Google has been cooperating with Samsung very closely lately. Maybe there's a pressure on Google from Samsung and the other big Android vendors to scale down the Pixel effort.
I've owned several Nexus and Pixel phones and they universally sucked. Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Pixel 2. I think that's all of them. I sent the last one to be fixed under warranty and they basically ignored me for six months (which I spent with no phone) until I threatened to get consumer protection from my country involved.
Yeah yeah, why did I keep buying them? I have no idea. I guess I assumed the rest of Android phones sucked more.
Count me as one anecdote that I love 'em! Best cameras I've ever used, paired with Google Photos means my wife is a happy camper and I get to look like a wizard fixing photos easily right on my phone. I can also install any .apk I want (hint: free youtube premium), why would I ever use a much more expensive, worse product like the iphone?
I've had very good experiences with all my Pixels. Only phone that was better was a high-end Samsung ($1000) and I sold that and replaced it with a cheap pixel.
(I've had various android phones going back to the T-Mobile G1).
I used to own a pixel phone and loved it. What made me move was the data collection, and to some extent lack of security updates on older models. Feature wise, I still like Android over iOS.
if it didn't spaz out while installing LineageOS on it, I'd still be using my Pixel 2 XL. it was probably struggling with some hardware failures (I dropped it a lot...) and wouldn't boot after.
Pixel 6s were on sale and I got one of those, no regrets. I am not enthusiastic about Google as a company, and I may consider an iPhone for my next cell, but I've been satisfied with the Pixel line so far.
I owned several Nexus phones as well as Pixel phones. I'd say that the Pixels were pretty decent; my main annoyance was with the fact that Google deliberately disabled some of the hardware features in that line-up to push their own proprietary solutions - most notably, there's no video output over USB-C nor Miracast, so that your only option is Chromecast.
I wonder what the reality is regarding Pixel's success; they lost me as a customer this year after it turns out the "free" Pixel 2 watch is mostly a paper weight because Fitbit and its new unified Google account requirement doesn't support Workspace custom domains. I pay for Workspaces, I paid for the device(s), but the penny has finally dropped in regards to their real motivations, they can't allow Workspaces to mingle with the private data regular accounts give them access to when it comes to Fitbit. Hopefully this will finally give me the motivation to wean off Google completely.
Cannot use them with a Google workspace account? Or cannot use them if you merely have a workspace account?
The former seems like it might be reasonable (and I wouldn't want to lock a piece of home infrastructure to a workspace account anyway); the latter seems utterly insane.
For Nest Protect (the smoke alarm), if you try logging in with a workspace account it just won't let you. Had to resurrect a very old, unused Gmail account just for that.
Google marketed Google Workspace (called “Google Apps” at the time) as a solution for individuals and families with custom domain. People still have these accounts and there is no way to migrate (e.g. purchases on Google Play, reviews on Google Maps, notes in Google Keep, etc.).
Not a work workspace but our family workspace, so very unreasonable. They forced us all to migrate to that...
For many years Google Home with all the Nest speakers and displays have worked fine. But you are not allowed to use the nest cameras, thermostats, doorbells, etc with workspace accounts. Hence I regret buying those.
And now I can't upgrade my storage or share my YouTubeTV account from my old family Workspace account. And migrating off is basically impossible, it's so frustrating.
I can confirm - it’s both utterly insane, and true. A number of the individual problems have been fixed over the years, but then new ones pop up due to rushed backend integrations.
Microsoft has a similar issue with their ‘personal’ vs ‘work’ logins.
God help you if you try to use the store to buy some things on a work account, or login to some services using a work account.
I have a workspace account that is my main email and such. With the Pixel 2 watch I had to use a @gmail.com account in order to use it. Not a huge deal, but annoying for sure.
Would be the same issue for someone who doesn't have an @gmail.com account at all. They would have to create one in order to use the Pixel 2 watch.
Pixel is not officially sold and supported in a substantial number of countries. It results in many issues, such as 5G not working when traveling from country to country. Or in case of Chromecast dongle, 5GHz Wi-Fi not working. Which makes my head explode, considering that they employ only "top talent" and has considerable resources to properly catalogue and implement all radio frequencies of the world.
Google cannot release any product worldwide. Their knowledge doesn't go too far beyond US market. You can call it Americentrism or just lack of competence of the ones in charge.
Institutionally, Google has the attention span of a Goldfish. Apple will continue to entrench their position as a leader in edge computing. Apple deserve their success; I hope they don’t get complacent once the Pixel division implodes.
Fair point perhaps, but they seem like the only game in town that seem to care about their customers. They’re far from perfect, but to me they are better than the rest. I really want Apple to feel some heat and have worthy competitors, but I just don’t see that.
Apple must turn a profit somewhere and charging a bit more to their high-end customers to give a bit more of a break to their low-end customers isn't a terrible method.
If you hate Apple's pricing, you have WAY more companies to hate on first.
This is misleading. Gross margin excludes operating expenses and taxes. Net margin or operating margin is more meaningful. Here's now the operating margins stack up for Q3 2023
Apple is still extremely profitable for a company that primarily makes and sells hardware. Nvidia has a higher margin but that's because of the AI boom.
I have been waiting my whole career to get a hold of their previous Nexus line. Then their Pixel line. Still no luck. It has been over a decade. Now it’s too late my whole family is now deeply invested in Apple’s ecosystem.
Honestly, I don't see anything that a phone manufacturer _requires_ to localise apart from frequency bands. How is Apple managing to sell iPhones with literally no other localisation?
Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.
Pixel phones are OK. They are just not priced competitively. They are priced like iPhones. But who are you kidding? Pixel phones are nowhere near iPhones.
OTOH I browse JavaScript heavy websites on my phone and I believe due to single-threaded performance, Chrome on Android is noticeably worse than Safari on iPhone.
My point is, Pixels are better than iPhones for some use cases and vice versa.
For people that care about vendor lock-in (which granted doesn't seem to be many), Pixels are great. They are supported on just about every network and you can root it if you desire.
There are continuous internal wars that we don't often see. You can get a glimpse of those in most of Google's hardware products (from Pixel phones to hubs to tablets) when they seem to be randomly prioritised/de-prioritised/re-prioritised every year.
> non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones
That's a kiss of death. I remember while working at Windows Phone team at Microsoft, a lot of program managers and designers were using iPhones and Macs. Unsurprisingly their own product never got off the ground because they failed to develop a vision for it. Android at Google is in a slightly better position, but this kind of attitude of not using your own product but preferring a competitor's one leads to inevitable decline.
I recall around that time reading a story where if Steve Ballmer would catch you using an iPhone on the MSFT campus he would blow up. At the time, comments were "make a better phone" but I agree with your position. It's surprising though, eating your own dogfood is one of the golden rules of development. Such a pity Microsoft didn't stick with Windows Phone.
It is not like those pixel phone are hand made and tuned to exacting standards by highly qualified google engineers like Mercedes Benz does it on some of its expensive models.
It is a commodity gadget made at some cheap shop in Asia. So people worked pixel phone have not much to do with its growth or lack of it.
Intel is only around today because the leadership was decisive enough to lay off most of the company early in its history, and they then proceeded to release a whack of innovative microprocessor products after these massive layoffs.
It's what happened. Intel was primarily a manufacturer of DRAM memory chips in the early 1980s. They pivoted hard to CPUs instead when it started looking like the IBM PC clone platform is a winner and their 386 chip could define the industry.
I don't know whether your comment is true, but the way to do layoffs while keeping innovation as high as possible is to do one round that is big enough that you can and do give guarantees to the employees that are left behind that they have jobs for life. Multiple rounds of layoffs is what really takes your innovation to zero.
Dell has a talent to do the exact opposite. HR should hire your service. But they would fire you since they wouldn't like your advice.
For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list.
CEO? He also has to follow orders.
Who's to blame then? I wonder.
The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.
From what I understand, the modern Dell (much like many airlines, for that matter) is in a sort of weird banking/finance business rather than technology and innovation. They are really good at managing capital and that is how they derive much of their profits.
Yes. And while Starbucks offers a decent service, Dell's has rather become absolutely mediocre.
I'm not even sure Dell has been that good at capital management as of late. His last good shot, and an amazing one, was to buy out his own company at a much undervalued price, with plenty of financing support from investment banks. 10 years ago already.
I’ve been through dozens of rounds of layoffs. That part I almost got used to. Staying innovative, and being seen as innovative by my boss, was the way to ensure I wasn’t on that list.
What killed it for me was when new management came in, refused to talk to anyone internal, brought in outside hires to be the innovators and change agents, and then shut down any of the legacy employees who tried to speak or bring ideas to the table. A lot of really talented people have left, and maybe that was the goal, as it avoids having to pay severance.
Funny. Here I was abandoning their products because they don't SUPPORT them. I dare say Google could have easily used their laid off staff to better maintain their existing products and through that restore confidence in their products and be able to achieve higher sales and profit margins.
Compared to Covid boom years... let's normalize the Covid years to their past trend and add the 2022 and 2023 data points as regular years. I'm sure they'd look just fine.
There are definitely cases where companies have true existential risk and layoffs can help get them through that.
That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway.
I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
> I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.
That is an issue of maligned incentives, not layoffs. This community is utterly insane sometimes, and I say that as a staunch unionist. This is literally Google, a company with an insanely large number of engineers, doing an insanely large number of different things, due to massive and clearly-net-bad-for-society consolidation, and there’ll still be hoards of people that’ll claim that the layoffs were the wrong thing to do.
Interesting point but I don't think it's that clear cut. Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over. Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation. So I think a lot depends on the leadership and incentive structures.
According to rando analysts who don't have a stake. Note that Twitter pre X as a business was unsustainable and I don't think it ever made a net profit in aggregate over its lifetime. It was all selling the dream even before the acquisition.
You state that as if your link does not substantiate what I said earlier. For the benefit of the people who don’t click on the link you cite, it simply proves as I said, that they never made an aggregate profit over their lifetime and you are linearly extrapolating the past (“starting to become…”) coming into the high interest rate environment where peers like $FB and $SNAP crashed and Twitter would surely have too.
Which it only had because Musk thrown out a number and people fought very very hard to make him stick to it. If he wasn't such a dumbass and forfeit due diligence, this wouldn't be the story.
Twitter laid most of their staff off then Musk gave them an ultimatum of: commit every day, all day, sleep at the office, to Twitter, or get fired. I wonder why there was more work produced in that period.
Both of those examples started with laying off basically all of top management.
If you’re just laying off engineers to meet some profitability measure for Wall Street then you’re not going to fix innovation. You need to replace all of management who are the ones who are in charge of what the engineers are doing.
Google is completely lost and doesn’t know what it does. Management launches new products just to look good and shuts them down a year later, and still the only thing making money is search and ads. That’s not going to be fixed by laying off engineers.
> Twitter/X seemed to increase the pace of product changes directly after laying of the majority of its employees after Elon Musk took over.
Changes? Yes. Often superficial changes. Change "Twitter" to "X", change blue checkmarks to yellow or gray or whatever, and sell blue to the lowest bidders. As for improvements? No, I haven't seen Twitter improve much if at all since the acquisition. In fact, the removal of third-party clients for example was a gross vandalization of the service.
> Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation.
This quip misses the biggest part of the story, which is that Apple didn't cut its way to success but rather acquired NeXT for over $400 million, a massive investment at the time, and Steve was merely replacing the old guard with his people.
Not just innovation, but layoffs are also devastating to the morale of the employees who are allowed to stay. This I feel is a factor that managers tend to grossly overlook when planning mass layoffs.
I am not advocating for this but you could turn that argument easily around: Not laying off people makes them feel very secure which does not incentivice them to take risks and innovate either. At least when they are no inherently driven to push their careers forward.
Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.
must disagree. A bloated company is the killer of innovation. Job security is no indicator for innovation. In fact, the most unsecure job produce the most innovative Tech (see Startups).
In a way, it's natural selection that drives evolution, by removing the unfit genes from the gene pool. This is arguably more important than mutation, and mutations would accumulate to be catastrophic over time without natural selection.
Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation.
The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.
>“Our members and teammates work hard every day to build great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to fire our co-workers while making billions every quarter,” the [union] group said in a post on the social media site X.
I mean no disrespect, but fundamentally a company is only able to do one of the two things: either hire, or fire people. Nobody is taking this away from them, and why would they? Once the leadership has spoken, it's up to employees to either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say. The union statement reads awfully like "We refuse to believe."
I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say, unions shouldn’t ever comment on decisions they disagree with because they are not helping anyone?
> either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say
Or openly criticize those decisions if they have the guts for that?
One of the motivations to unionize is to ensure that access to labor is mediated by the laborers collectively. This often manifests negotiations between leadership and the union over topics like the one under discussion.
I take their words as a call out to the aspirational future where the union gives employees a voice in the discussion about these kinds of hiring and firing decisions.
That's bad news for the IT jobs market. The big tech companies are firing people - those people will have no problem finding another job, but that's a job taken away from more average folks.
Combined with high interest rates, that prevent businesses from starting new projects financed through credit. Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work. Probably demand for IT roles in 2024 is going to be lower than previous years and salaries may stagnate or go down.
Aren't googlers famously burnt out and only know how to use Google products because of dogfooding? I don't mean to demean the people just laid off, surely some of them at least know enough to operate other software suites, but hasn't this been identified as a common problem?
That was when they were the darlings who did nothing but grow and snagging one of their employees was a stretch. Doing big layoffs kind of tarnishes the image.
I wonder if the well-documented nihism of Google, coupled with how all the marvellous internal Google tools seem to work a lot less well without their product teams running them, is secretly an employee retention strategy.
Feels like a stretch to me, I have to say. The only tool that comes to mind is Blaze/Bazel, which I haven't tried outside of Google, but the friction people experience is likely down to the fact that, outside of Google, you have to deal with a world that's more complicated than a single giant monorepo.
IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well, so if salaries go down then people change careers. For example, most people who can do IT could also become an electrician, for which the demand is currently high.
> Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work.
This is the sort of thing that increases demand for IT. Company had 40 artists and two IT staff, now they can get by with 10 artists but three IT staff, because IT has more work to do supporting the AI stuff.
Most people who do IT can become an electrician ? Im curious why you think that. Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble
> Most people who do IT can become an electrician ? Im curious why you think that.
It's fundamentally the same kind of mix between following bureaucratic rules and manipulating man-made technology.
> Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble
Real estate prices are still incredibly high, driven by undersupply of housing, which is unlikely to abate soon. As long as prices are high, construction will be profitable. If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.
There also seems to be some political support for doing something about the high housing costs, like relaxing zoning rules, which would allow new construction in places it's currently prohibited.
> If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.
The Empire is global. If the Fed lowers interest rates, not only can foreign nationals borrow at lower rates directly or indirectly from US banks, because of that the central banks in other countries tend to follow suit.
> IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well
True to some extent, but IT salaries are high in my opinion because until recently there was a very limited tech talent pool but huge demand for IT talent. I mean IT was only really seen as a good career around 15-20 years ago.
We just got lucky. We had the right skills at the right time. We rode the wave of big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook growing into the most profitable companies in the world. With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some and with plenty of freshly well educated IT talent entering the market there's really no reason to not expect this high salaries to continue. In my opinion they'll most likely fall to what your more typical middle class job pays.
Actually, IT was seen as a good career from around 80-87 and from around 95-01. It comes in waves. Then there is a bust, and those who went into IT just because it was seen as a "good career", not because they love coding, are weeded out.
And with only the passionate developers left, the cycle starts again.
Compilers did the same thing. But over time, as more ways to apply code and software got found, demand massively increased beyond what it was previously. This will probably be the same, at least if AI doesn't completely upend every single knowledge job there is.
II'm fairly certain I could learn the theorethical, physical background required to be an electrician pretty quick but that leaves me with precisely zero practical experience of actually pulling cables or building a switchboard without killing myself/others and/or buring down the building.
Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
> II'm fairly certain I could learn the theorethical, physical background required to be an electrician pretty quick but that leaves me with precisely zero practical experience of actually pulling cables or building a switchboard without killing myself/others and/or buring down the building.
What do you think the learning is meant for you to learn? You have to terminate aluminum conductors differently than copper to prevent corrosion etc. Learning these things is what allows you to wire a building without causing a fire.
> Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
Apprenticeship requirements are unfortunate -- basically giving the incumbents in an industry the ability to rate limit new entrants -- but it's not as if no one has ever done it before. So you do the apprenticeship.
> At least where I live it takes ~4 - 5 years education to become an electrician.
That's about the same as it is for IT, isn't it? Most decent IT jobs wanting a four-year CS degree.
And changing careers has retraining costs but not for some 18 year old who hasn't picked one yet. Which can balance out the supply and demand five years from now just as well as a 30+ year old changing careers.
> Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?
Do you know a lot of people in IT whose salary got lower?
They can do this too, if the difference in salaries becomes large, but it's obviously less expensive for someone who hasn't taken on the training cost for either industry yet so those would be the first to move.
Yep, not to mention that many of these engineers were already paid a fortune and are extremely over-hyped as they were basically just tiny cogs in a huge machine and they can't actually build anything on their own... Which is what is required for building software outside of big tech.
I agree. At the end of the day, FAANG engineers are just employees. I never understood the hype or the prestige they get. Also, unrelated but I've read your other comments and they are on point, you're too smart for HN. I say this unironically.
Thanks for the compliment. IMO, the concentration of smart people here is still very high. In most other forums, people don't even understand what I'm saying. Here it's like most people understand my comments but they disagree because they have an interest not to agree and so they require a higher standard of proof.
My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %)
Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense.
After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm. Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
You can be somewhere for 10 years. have glowing performance reviews, feel like you're making a difference, think it'll never happen to you, not even be aware the company is in shit, and then... tomorrow you're gone.
> TINA when CPI inflation (in the UK) is has been 18% in just 2 years.
The UK inflation rate was 3.9 percent in November 2023, down from 4.6 percent in the previous month. Between September 2022 and March 2023, the UK experienced seven months of double-digit inflation which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/306648/inflation-rate-co...
I can't tell from the context of your comment whether you believe the monthly inflation figures are inflation that happened in that month (the "one month's worth of inflation was X%") or if those are annualized figures (the "one month's measure of an annualized rate of inflation").
If you are of the belief that the monthly inflation figures "stack", you are saying inflation is much higher than the 18% in 2 years that GP reported.
If you are not of that belief, then the figures you cite are fairly consistent with the 2 year rise in prices being in the +18% neighborhood.
Owning shares in the entities for which money for goods and services pass through is the way to keep up with inflation. If I buy things from Costco/Apple/Toyota/Novartis/etc, then they increase prices, then their share prices go up accordingly.
This is a phenomenon of the last two decades. Before the fed started cutting rates after 9/11 (to support the country, the financial markets, the housing markets, etc.) both money market and savings accounts (you had to choose a good bank) usually gave positive inflation adjusted return.
Seems to me Treasury bills meaningfully outpace inflation, on average: https://www.bauer.uh.edu/rsusmel/other/lrret1.htm. But I was talking about cash accounts, which typically pay lower interest rates than T-bills or CDs (as noted on the above link).
In the late 1990s my savings account at the EmigrantDirect was paying about 7% with inflation around 3%.
This was not a term deposit, but a regular account, either itself with check-writing privileges or linked to a checking account with 1-3 day transfers. I think MMFs with check-writing paid similar interest, although not 100% sure as I never put my money there. Those were cash accounts as I could withdraw any amount, up to 100% of the account any time without any penalties.
Probably a confusion of what that percentage is - whilst the monthly figure is as you have said, the accumulated/aggregate percentage of inflation over those two years is probably what GP refers to as 18%
> Probably a confusion of what that percentage is - whilst the monthly figure is as you have said, the accumulated/aggregate percentage of inflation over those two years is probably what GP refers to as 18%
“Montly” inflation rates are usually expressed in terms relative to the prior year, not prior month.
Inflation measures are not across the board, they are aggregates. Similar to how pay at one company and profit is not ever the same even within the same industry or audience, different products have different prices.
Oh, I understand statistics, that's not what I'm saying: I'm plainly saying that so far, with anything I threw at it, the gov.uk inflation calculator is a plain lie.
In my experience--which is anecdotal, and thus shouldn't be trusted--nearly any discussion of inflation involves people waving around their untrustworthy anecdotal experience as evidence that the statistics are wrong.
Are you suggesting that while milk might have a price spike, carrots and beef would compensate?
But that's not what happens. What comes down in electronics. If you exclude food, shelter and medicine (things you need to live) the numbers are in line with govt estimates. But most people would bristle at this approach.
At least in the US, the government publishes overall inflation, inflation less food and energy, and inflation for each major category.
"This item looks different to me", "this category looks different to me", and "this basket looks different to me" are real feelings, but the government isn't straight up lying about inflation measurements.
> the government isn't straight up lying about inflation measurements
Agreed. The government publishes the methodology and the source data the final numbers are based on are generally publicly available. However, the methodology slowly changes with time. And whatever the rationale is (there is always one that sounds good) its effect is always lowering computed inflation numbers. And lower inflation numbers give government ability to keep printing and spending money -- a dream for most officials.
So while I do not think the government is straight up lying, it is slowly twisting the methodology due to seriously misaligned incentives. My 2c.
Reasonable by 2024 standards or by 1990 standards? I'm fairly sure that the P/Es of today would have been considered overvalued a few decades ago, when profits actually meant something, dividends were handed out, etc.
Share prices increase if the supply and demand curves for the shares move accordingly.
Share buybacks decrease supply of shares relative to demand, so share prices increase.
Share buybacks are likelier to happen the more profitable a business is.
A higher share price at time t+1 than time t means the shareholder can earn a profit if they buy a share and then sell later.
Ergo, profits mean something.
Edit: as a reply to the comment below this, please take a moment to look around and identify anything providing you utility that was the product of a publicly traded company.
I think they missed the idea that everything has a market. It is more of a macro econ class idea than the micro one most people take. Stock has is a market in itself. As well as the product they sell. But so is the money. The inputs for those different markets are different. You have very nicely described the market for stock dividends.
Dividends are not handed out because they are a silly way to distribute profits. Buybacks are better. This way people who want money out can sell some stock and those who don't avoid a burden of reinvesting the money as well as taxes.
Dividends mean a company managements thinks the stock is overvalued so it's not profitable to buy it back and it's better to pay cash out (there might be also some regulatory reasons like paying dividends to qualify for being an investment for various funds).
For those reasons avoiding companies that pay significant dividends is a superior investment strategy (because it means more competent management or management that doesn't consider the stock overvalued).
I don’t think you can generalize from one manager or even a team of management to all managers in every company.
But still your point about the absurd uncertainty of big company roles, even under glowing performance gauntlets as you so aptly say is well taken.
you highlight a paradox between the values the company espouses, and the ones they actually keep. In where it appears that, no loyalty is returned to the employee from the company in which the employee invested their loyalty so heavily.
Indeed, folks may quibble with this characterization, or even strongly disagree, but when cuts are made like this, even when valuable people could afford to be kept, that’s what it really comes down to.
Poor Google. The pain! What have they done to deserve this, oh heavens?
it's funney yeah. lack of empathy is correlated in psych studies with increase in power over others. people with less power need to be more empahtetic / in tune with other's feelings in order to get their needs met. makes sense. can realted from my childhood! :) haha
In summary: Patty McCord helped create the company culture in Netflix not ever holding on to people, if your position becomes slightly redundant or your performance falters for a bit, you're out. She apparently called herself "the queen of the good goodbyes". She says that she does not like the word "fired", that people are just "moving on" and that this is good for everyone involved. At one point in the interview, she gleefully recounts admonishing an employee she let go for crying about about it.
The twist being that she herself was eventually fired as well. The interview does not go very deep into this because "she doesn't like to talk about it", and just says that leaving Netflix was "terrible, painful and sad".
This is kind of silly. You probably chose to work at a company that “made billions”. You probably sought some perks related to doing so, be it remuneration, prestige, whatever. This is in part a game you choose to play, and the company that’s making billions is acting like a company that makes billions. You may in the future choose to make a different trade-off and work elsewhere? And I don’t mean some grow-or-die VC-backed startup.
I've worked across the spectrum from 8 people companies to 20,000 employee multi-nationals. From companies 30 years old to startups. It doesn't make a difference.
You likely won't see redundancy coming. Chances are you'll be dismissed out of the blue one random day.
Similar to me. The bigger the org the less likely you are to see it. My first one I see it in hindsight at a small company. They actually asked how many pens and pencils I had in my desk.
I have a hard time believing faang employees won't just drop the company they are working for if they are offered a 15 percent payrise from a competing company. Employees don't have to be loyal to their employers, why do employers have to be loyal to employees?
Cyberpunk is hypercapitalism with less ethics and even more survival of the fittest, plus cybernetics… and apart from the cybernetics part is actually not that far from some societies already.
Social resilience and social welfare have been vilified enough that I see just enough blanket downvotes in some social fora, as if its an icky subject or an allergy. Those who are at the top benefit from it, as long as as they have enough lackeys to do their bidding.
To me cyberpunk is something entirely different. To me it just means going back to "the garage", inventing cool shit, not worrying about making +200K per year while being your bosses toy, and sticking it to The Man
Quite a few BigCos had a genuine job-for-life culture until the 70s recessions hit. A few managed to keep it going until the 80s.
The big cultural change happened in the early 80s as MBA culture became the norm, with a shift towards zero sum neoliberal extremism and the uncoupling of pay from productivity.
We can thank Milton Friedman and Jack Welsh for much of that shift.
Friedman popularized an idea that shareholders should be prioritized above all else and Jack Welsh implemented it at GE, showing just how much profit can be made when you care only about the money/stock.
Better put, the relationship you have with your employer is a business relation ship. It's not personal. They are not your friends, nor your enemies. It's simply a convenient arrangement between the two of you for as long as that lasts. And it might become convenient for either side to change that arrangement at any point.
The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter. So, your risk increases with your salary. That's fine because it enables you to mitigate such a scenario by having savings.
I've been part of a big layoff round once. It wasn't personal. That was just my employer rounding up a large group of people to cut some meaningful chunk out of their salary expenses. It wasn't the last round either. The company, Nokia, ultimately got out of the phone and map business (I was in the maps unit). The final head count reduction was in the tens of thousands. A lot of those have since had successful careers and the Nokia implosion spawned quite a few successful companies.
But getting layed off is a bit of a rough ride. You feel bitter, angry, insulted, etc. But on reflection I actually got a fair deal and honestly I needed the wake up call that job security is a big illusion. I was just coasting in my career and a bit too comfortable. The moment was perfect as I was still in my thirties. This stuff gets harder as you get older, less flexible, and more dependent on job security. I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.
Smaller companies treat employees different, to an extent. Because in the end, regardless of company size, the owners expect a return of their investment. In case of owner-managed companies even more so.
To everyone their poison so, I guess. I learned that I am a large company guy, by a nature and nurture. Other people I know are the complete oppossite. One thing I learned so, no employee ever is safe. Not even lifetime employed state / public servants.
Honestly the size really doesn’t matter that much. As soon as it’s favorable you are out in ANY company. In my observational experience it’s only 10 to 20% companies who have heart and where they do actually try to maintain talent and foster good working relationships.
I think the size definitely matters, but I am not sure about the extent to which it matters.
I work at a company of roughly over 200 employees that is part of a much bigger org. Layoffs never happen where I am working. And one factor may be that HR has a different, in some cases personal relationship with their employees. That is certainly not the case in the parent org where large-scale layoffs happen every few years.
Edit: And I would not even attest that my company is one of those with a "heart", as you say.
That is a valid point. But no, the company has been around for 31 years and I have only worked there for just over 8 years. I am confident however that no large-scale layoffs ever happened there, because I have heard all sorts of harrowing stories from "back then", abusive managers and the like, but layoffs were never mentioned.
Might be survivorship bias though because the people that could have been laid off in the first few years cannot be there to tell the tale, of course.
The worse relationship I've had were in small companies. "Oh but we're so small we cannot afford raises" coming from the same people that are selling it millions later in the year.
I disagree. There is a lot of variance in small companies. There is a lot of variance in large companies as well (the famous "it will really depend on which team you belong to").
I really think there is little correlation between company size and your experience at such company. The predictive variables (if they ever exist) are elsewhere.
True, the difference is you are more likely to get the experience you've heard from reviews in a small company vs complete unknown in a big company (may be great, may be crap depending on your line of management)
In my network we keep joining the same (relative small) companies because we roughly know the culture we can shape and create an environment
In smaller company you are closer to person with the decision power. It is much easier to build closer relationship and have high visibility to avoid being laid off.
While that is true, if any given person has some X% chance of being an asshole, the more layers of management there are above you, the higher the chances you are at the mercy of at least one (and possibly multiple) asshole(s).
You could use the exact same argument in the other direction: the more layers of management there are above you, the higher the chances a high-level managers will protect your team from armageddon. Sometimes, it's only a matter of a single email or a chat with a CxO.
I stand by my original point: no obvious correlation between company size and quality of life inside it.
Don't kid yourself about small companies. Unless you're the owner, you're a fungible cog everywhere.
In fairness, anyone can leave at any time. Your employer, regardless of size, has to be prepared for the possibilty that you'll quit for a better job, or for some other reason. It would be inadvisable to get emotionally attached to employees.
The reason you're less likely to get laid off at a small company is that small companies don't have the capital to hire indiscriminately, so they're less likely to have large inefficiencies. The number of employees is already as low as they can get away with, given their current revenue, so only a significant downturn in revenue would justify layoffs.
Smaller companies also have a hard time hiring. A bad hire for your 7th employee is way more painful than for your 1000th, and you can't afford to spend to much time interviewing. If employee 7 does a good job and jives with the team, they'd be foolish to throw them out. Though I'm sure there genuinely are many small companies run foolishly out there.
Small companies (whether VC-funded or bootstrapped) have their own issues. They tend to be different from what you see at big companies but they're certainly not nirvana.
I thought this until a few days ago! At my “smaller company” of 150 or so employees, they just laid off a third of the company, and virtually everybody outside of the C suite was blindsided.
I think the posters who remind people that the employer/employee relationship is a business one have it right. We as engineers should strive as best as possible what our specific value is to a company. We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are more to the company than that. When we cease to have that value, or they cease to desire going down that path, they might end the relationship.
This is why the logical conclusion of this culture change is for anyone who can to move toward independent contracting. Like I mentioned in a different comment, I’ve had my best clients longer than any single job. But for the ones that didn’t work out, no one bats an eye at a 3 month contract.
> The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter.
And it applies to everyone up to the CEO.
At my company a new CEO came in to much fanfare. A year later they were unceremoniously turfed out because the board decided they weren’t up to the “new direction” the company needed to go.
And not to mention the people under the CEO who road her coattails. They were all turfed in quick succession (or smartly saw the writing on the wall and bailed first).
It’s a business relationship. That’s all. Treat it as such. Get as much money as you can. Don’t kill yourself in the hope your sacrifice will be repaid, it probably won’t.
Basically take the emotion out of it. When management talks of “our big family” they are just saying that because people like to hear it. It’s not true.
And once you’ve gotten enough years under your belt you start to see through the talk pretty easily. Trust your gut. If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last. Or at least plan according and don’t assume your job will be there next year or even next month.
> If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last.
For individual contributors leaving isn’t always that easy as most interviews now require Leetcode prep. If you haven’t already been practicing, it can take a few months to get prepared for the grind. This is even worse for folks who work and have obligations outside of work such as children or sick family members.
I haven't interviewed in years, but I had the impression that Leetcode interviews were mostly for FAANG type jobs. Are non-software companies (i.e. ones where software is not the product) doing this too now ?!
Honestly a very depressing outlook.
If I would really think this way I wouldn’t wanna work in this industry.
The only times I was really happy and motivated at work was when I was working within a team where we were really friends - I’m still in contact with most of them years after the fact and some became really close friends - this was outside of IT though.
