See also, Ken Burns documenting the death of the American Buffalo. Endless habitant encroachment keeps killing great parts of the earth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38056854
Farmers protect sheep, supplement their feed, have medical care and also keep the grass healthy.
But tech workers know how to fend for themselves, like using their hands and traveling and social skills and they know how society and things like farms work, right?
Sadly tech works have become so useless they don't have multiple tech skills anymore, many don't have any tech skills, just look at HN. Many blame Google because they can't even use search.
There are many self employed or employed by coöperatives but the majority aren’t and moreover most likely would not take either path, but I’m willing to revisit the question in a few years. I don’t think the dial will move much.
Many tech workers are paid well but overworked so even if they can't find an equivalent paying job you can still find a less stressful still comfortable to live on wage.
This is like the exact opposite of my experience. They’re paid well and have so little to do they invent meaningless problems to solve. Most big tech companies I’ve seen could easily operate with 50% of the engineers.
The idea of not having enough work is foreign to me. Sounds like bad prioritization of what needs to be done or a mismatch of roles leading to a dry pipeline of feature requests.
After all the improvements are infinite time is finite.
Only yesterday I was reading of a "lost" sheep that's been living on its own for 2 years (it's at the bottom of a cliff, people can see it from the sea but not reach it) and apparently doing great.
The title kind of buried the lede that nearly half of tech workers say they are willing to return after a layoff. This fits my own it’s-just-business attitude, but I thought spite would be more common.
>Over half (58%) of 6,000 professionals who responded to a recent Glassdoor poll said they’d never return to a company who laid them off. In the tech sector specifically, just 46% of workers said they’d boomerang. Men were slightly more likely to consider boomeranging than women, and older workers were more open-minded than younger ones.
It's not a super majority, but 54-58% does feel like "masses". I can see it both ways here.
Even this isn't very relevant. So they won't return to the company that laid them off, but that doesn't mean they won't work for a different company that laid off other people. I highly doubt any of these companies will have a hard time hiring people because of their layoffs. In the end, people will still go work for them because they pay at the top of the market.
>So they won't return to the company that laid them off, but that doesn't mean they won't work for a different company that laid off other people.
Sure, but I think the point is less "companies that layoff lose good employees for good" and more "if you layoff employee you lose that tribal knowledge forever". Is that something that a company will die from? Probably not, at least not in one fell swoop. But having half the people feel that way is some non-neglible brain drain.
Remember that part of the original reason the Big companies paid that much was as an anti-poaching measure. They didn't want competition getting top talent nor for top talent to be future competitors as they startup their own business. I wonder if the latter is going to pop up more with these kinds of movements.
Would love to see statistics on how many and which software jobs are moving from US to other countries now that these roles are 100% remote. Anyone know where to find this data?
Let's not pretend life offshoring is a new phenomena. It's been going on for 30 years now. It's been going on long enough that many of those jobs came back onshore and legions of books have been written as to why somehow the purported savings never materialized.
Yes but the pandemic forced nearly everyone to figure out how to get work done with nearly everyone remote. A lot of the roadblocks to remote work in the last two decades finally got solved. There are really no technical barriers of any kind anymore.
There aren't technical barriers but two huge social barriers immediately come to mind:
- Timezone
- Culture
Working with people in vastly different timezones is difficult. Just ask anybody working with people from the the US East coast and West coast. That's only a 3 hour time difference and it gets difficult.
Culture is another barrier. One of the things that's been hard for US-based companies to learn with working with people from India is in their culture it's impolite to say "no." They use other signals to indicate no. Americans miss those cues. They don't hear what the think is pushback and so they proceed as though everything were fine. Americans also find it difficult to work with Germans as their bluntness is seen as being rude. This is just scratching the surface for the culture barriers that abound.
This is why I say remote work != offshoring. They're two completely different animals.
The big win for US companies going remote isn't offshoring, but hiring people outside of big cities. The southeast and midwest are much cheaper than CA and the company doesn't have to deal with language, culture, and timezone issues.
