Amazing job off capturing nearly word for word what I've said to people and thought before, during, and after being laid off. The signs, symptoms, and treatment; perfect. To someone who's never experienced it, it would seem myopic, but it's not, it's just the way it is, do not give more to your company than you can control the outcome of having done so. You don't get to decide that you're not laid off, and the only thing, as sad as it is, that you should be doing, is exactly what you're paid for.
It is? That's a weird position to me. If I go to a store and pay $10 for a sandwich, I don't call it dystopian when I don't get two sandwiches. Similarly, if my working agreement is $X wage for 40 hours of work per week, I don't give them 60 hours, because we agreed on 40. What is dystopian about agreeing to terms and then executing on the agreed terms? That's just how exchanging money for goods & services works.
It's not "exactly the way it is" everywhere, though. I've worked at companies that, whenever they laid someone off, they were honest and upfront about it without playing any psychological tricks. Not every company has to be this devoid of soul.
That's true, I've been directly laid off and fired without cause without tricks, but the salient point to me is that usually it's a futile and burnout-inducing mission to try and put in extra effort to attempt to avoid the impending outcome. A manager at any company could just be annoyed with how you responded to a question one time and it'll be burned into their brain to get rid of you. In retrospect, although there have been valid moments where my performance has suffered, it's rare for that to be the cause imo, especially if they really don't know what you do anyway. You could think you're a crucial contributor, and all it takes is oversleeping on the wrong day to screw you permanently.
Oh, I don't know. In my current and previous job I was, frankly, amazed at the ronin-like attitude openly expressed by those new, young hires. I was nowhere near this radicalized, when I started my first 'real' job. Management is in for a rather rude awakening.
That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda
Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job
I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.
At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")
I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.
We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?
You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.
For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.
The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)
I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.
The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?
Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.
Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.
But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.
> One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.
The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.
Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)
It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.
I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments).
But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.
What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.
You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)
The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.)
Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).
Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.
Those 'progressive ideologies' with influence from Marx are what make all of what we see today happen. From killing people if they cant pay for healthcare to these sociopathic layoffs 'because AI'. So 'influence from Marx' is just nonsense.
The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them this is what you end up with.
And with that you showed exactly why I have the knee jerk reaction to attack communism every time it is brought up. There is a constant play of this type of thing and people are starting to think that because it is unchallenged it might be right.
Why should one care how Marx defined "socialism"? The term predates him by many decades, so he doesn't get to say what is "true socialism" and what isn't.
>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?
One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.
The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)
that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning
You can graduate from high school and leave your hometown, but the attitudes of high school remain in the office: the cliques, the cruelty, the in-groups and out-groups, the manipulation, the brown-nosing, the behind-the-back-shit-talking. The C students from your high school are now mid level managers above you and brought the mentality straight from there to the office.
I've been part of two really good teams, one went away because the company closed, the other because it was managed into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right with any level of management to have a bunch of at best average teams and then one very good team in the same org chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape along.
No that’s not it. Averages are easy to reason about top down. Averages are like manufactured parts; you can replace them when they break or slot them in where they’re needed. They’re easy to herd as a manager because they all work the same way. Before we had societies, this sort of reasoning wouldn’t have been very useful. A tribal chief doesn’t need uniformity, he needs to understand his members, all of whom he knows from birth, well enough to utilize their talents.
Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating.
While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
I’ve worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the biggest company (100k employees).
Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.
Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.
I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.
I worked at mostly small companies and had one 3.5 year stint at BigTech.
“pay less” is an understatement. Top of band for most Big enterprise companies or smaller companies is about the same that a new college grad gets at BigTech.
While I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than go back to BigTech at 50, if I were young and unencumbered instead of a 50 year old empty nester, I would make the trade off in a heart beat
I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their identity around the only community they are a part of -- their job.
Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.
Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even having a contract on paper only for my employer to first suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all after the first month.
Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.
Really enjoyed reading this, but I will say that the particular circumstances here are a bit rare. Germany got completely gutted in this layoff. Almost everyone employed in Germany was cut. I know a Senior Staff Engineer from Germany who was laid off then re-hired.
It’s not rare for entire business units or country offices to get shut down. That’s the easiest way to do a layoff because it’s mostly isolated from the rest of the company. Executives can meet most of their layoff target without having to get into the weeds of evaluating individual performance.
Often some functions are moved or merged into another unit, and that’s the escape hatch for the few people someone really wants to save.
It's very hard to measure this accurately at scale.
If you create metrics, they will be gamed. The people that succeed, then, are not necessarily those with the most merit, but those who are best at manipulating their metrics.
We started measuring progress this month by measuring how many percent of last week's planned tasks were completed, and it's already showing.
Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the number up.
One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as unimportant.
Damn I was part of may the 4th lay off from Shopify. They locked me out instantly from my crucial immigration related document on my work laptop, and there was no help whatsoever. Very ugly. Still remember.
In many countries, a number of visas are employer bound or sponsored, so there's a wide array of reasons why some relevant documents might live in the corporate sphere. Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device. There are often many more documents to a visa than just the visa itself.
> Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device.
That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to your machine/the building etc.
Even if it was a sponsorship, I find it strange that you can’t have copies of the immigration docs so that you can at least explain to immigration what’s going on. I’d imagine there is case number or something that you could keep?
Otherwise what happens? You can’t even explain or prove your current situation? Seems draconian.
40 years ago an autobody shop near me (where I lived at the time) went bankrupt. The employees came to work in the morning and the door had a new lock. It was 6 months before they could get their personal tools back. Mechanics provide their own tools, so this meant they couldn't really get a new job (or could but only after investing thousands in tools that they already owned but couldn't access).
this is why I regularly back up important documents to my personal computer. payslips, w2's, etc. never know when you might be terminated and lose access.
I've been part of layoffs twice (with around 8 years in the workforce by now) and yes, I realised the harsh truth that going above and beyond, putting in the soul and long hours is not worth it. No one cares in the long term, you're just a number in the spreadsheet at the end of the day.
But the thing is, I like what I'm working on, I like letting my passion dictate my actions. I want to go home at the end of the day and be proud of what I have accomplished.
But it's not worth putting in that effort for a company that treats you like any other resource. So I'm starting to become one of those soulless employees. You can call it quiet quitting or whatever. And it's slowly killing my spark.
I started working on my own projects to keep that spark alive. But 2h every day is not enough to build something that's worth it.
Yep I’m in exactly the same boat. I think I’ve largely decided that tech is just a job now; my motivation to code outside of work was tied to also somehow enjoying doing it at work and now I don’t anymore I also stopped doing it for fun.
So I’ve replaced advent of code with various other stuff, music, woodworking, books, the great outdoors and while my life is less rich in technology it’s becoming much fuller in other ways.
For me, coding outside of work becomes unsustainable as you age. It's not that you can't, it's because you realise there's more to life than staring at a computer screen. I love coding, but it's also good to go outside sometimes.
Recent years (40's) I've been on a building spree of sorts for my own projects[0]
I'm my 30's, a lot of energy went into home improvement projects, establishing a garden, and young kids. Now I find a lot of time and energy left for my own passion projects.
Like you, I like doing work I enjoy, but I have never been in a layoff, so I don't know how I will react to it.
My hope is that after a layoff I would be able to bounce back and find a new company where I can keep on doing fun work.
Life has ups and downs. I don't think shielding yourself from emotions is a healthy path. Just like you don't have to shield yourself from others forever after a breakup. A key ingredient is to have other part of your life to support you (family, couple, friends, ...) when one is failing.
It's been 20+ years since I was laid off when the first internet boom collapsed. I got a decent settlement, spent a while experimenting with self employment, and got another interesting full-time job which lasted for years. I'd rate the experience as significantly less traumatic than my first relationship breakup.
But yes, the first time you experience redundancies regardless of whether you're made redundant or survive is definitely an eye-opener. It's like those financial disclaimers "the value of your investment may go down as well as up". There may be very little warning. It may even happen at a time that's very bad for you personally. And it does break trust among the company.
I was thinking that it seems strange to fire a 10x dev that has regular one-on-one meetings with a VP. OP could have contacted said VP and outlined that he was worth keeping, until I got to this line :
>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees
This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.
While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.
At no point does the law force a company to fire a high performer. The company can literally just fire one fewer person - if the employee really is 10x and if the company has its shit together, that's what would happen.
Let us face it, the European welfare model is a blind alley. No one in the world is going to copy this from us again, now that it is clear that it makes us
a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;
b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;
c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.
IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.
Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.
The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.
The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.
"Europe consists of many countries, and different countries have significantly different welfare models."
In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high taxation and regulation to support those systems.
Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent. But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.
"Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed."
A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions. The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass expropriations.
We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More punitive taxation = more brain drain.
It makes sense to me that a big portion of government spending goes towards social welfare and healthcare – at the end, that's one of the most important things.
I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its heights. The lower investment into defense came not at the cost of higher social welfare.
The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that.
"The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that."
Do we? For what?
We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.
Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.
Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.
Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.
Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.
Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.
On a global markets, there always will be huge corporations, and nowadays they usually grow huge because they provide some useful or at least highly sought-after services. And their owners are certain to become rich.
You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...
"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."
You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.
But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
I live in welfare mecca with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is breaking under the load.
Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.
The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.
This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.
This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.
Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.
Everyone suffers like this.
Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics.
My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.
The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.
Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??
Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price
My experience is that many liberal Americans tend to admire European welfare systems as a counterpoint to the more cut-throat US systems, and really, really don't want to discuss the downsides.
People need to dream, I guess.
The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
> But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).
Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.
A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry. Yeah, there are outliers again, but that is the core demographics here.
The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.
Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...
That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.
By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.
> A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry.
You'd be surprised.
I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.
I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.
It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.
The Slovak government literally wants to try slavery light for doctors.
They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.
Slovakia under its current government is literally the second-most anti-EU country of the EU (after Hungary - though maybe Austria will soon follow suit), so I'm not sure if that illustrates your point well.
They aren't doing this because they disagree with the EU-wide consensus on general welfare / healthcare policies, though. Fico isn't Javier Milei, he is a pro-Russian populist social democrat, precisely the type of politican that promises unrealistic levels of welfare for a relatively poor state.
As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.
Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.
Or by Europeans that don't care for the 1000th clichéd "EU bad, America good" debate which invariably attracts low-quality comment as is immediately evident.
The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.
It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts of the world has been rapidly shrinking.
It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.
But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.
When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of tossing our aging population out onto the street we cannot do much more than increase immigration - something those old people don't like.
So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.
Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to deal with the aging situation than others.
The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.
The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.
I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.
And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.
Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?
Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.
Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.
It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.
Please pick any semi-advanced economy other than USA when talking about healthcare. USA is well known for its corrupt healthcare system. You are picking the worst of the worst as an example.
They're picking the US as an example because the person who started this discussion was saying that the European model is in their view unsustainable. It's possible that that person wants to change Europe into Singapore or something, but given this site, I consider it much more likely that they meant "unsustainable compared to the US".
Yeah the system doesn't work. Nothing has convinced me more of that fact than living in Germany has. If your system only works for a single generation in which you have an unusually large working population and relatively few children and relatively few old people, then your system doesn't work. The German system never worked, it was always just running on borrowed time.
Back when the life expectancy at birth was forty you mean? And the system has expanded greatly since then. Handouts for almost everyone except normal workers who pay the highest taxes on labour in the world after Belgium. And yes the system has stopped working now the population has stopped growing. Germany as an antiquated boomerocracy is unrivalled as far as I am aware.
Life expectancy at birth is irrelevant, people who die in infancy don't consume many resources at all. What matters is the percentage of the population that's of working age, and here Germany is fairly typical for a developed country.
It matters in combination with the tax rate on the working population. There are huge transfers of wealth ongoing from the working class to the retired class of people, who are the richest generation in history. People need to wake up and protect their class interests an stop arguing for this German Ponzi scheme.
I'm not sure what you're expecting demography-wise : would you rather have this, an unsustainable population growth or an average lifespan of 40 years ?