Your line of thinking seems to be common in the IT industry and I wonder if it’s a good industry for me to be in long term. I only was at one company so far where we had a really close-knit team.
The only times I was really happy and motivated at work was when I was working within a team where we were really friends
Ditto!
A business is made of employees, but the employees are not the business. Sometimes that means decisions have to be made in favor (sometimes arguably) of the business over you.
Understanding the ephemerality of the situation can help you appreciate when it's going well and the people you work with, while helping you be prepared if and when something happens. Hopefully you will have gained a lot more experience, a bigger network of good friends, and have a decent nest egg to take you to the next job.
> Honestly a very depressing outlook. If I would really think this way I wouldn’t wanna work in this industry. The only times I was really happy and motivated at work was when I was working within a team where we were really friends - I’m still in contact with most of them years after the fact and some became really close friends - this was outside of IT though.
It's important to differentiate between colleagues and the business. The people you work with can become friends, but ultimately the business will do whatever sociopathic thing makes the number go up the faster/helps to deal with the crippling emotional turmoil of the execs.
You can be friends with the people you work with/for, but if there comes a time when the business and the people's interests diverge, the business will normally win. As long as you are aware of this, you can be OK throughout it (sortof, getting laid off really, really sucks).
Oh yea I totally agree with your comment (and the others in the chain in this vein)
It is extremely important (to me) to form some kind of relationship with the people I work with to stay motivated.
It doesn’t have to be everyone and super close friendship - but that certainly helps if it comes naturally.
And yea businesses are like a form of “slow AI”. They will do what is necessary to survive even at the expense of the people who built them. And it is important to be mindful of that. But I can’t work with a Damocles sword hanging over me constantly. At some point I have to lie to myself and assume the business will also act in my interest if I do good work - even if it’s a naive and arguably stupid belief which has bitten me a couple times already. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault” or anyone acting with evil intent.
In the end I live after Juicy J’s eternal philosophy:
“Everything is business
Ain’t shit personal.”
There is a difference between your colleagues -- as people -- with whom you can have a close relationship, and the entity that is your employer, which you really have to assume would jettison you at a moment's notice, because almost all companies would if the need arose.
I don't think of it as depressing to act as if a fictional entity like a corporation isn't part of your family. By all means, be friends with your coworkers, show up and work hard, but don't get emotionally invested in a relationship with an LLC or a C Corp that can't love you back.
Corporations are not fictional entities. They are real things with their own goals and decision making networks independent of, and capable of enacting larger environmental change than, any individual human.
It's completely the opposite. Only humans can take action and make decisions. A "corporation" is at most a piece of paper in some filing cabinet. It is essential in life to understand the difference between what exists and what does not exist. A corporation is an abstraction that is 100% under human control. It is something that doesn't exist.
> If I would really think this way I wouldn’t wanna work in this industry
I've got bad news for you about pretty much every other industry. They'll throw you away at the first opportunity to make the CEO a few more bucks too. It's the Jack Welchification of the American economy
It is depressing, with more years of experience I see that there are no friends at work, lots of lies and politics. Managers lie to their teams constantly. Team members lie about amount of work done, working hours worked, experience in cv, etc.
At first place of work I had really nice team of young engineers, we've been students without kids, with lots of energy. Job was quite boring, but days were full of jokes and friendship.
And yes, I would like to exit this industry but am not ready to switch to x0.2 salary. Golden handcuffs!
They're aren't brainwashing you, they are playing to their own benefit. In the same way that you "brainwash" them with a stretch of a resume and overly optimistic self evals.
There are people who recognize the game being played, and people who get their souls crushed because they failed to properly recognize how the pieces in the game move.
Absolutely right. I was exactly thinking in same direction as your comment. There is no "they" it is just people. Job seekers, employees, employers all get economical with truth when needed.
Your relationship with $COMPANY should definitely be non-personal and unemotional - it's not a sentient being. Your relationship with the people, from the CEO down to your boss and coworkers should be situation-specific. I'm not sure how this is any different from all your other relationships. Do you love a $COMPANY where you are the consumer, or did you get great service from a specific person? Is $FAMILY super important, or a proxy for the close relationships it represents?
And this goes both ways, employees can go out as they please. The opposite party usually get hurt when it happens (either the firing or employee go out), and usually coworkers / existing workers that get the bad things.
So in my experience, don't get too attached to company (or coworker either), and go out if things start to go south or if there's better opportunity out there.
So you’re not aware how much a visa screws you in the job search? And you’re not aware how much time raising a family takes from searching for a job? And you’re not aware of the fact not all doctors are in network for all insurances, that your new insurance company can and will deny your dependents their medication to force them to take cheaper stuff that doesn’t work, again, to prove it doesn’t work? And you have to sit and watch your wife or your child or whatever be hospitalized and crash and know it’s just what happens when you switch jobs?
> I actually got a fair deal and honestly I needed the wake up call that job security is a big illusion. I was just coasting in my career and a bit too comfortable.
Many people fall for this and as long as you are an employee, no job is ever secure.
> I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.
This gives some hope that there are those that have learned from the illusion and are now realizing that these companies do not care about you.
And if you're not an employee, your biggest client can decide to "go in a different direction" at any time. Of course, you try to diversify but you're still subject to the economy, clients having management changes, etc.
I didn't actually mind. It was completely anticipated, and we (me and my team) were pretty much ready. I think the company made the correct decision, but the reason they got there, was because they made a whole cascade of rotten choices, that painted them into a corner they couldn't get out of, easily.
I really wish that they would have involved me in some of the really dumb decisions they made, because I'm actually pretty good at strategic thinking, and could have easily advised them of alternatives.
But what is done, is done.
The really annoying part, was coming out of a 27-year "silo," into the current tech industry zeitgeist.
As long as you can get another job and can get severance pay, a layoff feel like an achievement than a loss. That happened me in my last company, one that I was very attached to for what I now think was irrational reasons. I wanted to leave anyway, but having it just happen and getting a nice severance pay was a perk. I am treating my new job as the complete opposite and the feeling is cathartic, which allows me to focus better on my work instead of worrying about the maintaining the illusion of identity in the company I work for.
I see what you are saying. I am an engineer-turned-EM and you don't know me, so please take everything I say with a grain of salt:
> Your job is NOT safe.
Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
I think a better way to put it is:
"A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. You must rely on yourself"
This line of thinking still means diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work, keep doing interviews from time to time, spend some cycles thinking about "what would I do if I where to build my own startup", etc. But it will not put you in the "oh my I need to accept whatever they offer me right now" path.
Especially on FAANG companies, it very easy to "get lost in the technical work" and to "offshore your life's direction to the company", so to speak. If you think this might be happening to you, I recommend involving someone else - a coach, a therapist, a friend, a brother or a priest. Whatever works for you. Someone from outside the company. It might be scary and uncomfortable at first, but taking the driver's seat of your life is worth it.
I understand this rationale, but personally I have an extremely hard time disconnecting from work. It sucks 40 hours a week, which is most of my "alive" time, also sucks my brain stamina. Finding life outside of work is not easy, and considering that your main "alive time" activity is something that shouldn't be a pleasure, and is a f*cking battle, feels bad.
A full time job is generally under 2,000 hours a year while you’re awake ~5,840 (16 * 365) hours a year.
Overtime, long commutes, and thinking about the job at home can make it seem like all you do is work, but it’s possible to spend 40 hours a week having fun while you also have a full time job. Remember use your vacation and sick days, and say no to excessive unpaid overtime.
I refuse to work anywhere that requires me to work over 40 hours a week. You can ask up front what that expectation is and start looking for another job if they violate it.
Most people don't have nearly inexaustible amount of energy, so they need to rest and recuperate (merely just sleeping will not do it for them). So, if they have a demanding job, the 40 hours of week of having fun outside of work will largely consist of vegging on the coach in front of some TV show, or some similar low-energy activity.
It’s also possible people are talking about mental fatigue when they’re really dealing with depression.
If you’re mentally exhausted from work then going for a walk through a park is relaxing enough to regain some energy. If you’re depressed then you would still be vegging out on the weekend.
Which isn’t to say vegging out sometimes is a bad sign. Watching TV is fun in moderation.
What you wrote is true only in the narrowest sense: of course people “can” rationalize. People also “can” fly to the moon. That doesn’t mean that is what people are doing, and it comes across as deeply unempathetic to express as a default assumption.
I understand that people can be legitimately held back by circumstances outside of their direct control. That is also true.
I believe that on average people tend to like to take credit for their accomplishments and find someone/something to blame for their lack of accomplishments.
Ask the people who would've gone pro if their high school coach hadn't been a dick. Or who got passed over for a promotion because of work politics.
You can see the sun rise in the east. Despite what you seem to believe, you cannot see what is going on inside someone else’s head, which is essentially what you are claiming to be able to do.
I don't need to see into their heads. They have mouths and I have ears. I can literally hear people talk and not take accountability for their situations.
Perhaps internally they are taking accountability but all the evidence I have says that many do not.
That's perhaps true, but the lack of energy is also simultaneously true. Just a tougher-than-usual week at work can give me crippling headaches from pushing myself to the brink. The time after work is definitely spent recuperating, so that I can fight another day.
No, it’s definitely true. Other things can be true as well, of course.
But if you’re not accomplishing the things you want to accomplish you should deeply consider the possibility that you’re lying to yourself before you accept that your circumstances are at fault.
For some people, yeah. For others - you don't argue with a an attack of crippling headache, you lie paralysed in a convulsive spasm, waiting for it to pass. And then you remember that you perhaps should rest more.
I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical.
The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.
But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.
People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.
This is just unrealistic. When layoffs happens, whole departments can get cut. They don’t differentiate performers.
Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.
Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.
The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.
But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.
Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
Perhaps in the hyper inflated SV economy, but in the rest of the world you don't get to retire until you've reached the normal retirement age (minus a few years perhaps), and that makes it quite natural to see newly employed software engineers who are in their mid or even late 50s. I've worked with plenty of them.
I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
Once you get into late 50s/60s, I know quite a few people in tech at that point who have had reasonably well-paying jobs (though certainly not top-level FAANG salaries) who have presumably managed their finances well who are pretty much ready to wind down at that point--whether forced or otherwise. They mostly haven't classically retired but they're working part-time on often IT-adjacent types of projects.
People who think this way are blinded by their own worldview. A large number of the best engineers aren't in the business to become wealthy, and they don't leave the industry if they become wealthy.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.
People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.
But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.
I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.
That's why I said "in many parts of the US". There are certainly places in the US where someone can live quite comfortably on $100K. There are other parts where it would be quite difficult and where it would be almost impossible to own a home on that income.
Simply not being "homeless and hungry" is also not synonymous with "living comfortably". In many US cities, $100K is not enough to have much financial security and without owning a home it is more difficult to have much personal autonomy.
And you still haven’t listed a metropolitan area - and I’m being pedantic because you may not be able to live in Manhattan or downtown Seattle - for $100K?
This would be a 66% pay cut for me. As in, it would take 3 years of that pay to match one of my current year’s pay. Investing aggressively and retiring at 50 seems like a smarter option.
>Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern.
Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?
Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age.
This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable.
Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
There are a lot of decent programming jobs anywhere in the world too, we might not be FAANG but jobs are decent enough to raise a family and build a house.
Well no, I clearly wasn't saying there is no ageism at all. I was taking issue with the comment regarding developers having to leave tech over 50 years old.
Within the AI bubble, I think there is lots of ageism, but in real world mission-critical i.e. "serious stuff" there is plenty of jobs for experienced engineers.
There absolutely is ageism, but it's not as widespread as many younger devs seem to think. It also tends to be concentrated in a particular segment of our industry. Big picture, there isn't enough ageism to lose sleep about it.
> The idea that you must retire from tech before 50 is so incredibly false I have difficulty believing this view is even shared here.
Must retire? No, of course not.
I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.
For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.
But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.
Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.
>Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.
Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.
Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.
For anyone making this kind of money at an early age, don't spend it... invest it.
If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.
Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.
Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.
This is good advice. But it's worth pointing out that by default many of these people are heavily invested in GOOG. And those that aren't are probably heavily invested in market instruments propped up by the GOOG price.
So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.
I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.
Well, yeah I agree. But I think most people do by default. That's really the idea of vesting... to align employee interests with the interests of the company.
If you've built up a 1.2M / year lifestyle on a 1.2M / year income you've made some terrible mistakes, I doubt some internet advice is going to solve that.
>If you've built up a 1.2M / year lifestyle on a 1.2M / year income you've made some terrible mistakes
You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.
One of the pieces of career advice I've given my kids is: when your pay goes up, be very cautious about changing your lifestyle to match it. Going up that ladder is easy -- going back down is painful.
Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.
I was making $x in 2020 as a CRUD developer in Georgia.
I got a job at Amazon and was making $x+$100K
I was Amazoned last year from a remote position. By then, I had paid off debt, downsized from my big house in the burbs to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida and could easily live off of $x- $30K even though I’m making around $50K more than I was making 3 years ago.
Guess how much I stressed when Amazon started Amazoning?
I can't speak for being let go past 40, but every place I've worked (including a startup) have had IC developers over 40, and all but one over 50, working there.
You're never going to make as much again after 40: based on what metrics? Ageism is illegal in the US, and if this is true for you, you probably did not cultivate the type of software engineering skillset that scales well as you advance up the career ladder.
Legality just isn’t a concern when it comes to big companies. I am convinced that if someone looks at history from far away in the future, they will compress feudalism and industrial capitalism together.
These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.
Serfs being bound to the land, and power being directly held by those who provided military service are pretty stark differences between Feudalism and Capitalism. Not even Marx equated the two systems.
Yeah, but parent is saying if you zoom out. We don't know what will come next; it could be dramatically different. Nobody saw industrialization and its attendant social order coming.
I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".
Agreed, but highly doubt the effect is nearly as dramatic as claimed. If the effect is to the extent that engineers in their 40s can never make the money they made in their 30s, that would be trivial to prove. Even a big corp would have significant trouble defending such a statistic.
This got me thinking, I'm wondering how this will interact with the fact that technologically, we're getting increasingly better abstractions. So there's less pressure to learn what happens physically, the way that folks like Wozniak had to.
Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
> Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.
We are getting more abstractions, not necessarily better ones. I much prefer working with people who figure out how things work under abstractions rather than relying on them blindly.
Unlikely. Some people really just are better at low level than high level (and vice versa.) Further, I would say anyone who started after say... '97 never needed to have that layer, and '87 may be true too. The true pressure hasn't existed in over 25 years and yet we still have low level expertise because embedded will continue to be a use case.
The most powerful abstractions are typically not free. The rate of performance improvement from improvements in hardware has slowed down and might continue slowing down. Thus, the pressure to learn what happens behind various abstractions might actually increase, if advantageous performance improvements can primarily be obtained by peeling back the layers of abstraction at the cost of some development efficiency, since you can't just wait a couple of years for hardware to develop to a point where it can handle your inefficient abstraction anymore.
How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age? I'm in my late 30s, starting to feel fatigue in dealing with nasty little problems on a daily basis. I can say whether an approach is good or bad, but actually coding the stuff with all the modern ephemeral frameworks and libraries is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. I would want to afford to do "recreational programming" on greenfield projects, unbound by time and business requirements, but it is a luxury.
50 year old here. You replace reflex intelligence with applying wisdom.
I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.
FAANG jobs and organisational structures are not the norm across the world. The ratio between "people fixing stuff" and "old wisemen" is heavily skewed towards the former.
No doubt on the latter. I write a lot of "wisdom based code" to "fix stuff." Ideally before it needs fixing. :)
Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)
Good for you, but you are in a privileged position. Over here in grim Eastern Europe and outside a capital, your best chance is to find a remote job that doesn't actually suck and has longer-term prospects. Climbing to a managerial position means controlling people and being in touch with other managers posting bullshit on LinkedIn. Nobody will hire you to just write "wisdom-based" proof of concepts or whatever.
Sounds like you could be having health problems or just depression. You might mention this to your doctor at your next check up. What you describing doesn’t sound like normal aging for someone in their 30s.
> How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age?
I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.
What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.
> How about the general decline of cognitive ability with age?
This is a real issue at say 85, not at 45. You almost certainly aren't quite as quick as you were when you were 25, but on the other hand you typically know a lot more and the experience probably means you actually make far fewer errors overall...
To be a 50 year old engineer you would have had to start your career in the 90s. There weren't 10% of the number of SWE in the 90s as now. That's why you see the profession skew so young. I have seen no evidence of older engineers having trouble finding work.
My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder.
Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...
Being ready to retire at 50 would be a good thing, but getting laid off in your 40's is not a death sentence. I'm 63 now, still working as an engineer, and I was laid off in my 40's, twice. In addition to the emergency fund, another great way to build some security is to keep learning new stuff. In my experience the older engineers who get into trouble are the ones who try to rest on what they know and inhabit a niche they've built for themselves. In our business knowledge evaporates and niches crumble.
The last three companies I've worked for prefer hiring older workers. Well, they're not looking for age -- they're looking for very refined skills and experience -- but those thing are highly correlated with age.
If knowledge evaporates, maybe it wasn’t useful knowledge after all. Likewise, if a niche disappears, it wasn’t a good niche. Good long term strategy in terms of developing your career technically comes down to identifying knowledge and niches that aren’t going away any time soon. A person can have more or less insight when it comes to this.
> Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.
This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.
In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.
I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services
When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks.
One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress.
The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS.
The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team.
Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years
> Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence.
That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems.
But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.
Agreed. So much in life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you look at your employer as an exploitative user of your life, then that is what you will get out of it. You will continually feel raw about things that happen, imputing mal intent where there is none. If you imagine upper management as sinister mustache-twirling villains, you are going to despise everything they say and do, regardless of its merit.
There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.
No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.
A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.
The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.
I don't think this necessarily holds in the world of remote work. At least for me, relationships are very surface level. Almost no friendly banter, limited 2 second "How was your weekend?" before meetings that no one cares about. Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen.
This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants.
I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.
I get this, but I will admit to missing the camaraderie I got from working in person with people. I miss grabbing lunch with someone or a drink after work. But thats in the past now, and a job is just a place I exchange life hours for dollars now.
Me and one of my employees are going through almost identical and seriously difficult personal times. Our company and the people within it have really rallied around us, providing personal and professional support in ways I could never have imagined.
I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful.
We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it.
Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.
Unicorns exist but in the job search it’s a crap shoot to find one. Nearly impossible to identify in an interview setting and likely only through world of mouth.
Impossible to diagnose during an interview… because it depends on you as well. Caring is a transient thing, I’ve had crap employees, and now we have an awesome “soldered” team, which every previous employee could have created… but didn’t.
I’m not saying you have total control over it… but it depends on how people interact.
This has long been true to some degree when you work with people scattered around the world. But it's a legit concern that, overall, we're probably developing much shallower relationships with the people we work with compared to when we were together in-person more of the time. Doubtless there are people who prefer just tuning out co-workers as much as possible. But it's reasonable to ask how it will affect many companies in the longer run when many co-worker relationships are very surface compared to pre-COVID.
I think change in the remote work world is that we can no longer take these casual relationships for granted, or assume that they will just come into being. In this new world, we have to be intentional about building them.
Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.
In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.
I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.
I've said it many times both here and in "real life" - teams filled with any sizable proportion of consults (15-20% and up I would say) are one of the clearest, brightest red flags you could see.
I've seen first-hand organizations shift from 100% employed teams to being majority consultants, and the majority of those consultants on 1-2 year contracts then leaving. Code quality goes to absolute shit. The name of the game is spending the first half of your contract not getting fired and the second half looking for the next contract. Zero documentation. Refusing to do turnover meetings. Not showing up for the last day/week of the contract because their next contract wanted them to start earlier so they didn't care if they got paid for this one or not. Most egregiously someone just brought in their next contract's laptop into our office with over a month left on their contract.
None of this happens with employees. Sure you'll occasionally have someone quit with minimal or no notice but that's the exception. We had to basically assume that any time we got in the last month of the contract was a bonus. Consultants work for their recruiting firm, not for your org, and they behave accordingly.
Very much agree.
I am working with probably 40 consultants on a team of 80.
The absolute lack of pride in their work is pushing me to my breaking point.
I will know if I am going to leave in a couple weeks, 2 things need to happen for me to stay; I get promoted this month and half the consultants leave. If both don't happen I think I am gone.
> Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen.
I think after a point, it is up to us to create the culture we want to see in a team. Someone has to start sharing more things, start talking about more things so others will feel like the same. Have a pizza session after every few successful sprints. Share puzzles and other things regularly so people have more things to talk about. It is easy to feel detached when everyone only uses a group channel, but a lot of meaningful connections happen when you do talk 1-1 in private.
I mean I have worked at places where no one even exchanged email ids when they are about to leave the company, and lurked in online places where people whom I have never even met employed me immediately when i mentioned that my day job company was going bankrupt.
> I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical.
> The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
> ...
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org.
Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship.
For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most.
Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days.
Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
> Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.
> and I would not think of them very much after a few days
To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.
> Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
Why? The lay-offs are so broad, not selective at all. You're just as likely to get cut if you're working hard or not, if you're overpaid or underpaid. It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?
When companies make broad cuts, especially if they're eliminating projects or divisions they've decided are no longer important, the reality is that they don't do a lot of micro-optimizing at the individual level about who they keep and who they shed.
Sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time--and maybe it's even the impetus to do something different.
> It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?
Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.
The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.
All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.
This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.
Layoffs that don't target whole teams are always a mix of politics and performance. The lie that they aren't is what people tell themselves to feel better.
For anyone reading this, please don’t subscribe to this level of cynicism.
For SWEs at Google and almost anywhere else, the wind has blown very favorably for you and that’s something to be celebrated.
The direction of the wind has shifted, but we can never expect it to stay blowing in one direction forever, even if others get lucky and catch one like that.
You will no doubt set your sail and take it to new and wonderful places.
Let’s take a minute and be grateful for how good SWEs have it - we are frequently so insanely disconnected from the realities and struggles of the normal working class and we should remember and express some gratitude for it regularly.
That wasn't how I read that comment. What I heard him say was that we should be grateful for having been able to take advantage of an unusually favorable environment, while at the same time recognizing that it's been an unusually favorable environment that will, sooner or later, regress closer to the mean.
This is well-stated and appreciated positivity. It is disheartening to see the detractor/logic-leaping replies that followed. Thank you for writing it.
"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.
It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything.
As others have said, the employer-employee relationship is first and foremost a business relationship, i.e. transactional: you work and they pay you. When that relationship doesn't work any more for one side or the other, it ends.
It does often happen, of course, that professional friendships or even personal friendships develop. You are, after all, spending a lot of time with your co-workers. But don't think your good relationships or friendships will help if the business decides a layoff is necessary.
>"Your job is not safe" does not mean you should do everything possible to keep your job -- allowing yourself to be unfairly exploited and abused.
In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.
This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.
Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).
> This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use.
But that’s exactly the kind of relationship it is. Instead of maintaining some fantasy, you should call a duck, a duck.
I wouldn't say that people higher up can't be your friends, but when their office and them personally aren't the same thing.
I've seen family members fire other close family members, because a business is a business. Nothing special about it.
You can be friends with your colleagues, but when you understand that their role at a company is separate from your personal relationship - you may just get friends that transcend your employment.
My personal attitude towards employment - "I work for you while our goals align". Businesses most definitely treat any employee the same way.
That's a bad strategy unless your highest priority is to avoid work. If you want to make more money or have more stability, you will absolutely do better on average if you do more than the minimum. While high performance does not guarantee security, and management doesn't always make the best choices about who to let go, the "do the minimum" people do tend to be the first to go. You don't have to outrun the bear, you have to outrun the slowest guy running from the bear.
Ok, maybe it's excessive, but surely going the extra mile when the relationship do good work <--> job safety is broken is something, at least personally, I won't do.
I'm not saying it's guaranteed to protect you, I'm saying that on average you are going to come out ahead. I've been in the industry 30 years. I've seen all kinds of good and bad management, firings, layoffs, promotions, and attrition. When you excel at your work, the odds are very good that someone will notice. Even if your boss does not, your colleagues likely will. That turns into strong referrals, which helps you find better opportunities whether or not you get laid off.
This is good and realistic advice. Companies exist to make profit and returns for their investors/shareholders and ultimately they will do what this necessary to make that happen. Layoffs are just another (unfortunate) business transaction.
I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.
Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.
I wouldn't put "loyalty is dead" so starkly. But certainly lifetime employment from either side of the fence is absolutely not the norm. I've generally stayed at places a reasonably long time (arguably too long once or twice) but I still haven't made it much past a decade.
Loyalty is absolutely dead in the employer => employee direction. The second it becomes financially advantageous to have layoffs or to fire one person in particular, it will happen. Your direct manager, maybe even your skip, might fight for you to stay. But if someone 6 levels above you decides your time has come, that's the end of it. The test for whether loyalty exists in this direction is the answer to "you can keep this person at the cost of a negative financial impact for your organization - you will not make this money up in the medium term." What does your manager say? Your skip? The CEO?
There is absolutely still some loyalty in the other direction. Lots of people here would say it's misplaced. When it works out for you (cachet in the org, seniority, whatever) it can pay off, but for lots of people it only gets them burned when they get laid off with outdated skills in outdated tech because they were a "company man" for the last decade.
In Japan, there are stories of business men killing themselves because they have to lay off workers. The cultural norm there is that you’re employed for life - either your life or the companies, and both parties act to ensure that’s a long life. Maybe a little dramatic, but the cultural sentiment is there.
Google is cutting a few hundred R&D jobs out of their 180K employees, and countless ventures. These people could be repositioned, these people could be absorbed elsewhere. Google is wildly profitable, with record profits, which by definition means what they’re not falling on hard times.
I don’t know why we keep repeating the “companies exist to make profit for shareholders” line.
It’s barely real, it’s hardly law, and the more we say it, the worse companies will act because we’ve all accepted fate.
Companies exist in our society. They don’t have a right to profits. Any profits is a result of patronage and goodwill of the population. We can change laws, and cultural norms, and worker and environmental protections. We don’t need to be victims of greed like it’s some inevitable consequence of capitalism.
A company is not your friend, or your enemy. It's a machine. See it as such, use it as such.
A particular person above you in the management chain may actually be your friend. It does not mean that that person would be able to protect you from a layoff; that could be a conflict of interest. That person might give you an earlier warning so that you could start looking around ahead of time. That person could give you a glowing review and references for prospective employers. That person might introduce you to someone who might be interested in hiring you. But that person operates the machine, and plays by the rules of the machine, to which you have agreed when you have signed your offer.
Build good relationships with coworkers; this can be helpful, and is just more pleasant. But don't try to build a relationship with a company; you can't.
- never assume that just because it’s obvious to you (and your coworkers and boss) that it would be really stupid to lay you off or fire you, that they wouldn’t do it anyway.
A lot of what is going on IMO is burnout and disconnection from the on the ground reality at the executive layer.
That means short sighted, stupid, long term self harming decisions.
But just because what someone is doing is clearly stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. A hard lesson to learn sometimes.
Or, quite simply, the performance of an employee or division is not the only determination in layoffs. You could lay off half of teams and fill them in with ostensibly high performers in other teams, and then be worse off than before because the high performer was dependent on context and fit.
Or, you may have a division that is profitable, but it takes an outsized attention in the organization relative to its profitability and the loss of revenue is made up for focus in the rest of the organization. (Ideally, you would find a way to spin that off or sell it, but there are times where the tight integration makes this unfeasible.)
And yes, there is disconnection from the on-the-ground reality too. (and all sorts of things) - but this all goes to say that layoffs, when executed, often are not correlated with individual performance.
What you’re saying is the nice, rational way to describe a scenario.
There is that, and it does happen that way often.
There is also sometimes people just do stupid, self harming things. Either because they are not able to properly process/know/understand what the consequences will be, or because their short term incentives encourage them to at their long term detriment.
Or because the organizational incentives make it worthwhile for them to harm the actual organizations long term interests, and they will be rewarded for screwing over the organization this way.
It’s easy for engineers in particular to look at 2+2 and assume that everyone else knows 4 is the obvious answer, and hence will act appropriately. and they just need to be shown the truth if somehow they don’t understand this
But that isn’t how people often work, especially when dysregulated, stressed out, under outside pressure, etc.
Often, there are many people between the decision makers and the folks who know the actual truth and the inevitable consequences who have incentives that will make them actively hurt anyone trying to tell the decision makers the truth - often because the decision maker implicitly or explicitly wants it that way.
even engineers, though it’s often hard to ‘know’ that when you’re in the middle of it.
Many people will burn their lives to the ground until everyone agrees 5 is the correct answer. Or happily reassure their boss 5 is the answer while burning everyone else’s lives to the ground.
That can make many real life situations very surprising and frustrating for engineers in particular.
Because how could someone do that based on ‘wrong’ (usually just not the same) information? It’s stupid!
Because sometimes for many people, the individual/self interested ‘smart’ thing is to be as ‘stupid’ as possible. And that strategy is not something someone can just change on a dime. It’s inherent.
And sometimes people are just stupid. Even otherwise really smart people.
> Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
How is that? If a job is less secure, typically commands more pay. If you know you will be out of work in 6-12 months, your pay better include some cushion to cover time between jobs.
I appreciate your view but I took OP's comment differently.
"Your job is not safe" in my view means you should treat work as if you are a mercenary. Treat every role as short term, go in do the job, get paid and always be looking for the next better thing, no emotional ties. Be prepared to cut them before they cut you.
I feel like it would actually drive salaries up as people move to higher paying roles and companies scramble to keep people that they would have otherwise expected to remain for years.
For context, I once worked at company A for 2 years then got a new job offer for 20% more than I currently made. I accepted the offer and then told my VP that I got a new job and the offer was 35% more. He matched the 35% so I stayed for another year and then got a new job for 25% more than that. A little after that, Company A started doing layoffs. If I had been loyal I would have likely been laid off, instead I left with a much higher salary because I was loyal only to the money.
Companies used to be loyal but no longer are, your job is not safe.
Perhaps we actually are on the same page in principal as I agree with all of your other suggestions "diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work" just a different take on the original comment.
Nothing would make me happier than to eradicate this line of thought, but laying the responsibility of that on the employee is poor management at best, malicious bullshit at worst.
We EMs do nothing to re-assure our employees that they are valued co-workers and not "resources" to be managed.
When one of my valued employees comes to me and says "I got another job offer and the increase in TC will change my life," most of the time they are a top-performer I want to keep, so I go to my manager asking to match their comp. But...they have to ask their manager, then their manager, so on and so forth. Even HR sometimes steps in with excuses why we cant. By the time a decision is made, if one is ever made, the employee I wanted to keep is already at their new employer.
So I would recommend my employees look out for themselves, bc I (and my management hierarchy) certainly won't (though they can, they just don't want to).
And if you are still looking to lay responsibility on to someone, look in the mirror.
This. Your company is not every going to fix you, optimize your life, or be loyal to you. But you can take responsibility of all those things, and never let up. Get better, look for opportunities that satisfy what you value - always.
Parts of it is that when you're cutting an arbitrary number (like 5%) just because.... you kind have to do it "randomly" so that there's no claim of discrimination. If it just so happens that all you best performers share a demographic trait of the protected or protected-adjacent kind (sex, orientation, religious beliefs, etc.) you'd expose yourself to discrimination lawsuits by people who don't match that facet.
It sucks and it's a symptom of risk management being a leading consideration to the process of a layoff, more so than performance optimization or culture change, but that's how it "makes sense"
I think the biggest thing any one person can do (regardless of your occupation) is to build up that emergency fund. Life happens and having those funds gives you options!
Our organization has a policy that it hires developers on 3-year contracts, and renews them no more than two times. So when you have reached 9 years in the org; when you have become intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out.
I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.
Doesn't matter. It is a lopsided relationship. As an employee, it is massive portion of your life. From the employer perspective you are a resource, and can be replaced (not making a moral judgement, just saying that you can...). So the fact that someone can leave after 2 years is less impactful on the company than a company that forces you to leave after X years.