I expect some cultural and experience differences between people who did and didn’t relocate to prioritize their careers, in some ways more than people who tried to immigrate but couldn’t get permission.
Let me give you some insight. Out of 100 applications, 60 don't meet even the most basic resume standards (zero experience, not in country, blatant errors). Of the 40 remaining, 20 do not have adequate experience in the field. Of the 20 left, 10 fail the phone screen, 5 fail the interview loop and a single applicant is far better than the other 4 who got this far.
You are not competing with 100 other applicants (unless you put zero effort into your resume and have no experience, in which case you have bigger issues).
The amount of blatant errors I've seen in resumes is massive.
A lot of people are talking about the numbers. But top senior engineers are hard to find. The ones who were let go also took institutional knowledge with them. This is why they are in demand, they are “proven” and they can operate much better in that role than their replacements.
I was not let go, but I left a company along with a wave of others (mostly those senior enough to be certain that they’ll find great work) when the company U-turned on their remote work promises. The team I was on was responsible for a major feature of the product, and only had two very senior software engineers, who both left in protest when it was ultimatum-style demanded that they’d move into commutable distance. It’s almost like we were let go. Like many people, we had moved away from an expensive city during the pandemic and were not looking to come back.
The company has replaced us with more than 15 contractors of junior to mid skills. Despite this, they are now periodically emailing us to come back, and work remote. It started as “come back, we will let you be remote”, and has evolved to much more appealing offers over time.
The difference between us and many more contractors is not that we’re John Carmacks and the contractors are graduates. It’s part seniority, but much larger part - a ton of knowledge about the systems the company had and the types of systems in the industry used for the feature we were responsible for.
Good luck replacing institutional knowledge with cheap labor. Every company thinks they’re special and they’ll have a great time with this footgun. And good luck to them! But I don’t know anyone who has found good employment now and wants to return to that.
Some layoffs could be more “amicable”, so I can imagine people wanting to return. But it will be hard for those in the industry who legitimately got much better jobs, which a lot of seniors that dedicated long tenures to the footgun company did. On the other hand, juniors might be easier to swap out than long-time seniors, though there are still costs to training them. It’s a lot of extra work before one employee is fully replaced by another.
> Despite this, they are now periodically emailing us to come back, and work remote. It started as “come back, we will let you be remote”, and has evolved to much more appealing offers over time.
I'm not sure that's a genuine ask. As soon as you help train the newbs up, they'll lay you off all over again.
But also realize that you and your co-worker were n=2 out of maybe 1000. You might be rounding errors on the effects management were looking for.
I think management was seeing such collateral damage as just rounding errors. But it did not work out this way.
Engineers above the senior level were far more likely to leave than juniors. This was because finding remote, well-paying work even today is still a lot easier for a senior, principal, fellow engineers, than it is for those less experienced. I would say principals and seniors were most likely to leave. They left the company I was talking about 2:1 compared to others.
Fellows/distinguished level engineers didn’t leave much either. But probably because the RTO mandate was negotiable for them, as many other things. Moreover, it might be difficult to move laterally to a different company and remain at that level, with that pay.
It was mostly that the middle fell out.
I guess companies always think they’ll get the undesirables and replaceables out with layoffs, but through a lot of secondary effects (morale, distrust, lack of stability, leaving friends, and so on) they often get rid of the people that are most in demand and hardest to replace.
It might not be 2:1 in every case, but I do believe that the ones in demand are most likely to leave in “soft” layoffs like forced RTO or whatever Musk was doing at X, where the employees themselves choose whether to to or stay and submit. If you just decimate the company evenly, the outcome could be less destructive.
I feel culture is emotional manipulation (e.g. the Cameo "Fameo" [1] or family). This works until layoffs need to happen, and then any justification for removing those same family members are justified.
So as an employee (not necessarily you, though), if you're angry that you got laid off, it's because you drank management's gas lighting kool-aid. And further, you shouldn't be amazed at how far the C-staff will go to protect their bonuses. Even if it means reducing your "Fameo" to 1/10th of what it was.
