter of great fortune that I ended up with and not just oh everyone has it type.
Not in the bay area, though.
maybe it's time to swing back a little.
So why in the world would I want to hire an overpriced ex-rest-and-vester when I can instead hire someone hungry with a track record of making a difference at small to medium companies?
I also don’t think people generally have a problem with interviews. You have to be assessed somehow, obviously, and people at top companies still get interviewed when jumping to other top companies. I’ve really only seen serious complaints (that is, beyond mild grumbling) when interviewing is a huge time sink for a specific company, especially when that company’s compensation is lower and/or the communication process is poor (e.g. ghosting).
Why in the world would anyone interview with you if your company offers less than top tech for equal or harder interviews? (Spinning your rhetoric back at you for added effect. I don’t know what your hiring is like.)
People who need job will apply. Its not like some one is forced to apply when otherwise they could get million dollar a year job to develop deep machine learning AI at Google.
If that attitude persists, it doesn't matter how good they are, their toxicity will override that skill and they'll be out before long.
I'm saying this as someone who came here from FAANG companies and put in a lot of personal effort to not become the FAANG brat.
Your organization does drug tests, and you think this guy is the toxic one?
If you have a family to look after, you cannot casually have your partner quit their job, your kids to switch schools in the middle of the year, break your lease/ mortgage and move states overnight.
There are real transaction costs for employees that do not allow for proper free market function
But remote work showed how high they would have to pay to retain talent in a real free market environment.
So unsurprisingly everyone forced a return to office policy.
This is hilarious
Would you have thought a few weeks ago that California and the federal government could apply enough pressure to the largest pharma companies to set the price of insulin at $35? Me neither, but here we are. Come out swinging, we have nowhere to go but up.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/01/1160339792/eli-lilly-insulin-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/sanofi-insulin-pr...
Edit: Looks like California has gone so far as to contract to have it manufactured and set the price at $30, even better. Thesis is “change is possible.” Please excuse the length this example took to demonstrate the point.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3907583-california-mov...
Housing crisis, traffic crisis, transportation infrastructure crisis, environmental crisis.
Covid showed how many jobs can be conducted fully remotely.
You forgot freedom of assembly.
Alternatively, Covid showed how little people were working in the office too.
If remote work would "drive wages down", it would already do so -- since that's an option available to employeers now
The skilled on-shore would be paid more, the fungible would be paid less.
But again offshoring is not always the cheapest answer due to the inefficiency that time difference introduces.
I've been hearing this sort of doom and gloom since the 90s, yet here I am making bank in the USA still
Things that can be resolved in 5 minutes have to wait for a day.
AI is coming for those roles before they end up in India or PI.
Speaking of NAFTA, that's one of the reasons we're seeing Mexico City as an offshore hub. Better timezone overlap, can usually trust that their credentials are legitimate, and it's not hard to find a (Mexican accented) Spanish speaker in much of the US.
Plus the NAFTA TN visa means if they're good you can easily bring them across the border with no H1B headaches. Cheaper flights, too.
I know you don't mean it this way, but it should right? It's fundamentally cheaper - no commute on the employee part, no office space on the employer side. Greatly enhanced flexibility all round. Both sides should definitely splitting the dividends.
I'm fine with it if that is how it works.
This also means the worker can live where the cost of living is lower, and be willing to work for less--thus pushing down wages. Arguably the worker still comes out ahead though if she can live where she wants to...assuming she likes working remotely from a low cost-of-living place. If she'd rather live in NYC and go to the office, she might not be happy to see her wage go down.
yep - in the short term there will be some discontinuities like this. But longer term - more staff working remotely is going to take pressure off real estate prices in cities, so it will actually be justifiable even there that salaries can fall. Unfortunately since so many office space leases are long term, and rezoning of land use even slower, this can take a very long time to flow through.
> real free market environment
I'm hoping you're just kidding.
The tech labor market would not exist as it does today without substantial very specific regulations of various parties' behavior; e.g., stopping me from:
1. copying my employer's codebase, or
2. exfiltrating my employer's customer and pricing lists, or
3. holding two jobs at competing companies at the same time, or
4. shorting my employer's stock then actively sabotaging the company.