If on the other hand you are just saying "well it is unlikely you will get to 9 years" the problem with that thinking is that the closer you get to 9 years and the more you have invested the more likely you will want to stay for 9 and being forced out for no reason is silly. It is a job, not the presidency.
This is exactly the disconnect between people's salary expectations and their actual salary. It's not really based on how valuable your work is, but how easily replaced you are.
Yes and to be completely fair, the benefit for an employee is to get to focus on one specialty rather than run a business. And have a known paycheck. And get experience while being paid to do so.
Honestly as long as a company has enough variety internally I (slightly) prefer staying with until they "go bad".
Now I also prefer startups and my carrier isn't yet that old (like ~8 years) so never is still the answer.
Through companies being often way less likely to give a trusted long term employee a payrise or trust them with more responsibilities then they are to do so with a new hired employee they have hard times to properly judge the skill of is still an (absurd but not IT specific) issue.
Honestly that sounds fine and quite honest to have such a policy. I think in my career I've met like 2 or 3 engineers who would have been at one place longer than that.
> I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.
I'm not I have literally heard a software engineer which was since recently responsible for hiring just saying just a few sentences apart:
- oh we shouldn't hire this person they only ever worked for the same company so they must not interested in learning and improving themself
and then
- oh we shouldn't hire that person they have switched companies every 2-3 years so they must be bad at their job and jump companies before they get fired
... wtf
and that person didn't get that opinion due to being crazy or so but from spending ~2 days to read up on what you need to look out for when hiring people, i.e. from other software enginers, software project managers and people which founded startups
the problem is not only is there a lot of nonsense out their there are multiple different conflicting engineering cultures out their each insisting only their way is the right way and convincingly pursuing people why the other way is supposedly terrible. Not few of them also pushing a rather toxic culture or a live style which only work for a singles with workoholic like traits or people which at some point in their live had the luck to get rather wealthy and no assume any software enginer in the world is in their position. It's just shit.
Not that I am insensitive to one’s predicament, but who takes 9 years to become familiar with a domain? Unless it’s some kind of software that runs a special kind of nuclear submarine that no one knows how it works and no one want to change more than one line of code per year.
I think that the issue is continuous raises. Instead the raises should slowly decrease but also the expectation of time commitment should decrease. It should be expected that someone with 10yrs experience at the firm only spent 10 or 15 hours per week working. They are exponentially more efficient. If it's then not expected that the company pay more, then the tenured employee isn't seen as a drain on resources. Hell they could even get payed less. It think it is fair because it allows people to seek out more work to fill their time.
"Those that I respected the most." I always say this, but if you appreciate someone at work, dont say it to them. Say it to management. Managements face an impossible task of appreciating every single employees' worth. You can help.
> After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
I've seen a manager at a large company make "once in 10 year cuts", then the next year make similar cuts. This was maybe 5/10 years ago and they still cut like this today - how on earth they are still operating I don't know.
One of the tricks they pulled was to sack a senior role and simply add the entire senior role to a junior role, but keep pay, etc, the same. The sell the idea to the junior employee they told them that it would help with promotions. 5 years of no promotions and insane stress they were out.
They are also legally required to have some positions filled with qualified people, but they have unqualified people working those positions with "on the job training".
The company itself has declared internally it will be bankrupt as early as next year without some form of financial assistance. COVID just about killed them with excessive borrowing to make up for missed revenue, to survive and come back into a poor economy.
I know two people working for this company, one is looking for another job, the other is stuck in the company as they did a deal with University support in return for being retained for some years.
> Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm.
How many people work for a company now that they believe will be around in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time? There's an extremely high chance you will far outlive the company you work for.
> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
Given how things are going, I would suggest tangible assets that can be easily liquefied, even if in a poor economy.
> How many people work for a company now that they believe will be around in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time? There's an extremely high chance you will far outlive the company you work for.
I’ve worked at the same company now for 14 years. If I chose to, I feel like there’s a good chance I could work another 15-25 years at the same firm. My company sells software to local, state, and federal government customers. There are competitors in this space, but no company dominates any particular sector. There’s ample room for growth. Our software is critical to government operations and is necessary even during economic downtimes. Working with employees who have been at the company for 30-40 years isn’t uncommon. I work on 911 systems and find the domain interesting, rewarding, and important. We can help save lives and help government work more effectively.
The company I'm speaking for is one of these government customers - and they are absolutely necessary with no competitors. I still think that given all that, they may be allowed to go bust simply because it is run so poorly and it might actually be better to start again.
> The likelihood of making real (not paper) life-changing money
There is a difference between "save, build an emergency fund" and "get into some get-rich-quick scheme".
The goal of emergency funds and saving, for most people, is to prevent life-changing events, not create them. You don't need a ludicrous paycheck to have a rainy days fund, and to put money aside, and you shouldn't count on IPOs and acquisitions to build it.
> You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
I've been an executive and every position along the chain in the lead up to that within my industry. If I took anything away from my time in it (I have since moved back to practical hands on roles) it is that your above statement is sadly, quite accurate.
My time as an executive has left me soured on the industry full stop long term now i've realised its shit all the way up. I just kept thinking i'd get high enough to find people who like me, had morals or beliefs which they may apply to their decision making. But no, morals have no belonging it would appear in the executive class, which to be fair, I should have known about in advance, but my continued promotions were really quite accidental over the years and I am obviously niave.
Let’s be real the majority of these people getting laid off aren’t gonna grind for 2-3 years with low odds of succeeding. Same thing that happened with Twitter layoffs and any covid layoffs.
People wanting to build stuff to their hearts desire long left or didn’t start at google in the first place
Consider that that's only a part of the picture. Revenue minus costs, combined with the growth dynamics and constituent nature of both tell a fuller picture. Top line alone is almost meaningless
Perhaps this is a non sequitur, but I've been writing Django & HTMX as well as using LLMs to the end of creating an automated circuit board factory. Previously, I co-founded a company that went public in the space. If you think any of the "best engineers, those that I respected the most" might be interested in working together with me, please send them my way - I'm hiring.
jeff+hn AT nimbleprecision DOT com
To your point, I can't make any promises that folks will be able to work at the company forever, but I can say that the ambition is to build a company for the long term and I do think there's a lot of value in having a long tenured engineering team insofar as the context folks build up for the problem set, the code base, and the team can be immense.
Your job never has been safe. Well, not in "big tech firm" territory anyway. I've not gone more than 3 years without seeing some kind of downsizing or shift in strategy or whatever. I swear that companies are like dogs, they roll over and scratch every once in a while, and have layoffs.
Sometimes it's just a distant boom over the horizon ("I hear they're getting killed over in Consumer"), sometimes it's like they line everyone up everyone in your division and boop! every fifth person and it sucks pretty hard.
I won't pontificate on another boring survival strategy, except to observe that I've nearly always switched jobs and technologies after five years anyway. I would be scared for my career if I spent ten years working on one thing.
Sometimes you're saved by smart, sometimes you're saved by lucky, and most of the time you'll be wrong about which one it was. :-)
"I've nearly always switched jobs and technologies after five years anyway."
I'm another long-termer too, not as long but I aspire to! I haven't thought about it, but staying current, and switching techs is probably why I still love it and think I'll be ok in the next round of layoffs.
Right now it's cloud and serverless in python, next, I bet it's LLMs or something in that space. Before that, it was protocol-level C++, UI C++, Java middleware. It just keeps changing, and that's a good thing! I can't imagine working in a dull static changing world.
Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe.
The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine who to lay off?
If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is simply bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.
> Pretty sure that if you have glowing perf reviews, your job is safe.
No, because when large corps want to reduce head count/payroll, it often comes as a top down directive for every group to trim by X%...
In this type of environment being good at your job doesn't help - after a few cycles of these types of layoff all that are left are the better people, and the next X% layoff will be them.
Companies will cut you in a random layoff at the drop of a hat. I've seen this enough times in my career. It doesn't matter if they promise its the only/last/whatever cutoff, or it was for performance only, or whatever..
People in your network will pick you up and refer you / hire you on at the next gig.
My prior employer just did a wave of deep cuts and the stories I heard out of management were pretty crazy. Directory level people were basically given an hour to cut $X Million off their people budget from their directs and all their skip level staff. They then begin laying them off the same day. This was not a well planned or thought out process. So obviously the people I saw getting laid off were a mix of underperformerss, great-but-expensive, random personal grudges from the director, and unfortunately biased towards a lot of "lifers" who'd been there a long time.
Excellent advice. Time invested in cultivating your relationships and network is invaluable for generating opportunities. If people have a good experience working with you and understand what you are capable of, they will bring opportunities to your door throughout your career.
I have ex-coworker friends I've gotten regular drinks/meals with for close to 20 years now. Our average tenure at any shop meanwhile is 5 years. Who cares what company name is on the door.
You wouldn't catch me dead at any sort of company sponsored drinks/social thing.
I would also observe that some of the people most slavishly "living the brand", reposting stuff on LinkedIn, joining all the work social groups, etc.. were some of the first to get whacked in the last few rounds of layoffs at the old shop.
Which way does the causality go is a good question, but their time would probably have been better spent on having an organic network of people in the industry they genuinely enjoy the company of.
Second this, because it so hard. You pour yourself into something, and then management changes, direction changes, and suddenly your baby turns into crap. Your creation probably isn't even put out of its misery, it is allowed to live, but gets tortured, and mangled into some unholy abomination.
It can be very upsetting. I still dwell on a big project, get angry, tense, it is very unhealthy, and also difficult to let go.
I think it is a misconception that if a company does well, it will hire more people and pay more. It is purely a supply and demand situation. The ideal number of employees in a company is zero.
I think that depends on the type of business. If the company sells software then they are more likely to consider good developers as an asset, but if the product is something else that just has a software component, or for software jobs unrelated to the product (accounting, etc), then you are just a cost to be reduced, not an asset.
I’ve been in several different orgs that held a lot of layoffs and they’re sometimes performance related but other times just wrong place, wrong time as others have commented.
I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.
Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.
When you see that management people can't be direct, plain-spoken, and authentic with employees, you should realise that there is a cronyarchy... and you are not in the special club.
The easiest way to follow this advice is to take it to its logical conclusion and just offer your services on a contracting basis, as a single member LLC or a small partnership. At this point in the US tech industry the relationship between employers and FTEs is so tenuous that there isn’t much difference between the two legal arrangements in terms stability. I’ve kept my best clients much, much longer than my longest tenured FTE jobs.
And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.
Well, this is one of the reasons you charge more as a freelancer. It's ~$2k/mo for a family; even if I charged exactly the same as my market rate as an FTE, that would be less than the tax benefit I get from operating through a properly set up LLC taxed as an S-corporation. LTD and E&O insurance are other big expenses, but they're not prohibitive given the delta in hourly rate between FTE and C2C.
There are a lot of hackernewsers frothing at the mouth for layoffs, so excited that all the engineers they don't think are good are gonna get laid off. This right here is the thing they don't understand: companies are typically incompetent when it comes to performance measurement and there's a good chance they'll lay off good people and leave the suck ups who don't do anything. After all, if you're so confident that you're company has been incompetent enough to make a bunch of bad hires and keep them to this point, why would you be confident they'd suddenly get it right this time?
I'm not a libertarian, but since there are many people here tempted by its simplicity and claimed intellectual elegance [1], I want to share "The Libertarian Argument for Unions":
> This essay examines the arguments that many self-proclaimed libertarians make against unionization. It examines whether unions could be expected to arise in a libertarian utopia; whether we could expect them to arise in both the private and the public sector; what limits, if any, we could expect to be imposed on union organizing and behavior; and specifically, whether rules that make the workplace a union shop – that is, a place where all non-management employees are required to be members of the union and contribute to the cost of collective bargaining, or whether rules similar to those embodied in what are typically called “right-to-work” laws are more likely to prevail and be thought consistent with the demands of libertarianism. Finally, I close by examining the relationship between libertarianism and some popular conceptions of liberty a little more closely and argue that, while many people who think of themselves as libertarians believe that maximizing individual negative liberty is fundamental, this is actually a mistake. Libertarianism actually rejects that concept of liberty in favor, I will argue, of a more republican conception, under which liberty is defined as an absence of domination, and a high degree of unionization and this form of liberty are totally compatible.
[1] I personally reject "elegance" as the driving first principle when weighing ethical and normative theories. There are higher standards to seek: most importantly, a rejection of dogmatism and the embrace of continual learning. Any calcified definition of "elegance" cannot stand the test of time; what is elegant to one generation may be deeply immoral to the next. To be clear, I don't mean to say that notions of ethics must be left ambiguous. I certainly do not defend ethical "systems" which amount to little more than evergreen debates over weighing contradictory principles. Rather, I mean ethical systems must improve as our intelligence and awareness improve.
Not sure why one would be "attached" to a company. It is a friggin business. You exchange your labor for money. That is all about it. Yes some projects can be exciting and mentally rewarding, especially in the initial stages but never forget that you are not the one running the show. Worry about yourself first. Owners of the company do just that and act accordingly. There are exceptions here and there but never rely on those. Hope for the best prepare for the worst.
I do not perceive transactional relationships as a tragedy. It's the best feedback loop there is.
You achieve the goals that are aligned with the business - business pays you.
I've been a contractor for 10 years and never took a dollar unless the goal is achieved. Ended up getting full-time position as a head of engineering hefty compensation by one of my clients.
I read once somewhere that the phrase “my job”/“your job” is one of the biggest oxymorons ever termed in America. You do not possess the job. You do not own it. You never did. There never was a time where anyone did. The “job” is owned by the employer. You may be assigned it. It may be unassigned by the employer. Or reassigned by the employer. Or redefined by the employer. “Your job” never was.
On the flip. It’s your life. Own that. We came up with the ideas of continuous integration, apply that to the relationship. Constantly renegotiate how your life overlaps with your employers job.
> The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description.
> The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered.
> In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.
Well most humans do, but psychopaths (and I speak from personal experience) probably do not, and the smarter among them tend to do really well in the American corporate context.
It is even worse in certain Asian countries. Your entire identity and self-worth is defined by your work.
I'm just glad that I'm being able to completely disconnect from work, when I check out. My tittle means nothing. Where I work means nothing. I do enjoy my co-workers, that's about it.
You should immediately flip the bozo bit in any leader who tells you that layoffs are done and you don't need to worry. That is a bullshit statement that no manager with any experience would ever say. It's so bad, I honestly question if that's what they actually said and I have no basis other than experience to believe that!
And yet, like in love, the trick is to love again.
Sure, be wise and have high standards about money. But there are some good entrepreneurs here. I was employee #250, it went IPO, became a millionaire. And now that I’ve created a startup, I try to pay it forward.
Look, all sentences in any language implicitly start with or end with the words: "For now." The sooner you incorporate that into your beliefs, the better off you will be. It isn't about "trust." Trust is conditional and blind trust in statements that cannot be true under all circumstances is something you just need to grow out of; circumstances change and intents change.
As you gain experience, you get really good at parsing and identifying axes of flexibility in statements from the power structure. In general, professional managers in a power structure will always distort or mislead with any statements they make to turn any announcement into a steering opportunity. This is just how it is and it's really not about "trust", it's about manipulation.
Manipulation is _everywhere_ in the tech companies. Nothing is more amazing to me than an experience I had early on that woke me up: the day after I attended a meeting about how the company was working on a project that was incredibly unethical (think google's china search engine-level unethical or worse, like Nokia's building anti-dissident features into their 3g networking for Iran), I attended a company all hands where the entire message from every exec, including those that were involved, was about how we were a force for free speech, freedom, etc. I already knew but it was stark.
They also engage in constant attempts to blur things. Google, in particular, spends a lot of money to help muddy the job-vs-personal waters because it gives them power. For their first decade and a half, at least, they ran the whole company like college - extracurricular activities, etc. This wasn't just because the founders had no professional experience prior, it was strategic to make it very hard for people to leave (and when they started leaving for FB, that was to another place that was similar).
So forget about "trust" - start thinking in terms of "what is this person not saying, what is this person trying to imply without putting it in words, what flexibility are they reserving for themselves with their statements" etc.
But there are certainly companies out there that actually care about the welfare of their employees. Usually family owned and such.
That's where I choose to work and they have always taken care of my needs and listened to me.
I never really understood why people have such a desire to work for these big companies that don't care about you. I guess it's just different strokes...
I definitely try to pick jobs based on vibe, but that's still not 100% safe. I adore my current employer. Best place I've ever worked. But we're contractors, and my team's contract just ended unexpectedly. I trust they respect me enough to rotate me to another team, but I gotta sweat bullets and send out résumés nonetheless.
Is it really a contract if it can end unexpectedly? I know it is, but really the original purpose of a contract is to set the terms and conditions, so nothing was surprise when it happened.
We really need a better term for these one sided work agreements.
often they have buyout clauses and such for this kind of termination. Its very common.
The cost of the contract being one cost, so when you think about cost of managing the contract and contracts etc. severing it via a payout can be cheaper, and is often sudden to the contractors unfortunately.
Yeah, places that I'm used to working do things like: when covid hit and work dried up, the company told employees to go out and find charity work and the company would pay your full salary to do the charity work.
They share in the profits with the employees and such.
I mean sure, it's not 100% a save job. If something truly terrible happened and the company went bankrupt etc, then of course you can still lose your job.
But no time have I ever seen or felt like they would ever lay off people unless the company literally couldn't go on to survive some other way.
I worked at such a place right out of college. Always claiming we were family and that they would take care of their workers. Then covid happened, they lost some money, and laid off 25% of their employees, including people who had been there 10+ years. Now I work at a big company and make 3x as much with similar workloads. Glad I learned early on that no company is actually a family and will put your needs above the needs of the company!
>Glad I learned early on that no company is actually a family and will put your needs above the needs of the company!
You learned that 1 company isn't a family company and puts your needs above the company...
When covid hit and work dried up where I work, the company told employees to go out and find charity work and the company paid our full salary to do the charity work.
Just one example of the way they think and act. I've been there 15 years and never seen a single instance or case that would make me believe they would act any other way.
They pay plenty fair and I make more than I know what to do with for myself.
My ex-firm (an healthtech company in the US) is doing well.
I was a manager there. I was demoted while my newborn was in the NICU (neonatal ICU) at the beginning of my paternity leave. And my position was eliminated a few weeks after I came back to work. As a condition of getting severance, I can't officially talk about it.
Managers will never be honest. Managers are modern practitioners of Taylorism(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management). They have to see you as a number and a resource in order to do their jobs and fit in the hierarchy. Thats why you never trust them and always reverse manage them.
> SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm
"no longer" -> this might be the time to seriously talk about unionization. Programmers used to have a huge advantage at the bargaining table, going in as an individual. If parent is correct (I tend to agree) these days are over and they're not coming back. In that case, collective bargaining promises better results.
I see a lot more unionization efforts in software lately. Maybe it's just my own confirmation bias but maybe it's just that others are coming to the same conclusions.
My company made some bad decisions and had two rounds of layoffs as a result. I was cut in the first round. My boss is also a friend and confirmed over beer that the highest paid of us were the first to go.
I had negotiated higher pay based on past experience when I joined. So it goes.
Unless you’re truly special, The days of multi hundred thousand total comp packages are over - you’d better learn to live as though you’re on a ~175k salary, and if that’s too low, start taking steps on cutting NOW
See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering
"Maybe a recession is forthcoming?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.
"Maybe LLMs will reduce programming needs?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.
I can adapt to an increased level of cynicism, even to the point it informs my concrete career decisions.
But this level of bad faith itself must do some damage to the economy, mustn't it? There must be some concrete value that would be generated by increasing good faith between employers and employees, musn't there be?
Megacorps have international plans. Theyre eying the Asian market and surrounding areas planning to be an integral part of converting their society to modernism. Big tech is literally creating their customers via corporate imperialism.
>> You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever.
This seems like a really negative and self-damaging perspective. I'm the direct manager for 14 people with whom I have hard-won relationships, built on trust and caring over long periods of time. We're not friends or family, but I honestly care about them. I share as much as I can, and try to include my confidence and assessment of what I share. If they follow your advice and unequivocally discount it all, I think they're actually in an even WORSE situation. Regardless, what a sad, scary way to live.
I've had great relationships with managers like you. And yet had that sudden 1-1 meeting where I was told "your services are no longer needed". In one case, there wasn't even a face-to-face meeting, or any explanation for termination. I got a call from my recruiter, and my corporate access was cut off precisely at 5pm.
AI has increased the perception of productivity to unwitting managers, which is a dangerous pit to be falling into.
It's like a lot of those fabled 10x engineers that I've run into over the years; they may seem like they're incredibly productive and managers love them, but in reality their work is so riddled with issues and rushed half-baked ideas, that they end up costing the other engineers on the team 10x the amount of their time to review and fix it all. And it's those other engineers who do all of the invaluable but underappreciated cleanup work who are getting the boot right now.
Oh I'm sure they exist, that's why I said "a lot", not "all". My point is more about how managers perceive the employees they manage. They all want to believe that they found the goose that lays the golden eggs, but in reality so many perceived rockstar engineers are just over-confident or over-eager people mass producing garbage.
That's the important parallel with using AI in production: on the surface it may seem like the solution to all productivity problems, but in reality it still takes a lot of human brainpower to review, assess, fix and maintain whatever the AI model spits out. Especially since generative AIs like to present their work with supreme confidence, and it's getting increasingly hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.
I think a sizeable % of engineers can be 10x-ers as ICs / leads - but it's kind of an "in the zone" thing, when they're experienced in the stack and the product, can navigate the org, are motivated and aren't held back by issues with team or management (or personal issues etc).
But it's like growing plants, in the sense that it only takes one crucial element to be missing to limit growth (or "output").
I've met a few ppl who were _reliable_ 10xers (could navigate a much wider range of techs / domains / situations than others) but I've seen even the best crash and burn at times when the circumstances aren't right.
Widespread use of tools like Copilot hasn’t been happening for long enough for you to draw these generalisations with an appropriate degree of confidence. This just comes across as you misrepresenting your personally-aligned hypothetical as reality.
I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the 10x developer stuff is basically down to the 10x person being the original author of the code.
Every other developer on the project has to do at least 3 times as much work, they have to read through the original code and try and understand what the original person was thinking of when writing it before even getting to solving the problem at hand.
A true 10x developer would write code good enough that every other developer could maintain it as easily as the original author.
I feel I am one of those developers that codes 100 times faster since ai tools came out. I was not slow before by the way. But now I can take a well defined interface and class example, ask gpt4 for a new well defined variant, and out it comes. one tweak and a test later its done.
Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours.
Novel work can't yet be automated. But... most of the work I do is not novel, and theres files and files of preexisting context for copilot to consume.
As for this effect being widespread and noticed enough to be related to the firing. I dont think its the case.
The people I work with don't seem to get nearly as much out of the tools as I do, and not for lack of trying. They're constantly using the tools too. Even if companies are considerably more productice with the tools, I do not think management would have been attuned enough to performance and costd to have instigated layoffs from it.
You’re benchmarking yourself based on your own experience of course. Not to say this is horribly wrong but yeah, doesn’t tell the rest of us much about productivity.
Like saying that you run faster after a cup of coffee, cool ?
Much of what I've done with ai tools I have had to do before and struggled over days. I was a python dev mostly but I had cases at work where I needed to write java, c, or c++. The genicam compliant industrial camera nonsense it got me through in a few hours was insane. And using a fuzzy logic library. I did not have to spend tons of time reading the documentation, struggling with cmake, or figuring out how to install and link dlls or even syntax for that matter. I can start to type a comment of a high level description of a small codeblock and copilot spits it out.
This works in any language.
It isnt that it speeds up every single operation I do. When I get in the zone I toggle it off. But 80% of the time i hit a snag it instantly short circuits me through the issue. I can and do ask follow up questions about how the thing works so the next time I come across it it wont even be a snag. So I have had slowly compounding speed boosts from it for two years. I code faster with it also because it taught me things, and I have learned when to turn it off (often)
It's starting to replace some low-level jobs, like copywriting and art-based positions. For development, the only thing I've found it good for is giving me example usage for custom Apis and other things that I can't just Google/download.
It's marginally better than Stackoverflow (which I've only ever used to give me an idea that I then turn into my own code, usually written from scratch, because most code is littered with security vulnerabilities).
It's a long way from replacing developers or increasing productivity on a measurable level. It's also like building your business on quick sand. Some feature you use today might be put behind a higher pay-tier (or removed) at any time.
I have only used the free version of ChatGPT and I'll admit that it has been helpful, but only for maybe 50% of the stuff In ask it.
Maybe 15% of the time it has been a hindrance by making up stuff. It's basically a faster version of Stack Overflow / web search.
A lot of IT work is maintenance work, and it knows nothing about those systems. It's good for me for JavaScript as I spend 80% of my time on the backend. I know enough JavaScript to debug other peoples work, or to add some simple jQuery / vanilla JS to an HTML page (which is all that is needed in the majority of cases), but if I was to build a React App from scratch, it would likely look like beginner level stuff.
Has anyone had experience with the paid version of ChatGPT? How does it compare?
Well, hopefully there's a silver lining to all this: Talented and underappreciated engineers (or those just caught in the crossfire of shitty policies) will go on and start new, more exciting companies.
Then they will realize that the media has been fully monopolized and can't find get any users and that it's not so easy outside of the cushy confines of Big Tech.
I still haven't gotten over the fact that most of these corporate employees think that the majority of the population literally became crazy over the past few years.
They must think we all got long COVID with brain damage and that the vaccines protected them from this.
Its an inevitability. As large companies focus on profitability of existing business lines, small companies entertaining risk will discover new markets. High growth in new markets (with fewer competing startups, easier hiring, and institutional blind spots) will make investment attractive -even in a high rate environment. Of course each dollar of fundraising will be hard earned - requiring those startups to have a much higher bar for adding real value and sustainable business model. This cycles repeats itself across history.
6 years ago, with cheap money and everyone eager to start new firms makes success more of a lottery than a systematized effort. I'd rather be a startup founder raised on lean capital with less of a crowded marketplace.
Have a family and esp these employees in high CoL cities? Very tough.
Speaking from experience. Been there done that.
"We'll have all this new innovation via new startups now!" is such a feel good sentiment to layoffs but in reality is nowhere close to a solution for the affected employees
Vote with your labor and be willing to change immediately jobs (that is why remote is great). If you did not like what the manager said in a random meeting quit on the spot, find another job online. No more notice courtesies.
Yeah this is what Amazon said about warehouse employees and now they have to pay them $25 per hour and offer free tuition programs in addition to fat sign up bonuses.
Workers have the power. They just need to remember it.
They have already started outsourcing to Canada at 60% of the cost.
One of my clients outsources all large projects to a company in Ukraine (The HQ is there, but the developers are in other parts of Europe). The time zone isn't too bad, their English/communication is nearly perfect, and it's at a fraction of the cost here in the US.
A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.
> A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.
Sounds like complete BS. Even just taking in salaries, that's $9K/year/dev - even living in Ukraine you would make more than that. If you've moved out of the country and are in Poland for example, that's not a livable wage.
I Oversee the project and can see all invoices from the contracting company. Even so, This is the cost of one developer in the US, which would never be able to complete this project in a year.
9k a year in Ukraine is entirely possible for dev work. Especially if you are outside the main city. Devs in Ukraine often juggle multiple projects. It’s not uncommon to work 2-3 projects at a time.
So you want us to believe that the same managers who could not
manage remote US employees and started crying for return to office will suddenly be able to run a tight ship with overseas freelancers?
The problem isn't how good overseas talent is (I worked with Avanade developers from Poland and they are excellent, need zero ramp up time) but rather is our own management good enough to work with them if management can't even work with remote people in the same time zone.
Remember, Europe culture is very different. There are laws there and you can't "manage by crisis" when your team has multiple people in Europe. Basically, this forces management to actually do its job instead of relying on Venkat (who is on an H1B visa and can't fight back) to be unofficially on call 24/7.
I'm surprised to see so many comments here taking layoffs personally, or talking about how layoffs are stupid.
Layoffs are not personal, and the corollary to that is that you should never treat your company as a friend. It's a company trying to maximize value.
Also, layoffs do work. Almost every large, successful company has done them at some stage. They are an expected, and necessary, part of operating a company and responding to changing market conditions.
Yes, it sucks. They are not nice. But it's expected and it's helpful to remember that.
When a company has embedded itself so deeply in public life - globally - it's reasonable to have strong feelings about its actions.
When we say layoffs work, are we considering the way the same companies overhired just a few years ago, harming the rest of the employment market? Do we remember this in later discussions when we treat these companies as prescient hiveminds, in spite of them using overtuned bang-bang control for their hiring? Do we remember it in discussions about workers rights and the things we tie to employment in the naive assumption that only those who deserve it lose their jobs?
I find it a bit hilarious that programmers feel entitled being employed for life in one company. Did you ever consider finishing the project? Getting it done and delivered?
My first paid job as a programmer was like that. We made an exam software for university, a complete package covering the process from authoring test questions to making reports.
We made it in 6 months and it was done. Finished. Working. There was some maintenance/improvement, but that was a separate deal. We did not expect university to employ us for life to maintain it.
Shouldn't that be a norm?
Like, yeah, obviously Google has a lot of projects, so they can allocate programmers to do something different after something is done. But they didn't promise employment for life, did they?
Obviously, people like being securely employed. But, perhaps, that should be addressed at societal level - e.g. unemployment benefits.
I'm suggesting that it's up to Microsoft management to decide what software they want to develop, and programmers should expect they are hired to develop a product. Downsizing should be considered a norm.
People came to assume that a total comp >$100k is a norm, but it's really not.
E.g. engineer working on research projects for INRIA in France might get up to $3000 gross a month. (And you might get better job security in France but it comes with a bit of total comp hit, as you see.)
That's the reality for most people on Earth. Salary >$100k should be considered an insane arb opportunity, not a stable job expectation.
Microsoft makes a shitload of money selling Windows to billions of people, and is able to pay a lot to devs? OK, good for those devs. But would that last? Uncertain.
These companies make a lot of money because of supply & demand. They pay large salaries because of supply & demand. They have layoffs because of supply & demand.
It's free market. Stop complaining unless you can propose something better.
I think what your parent meant was that, instead of just asserting that something is true, you provide some peer reviewed research or something like that which supports your assertion. For example, you might want to include a link to some article pointing to research which supports your assertion. For example, you can add something like
to your comment. Of course, this link points to two decades of research showing that your assertion is wrong, so you probably don't want to include this specific link in your comment, but you get the idea I hope.
>Of course, this link points to two decades of research showing that your assertion is wrong, so you probably don't want to include this specific link in your comment, but you get the idea I hope.
I think that the state of the telecoms industry will let you infer that I was being sarcastic and will also provide quite strong evidence that the study you cite is correct!
Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring (management's fault) or there was a big revenue downturn (market forces). This time it was because of over-hiring at the COVID mania. People left safer jobs to join FAANGs tempted with higher salaries and a prospect of improving their CV. And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years.
This is totally a fault of management and none of them are losing their jobs! People have a good reason to be pissed off.
had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023.
and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023.
They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hiring??? Each person added as much revenue as the ones before them.
Over-hiring would have been if post-Covid business would have dropped, which, guess what, did NOT happen for FAANG. It was, in the worst case scenario, stable (even then, slightly growing).
Don't forget there are also hundreds of thousands of external people. Bodies bought from different vendors, doing pretty much the same job as internals but with lower pay and almost no benefits.
They've been cut a lot last year, but no news about it.
Also there are cuts in high cost of living locations. Why to keep people in California if you can hire in Warsaw and pay x0.25 of US rate there?
I suspect that more of these layoffs happen in the US, both because it's the most expensive location, has the most staff and has the least friendly redundancy laws (for employers, that is)
Revenue per employee is never a goal in itself. Only revenue, expenses, and strategic goals. If they can meet their strategic goals with less resources, they over-hired.