I'm also sure they made a calculation. If they want to get rid of 1/2 the company, lay off about 1/3. The rest will be through attrition. Those co-workers getting laid off, they're not usually management's problem anymore. They're yours to figure out. Hope you can self organize after half your staff is gone!
But in all honesty if management just said, "Thanks for you hard work. The company is doing really well. We're fortunate enough to be growing instead of shrinking..." -- I think that level of honesty would do wonders for employees when it came time to do a layoff.
I just don't see it mattering long-term. We bounced back from the dotcom crash to even higher levels. Same with other downturns. The importance of tech hasn't declined any. There are plenty of tech companies to find good jobs at that you can afford to carry a grudge, while companies have plenty of people to hire from still.
If some don't return, they'll relax hiring requirements until they're filled. Hiring requirements from top companies have a lot of room to relax - easier questions, less interview rounds, etc.
Maybe this time is different with higher interest rates?
Though in the case of dot-bomb a fair number of people left the industry and stayed left or at least switched out of SV-type company space. People need to eat and once many switch tracks they may not switch back—especially if they move.
Except we'll not always get those undergrads ... When most of the stories are about layoffs, we won't get any more majors, but it takes ~5 years to start (not that many people will change majors).
Well, they will need to major in something--assuming they want to get a degree. It's not clear that hiring (and pay) in other engineering fields is necessarily a whole lot better, even today. And, while I don't think there's anything especially wrong with majoring in English or history, it's also not necessarily a better path if you can handle and at least somewhat enjoy CS.
> Maybe this time is different with higher interest rates?
Absolutely. Startups are a low interest rate phenomenon. With high interest rates, investors become a lot more selective. Fewer reasons to risk money on startups when the government is paying out a nice return. The higher the interest, the harder it is to get credit, therefore there'll be less money circulating which puts the brakes on inflation but also slows down the economy given that easy credit is one of the drivers of exponential growth.
Startups are not a low interest rate phenomenon. I bet the average small business would be considered a startup in terms of revenue, potential growth and employee headcount.
What is a low interest rate phenomenon is the unicorn growth strategy and dump trucks full of cash going in to stupid businesses that don't really have a path toward solvency but have really nice marketing.
The world hasn't become less technologically dependent. Software isn't easy to write and even if LLMs make it more approachable for everyone, there is still so much digitization yet to come that there will not be less demand for software. The biggest question is can you afford to write software on what you can bring in if you're working at a body shop?
Software touches every single interaction anyone has in the world anywhere unless they live in some of the very, very few subsistence cultures still in existence. Some people may use less modern tools but even selling grain or fruits you grew will likely still need some kind of software and some kind of technology and touch markets in international places. The world is no longer local.
Maybe it's different this time. I don't think so. Interactions will be changed. Habits will be reconfigured. Software is not going away or getting easier. LLMs may make it easier to crank out some rote CRUD app but they still cannot replace reason, interpretation, or the development cycle.
> The world hasn't become less technologically dependent. Software isn't easy to write and even if LLMs make it more approachable for everyone, there is still so much digitization yet to come that there will not be less demand for software.
I’m old enough to have suffered through .com and the whole “outsourcing will take our jobs”. LLMs aren’t nearly as useful as on offshore junior engineer in a 12 hour different timezone.
Former junior recruits forget how relatively inexperienced and well paid they were when they started.
They might not come back but there will be plenty of new people willing to.
It’s nice they are finding more to life and about themselves to enjoy. Maybe the greybeards they made fun of had it figure it out all along and welcome you to your future.
It doesn't matter.
If a company is able to figure out how to build a great, high performing team without the office overhead, then they will have a significant advantage, especially in an environment where financing becomes more difficult.
66 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadGuess the sheep have little choice.
See also, Ken Burns documenting the death of the American Buffalo. Endless habitant encroachment keeps killing great parts of the earth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38056854
Farmers protect sheep, supplement their feed, have medical care and also keep the grass healthy.
But tech workers know how to fend for themselves, like using their hands and traveling and social skills and they know how society and things like farms work, right?