To say nothing of the even more basic stuff like squatting in my employer's office or even just using force to take what I want from the company or its executives/sharholders, for example.
Labor markets can't exist without lots of strong legal guardrails, and in the case of tech those property rights and contractual obligations are highly fictional and extremely unnatural. Intellectual property, non-competes, non-disclosures, securities regulations on insider trading, laws about industrial espionage and sabotage, the list goes on. All of it highly fictional and unnatural.
Modern markets are, definitionally, just a dynamical process playing out that is governed by an enormous collection of state-backed rules. Nothing like what you might consider a "natural" market, such as early civilized man bartering at the bazaar.
The amount of propaganda/brainwashing required to believe that something like a modern equity or labor market is a naturally occurring phenomenon... oof.
Positing a cartel in employment wages doesn't explain RTO.
You don't have to actually be good to find a well-paying job in this industry. You should be looking regardless.
Now your manager can no longer approve it, and even if your manager did previously approve it you might need to request approval from a higher authorisation level.
Otherwise if you have a family and are settled somewhere, I'd wait to find out before moving, then either commute during the week or get a temp spot once you know if you are RTO until kids are out of school where you are and you can plan a move more fully.
Imagine working there right now, that uncertainty must be so stressful, it would be for me.
Why are companies so interested in RTO, when the data seems to show that remote work is more productive? It seems like traditional management needs new training to sustain remote productivity gains, not that remote work should be discontinued to increase managers' trust in their employees.
I have found these people to generally be bad managers who use this to compensate for their lack of effective management skills, but that’s why.
Amazon had a lot of trouble hiring during a 'normal' market.
Feels odd to see that play out in industry.
“Eventually, Email = Gmail” was one conclusion: their email offering was not just “the hardware resources of a paid product (gigabytes of storage, etc) for free”, but also “the feature development velocity of a paid product (teams of full-time well-paid engineers) for free”. So essentially, other email providers wouldn’t last very long being undercut so heavily, and Google’s ad revenue allowed them to undercut forever. One of us pointed out that you might not even get other email providers in the first place, since Google could just hire all the email developers to work on Gmail. Even if they didn’t add any value - even if they subtracted value - as long as AdWords kept ticking along Google could still afford to keep them on payroll at a higher rate than any competitor could offer.
Our sobering conclusion was that Google could be this gigantic elephant sitting on top of dozens of different product markets, squeezing them all out by undercutting revenue streams and hiring all the talent - an elephant that would stay perched there based mostly on whether people kept buying ads elsewhere, and based not at all on whether they did a good job on the product or not.
Things didn’t quite turn out like we worried (it became FANG/FAANG instead of Google, for instance) and it seems like our pessimism was somewhat unwarranted, although writing it out now, parts of it do certainly ring true.
But! One thing we absolutely didn’t expect was that Google/FAANG would one day voluntarily decide to shed tens of thousands of “captive” developers! Many of these devs were doing no work, busywork, or redundant work, so these layoffs represent a huge and very real injection of talent back into the tech sphere (e.g. they were building a redesign of Gmail, but are now building the first design of a new product).
I know there’s an impression that many of the layoffs are “people in tech” non-developers (talents in their own right, to be sure, but somewhat less relevant for engineer-hungry startups), but many of the layoffs are developers, and they will find work building new competitors instead of rebuilding/maintaining existing market leaders. Something to be happy about at the birds-eye view of tech progress, even while the layoffs themselves surely suck for the individuals affected.
"Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted. "
So people [Amazon employees, the market] are just supposed to just excuse them not just for being crappy at analyzing project costing and the market and overhiring like crazy last year.. but also being crappy at their job at managing the layoffs this year, too?
... We're overstaffed... but we can't tell you who we're overstaffed with. (So just a hunch then?). But we have to do these layoffs. We, uh, just didn't want to rush who they, uh, were, uh, back then... before... so, trust us, we need this number of people gone. So we'll announce this, to put you on the edge of your seat that it might be you... because, y'know, it'd be rude to, announce who, uh, before we're ready?
Barely even trying to hide that it's really just about making Stock Price # Go Up (it didn't go up enough with the last round, I guess) and keep employees on their toes.