>"And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years."
Is this the consensus then that is really rough out there right now? I know that big tech has been hit hard the last year but is the outlook equally bad for startups, enterprise etc. as well?
We should be clear that this isn’t a uniformly held attitude. Before the recent layoff wave started in late 2022, losing your job, even for layoffs raised eyebrows and questions. This has definitely changed the past year but im not sure the stigma is gone just yet.
It is not the individual layoff which is the issue for the people. It is the general feeling that the little man get squeezed under the argument of cost savings and the rich man takes out even more than the year before, independent of the market and company performance. In the past the entrepreneur took the yearly risks and was rewarded or not for it.
The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on the backs of the employees. These layoffs are often bound to the goal to have a return like Apple and not like General Electric (company examples are educated guesses).
In the end, the employees have a miserable life and products of the company are a shit show.
It’s one metric: revenue per employee. In a more capital expensive market, such as our current one, this metric is the one corporate managers are focusing on.
Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have used a cycle of expansion and contraction to crush the working people’s power in the interest of controlling inflation (which is really largely the direct result of excess government money printing as a result of imbalanced spending), all the while consolidating more-and-more wealth in smaller and smaller circles of people. It’s an absolutely psychotic way to run a business cycle, and it kills a great many people directly:
The latest deleveraging of worker cries and demands for better conditions and pay comes as workers are asking for more work-at-home and flexibility, a more balanced work/life balance, and focus on similar health and wellness goals, as well as demands for salary raises to keep up with the ongoing inflation.
For three decades worker pay has been dropping. The gap between the growth of productivity and that of a typical worker’s pay has grown quite extreme, and continues to grow through the application of austerity principle:
While it looks like “inflation and interest rates are causing the problems,” it remains easily predictable economic theory that we would find ourselves here. People may not realize it, but since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.
This of course causes “inflation,” which is in no small part what the news likes to call “excess corporate profits.” Basically inflation benefits those that hold real assets and are closest to the money printers, while crushing those who don’t and are the furthest (often the most marginalized).
Consider that the market rewards these companies handsomely for their layoffs:
- Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.
- Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.
- Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.
- Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.
what do you mean by “earnings per staff member laid off”? are you dividing their total earnings by number of staff laid off? if so, then Apple earning 100 billion while laying off 10 employees would be “earning 10 billion per staff laid off”, or am i misunderstanding?
- The google metric doesn't make sense. In fact, the graph tells sort of the opposite story. Revenue per employee shot up and then they did layoffs in response... huh? My guess is that this graph is missing the forecasts that are being used to make these decisions. Google likely has a similar chart, but one that goes out 5-10 years and is showing a concerning trend (that was certainly the case when I worked there).
- Austerity is a government thing. I'm not connecting the dots between deficit reduction and corporate layoffs...
- I thought the money supply calculations changed recently which is why the metric shot up in recent years.
- How are you getting Microsoft was rewarded with 9.8M per employee for their "layoffs?" They cut 10k people, so wouldn't this mean if they had laid off 1 person, they would have earned 98B per layoff? This metric doesn't make sense.
- The "other CEO" you link to runs a company with 200 employees. I'm not sure this is comparable to a company the size of Google.
Companies aren't charities. Just because they can afford to hire or keep an employee doesn't mean they should or have to.
You're also forgetting that raw dollars are not how companies are viewed. Every company is viewed on how it performs agains the risk free return rate. The rate going from 0 -> 5+ means companies must now generate returns in excess of the RFR in line with their generally accepted risk. This is the ultimate outcome of raising rates to reduce inflation - across the board layoffs lowering averages salaries.
"since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation" - I've seen this notion repeated and I assume it's a reference to M1 as published by FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
The actual story, as far as I can tell, is that money that had previously been considered as M2 (=less liquid) is also counted as M1 due to rule changes regarding savings accounts.
To see this is the case, you can plot both together. If in fact, new money was printed, you would expect M2 to have the same jump as M1, as M2 is M1 + more stuff. However, you see a much smaller jump:
Agreed. As a legitimate inventor and innovator, these management teams are signaling to me that they are not worth working for. The rest of talent that creates actual value, whether in engineering, sales, management, or otherwise, should seriously pay attention and do the same.
I guess we'll see if this turns out to be true. If it does, they'll realize their mistakes, and the competitors that didn't let people go should outperform them. If it doesn't, then it'll show that many tech companies simply overhired, which I think we all know they did over the past few years.
I myself work at a telco where business has stagnated over the past decade, due to market saturation and new, cheaper competition. We've had layoffs each year since I started since that's the only way to keep increasing profits. One day it'll probably hit me, but oh well. I know our company has fat to trim and if I'm actually not making any real impact, then I'm fine with looking for a job where I do. Efficient companies are important for a healthy economy.
It's not about killing experiments. It's about things that were advertised as the next big thing with fanfare to not be properly maintained and eventually killed even though they had a lot of users. That's the problem.
This isn't the right way to view it -- it's not necessarily about a dollar amount. People making 6 figures and people making 5 figures are not enemies. The segmentation is between those tho provide work and those who perform it, with the former profiting off the surplus value provided by the latter
Are you insinuating that the workers (or the public) have the ability to self-determine through share ownership? You are aware that Alphabet stock is split, with the class B shares being owned by the founders, right?
Do you think FAANG SWEs aren't in the top 10% of Americans?
Investors aren't some distinct class, we're mainly talking about pension funds and the 401ks of similarly well-compensated professional-managerial workers.
> Research has long shown that layoffs have a detrimental effect on individuals and on corporate performance. The short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are often overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation — all of which hurt profits in the long run. To make intelligent and humane staffing decisions in the current economic turmoil, leaders must understand what’s different about today’s larger social landscape. The authors also share strategies for a smarter approach to workforce change.
Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers. By forming a collective bargaining position the workers can prevent that from happening. With the tight labor market there are very few places where employers are able to exploit anyone, people can just move to another job. And in many European countries there are already strong worker protections in place through legislation. (I would argue too much, where I live).
So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers. I think being a member of one signals to an employer you may want to exploit them, rightly or wrongly, at least where I live it's often understood membership will hurt your chances of getting higher up in the organisation.
> Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers.
This is an overly narrow definition, so I label it is largely incorrect.
Think of it this way: society involves dynamically-shifting power balances. To the extent the goals of a society include:
(a) standardizing certain rights and norms
(b) providing checks and balances so the powerful have less temptation and ability to exploit the less
We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.
> So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers.
This statement is silly and ignores the realities I've seen. Sure, a union left to its own devices might be tempted to push too far. But given the dynamic one tends to see in western economies, there is always some kind of negotiation with the associated corporation. Such negotiation is quite similar to parties in the legal system hashing it out. Both may start off far apart but the negotiation tends to lead towards compromise. In the United States, unions that push to far face public backlash and even Presidential action.
I'm not making any dogmatic claims here. I'm simple rejecting overly simplistic arguments against unions. I will readily accept that unions are not silver bullets and there are documented cases of corruption and misaligned incentives. But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world. I laugh at people who aren't even trained economists who interpret their models as some kind of reality -- or worse, some kind of normative specification.
Very few dogmatic claims pro- or anti- union survive contact with reality.
> But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world.
You can say that about any topic, but what specifically are you proposing? Or do you just want to talk about stuff?
> We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.
Ultimately we need a cohesive strategy to convert your wishes and desires into actionable legislation and policies and consensus building around those - which is the hard part. It seems to me, few people want to take crack at that.
You were kinda wishy washy in your response. I'm bringing the conversation back on track. Sorry, didn't know you were so sensitive to language. I'll try to calibrate my responses to you.
I see your desire to "bring the conversation back on track". On your terms, it would seem. It came across rather heavy handedly. This is a request you can make, not something you can impose.
By "wishy-washy" do you feel like... I'm being indecisive? Not taking a firm stance? Changing positions?
Here's how I see it -- I often intentionally don't "hit people over the head" with my particular positions. It doesn't mean I don't have a stance; instead, I often prefer to frame the issue first. I consider this a starting point, not an ending one, so feel free to continue the conversation.
You see this through a very American lens. I think you are trying to paint my statement as "anti union", it is not intended as such. What you describe is much better solved with government legislation and trade bodies. There is a reason union membership in some Northern Europe has dwindled from over 80% to less than 5%, they have simply outlived their usefulness.
Unions have the wrong incentives. They represent employees and have no incentive to think about future employees, employers, customers or anyone else. There are simply better ways to organise society.
How does it make sense for Google to keep laying off people (many of them skilled overperformers) while continuing to hire? It seems they have alienated a large part of their workforce with these decisions. Plus they are running into legal fights in Europe where it's not so easy to randomly fire employees.
I would truly like to understand this, but I haven't heard an explanation of why the actions make sense for the organization as a whole.
The people they are hiring are probably cheaper than the people being laid off. The costs of the layoff are massive in morale, lost know how, missed opportunities, etc. But to the finance people, that's just as well because it's not their problem to deal with.
I understand it might make sense for specific managers who meet some goals and get bonuses, etc.
But I'm asking for an explanation of why it would be reasonable for the organization as a whole and for its shareholders (the ones who understand what's going on).
Managers are basically never consulted on layoffs. At a high enough level in the organization, you might find out a week or two before everyone else and mark some people as critical, but that's about it.
Basically every company I've worked at can be roughly divided into the finance side and the business side, and IME all the important shots are called by the finance people. The business side has to justify itself in terms the finance people set, not the other way around. As for how it makes financial sense, I can't speak to that, but things do tend to work out the way the CFO predicts. That's hardly surprising, because the other finance people working on Wall St. are looking at the same spreadsheets and following the same economic theory.
By the way, I don't think this is a good way to run companies. But it's the way I think almost all of them are run.
people are constantly job hopping, Google has to always be hiring just to negate attrition.
Second, there isnt a single budget for hiring that interviews everyone and ships them out everywhere. certain groups/products can be growing within google while others are shrinking. should the chrome team not be allowed to grow because google+ was in the trash can?
third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuffle everyone around the company. You cant just take someone from the google maps team and have them start working on nexus phones.
all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.
> third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuffle everyone around the company. You cant just take someone from the google maps team and have them start working on nexus phones.
True, but even so, you can train the employee for the new role. You need to do the same anyway for a new, external candidate (and it's even worse because they will need to familiarise themselves with internal tools and processes that the Maps employee would already be familiar with).
Google has been hiring people into the same roles and teams where they have laid people off.
> all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.
For me this is very offputting and definitly makes me move faster out of that system.
I can either work for the next 30 years 40h a week and create some 'value' for companies like google and have nice holidays, etc. OR i don't.
And yes i can afford a very basic version of not working anymore already or at least no longer playing the game in some companies.
Wasn't there some Gen X/Z meme about quite quitting? Guess what could incluence this? Having an appreciation for your company and your companies management style.
A lot of people here have never worked in an economic downturn, and workers WANT to believe their job is more than a job. Why else would they devote so much time and energy to it? It may just even represent their self-worth.
If the alternatives are not working at all, or working at a company that might have problems paying their employees , I think many will take the risk of working at a large tech company that does regular layoffs but gives generous severance
For me it is the cycle of over hiring and layoffs that make me mad. Executives bear no consequences for their decisions instead the consequences are borne by the lower level employees.
What I would like to see is senior and executive management (Director+) bonuses cancelled for the year a layoff occurs. If they aren’t willing to cancel bonuses company wide then a layoff is really just stock manipulation. By making sure they bear some of the consequences maybe they will make better choices in the future.
If you don't want to be laid off, don't get hired. It's just part of the process. Or get a government job. I hear people can last dozens of years in those.
I think you're arguing against a strawman. Nobody says layoffs are stupid because they're not a very "nice" thing to do. They say so because the statement "it's a company trying to maximize value" is contentious.
The long term objective of a company is not to save as much money as possible. It's to spend money toward endeavors that generate more money.
If the layoff is because of an efficiency improvement, that's justified - like a factory replacing labor with newer cheaper robots. However, that's not what the tech layoffs were about. Tech companies are basically saying we want to do less work. It's not an efficiency improvement, it's a downsizing of their business activities, and it's not clear-cut whether that's a good business strategy for companies that are wildly profitable and growing.
a company can have multiple products that are at different stages in the business cycle. If Microsoft never did layoffs in their entire history they would still have a dev team working on Zunes, and 95% of the company would be working on desktop windows
Most of the tech companies generate their revenue from their core businesses. For Google it's ~80% from ads, and probably even more of their profit comes from Ads. The history of companies being able to generate abnormal profits in other business lines is not favorable overall. I think experimenting and trying to find new sources of revenue makes sense, but the flip side of that is you have to kill those projects if they aren't going to pan out. It makes sense to shutdown even profitable businesses (or sell them) if you can make more by reinvesting in your core business.
It's naïve to think that frequent layoffs at the periphery of their business (itself not true - there were layoffs in Ads, Search and other similar "core businesses") won't affect their core business. Google loses a bit of its brand value every time it does a big public layoff. At some point, the Google brand will be most associated with the word layoff and nothing else. It affects morale for existing employees and makes the whole company culture just a little more selfish and paranoid.
Associating your company with unhappiness and strife does not come without a cost.
This is why I hate working as a regular salaried employee. After this happened to me a few years after college, I spent over a decade building up a consulting business. I always keep multiple clients at the same time and I'm not devasted if one chooses not to renew my contract.
It's interesting that you think this is lower risk. Maybe that's a US thing? Typically employees are harder to cut than simply choosing not to extend contracts with consultants.
I would hope they make 3-10x running their own consultancy compared to working as an employee. The risk is still much higher, but it’s offset by the large reward.
Someone should start an massive incubator that takes in top laid off employees and gives them resources to build a competing product. They will be motivated as hell and have a ton of domain knowledge and generally have a good idea on how to do things in way more efficient way than what their former employer did. For kicks and to save money replace most of mngmnt roles with AI model.
There are often non-compete clauses in employment contracts. Depending on the country, they're not worth the paper they're written on sometimes. In others, legally binding.
Are there any examples of companies successfully enforcing non-competes against rank and file employees? (I'm excluding high value targets like Jeff Dean here where it might actually make sense to put millions in lawyers behind a suit).
It would be rather interesting if it would be legal for me to hire somebody, then fire them the next day and they couldn't compete with me for some period of time. But then again, US employment law is rather different from EU so maybe that's possible there?
A layoff isn't a firing unless you choose to not accept the package. Accepting a severance is considered voluntary separation. You sign a document stating this.
Not true as a general statement. May be true in certain cases. And certainly, in the case of a layoff (such as this one), with a severance package, a non-compete could be part of the severance agreement.
(Or not, depending on locale. For sure not in California.)
Or having only ever worked at FAANG(s), many of them completely lack the skills that would make them effective as an entrepreneurs and it would be nigh useless to try to incubate new businesses out of them. Maybe. Not all. I am thinking of traits and skills such as actually talking to your users, selling product to customers, doing things small scale, being able to work without huge back office support, not having KPIs to game, and such.
Completely agree with this take. I worked in FAANG and before that I worked in various startups.
Most of the people around me are very adapted to this very specific hyper-structured environment that we are in. This is not a criticism - they are thriving in this environment and everyone is happy.
But no way would I want to take these people with me on a new venture. (the inverse is also true; I would not take a shoot-from-the-hip go-getter and put them into a mature product environment that with intense legal scrutiny)
How do you reconcile your final paragraph/sentence with your own ability to succeed[1] in both environments?
My experience is that the ability to adopt to structured/unstructured environments are not mutually-exclusive: some people may thrive in one but not the other, and others can do well in both (or none!) My motto is to make the right trade-offs in any environment - which is a universal superpower for engineers in my book; especially when coupled with curiosity and a willingness to learn.
You might be too charitable. There were hard transition phases where I was not necessarily considered successful.
And I probably only made it through because my employer had deep pockets and chilled while I took time to adapt. The other direction (big co -> startup) is no where near as forgiving.
Mottos are fine, but what we need to succeed is skill and practice with skills.
We are susceptible to innovators dilemma on a personal basis, and it’s hard to break habits and intuition hardened over years in a different environment.
And when I was in start up land I did watch a lot imported talent from FAANG come in and bomb out - they were trying to care about long term code quality and we needed to slap together a demo in 48 hours. It was like oil and water
Edit: btw I don’t mean to signal that it’s impossible to do to be someone who thrives in both situations. It was a comment on the original suggestion of “just start a new company and hire up all these lay offs to get rich quick”. I believe that’s not going to be a good strategy
I refuse to hoist the guillotine when the time (seems sooner every day) arrives. But I also refuse to stand in the way either, or at least more than I'm already doing by incessantly badgering the kleptoclass that they will get tennis court-ed if they keep this shit up.
Posting beat after beat and carpet bombing Sunnyvale like fucking Curtis LeMay at the same time is offensive to everything about being an American, and a hacker, and really just a human.
Layoffs happen, markets go dry, the world moves on. But stuffing your pockets until it's spilling out while walking around the Bay Area with a Samurai Sword drunk from Fucki Sushi?
I won't help them drag you out of your Tesla and beat them to death with your own iPhone. But let's quit while we're ahead assholes?
It's news because it's been repeated ad nauseam only recruitment, HR, sales and other non tech roles will be affected by layoffs in big tech companies. The numbers aren't important just that there are numbers because it relates to engineering and it's something the tech community didn't expect.
Unions are for employees what HR is for companies and I don't see companies doing everything that's legal and some things which are blatantly illegal to prevent themselves from having HR departments
There are basically no unions in tech in Europe. The countries where tech workers are dominated by tech unions can be counted on one hand, and they're probably the Nordic ones.
Germany doesn't really have tech unions and for sure they don't dominate the tech scene. France, neither, Eastern Europe (all of them), don't, Southern Europe, not that I know of.
> dev salaries in EU and the UK are so abysmally low
I don't think they are. I think salaries in the US are astronomical, and it boggles the mind how in California a 22 year old React nerd can command a salary five times higher than, say, a teacher.
It's all a matter of perspective. From my perspective, if you can sit on your sofa, build a website, and pull in €80k, you're doing just fine.
> It's all a matter of perspective. From my perspective, if you can sit on your sofa, build a website, and pull in €80k, you're doing just fine.
Where do you put the sofa? For locals who inherited and apartment somewhere in Stockholm or Berlin, or have been living in rent-controlled apartment for 20 years, sure, 50k after-tax is fine-ish. What about expats who didn't inherit a 500k Euro apartment from their late grandma?
Define "comfortably". In EU cities with developed IT job markets (Munich, Stockholm, Paris, etc.) you will be spending half of more of your after tax salary just on rent. And you won't be able to afford to live there anymore after you retire.
Oh, I'm from eastern Europe myself and of course you can have quite comfortable life there for 80k gross. The counterpoint to that is that 80k is not nearly close to average salary of a person "developing web sites from their sofa" in that region.
UTAW and CWU specifically are unions for tech workers in the UK. At big companies especially, like BT, a sizable proportion of the workforce is unionised.
I think they were the exception, the lay offs are likely execs realizing they can get the same or better by hiring someone remotely in a developing country to do the work.
Not saying this is a better outcome for anyone specifically, but surely it's compelling?
Most probably because they think unions would standardize salaries and eliminate outlier FAANG compensation packages. Everybody thinks they are special and would get that outlier compensation after all. An idea which is not so battle-tested as we see.
Yeah the union I'm a part of said this was the major thing that people don't like at tech companies, and they explicitly say that their approach is not the same with other industries, and that they are fully on board with things like performance based compensation and keeping up with market rates.
In the US, when you say "labor union", people think of a factory worker standing in a picket line outside some dinosaur car assembly plant in Flint, Michigan that's about to close anyway.
The media has very successfully demonized unions, and many skilled workers believe the company line that unions drive down average wages, make it impossible to fire useless people, charge heavy membership fees, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Bar_Association - For Lawyers. A bit like for Doctors, they get themselves involved in the accreditation process of education facilities and then by extension the State Bar organizations.
I don't think they are that common in tech in Europe/Germany as well.
SWEs are used to being in a good negotiation position and not in need for collective bargain.
My employer has a works council, but no union representation. That council is mostly occupied with dealing with compensation (provisions, product assignments, ...) of sales people, who make the largest group, thus most votes. SWE needs aren't seen.
One reason is that in times of high growth, unions tend to be a limiting factor to innovation, growth and worker compensation, especially for top performers.
Another is that during layoffs, unions may force the company to lay off people based on seniority instead of competency.
If you compare salaries for developers between Germany and the US, I think this point becomes blatantly clear.
Not that alone, but a lot of the factors that hold European companies back compared to American ones when it comes to innovation come from the same ideology, whether it appears as regulation, taxation or a number of other factors aimed at improving safety and comfort, even if it comes at the cost of liberty and incentive.
That "liberty and incentive" is extremely unevenly distributed, which is why this thread exists.
Besides - the US is clearly losing its reputation for tech competence.
Between some of the world's crappiest broadband (unevenly distributed again), NASA Moon missions failing to reach the Moon, Boeing blowing their own doors off, and Google's search enshitification and inability to understand what a stable product line is - among others - the US really isn't the powerhouse of progress it thinks it is.
> That "liberty and incentive" is extremely unevenly distributed
Absolutely. I said in high growth phases, it may be beneficial for employees to not organize. Once an industry stabilizes, that may change. The German model has certainly been working much better for automotive and other established industries.
But even developers who have not been able to get into FAANG positions, US developer salaries are still higher than German ones, as far as I can tell. And for the ones that did get into FAANG, the difference is vast, even for entry level.
U.S. developer salaries are also higher than in Japan and over developed salaries, even if those labor markets aren't exactly known for unionization, either.
Fair enough, though it is possible to get the effects of a union without a union, if worker-employee relationship resembles a feudal lord-serf relationship, where the serf is bound to the lord for life, but the lord is also responsible for covering the basic needs of the serf.
Obviously, Japan, China and Korea come from quite different circumstances to Europe and the US in a multitude of ways.
Have you considered that it might not be European companies "getting held back", but American companies unduly getting ahead by externalizing their negative effects onto society. Think social media and mental health, advertising and mass surveillance, Airbnb's business model vs displaced local population, proliferating gig economy vs exploited gig workers, for example.
Those are very subjective "negative effects". And it is perfectly possible that the American people is perfectly willing to accept those in exchange for the 50% extra household income compared to Germany.
Well, in exchange for the lower salary I get less crumbling infrastructure, a mostly working health system, in average better schools without need for extra security, ... and I get better protection from being fired in the spot and better unemployment benefits.
All that then leads to cities without no-go areas, where kids can play outside alone.
While of course downsides are that I don't have an as big house and no big backyard.
Don't forget that European media love to focus on the worst aspects of the US. Not every school in the US requires armed guards and infrastructure is pretty good in many places.
And in particular, if you have a senior position at a FAANG company, you make enough money to put away significant savings for a rainy day, you get access to healthcare that is typically more modern than what is available in Europe, and you don't need to expose yourself to those inner cities unless you want to.
And talking about no-go-zones. They're starting to pop up in Europe now, too, there are plenty of them in Sweden. I wouldn't put all the blame for them on capitalism. Rather, such phenomena seem to be more associated with cases of ethnic or social minorities that feel alienated by society.
German infrastructure is crumbling too. I wouldn't hold it up as some shining beacon.
> and I get better protection from being fired in the spot
Yes, that's the difference in attitudes people are talking about. It's the safety of keeping what you have versus the drive to reach for better. Societies' outcomes reflect that. More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.
> More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.
To be fair, the median household in the US doesn't have that much more disposable income if taking healthcare and child care costs into account, especially if they're simultaneously expected to save up a 1-2 year buffer and maybe more if they want a comfortable retirement.
But for the top 20%, which includes many tech workers, the difference is larger.
That chart doesn't support your claim that higher household income isn't reflected in happiness scores. Multiple factors are at play in those scores. The report mentions a few, but I couldn't find how much each correlates with the self-reported life evaluation.
As a funny BTW, the country used in this thread as a direct comparison, Germany, is indistinguishable from the US in this table.
His point was that it's not the only factor, and if you read that paper he cited there is a breakdown of exactly what factors contributed to happiness.
A social support network was one of the highest ranked, much higher than GDP per capita (the wealth of a nation, which can be used as a proxy for personal income if you have a Gini index to weight it against).
Finland comes out well ahead even if you weight it against Gini, and Finnish developers aren't earning more than US folks by a country mile.
> externalizing their negative effects onto society
Those US products are in common use in Europe, too, with the same effects. It's not illegal to create the kind of products Google and Facebook sell from Europe.
The main difference is not the relationships between companies and consumers, but rather the relationship between the companies, workers and the government.
> gig workers
I remember reading a book about this when in high school (in the 80s, though the book was quite a bit older), written by and from the perspective of the unions, where they argued that the during phases of growth, unions DID hold salaries back, but (according to themselves) this was more than made up for during recessions.
In the 19th century, the factory workers had a "gig economy" too, where they would often have to work on a day-by-day basis, and would show up at the gates of the factory every morning hoping to have work that day. If there were not enough workers, they could ask for very good salaries, but if there was a surplus it led to collapsing wages AND a high risk of no income at all, ie even worse than the Uber model.
This is precisely why many companies are trying to make regular dev roles as interchangeable as possible. By minimizing the dependency on individuals, they make their own bargaining position much stronger.
And when you stop being an employee that is valued for your individual contributions, and become an easily replicable "resource", it may very well be in your best interest to unionize.
However, there are externalities connected to unions, as they DO tend to stifle innovation, lowering all boats.
If worker well-being is a high priority, but a country ALSO wants a dynamic economy, one may want to look to Denmark, where most of the "safety net" responsibilities are moved from the employers to the government.
That requires a taxation level a bit higher than in Germany, but may be part of the reason why wages are significantly higher, and only exceeded by special cases like the US, Switzerland and Norway.
> whether it appears as regulation, taxation or a number of other factors aimed at improving safety and comfort
Also stuff like being bereft of energy resources (compared to American oil/gas/solar), having fucking Russia to the East, the cost of rebuilding after WW2, having lots of languages and cultures (limiting effective market size)...
They have professional associations - the most successful unions ever, not least because they pretend not to be unions. See the medical profession as a good example.
Sports and movies/TV have unions, and those are by far the highest paid individual contributors. Tech workers just have been sold a bill of goods that they will be held back by unions. Meanwhile, tech CEOs "unionized" to make sure that poaching was held back, and by extension, compensation.
If you're picking jobs where a tiny number of people are employed, then Fortune 100 CEOs make far more than athletes and actors, they're not unionized.
This thread is about labor unions, which negotiate salaries. Sports people are almost universally not in this category - they usually have an agent to negotiate their individual salary.
If you're talking the SAG for actors and the like, median actor income is $46k, one of the lowest paid professions. That works out to $23/hr for fulltime work. You can get that at McDonalds in many places.
I don't know why you added "Try again", especially because I intentionally specified "Individual contributors". Your response also highlights what I was talking about: unions do not hold back their highest paid members while bringing up the bottom for their lowest paid members, just as is the case for SAG.
Most unions cap pay, e.g., [1]. A simple Google gives plenty of evidence.
Your claim about SAG is also wrong; SAG has plenty of pay caps too. For example, here [2] is one explained on their own site. They've always had them and likely always will. There's plenty more.
Unions extract higher pay by making a monopoly on labor (and US antitrust law had to carve out a special monopoly exception for them). This monopoly obtains higher wages for those in the union at the cost of those prevented from working by the union and by increased prices to the surrounding economy. These are all standard econ results.
£138k a year in most of the UK is a very, very comfortable living. Especially when you don't have to pay for things like _your own healthcare._ It puts you comfortably in the top 5% of earners.
The same could be said for most professions in the UK. They're paid less than their US counterparts, but it's an excellent example of how you can't always measure quality of life in $ and £.
My job as a software engineer pays considerably less in the UK than my US counterparts, so why haven't I moved there?
Verdi and IG Metall represent developers. (IGM a bit more traditional, when IBM built machines here; verdi tries to take over as software development is a service of some kind)
Low salaries in tech in EU is not related to unions. Most software jobs are outside of unions. There amount of money in the EU industry is lower and people are ok to low salaries. It is an open market: people are getting paid bare minimum.
Covid and remote work shift changed a bit, though. Salaries in the EU tech grown dramatically.
they are the norm but not on the tech world. in my 10+ years working in europe (tech) i've never once met someone that was part of a union. i've had this discussion with my manager recently and you can see that people are starting to become aware (of unions) and see the need, after years of feeling untouchable. it's still very early though.
In Europe, unions can have devastating effects by ruining the relationships between the leadership and the rank-and-file.
We are stuck in a self-reinforcing feedback loop where unions represent a very small portion of the employees therefore most employees avoid being associated with unions because it makes you look like an activist.
There's this phenomenon where employees earning higher than their friends and family OR at least doing work in a clean and safe environment tend to believe that they are not workers and they oppose regulations and unions because they feel like its beneath them.
At the company of a friend of mine, the white collar employees do charity events for the blue colar ones and while the blue colar ones participate on labour day events, the white collar ones are too cool to be with them.
But when the actual non-workers(the true elite) feel like they can make more money by laying off some white collar workers, the cool white collars go through the exact same process as the blue collar ones they chipped in for.
Also, these are not even high earning white collars, they just happen to work in a pleasant environment. Many blue collar workers make more money in comparison to white them and are closer to the non-workers since they can actually do highly paid short term contract work.
There's a strong cognitive dissonance going on among white collar workers, having trouble to process the signals on if they are the cool elite or the working class. In Europe, this is not as strong because of the unions and regulations pushing all workers to earn more less the same and the work environments are safe and clean. In places outside of EU there can be workers which are 10x or 100x beter off than those at the bottom because the top can be higher but usually the bottom is also much lower and this gets the better off ones very confused.
Nope. This is laughably out of touch -" I don't understand how certain people don't think like I do so they must be irrational." If unions were structured differently, there would be more incentives. People at large, in group form are much more rationale then academics want to give credit, they are simply following the incentives in their life and attempting to do what's best for themselves. Unions in the US are not very incentivising.
In the us, the way laws are written, unions are a political entity and basically from inception are in bed with the government. This creates a mismatch of incentives as the union is motivated to operate politically and this is reflected internally because that's how power is derived externally and thus internally. This creates a lot of odd things like the local foreman who manages the house is doing so because he has been around for 20 years or because he is friends with the guy who has been around for 20 years or because he bought in with millions to be that guy not because they are the right people for the job.
Because of these legal protections and structures unions don't have to compete against other unions and they don't have to compete for the workers membership either. For example the IATSE gets a cut of your work if you work in the industry because that's legally mandated even if you aren't a member. This encourages unions to become bloated, and self serving and it's not immediately clear their value add. Just like elsewhere in society top down structures begin to appear where a few people at the top of the union get most of the pie.
Workers are hesitate to involve themselves with unions here because they are yielding agency to a political machine in a fairly permanent way.
Don't forget some of the cons and headlines around unions here either. Some of the unions using violence, like the teamsters, here to gain power. Teachers unions trying to keep bloated headcounts in empty (by half) schools in Chicago nearly bankrupting the city. Police unions protecting their members despite obvious misconduct. Lots of police/fireman/city unions keep garenteeing investment return rates that aren't in line with the market that eventually bankrupt the city.
If the legal freedom and incentives were there people would do it, but this system is by design.
I am a soft engineer but have remained a iatse card holder.
Unions kill innovation, at least in US. And 10-20% of people do the actual work so 80-90% can have the time to complain nonstop while making 400k plus.
As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.
On the other hand almost everyone in the world uses something made by American corporations.
> As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.
Keep in mind Europe exports more to the world market than America does (and more of them are goods versus services). Like yeah, if you live in the US you probably use more American-made tools - that is not true for the rest of the world.