Sadly tech works have become so useless they don't have multiple tech skills anymore, many don't have any tech skills, just look at HN. Many blame Google because they can't even use search.
[0] sorry for the analogy.
Many tech workers are paid well but overworked so even if they can't find an equivalent paying job you can still find a less stressful still comfortable to live on wage.
After all the improvements are infinite time is finite.
Just attach more c̶a̶r̶r̶o̶t̶s̶ cash on the stick when their employees rent rises and they will start running back.
It's lying for clicks and engagement.
>Over half (58%) of 6,000 professionals who responded to a recent Glassdoor poll said they’d never return to a company who laid them off. In the tech sector specifically, just 46% of workers said they’d boomerang. Men were slightly more likely to consider boomeranging than women, and older workers were more open-minded than younger ones.
It's not a super majority, but 54-58% does feel like "masses". I can see it both ways here.
The title didn't imply otherwise to me.
Sure, but I think the point is less "companies that layoff lose good employees for good" and more "if you layoff employee you lose that tribal knowledge forever". Is that something that a company will die from? Probably not, at least not in one fell swoop. But having half the people feel that way is some non-neglible brain drain.
Remember that part of the original reason the Big companies paid that much was as an anti-poaching measure. They didn't want competition getting top talent nor for top talent to be future competitors as they startup their own business. I wonder if the latter is going to pop up more with these kinds of movements.
Single tech position gets like 100 applications, thousands of its remote. I think this guy is out of reality!
Devs in countries like Poland are now thriving, many of those jobs moved into cheaper regions!
- Timezone
- Culture
Working with people in vastly different timezones is difficult. Just ask anybody working with people from the the US East coast and West coast. That's only a 3 hour time difference and it gets difficult.
Culture is another barrier. One of the things that's been hard for US-based companies to learn with working with people from India is in their culture it's impolite to say "no." They use other signals to indicate no. Americans miss those cues. They don't hear what the think is pushback and so they proceed as though everything were fine. Americans also find it difficult to work with Germans as their bluntness is seen as being rude. This is just scratching the surface for the culture barriers that abound.
This is why I say remote work != offshoring. They're two completely different animals.
Google did a hiring spree for its Warsaw office last year because yes, they require people to show up there on a daily basis.
The pay was uninspiring though - something around $75k reportedly.
Meanwhile ClickUp offered close to twice that when it was present on Polish[0] job boards recently.
Remote contracts land somewhere in between in terms of salary.
[0] it's useful to note that these are also functionally Ukrainian boards, considering how the Russian invasion affected businesses.
You are not competing with 100 other applicants (unless you put zero effort into your resume and have no experience, in which case you have bigger issues).
The amount of blatant errors I've seen in resumes is massive.
I was not let go, but I left a company along with a wave of others (mostly those senior enough to be certain that they’ll find great work) when the company U-turned on their remote work promises. The team I was on was responsible for a major feature of the product, and only had two very senior software engineers, who both left in protest when it was ultimatum-style demanded that they’d move into commutable distance. It’s almost like we were let go. Like many people, we had moved away from an expensive city during the pandemic and were not looking to come back.
The company has replaced us with more than 15 contractors of junior to mid skills. Despite this, they are now periodically emailing us to come back, and work remote. It started as “come back, we will let you be remote”, and has evolved to much more appealing offers over time.
The difference between us and many more contractors is not that we’re John Carmacks and the contractors are graduates. It’s part seniority, but much larger part - a ton of knowledge about the systems the company had and the types of systems in the industry used for the feature we were responsible for.
Good luck replacing institutional knowledge with cheap labor. Every company thinks they’re special and they’ll have a great time with this footgun. And good luck to them! But I don’t know anyone who has found good employment now and wants to return to that.
Some layoffs could be more “amicable”, so I can imagine people wanting to return. But it will be hard for those in the industry who legitimately got much better jobs, which a lot of seniors that dedicated long tenures to the footgun company did. On the other hand, juniors might be easier to swap out than long-time seniors, though there are still costs to training them. It’s a lot of extra work before one employee is fully replaced by another.