But also, yes, in the "West" we've been living way above our means for almost a century now, and the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
I had to look this up, and the law states that the Sozialauswahl (social selection) only applies to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. The law applies when the company is doing across-the-board layoffs (e.g. because they have become unprofitable).
It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last, compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong – the company would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because of this law.
Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was affected by it.
OP didn't got it right. It only applies for those with the same qualifications (i.e. given two 10x devs, the most vulnerable one is kept) so the company gets to keep a 10x dev. He's just externalising his problems to the easiest target (ie. vulnerable people). His own situation is partially his fault and he admits as much when he describes a list of what he would have done differently.
People expect things to always work the same way and they get upset when they don't.
Strongly agree with the author.
I was laid off two years ago, and I am experiencing the same feelings he is describing: I no longer want to give my 100%, I no longer overcommit.
I do the minimum required and feel emotionally detached from the company and my colleagues.
It's a waste that so many individual contributors who, as the author said, had good performance and were close to the users went through a laid off. Now a new generation of previously high achievers work force will get back in the market and no longer use all their potential for their job.
Like it wasn't the fault of the new company that hired me, that now I do the bare minimum, they won't see the full potential I gave before. And I, I cannot prevent it. My work ethics and motivation died after the lay off.
It's disappointing that you feel detached from your colleagues. They're in the same boat as you. Also, increasing your network doesn't hurt. There's a risk in being known as the quiet or moody guy who doesn't interact with anyone. It might make you enjoy your work more too.
Partially agree.
I still network, and actually found my current job thanks to my network.
I still interact with ma colleagues, help them, socialize. But I try to keep some emotional distance.
When I got laid off, my colleagues were also my close friends, so on top of the laid off turmoil I was living, I was sad I would no longer work with them.
Hmm… not really, bars are high, no one is hiring fresh graduates anymore, and new generation is more detached with better sense of real world and focus on work-life balance and more personal growth, unlike previous generation who usually tied their identity to their work and gave their 500% for peanuts and glory(always fake and meaningless).
I understand.
But since I have decided to reduce my time and energy dedicated to a company, I put this extra time and energy more towards my personal hobbies.
I feel like I am living two lives in one day, at work I am detached and do only what's required, while outside work I am deeply invested in my things.
I read a book called “The Goal” by Goldratt and he describes his theory of constraints. One of the main predictions of his theory is that the existence of many resources working at maximum capacity is symptomatic of a wildly inefficient production system. Thus you shouldn’t feel guilty about not giving 100% every day. This behavior is necessary to properly balance the total throughout of your company. Ideally only one person should be giving 100% in any given company, and in a fair and balanced system this would be the CEO who is concomitantly receiving massive compensation.
This theory feels like it’s making tons of assumptions and leans heavily on semantics.
In a factory you have many components operating near or at capacity. In a high growth environment you want all of your components working at capacity to explore the problem space and optimize.
That was one of the most eye opening books for me. I think it all applies to Software development as well. It is not uncommon that you work all weekend to finish your task, only to see it waits two weeks in the next person's queue.
I've applied it to my studies as well. You will achieve little by learning a bit of everything. There is always one area of knowledge you are urgently lacking in, that you should hyperfocus on, in order to alleviate the information bottleneck of the system you are working on. It's the same as in the book: the teacher is always whittling down the incoherent problem space to the critical piece of wisdom that the protagonist then has to discover on his own.
This is how you generate more layoffs for yourself. Having money saved and living within your means greatly reduces the impact of being laid off. You need to be impactful and putting yourself out there at all times or you lose trust. Several people who have allowed themselves to be beat down mentally at my company have lost trust and are on the chopping block. It can take a year or more before you get sacked. You can also reverse the course at almost any time.
Thank you for your advice. I agree.
I am still working and completing my tasks, so far I didn't give anyone any reason to complain about my work. But I would not put again the extra hours or extra creativity.
I save money and live within my means. And I live in a country with great unemployment benefits if it happens again. When I got laid off, I didn't suffer financially thanks to our support system, but emotionally it was hard.
While not bad advice, but careful - you will die and you don't know when. You can't take it with you (almost all religion agrees on this, though if yours doesn't then I guess I won't argue religion here). Have a reasonable amount of saved money, but make sure you are using the majority of what you earn on things you enjoy (well at least things you enjoy consistent with the law and religion should either of those conflict with what you enjoy)
I was working for a German startup that had been acquired by a big American company. The relationship between my team and the big corp was strained from the start - we felt that they simply didn't understand what we did and didn't give us the liberty to decide how best to do things. They also didn't seem very mindful of time zone differences or understanding of German worker protection laws.
When they laid off the other team that was working in our office (on an entirely different product), they of course assured us that we were safe - they believed in our product, yadda yadda.
Then at some point, things started getting weird - a job position was cancelled right before we were going to offer the candidate the job. A trip to HQ was cancelled last minute. An external team was getting increasingly involved.
About a year after the other team had been fired, the second highest ranking executive was visiting our office, something he would do once in a while. When the visit was announced, we were joking that "if he brings Pattie from HR, they'll lay us off". I got the message from my coworker on my way to work: "Pattie is here."
The speech the executive gave us was the stupidest thing I've ever heard somebody say to me. He literally said: "In a couple of years, you will look at this as a big opportunity." We just rolled our eyes at each other. When he left the room, we picked up the remotes and started playing stickman against each other. It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.
We had a very nice office and so we were looking forward to be able to spend our notice period together, playing video games, making music and doing the bare minimum in terms of handover duties. Unfortunately, covid happened at right that time and our time together was dramatically cut short, which I still consider a tragedy.
One woman in our team was pregnant and fought the settlement they were offering us. As far as I know, they had to keep her on for longer and she eventually negotiated a better deal - pregnant people are especially protected under German labour law.
To this day, some in my former team doubt that what they did was really all that legal and think we should have fought back, because it later turned out that they lied to us about a bunch of things. But I doubt it would have been really worth it. They just wanted us out.
After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the advice a little:
- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.
- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.
- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.
Indeed. The real discovery in the article is that the people who manage performance and the people who manage headcount were completely different people. The article writer had (common mistake) assumed that impressing the former would take care of the latter. It doesn't; the techniques to manage the headcount people are different.
I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about why beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable or looking out for you.
> the techniques to manage the headcount people are different
I would like to hear a little bit more about those techniques.
The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan layoffs know very little about the individual's other than their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful: it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of whether to be promoted or something different.
Nothing magic or particularly reliable, but a few things stemming from the basics - layoffs happen because the accountants say there isn't enough money, and [Function X] seems to cost more than [Profit/Opportunity Y] that is assigned to it. Then a bunch of people have no job the next week. So to avoid being picked up in a layoff, it is helpful to talk to the accountants, figure out what Y is and what X you are in, and if the numbers aren't promising work to get re-categorised as a Z, increase Y or negotiate to change how things are measured.
Most product teams are organised around the idea that someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit. Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.
Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the time software people show no interest in whether the plans they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading to more money.
Eg, in the original article I see things like "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack him.
If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to make it so.
[0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something that can be assumed.
1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people above you know it.
2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where you're fixing bugs and making improvements, not just keeping things ticking over.
3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by working in departments that bring in more revenue than they cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success; and in an area where the company's strategy calls for growth.
4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can do about this, except working at the head office, or a very large branch office where important projects are based.
5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to start sending out resumes and maybe getting the unemployment insurance on your car loan.
Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard of some people having great success with the opposite strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of these are hard-and-fast rules.
Yes. When the first dot-com bubble burst, my father was working on semiconductor manufacturing machines.
The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day before. The business was cashflow positive, not some crazy gamble.
But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of investors decided to get out of tech stocks.
Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.
There is a halfway between 1 and 3 where the manager is told to drop 5% and rather than picking one dev per team the manager just squashes one “nice-to-have” application and drops that team.
There's also the shifting over-correction from "stack ranking is problematic and risks lawsuits about bias in performance counting" (because no one trusts performance metrics anymore) and 1 becomes "layoff a 'random' 5%" because "random" is the new "fair".
There is one other thing you can sometimes pull off: tell your boss you could work for a different division. Often (but not always, perhaps not even the majority of times) when layoffs happen there are also moves to a different division that is hiring people. So you want to make sure you are on the list of people to recommend to the other division. (this sometimes means getting skills the other wants before the layoffs)
> Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving.
I actually thought about doing this early in my career and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few years off their path to being able to (ethically, without lying) put "Senior" on their resume.
It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are considering this I would also suggest you do it in a market/business area that you don't particularly care about. I've been in more than one interview where a senior executive who was very tied in on the business side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc) immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as a red flag.
The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but it's something to consider.
The key point is that people need to face today's economic/political realities which is that it is all "Realpolitik" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either learn how to play the game based on circumstances or suffer.
Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected after a setback and constantly strive for self-improvement. “When I look at my own particular responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT – the more people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY – If you get along with people, they are more likely to do things for you. CREDIBILITY – if you are known to be good on words, people take you seriously," he said.
“My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it, you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember and hope what you said was right."
So make sure you have good contact with Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the abnormal (with caveats).
In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.
As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.
I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.
I think it comes down to a previous discussion on HN, "don't just crush tickets".
Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job security but doesn't help when your managers managers manager has to make cuts.
But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and being a person.
And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?
Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.
That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.
The point of the article isn't to just "work less", but rather that working above and beyond what you're contracted for in a large organization in the long run ultimately won't matter. The takeaway is that your "extra" efforts can be better spent elsewhere: family, personal projects, interviews for next gig, etc.
The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)
I don't think the original post is advocating for just "throwing in the towel" here. Instead they're simply stating that working what you're specifically contracted for is a more reasonable and sustainable model than always going "above and beyond" for little to no gain to your work life and at great cost to your personal life.
Corporations by design don't "care" about you, they only care about maximizing profits and returns for their shareholders. Sure you can get "noticed" by higher ups, but those individuals have no obligations to you in the day to day operations unless you're getting cozy with the (increasingly externally conteacted) deciders/architects of the next upcoming re-org.
It's not explicitly stated in the article, but their call-out of the behavior of large companies speaks to the missing piece of the puzzle here: the "stage" of the company's lifecycle plays a crutial role in how much your "above and beyond" contributions matter. 10 person start-up? Matters significantly. 1000+ person org? Drop in the bucket.
It might be. But I’ve been in the room when a very high performing team was given the ax. This was a team that had all kinds of kudos and objective measures showing they were better than their peers.
But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of that magnified the savings.
I’ve done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and the advice I’d tell people is don’t think it’s a reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.
Most of the time it’s just macro factors out of your control.
Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets off the board and my team did $x”
You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).
You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours.
It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
> trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there.
This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.
IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM
or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012.
No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.
When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.
I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.
“By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.”
This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.
I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process.
One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects.
The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.
The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.
But no one to a first approximation is going to do it. Statistics show that on average, people only look at your resume for 6 seconds.
And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.
I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.
I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs
I am not buying the oft-quoted statistics in HR/Recruiting which like most popular adages is mostly made up from a few anecdotes and widely disseminated which people then accept because "everybody says so". The key is to hook in the reader from the summary/qualifications on the first page.
The "tell me about yourself" question is one of the worst to ask and i never do this. It is so open ended that people start rambling. Instead get them to focus (this also calms their nerves) by asking about notable jobs picked from their resume "what did you do as ... at ..." and dig more as needed. Do this for a couple more jobs if available and you will get to see how confident the candidate is, how he communicates, the depth of his knowledge and his modes of thinking. From here, you generalize to what the job actually needs and give the candidate some idea of the job and its environment and ask how he hopes to fit in and contribute. This makes things clear to both interviewer and interviewee.
I also do not place much weight on personality/psychology tests/questions. People generally cannot be truthful in their answers to questions like "how do you deal with conflict with your co-worker?" etc. Here i trust to "gut feeling" based on non-verbal impressions, verbal communication and pointed questions (challenge the candidate by taking a contrarian stance and see how he responds).