Just looking around my kitchen now - my knives are made in Germany; my coffee grinder in Norway; my toaster in the UK. Then it's mostly made in China (air fryer, microwave, kettle, pressure cooker). The coffee roaster I have packed away is made in South Korea; the 3D printer on the kitchen table is made in Czechia.
I don't think I own a single kitchen tool or appliance made in the US.
EDIT: Actually, yeah I've got an Aeropress made in the US.
As a European I'm curious which unions and industries are you talking about? I've been working tech or tech-adjacent jobs my entire life here and I've never been in a union nor do I know any friends (developers / designers) that are in a union. And I'm going to conferences and meetups on a regular. I'm not saying unions don't exist (probably more so in certain industries), but for devs to be in a union in Europe? Never heard of it.
"Betriebsrat" sounds German to me, so possibly Germany?
And definitely Sweden. Many (most?) of my software engineer colleagues are members of either the engineering-specific "Sveriges Ingenjörer" or generic white-collar "Unionen" union.
> “Betriebsrat" sounds German to me, so possibly Germany?
I am in Germany and I never heard of any union for Devs, not even large firms having any specific ones for Devs. My colleagues frequently discuss about unionizing but there are huge pay disparity hence most often it is hard to get everyone on board sadly.
Most unions are intended for craftsmen, minijobs, public transports and such. There are some small employers covered by famous IG Metall tariff but that is not the norm. I know that likes of Airbus has some kind of union that covers most of the departments and hence pays insane salary but that is something I heard from friends of people who work there, so I can’t assure accuracy.
There might be unions but that is not the norm except some dinosaurs.
It’s very common in Norway. Many IT people are member of NITO (Norwegian Society of Engineers and Technologists) or Tekna (Norwegian Society of Graduate Technical and Scientific Professionals).
Yeah, and Tekna a few years back was one of those pushing to get rid of the (now illegal) anti-competition contracts all employers made you sign. So while most people don't see them day-to-day (as in, they don't set tariffs and often don't negotiate your salary), they still influence a lot. And the salary statistics is very useful in leveling the playing field and getting what you're worth.
And the union deals on insurances, mortgage etc. saves me much more money each year than the union fee.
Dont you just love it when people speak of their own little bubble as if it was an entire continent? I never met anyone in “Europe” working in tech part of a union.
Unions in Germany aren't really split up by profession, but by industry. So if you e.g. work in the car or manufacturing industry, there's a good chance that most workers in your company are part of "IG Metall", which is the biggest union in Germany. And that union then negotiates the salary & working conditions for every normal employee, even if you aren't part of the union. So if you ever met a developer from Siemens, Mercedes, BMW, Bosch, etc. they are probably enjoying the benefits of a union.
As you said, they are only under that umbrella because of the sector. Outside of those companies, there's basically no unions at all in IT/Mostly-IT companies.
Interesting. I think that makes a lot more sense for the heavy industries in Germany. I've been working for many years across the border in the Netherlands (South Holland specifically) where there's a lot of tech/design companies and studios and I just haven't come across anyone in a union or even heard of people being in a union.
I worked in tech (DAX company) in Germany for almost a decade and we were unionized.
I'd say the union was one of the main reasons why we didn't have mass layoffs when the company was in a hard spot. Instead more acceptable options like part-time and voluntary resignation with exit packages were negotiated and still met similar cost saving goals.
In small shops you probably won't have a union but they don't tend to hire&fire like the big multinationals.
They didn't want me to negotiate my offer, after I went through the whole interview process. Passed the message through my prospective boss: "take it or leave it, you can't have it better than people already at the company".
Yeah, salary negotiations in the context of a union contract is a specific skill. Knowing the system is absolutely essential.
The way to go would have been to communicate to your prospective boss that he needs to create a position in a higher compensation tier, or a position outside the union contract. If they want you badly enough, both are possibilities. Especially position outside the union contract are very common once you're a senior/principal engineer.
If it's only a small bump you want (not an entire compensation tier), telling your prospective boss that he needs to take your CV and convince HR that this means you have 15 years of relevant experience will also work - this will get you a high compensation level within your tier.
I've never heard of anyone using unions in software in europe. Maybe something popular in just one country?
The problem with unions is that if you are a top performer it's harder to get promoted, if you're crap it's harder to get rid of you.
Overall it's great for non productive people who can pay a little and coast, great for everyone else. I can understand unions for low paid jobs the should be done by machines (eg. factory workers) but it doesn't make sense for knowledge work where performance has huge impact.
Because a big tech company will think twice before opening o position in Europe and will consider not the impact of that position could bring, but how hard is to fire someone from that position. Some of the people targeted by the last year's lay-offs were still employed one year later and the company couldn't do anything for stupid legal reasons, like not already having a union to negotiate for 1 person. Being in a limbo for 1 year, not being able to do anything except quit and loose any potential layoff compensation package, but neither able to work for the company, nor interview and find a new job is horrible for everyone involved.
US restarted hiring quickly after the layoffs, but EU has still a hiring freeze in several FAANGS.
How many large tech. companies has Europe produced ?
Why would (or even: could) anyone start/build a cutting-edge tech. company in Europe given the hell that labor laws are over there ?
Labor laws in Europe are a giant hindrance to economic growth.
People in most European countries have made a political choice: safety and stagnation over wealth and growth.
That's their choice, fine, they're free to do as they please in their own house.
But when you make a choice, you can't ignore the consequences of these choices.
That's why "not in the US":
Different political choices, betting on growth, agility, innovation, running fast, and yes -- ooooh, what a terrible thing -- taking risks, and among others that employment may come and go because the world is not a static place.
And why would you say, aren't there any large investors?
If the labor market conditions were good (and taxes, and work ethics, and ... the list is very long), the investors would come, even from far away, believe me.
Money can move around the world very fast these days.
Wow, that's a very opinionated take, to say the least. Especially when by Europe we mean three dozen countries or so, all of them with their own history, policies and laws. A little bit more nuance would help.
In Poland most people scoff at any mention of unions for software developers. I think this is because we're still in the phase of quick SWE salary growth powered in large part by the best performers in the field being good negotiators in salary talks with incoming foreign capital. They drive the companies' labor cost expectations up and it benefits everybody in the field.
There's also a huge disparity between the SWE salaries and the rest of the society in Poland, I can imagine fears that unionization overall would flatten out those differences.
Another factor is that in places where we have unions (leftover fields still highly tied to the government, e.g. teachers) they tend to not function very well in practice (not enough employee advocacy, unhealthy level of union politics affecting people's outcomes in the workplace etc.).
Lastly, we're still pretty fresh to the whole capitalism game as a country, so we're scared of anything that resembles a step backwards.
The US also pays significantly more. Unions change the risk calculation for employers, and the result will be changes in compensation, and often increased costs to consumers.
Also unions in the US have quite often rewarded seniority over skill and effort, making them less attractive to high performers.
Early on in tech I outperformed all those I started with, and was able to make significantly more as a result. My friends in union jobs (electrician, auto plant workers, ..) did not get any such opportunity to shine, and they even had to strike (i.e., no pay) when the local shops decided they should. They're not allowed to work outside jobs, they have a terrible time starting new shops, since the existing union power brokers like the control over their employment.
I looked into moving to the UK, and saw how few startups in the EU become big, how hard it is in most countries there to make new businesses compared to the US, and decided against it. The EU is ~450M people, the US is ~330M. Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies.
Increased benefits to workers for one facet of employment is not free. Laws adding costs per employee to an employer are not simply paid out of magic money.
Where is any evidence to back this? How can you compare a VC funded tech job pay to a normal trade pay? Software pays a lot because its a good business. There is no physical product cost so labor can be higher, and margins are higher. Comparing the EU and US start up cultures and implying its somehow due to labor protections is disingenuous.
You do make some very good points, but I disagree on one.
>Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies.
Money is power/control, and not having a concentration of wealth is a good thing for society. Granted many of the ultra wealthy also support giving away their wealth - but (IMHO) the Benevolent dictator model for social change is indicative of a failure of government. I think there is wastage of allocated capital both when its done by elected officials and also with the ultra wealthy.
> not having a concentration of wealth is a good thing for society
The US has higher income for median, for the poor. for those in poverty, for every decile, by a decent margin.
For example, US median income is around 46k. Germany is a reasonable first world country, yet median income is 33k (all in PPP dollars). This is huge. Most of the first world has similarly low income, at every level.
If your argument against income is that some people make a lot, so instead make everyone poorer, I find that a weak argument. It is a common outcome of poorly designed policies that those focusing on the rich or poor but with a bad understanding of history and econ end up making. I'd rather policymakers learn econ and history and learn that things like rent control, or various forms of taxes, have consequences that often hurt those they claim to want to help.
> I think there is wastage of allocated capital both when its done by elected officials and also with the ultra wealthy.
You think the average person would allocate capital better than those that understand investment and growth, and are willing to risk their own resources? There's a reason govt funds vastly underperform general markets - those with less to lose (i.e., those playing with other's money) likely fare worse at allocation than those that have more skin in the game. I know that most workers I tend to hang out with have a terrible understanding of how econ/macro/finance or even starting and funding businesses works.
Also those countries that tend strongly into socialism instead of capitalism have not done as well as those with strong capitalist bases (i.e., all first world countries - where people can own the means of production and operate for their own profit). If capital were allocated so much better in the places you seem to want, where is the evidence that it works? There's 200+ countries; if it worked, you'd think it would be winning somewhere....
>If your argument against income is that some people make a lot, so instead make everyone poorer, I find that a weak argument
How did what I say in any way relate with making everyone poorer? You're just assuming what my position is, and also assuming the outcome based on what happened in other random countries, in a completely different setting.
I'm against concentrations of power because the government should not have a competitor when it comes to power. We elect the government, and in a functioning democracy the government's policies are decided on by voters. This in effect ensures only the people get to decide who govern them. There should never be another entity which can out compete a government when it comes to power and influence.
>I'd rather policymakers learn econ and history and learn that things like rent control, or various forms of taxes, have consequences that often hurt those they claim to want to help.
Its a common talking point, but in reality that is just an opinion masquerading as fact. It presumes everything in economics is an inarguable fact. It is not. Humans have been successfully governing themselves under various systems of governance. Anyway, that itself is a 4 hour debate, so I'll just leave it at that. If you want the final word you have it, I won't argue with it ;)
> Its a common talking point, but in reality that is just an opinion masquerading as fact.
Spoken like someone ignorant of history and econ. Rent control is such a screw up, over and over, that it's a basic part of econ 101, yet politicians and everyday people want and obtain it again and again, each time to the same outcome - less housing and less affordable housing.
Care to point out where rent control has been a smashing success, and compare that to places it has been a dismal failure? This is not opinion - this is fact. Or simply read some survey papers - google has plenty.
A good tax example is something like the Swedish Financial Transaction Tax [1], which was a major screw up, yet has been tried in around 15 countries, all with similar screw ups, yet is popular (see Bernie Sanders version from ~2020 for example). There are ample academic papers detailing all of these.
Also fact. Go ahead and explain how the Swiss tax was a success.
People ignorant of history and econ, and most importantly how econ works, continually repeat stupid ideas. Maybe this time magic will work because they believe it?
You are a prime example of this problem with your claim. Yes, there is some play in econ, but it's no where near something one can just wish away, yet people ignorant of it try.
You can believe in your ideology, the problem is you have to convince others if you want to do anything democratic, and so far you haven't. I said I won't argue with you so I wont ;) Good luck.
Many differences between the US and EU, not just workers benefits.
IMO, more likely to affect startup company success in becoming big:
- One common language, one culture, one currency across the US (sure, differences between states in culture but not as diverse as in Europe). This is gradually converging via the EU, but the US has a couple of centuries headstart...
- VC funding concentration in California (think about how many of those "US" companies are from California); VC investors in US are global names if you work in the industry, in EU they are regional names.
- Generalising a bit here, but from my experience, I find work/life balance generally considered more important in EU compared to US. In the US, work is given a higher priority and if your boss asks you to stay late/work on a weekend, many colleagues in the US would do it, European colleagues would put e.g. family first instead.
- Side note; work/life balance point can be reflected in terms of national culture, e.g. "The American Dream"
Google has a union. It costs thousands of dollars per year to join and primarily focuses on political issues like lobbying management not to pursue contracts with the US military.
And even if they had a good union, I fail to see how it would have prevented this.
I don't think its so much the industry as the geography. It is all about tradeoffs and I don't think there is a clear answer as to what the better way is. I am in the US and to me the American dream is the selling point here. While I don't think the American dream is as easy as it was decades ago, I do think its still very much a possibility when I see the number of immigrants that come either as skilled workers or labor and can really lift themselves up. I am not European but my impression is that lots of the EU advertises itself as stable.
I personally have no interest in joining a union. I don't think companies are my friend but I also know that it is bad to become complacent which I find a lot of lifers at big companies can become. I am not suggesting you need to be working 90 hour weeks but I do think a lot of individuals, including engineers, fall into the trap of doing one thing well and nothing else and stick into a single role for such a time that they lose plasticity. The employee - employer relationship is not a war against each other but a market balance, I need to be adding incremental value and the employer needs to be recognizing it and we are left to negotiate the terms.
Well, unions tend to average the outcome. But IT positions, being on the top side of the employee distribution, can typically obtain more.
I can give you a real-world example. Our company (Italy) office was relocated, and unions entered negotiations to obtain three days of remote work for the entire personnel. However, I and others refused to sign the agreement because, with more negotiation power, our target was full remote work. However, in doing so, we were undermining the union positions, which made them unhappy. Fortunately, things ended well; all personnel got the three days, and a few other people were granted full remote work.
In Europe unions negotiate with company leaders to make deals that help businesses negotiate market conditions. In the US unions enable workers to gang up on management in order to increase pay. The words are similar, but the structures, operations, and goals involved are all completely different.
And the lack of this practice across an entire industry. Margins are getting smaller and smaller and the successful companies will use such practices to inform all sorts of decisions, from building in house vs 3rd party vendor, to hiring, to R&D, etc.
The days of YOLO moonshots are over for our industry. Of course venture capital will continue to exist but perhaps directed to new industries.
I definitely wouldn’t say the days of YOLO moonshots are completely over (just look at the current level of investment in AI startups). Those days will return when the investment climate is improved, as it was prior to this recession and will be afterwards.
In relative terms, it's not huge - NYT is no more specific than hundreds, so let's say 500, out of 182,000 - that's 0.27% (though obviously a higher impact on engineering - you might that would be what they'd cut last).
And it seems to be layoffs in hardware which, frankly, Google is not great with. Yes, Pixel has improved vs previous years. But Pixel is mostly US, Apple owns the US market and Pixel is not making any inroads (at best it is eating other Android devices). Google has no real runaway hardware hits. It's had a few promising launches but then they manage to take them in bad directions (Google WiFi going from a simple focused thing to becoming this giant Google Home mess that's a pain in the ass to use, Chromecast devices losing functionality, etc, etc). Google support documentation has been 100% useless every time I've had an issue (to be fair: so is Apple's).
Amazon's hardware (Alexa) is the market leader I think and even it was hit with layoffs last year wasn't it? Even specifically Alexa which Google's Assistant hardware line tries to compete with.
It's probably extremely rational to step back and conclude that Google sucks at hardware. I do like Google WiFi (it frustrates me but it is fairly set-it-and-forget-it for my parents/non technical friends) and Pixel (because I hate iOS).
Google as a company doesn't have the attention span or focus anymore to ship excellent hardware. "Everyone knows" that they don't stay focused on things, and I can't imagine that making it easy to higher top quality hardware and firmware folks. Once you eliminate good pay and stability, there's not a lot to recommend Google to hardware folks.
It’s just business. And it’s not like swe aren’t making 400k or more at least in bay area.
People need to understand that just because you have a little bit of RSUs and a 200k base doesn’t mean you’re God.
You’re an asset like a machine. And you’re expensive to the bottom line.
This is literally explicitly laid out now with section 174.
If you’re taking this personally ask yourself why you’re even working for arguably some of the best most efficient capitalists on the planet. Maybe you should work for a government agency or smaller company. But you want that 400k plus right?
The fundamentals remain the same: they are workers who support families of arbitrary needs and complexities and not just themselves. Are they expensive to the bottom line? Good -- they _allow_ the bottom line because they are the ones generating value.
Not the shareholders and upper managers calling for layoffs to maximize their stock prices who you seem to appreciate more.
I’m just pointing out reality. Sorry I know it’s not “kind” or whatever. Just true though.
If someone makes a Faustian bargain, it will have consequences.
You make a deal with the devil (biggest capitalist empires on the planet - I don’t think they’re evil btw I’m just making analogy) and the devil will come for you.
For them, it’s just business. That’s their whole point of existence, to run their business and grow even at their stage. I don’t work for these companies but I do hold positions in them through my 401k.
I have worked in the Bay Area for decades, and never seen 400k+. My current contract comes out at about 165k with no benefits.
The reason I work for a soul-less telco, is that it is hard (for me at least) to find a job in the first place. I've been at plenty of small companies as well. If I could have gotten in at Google I would have done it in a heart beat, not just for the money, but to have FAANG on my resume.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 507 ms ] threadThere are dumb stories on the first page even with 3 and 4 votes. HN ranking is seriously broken.
I don't buy the "it's users flagging, bro" excuses anymore...
That sounds weird to me. Pixel phones has grown very fast in the last years and I don't se how it can be seen as anything but a great success.
Yeah yeah, why did I keep buying them? I have no idea. I guess I assumed the rest of Android phones sucked more.
(I've had various android phones going back to the T-Mobile G1).
Pixel 6s were on sale and I got one of those, no regrets. I am not enthusiastic about Google as a company, and I may consider an iPhone for my next cell, but I've been satisfied with the Pixel line so far.
The former seems like it might be reasonable (and I wouldn't want to lock a piece of home infrastructure to a workspace account anyway); the latter seems utterly insane.
For many years Google Home with all the Nest speakers and displays have worked fine. But you are not allowed to use the nest cameras, thermostats, doorbells, etc with workspace accounts. Hence I regret buying those.
Microsoft has a similar issue with their ‘personal’ vs ‘work’ logins.
God help you if you try to use the store to buy some things on a work account, or login to some services using a work account.
You will regret it.
I have a workspace account that is my main email and such. With the Pixel 2 watch I had to use a @gmail.com account in order to use it. Not a huge deal, but annoying for sure.
Would be the same issue for someone who doesn't have an @gmail.com account at all. They would have to create one in order to use the Pixel 2 watch.
I got one as a gift. It is a good looking door stop, though.
Google cannot release any product worldwide. Their knowledge doesn't go too far beyond US market. You can call it Americentrism or just lack of competence of the ones in charge.
Apple must turn a profit somewhere and charging a bit more to their high-end customers to give a bit more of a break to their low-end customers isn't a terrible method.
If you hate Apple's pricing, you have WAY more companies to hate on first.
Apple has a gross margin of 44%.
Amazon has gross margin of 46%
AMD has a gross margin of 47%
IBM has a gross margin of 54%.
Microsoft has a gross margin of 71%.
Oracle has a gross margin of 72%
Nvidia has a gross margin of 74%.
Meta has a gross margin of 78%
Reference please? Amazon has massive retail sales and it's not even making a profit on this much of the time--and the rest of the time it's low.
This particular one is from this site.
https://finbox.com/NASDAQGS:AMZN/explorer/gp_margin/
Those margins plus the AI bubble are why MS stock prices are so high.
https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/gross_profit_margin
Nvidia 57.5% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/nvda/financial...
Microsoft 47.6% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/msft/financial...
Meta 40.2% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/meta/financial...
Apple 30.1% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/aapl/financial...
Google 27.8% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/goog/financial...
IBM 14% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ibm/financials
Amazon 7.8% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/amzn/financial...
AMD 3.8% https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/amd/financials
Apple is still extremely profitable for a company that primarily makes and sells hardware. Nvidia has a higher margin but that's because of the AI boom.
Every year they'll say "we're serious this time" and promise to dump money into marketing, but it really goes nowhere and carriers continue to push other phones.
They sell a lot of them, very very far from zero...
OTOH I browse JavaScript heavy websites on my phone and I believe due to single-threaded performance, Chrome on Android is noticeably worse than Safari on iPhone.
My point is, Pixels are better than iPhones for some use cases and vice versa.
I'm a happy Pixel owner.
It seems that this year Pixel lost.
The reason they are doing this is probably because the non-tech management MBAs running Google are all using iPhones.
The market share speaks for itself.
For what it's worth, India with over a billion people is a large market for Android.
Anyway, the iOS market share seems to be increasing rapidly in India. See https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/devices/ip...).
That's a kiss of death. I remember while working at Windows Phone team at Microsoft, a lot of program managers and designers were using iPhones and Macs. Unsurprisingly their own product never got off the ground because they failed to develop a vision for it. Android at Google is in a slightly better position, but this kind of attitude of not using your own product but preferring a competitor's one leads to inevitable decline.
Maybe resetting the engineering department is the only chance of innovating, when the company is so big and the (maybe bad) culture is so pervasive?
Apple has fired Jony Ive, and nothing bad had happened (quite the contrary).
Google has fired the head of computational photography, and nothing bad had happened.
The various third party android phones have severe drawbacks in their manufacturers tweaked android or inferior hardware.
It is a commodity gadget made at some cheap shop in Asia. So people worked pixel phone have not much to do with its growth or lack of it.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66863
For the defense of big corp, finance is often told a figure as to how many in percentage to layoff. Not much more, not much less or you get added to the list.
CEO? He also has to follow orders.
Who's to blame then? I wonder.
The practice and coordinated moves in the tech industry, and beyond, consistency in the pattern observed (and attested so broadly) led me to believe it is well intentional. Instill fear and anxiety to those who are left so that they stop claiming they deserve a significant raise. Will figure out how to innovate once we've regain control over the main cost: wages.
I'm not even sure Dell has been that good at capital management as of late. His last good shot, and an amazing one, was to buy out his own company at a much undervalued price, with plenty of financing support from investment banks. 10 years ago already.
What killed it for me was when new management came in, refused to talk to anyone internal, brought in outside hires to be the innovators and change agents, and then shut down any of the legacy employees who tried to speak or bring ideas to the table. A lot of really talented people have left, and maybe that was the goal, as it avoids having to pay severance.
That's not Google. Instead, this means that now I need to go have a fire drill where I figure out who has been fired on all the teams I collaborate with and figure out how that fucks with my team's 2024 plans that are getting reviewed and finalized basically right now. I need to deal with the morale killer that is another layoff at just about the one year anniversary of the big one last year when memories of layoffs were on just about everybody's mind anyway.
I don't know anybody in Assistant, but when I read this headline I assume that the reason there are layoffs there is because Google wants more people working on new LLM hotness and is unable to naturally transition people from Assistant onto Bard or whatever so they are just firing a bunch of people in Assistant to free up budget to hire people working on LLMs. That's not a mechanism for saving the company. That is covering up for shitty management and incentive structures that can't get people working on the stuff they want without this sort of extreme action.
Which makes absolutely no sense because a ton of the DialogFlow data would make google's version of an llm much much better than whatever was offered by anybody else.
Like going to the masseur during working hours?
In addition, if this occurs, make sure to blame external factors or wide-ranging conspiracies.
Says another rando who doesn't have a stake.
It was starting to be sustainable: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
I don't know exactly what they did in 2020 to mess up their numbers, but 2017 - 2021 shows a company that was stabilizing at ok profit margins.
If you’re just laying off engineers to meet some profitability measure for Wall Street then you’re not going to fix innovation. You need to replace all of management who are the ones who are in charge of what the engineers are doing.
Google is completely lost and doesn’t know what it does. Management launches new products just to look good and shuts them down a year later, and still the only thing making money is search and ads. That’s not going to be fixed by laying off engineers.
Changes? Yes. Often superficial changes. Change "Twitter" to "X", change blue checkmarks to yellow or gray or whatever, and sell blue to the lowest bidders. As for improvements? No, I haven't seen Twitter improve much if at all since the acquisition. In fact, the removal of third-party clients for example was a gross vandalization of the service.
> Also, when Steve Jobs returned to lead apple in 1997 he fired a significant fraction of the company before starting an incredible period of innovation.
This quip misses the biggest part of the story, which is that Apple didn't cut its way to success but rather acquired NeXT for over $400 million, a massive investment at the time, and Steve was merely replacing the old guard with his people.
The world’s most valuable company comes to mind.
Edit: To expand on my comment: At my company the problem with missing innovation is not related to layoffs (which do not happen, thankfully). But rather that hiring is very slow as management thinks teams need to "earn" those additional resources by innovating instead of the other way around: hiring people that are willing to innovate.
Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation.
The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.
I mean no disrespect, but fundamentally a company is only able to do one of the two things: either hire, or fire people. Nobody is taking this away from them, and why would they? Once the leadership has spoken, it's up to employees to either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say. The union statement reads awfully like "We refuse to believe."
I'm not sure that's helping anybody!
> either listen, or ignore what the leadership has to say
Or openly criticize those decisions if they have the guts for that?
I take their words as a call out to the aspirational future where the union gives employees a voice in the discussion about these kinds of hiring and firing decisions.
Combined with high interest rates, that prevent businesses from starting new projects financed through credit. Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work. Probably demand for IT roles in 2024 is going to be lower than previous years and salaries may stagnate or go down.
OTOH, they're pretty smart.
> Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work.
This is the sort of thing that increases demand for IT. Company had 40 artists and two IT staff, now they can get by with 10 artists but three IT staff, because IT has more work to do supporting the AI stuff.
It's fundamentally the same kind of mix between following bureaucratic rules and manipulating man-made technology.
> Also Im not too sure about high demands for electricians. This seems to rely on a booming real estate market which is in a whole world of trouble
Real estate prices are still incredibly high, driven by undersupply of housing, which is unlikely to abate soon. As long as prices are high, construction will be profitable. If prices crash the Fed is likely to lower interest rates which makes construction profitable again, because the prices are lower but so are the construction company's borrowing costs.
There also seems to be some political support for doing something about the high housing costs, like relaxing zoning rules, which would allow new construction in places it's currently prohibited.
The Fed? Not everyone lives in the Empire
True to some extent, but IT salaries are high in my opinion because until recently there was a very limited tech talent pool but huge demand for IT talent. I mean IT was only really seen as a good career around 15-20 years ago.
We just got lucky. We had the right skills at the right time. We rode the wave of big tech companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook growing into the most profitable companies in the world. With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some and with plenty of freshly well educated IT talent entering the market there's really no reason to not expect this high salaries to continue. In my opinion they'll most likely fall to what your more typical middle class job pays.
It has been seen as a good career ever since it started employing a significant number of people.
> With technology maturing from here on the industry will likely stagnate some
That's the thing that happened 15-20 years ago.
And with only the passionate developers left, the cycle starts again.
Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
What do you think the learning is meant for you to learn? You have to terminate aluminum conductors differently than copper to prevent corrosion etc. Learning these things is what allows you to wire a building without causing a fire.
> Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
Apprenticeship requirements are unfortunate -- basically giving the incumbents in an industry the ability to rate limit new entrants -- but it's not as if no one has ever done it before. So you do the apprenticeship.
Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?
That's about the same as it is for IT, isn't it? Most decent IT jobs wanting a four-year CS degree.
And changing careers has retraining costs but not for some 18 year old who hasn't picked one yet. Which can balance out the supply and demand five years from now just as well as a 30+ year old changing careers.
> Do you know people who switched from IT to electrician because their salary got lower?
Do you know a lot of people in IT whose salary got lower?
Ah ok. I though you where talking about people currently working in IT switching over to become an electrician.
This place can wear a man down fast.
Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense.
After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers)
You can't trust anything anyone above you in the management chain tells you. Not one thing. Not ever. Even if they're being truthful they were probably lied to themselves or told a half truth.
Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm. Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
You can be somewhere for 10 years. have glowing performance reviews, feel like you're making a difference, think it'll never happen to you, not even be aware the company is in shit, and then... tomorrow you're gone.
Your job is NOT safe.
They go in to public companies, they hire MBA's, and they try to improve profitability of company by letting engineers go.
Your money have come a full cycle :)
The UK inflation rate was 3.9 percent in November 2023, down from 4.6 percent in the previous month. Between September 2022 and March 2023, the UK experienced seven months of double-digit inflation which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/306648/inflation-rate-co...
If you are of the belief that the monthly inflation figures "stack", you are saying inflation is much higher than the 18% in 2 years that GP reported.
If you are not of that belief, then the figures you cite are fairly consistent with the 2 year rise in prices being in the +18% neighborhood.
Nov 2021 - 114.1
Nov 2023 (latest value) - 130.0
So, 14%. 18% slightly out of date figure.
Cash in the bank, even at 5% rates, hasn't kept up.
Central banks want to incentivize investments.
They borrow short at base rates and lend long at a margin
Anything else will fall short.
In real terms US bills have returned 0.4%/yr over the last 120+ years
This was not a term deposit, but a regular account, either itself with check-writing privileges or linked to a checking account with 1-3 day transfers. I think MMFs with check-writing paid similar interest, although not 100% sure as I never put my money there. Those were cash accounts as I could withdraw any amount, up to 100% of the account any time without any penalties.
“Montly” inflation rates are usually expressed in terms relative to the prior year, not prior month.
When we look at another data source, annual inflation rates for the UK don’t appear to be 18%: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/inf...
Bank of England inflation calculator at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... says it should be £1.34
So much for the inflation numbers.
aka, some folks on HN don't know about statistics.
But that's not what happens. What comes down in electronics. If you exclude food, shelter and medicine (things you need to live) the numbers are in line with govt estimates. But most people would bristle at this approach.
"This item looks different to me", "this category looks different to me", and "this basket looks different to me" are real feelings, but the government isn't straight up lying about inflation measurements.
Agreed. The government publishes the methodology and the source data the final numbers are based on are generally publicly available. However, the methodology slowly changes with time. And whatever the rationale is (there is always one that sounds good) its effect is always lowering computed inflation numbers. And lower inflation numbers give government ability to keep printing and spending money -- a dream for most officials.
So while I do not think the government is straight up lying, it is slowly twisting the methodology due to seriously misaligned incentives. My 2c.
But either way, I've lately become convinced to ignore inflation. The real thing we should be reducing is printing of money, no if buts or maybes.
£6 for a pint of beer (outside of London) is 'the new normal'.
Until the huge bubble around tech companies explodes.
Apple, Microsoft, Meta priced for modest growth.
Do we live in the same metaverse?
AAPL priced for modest growth? The $3tn company???
Share buybacks decrease supply of shares relative to demand, so share prices increase.
Share buybacks are likelier to happen the more profitable a business is.
A higher share price at time t+1 than time t means the shareholder can earn a profit if they buy a share and then sell later.
Ergo, profits mean something.
Edit: as a reply to the comment below this, please take a moment to look around and identify anything providing you utility that was the product of a publicly traded company.
Google's PE is 25 today compared to the S&P of the 1990s 15 https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio/table/by-year
That said in the 1990s the US had access to a huge new market (the USSR market), something that US companies don't have today.
For those reasons avoiding companies that pay significant dividends is a superior investment strategy (because it means more competent management or management that doesn't consider the stock overvalued).
But still your point about the absurd uncertainty of big company roles, even under glowing performance gauntlets as you so aptly say is well taken.
you highlight a paradox between the values the company espouses, and the ones they actually keep. In where it appears that, no loyalty is returned to the employee from the company in which the employee invested their loyalty so heavily.
Indeed, folks may quibble with this characterization, or even strongly disagree, but when cuts are made like this, even when valuable people could afford to be kept, that’s what it really comes down to.
Poor Google. The pain! What have they done to deserve this, oh heavens?
This has happened to me twice in my career and both times its like you're talking to a whole different person.