I'm not sure that's a genuine ask. As soon as you help train the newbs up, they'll lay you off all over again.
But also realize that you and your co-worker were n=2 out of maybe 1000. You might be rounding errors on the effects management were looking for.
Engineers above the senior level were far more likely to leave than juniors. This was because finding remote, well-paying work even today is still a lot easier for a senior, principal, fellow engineers, than it is for those less experienced. I would say principals and seniors were most likely to leave. They left the company I was talking about 2:1 compared to others.
Fellows/distinguished level engineers didn’t leave much either. But probably because the RTO mandate was negotiable for them, as many other things. Moreover, it might be difficult to move laterally to a different company and remain at that level, with that pay.
It was mostly that the middle fell out.
I guess companies always think they’ll get the undesirables and replaceables out with layoffs, but through a lot of secondary effects (morale, distrust, lack of stability, leaving friends, and so on) they often get rid of the people that are most in demand and hardest to replace.
It might not be 2:1 in every case, but I do believe that the ones in demand are most likely to leave in “soft” layoffs like forced RTO or whatever Musk was doing at X, where the employees themselves choose whether to to or stay and submit. If you just decimate the company evenly, the outcome could be less destructive.
So as an employee (not necessarily you, though), if you're angry that you got laid off, it's because you drank management's gas lighting kool-aid. And further, you shouldn't be amazed at how far the C-staff will go to protect their bonuses. Even if it means reducing your "Fameo" to 1/10th of what it was.
I'm also sure they made a calculation. If they want to get rid of 1/2 the company, lay off about 1/3. The rest will be through attrition. Those co-workers getting laid off, they're not usually management's problem anymore. They're yours to figure out. Hope you can self organize after half your staff is gone!
But in all honesty if management just said, "Thanks for you hard work. The company is doing really well. We're fortunate enough to be growing instead of shrinking..." -- I think that level of honesty would do wonders for employees when it came time to do a layoff.
[1] https://archive.ph/2023.10.23-081817/https://www.nytimes.com...
If some don't return, they'll relax hiring requirements until they're filled. Hiring requirements from top companies have a lot of room to relax - easier questions, less interview rounds, etc.
Maybe this time is different with higher interest rates?
Absolutely. Startups are a low interest rate phenomenon. With high interest rates, investors become a lot more selective. Fewer reasons to risk money on startups when the government is paying out a nice return. The higher the interest, the harder it is to get credit, therefore there'll be less money circulating which puts the brakes on inflation but also slows down the economy given that easy credit is one of the drivers of exponential growth.
What is a low interest rate phenomenon is the unicorn growth strategy and dump trucks full of cash going in to stupid businesses that don't really have a path toward solvency but have really nice marketing.
Will also be impacted due to higher interest rates on their credit lines. Perhaps not as much but still.
> dump trucks full of cash going in to stupid businesses that don't really have a path toward solvency but have really nice marketing
That's what I meant by startups though. Startups that aren't doing that are just regular small businesses.
Software touches every single interaction anyone has in the world anywhere unless they live in some of the very, very few subsistence cultures still in existence. Some people may use less modern tools but even selling grain or fruits you grew will likely still need some kind of software and some kind of technology and touch markets in international places. The world is no longer local.
Maybe it's different this time. I don't think so. Interactions will be changed. Habits will be reconfigured. Software is not going away or getting easier. LLMs may make it easier to crank out some rote CRUD app but they still cannot replace reason, interpretation, or the development cycle.
I’m old enough to have suffered through .com and the whole “outsourcing will take our jobs”. LLMs aren’t nearly as useful as on offshore junior engineer in a 12 hour different timezone.
Alternatively, how much more they'd have to pay to get the same quality of people? I'd assume it's close to 20% more, which should be significant
They might not come back but there will be plenty of new people willing to.
It’s nice they are finding more to life and about themselves to enjoy. Maybe the greybeards they made fun of had it figure it out all along and welcome you to your future.
“That’s foootball”