Finally, i make sure that the interviewee at the very outset understands that though i am the interviewer it does not mean that i am more knowledgeable than him in his areas of expertise. This works great by boosting his confidence which then leads to a more natural interaction.
Recruiting/HR is a complex art where you have to consider various factors to build a picture of a person (suited to a role) from factual data and psychology. IMO a good way is to start with an understanding of Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory For a nice overview, see the book Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.
The fact is that every open req especially for remote positions get hundreds of resumes within the first hour, who is going to read that? An 8 page resume goes straight to the trash. Part of a job of a “senior” is good communication skills and knowing your audience. An eight page resume shows laziness since they didn’t take the time to make it shorter and no one is going to listen to or read anything 8 pages especially as a manager who just wants to know what is going on a high level.
I ask the tell me about yourself question partially to assess their communication skills and getting to the point.
Do you think people who are conducting an interview loop at large companies are going to go through an 8 page resume? Yes I’ve been on both sides of a BigTech interview loop and have gone through the interview training process there.
Even at smaller companies when building a team and I’ve had 80% of the say so about who gets hired, I still needed evidence to take the CxO/director and couldn’t go by “gut feel”.
And when dealing with customers (I work in consulting now) or “the business” you have to have a strategy to deal with interdepartmental conflicts, different stakeholders have different priorities, some people don’t want to change etc. I’m not talking about a conflict with another coworker arguing about which design pattern to use.
You have missed the point of the long CV. It is not that the recipient has to read everything. As mentioned, the first couple of pages is the resume. However the details are there to provide more info. as needed. Contrary to what you think i have had very good response to such a layout. Often times they see a company/project/technology there (even if old) which rings a bell with them and which they are then eager to discuss. That is the point; Give them all the info. in which you are strong so that they can make a better informed decision. The same is what i look for when i am the interviewer; a few bullet points on a 2-page resume which basically tell me nothing is useless.
Incidentally, Jeff Bezos does something similar with his 6-page memo (plus annexes) for meetings; Same idea different domain; More details help better decision-making.
"Gut Feel" is absolutely needed to give your input on Team Fit, Conflict Management and similar other intangible Human factors. Some companies are doing Myers-Briggs etc. but i give them lower weightage (because they can be gamed by practice) over subjective feelings.
A report on a interviewee should include objective assessments (knowledge, experience etc. and your inferences based on them) and subjective assessments (temperament, maturity etc.)
I worked at AWS for three years (Professional Services). Using Amazon as an example of a good corporate culture and how companies should behave is not the argument you think it is.
But I see a few scenarios.
You have a strong network and the resume is a formality. In that case it’s easy enough to tailor your resume for the job. I don’t need to put that I wrote FORTRAN and C on VAX and Stratus mainframes in the mid 90s. There is no need for an 8 page resume. The year before last I had two offers for strategic positions based on my network.
The second case you are targeting a company where you know you have a competitive advantage, again in that case, you only need to have a resume that focuses on what gives you a competitive advantage. In my case, now I focus on strategic cloud consulting positions that focus on app development. In that case, I only need to focus on my job at a startup in 2018, talk in broad strokes about my time at AWS (working there automatically gets call backs by the way), and when the day comes, when I leave my current job as a “staff architect”.
The worse case is if you are spamming your resume far and wide and you are looking for any generic job. I look at an 8 page resume and then I have to take the time to see what is this person trying to communicate - it goes in the trash and I move on. I have hundreds of other resumes that I can get through quickly.
Of course if the company is reaching out to me, it’s even easier to tailor my resume for the job requirements. I have my “career document” to pull from either way that is as long as needed.
But even then I’m not going back even to the low level work I did in 2012 for Windows CE devices.
I am not talking about general Amazon corporate culture so your caveat makes no sense. I am talking about the practice of one specific technique which leads to better decision-making and which has also been validated by other people adopting it. Here is Jeff's own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
I consider 2-page resumes no better than a powerpoint presentation (i.e. almost useless) and furthermore when i see people tailor it to what they think i should know i consider it maybe trying to hide something. This is because by omitting companies they take away a vector for me to check references and more. Note that this is different from highlighting relevant experience/knowledge.
Your scenarios are nothing new from what you have already mentioned earlier; And spamming is not what i am talking about. That is a policy decision made by each person based on his circumstances.
You and most folks are simply parroting current practices in HR/Recruiting which are broken and need to be rethought from the ground up. To repeat once more, all details matter at some level in recruiting. As they say "measure twice and cut once" and "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".
Well, since most people at least in the US don’t do 8 page resumes and yet they get hired everyday and most managers aren’t asking for 8 page resumes and aren’t complaining about two page resumes, you ever thought you might be the outlier?
On the other hand, do you pay top of market? Would anyone be clamoring to expand their resume to eight pages because you prefer it?
Well, did you ever realize that you have a "bee in your bonnet" regarding the number 8 which is not the point of my example resume? It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels) with nothing omitted. The rationale has already been pointed out viz. a) Different job fit than applied for job b) background reference checking c) indicators of self-motivation/adaptability/breadth of thought etc. all of which are very relevant.
As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken. So being a outlier in this case is good. Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter. When i do send in my CV, recruiters invariably call me back which then helps me to prime them with specific relevant experiences listed in the CV which they then forward to the actual interviewers. It allows one to stand out from the crowd.
Finally, most 2-page resumes look all the same with keywords/boiler-plate sentences/paragraphs with nothing giving me any additional insight into the person. The self-imposed page limit causes them to self censor their words/sentences unnecessarily leading to loss of info. For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.
Well, seeing that my success rate over 25 years (not counting my first job the i got via a return offer from a internship) is also 100% across looking for a job 9 times as far as send my email to a recruiter -> get an interview with only two pages at most, I think I’m doing pretty good.
Admittedly before 2020, those were local recruiters with local jobs.
> It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels)
Let’s say I was looking for a job next year. I wouldn’t want to use my one hour I have with an interviewer to talk about anything I did before 2016. I’m looking for high level staff roles at small to medium companies. I want the entire conversation to be about signaling that I have competencies with leading a project from initial discovery with stakeholders to implementation and getting it done on time, on budget and meets requirements.
I also want to signal that while my breadth in my chosen domain is wide and I’m going to highlight projects that show that breadth, I’m not a paper tiger who can’t do hands on keyboard software development or “cloud engineering”. I can demonstrate that easily in 2 pages by leaving off anything before 2016.
Within those 10 years I can demonstrate a steady growth from being a barely competent lead developer, to being an architect at a startup, to consulting and working on projects with increasing “scope”, “impact”, and “ambiguity”.
> As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken.
Even if recruiting is broken , it’s a “gravity problem. Just because you may not like gravity, if you jump out of 50 story building, you will die. While I’ve avoided the leetCode grind, I’ve played the “how to be successful at system design and behavioral interviews” game with aplomb. You adapt to the reality
>So being an outlier in this case is good.
Or you can just be an outlier by having a skill set and experience that sets you apart from the crowd in whatever niche you decided to pursue.
> Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter.
The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. I once had an interviewer ask me a “trick question” about C in 2014 for a C# development position. Even at the time I was six years removed from any C programming. I answered it and got the job. But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.
> For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.
Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”. I communicate my expertise on my resume by telling how I used my knowledge to achieve an outcome.
Again, you are not saying anything new at all with this wall of text. You can claim any competency you want but that has to be evaluated and judged by the Interviewer's (and his team's) standards. This is the key; since your opinion of yourself does not count for that much, you provide all the info. you can to the Interviewer so they can pick up on it and dig deeper on all aspects (coding, designing, requirements specification, system architecture etc.) as needed.
Also a lot of words/phrases you have used above are general platitudes. By themselves they mean nothing unless you can tie them to a specific usecase/experience from your CV which should contain the details. Both the "Forest" i.e. big picture/business need/overall system/architecture/etc. details and "The Trees" i.e. languages/tools/libraries/frameworks/techniques/etc. matter.
You have to deal with Reality even if it is broken but you can do it differently than the norm (but stand out on the positive side) and get excellent results. To paraphrase a wellknown saying; "It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick [recruiting process]".
> The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. ... But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.
This depends on what i am interviewing you for. As pointed out above, my requirements/needs trump your view/opinions of the role.
As an example, my very first job was implementing a Personnel Information System using Cobol85 on a Cyberdata mainframe. Using Structured Analysis and Design methods (this was before OO became mainstream) I implemented a RDBMS inspired design using ISAM files and also a UI using ansi escape codes. So even though i do not remember much of the Cobol language itself i remember the design which is still useful today. Hence i can demonstrate knowledge of Relational Theory/RDBMSes as needed. This is only possible if it were listed in the CV in the first place.
> Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”.
You have failed the test. This only shows you have no business evaluating any resume for a C++ developer. It is actually an advanced expertise which most good interviewers understand and appreciate and design teams need.
I generally disagree with the CV point but the "6 seconds" anecdote doesn't ring true to me except for obviously unfit applicants. I have definitely spent less than 10 seconds looking at a resume but it's because I immediately rejected the applicant - for example, the role is a solid mid-level or senior role and the applicant just graduated college and has no relevant experience or open source projects.
I want to be interested in your resume. If I'm interviewing you, you can be absolutely sure I've spent at least 20-30 minutes reading over your resume, looking up your past companies/schools, getting a sense of what you've done and pulled out a few relevant or interesting things to ask about.
I think the "6 seconds" thing is mostly HR drones who are barely qualified to write the resumes they're reading, let alone judge them, and are simply sorting into "yes" and "no" piles.
Do you think that most managers spend 30 minutes reading over a resume and do everything else they have to do?
I can guarantee you that none of my managers spent more than 5 minutes looking over my resume and 4 of my six lady jobs have been strategic early hires, 1 was at BigTech where one person in my loop was my eventual manager and my current one was for one of I think 25 highest level IC positions at my current company of 600-700 people.
Honestly I don't want to read narrative prose which is as likely to be a lie as anything else on the resume/CV. A half page might be fine if you've got a dozen CVs to look at for an ultra-specific role. If you just need a half-decent Golang developer and have 80 resumes that pass the initial screen? I'm not reading 40 pages of fluff, and if I'm not going to read all of its it's unfair to read any of it.
If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.
I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.
I already pointed out in my other comments that the first couple of pages is the resume but the details are given to consult as needed. This is how it should be since more details help one make better decisions. The current Recruiting/HR practices are broken which nobody seems to question. Human Resource is very important in this highly competitive economy where a single employee can change the entire future of the company, and yet people are using keyword searches, bullet point explanations and snap judgements for recruiting. Add in the fact that there is almost no training given to new employees nowadays which means it is even more important to recruit the right person.
You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.
A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
> You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making.
So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?
> A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations
Well first there is a huge difference between what Amazon says in public and what actually happens (like the Bullshit leadership principles especially the one about being the best employer). I can tell you from personal experience from actually working at Amazon that there were a lot of PowerPoint slides in internal meetings and especially when dealing with customers. I did my share of them.
Second, instead of using an analogy, we can actually talk about resumes at Amazon and how the hiring process works. No one ever submits 8 page resumes, nor does anyone in the hiring loop bemoan the fact that we only got 2 page resumes. I was on both sides of the hiring process there.
Never did they mention a word in the “Make Great Hiring Decisions” training program that they really like candidates to give them 8 page resumes.
Do you really want to keep bringing Amazon up as an example to someone who actually worked there?
> So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?
Yes, if only to confirm veracity. The mantra is "Trust but Verify".
The point of bringing up the Amazon example was to show a specific technique which works and has been adopted/validated by others. Amazon is a giant company and you were just one small cog in the wheel so pointing to your Amazon experience is not very convincing. This was not something imposed on every trivial meeting but for important strategic ones. There is good logic behind such a practice viz. helps to get the entire team on the same page w.r.t. some subject. Finally, i did not say that Amazon did the above for recruitment but suggested that recruiting in general would be far better if they (and everybody else) adopted such a logic.