In my cynical opinion, being that different person is the number 1 trait companies look for when selecting managers
In summary: Patty McCord helped create the company culture in Netflix not ever holding on to people, if your position becomes slightly redundant or your performance falters for a bit, you're out. She apparently called herself "the queen of the good goodbyes". She says that she does not like the word "fired", that people are just "moving on" and that this is good for everyone involved. At one point in the interview, she gleefully recounts admonishing an employee she let go for crying about about it.
The twist being that she herself was eventually fired as well. The interview does not go very deep into this because "she doesn't like to talk about it", and just says that leaving Netflix was "terrible, painful and sad".
I mean, is this impostor syndrome or is it something else?
You likely won't see redundancy coming. Chances are you'll be dismissed out of the blue one random day.
Social resilience and social welfare have been vilified enough that I see just enough blanket downvotes in some social fora, as if its an icky subject or an allergy. Those who are at the top benefit from it, as long as as they have enough lackeys to do their bidding.
Your advice is sound: exchange your expertise for money, invest the money, leave.
The big cultural change happened in the early 80s as MBA culture became the norm, with a shift towards zero sum neoliberal extremism and the uncoupling of pay from productivity.
Friedman popularized an idea that shareholders should be prioritized above all else and Jack Welsh implemented it at GE, showing just how much profit can be made when you care only about the money/stock.
The more you earn, the higher the risk that at some point somebody decides that they want to spend less / smarter. So, your risk increases with your salary. That's fine because it enables you to mitigate such a scenario by having savings.
I've been part of a big layoff round once. It wasn't personal. That was just my employer rounding up a large group of people to cut some meaningful chunk out of their salary expenses. It wasn't the last round either. The company, Nokia, ultimately got out of the phone and map business (I was in the maps unit). The final head count reduction was in the tens of thousands. A lot of those have since had successful careers and the Nokia implosion spawned quite a few successful companies.
But getting layed off is a bit of a rough ride. You feel bitter, angry, insulted, etc. But on reflection I actually got a fair deal and honestly I needed the wake up call that job security is a big illusion. I was just coasting in my career and a bit too comfortable. The moment was perfect as I was still in my thirties. This stuff gets harder as you get older, less flexible, and more dependent on job security. I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.
While this is a respectable way to see employer / employee relationships, it does not apply to every company / employee out there.
In particular, I think this is very true for BigCo, where most people are seen as fungible cogs.
The smaller the company, the better.
To everyone their poison so, I guess. I learned that I am a large company guy, by a nature and nurture. Other people I know are the complete oppossite. One thing I learned so, no employee ever is safe. Not even lifetime employed state / public servants.
I work at a company of roughly over 200 employees that is part of a much bigger org. Layoffs never happen where I am working. And one factor may be that HR has a different, in some cases personal relationship with their employees. That is certainly not the case in the parent org where large-scale layoffs happen every few years.
Edit: And I would not even attest that my company is one of those with a "heart", as you say.
There's a high chance you're just a "sweet summer child" who wasn't there the last time things were REALLY bad.
Might be survivorship bias though because the people that could have been laid off in the first few years cannot be there to tell the tale, of course.
I disagree. There is a lot of variance in small companies. There is a lot of variance in large companies as well (the famous "it will really depend on which team you belong to").
I really think there is little correlation between company size and your experience at such company. The predictive variables (if they ever exist) are elsewhere.
In my network we keep joining the same (relative small) companies because we roughly know the culture we can shape and create an environment
If those people are assholes, the size of the company doesn't matter, your employment in that company will suck.
I stand by my original point: no obvious correlation between company size and quality of life inside it.
In fairness, anyone can leave at any time. Your employer, regardless of size, has to be prepared for the possibilty that you'll quit for a better job, or for some other reason. It would be inadvisable to get emotionally attached to employees.
The reason you're less likely to get laid off at a small company is that small companies don't have the capital to hire indiscriminately, so they're less likely to have large inefficiencies. The number of employees is already as low as they can get away with, given their current revenue, so only a significant downturn in revenue would justify layoffs.
I think the posters who remind people that the employer/employee relationship is a business one have it right. We as engineers should strive as best as possible what our specific value is to a company. We should not delude ourselves into thinking we are more to the company than that. When we cease to have that value, or they cease to desire going down that path, they might end the relationship.
It doesn't work both ways. They only get the benefits. You do not.
And it applies to everyone up to the CEO.
At my company a new CEO came in to much fanfare. A year later they were unceremoniously turfed out because the board decided they weren’t up to the “new direction” the company needed to go.
And not to mention the people under the CEO who road her coattails. They were all turfed in quick succession (or smartly saw the writing on the wall and bailed first).
It’s a business relationship. That’s all. Treat it as such. Get as much money as you can. Don’t kill yourself in the hope your sacrifice will be repaid, it probably won’t.
Basically take the emotion out of it. When management talks of “our big family” they are just saying that because people like to hear it. It’s not true.
And once you’ve gotten enough years under your belt you start to see through the talk pretty easily. Trust your gut. If the company starts to look wobbly, be the first out the door, not the last. Or at least plan according and don’t assume your job will be there next year or even next month.
For individual contributors leaving isn’t always that easy as most interviews now require Leetcode prep. If you haven’t already been practicing, it can take a few months to get prepared for the grind. This is even worse for folks who work and have obligations outside of work such as children or sick family members.
You should be reliable, you should help everyone in your "family". If you leave your "family" abruptly it is a kind of betrayal.
Also funny is brainwashing employees to think that HR is their fried, that HR can help with issues at work.
It is a business. Do minimum amount of work you've been hired for, get your paycheck and focus on your private life!
Your line of thinking seems to be common in the IT industry and I wonder if it’s a good industry for me to be in long term. I only was at one company so far where we had a really close-knit team.
Ditto!
A business is made of employees, but the employees are not the business. Sometimes that means decisions have to be made in favor (sometimes arguably) of the business over you.
Understanding the ephemerality of the situation can help you appreciate when it's going well and the people you work with, while helping you be prepared if and when something happens. Hopefully you will have gained a lot more experience, a bigger network of good friends, and have a decent nest egg to take you to the next job.
It's important to differentiate between colleagues and the business. The people you work with can become friends, but ultimately the business will do whatever sociopathic thing makes the number go up the faster/helps to deal with the crippling emotional turmoil of the execs.
You can be friends with the people you work with/for, but if there comes a time when the business and the people's interests diverge, the business will normally win. As long as you are aware of this, you can be OK throughout it (sortof, getting laid off really, really sucks).
It is extremely important (to me) to form some kind of relationship with the people I work with to stay motivated. It doesn’t have to be everyone and super close friendship - but that certainly helps if it comes naturally.
And yea businesses are like a form of “slow AI”. They will do what is necessary to survive even at the expense of the people who built them. And it is important to be mindful of that. But I can’t work with a Damocles sword hanging over me constantly. At some point I have to lie to myself and assume the business will also act in my interest if I do good work - even if it’s a naive and arguably stupid belief which has bitten me a couple times already. It wasn’t anyone’s “fault” or anyone acting with evil intent.
In the end I live after Juicy J’s eternal philosophy: “Everything is business Ain’t shit personal.”
I don't think of it as depressing to act as if a fictional entity like a corporation isn't part of your family. By all means, be friends with your coworkers, show up and work hard, but don't get emotionally invested in a relationship with an LLC or a C Corp that can't love you back.
Also, you are incorrect about corporations not being fictional entities. Try googling the phrase.
I've got bad news for you about pretty much every other industry. They'll throw you away at the first opportunity to make the CEO a few more bucks too. It's the Jack Welchification of the American economy
At first place of work I had really nice team of young engineers, we've been students without kids, with lots of energy. Job was quite boring, but days were full of jokes and friendship.
And yes, I would like to exit this industry but am not ready to switch to x0.2 salary. Golden handcuffs!
There are people who recognize the game being played, and people who get their souls crushed because they failed to properly recognize how the pieces in the game move.
So in my experience, don't get too attached to company (or coworker either), and go out if things start to go south or if there's better opportunity out there.
Spoken like a man who never needed healthcare, who never had dependents, who never lived under the cage of a visa.
US is just simply has a system that's very cons for employees, especially with visa and right to work law.
Many people fall for this and as long as you are an employee, no job is ever secure.
> I've been doing startups and freelance work ever since. Which means I'm my own boss now and I've learned a lot in the decade since that happened.
This gives some hope that there are those that have learned from the illusion and are now realizing that these companies do not care about you.
I didn't actually mind. It was completely anticipated, and we (me and my team) were pretty much ready. I think the company made the correct decision, but the reason they got there, was because they made a whole cascade of rotten choices, that painted them into a corner they couldn't get out of, easily.
I really wish that they would have involved me in some of the really dumb decisions they made, because I'm actually pretty good at strategic thinking, and could have easily advised them of alternatives.
But what is done, is done.
The really annoying part, was coming out of a 27-year "silo," into the current tech industry zeitgeist.
Nasty culture shock.
Backend of the backend.
The shock was encountering the value system of modern corporations and even individual ICs.
I’m not going to get more specific, but let’s just say that I have a value system that does not mesh well, with today’s tech culture.
> Your job is NOT safe.
Nothing will make execs happier than having this line of thought popularized amongst engineers. It will allow them to hire cheaper, and exploit existing engineers more.
I think a better way to put it is:
"A job is not your family, and a job is not your identity. You must rely on yourself"
This line of thinking still means diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work, keep doing interviews from time to time, spend some cycles thinking about "what would I do if I where to build my own startup", etc. But it will not put you in the "oh my I need to accept whatever they offer me right now" path.
Especially on FAANG companies, it very easy to "get lost in the technical work" and to "offshore your life's direction to the company", so to speak. If you think this might be happening to you, I recommend involving someone else - a coach, a therapist, a friend, a brother or a priest. Whatever works for you. Someone from outside the company. It might be scary and uncomfortable at first, but taking the driver's seat of your life is worth it.
> Your job is NOT safe.
in service of
> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
Overtime, long commutes, and thinking about the job at home can make it seem like all you do is work, but it’s possible to spend 40 hours a week having fun while you also have a full time job. Remember use your vacation and sick days, and say no to excessive unpaid overtime.
If you’re mentally exhausted from work then going for a walk through a park is relaxing enough to regain some energy. If you’re depressed then you would still be vegging out on the weekend.
Which isn’t to say vegging out sometimes is a bad sign. Watching TV is fun in moderation.
> People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.
Believing that's true can help you decide if you are responsible for not reaching your goals or if you truly are the victim of circumstance.
I understand that people can be legitimately held back by circumstances outside of their direct control. That is also true.
I believe that on average people tend to like to take credit for their accomplishments and find someone/something to blame for their lack of accomplishments.
Ask the people who would've gone pro if their high school coach hadn't been a dick. Or who got passed over for a promotion because of work politics.
Saying "The sun rises in the east" over and over doesn't make it true. It's true because it's true no matter how many times I say it.
Perhaps internally they are taking accountability but all the evidence I have says that many do not.
But if you’re not accomplishing the things you want to accomplish you should deeply consider the possibility that you’re lying to yourself before you accept that your circumstances are at fault.
> You can always find a reason to rationalize why you're not doing what you say you want to be doing.
I did say:
> People can always find a reason to rationalize why they’re not doing what they say they want to be doing.
That statement is true.
The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
And yes, value yourself, absolutely. And your job is not your family or your identity, and manage risk, and there are bad bosses and bad company cultures. But it's not uniform.
But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
Even at big, bureaucratic companies like big investment banks, if you're at a certain level (not that high), eventually you'll mostly be taken care of. Not everyone and not always, but e.g. if you're an ED at an investment bank, you can have a job for life, maybe not at your current place forever, but the industry will take care of you. Similarly if you've been at dunno, Mercedes for 15 years and you're not the bottom 20 percent in terms of performance, then it's kinda guaranteed that you'll have a job in the auto industry forever.
People who have been let go from Google today can have an extremely lucrative job forever in the industry.
Likewise, there is a huge bias in hiring against older developers. Getting laid off in your 40s is a death sentence. You’ll never make as much money again, and you’ll be lucky to find employment.
Be ready to retire by 50, because anything else is both risky and improbable.
Perhaps in some of the "trendy" "bro-culture" startups you'd have a more difficult time as an older developer but even in those places, the level of experience and skills older devs bring can be extremely valuable.
But say you were laid off in your 40's, now what? Well, there are so many bigger, less volatile companies out there with solid pay that are desperate for senior people with experience. There's also consulting for those who have spent a career building up a network of contacts. You can still leverage those old contacts for future opportunities as well.
Governmental work and such is also a place where age is not a concern. Here I agree you might not make as much money but employment is always available to developers who are skilled, experienced and flexible.
Well I guess the idea is that all the "best" engineers would have already made millions by the time they hit 50 and so therefore those who are left are...
I must admit though that I've only seen one newly hired in their 60s, but probably the very few that find themselves involuntarily out of a job at that age can afford to and choose to retire a little bit earlier than planned.
The ones who are in it just for the money rarely become the best engineers.
To avoid being unemployable in your 50’s learn COBOL so you can work for a big stupid company or government.
Once out of the umbrella of the FAANGS, there are tons of jobs for SWE, just not at the eye watering salaries.
East Coast, tons of jobs at the 100K range.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/10/09/budget-breakdown-of-a-co...
And if you talk to the people who strongly identify with the MAGA movement, their main concerns are guns, illegal immigration, “persecution because of their Christian beliefs”, and for some strange reason - Disney.
People who know me and one of my friends calls us the “odd couple”. I’m a Black mostly agnostic bleeding heart libertarian capitalist pig who works in tech (including a stint in BigTech), my friend is a White former military high school dropout who is an evangelical Christian, gun loving and rural, who rails against those “illegals”.
But he attends a predominantly Black church and has been married to a deaf Vietnamese woman for two decades who he loves dearly.
I also use to live in a famous “sun down” town in Georgia made famous by Oprah. I’m often in conversations with modern “conservatives”. I don’t argue, I just listen.
Why only single out government/public sector jobs as palces for all-age job stability?
Aerospace, defence, semiconductor, automotive, industrial, medical, healtchare, banking, insurance, manufacturing, naval, rail and freight, logistics and transportations, basically all legacy businesses, all are hiring SW engineers and are staffed by mostly older workers, but HN mostly snuffs at these fields because they're not in SV, are seen as un-cool, boring, old and crusty and don't pretend to change the world through innovation and paying millions in TC for 10h/week of pretending to work from home to psuh ads to people, like Google does, but it's not like you will starve to death and be homeless if you work as a dev in those "un-cool" kinds of fields for a lot less than what Google pays, going from 1% top earners to 5% top earners. If you're a 10x dev you'll find top paying jobs no matter your age.
This might sound harsh, but perhaps the last ~10+ years of hyper-growth in the VC funded SW sector has warped many devs perspective on their own value and what the rest of the real world is like, where if a company doesn't offer FAANG TC then it's automatically unlivable.
Hell, if AI makes my medicore coding skills redundant, as I'm not a 10X dev, I can always go into trades. Plumbers, carpenters, electricians, you name it, are making bank now as there's a shortage of trades and the labor market is overcrowded with all kinds of BS consultants and "laptop workers", as per the last south park episode which I recommend you watch.
Not where I live you can't build a house on a dev wage. Average dev wages is ~55k/year and average house price is something like 500k+.
To the contrary, this is the very finest distilled HN for you. I wouldn't expect less.
Must retire? No, of course not.
I worked through most of my 50's though and definitely saw "the writing on the wall". I don't want to scream "Ageism!" because I think people are often too quick to pigeon hole a thing that has much more complex roots.
For example, because of my white hair, beard, I'm probably not the guy you would go to and ask a Swift question to. And I don't blame anyone for having that ... instinct.
But it was a combination of things like that began to inform me that my better days in the industry were behind me.
Believe me, I tried to act as mentor when I knew I was probably within a year or two of heading out of the industry but I found the young'uns didn't want a mentor either. Oh well. I think I would have at their age but not everyone is the same.
Going from 800K-1.2M down to 200K-300K total comp is not that devastating I'd say :)
If you've built up a 1.2M a year lifestyle, then going back to 250k a year lifestyle might feel like a "death sentence", at which point you will hear the world's smallest violin playing for you.
Hance why you shouldn't keep extending your lifestyle proportionally with your paycheck growth, and learn to stay humble and frugal and not spend to 'keep up with the Joneses'.
Unless you're in the same league with John Carmack or Andrej Karpathy where top companies are begging at your feet, you should treat jobs with very large TCs more like short therm lottery wins rather than cashflows guaranteed to last, since there's a high chance you're not that special as you think, and that there's probably others out there who can and are willing to do your work better and for cheaper when the crunch comes and the layoff axe starts to swing towards those non-exec workers responsible for company's biggest paycheck expenses. Those who've lived thorugh the 2008 days will know and remeber what I'm talking about.
If you're actually making $1.2 million a year, invest at least $500k/yr.
Then if you need to take a pay cut later, hopefully the dividends from your investment accounts brings your total income close to where it once was.
Also if you're reading this wondering if people actually make this amount of money coding... the answer is no, with the exception of an incredibly small percentage of people. Expecting $800k comp is not realistic for 98% of people.
So, mumble mumble, something about diversifying.
I'm sure the layoffs are likely to lead to a short-term bump because the markets will interpret it as Google adulting. But if they're signalling that they're afraid of AI eating their market share, then you probably want to be proactive about that.
I always chose option 1. This is like personal finance 101.
And for the company the purpose of RSUs instead of cash is to not deplete cash reserves.
You'd be surprised by people's poor spending habbits. Aquitances of mine when they got their first SV job out of college at Facebook, they immediately bought brand new Porsche 911's.
I think a token of "I've made it!" is fine. Maybe we all need that once in our life.
The problem is if it persists. (Worst, if somehow gambling, etc. becomes involved.)
You get a signing bonus for the US militrary? Damn that's pretty sweet.
If you're living this way, feel free to reach out. I have loads of advice you don't want to but need to hear.
Ideally, your standard of living should cost you a fraction of what your income is.
I got a job at Amazon and was making $x+$100K
I was Amazoned last year from a remote position. By then, I had paid off debt, downsized from my big house in the burbs to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida and could easily live off of $x- $30K even though I’m making around $50K more than I was making 3 years ago.
Guess how much I stressed when Amazon started Amazoning?
These companies have a big influence on what is legal or what is a priority for governments.
This is literally RTO /s
I have talked to literally hundreds of people in my life who have suffered through illegal workplace discrimination and I've honestly never met a single one who prosecuted a discrimination case successfully. Things are only illegal if you can prove them, and most managers don't go around yelling "holy shit I hate old people".
Tech skewing young and being ageist is also partially an artefact of tech being a new hot growing rapidly changing field. That is waning over time.
Is low-level expertise going to continue to skew older? Or are things like Rust and embedded AI going to bring in a bunch of new blood?
AI product dev hat on for this comment. My take is AI will continue to give solid first drafts, and expertise, creativity, and curiosity are required to take it the rest of the way. Maybe, just maybe, we get beyond the GPT architecture and embed a reasonable state of the world for wider use cases similar to a CoPilot.
I'm a very senior IC in a FAANG and almost my whole job is going around and sharing 30+ years of wisdom with people on everything from "dealing with people" to architecture to pull request reviews.
Also, while I'm at FAANG now, I'm there because I was previously at a startup that was acquired by said FAANG, and if anything, there is even MORE of a need for this sort of wisdom intelligence in a startup. :)
I don't think there is an inevitable general decline of cognitive abilities with age, or the effect isn't strong enough to matter. At least, I haven't really seen them.
What I have seen is older people who are just tired of the constant personal improvement that any career needs to continue to flourish. People often find their niche and just want to stay there. That's a different thing entirely, though.
This is a real issue at say 85, not at 45. You almost certainly aren't quite as quick as you were when you were 25, but on the other hand you typically know a lot more and the experience probably means you actually make far fewer errors overall...
My career went in to the toilet in my 40s, and it has never really recovered. However, I'm an introvert and on the spectrum, so I lack good networking skills and never moved up the career ladder.
Even so, among my circle of friends there is a consensus that many of us were struggling around age 50, and now I am 60. The only jobs I've had in the last 5 years have been contracts. My current gig, I haven't seen a raise in 3 years, despite 20% inflation. I've been told that the company I work for has a freeze on raises, so I will have to start job hunting...
This just isn't true as a broad statement, although I don't doubt it's true for some parts of the industry. Big picture, though, older engineers are no less employable than younger ones. In the right company, experienced engineers are valued more highly, even.
In the rest of the industry, not many software workers make enough to realistically retire by 50, anyway. Not without living like monks their entire lives. (recall: you need a lot more money to retire at 50 than at 65) And older workers mostly do OK in the rest of the industry, at least until age 60 or so.
I got my first job in BigTech at 46 - working at AWS in Professional Services
When I got Amazoned last year, I had three offers within three weeks.
One of those offers was from a former coworker who is now a director at a well known public company. It would have paid about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs at AWS. I didn’t want the stress.
The other offer was for a “staff architect” position at the company that acquired the company I worked for before going to AWS.
The third and the offer I did take was a for a senior full time position at a consulting company that should lead to staff position as we grow the AWS specialty that I know inside out from working with the team.
Unless I’m completely misreading the market - and I seriously doubt I am - there is no reason that if I cared to I couldn’t increase my total compensation by 30-40% inflation adjusted over the next few years
That's just not true. In my mid (ugh, getting to be late) 50s and I've been laid off in most of the downturns since the dot-com bust, including this recent one. Getting a new job at comparable compensation has rarely been a big problem. I suppose if you let your skills get rusty or work on a VERY specialized tech stack and don't want to do something else, then sure, you'll have problems.
But in this market, I'd rather be a grizzled veteran with demonstrable skills in a variety of areas than a new grad.
There are for sure exceptions, but I think most people would be very surprised at how little control the decision makers at the top actually have. They have a duty to make the best decisions for the company, and most of the time that is not ambiguous. The real difference I believe comes in how they handle it. Companies that provide generous severance, for example, are deserving of gratitude.
No doubt, it can really hurt when you have busted your ass and put your blood and sweat into a company, and they discard you. Many people tend to identify themselves with their employment, which I think lent very well to the idea of it being a family, but it won't be helpful to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. Many people get a lot of fulfillment from their identity with the company, and there is nothing wrong with that. It's very natural, in fact. Humans are group-based animals that look for group associations and identify with them. Yes, it is great for people to use families and friends for that, but the reality is not everyone has that option.
A much healthier approach in my opinion is to find a good balance. Understand how the system works. When you see the sausage being made, and try to empathize and put yourself in the decision makers position, it can help take the sting off and give you a more realistic outlook on life.
The worst thing you can do for your mental health and life satisfaction, is embrace bitterness. You don't need buy into a delusion that things are great, that you are loved for you, or that the company is a big family, but you also don't need to buy into a delusion that the company and upper management are just evil heartless people figuring out how best to use and abuse you before tossing you out the door when they are finished with you. As with most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Try to find that truth.
This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants.
I do agree though that its pretty awful but the thought of moving my family to a big city, doubling my cost of living and having to commute is also pretty bad. I live in a not tech city and would have to move to get a comparable salary at an in person job.
I have said that while other companies I have worked within would be sympathetic, they definitely would not have been empathetic; however, at my current company, EVERYONE from the CEO to interns have been so very empathetic, helpful, and thoughtful.
We are all remote and have been since the pandemic. These are people who are reaching out regularly, coming to visit, offering support in whatever way possible, and being genuinely good human beings. It's simply a work culture when you don't have this, but you CAN find it.
Don't lose hope. Good companies and great people within them are there, remote or not.
I’m not saying you have total control over it… but it depends on how people interact.
Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.
In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.
I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.
I've seen first-hand organizations shift from 100% employed teams to being majority consultants, and the majority of those consultants on 1-2 year contracts then leaving. Code quality goes to absolute shit. The name of the game is spending the first half of your contract not getting fired and the second half looking for the next contract. Zero documentation. Refusing to do turnover meetings. Not showing up for the last day/week of the contract because their next contract wanted them to start earlier so they didn't care if they got paid for this one or not. Most egregiously someone just brought in their next contract's laptop into our office with over a month left on their contract.
None of this happens with employees. Sure you'll occasionally have someone quit with minimal or no notice but that's the exception. We had to basically assume that any time we got in the last month of the contract was a bonus. Consultants work for their recruiting firm, not for your org, and they behave accordingly.
I will know if I am going to leave in a couple weeks, 2 things need to happen for me to stay; I get promoted this month and half the consultants leave. If both don't happen I think I am gone.
I think after a point, it is up to us to create the culture we want to see in a team. Someone has to start sharing more things, start talking about more things so others will feel like the same. Have a pizza session after every few successful sprints. Share puzzles and other things regularly so people have more things to talk about. It is easy to feel detached when everyone only uses a group channel, but a lot of meaningful connections happen when you do talk 1-1 in private.
I mean I have worked at places where no one even exchanged email ids when they are about to leave the company, and lurked in online places where people whom I have never even met employed me immediately when i mentioned that my day job company was going bankrupt.
> The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotions, and there are managers who're not psychopats and find it very hard to e.g. let people go.
> ...
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world works.
That's true, but the problem is the psychopathic organization exploits those relationships ruthlessly. It will use well-meaning people to lean on those relationships to get more out of employees, but then turn around and shit on them when it suits the org.
Corporations can be and (and usually are) psychopaths, even if they're made exclusively from well-adjusted, interpersonally-kind people. The whole is different from its parts.
I found this to be a very obvious reality in the companies in which I worked. And not in the sense of "poor me, nobody loves me": on the contrary, I found that I was more indifferent than expected even toward the departure of colleagues with whom I had a good relationship.
For example, in the current group of about 40 people in which I work, two directors who had moved up the ladder, were quite well-liked, and had a long tenure with the company, left to work for other companies. Their colleagues, including me, forgot about them within 2 weeks at most.
Another colleague was forced to retire after 40 years with the company: a month before his (forced and unexpected) retirement, he sat down with me to explain what he intended to do in the company over the next 3 years. But he was forced to retire and disappeared from people's minds within a few days.
Despite an excellent memory, I forget the names of most of my colleagues after a month's break. If I leave the company, they are never mentioned again. Apart from the usual exceptions, "standard" working relationships, especially in large companies, are tenuous, easily broken, and easily forgotten.
I think this is just normal human self-regulation. Extreme example, but people are mostly OK and functional a month after their mother passes away. If the best and most critical person in my team would leave today then I would focus on filling the gap, etc. and I would not think of them very much after a few days, but this doesn't mean that all that they're a fully fungible cog.
To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be functional at some point after losing their mother, but the mother's name and role in the org/family is unlikely to be forgotten, even after decades.
Why? The lay-offs are so broad, not selective at all. You're just as likely to get cut if you're working hard or not, if you're overpaid or underpaid. It's completely out of the employee's control, so why would it change the employee's behavior?
Sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time--and maybe it's even the impetus to do something different.
Employees don’t have visibility into their peers actual performance. They see a silver of it and infer. This makes layoffs look random. Then, we rely on publicly reported “I was given a great review and still let go!” posts — which are all self-interested. No one wants to hire or refer someone who was doing poorly so there’s an incentive to fib or have selective amnesia.
The whole cohort of folks let go are incentivized to keep up the fiction that it was random.
All things being equal, there is no reason to layoff someone high performing over their less capable peer. I’ve never seen it done randomly, and I’ve sat in these meetings.
This is not to say whole divisions or companies haven’t been let go, but that’s not the same situation here. We’re talking about selective cuts across the entire company where core, or advertising lost some folks, while others remained. That is not random.
For SWEs at Google and almost anywhere else, the wind has blown very favorably for you and that’s something to be celebrated.
The direction of the wind has shifted, but we can never expect it to stay blowing in one direction forever, even if others get lucky and catch one like that.
You will no doubt set your sail and take it to new and wonderful places.
Let’s take a minute and be grateful for how good SWEs have it - we are frequently so insanely disconnected from the realities and struggles of the normal working class and we should remember and express some gratitude for it regularly.
[0] well, probably not he alone, but he is the figurehead of a group that put him there and keeps him there, and at Alphabet that group shits the wind
All the "wind", "sails" and boat metaphors won't change the fact that loyalty is a virtue that fits very poorly on both sides of employment.
It means that you need to be responsible for yourself, and not allow thoughts like "I'm a valuable employee", or "I have too much seniority", or "my manager and I get along great" to convince you management won't lay you off or fire you or that they owe you anything.
As others have said, the employer-employee relationship is first and foremost a business relationship, i.e. transactional: you work and they pay you. When that relationship doesn't work any more for one side or the other, it ends.
It does often happen, of course, that professional friendships or even personal friendships develop. You are, after all, spending a lot of time with your co-workers. But don't think your good relationships or friendships will help if the business decides a layoff is necessary.
In my opinion it should mean that you not only consider the relationship transactional, you consider yourself as an independent business operating within a business transaction, an LLC or sole proprietorship if you will. Remove yourself from emotional attachment this way.
This line of thought leads people to naturally adopt the exact same sort optimization (exploitation) strategies businesses (your employer) does with the same justifications they use. As such you should focus on diversifying your employment or making sure you’re diversely employable should you need new revenue streams, have savings and cash reserves for economic downturns, and focus on your profit margins (time invested vs paid) and so on and optimize around these sort of criteria.
Obviously if you have a good transactional relationship and are to some degree dependent on that relationship you don’t do everything possible to undermine it (just as employers have limits they’ll stop at before employees start to flee) but never consider it at any sort of emotional or attached level, it’s merely a strategic relationship and be ready to optimize wherever you can for your LLC depending on its goals (i.e. your goals).
But that’s exactly the kind of relationship it is. Instead of maintaining some fantasy, you should call a duck, a duck.
I've seen family members fire other close family members, because a business is a business. Nothing special about it.
You can be friends with your colleagues, but when you understand that their role at a company is separate from your personal relationship - you may just get friends that transcend your employment.
My personal attitude towards employment - "I work for you while our goals align". Businesses most definitely treat any employee the same way.
I was once in a meeting with an SVP who was going over what he was going to say in an upcoming all-hands meeting. He kept referring to employees as “resources” and I told him he should call them people or team members as resources was dehumanizing and made it sound like we’re just line items on a spreadsheet and pawns on a chessboard. He looked at me and said you’re right - that is how they look at things, but thanked me for reminding me of his audience. He was candid with me only because I was also high up in the org.
Companies are not your friend. The people above you in the org are not your friend. You are not special or different or immune or safe. Ultimately, you do have to look out for yourself. If a company is able and willing to terminate your job for financial reasons, you need to be willing and able to terminate your job for financial reasons too - on your own terms and with a better higher paying job lined up. It’s just another business transaction. Loyalty is dead. Act accordingly.
There is absolutely still some loyalty in the other direction. Lots of people here would say it's misplaced. When it works out for you (cachet in the org, seniority, whatever) it can pay off, but for lots of people it only gets them burned when they get laid off with outdated skills in outdated tech because they were a "company man" for the last decade.
Google is cutting a few hundred R&D jobs out of their 180K employees, and countless ventures. These people could be repositioned, these people could be absorbed elsewhere. Google is wildly profitable, with record profits, which by definition means what they’re not falling on hard times.
Loyalty is dead.
Something that has never existed cannot die.
But the myth, and the brainwashing, of "employee loyalty" is still very much alive. Some even buy that crap.
The classic comeback for this is to refer to management as "overhead."
Companies pay taxes, operate in a community, and employ people. Shareholders may not care about such trifles... until the race to rot is complete.
It’s barely real, it’s hardly law, and the more we say it, the worse companies will act because we’ve all accepted fate.
Companies exist in our society. They don’t have a right to profits. Any profits is a result of patronage and goodwill of the population. We can change laws, and cultural norms, and worker and environmental protections. We don’t need to be victims of greed like it’s some inevitable consequence of capitalism.