Just got accepted on my first job last month. Yet, last week, company (>500 ppl) already announced some small layoffs.
Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?
If you're actually down to jump ship you can probably be upfront about it.
It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.
Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of technical knowledge is essentially based on vibes. My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.
If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they agreed.
Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.
I dropped out of university, so in my early years it took a lot of tuning my resume to give the impression that I had a degree without actually saying it. Thankfully I had taken summer courses at a different, nearby university for two years before college. Eventually I would just put the years, the universities, and the major I was pursuing. Now I just leave it off the resume.
I had one manager who found out after the fact and told me he wouldn't have hired me if he realized, but he was glad he did.
I had an interview where they asked for a college transcript and then grilled me on why I failed Martian Geology and why I only got a C in Vector Calculus. I was given an offer, but declined it because of that experience. I dodged a bullet too; I've seen reports that the company sues former employees just to cost them money.
If you just started at your first job i would focus first on becoming an asset for your team.
Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft skills and maintain friendships.
There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.
Whether or not you start actively looking for other jobs, you can take any opportunities you have to better develop your network. It's harder just starting out but post my first fairly extended role out of grad school, every one of my jobs was through someone I knew.
Well, you say just that. It even demonstrates a beginning of business acumen.
Everyone does it, recruiters aren’t naive. Once I became old enough to hire people, I understood it’s ok (depending on the audience, beware) to say “I can start on Monday but I’ll take two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it’s already planned.” Better have employees who are mature enough to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I told him during the first month he shouldn’t work more than 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental, bank, insurances, child care, etc.).
There's no need. Just tell them that you're keeping tabs on the job market and would switch for a compelling offer. It's up to them whether they have one for you.
I was laid off during dot-bomb and was lucky enough to land a good (actually better) job through someone I knew pretty quickly. Pay wasn't great and they barely came through dot-bomb themselves later. But whatever.
I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business. Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job market was really tough at the moment.
But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.
Yeah, I think the first email I dropped was to this guy who owned a small company we had been a client of in an earlier role. He invited me up to lunch and was there with his (later) COO. It was basically a casual interview. Later, we discussed some contract work but he basically decided to just hire me. Which was nice because it was basically nuclear winter during dot-bomb--nothing else that even vaguely resembled a lead.
I think this sort of thing bugs a lot of people here because they think that some sort of theoretical skill assessment should be what matters. But that's not how the world works for the most part.
I never understood the advice of to take on impactful work. How does work? The team is assigned units of work and then individuals are usually assigned the tasks. The only way I see it to work is to be on a team that works on impactful projects.
I know this probably doesn't help you now, but I negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.
I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.
The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.
Also, keep yourself employable. What you get hired to do and what you'll find yourself doing 6 months later, 2 years later, etc. aren't going to be the same. Whatever you are doing, keep in mind how much of it is really a marketable skill and how much of it is specialized to a small slice of the industry or perhaps even just your current company. Move within a company to keep working on what is useful to one's own career. I would only accept dead end work for a significant pay bump or as I'm finalizing for retirement.
Not sure why you got downvoted for this. My current role started very tech-heavy and morphed into almost completely documentation as my management found out I'm one of the only ones at the company who doesn't suck at grammar and photography. Now my day-to-day really wouldn't be useful for getting another job with a similar title (and pay) to my current one, and I need to devote extra time outside of work to keeping up with actual tech skills that I used to be able to develop on-the-job.
One of my earliest jobs was supposedly programming but was actually a slow descent into tech support for in house applications under the hood and I glad I took that as a hint to move elsewhere. Since then, it has always been a balance between doing what the company needs but also making sure I'm positioned to learn new technology or otherwise be growing my career in some fashion.
I agree with this, maybe I'd summarize things in a slightly different way: think of employment as a mutually beneficial transaction. That doesn't necessarily mean simply working the contracted hours, but keep in mind that jobs are, these days transactional in nature.
I can go above and beyond, work on the weekends etc, but there should be a benefit to me. That could be because I learn something and it sets me up for my next job, I increase my chances of a promotion, or just that it's something interesting to me personally.
I think there is probably less cynicism this way too, because this is how most companies look at employees too.
My recommendation would be: don't make your work be part of your identity, unless it's your work (e.g. your business). The work you do for others is not who you are. Your employer is not your family, nor even your friend. It's a business relationship, and should be taken as such.
This, incidentally is good advice for both sides of an employment relationship: employers sometimes also mistakenly believe that employees are their friends and family and then get a rude awakening when employees suddenly leave with no warning, for a 10% increase in salary.
I agree with the “it’s a business relationship and not family” part, but not with the identity part. Something you spend ~40% of your awake time with is certainly part of one’s identity, and for good mental health should be something one enjoys.
The first layoff is always the worst. You'll treat future gigs as transactional and be better for it. The younger you're laid off the sooner you'll learn this.
I'm so grateful I was laid off just 2 years into my first software gig out of school. I graduated, worked my ass off at a startup, and theeeen covid! It hurt but that was a permanent wisdom upgrade.
The worst part is finding out how many things depend on your job. I needed to move out when I was laid off, but good luck finding someone to rent to you when you don't have a job.
Yes... I'm in the UK, in London. For renting, even as a founder who has a profitable business that was active for a year, they're still either asking for upfront payments (12 months...) or a guarantor. This was the case for multiple locations (SE13 + E16).
They said if my business was running for 2 years or more then they'd accept that as low enough risk.
A bit understandable in this economical situation, but man, it's hard. Even for the guarantor, they need to own a house and have at least 40x the monthly rent as proven (PAYE or business with 2+ years) yearly income.
I knew only one person who could be a guarantor that fits the requirements.
Alternative was AirBnb or other monthly accommodation which was of course more expensive.
The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.
This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.
“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
That's because they have a budget which is planned ahead (e.g., 2024 for 2025) for everything.
Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).
I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.
Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which don’t factor in continual employment of staff lead to the morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn’t actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale high is a goal (which it definitely isn’t at many companies.)
Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.
“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.
Playing devil's advocate: Firing people has a huge financial impact - around $100,000 per person per year. The event only cost $50,000 once. So it might not be that significant, and at least the staff gets to enjoy a nice event. Why eliminate both when the event's cost is equivalent to just half a position?
I think it has more to do with the psychological effect than with money itself.
We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.
When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".
It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...
This one's easy. Because you value your people more than the parties they can throw. The cost/benefit are not just monetary. If they were, the event would have no reason to happen under any circumstance.
You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.
Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will print money next year, so based on this prediction I will raise the budget for the FY. Then when the prediction of revenue fails, you do cuts, oh well you were wrong. But next year you can do the same thing. Game theory wise this works because if you're right, you bet big, hire big, are ahead next year vs your competitors that invested less. If it goes wrong you are seen as a serious executive that has the courage to have layoffs when needed, and if your market is ebbing your competitors will also be suffering somewhat.
It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.
This happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.
That is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article, government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets approved all the time because it looks good.
Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit. This is especially true in government, and big companies are similar.
There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.
Suddenly I'm connecting the relationship between "budget based economics" and "agile" as commonly implemented. It's trying to fit creativity into a budget. In the places that do it well, it's like "We're supposed to make some really great art, here's the crayons we can afford, sorry if it's not exactly right but it's what we could manage, do whatever you can, we will take it!" In places that do it poorly, it's like "we need you to make the Uber of the Mona Lisa, I'm gonna need you to find a way to make that work, but we can totally be flexible on this, which crayons do you need."
The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.
I have never even understood the approach. The sub-budgets within an organization seem so arbitrary and become games in and of themselves, often leading to frivolous purchases just to use up the budget and not get your budget slashed.
Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?
Managers play games because they are looking out for their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is underspending, because they are tying up resources - companies will have a desired internal rate of return (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on their investments then a manger tying up capital is costing a lot.
Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share information. Sharing information at least cuts down on some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it has a limit at scale.
Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses gets done sometimes.
Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I think.
Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my reading is he basically tried to create a system where everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he hoped).
There's better and worse ways to try to get around the Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.
Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of clueless administrators that can't do much.
Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.
Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may not overlap with reality.
Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom" and thus push to get more and more people (either by grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is indeed how you create a "legible & convincing narrative" to increase your budget (end goal being more people, more power).
In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.
This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.
It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.
Surely this is a question of having skin in the game, where management is all game and employees all skin. If the clowns making decisions would get hit by bad ones, things would look differently. You now, actually "taking full responsibility".
They don't spend $200k on consultants just because it's fun. They do it when there are already difficulties in figuring out how to productively use the employees who make $40k (say 20 of them).
This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.
A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.
Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.
In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.
Outside of the US this optionality does have some value to deserve at least some premium.
Hire an extra dev for the same money looks good on paper, but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
(I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the other direction as well)
> but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark. Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety representative.
And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two months because they decided that they didn't have the budget anyway.
Furthermore, the "additional cost" of an employee in Europe is a further 35% of the salary due to social fees. That is why contractors often don't cost more to the company, although it might seem like that to employees.
In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where employees, just with a different company. They just opted to station the same people at the same client for all those years.
In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently" bump into each other in the cantine, but not go together), or share the same office equipment for coffee, having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.
Why is that ridiculous? Contractors are not employees, so why should they be invited to a give thanks party for employees? Become an employee if you want to partake.
Feelings of entitlement are wrong here. Decency though tells us to invite everyone.
Christmas part is not special "give thanks to employees" party, it is more of end of a year party. It makes perfect sense to invite contractors. Even if it was "give thanks" party, contractors worked on projects.
I remember a work Christmas party attended by a contractor. The company was an sme and as usual we closed the office at mid-day and headed for a local restaurant to eat and socialise. The contractor as chatty and sociable, and seemed happy to be dining on the company's bill. Wine flowed.
Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
yeah it was just my facetious way of observing that there could be other explanations that he was gone as soon as he couldn't charge for his presence, in fact when I consult I would never charge for going to one of those things - but I would of course expense it on my taxes.
> Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
I have seen employees doing exactly the same, so I do not see anything worth anger here. It is never the case that everyone goes to christmas party. Unless not going is punished in some way, in which case they go, but only to avoid punishment.
Its caste. The cleaning lady is part of the company and its a horror that the dalit are dis-included from all company activities. The only actual reason is to divide and conquer and prevent them being part of any employee unionization.
I've been a consultant/contractor, less than 4 months in, and I still have been invited to (great) Christmas party, and even shared paid buses that took whole company and also given free accommodation.
Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.
How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.
I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".
Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?
Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties.
I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.
I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.
I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.
Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.
I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.
That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.
Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants.
If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.
If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project?
If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.
But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.
Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.
My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why).
The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.
If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers?
This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.
OK sure, but I never once mentioned any of this and have no idea what the social customs are around hiring general contractors to build buildings or asking CIA-adjacent consulting companies how to jack up the price of bread. I just know that half my coworkers have a slightly different email address for "legal reasons", and they aren't allowed to come to the Christmas party. This is, in my opinion, simply mean. Basically we seem to have invented a kind of at-will apartheid that 0.0001% of the population understand and even fewer benefit from.
That’s staff augmentation which is completely different. If your company doesn’t know anything about Salesforce for instance and you just need a one off large project, you are going to hire a consulting company to go off and do the work and leave.
It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s
I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building
Nothing ridiculous about it. That came out of the permatemp lawsuits in the US by contractors a couple of decades ago which resulted in employers avoiding doing anything that made it look like contractors were being treated like permanent employees. Squeezing for money by a few contractors ruined a good thing for the rest of them.
That's a manifestation of your specific environment and not a general rule. I guess it is the work of some overeager compliance department, because it is the kind of overreacting self-mutilation that happens if people do not understand a law and want to be absolutely sure (cf. GDPR).
[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!
> In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities
AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.
Consultancy has no such protections.
I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.
What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.
You get that at many companies whose legal department is too worried that AÜG might somehow be triggered for them, or have a strong union that would rather see all consulting folks be gone, which I understand when placed in the shoes of internal folks.