A particular person above you in the management chain may actually be your friend. It does not mean that that person would be able to protect you from a layoff; that could be a conflict of interest. That person might give you an earlier warning so that you could start looking around ahead of time. That person could give you a glowing review and references for prospective employers. That person might introduce you to someone who might be interested in hiring you. But that person operates the machine, and plays by the rules of the machine, to which you have agreed when you have signed your offer.
Build good relationships with coworkers; this can be helpful, and is just more pleasant. But don't try to build a relationship with a company; you can't.
- never assume that just because it’s obvious to you (and your coworkers and boss) that it would be really stupid to lay you off or fire you, that they wouldn’t do it anyway.
A lot of what is going on IMO is burnout and disconnection from the on the ground reality at the executive layer.
That means short sighted, stupid, long term self harming decisions.
But just because what someone is doing is clearly stupid, doesn’t mean they won’t do it. A hard lesson to learn sometimes.
Or, you may have a division that is profitable, but it takes an outsized attention in the organization relative to its profitability and the loss of revenue is made up for focus in the rest of the organization. (Ideally, you would find a way to spin that off or sell it, but there are times where the tight integration makes this unfeasible.)
And yes, there is disconnection from the on-the-ground reality too. (and all sorts of things) - but this all goes to say that layoffs, when executed, often are not correlated with individual performance.
There is that, and it does happen that way often.
There is also sometimes people just do stupid, self harming things. Either because they are not able to properly process/know/understand what the consequences will be, or because their short term incentives encourage them to at their long term detriment.
Or because the organizational incentives make it worthwhile for them to harm the actual organizations long term interests, and they will be rewarded for screwing over the organization this way.
It’s easy for engineers in particular to look at 2+2 and assume that everyone else knows 4 is the obvious answer, and hence will act appropriately. and they just need to be shown the truth if somehow they don’t understand this
But that isn’t how people often work, especially when dysregulated, stressed out, under outside pressure, etc.
Often, there are many people between the decision makers and the folks who know the actual truth and the inevitable consequences who have incentives that will make them actively hurt anyone trying to tell the decision makers the truth - often because the decision maker implicitly or explicitly wants it that way.
even engineers, though it’s often hard to ‘know’ that when you’re in the middle of it.
Many people will burn their lives to the ground until everyone agrees 5 is the correct answer. Or happily reassure their boss 5 is the answer while burning everyone else’s lives to the ground.
That can make many real life situations very surprising and frustrating for engineers in particular.
Because how could someone do that based on ‘wrong’ (usually just not the same) information? It’s stupid!
Because sometimes for many people, the individual/self interested ‘smart’ thing is to be as ‘stupid’ as possible. And that strategy is not something someone can just change on a dime. It’s inherent.
And sometimes people are just stupid. Even otherwise really smart people.
Also, sociopaths exist and they are often in management.
But in both cases, the key insight is that layoffs are often past the control of the engineer.
With the caveat that everyone responsible is also going to attempt to deny/deflect/reverse victim and offender, etc.
It’s amazing how ‘helpless’ some management/execs get when unpleasant decisions need to be made.
That's a good way of putting it. I've let it happen to me in the past, and I've seen it happen many times.
Your comment is solid advice.
How is that? If a job is less secure, typically commands more pay. If you know you will be out of work in 6-12 months, your pay better include some cushion to cover time between jobs.
I feel like it would actually drive salaries up as people move to higher paying roles and companies scramble to keep people that they would have otherwise expected to remain for years.
For context, I once worked at company A for 2 years then got a new job offer for 20% more than I currently made. I accepted the offer and then told my VP that I got a new job and the offer was 35% more. He matched the 35% so I stayed for another year and then got a new job for 25% more than that. A little after that, Company A started doing layoffs. If I had been loyal I would have likely been laid off, instead I left with a much higher salary because I was loyal only to the money.
Companies used to be loyal but no longer are, your job is not safe.
Perhaps we actually are on the same page in principal as I agree with all of your other suggestions "diversifying your options, building an emergency fund, have a fulfilling life outside work" just a different take on the original comment.
> Your job is NOT safe.
Nothing would make me happier than to eradicate this line of thought, but laying the responsibility of that on the employee is poor management at best, malicious bullshit at worst.
We EMs do nothing to re-assure our employees that they are valued co-workers and not "resources" to be managed.
When one of my valued employees comes to me and says "I got another job offer and the increase in TC will change my life," most of the time they are a top-performer I want to keep, so I go to my manager asking to match their comp. But...they have to ask their manager, then their manager, so on and so forth. Even HR sometimes steps in with excuses why we cant. By the time a decision is made, if one is ever made, the employee I wanted to keep is already at their new employer.
So I would recommend my employees look out for themselves, bc I (and my management hierarchy) certainly won't (though they can, they just don't want to).
And if you are still looking to lay responsibility on to someone, look in the mirror.
This is so important.
It sucks and it's a symptom of risk management being a leading consideration to the process of a layoff, more so than performance optimization or culture change, but that's how it "makes sense"
Our organization has a policy that it hires developers on 3-year contracts, and renews them no more than two times. So when you have reached 9 years in the org; when you have become intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out.
I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should manage its software engineers.
If on the other hand you are just saying "well it is unlikely you will get to 9 years" the problem with that thinking is that the closer you get to 9 years and the more you have invested the more likely you will want to stay for 9 and being forced out for no reason is silly. It is a job, not the presidency.
This is exactly the disconnect between people's salary expectations and their actual salary. It's not really based on how valuable your work is, but how easily replaced you are.
Now I also prefer startups and my carrier isn't yet that old (like ~8 years) so never is still the answer.
Through companies being often way less likely to give a trusted long term employee a payrise or trust them with more responsibilities then they are to do so with a new hired employee they have hard times to properly judge the skill of is still an (absurd but not IT specific) issue.
Why work for someone who clearly doesn't align with your professional values?
the idea, i suppose, is to prevent anyone from becoming so integral and important that they will have negotiating leverage over the business.
Cogs needs to be replacible. It's also the core reason why thorough documentation, procedures and runbooks are encouraged.
I'm not I have literally heard a software engineer which was since recently responsible for hiring just saying just a few sentences apart:
- oh we shouldn't hire this person they only ever worked for the same company so they must not interested in learning and improving themself
and then
- oh we shouldn't hire that person they have switched companies every 2-3 years so they must be bad at their job and jump companies before they get fired
... wtf
and that person didn't get that opinion due to being crazy or so but from spending ~2 days to read up on what you need to look out for when hiring people, i.e. from other software enginers, software project managers and people which founded startups
the problem is not only is there a lot of nonsense out their there are multiple different conflicting engineering cultures out their each insisting only their way is the right way and convincingly pursuing people why the other way is supposedly terrible. Not few of them also pushing a rather toxic culture or a live style which only work for a singles with workoholic like traits or people which at some point in their live had the luck to get rather wealthy and no assume any software enginer in the world is in their position. It's just shit.
You can in SMEs. Avoid VC-owned or public companies. Of course, there are no guarantees.
I've seen a manager at a large company make "once in 10 year cuts", then the next year make similar cuts. This was maybe 5/10 years ago and they still cut like this today - how on earth they are still operating I don't know.
One of the tricks they pulled was to sack a senior role and simply add the entire senior role to a junior role, but keep pay, etc, the same. The sell the idea to the junior employee they told them that it would help with promotions. 5 years of no promotions and insane stress they were out.
They are also legally required to have some positions filled with qualified people, but they have unqualified people working those positions with "on the job training".
The company itself has declared internally it will be bankrupt as early as next year without some form of financial assistance. COVID just about killed them with excessive borrowing to make up for missed revenue, to survive and come back into a poor economy.
I know two people working for this company, one is looking for another job, the other is stuck in the company as they did a deal with University support in return for being retained for some years.
> Never get invested emotionally. SWEs in particularly no longer live in a world where you can expect to have a rewarding career working for >=5 years at any given firm.
How many people work for a company now that they believe will be around in 10, 20, 50, 100 years time? There's an extremely high chance you will far outlive the company you work for.
> Take their fucking money, build a big emergency fund, save, invest, and focus on the rest of your life outside of work.
Given how things are going, I would suggest tangible assets that can be easily liquefied, even if in a poor economy.
I’ve worked at the same company now for 14 years. If I chose to, I feel like there’s a good chance I could work another 15-25 years at the same firm. My company sells software to local, state, and federal government customers. There are competitors in this space, but no company dominates any particular sector. There’s ample room for growth. Our software is critical to government operations and is necessary even during economic downtimes. Working with employees who have been at the company for 30-40 years isn’t uncommon. I work on 911 systems and find the domain interesting, rewarding, and important. We can help save lives and help government work more effectively.
Very sane advice, but unfortunately not always an option.
The likelihood of making real (not paper) life-changing money in a few years has considerably decreased in 5-10 years.
It will only come back with a good pace of IPOs and investor-positive acquisitions.
The world needs sustainable businesses, not IPO jackpots for a few and looming redundancies for the rest.
There is a difference between "save, build an emergency fund" and "get into some get-rich-quick scheme".
The goal of emergency funds and saving, for most people, is to prevent life-changing events, not create them. You don't need a ludicrous paycheck to have a rainy days fund, and to put money aside, and you shouldn't count on IPOs and acquisitions to build it.
I've been an executive and every position along the chain in the lead up to that within my industry. If I took anything away from my time in it (I have since moved back to practical hands on roles) it is that your above statement is sadly, quite accurate.
My time as an executive has left me soured on the industry full stop long term now i've realised its shit all the way up. I just kept thinking i'd get high enough to find people who like me, had morals or beliefs which they may apply to their decision making. But no, morals have no belonging it would appear in the executive class, which to be fair, I should have known about in advance, but my continued promotions were really quite accidental over the years and I am obviously niave.
I expect in the next 2-5 years to see a dynamic flourising of innovative companies started by these unshackled workers.
People wanting to build stuff to their hearts desire long left or didn’t start at google in the first place
Consider that that's only a part of the picture. Revenue minus costs, combined with the growth dynamics and constituent nature of both tell a fuller picture. Top line alone is almost meaningless
Doesn't this apply to everyone?
jeff+hn AT nimbleprecision DOT com
To your point, I can't make any promises that folks will be able to work at the company forever, but I can say that the ambition is to build a company for the long term and I do think there's a lot of value in having a long tenured engineering team insofar as the context folks build up for the problem set, the code base, and the team can be immense.
I don't get why people get offended by it. we are not living in a "fair world" whatever that means.
You can die tomorrow or live another 50 years, nobody knows why. All of it is just luck.
Your job never has been safe. Well, not in "big tech firm" territory anyway. I've not gone more than 3 years without seeing some kind of downsizing or shift in strategy or whatever. I swear that companies are like dogs, they roll over and scratch every once in a while, and have layoffs.
Sometimes it's just a distant boom over the horizon ("I hear they're getting killed over in Consumer"), sometimes it's like they line everyone up everyone in your division and boop! every fifth person and it sucks pretty hard.
I won't pontificate on another boring survival strategy, except to observe that I've nearly always switched jobs and technologies after five years anyway. I would be scared for my career if I spent ten years working on one thing.
Sometimes you're saved by smart, sometimes you're saved by lucky, and most of the time you'll be wrong about which one it was. :-)
I'm another long-termer too, not as long but I aspire to! I haven't thought about it, but staying current, and switching techs is probably why I still love it and think I'll be ok in the next round of layoffs.
Right now it's cloud and serverless in python, next, I bet it's LLMs or something in that space. Before that, it was protocol-level C++, UI C++, Java middleware. It just keeps changing, and that's a good thing! I can't imagine working in a dull static changing world.
The "best engineers" you're talking about were the best by which metrics, and why were these metrics so different from those that execs used to determine who to lay off?
If they are indeed superior engineers, and your company is simply bad at evaluating talent, then they did a huge favor to these engineers by laying them off. Trust me.
No, because when large corps want to reduce head count/payroll, it often comes as a top down directive for every group to trim by X%...
In this type of environment being good at your job doesn't help - after a few cycles of these types of layoff all that are left are the better people, and the next X% layoff will be them.
Companies will cut you in a random layoff at the drop of a hat. I've seen this enough times in my career. It doesn't matter if they promise its the only/last/whatever cutoff, or it was for performance only, or whatever..
People in your network will pick you up and refer you / hire you on at the next gig.
My prior employer just did a wave of deep cuts and the stories I heard out of management were pretty crazy. Directory level people were basically given an hour to cut $X Million off their people budget from their directs and all their skip level staff. They then begin laying them off the same day. This was not a well planned or thought out process. So obviously the people I saw getting laid off were a mix of underperformerss, great-but-expensive, random personal grudges from the director, and unfortunately biased towards a lot of "lifers" who'd been there a long time.
I have ex-coworker friends I've gotten regular drinks/meals with for close to 20 years now. Our average tenure at any shop meanwhile is 5 years. Who cares what company name is on the door.
You wouldn't catch me dead at any sort of company sponsored drinks/social thing.
I would also observe that some of the people most slavishly "living the brand", reposting stuff on LinkedIn, joining all the work social groups, etc.. were some of the first to get whacked in the last few rounds of layoffs at the old shop.
Which way does the causality go is a good question, but their time would probably have been better spent on having an organic network of people in the industry they genuinely enjoy the company of.
Second this, because it so hard. You pour yourself into something, and then management changes, direction changes, and suddenly your baby turns into crap. Your creation probably isn't even put out of its misery, it is allowed to live, but gets tortured, and mangled into some unholy abomination.
It can be very upsetting. I still dwell on a big project, get angry, tense, it is very unhealthy, and also difficult to let go.
I also see advice that states you should change jobs every few years to ensure you continue to grow as a person, ensure salary growth (a real thing in my experience) and to ensure you’re staying relevant. So it seems that we want the option to move on our terms but we don’t think companies should view it the same. Management is also painfully aware that key employees can be ‘one bad meeting away’ from leaving. It seems like if we want stability then we probably need to offer some as well; many in this thread describe the relationship as either transactional or a negotiation and if we really believe it then we should view it from both sides.
Finally, there are large industries where there is significant stability: government, defense, etc. They don’t have FAANG comp, but can pay reasonably well.
See a recent HN thread: "Signs that it's time to leave a company" _ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38943040
When you see that management people can't be direct, plain-spoken, and authentic with employees, you should realise that there is a cronyarchy... and you are not in the special club.
This just corporate culture though. where are you working where that isnt the case?
And there are lots of benefits to being independent legally. Tax benefits aside, the pay is usually much higher, and you can/should take on multiple clients simultaneously. This leaves you less exposed to the whims of a single C-suite, and lets you stack up silly amounts of money when times are good.
That will lead you back to the same place when the fund runs out.
Invest in yourself instead of Google. Especially as a SWE. It's never been easier to start your own company.
> This essay examines the arguments that many self-proclaimed libertarians make against unionization. It examines whether unions could be expected to arise in a libertarian utopia; whether we could expect them to arise in both the private and the public sector; what limits, if any, we could expect to be imposed on union organizing and behavior; and specifically, whether rules that make the workplace a union shop – that is, a place where all non-management employees are required to be members of the union and contribute to the cost of collective bargaining, or whether rules similar to those embodied in what are typically called “right-to-work” laws are more likely to prevail and be thought consistent with the demands of libertarianism. Finally, I close by examining the relationship between libertarianism and some popular conceptions of liberty a little more closely and argue that, while many people who think of themselves as libertarians believe that maximizing individual negative liberty is fundamental, this is actually a mistake. Libertarianism actually rejects that concept of liberty in favor, I will argue, of a more republican conception, under which liberty is defined as an absence of domination, and a high degree of unionization and this form of liberty are totally compatible.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/in-the-name-of-libe...
[1] I personally reject "elegance" as the driving first principle when weighing ethical and normative theories. There are higher standards to seek: most importantly, a rejection of dogmatism and the embrace of continual learning. Any calcified definition of "elegance" cannot stand the test of time; what is elegant to one generation may be deeply immoral to the next. To be clear, I don't mean to say that notions of ethics must be left ambiguous. I certainly do not defend ethical "systems" which amount to little more than evergreen debates over weighing contradictory principles. Rather, I mean ethical systems must improve as our intelligence and awareness improve.
You achieve the goals that are aligned with the business - business pays you.
I've been a contractor for 10 years and never took a dollar unless the goal is achieved. Ended up getting full-time position as a head of engineering hefty compensation by one of my clients.
I read once somewhere that the phrase “my job”/“your job” is one of the biggest oxymorons ever termed in America. You do not possess the job. You do not own it. You never did. There never was a time where anyone did. The “job” is owned by the employer. You may be assigned it. It may be unassigned by the employer. Or reassigned by the employer. Or redefined by the employer. “Your job” never was.
On the flip. It’s your life. Own that. We came up with the ideas of continuous integration, apply that to the relationship. Constantly renegotiate how your life overlaps with your employers job.
- goal of your company / values - need to grow - need to perform and be seen as such - need to belong
so often we can read warnings about not falling for this, but it's so common .. it's wired in us it seems
https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/duke-fuqua-insights/kay-passion-e...
> The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description.
> The team found passion exploitation consistently across eight studies with more than 2,400 total participants. The studies varied in design, in the participants (students, managers, random online samples) and in the kinds of jobs they considered.
> In one study, participants who read that an artist was strongly passionate about his job said it was more legitimate for the boss to exploit the artist than those who read the artist wasn’t as passionate. This finding extended to asking for work far beyond the job description, including leaving a day at the park with family and cleaning the office bathroom.
Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30998042/
I'm just glad that I'm being able to completely disconnect from work, when I check out. My tittle means nothing. Where I work means nothing. I do enjoy my co-workers, that's about it.
And yet, like in love, the trick is to love again.
Sure, be wise and have high standards about money. But there are some good entrepreneurs here. I was employee #250, it went IPO, became a millionaire. And now that I’ve created a startup, I try to pay it forward.
Large corporations, of course no.
As you gain experience, you get really good at parsing and identifying axes of flexibility in statements from the power structure. In general, professional managers in a power structure will always distort or mislead with any statements they make to turn any announcement into a steering opportunity. This is just how it is and it's really not about "trust", it's about manipulation.
Manipulation is _everywhere_ in the tech companies. Nothing is more amazing to me than an experience I had early on that woke me up: the day after I attended a meeting about how the company was working on a project that was incredibly unethical (think google's china search engine-level unethical or worse, like Nokia's building anti-dissident features into their 3g networking for Iran), I attended a company all hands where the entire message from every exec, including those that were involved, was about how we were a force for free speech, freedom, etc. I already knew but it was stark.
They also engage in constant attempts to blur things. Google, in particular, spends a lot of money to help muddy the job-vs-personal waters because it gives them power. For their first decade and a half, at least, they ran the whole company like college - extracurricular activities, etc. This wasn't just because the founders had no professional experience prior, it was strategic to make it very hard for people to leave (and when they started leaving for FB, that was to another place that was similar).
So forget about "trust" - start thinking in terms of "what is this person not saying, what is this person trying to imply without putting it in words, what flexibility are they reserving for themselves with their statements" etc.
Maybe your job(s).
But there are certainly companies out there that actually care about the welfare of their employees. Usually family owned and such.
That's where I choose to work and they have always taken care of my needs and listened to me.
I never really understood why people have such a desire to work for these big companies that don't care about you. I guess it's just different strokes...
Is it really a contract if it can end unexpectedly? I know it is, but really the original purpose of a contract is to set the terms and conditions, so nothing was surprise when it happened.
We really need a better term for these one sided work agreements.
The cost of the contract being one cost, so when you think about cost of managing the contract and contracts etc. severing it via a payout can be cheaper, and is often sudden to the contractors unfortunately.
They share in the profits with the employees and such.
I mean sure, it's not 100% a save job. If something truly terrible happened and the company went bankrupt etc, then of course you can still lose your job.
But no time have I ever seen or felt like they would ever lay off people unless the company literally couldn't go on to survive some other way.
You learned that 1 company isn't a family company and puts your needs above the company...
When covid hit and work dried up where I work, the company told employees to go out and find charity work and the company paid our full salary to do the charity work.
Just one example of the way they think and act. I've been there 15 years and never seen a single instance or case that would make me believe they would act any other way.
They pay plenty fair and I make more than I know what to do with for myself.
I was a manager there. I was demoted while my newborn was in the NICU (neonatal ICU) at the beginning of my paternity leave. And my position was eliminated a few weeks after I came back to work. As a condition of getting severance, I can't officially talk about it.
That is the culture of tech companies today.
"no longer" -> this might be the time to seriously talk about unionization. Programmers used to have a huge advantage at the bargaining table, going in as an individual. If parent is correct (I tend to agree) these days are over and they're not coming back. In that case, collective bargaining promises better results.
I see a lot more unionization efforts in software lately. Maybe it's just my own confirmation bias but maybe it's just that others are coming to the same conclusions.
My company made some bad decisions and had two rounds of layoffs as a result. I was cut in the first round. My boss is also a friend and confirmed over beer that the highest paid of us were the first to go.
I had negotiated higher pay based on past experience when I joined. So it goes.
See also the other hiring post on todays HN front page that’s a Bay Area startup but only hiring for South America for engineering
"Maybe a recession is forthcoming?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.
"Maybe LLMs will reduce programming needs?" Better 'can a bunch of people just in case it happens to be so.
I can adapt to an increased level of cynicism, even to the point it informs my concrete career decisions.
But this level of bad faith itself must do some damage to the economy, mustn't it? There must be some concrete value that would be generated by increasing good faith between employers and employees, musn't there be?
This seems like a really negative and self-damaging perspective. I'm the direct manager for 14 people with whom I have hard-won relationships, built on trust and caring over long periods of time. We're not friends or family, but I honestly care about them. I share as much as I can, and try to include my confidence and assessment of what I share. If they follow your advice and unequivocally discount it all, I think they're actually in an even WORSE situation. Regardless, what a sad, scary way to live.
It's like a lot of those fabled 10x engineers that I've run into over the years; they may seem like they're incredibly productive and managers love them, but in reality their work is so riddled with issues and rushed half-baked ideas, that they end up costing the other engineers on the team 10x the amount of their time to review and fix it all. And it's those other engineers who do all of the invaluable but underappreciated cleanup work who are getting the boot right now.
That's the important parallel with using AI in production: on the surface it may seem like the solution to all productivity problems, but in reality it still takes a lot of human brainpower to review, assess, fix and maintain whatever the AI model spits out. Especially since generative AIs like to present their work with supreme confidence, and it's getting increasingly hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.
But it's like growing plants, in the sense that it only takes one crucial element to be missing to limit growth (or "output").
I've met a few ppl who were _reliable_ 10xers (could navigate a much wider range of techs / domains / situations than others) but I've seen even the best crash and burn at times when the circumstances aren't right.
These are the kind of people who cook up something like git when they take a one year sabbatical from their main project.
Or even hardware people like Jim Keller.
10x engineers are plentiful if you define the median engineer as 1x. There are a LOT of mediocre engineers out there to draw the median down.
Every other developer on the project has to do at least 3 times as much work, they have to read through the original code and try and understand what the original person was thinking of when writing it before even getting to solving the problem at hand.
A true 10x developer would write code good enough that every other developer could maintain it as easily as the original author.
Some things that would have taken me weeks take days. And some things that used to take days take 1-3 hours.
Novel work can't yet be automated. But... most of the work I do is not novel, and theres files and files of preexisting context for copilot to consume.
As for this effect being widespread and noticed enough to be related to the firing. I dont think its the case.
The people I work with don't seem to get nearly as much out of the tools as I do, and not for lack of trying. They're constantly using the tools too. Even if companies are considerably more productice with the tools, I do not think management would have been attuned enough to performance and costd to have instigated layoffs from it.
Like saying that you run faster after a cup of coffee, cool ?
Much of what I've done with ai tools I have had to do before and struggled over days. I was a python dev mostly but I had cases at work where I needed to write java, c, or c++. The genicam compliant industrial camera nonsense it got me through in a few hours was insane. And using a fuzzy logic library. I did not have to spend tons of time reading the documentation, struggling with cmake, or figuring out how to install and link dlls or even syntax for that matter. I can start to type a comment of a high level description of a small codeblock and copilot spits it out. This works in any language.
It isnt that it speeds up every single operation I do. When I get in the zone I toggle it off. But 80% of the time i hit a snag it instantly short circuits me through the issue. I can and do ask follow up questions about how the thing works so the next time I come across it it wont even be a snag. So I have had slowly compounding speed boosts from it for two years. I code faster with it also because it taught me things, and I have learned when to turn it off (often)
It's marginally better than Stackoverflow (which I've only ever used to give me an idea that I then turn into my own code, usually written from scratch, because most code is littered with security vulnerabilities).
It's a long way from replacing developers or increasing productivity on a measurable level. It's also like building your business on quick sand. Some feature you use today might be put behind a higher pay-tier (or removed) at any time.
Maybe 15% of the time it has been a hindrance by making up stuff. It's basically a faster version of Stack Overflow / web search.
A lot of IT work is maintenance work, and it knows nothing about those systems. It's good for me for JavaScript as I spend 80% of my time on the backend. I know enough JavaScript to debug other peoples work, or to add some simple jQuery / vanilla JS to an HTML page (which is all that is needed in the majority of cases), but if I was to build a React App from scratch, it would likely look like beginner level stuff.
Has anyone had experience with the paid version of ChatGPT? How does it compare?
They must think we all got long COVID with brain damage and that the vaccines protected them from this.
Which what money?
With these interest rates and Section 174, it's pretty rough out there to start one as compared to ~6 years ago.
6 years ago, with cheap money and everyone eager to start new firms makes success more of a lottery than a systematized effort. I'd rather be a startup founder raised on lean capital with less of a crowded marketplace.
Have a family and esp these employees in high CoL cities? Very tough.
Speaking from experience. Been there done that.
"We'll have all this new innovation via new startups now!" is such a feel good sentiment to layoffs but in reality is nowhere close to a solution for the affected employees
Vote with your labor and be willing to change immediately jobs (that is why remote is great). If you did not like what the manager said in a random meeting quit on the spot, find another job online. No more notice courtesies.
It's gonna be great.
Workers have the power. They just need to remember it.
Digital jobs dont.
Way different than the bread and butter jobs most of the tech industry consists of.
Open AI has maybe a thousand jobs out of millions of jobs in the tech industry. I wouldn't say its a good sample.
One of my clients outsources all large projects to a company in Ukraine (The HQ is there, but the developers are in other parts of Europe). The time zone isn't too bad, their English/communication is nearly perfect, and it's at a fraction of the cost here in the US.
A large year-long project that I was the tech lead on that involved moving our legacy systems to a brand-new system (this includes all of the coding, etc) cost the company around $90,000. There were 10 devs on staff.
Sounds like complete BS. Even just taking in salaries, that's $9K/year/dev - even living in Ukraine you would make more than that. If you've moved out of the country and are in Poland for example, that's not a livable wage.
Boy, they are in for a treat.
Remember, Europe culture is very different. There are laws there and you can't "manage by crisis" when your team has multiple people in Europe. Basically, this forces management to actually do its job instead of relying on Venkat (who is on an H1B visa and can't fight back) to be unofficially on call 24/7.
Layoffs are not personal, and the corollary to that is that you should never treat your company as a friend. It's a company trying to maximize value.
Also, layoffs do work. Almost every large, successful company has done them at some stage. They are an expected, and necessary, part of operating a company and responding to changing market conditions.
Yes, it sucks. They are not nice. But it's expected and it's helpful to remember that.
When we say layoffs work, are we considering the way the same companies overhired just a few years ago, harming the rest of the employment market? Do we remember this in later discussions when we treat these companies as prescient hiveminds, in spite of them using overtuned bang-bang control for their hiring? Do we remember it in discussions about workers rights and the things we tie to employment in the naive assumption that only those who deserve it lose their jobs?
My first paid job as a programmer was like that. We made an exam software for university, a complete package covering the process from authoring test questions to making reports.
We made it in 6 months and it was done. Finished. Working. There was some maintenance/improvement, but that was a separate deal. We did not expect university to employ us for life to maintain it.
Shouldn't that be a norm?
Like, yeah, obviously Google has a lot of projects, so they can allocate programmers to do something different after something is done. But they didn't promise employment for life, did they?
Obviously, people like being securely employed. But, perhaps, that should be addressed at societal level - e.g. unemployment benefits.
People came to assume that a total comp >$100k is a norm, but it's really not.
E.g. engineer working on research projects for INRIA in France might get up to $3000 gross a month. (And you might get better job security in France but it comes with a bit of total comp hit, as you see.)
That's the reality for most people on Earth. Salary >$100k should be considered an insane arb opportunity, not a stable job expectation.
Microsoft makes a shitload of money selling Windows to billions of people, and is able to pay a lot to devs? OK, good for those devs. But would that last? Uncertain.
Who should receive the shitload of money that these companies make?
Under UBI, you and I.
These companies make a lot of money because of supply & demand. They pay large salaries because of supply & demand. They have layoffs because of supply & demand.
It's free market. Stop complaining unless you can propose something better.
"OK Google, what's a patent?"
When guilds/unions are stronger, then project only work is fine to organize around.
Google lobby.
yup.
https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...
to your comment. Of course, this link points to two decades of research showing that your assertion is wrong, so you probably don't want to include this specific link in your comment, but you get the idea I hope.
I think that the state of the telecoms industry will let you infer that I was being sarcastic and will also provide quite strong evidence that the study you cite is correct!
This is totally a fault of management and none of them are losing their jobs! People have a good reason to be pissed off.
> Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring
Ok, let's define "over-hiring".
Google...
had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023.
and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023.
They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hiring??? Each person added as much revenue as the ones before them.
Over-hiring would have been if post-Covid business would have dropped, which, guess what, did NOT happen for FAANG. It was, in the worst case scenario, stable (even then, slightly growing).
Have they stopped hiring? Uhhhh...
That really tells you all you need to know about the cynicism.
They've been cut a lot last year, but no news about it.
Also there are cuts in high cost of living locations. Why to keep people in California if you can hire in Warsaw and pay x0.25 of US rate there?
Again, this is just callous.
Is this the consensus then that is really rough out there right now? I know that big tech has been hit hard the last year but is the outlook equally bad for startups, enterprise etc. as well?
I remember a recruiter recommending a person who was laid off to me: "Oh, he was was part of a layoff, it's not like he was fired or something".
Of course it still absolutely sucks to be laid off, but everyone knows there isn't much rhyme or reason to them other than "companies want money".
Plenty of people here have too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14943146
The variation / risk on the (unrealistic) return is now managed on the backs of the employees. These layoffs are often bound to the goal to have a return like Apple and not like General Electric (company examples are educated guesses).
In the end, the employees have a miserable life and products of the company are a shit show.
For example, Google:
https://fourweekmba.com/google-revenue-per-employee/
Ultimately it’s about something called austerity, which is taught in mba-jargon filled economic theory as a way to keep the working classes inline. Since the 1920s, western countries have used a cycle of expansion and contraction to crush the working people’s power in the interest of controlling inflation (which is really largely the direct result of excess government money printing as a result of imbalanced spending), all the while consolidating more-and-more wealth in smaller and smaller circles of people. It’s an absolutely psychotic way to run a business cycle, and it kills a great many people directly:
https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/how-austerity-ki...
The latest deleveraging of worker cries and demands for better conditions and pay comes as workers are asking for more work-at-home and flexibility, a more balanced work/life balance, and focus on similar health and wellness goals, as well as demands for salary raises to keep up with the ongoing inflation.
For three decades worker pay has been dropping. The gap between the growth of productivity and that of a typical worker’s pay has grown quite extreme, and continues to grow through the application of austerity principle:
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
While it looks like “inflation and interest rates are causing the problems,” it remains easily predictable economic theory that we would find ourselves here. People may not realize it, but since 2020, the US has printed nearly 80% of ALL US Dollars in circulation. To put that in perspective, at the start of 2020 we had ~$4 trillion in circulation. Now, there is nearly $19 TRILLION in circulation, a 375% jump in 3 years.