There was an lawsuit against Microsoft in the past that they lost because they used to treat contractors almost like employees. I'm guessing that is why these days most contractors are employed by someone else and not truly independent.
There’s the whole capital expenditure vs operating expenses angle too, and depending on a company’s particular situation, one might look better on paper than the other. Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.
This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to win shareholder brownie points.
Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money? Or is this all some nonsense setup by the company to shuffle the numbers to look superficially better for a specific metric?
"We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the actual recurring cost number is worse.
(There's also some complexities in some industries around money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on certain types of expenditures...)
It’s all about accounting for the spend. Wall Street often looks at Capital Expenditures as a sign of growth or at least net neutral, but they view Operating Expenses as negative. If you can reduce your operating expenses by 200k, but increase your capital expenditure by 400k, you’ve reduced overall profit in order to increase growth potential because your investing 400k into new stuff that will bring in more revenue.
This strategy cannot work long term unless there is growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number of employees. But it can definitely work short term if the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad, and it has the benefit of giving management someone else to blame when the project work doesn’t get done.
If your company starts replacing employees with contractors, that’s a bad sign.
That might be it, this company was obsessed with CAPEX vs. OPEX. Everything was always put into the context of CAPEX or OPEX. OPEX being bad and CAPEX good.
Wait, when did that change? I thought the prevailing wisdom in our industry is that CAPEX sucks, OPEX rules. I understdood that's what's driving SaaSification of everything - replacing some internal tool and labor with a SaaS is literally turning CAPEX into OPEX, and it was supposedly what the investors liked.
The only real difference is tax treatment. Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes. So opex are more tax-efficient, but they lower your reported earnings.
>Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money?
This may vary due to region. For example in the U.S where you can fire people quickly the contractor benefit is less apparent, but in EU where after a short period you may have to spend a long time to fire someone it may be beneficial to hire a contractor rather than going through a lengthy hiring process only to find out you want to fire them.
Contractors in such an environment often are a reasonable investment for a project that has a particular dedicated timeline. Like we expect 1 year for project to finish. We hire for 1 year, and opportunity to extend for 3 months 2 times in case it goes bad.
Otherwise you have to hire for project and then do these layoffs everybody here is complaining about.
Furthermore in EU if you are paying 10000 for an employee, you probably have extra fees on top of that so you are paying 14000 (estimation) then for contractor you are not paying 28000, but 20000. The pricing is not great, but there are lots of factors that can make it seem more attractive than it might appear on its face.
Finally, Contractors tend not to do any of this quiet quitting or whatever, probably because for them it is more a business and they are also earning significantly more that makes it an interesting business to be in and to maintain.
You can give workers temporary contracts and extend them as you see fit. None of what you are saying makes any sense to me.
Also, I will repeat this as many times as possible: you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law. You need to give your employee a WRITTEN letter of termination, to make the termination legally binding. Then all you have to do is give them notice (or pay the salary out immediately if you want to get rid of them immediately).
Paying double so you can fire contractors is illogical. The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months, after working 20 damn years at a single company, which means at worst the company would have to pay half your salary out a single time to get rid of you immediately. None of this 2x every year multi-year bullshit.
The reason why you hire contractors is that you do not need the full output of an employee. You might only need three months or maybe just a week. It's the same reason companies rent equipment instead of buying.
> you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law.
That is overly simplified. First, you have to commit to one of three types of layoffs, only one of which usually is applicable (betriebsbedingte Kündigung). But if you do that you have to consider the social circumstances of the employee and also other comparable employees. Which absolutely can result in not being able to fire the employee you would like to fire without also firing a number of other employees first. That could be really disruptive, so it is not quite so easy for German employers.
In my experience long time contractors will absolutely "quiet quit" if put into the same catch-22 situations that push employees to do this.
The main difference at least in my region is that if you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't as strong. In other words, tech workers who become contractors here usually are better contributors and have an easier time finding good offers.
I am wondering whether a company "optimizing for shareholder brownie points" is a good signal to either look for employment elsewhere or as an investor start investing elsewhere. It seems like a company who prioritizes this either has reached their potential (which might be fine) or is just not able to innovate anymore.
There's still a question of what you consider profitable.
A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.
Layoffs in big tech are mostly to place workers in their place and shake the market, they've definitely been able to drive down salaries these past two years.
> We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business and acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.
You stated that there aren't many profitable lifestyle companies. And the insinuation put forth is that they are very rare to the point of almost nonexistent.
This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?
No. But I do know statistics. The largest employees in tech are the public companies that we have all heard of. The next largest segment are VC funded companies with the smallest segment by far being the “lifestyle companies”.
Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many of those do you think are going to be profitable, private, lifestyle companies?
I would put money on all of big tech and all public companies combined not employing more than 30% of professional programmers. At least in the US only 15% work at a large company (500+).
> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
I'm in a VC-owned business with a 50% profit ebitda. But a common trick is to just load it with debt. The VC firm pays out all profits as dividends, all investments into restructuring, M&A and new technology is paid for by high-interest loans from the shareholder. What's left is a company that barely cashflows as all profit goes towards paying interest to the VC firm.
The appointed management team has to operate within that scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50% interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise dying and slowly shrinking business sector.
In other words a terrible place for general salary growth.
So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3) that aren't owned by VC.
Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't really apply as much.
Large US companies that I’ve worked with or for do this as a SOP. It’s not a calculation being done at the hiring manager level as much as a path of least resistance because that’s the way it’s been done for so long.
> contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure
You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with a depreciation period.
Changing the expenses that way can only increase the company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.
If you have time, how can capex, an expense, appear as earnings? (I'm pretty clueless about these things)
Aha, it's that: "Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes" (I see in other comments here),
but capex is not subtracted, so then it looks as if the company is doing better, on paper, although it's not. And this works only for a while, maybe some years? Which might be long enough for the current management, if they leave before things get too bad?
This is exactly what has changed [1]: R&D costs had been an immediate tax break, but since 2022 became an expenditure requiring a 5-year amortization period.
That change had been planned to be canceled before coming into force, but it was not canceled on time.
Hence the wave of layoffs in 2022, as companies were urgently trying to improve their balance sheets, as investors and the Wall Street requested, AFAICT.
Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.
That doesn't make any sense. In any situation in which a contractor expense would be capitalized, an employee's salary would also be capitalized. Labor costs are labor costs; whether someone is a contractor or an employee is a labor law issue, not a tax issue. (Internal R&D was the big exception to the capitalization rule, but that loophole was closed, which is what prompted a lot of tech and videogame layoffs over the past 2 years.)
There are soft perks. I have a pension that counts how long I work for the company (I have no idea what the real terms of it are, but that simplification will do for this discussion). Long term than pension is - hopefully - worth far more than a couple years of no raises. Depending of course on how long I live - statistically I will die sometime between 60 and 100 with the most likely age being 80 - the longer I live the more than pension is worth, on the low end it is worthless.
That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation, but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer position in the company that resulted in a nice level promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best option.
I forgot that pensions are still a thing in some places.
But when you calculate the the present value of the pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying to be combative)
> is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it?
That is a great question that is at least partially unknowable. You cannot discount future cash flows without knowing how long you will live and thus how much you should discount. Also things like inflation are unknowable.
As I said, I did leave. I stayed with the same company but found a different division. Which is the best of all worlds. I think, perhaps I could get a better offer elsewhere? If so would that better job still exist or would I now be laid off for months before finding a new job and thus destroying all the income gain from that new job?
There are a ton of unknowable factors. I can say it worked out okay for me so far, but that is about it.
It depends on who you are and what market you are in. Many people in recent years have reported putting in over a thousand job applications and only netting a couple of interviews, none of which resulted in a job offer. But if you have a network into available jobs and can short cut all of the pipeline insanity going on now, making a jump would be smart. Then again, the type of companies that play these games typically don't have top notch talent in the first place. Many people might endure it because they fear they don't have other options.
Exactly. Generally, when one company institutes pay freezes, they're probably also in a hiring freeze, along with the rest of the industry. Everything's nice and coordinated and they all use the same "macroeconomic environment" as the excuse. So an employee doesn't really have the option to just hop jobs, nobody else is hiring. Ironically, the best time to hop jobs is when you're getting raises because the economy is strong and everyone else is hiring.
How exactly does one become a consultant on a 1099? Go work for a consulting company a W-2? That’s how I did it four years ago. Well, the consulting company takes a nice chunk above what they bill you out for.
How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you found ‘em.
You have to legally start a company. That means some legal work (you don't need a lawyer, but it helps). You need to do the books yourself - and because this is very different areas of tax law you really should hire an accountant (only an hour/month, but having extra eyes look at the books is useful). If you do this right you make more money, but there are problems if you miss some legal detail that W-2 employees don't have.
Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places won't work with you. however most of the big consulting companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that work similar)
As I understood it, you're also on the hook for valuing yourself properly. You may think you're making more money, until you factor in vacations and medical and retirement and slack time and...and...and
The easiest way is to reach out to consulting companies and ask if they take subcontractors. Second easiest is to ask companies that want to hire you if they’ll take you as a contractor instead.
Think about a wider scale than your employer: if the costs of the consultants goes in fact in the pockets of the investors of your employer, that money is not lost.
In quite many places, hiring consultants has a very high corruption potential (e.g. the hiring manager favoring one of several suppliers). With employees they don't have this leverage.
Management tend to get a bee in their bonnet about headcount, specifically full time employees, while they don't count consultants as being under the same kind of restrictions. It does often end up in the madness you describe, like that time there was a data entry consultant costing at my 0 company 100k, which a full timer would have been paid 35k max.
One that is functionally different but causes the same type of morale hit is managers and upward equipping themselves with fully loaded MacBooks and iPhones, but equipping rank-and-file employees with shitty Dell laptops and budget tier Android phones.
That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies, but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.
"low level" do count in stats if need to show "savings" and can be easily replaced when needed. Also they do not generate profits but need resources (mentoring etc.). On the other side costs are tax deductible.
It's just normal late Capitalism syndrome - no one takes responsibilities, and everyone, at least everyone that is close to the trough tries to get his/her head into it.
From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants, it's everywhere. That's it.
Um, I have seen irrationality all across the board. Market participants shooting themselves in the foot.
I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.
When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.
I have even explained to recruiters that there is an opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and don’t want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To their credit, some are not.
And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and then cut their task force. Many of them don’t care about you, but expect you to care about them. They’ll even expect you to stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won’t pay you overtime.
One thing I learned the other day is to never believe the internal corporate newsletters. For an entire year, pretty much every single day would bring in an e-mail from Company BU A, or Cross-Company Initiative X, or Podcast with CEO, or such. Every single one of them would talk about the great successes in recovering from the economic crisis, the amazing results this quarter, the great product release here, another successful merger there, new perspectives on Bitcoin or AI or such from CEO, whatnot - all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed. And then a layoff wave finally reaches your department, and you learn that apparently the whole BU is deep in the red and they're forced to cut staff across the board, and it's been like this forever, and that's why there was an emergency meeting last Thursday (called "Financial Update Q3 for BU Y" or something, non-obligatory and otherwise not announced or discussed), and "don't you ever attend town halls?".
(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)
Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.
Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.
For most execs/people, there's a big difference between what people will say in a meeting and what they will write down. They feel the permanance of the writing or recording.
one of lessons i learned hard way: do not trust - or avoid - managers/higher-ups who do not want their things in written - even e-mails. While still have you sign all kind of stuff.
When narratives fail, to casual observers the failure seems sudden and out of the blue, but there are usually unmistakable signs of "narrative breakdown" that often become obvious to most observers only in hindsight. One of the most dramatic stories of a "failed narrative" we have ever read comes from Barton Biggs, in his book "Wealth, War and Wisdom":
>> "...the Japanese official battle reports and the Japanese press reported the Battle of the Coral Sea as a great triumph, and Midway was portrayed as a victory, not a defeat, although some loss of aircraft and ships were admitted. Although casualties must have been noted and grieved, Japanese society at the time was so united behind the war policy and believed so totally in the invincibility of the Japanese military, that defeat and economic failure were virtually inconceivable. It would have been unpatriotic to sell stocks..."
>> "Not every investor in Japan misread the battles at Coral Sea and Midway. Food was in short supply, and railings in the parks around the Imperial Palace were being dismantled for their iron. The Nomura family and Nomura Securities in mid-1942 began to suspect the eventual defeat of Japan. Although the newspapers and radio broadcast only good news about the course of the war, the Nomuras apparently picked up information in the elite tea houses of the upper class. Many of the naval officers and aviators involved in the battles at Midway and the Coral Sea had geishas, and when the officers failed to return, rumors began to circulate."
>> "The Nomura family, sensing something was amiss, began to gradually sell its equity holdings, and even sold short. Later they purchased real assets, probably reasoning that land and real businesses would be the best stores of value in a conquered country. These protected assets allowed the family to have the capital to finance the rapid expansion of Nomura Securities & Research in the immediate postwar years and eventually emerge as the dominant securities firm in Japan."
When did the narrative above "officially" fail? Many date it to August 15, 1945, six days after the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, when Emperor Hirohito addressed Japan on the radio to announce Japan's surrender, noting "...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..."
"the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small." - https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/
Centralised rule, surveillance, privileging the upper classes, meaningless statistics, perfomative loyalty; things capitalists say they hate about communism, they love when designing companies.
> "all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed."
Everything whizzing rapidly upwards while your cube farm gets more crowded and your tools slower and your once-respected skilled work devalued in favour of pump-n-dump funny-money schemes?
> "The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
If it makes you feel any better, there is usually little connection between management wasting money last year and laying off employees this year. Downsizing targets are based on predicted future needs so if business is trending down they'll cut just as many employees even if they have an enormous amount of cash saved.
I think that the honorable thing in those companies is for a CEO to demand seppuku from a significant portion of the c-suite. At least as a form of solidarity with the workers put to the sword.
We are apparently going through a "year of efficiency" and most of us know what it means. After "more with less" round come layoffs so one might as well do some basic prep work, dust off resume, reach out to your support network.. just saying.
I'm not disagreeing - but I think it's worth pointing out that an employee on $40K actually costs the company a lot more ( can be as much as > 2x ) - not just employers tax, pensions contributions etc, but also the cost of factory/lab/office space and equipment and consumables[1].
[1] Assuming the consultants aren't also in the office with a desk etc
$40k is a tiny salary, too. Taxes, facilities, and benefits are going to be more than 2x that. A contractor paid $200k/year is likely cheaper in total cost than an employee paid $100k/year.
Employee headcount is also evaluated less favorably when potential investors evaluate the company's health. They're implicitly seen as a promise to continue paying them in the future, whether that's materially different from what the company does with contractors or not.
And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch of contractors not having their contracts renewed.
I was laid off once. The reason on paper was budgetary, times are tough, etc. But the real reason was that I was a bad fit for the role - for a variety of reasons.
I got pipped, and foolish me tried hard to work on the items in the pip (to no effect). The layoff came right on schedule.
A few years later, I was chatting with an old coworker and I came to find out that the director of engineering had demanded it. It was in direct response to me refusing to participate in building a knowingly DMCA-violating product.
The pip was theater. The "times are tough" bit was theater. The reality is that the director wanted me gone, and that is how they did it for legal coverage reasons.
I don't really blame the company - I was a bad fit, and I can see that clearly in hindsight. But it did teach me never to accept budgetary layoffs at face value.
I don't see the theater as bad or good. If anything, it's slightly good.
It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your work reputation (because layoff is public).
I was never really concerned about the ethics, but was more worried that I'd be personally liable for it. I kept thinking about the VW emissions scandal, where the engineer that implemented it was given prison time.
In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about. I also never should have expected that I'd be able to change the director's mind by refusing to do what he said.
Getting soft-fired really shook me, and it was a hit to my self-confidence. I did learn some valuable life-lessons from it though, and including that nobody should ignore office politics.
Afterwards, I found a job that was a much better fit. That next job changed the direction of my career, and I'm very happy with where I am now.
when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money
Working in corporate America has caused me to view layoffs as proof of managerial incompetence. I understand that the market doesn't see it that way, but that's the conclusion I've come to.
What's even more absurd than cost cutting after mismanagement is a layoff and cost cutting while having record profits. Look at most of the big tech layoffs last year and the year before. Every one of them was reporting more profit and revenue than ever before and still doing layoffs
> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.
Basically:
* We were spending money like it was going out of style
* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.
* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.
This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech, that you need to try and get as much money out of your initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.
It doesn't matter what the reason is. The reason is whatever will look least bad in the news (if it ever makes it in the news) - and is legal. Ignore the reason, it has nothing to do with you, it's not about you, it's a technical detail. But yes, it would be nice if the manager was helping their employees understand that.
Even for an investor keeping an eye on their holdings, give minimal weight to the reasons for a detail level layoff.
I feel like that not only due to my recent layoff due to cuts, but also due to the job market. I'm tired of applying to ghost openings that exist just to signal growth when there's none.
Q : What's the difference between a permie and a contractor? A: The contractor KNOWS they have no job security. ;). Your only real job security is your skillset. If that's good, lay-offs are often an opportunity rather than something to be feared. I've been laid off twice, 20 yrs apart. 1st company folded soon after. 2nd got taken over by bigger one. Was glad to be out in both cases, not happy place to remain. In both cases quickly got a better job, pay rise, and engineered a nice long break between jobs. 2cnd time I wasn't super happy there, but risk averse about moving due to young family. Lay-off was helpful push to look for something else. Found another job, then hopped on in 18 months to a great job. Got rid of a nasty commute in the process. Many people tell this story. Far too many of us stay places too long, we think "better the devil you know". Layoffs can be a blessing..... Caveat - if you're working a min wage job without a marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared and a totally different experience.
There's a lot of minimum wages. Are you talking about the federal minimum wage ($7.50/hr), or the minimum wage local to the worker ($15.00/hr where I live)?
Lay off is great if economy is booming(some 2012-2018 and then 2021) but nightmare if economy is screwed(2024-present).
I recall commenting few days back that, the job market is so screwed now that even senior engineers with decades of experience are not trusted these days if they are missing minor experience in some minor tool.
In 2021, I remember everyone with ability to type some code(regardless of quality) land great jobs, remote contracts etc. Everyone I know currently looking to change or were laid off since mid last year are suffering(real bad) and all of these are highly qualified people whom I’d really trust with most critical work.
Ironically, if you are a contractor going through a staffing agency, when you are "fired" from a contract, you generally still get paid something by the agency and get "bench time" to train up your skills or work on internal projects. Sometimes contractors have better job security from a paycheck perspective.
Depends on the agency. Many will not pay you (and some may terminate you themselves if you don't have a contract for you, because they are paying your benefits).
Being a contractor can be a good play, especially if your spouse carries benefits for your family.
Being a contractor is generally considered low status and temporary, so if you can get over that, then you can thrive.
The upside to this is the understanding that it is transactional and hourly. There is no expectation that you get emotionally invested. Which can actually be a much more health arrangement.
Worked with some of the teams making the first iPhone and bringing the Internet to everyone in a pocket sized slab was way more than a job it was a dream. Didn't turn out quite as expected, but this idea that work is only that is in my opinion dangerous. Millions are made selling sugar water and there is a famous multimillionaire with warehouses full of nickles, but business can be much more than that and it is up to all participants to build, man, and steer the boats.
I'm not sure he clearly didn't want to mention it - he didn't state he didn't mention it on purpose. I'm sure many people wondered, and going on LinkedIn is trivial. Had it not been on LinkedIn I wouldn't have looked further. If he didn't want to be outed, he could take Shopify off of Linkedin.
Great read OP. My only hope is that somewhere in the future, when these "efficiency-focused" companies close. (Nobody there will build anything special soon and they can easily be disrupted.) Maybe, just maybe, someone would start something that will do things differently, and others will follow.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 456 ms ] threadThe young employees believe it entirely because they have never known any different.
The more experienced become more realistic about the way the entire system works.
the real pro-level insight is understanding that the people left behind are often in a worse position - inertia keeps them locked into a dying company
Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job
I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.
For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.
The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)
The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?
Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.
But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.
The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.
The one job I can think of where the people really don't like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and people tend to not stay on it.
But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.
What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.
Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.
I’m going through this now, just resigned due to burnout while being a “rockstar developer” with no life recently.
Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).
Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.
The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them this is what you end up with.
Meanwhile bosses boss people around.
And with that you showed exactly why I have the knee jerk reaction to attack communism every time it is brought up. There is a constant play of this type of thing and people are starting to think that because it is unchallenged it might be right.
Dude, that's the naked reality. You are contorting yourself to avoid facing it.
True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning
I first read that as "we might all study cosmetology ...", so my mind went to an altogether different space-based metaphor.
So what exactly are the parent doing all along?
(I think I know the answer - they are inexperienced/dysfunctional themselves)
What astonishes me is that people fall for that BS.
Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will have real impact and they actually need you.
While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.
“pay less” is an understatement. Top of band for most Big enterprise companies or smaller companies is about the same that a new college grad gets at BigTech.
While I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than go back to BigTech at 50, if I were young and unencumbered instead of a 50 year old empty nester, I would make the trade off in a heart beat
Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back to the office.
Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.
Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.
My family doesn't give me performance reviews.
Often some functions are moved or merged into another unit, and that’s the escape hatch for the few people someone really wants to save.
If you create metrics, they will be gamed. The people that succeed, then, are not necessarily those with the most merit, but those who are best at manipulating their metrics.
Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the number up.
One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as unimportant.
Good reminder, never mix work and personal. Or at the very least maybe use a cloud service or a thumb drive.
That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to your machine/the building etc.
Otherwise what happens? You can’t even explain or prove your current situation? Seems draconian.
But the thing is, I like what I'm working on, I like letting my passion dictate my actions. I want to go home at the end of the day and be proud of what I have accomplished.
But it's not worth putting in that effort for a company that treats you like any other resource. So I'm starting to become one of those soulless employees. You can call it quiet quitting or whatever. And it's slowly killing my spark.
I started working on my own projects to keep that spark alive. But 2h every day is not enough to build something that's worth it.
So I’ve replaced advent of code with various other stuff, music, woodworking, books, the great outdoors and while my life is less rich in technology it’s becoming much fuller in other ways.
I think I prefer it this way.
Recent years (40's) I've been on a building spree of sorts for my own projects[0]
I'm my 30's, a lot of energy went into home improvement projects, establishing a garden, and young kids. Now I find a lot of time and energy left for my own passion projects.
[0] https://turas.app and https://coderev.app
My hope is that after a layoff I would be able to bounce back and find a new company where I can keep on doing fun work.
Life has ups and downs. I don't think shielding yourself from emotions is a healthy path. Just like you don't have to shield yourself from others forever after a breakup. A key ingredient is to have other part of your life to support you (family, couple, friends, ...) when one is failing.
But yes, the first time you experience redundancies regardless of whether you're made redundant or survive is definitely an eye-opener. It's like those financial disclaimers "the value of your investment may go down as well as up". There may be very little warning. It may even happen at a time that's very bad for you personally. And it does break trust among the company.
>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees
This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.
While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.
a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;
b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;
c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.
IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.
Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.
The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.
The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.
Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed.
In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high taxation and regulation to support those systems.
Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent. But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.
"Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed."
A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions. The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass expropriations.
We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More punitive taxation = more brain drain.
I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its heights. The lower investment into defense came not at the cost of higher social welfare.
The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that.
Do we? For what?
We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.
Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.
Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.
Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.
Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.
Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.
You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...
"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."
You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.
But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.
Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.
The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.
This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.
This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.
Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.
Everyone suffers like this.
Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.
The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.
Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??
Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price
People need to dream, I guess.
The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).
Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.
The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.
Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...
That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.
By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.
You'd be surprised.
I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.
I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.
It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.