This of course causes “inflation,” which is in no small part what the news likes to call “excess corporate profits.” Basically inflation benefits those that hold real assets and are closest to the money printers, while crushing those who don’t and are the furthest (often the most marginalized).
And again, austerity is applauded:
https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/marc-benioff-salesforce-earni...
Consider that the market rewards these companies handsomely for their layoffs:
- Amazon had $2.8 million in earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization – or EBITDA) for every staff member they laid off in January.
- Meta had $3.9 million in earnings for each of the 11,000 staff members they laid off in November. In response to Meta’s cost-cutting strategy, its stock price increased by 19 percent.
- Tech giant Microsoft had an EBITDA of $98.8 billion in 2022. This means they earned $9.8 million for each person they laid off in January 2023.
- Other companies’ layoffs weren’t as difficult to understand: WeWork ended 2022 with an EBITDA of -$824 million, and Spotify ended its fiscal year with an EBITDA of -$290 million.
https://www.business.com/finance/big-tech-earnings-and-layof...
So it’s unfortunately financially rewarding to lay people off, and it’s a measurable economic impact you can show the board and your investo...
- The google metric doesn't make sense. In fact, the graph tells sort of the opposite story. Revenue per employee shot up and then they did layoffs in response... huh? My guess is that this graph is missing the forecasts that are being used to make these decisions. Google likely has a similar chart, but one that goes out 5-10 years and is showing a concerning trend (that was certainly the case when I worked there).
- Austerity is a government thing. I'm not connecting the dots between deficit reduction and corporate layoffs...
- I thought the money supply calculations changed recently which is why the metric shot up in recent years.
- How are you getting Microsoft was rewarded with 9.8M per employee for their "layoffs?" They cut 10k people, so wouldn't this mean if they had laid off 1 person, they would have earned 98B per layoff? This metric doesn't make sense.
- The "other CEO" you link to runs a company with 200 employees. I'm not sure this is comparable to a company the size of Google.
You're also forgetting that raw dollars are not how companies are viewed. Every company is viewed on how it performs agains the risk free return rate. The rate going from 0 -> 5+ means companies must now generate returns in excess of the RFR in line with their generally accepted risk. This is the ultimate outcome of raising rates to reduce inflation - across the board layoffs lowering averages salaries.
I think that was their point. To not be taken advantage of employees are incentivized to do as little work as possible.
The actual story, as far as I can tell, is that money that had previously been considered as M2 (=less liquid) is also counted as M1 due to rule changes regarding savings accounts.
To see this is the case, you can plot both together. If in fact, new money was printed, you would expect M2 to have the same jump as M1, as M2 is M1 + more stuff. However, you see a much smaller jump:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1dwhY
The rule-change coincided with COVID relief measures which did include money-printing, but at a much smaller scale than implied.
I guess we'll see if this turns out to be true. If it does, they'll realize their mistakes, and the competitors that didn't let people go should outperform them. If it doesn't, then it'll show that many tech companies simply overhired, which I think we all know they did over the past few years.
I myself work at a telco where business has stagnated over the past decade, due to market saturation and new, cheaper competition. We've had layoffs each year since I started since that's the only way to keep increasing profits. One day it'll probably hit me, but oh well. I know our company has fat to trim and if I'm actually not making any real impact, then I'm fine with looking for a job where I do. Efficient companies are important for a healthy economy.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
Investors aren't some distinct class, we're mainly talking about pension funds and the 401ks of similarly well-compensated professional-managerial workers.
https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...
So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers. I think being a member of one signals to an employer you may want to exploit them, rightly or wrongly, at least where I live it's often understood membership will hurt your chances of getting higher up in the organisation.
This is an overly narrow definition, so I label it is largely incorrect.
Think of it this way: society involves dynamically-shifting power balances. To the extent the goals of a society include:
(a) standardizing certain rights and norms
(b) providing checks and balances so the powerful have less temptation and ability to exploit the less
We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.
> So unions are of little use anymore, except for perhaps using the power they have to exploit employers.
This statement is silly and ignores the realities I've seen. Sure, a union left to its own devices might be tempted to push too far. But given the dynamic one tends to see in western economies, there is always some kind of negotiation with the associated corporation. Such negotiation is quite similar to parties in the legal system hashing it out. Both may start off far apart but the negotiation tends to lead towards compromise. In the United States, unions that push to far face public backlash and even Presidential action.
I'm not making any dogmatic claims here. I'm simple rejecting overly simplistic arguments against unions. I will readily accept that unions are not silver bullets and there are documented cases of corruption and misaligned incentives. But the solution is not to argue that the notion of a union is useless. The intellectually honest solution is to seek achievable solution in the mess that is the real world. I laugh at people who aren't even trained economists who interpret their models as some kind of reality -- or worse, some kind of normative specification.
Very few dogmatic claims pro- or anti- union survive contact with reality.
You can say that about any topic, but what specifically are you proposing? Or do you just want to talk about stuff?
> We don't want to rely on only one mechanism to achieve (a) and (b). Sure, we want healthy markets and skilled workers. We also want workers who have enough flexibility to change industries and to move geographically. But we also want effective regulation. And we ALSO want organizations that can directly advocate on behalf of workers.
Saying that comes across as dismissive.
By "wishy-washy" do you feel like... I'm being indecisive? Not taking a firm stance? Changing positions?
Here's how I see it -- I often intentionally don't "hit people over the head" with my particular positions. It doesn't mean I don't have a stance; instead, I often prefer to frame the issue first. I consider this a starting point, not an ending one, so feel free to continue the conversation.
Unions have the wrong incentives. They represent employees and have no incentive to think about future employees, employers, customers or anyone else. There are simply better ways to organise society.
I would truly like to understand this, but I haven't heard an explanation of why the actions make sense for the organization as a whole.
It makes me worried about investing in GOOG.
But I'm asking for an explanation of why it would be reasonable for the organization as a whole and for its shareholders (the ones who understand what's going on).
Basically every company I've worked at can be roughly divided into the finance side and the business side, and IME all the important shots are called by the finance people. The business side has to justify itself in terms the finance people set, not the other way around. As for how it makes financial sense, I can't speak to that, but things do tend to work out the way the CFO predicts. That's hardly surprising, because the other finance people working on Wall St. are looking at the same spreadsheets and following the same economic theory.
By the way, I don't think this is a good way to run companies. But it's the way I think almost all of them are run.
If you have a lot of money, you have their ear..
Second, there isnt a single budget for hiring that interviews everyone and ships them out everywhere. certain groups/products can be growing within google while others are shrinking. should the chrome team not be allowed to grow because google+ was in the trash can?
third, not every employee is exchangeable, you cant just shuffle everyone around the company. You cant just take someone from the google maps team and have them start working on nexus phones.
all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.
True, but even so, you can train the employee for the new role. You need to do the same anyway for a new, external candidate (and it's even worse because they will need to familiarise themselves with internal tools and processes that the Maps employee would already be familiar with).
Google has been hiring people into the same roles and teams where they have laid people off.
> all of these things are fairly obvious if you thought about it for more than 30 seconds, so its somewhat concerning you find this topic so perplexing.
Wow, you are rude.
I can either work for the next 30 years 40h a week and create some 'value' for companies like google and have nice holidays, etc. OR i don't.
And yes i can afford a very basic version of not working anymore already or at least no longer playing the game in some companies.
Wasn't there some Gen X/Z meme about quite quitting? Guess what could incluence this? Having an appreciation for your company and your companies management style.
What I would like to see is senior and executive management (Director+) bonuses cancelled for the year a layoff occurs. If they aren’t willing to cancel bonuses company wide then a layoff is really just stock manipulation. By making sure they bear some of the consequences maybe they will make better choices in the future.
The long term objective of a company is not to save as much money as possible. It's to spend money toward endeavors that generate more money.
If the layoff is because of an efficiency improvement, that's justified - like a factory replacing labor with newer cheaper robots. However, that's not what the tech layoffs were about. Tech companies are basically saying we want to do less work. It's not an efficiency improvement, it's a downsizing of their business activities, and it's not clear-cut whether that's a good business strategy for companies that are wildly profitable and growing.
Associating your company with unhappiness and strife does not come without a cost.
The person who is laid off has to scramble in order to say, not have to move countries, or pay for their healthcare bills.
It's not personal for the company, but it is personal for each person who was laid off
Whether or not it is extra work or if it is worth the extra work is dependent on the individual.
So in my case, it was having a network and connecting across it regularly.
(Or not, depending on locale. For sure not in California.)
Most of the people around me are very adapted to this very specific hyper-structured environment that we are in. This is not a criticism - they are thriving in this environment and everyone is happy.
But no way would I want to take these people with me on a new venture. (the inverse is also true; I would not take a shoot-from-the-hip go-getter and put them into a mature product environment that with intense legal scrutiny)
My experience is that the ability to adopt to structured/unstructured environments are not mutually-exclusive: some people may thrive in one but not the other, and others can do well in both (or none!) My motto is to make the right trade-offs in any environment - which is a universal superpower for engineers in my book; especially when coupled with curiosity and a willingness to learn.
1. I'm taking the charitable presumption.
And I probably only made it through because my employer had deep pockets and chilled while I took time to adapt. The other direction (big co -> startup) is no where near as forgiving.
Mottos are fine, but what we need to succeed is skill and practice with skills.
We are susceptible to innovators dilemma on a personal basis, and it’s hard to break habits and intuition hardened over years in a different environment.
And when I was in start up land I did watch a lot imported talent from FAANG come in and bomb out - they were trying to care about long term code quality and we needed to slap together a demo in 48 hours. It was like oil and water
Edit: btw I don’t mean to signal that it’s impossible to do to be someone who thrives in both situations. It was a comment on the original suggestion of “just start a new company and hire up all these lay offs to get rich quick”. I believe that’s not going to be a good strategy
Posting beat after beat and carpet bombing Sunnyvale like fucking Curtis LeMay at the same time is offensive to everything about being an American, and a hacker, and really just a human.
https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=GOOG&p=d
Layoffs happen, markets go dry, the world moves on. But stuffing your pockets until it's spilling out while walking around the Bay Area with a Samurai Sword drunk from Fucki Sushi?
I won't help them drag you out of your Tesla and beat them to death with your own iPhone. But let's quit while we're ahead assholes?
I don’t want to make light of anyone losing their job, but this just doesn’t seem meaningful at this scale
Where are people still saying it's only non-technical roles?
Germany doesn't really have tech unions and for sure they don't dominate the tech scene. France, neither, Eastern Europe (all of them), don't, Southern Europe, not that I know of.
Salaries are still low.
I don't think they are. I think salaries in the US are astronomical, and it boggles the mind how in California a 22 year old React nerd can command a salary five times higher than, say, a teacher.
It's all a matter of perspective. From my perspective, if you can sit on your sofa, build a website, and pull in €80k, you're doing just fine.
Where do you put the sofa? For locals who inherited and apartment somewhere in Stockholm or Berlin, or have been living in rent-controlled apartment for 20 years, sure, 50k after-tax is fine-ish. What about expats who didn't inherit a 500k Euro apartment from their late grandma?
It has a developed IT job market, and as a senior software developer you'd likely be spending ~20% of your salary on rent.
Europe is more than just the few most expensive cities.
UTAW and CWU specifically are unions for tech workers in the UK. At big companies especially, like BT, a sizable proportion of the workforce is unionised.
American dev salaries are the exception. It's the rest of the world where they're not outstanding.
Not saying this is a better outcome for anyone specifically, but surely it's compelling?
The media has very successfully demonized unions, and many skilled workers believe the company line that unions drive down average wages, make it impossible to fire useless people, charge heavy membership fees, etc.
Actors and other have "Guilds", lawyers have a "Bar"...
(sure the other two you mentioned have unions but...)
Just name it like something you'd find from DnD.
https://www.gm.com/company/facilities/flint-assembly
SWEs are used to being in a good negotiation position and not in need for collective bargain.
My employer has a works council, but no union representation. That council is mostly occupied with dealing with compensation (provisions, product assignments, ...) of sales people, who make the largest group, thus most votes. SWE needs aren't seen.
Another is that during layoffs, unions may force the company to lay off people based on seniority instead of competency.
If you compare salaries for developers between Germany and the US, I think this point becomes blatantly clear.
There is no way to get a clear picture if unions limit innovation or whatever.
Besides - the US is clearly losing its reputation for tech competence.
Between some of the world's crappiest broadband (unevenly distributed again), NASA Moon missions failing to reach the Moon, Boeing blowing their own doors off, and Google's search enshitification and inability to understand what a stable product line is - among others - the US really isn't the powerhouse of progress it thinks it is.
Absolutely. I said in high growth phases, it may be beneficial for employees to not organize. Once an industry stabilizes, that may change. The German model has certainly been working much better for automotive and other established industries.
But even developers who have not been able to get into FAANG positions, US developer salaries are still higher than German ones, as far as I can tell. And for the ones that did get into FAANG, the difference is vast, even for entry level.
Obviously, Japan, China and Korea come from quite different circumstances to Europe and the US in a multitude of ways.
I know I would.
All that then leads to cities without no-go areas, where kids can play outside alone.
While of course downsides are that I don't have an as big house and no big backyard.
And in particular, if you have a senior position at a FAANG company, you make enough money to put away significant savings for a rainy day, you get access to healthcare that is typically more modern than what is available in Europe, and you don't need to expose yourself to those inner cities unless you want to.
And talking about no-go-zones. They're starting to pop up in Europe now, too, there are plenty of them in Sweden. I wouldn't put all the blame for them on capitalism. Rather, such phenomena seem to be more associated with cases of ethnic or social minorities that feel alienated by society.
German infrastructure is crumbling too. I wouldn't hold it up as some shining beacon.
> and I get better protection from being fired in the spot
Yes, that's the difference in attitudes people are talking about. It's the safety of keeping what you have versus the drive to reach for better. Societies' outcomes reflect that. More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.
To be fair, the median household in the US doesn't have that much more disposable income if taking healthcare and child care costs into account, especially if they're simultaneously expected to save up a 1-2 year buffer and maybe more if they want a comfortable retirement.
But for the top 20%, which includes many tech workers, the difference is larger.
[1] https://happiness-report.s3.amazonaws.com/2023/WHR+23.pdf
As a funny BTW, the country used in this thread as a direct comparison, Germany, is indistinguishable from the US in this table.
A social support network was one of the highest ranked, much higher than GDP per capita (the wealth of a nation, which can be used as a proxy for personal income if you have a Gini index to weight it against).
Finland comes out well ahead even if you weight it against Gini, and Finnish developers aren't earning more than US folks by a country mile.
Those US products are in common use in Europe, too, with the same effects. It's not illegal to create the kind of products Google and Facebook sell from Europe.
The main difference is not the relationships between companies and consumers, but rather the relationship between the companies, workers and the government.
> gig workers
I remember reading a book about this when in high school (in the 80s, though the book was quite a bit older), written by and from the perspective of the unions, where they argued that the during phases of growth, unions DID hold salaries back, but (according to themselves) this was more than made up for during recessions.
In the 19th century, the factory workers had a "gig economy" too, where they would often have to work on a day-by-day basis, and would show up at the gates of the factory every morning hoping to have work that day. If there were not enough workers, they could ask for very good salaries, but if there was a surplus it led to collapsing wages AND a high risk of no income at all, ie even worse than the Uber model.
This is precisely why many companies are trying to make regular dev roles as interchangeable as possible. By minimizing the dependency on individuals, they make their own bargaining position much stronger.
And when you stop being an employee that is valued for your individual contributions, and become an easily replicable "resource", it may very well be in your best interest to unionize.
However, there are externalities connected to unions, as they DO tend to stifle innovation, lowering all boats.
If worker well-being is a high priority, but a country ALSO wants a dynamic economy, one may want to look to Denmark, where most of the "safety net" responsibilities are moved from the employers to the government.
That requires a taxation level a bit higher than in Germany, but may be part of the reason why wages are significantly higher, and only exceeded by special cases like the US, Switzerland and Norway.
Also stuff like being bereft of energy resources (compared to American oil/gas/solar), having fucking Russia to the East, the cost of rebuilding after WW2, having lots of languages and cultures (limiting effective market size)...
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/07/more-physicians-join-unions
This thread is about labor unions, which negotiate salaries. Sports people are almost universally not in this category - they usually have an agent to negotiate their individual salary.
If you're talking the SAG for actors and the like, median actor income is $46k, one of the lowest paid professions. That works out to $23/hr for fulltime work. You can get that at McDonalds in many places.
Try again.
Your claim about SAG is also wrong; SAG has plenty of pay caps too. For example, here [2] is one explained on their own site. They've always had them and likely always will. There's plenty more.
Unions extract higher pay by making a monopoly on labor (and US antitrust law had to carve out a special monopoly exception for them). This monopoly obtains higher wages for those in the union at the cost of those prevented from working by the union and by increased prices to the surrounding economy. These are all standard econ results.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/commentary/should-un...
[2] https://www.sagaftra.org/important-notice-regarding-2022-com...
Thanks for more evidence of how unions "improve" outcomes.
https://www.physiciansweekly.com/how-do-us-physician-salarie...
The same could be said for most professions in the UK. They're paid less than their US counterparts, but it's an excellent example of how you can't always measure quality of life in $ and £.
My job as a software engineer pays considerably less in the UK than my US counterparts, so why haven't I moved there?
Interesting. That's the default by law here in Sweden, but can be negotiated with the union -- usually in exchange for better severance compensation.
Covid and remote work shift changed a bit, though. Salaries in the EU tech grown dramatically.
We are stuck in a self-reinforcing feedback loop where unions represent a very small portion of the employees therefore most employees avoid being associated with unions because it makes you look like an activist.
At the company of a friend of mine, the white collar employees do charity events for the blue colar ones and while the blue colar ones participate on labour day events, the white collar ones are too cool to be with them.
But when the actual non-workers(the true elite) feel like they can make more money by laying off some white collar workers, the cool white collars go through the exact same process as the blue collar ones they chipped in for.
Also, these are not even high earning white collars, they just happen to work in a pleasant environment. Many blue collar workers make more money in comparison to white them and are closer to the non-workers since they can actually do highly paid short term contract work.
There's a strong cognitive dissonance going on among white collar workers, having trouble to process the signals on if they are the cool elite or the working class. In Europe, this is not as strong because of the unions and regulations pushing all workers to earn more less the same and the work environments are safe and clean. In places outside of EU there can be workers which are 10x or 100x beter off than those at the bottom because the top can be higher but usually the bottom is also much lower and this gets the better off ones very confused.
In the us, the way laws are written, unions are a political entity and basically from inception are in bed with the government. This creates a mismatch of incentives as the union is motivated to operate politically and this is reflected internally because that's how power is derived externally and thus internally. This creates a lot of odd things like the local foreman who manages the house is doing so because he has been around for 20 years or because he is friends with the guy who has been around for 20 years or because he bought in with millions to be that guy not because they are the right people for the job.
Because of these legal protections and structures unions don't have to compete against other unions and they don't have to compete for the workers membership either. For example the IATSE gets a cut of your work if you work in the industry because that's legally mandated even if you aren't a member. This encourages unions to become bloated, and self serving and it's not immediately clear their value add. Just like elsewhere in society top down structures begin to appear where a few people at the top of the union get most of the pie.
Workers are hesitate to involve themselves with unions here because they are yielding agency to a political machine in a fairly permanent way.
Don't forget some of the cons and headlines around unions here either. Some of the unions using violence, like the teamsters, here to gain power. Teachers unions trying to keep bloated headcounts in empty (by half) schools in Chicago nearly bankrupting the city. Police unions protecting their members despite obvious misconduct. Lots of police/fireman/city unions keep garenteeing investment return rates that aren't in line with the market that eventually bankrupt the city.
If the legal freedom and incentives were there people would do it, but this system is by design.
I am a soft engineer but have remained a iatse card holder.
As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.
On the other hand almost everyone in the world uses something made by American corporations.
Keep in mind Europe exports more to the world market than America does (and more of them are goods versus services). Like yeah, if you live in the US you probably use more American-made tools - that is not true for the rest of the world.
Just looking around my kitchen now - my knives are made in Germany; my coffee grinder in Norway; my toaster in the UK. Then it's mostly made in China (air fryer, microwave, kettle, pressure cooker). The coffee roaster I have packed away is made in South Korea; the 3D printer on the kitchen table is made in Czechia.
I don't think I own a single kitchen tool or appliance made in the US.
EDIT: Actually, yeah I've got an Aeropress made in the US.
And definitely Sweden. Many (most?) of my software engineer colleagues are members of either the engineering-specific "Sveriges Ingenjörer" or generic white-collar "Unionen" union.
I am in Germany and I never heard of any union for Devs, not even large firms having any specific ones for Devs. My colleagues frequently discuss about unionizing but there are huge pay disparity hence most often it is hard to get everyone on board sadly.
Most unions are intended for craftsmen, minijobs, public transports and such. There are some small employers covered by famous IG Metall tariff but that is not the norm. I know that likes of Airbus has some kind of union that covers most of the departments and hence pays insane salary but that is something I heard from friends of people who work there, so I can’t assure accuracy.
There might be unions but that is not the norm except some dinosaurs.
Even 40% makes a huge difference, though.
And the union deals on insurances, mortgage etc. saves me much more money each year than the union fee.
I'd say the union was one of the main reasons why we didn't have mass layoffs when the company was in a hard spot. Instead more acceptable options like part-time and voluntary resignation with exit packages were negotiated and still met similar cost saving goals.
In small shops you probably won't have a union but they don't tend to hire&fire like the big multinationals.
The way to go would have been to communicate to your prospective boss that he needs to create a position in a higher compensation tier, or a position outside the union contract. If they want you badly enough, both are possibilities. Especially position outside the union contract are very common once you're a senior/principal engineer.
If it's only a small bump you want (not an entire compensation tier), telling your prospective boss that he needs to take your CV and convince HR that this means you have 15 years of relevant experience will also work - this will get you a high compensation level within your tier.
The problem with unions is that if you are a top performer it's harder to get promoted, if you're crap it's harder to get rid of you.
Overall it's great for non productive people who can pay a little and coast, great for everyone else. I can understand unions for low paid jobs the should be done by machines (eg. factory workers) but it doesn't make sense for knowledge work where performance has huge impact.
Oh and they want money to do that.
US restarted hiring quickly after the layoffs, but EU has still a hiring freeze in several FAANGS.
How many large tech. companies has Europe produced ?
Why would (or even: could) anyone start/build a cutting-edge tech. company in Europe given the hell that labor laws are over there ?
Labor laws in Europe are a giant hindrance to economic growth.
People in most European countries have made a political choice: safety and stagnation over wealth and growth.
That's their choice, fine, they're free to do as they please in their own house.
But when you make a choice, you can't ignore the consequences of these choices.
That's why "not in the US":
Different political choices, betting on growth, agility, innovation, running fast, and yes -- ooooh, what a terrible thing -- taking risks, and among others that employment may come and go because the world is not a static place.
Many tech companies started in Europe, got successful then moved to US because they could not longer find big enough investors in Europe.
Google only did layoffs very recently so I don't see how be able to fire people at will helped them grow.
And why would you say, aren't there any large investors?
If the labor market conditions were good (and taxes, and work ethics, and ... the list is very long), the investors would come, even from far away, believe me.
Money can move around the world very fast these days.
There's also a huge disparity between the SWE salaries and the rest of the society in Poland, I can imagine fears that unionization overall would flatten out those differences.
Another factor is that in places where we have unions (leftover fields still highly tied to the government, e.g. teachers) they tend to not function very well in practice (not enough employee advocacy, unhealthy level of union politics affecting people's outcomes in the workplace etc.).
Lastly, we're still pretty fresh to the whole capitalism game as a country, so we're scared of anything that resembles a step backwards.
Also unions in the US have quite often rewarded seniority over skill and effort, making them less attractive to high performers.
Early on in tech I outperformed all those I started with, and was able to make significantly more as a result. My friends in union jobs (electrician, auto plant workers, ..) did not get any such opportunity to shine, and they even had to strike (i.e., no pay) when the local shops decided they should. They're not allowed to work outside jobs, they have a terrible time starting new shops, since the existing union power brokers like the control over their employment.
I looked into moving to the UK, and saw how few startups in the EU become big, how hard it is in most countries there to make new businesses compared to the US, and decided against it. The EU is ~450M people, the US is ~330M. Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies.
Increased benefits to workers for one facet of employment is not free. Laws adding costs per employee to an employer are not simply paid out of magic money.
>Now look at how few companies in the EU become worth 1B compared to the US. That low ratio also applies to smaller (and larger) companies.
Money is power/control, and not having a concentration of wealth is a good thing for society. Granted many of the ultra wealthy also support giving away their wealth - but (IMHO) the Benevolent dictator model for social change is indicative of a failure of government. I think there is wastage of allocated capital both when its done by elected officials and also with the ultra wealthy.
The US has higher income for median, for the poor. for those in poverty, for every decile, by a decent margin.
For example, US median income is around 46k. Germany is a reasonable first world country, yet median income is 33k (all in PPP dollars). This is huge. Most of the first world has similarly low income, at every level.
If your argument against income is that some people make a lot, so instead make everyone poorer, I find that a weak argument. It is a common outcome of poorly designed policies that those focusing on the rich or poor but with a bad understanding of history and econ end up making. I'd rather policymakers learn econ and history and learn that things like rent control, or various forms of taxes, have consequences that often hurt those they claim to want to help.
Here's some metrics for various ways to measure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
OECD has tons more.
> I think there is wastage of allocated capital both when its done by elected officials and also with the ultra wealthy.
You think the average person would allocate capital better than those that understand investment and growth, and are willing to risk their own resources? There's a reason govt funds vastly underperform general markets - those with less to lose (i.e., those playing with other's money) likely fare worse at allocation than those that have more skin in the game. I know that most workers I tend to hang out with have a terrible understanding of how econ/macro/finance or even starting and funding businesses works.
Also those countries that tend strongly into socialism instead of capitalism have not done as well as those with strong capitalist bases (i.e., all first world countries - where people can own the means of production and operate for their own profit). If capital were allocated so much better in the places you seem to want, where is the evidence that it works? There's 200+ countries; if it worked, you'd think it would be winning somewhere....
How did what I say in any way relate with making everyone poorer? You're just assuming what my position is, and also assuming the outcome based on what happened in other random countries, in a completely different setting.
I'm against concentrations of power because the government should not have a competitor when it comes to power. We elect the government, and in a functioning democracy the government's policies are decided on by voters. This in effect ensures only the people get to decide who govern them. There should never be another entity which can out compete a government when it comes to power and influence.
>I'd rather policymakers learn econ and history and learn that things like rent control, or various forms of taxes, have consequences that often hurt those they claim to want to help.
Its a common talking point, but in reality that is just an opinion masquerading as fact. It presumes everything in economics is an inarguable fact. It is not. Humans have been successfully governing themselves under various systems of governance. Anyway, that itself is a 4 hour debate, so I'll just leave it at that. If you want the final word you have it, I won't argue with it ;)
Spoken like someone ignorant of history and econ. Rent control is such a screw up, over and over, that it's a basic part of econ 101, yet politicians and everyday people want and obtain it again and again, each time to the same outcome - less housing and less affordable housing.
Care to point out where rent control has been a smashing success, and compare that to places it has been a dismal failure? This is not opinion - this is fact. Or simply read some survey papers - google has plenty.
A good tax example is something like the Swedish Financial Transaction Tax [1], which was a major screw up, yet has been tried in around 15 countries, all with similar screw ups, yet is popular (see Bernie Sanders version from ~2020 for example). There are ample academic papers detailing all of these.
Also fact. Go ahead and explain how the Swiss tax was a success.
People ignorant of history and econ, and most importantly how econ works, continually repeat stupid ideas. Maybe this time magic will work because they believe it?
You are a prime example of this problem with your claim. Yes, there is some play in econ, but it's no where near something one can just wish away, yet people ignorant of it try.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...
The ideology in this thread is only willfull ignorance - showing someone something easy to grasp, yet they refuse to believe it.
You illustrate my point precisely. Mass (and often willful) ignorance leads humanity to make bad decisions.
> I said I won't argue with you
Yet you continue to reply after you already said you won't.....
IMO, more likely to affect startup company success in becoming big:
- One common language, one culture, one currency across the US (sure, differences between states in culture but not as diverse as in Europe). This is gradually converging via the EU, but the US has a couple of centuries headstart...
- VC funding concentration in California (think about how many of those "US" companies are from California); VC investors in US are global names if you work in the industry, in EU they are regional names.
- Generalising a bit here, but from my experience, I find work/life balance generally considered more important in EU compared to US. In the US, work is given a higher priority and if your boss asks you to stay late/work on a weekend, many colleagues in the US would do it, European colleagues would put e.g. family first instead.
- Side note; work/life balance point can be reflected in terms of national culture, e.g. "The American Dream"
And even if they had a good union, I fail to see how it would have prevented this.
I personally have no interest in joining a union. I don't think companies are my friend but I also know that it is bad to become complacent which I find a lot of lifers at big companies can become. I am not suggesting you need to be working 90 hour weeks but I do think a lot of individuals, including engineers, fall into the trap of doing one thing well and nothing else and stick into a single role for such a time that they lose plasticity. The employee - employer relationship is not a war against each other but a market balance, I need to be adding incremental value and the employer needs to be recognizing it and we are left to negotiate the terms.
I can give you a real-world example. Our company (Italy) office was relocated, and unions entered negotiations to obtain three days of remote work for the entire personnel. However, I and others refused to sign the agreement because, with more negotiation power, our target was full remote work. However, in doing so, we were undermining the union positions, which made them unhappy. Fortunately, things ended well; all personnel got the three days, and a few other people were granted full remote work.
Yeah things have changed. It may be time for Software Engineers to unionize.
And the lack of this practice across an entire industry. Margins are getting smaller and smaller and the successful companies will use such practices to inform all sorts of decisions, from building in house vs 3rd party vendor, to hiring, to R&D, etc.
The days of YOLO moonshots are over for our industry. Of course venture capital will continue to exist but perhaps directed to new industries.
Amazon's hardware (Alexa) is the market leader I think and even it was hit with layoffs last year wasn't it? Even specifically Alexa which Google's Assistant hardware line tries to compete with.
It's probably extremely rational to step back and conclude that Google sucks at hardware. I do like Google WiFi (it frustrates me but it is fairly set-it-and-forget-it for my parents/non technical friends) and Pixel (because I hate iOS).
Google wouldn't exist as you know it if they didn't didn't build great data center and network hardware.
Their problems in consumer hardware are not about the hardware specifically. It is about product management and go-to-market.
If taken at face value, software companies should simply have 0 software developers.
People need to understand that just because you have a little bit of RSUs and a 200k base doesn’t mean you’re God.
You’re an asset like a machine. And you’re expensive to the bottom line.
This is literally explicitly laid out now with section 174.
If you’re taking this personally ask yourself why you’re even working for arguably some of the best most efficient capitalists on the planet. Maybe you should work for a government agency or smaller company. But you want that 400k plus right?
The fundamentals remain the same: they are workers who support families of arbitrary needs and complexities and not just themselves. Are they expensive to the bottom line? Good -- they _allow_ the bottom line because they are the ones generating value.
Not the shareholders and upper managers calling for layoffs to maximize their stock prices who you seem to appreciate more.
If someone makes a Faustian bargain, it will have consequences.
You make a deal with the devil (biggest capitalist empires on the planet - I don’t think they’re evil btw I’m just making analogy) and the devil will come for you.
For them, it’s just business. That’s their whole point of existence, to run their business and grow even at their stage. I don’t work for these companies but I do hold positions in them through my 401k.
The reason I work for a soul-less telco, is that it is hard (for me at least) to find a job in the first place. I've been at plenty of small companies as well. If I could have gotten in at Google I would have done it in a heart beat, not just for the money, but to have FAANG on my resume.