They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.
https://minutovezpravy.cz/clanek/slovensko-chce-prinutit-lek...
That made a lot of news. It is every bit as bad as it sounds.
As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.
Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.
Yeah, and Elon Musk is stoking Alternative für Deutschland. Not sure what's going to come out of it but it doesn't look too good for Germany either.
The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.
It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.
But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.
So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.
The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.
The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.
No, not always, no.
Trying to ostracize one model to favor the other is the recipe for a collapse
Perhaps that's what the USA is, a disposable Empire
I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.
And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.
Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?
Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.
Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.
It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.
But also, yes, in the "West" we've been living way above our means for almost a century now, and the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last, compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong – the company would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because of this law.
Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was affected by it.
People expect things to always work the same way and they get upset when they don't.
It's a waste that so many individual contributors who, as the author said, had good performance and were close to the users went through a laid off. Now a new generation of previously high achievers work force will get back in the market and no longer use all their potential for their job. Like it wasn't the fault of the new company that hired me, that now I do the bare minimum, they won't see the full potential I gave before. And I, I cannot prevent it. My work ethics and motivation died after the lay off.
In a factory you have many components operating near or at capacity. In a high growth environment you want all of your components working at capacity to explore the problem space and optimize.
When they laid off the other team that was working in our office (on an entirely different product), they of course assured us that we were safe - they believed in our product, yadda yadda.
Then at some point, things started getting weird - a job position was cancelled right before we were going to offer the candidate the job. A trip to HQ was cancelled last minute. An external team was getting increasingly involved.
About a year after the other team had been fired, the second highest ranking executive was visiting our office, something he would do once in a while. When the visit was announced, we were joking that "if he brings Pattie from HR, they'll lay us off". I got the message from my coworker on my way to work: "Pattie is here."
The speech the executive gave us was the stupidest thing I've ever heard somebody say to me. He literally said: "In a couple of years, you will look at this as a big opportunity." We just rolled our eyes at each other. When he left the room, we picked up the remotes and started playing stickman against each other. It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.
We had a very nice office and so we were looking forward to be able to spend our notice period together, playing video games, making music and doing the bare minimum in terms of handover duties. Unfortunately, covid happened at right that time and our time together was dramatically cut short, which I still consider a tragedy.
One woman in our team was pregnant and fought the settlement they were offering us. As far as I know, they had to keep her on for longer and she eventually negotiated a better deal - pregnant people are especially protected under German labour law.
To this day, some in my former team doubt that what they did was really all that legal and think we should have fought back, because it later turned out that they lied to us about a bunch of things. But I doubt it would have been really worth it. They just wanted us out.
- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.
- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.
- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.
The last two points are fine, however.
I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about why beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable or looking out for you.
I would like to hear a little bit more about those techniques.
The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan layoffs know very little about the individual's other than their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful: it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of whether to be promoted or something different.
What other techniques are you aware of?
Most product teams are organised around the idea that someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit. Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.
Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the time software people show no interest in whether the plans they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading to more money.
Eg, in the original article I see things like "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack him.
If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to make it so.
[0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something that can be assumed.
1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people above you know it.
2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where you're fixing bugs and making improvements, not just keeping things ticking over.
3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by working in departments that bring in more revenue than they cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success; and in an area where the company's strategy calls for growth.
4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can do about this, except working at the head office, or a very large branch office where important projects are based.
5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to start sending out resumes and maybe getting the unemployment insurance on your car loan.
Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard of some people having great success with the opposite strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of these are hard-and-fast rules.
The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day before. The business was cashflow positive, not some crazy gamble.
But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of investors decided to get out of tech stocks.
Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.
I actually thought about doing this early in my career and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few years off their path to being able to (ethically, without lying) put "Senior" on their resume.
It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are considering this I would also suggest you do it in a market/business area that you don't particularly care about. I've been in more than one interview where a senior executive who was very tied in on the business side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc) immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as a red flag.
The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but it's something to consider.
The key point is that people need to face today's economic/political realities which is that it is all "Realpolitik" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either learn how to play the game based on circumstances or suffer.
S.Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister of India said this recently which i think is highly applicable here (https://www.news18.com/india/eam-jaishankar-advice-stress-ma...);
Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected after a setback and constantly strive for self-improvement. “When I look at my own particular responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT – the more people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY – If you get along with people, they are more likely to do things for you. CREDIBILITY – if you are known to be good on words, people take you seriously," he said.
“My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it, you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember and hope what you said was right."
So make sure you have good contact with Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the abnormal (with caveats).
In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.
As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.
I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.
Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job security but doesn't help when your managers managers manager has to make cuts.
But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and being a person.
And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?
Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.
That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.
The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)
Throwing in the towel and saying I'm not going to bother in the future... yeah I'd never be hiring you in the first place.
Corporations by design don't "care" about you, they only care about maximizing profits and returns for their shareholders. Sure you can get "noticed" by higher ups, but those individuals have no obligations to you in the day to day operations unless you're getting cozy with the (increasingly externally conteacted) deciders/architects of the next upcoming re-org.
It's not explicitly stated in the article, but their call-out of the behavior of large companies speaks to the missing piece of the puzzle here: the "stage" of the company's lifecycle plays a crutial role in how much your "above and beyond" contributions matter. 10 person start-up? Matters significantly. 1000+ person org? Drop in the bucket.
But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of that magnified the savings.
I’ve done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and the advice I’d tell people is don’t think it’s a reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.
Most of the time it’s just macro factors out of your control.
It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.
IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.
When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.
I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.
This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.
One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects.
The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.
And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.
I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.
I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs
The "tell me about yourself" question is one of the worst to ask and i never do this. It is so open ended that people start rambling. Instead get them to focus (this also calms their nerves) by asking about notable jobs picked from their resume "what did you do as ... at ..." and dig more as needed. Do this for a couple more jobs if available and you will get to see how confident the candidate is, how he communicates, the depth of his knowledge and his modes of thinking. From here, you generalize to what the job actually needs and give the candidate some idea of the job and its environment and ask how he hopes to fit in and contribute. This makes things clear to both interviewer and interviewee.
I also do not place much weight on personality/psychology tests/questions. People generally cannot be truthful in their answers to questions like "how do you deal with conflict with your co-worker?" etc. Here i trust to "gut feeling" based on non-verbal impressions, verbal communication and pointed questions (challenge the candidate by taking a contrarian stance and see how he responds).
Finally, i make sure that the interviewee at the very outset understands that though i am the interviewer it does not mean that i am more knowledgeable than him in his areas of expertise. This works great by boosting his confidence which then leads to a more natural interaction.
Recruiting/HR is a complex art where you have to consider various factors to build a picture of a person (suited to a role) from factual data and psychology. IMO a good way is to start with an understanding of Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory For a nice overview, see the book Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.
I ask the tell me about yourself question partially to assess their communication skills and getting to the point.
Do you think people who are conducting an interview loop at large companies are going to go through an 8 page resume? Yes I’ve been on both sides of a BigTech interview loop and have gone through the interview training process there.
Even at smaller companies when building a team and I’ve had 80% of the say so about who gets hired, I still needed evidence to take the CxO/director and couldn’t go by “gut feel”.
And when dealing with customers (I work in consulting now) or “the business” you have to have a strategy to deal with interdepartmental conflicts, different stakeholders have different priorities, some people don’t want to change etc. I’m not talking about a conflict with another coworker arguing about which design pattern to use.
Incidentally, Jeff Bezos does something similar with his 6-page memo (plus annexes) for meetings; Same idea different domain; More details help better decision-making.
"Gut Feel" is absolutely needed to give your input on Team Fit, Conflict Management and similar other intangible Human factors. Some companies are doing Myers-Briggs etc. but i give them lower weightage (because they can be gamed by practice) over subjective feelings.
A report on a interviewee should include objective assessments (knowledge, experience etc. and your inferences based on them) and subjective assessments (temperament, maturity etc.)
But I see a few scenarios.
You have a strong network and the resume is a formality. In that case it’s easy enough to tailor your resume for the job. I don’t need to put that I wrote FORTRAN and C on VAX and Stratus mainframes in the mid 90s. There is no need for an 8 page resume. The year before last I had two offers for strategic positions based on my network.
The second case you are targeting a company where you know you have a competitive advantage, again in that case, you only need to have a resume that focuses on what gives you a competitive advantage. In my case, now I focus on strategic cloud consulting positions that focus on app development. In that case, I only need to focus on my job at a startup in 2018, talk in broad strokes about my time at AWS (working there automatically gets call backs by the way), and when the day comes, when I leave my current job as a “staff architect”.
The worse case is if you are spamming your resume far and wide and you are looking for any generic job. I look at an 8 page resume and then I have to take the time to see what is this person trying to communicate - it goes in the trash and I move on. I have hundreds of other resumes that I can get through quickly.
Of course if the company is reaching out to me, it’s even easier to tailor my resume for the job requirements. I have my “career document” to pull from either way that is as long as needed.
But even then I’m not going back even to the low level work I did in 2012 for Windows CE devices.
I consider 2-page resumes no better than a powerpoint presentation (i.e. almost useless) and furthermore when i see people tailor it to what they think i should know i consider it maybe trying to hide something. This is because by omitting companies they take away a vector for me to check references and more. Note that this is different from highlighting relevant experience/knowledge.
Your scenarios are nothing new from what you have already mentioned earlier; And spamming is not what i am talking about. That is a policy decision made by each person based on his circumstances.
You and most folks are simply parroting current practices in HR/Recruiting which are broken and need to be rethought from the ground up. To repeat once more, all details matter at some level in recruiting. As they say "measure twice and cut once" and "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".
On the other hand, do you pay top of market? Would anyone be clamoring to expand their resume to eight pages because you prefer it?
As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken. So being a outlier in this case is good. Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter. When i do send in my CV, recruiters invariably call me back which then helps me to prime them with specific relevant experiences listed in the CV which they then forward to the actual interviewers. It allows one to stand out from the crowd.
Finally, most 2-page resumes look all the same with keywords/boiler-plate sentences/paragraphs with nothing giving me any additional insight into the person. The self-imposed page limit causes them to self censor their words/sentences unnecessarily leading to loss of info. For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.
Admittedly before 2020, those were local recruiters with local jobs.
> It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels)
Let’s say I was looking for a job next year. I wouldn’t want to use my one hour I have with an interviewer to talk about anything I did before 2016. I’m looking for high level staff roles at small to medium companies. I want the entire conversation to be about signaling that I have competencies with leading a project from initial discovery with stakeholders to implementation and getting it done on time, on budget and meets requirements.
I also want to signal that while my breadth in my chosen domain is wide and I’m going to highlight projects that show that breadth, I’m not a paper tiger who can’t do hands on keyboard software development or “cloud engineering”. I can demonstrate that easily in 2 pages by leaving off anything before 2016.
Within those 10 years I can demonstrate a steady growth from being a barely competent lead developer, to being an architect at a startup, to consulting and working on projects with increasing “scope”, “impact”, and “ambiguity”.
https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
> As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken.
Even if recruiting is broken , it’s a “gravity problem. Just because you may not like gravity, if you jump out of 50 story building, you will die. While I’ve avoided the leetCode grind, I’ve played the “how to be successful at system design and behavioral interviews” game with aplomb. You adapt to the reality
>So being an outlier in this case is good.
Or you can just be an outlier by having a skill set and experience that sets you apart from the crowd in whatever niche you decided to pursue.
> Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter.
The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. I once had an interviewer ask me a “trick question” about C in 2014 for a C# development position. Even at the time I was six years removed from any C programming. I answered it and got the job. But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.
> For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.
Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”. I communicate my expertise on my resume by telling how I used my knowledge to achieve an outcome.
Also a lot of words/phrases you have used above are general platitudes. By themselves they mean nothing unless you can tie them to a specific usecase/experience from your CV which should contain the details. Both the "Forest" i.e. big picture/business need/overall system/architecture/etc. details and "The Trees" i.e. languages/tools/libraries/frameworks/techniques/etc. matter.
You have to deal with Reality even if it is broken but you can do it differently than the norm (but stand out on the positive side) and get excellent results. To paraphrase a wellknown saying; "It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick [recruiting process]".
> The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. ... But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.
This depends on what i am interviewing you for. As pointed out above, my requirements/needs trump your view/opinions of the role.
As an example, my very first job was implementing a Personnel Information System using Cobol85 on a Cyberdata mainframe. Using Structured Analysis and Design methods (this was before OO became mainstream) I implemented a RDBMS inspired design using ISAM files and also a UI using ansi escape codes. So even though i do not remember much of the Cobol language itself i remember the design which is still useful today. Hence i can demonstrate knowledge of Relational Theory/RDBMSes as needed. This is only possible if it were listed in the CV in the first place.
> Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”.
You have failed the test. This only shows you have no business evaluating any resume for a C++ developer. It is actually an advanced expertise which most good interviewers understand and appreciate and design teams need.
I want to be interested in your resume. If I'm interviewing you, you can be absolutely sure I've spent at least 20-30 minutes reading over your resume, looking up your past companies/schools, getting a sense of what you've done and pulled out a few relevant or interesting things to ask about.
I think the "6 seconds" thing is mostly HR drones who are barely qualified to write the resumes they're reading, let alone judge them, and are simply sorting into "yes" and "no" piles.
I can guarantee you that none of my managers spent more than 5 minutes looking over my resume and 4 of my six lady jobs have been strategic early hires, 1 was at BigTech where one person in my loop was my eventual manager and my current one was for one of I think 25 highest level IC positions at my current company of 600-700 people.
If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.
I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.
You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.
A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?
> A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations
Well first there is a huge difference between what Amazon says in public and what actually happens (like the Bullshit leadership principles especially the one about being the best employer). I can tell you from personal experience from actually working at Amazon that there were a lot of PowerPoint slides in internal meetings and especially when dealing with customers. I did my share of them.
Second, instead of using an analogy, we can actually talk about resumes at Amazon and how the hiring process works. No one ever submits 8 page resumes, nor does anyone in the hiring loop bemoan the fact that we only got 2 page resumes. I was on both sides of the hiring process there.
Never did they mention a word in the “Make Great Hiring Decisions” training program that they really like candidates to give them 8 page resumes.
Do you really want to keep bringing Amazon up as an example to someone who actually worked there?
> So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?
Yes, if only to confirm veracity. The mantra is "Trust but Verify".
The point of bringing up the Amazon example was to show a specific technique which works and has been adopted/validated by others. Amazon is a giant company and you were just one small cog in the wheel so pointing to your Amazon experience is not very convincing. This was not something imposed on every trivial meeting but for important strategic ones. There is good logic behind such a practice viz. helps to get the entire team on the same page w.r.t. some subject. Finally, i did not say that Amazon did the above for recruitment but suggested that recruiting in general would be far better if they (and everybody else) adopted such a logic.
Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?
So you just explain to the fake job interviewer that you're the 1 in 20 fake job candidate.
There's a 5% chance they'll understand.
It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.
Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of technical knowledge is essentially based on vibes. My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.
If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they agreed.
Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.
But for the unwritten interview rule: Don't be negative.
Even if the interviewer knows you're in a dumpster fire, you have more to lose.
I don't put dates on my education anymore. shrug
I dropped out of university, so in my early years it took a lot of tuning my resume to give the impression that I had a degree without actually saying it. Thankfully I had taken summer courses at a different, nearby university for two years before college. Eventually I would just put the years, the universities, and the major I was pursuing. Now I just leave it off the resume.
I had one manager who found out after the fact and told me he wouldn't have hired me if he realized, but he was glad he did.
I had an interview where they asked for a college transcript and then grilled me on why I failed Martian Geology and why I only got a C in Vector Calculus. I was given an offer, but declined it because of that experience. I dodged a bullet too; I've seen reports that the company sues former employees just to cost them money.
Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft skills and maintain friendships.
There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.
Everyone does it, recruiters aren’t naive. Once I became old enough to hire people, I understood it’s ok (depending on the audience, beware) to say “I can start on Monday but I’ll take two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it’s already planned.” Better have employees who are mature enough to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I told him during the first month he shouldn’t work more than 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental, bank, insurances, child care, etc.).
I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business. Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job market was really tough at the moment.
But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.
The best interview hack
I think this sort of thing bugs a lot of people here because they think that some sort of theoretical skill assessment should be what matters. But that's not how the world works for the most part.
I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.
In what industry does a new hire just not have someone telling them what to do?
The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.
I can go above and beyond, work on the weekends etc, but there should be a benefit to me. That could be because I learn something and it sets me up for my next job, I increase my chances of a promotion, or just that it's something interesting to me personally.
I think there is probably less cynicism this way too, because this is how most companies look at employees too.
This, incidentally is good advice for both sides of an employment relationship: employers sometimes also mistakenly believe that employees are their friends and family and then get a rude awakening when employees suddenly leave with no warning, for a 10% increase in salary.
My first layoff was rough. It was in '00 and I was 21, so I didn't have too many obligations.
My second layoff was in '23 and I was 44 with kids and a mortgage. It hit me a lot harder.
My third was in '24, but I had learned my lessons and had positioned myself better, so I wasn't as badly affected.
They said if my business was running for 2 years or more then they'd accept that as low enough risk.
A bit understandable in this economical situation, but man, it's hard. Even for the guarantor, they need to own a house and have at least 40x the monthly rent as proven (PAYE or business with 2+ years) yearly income.
I knew only one person who could be a guarantor that fits the requirements.
Alternative was AirBnb or other monthly accommodation which was of course more expensive.
This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.
“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).
I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.
Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.
“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.
Mismanagement of funds is one of the worst things. Is it pure incompetence?
Or is that they don't give a damn and that "let's get together 500+ people for a fully paid weekend" is too cool to cancel?
...like better an egg today than a hen tomorrow. I mean, they don't get affected anyways, they do get the egg and hen...!
We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.
When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".
It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...
You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.
It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.
And yeah, those quick to materialize gains, where the manager can easily discover if a project worked within the same fiscal year...
Also dragons and unicorns, I guess... what a world those people live in!
There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.
The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.
Everything gets corrupted, today's agile is way worse than what came before in practice.
Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?
Managers play games because they are looking out for their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is underspending, because they are tying up resources - companies will have a desired internal rate of return (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on their investments then a manger tying up capital is costing a lot.
Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share information. Sharing information at least cuts down on some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it has a limit at scale.
Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses gets done sometimes.
Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I think.
Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my reading is he basically tried to create a system where everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he hoped).
There's better and worse ways to try to get around the Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.
In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.
It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.
This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.
A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.
Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.
In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.
Hire an extra dev for the same money looks good on paper, but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
(I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the other direction as well)
Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark. Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety representative.
And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two months because they decided that they didn't have the budget anyway.
Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
Or, maybe, had better things to do. :)
It's not necessarily up to them.
Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.
How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.
I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".
I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.
I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.
I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.
Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.
I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.
That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.
If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.
If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.
But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.
Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.
My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.
It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s
I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building
[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!
[1] https://www.sup-kanzlei.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Scheinselbs...
AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.
Consultancy has no such protections.
I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.
What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.
https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/companies/dont-treat...
This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to win shareholder brownie points.
"We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the actual recurring cost number is worse.
(There's also some complexities in some industries around money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on certain types of expenditures...)
This strategy cannot work long term unless there is growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number of employees. But it can definitely work short term if the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad, and it has the benefit of giving management someone else to blame when the project work doesn’t get done.
If your company starts replacing employees with contractors, that’s a bad sign.
- a contractor provides a "service" that improves your money-machine output.
(or so it's said).
This may vary due to region. For example in the U.S where you can fire people quickly the contractor benefit is less apparent, but in EU where after a short period you may have to spend a long time to fire someone it may be beneficial to hire a contractor rather than going through a lengthy hiring process only to find out you want to fire them.
Contractors in such an environment often are a reasonable investment for a project that has a particular dedicated timeline. Like we expect 1 year for project to finish. We hire for 1 year, and opportunity to extend for 3 months 2 times in case it goes bad.
Otherwise you have to hire for project and then do these layoffs everybody here is complaining about.
Furthermore in EU if you are paying 10000 for an employee, you probably have extra fees on top of that so you are paying 14000 (estimation) then for contractor you are not paying 28000, but 20000. The pricing is not great, but there are lots of factors that can make it seem more attractive than it might appear on its face.
Finally, Contractors tend not to do any of this quiet quitting or whatever, probably because for them it is more a business and they are also earning significantly more that makes it an interesting business to be in and to maintain.
Also, I will repeat this as many times as possible: you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law. You need to give your employee a WRITTEN letter of termination, to make the termination legally binding. Then all you have to do is give them notice (or pay the salary out immediately if you want to get rid of them immediately).
Paying double so you can fire contractors is illogical. The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months, after working 20 damn years at a single company, which means at worst the company would have to pay half your salary out a single time to get rid of you immediately. None of this 2x every year multi-year bullshit.
The reason why you hire contractors is that you do not need the full output of an employee. You might only need three months or maybe just a week. It's the same reason companies rent equipment instead of buying.
I believe the maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to as a contractor is whatever your contract says
That is overly simplified. First, you have to commit to one of three types of layoffs, only one of which usually is applicable (betriebsbedingte Kündigung). But if you do that you have to consider the social circumstances of the employee and also other comparable employees. Which absolutely can result in not being able to fire the employee you would like to fire without also firing a number of other employees first. That could be really disruptive, so it is not quite so easy for German employers.
The main difference at least in my region is that if you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't as strong. In other words, tech workers who become contractors here usually are better contributors and have an easier time finding good offers.
A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.
Employees were getting a bit too uppity.
https://abc.xyz/assets/71/a5/78197a7540c987f13d247728a371/20...
> We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business and acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.
This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?
Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many of those do you think are going to be profitable, private, lifestyle companies?
My employer is one of them. Several thousand employees, global reach, and owned by PE (Blackstone and Vista).
Companies that make a shit ton of money generally don't like changes.
They're just looking for the next fool to squeeze.
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/flower-delivery-company-ftd-...
The appointed management team has to operate within that scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50% interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise dying and slowly shrinking business sector.
In other words a terrible place for general salary growth.
So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3) that aren't owned by VC.
Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't really apply as much.
You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with a depreciation period.
Changing the expenses that way can only increase the company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.
Bingo. That's the main reason to shift opex to capex.
Aha, it's that: "Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes" (I see in other comments here),
but capex is not subtracted, so then it looks as if the company is doing better, on paper, although it's not. And this works only for a while, maybe some years? Which might be long enough for the current management, if they leave before things get too bad?
Just by classifying something as capex, it's automatically classified as profit already.
That change had been planned to be canceled before coming into force, but it was not canceled on time.
Hence the wave of layoffs in 2022, as companies were urgently trying to improve their balance sheets, as investors and the Wall Street requested, AFAICT.
[1]: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof...
That doesn't make any sense. In any situation in which a contractor expense would be capitalized, an employee's salary would also be capitalized. Labor costs are labor costs; whether someone is a contractor or an employee is a labor law issue, not a tax issue. (Internal R&D was the big exception to the capitalization rule, but that loophole was closed, which is what prompted a lot of tech and videogame layoffs over the past 2 years.)
Why would anyone stay at a company that had pay freezes for a few years. I would have been looking for another job the moment they announced them.
That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation, but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer position in the company that resulted in a nice level promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best option.
Though your mileage will vary.
But when you calculate the the present value of the pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying to be combative)
That is a great question that is at least partially unknowable. You cannot discount future cash flows without knowing how long you will live and thus how much you should discount. Also things like inflation are unknowable.
As I said, I did leave. I stayed with the same company but found a different division. Which is the best of all worlds. I think, perhaps I could get a better offer elsewhere? If so would that better job still exist or would I now be laid off for months before finding a new job and thus destroying all the income gain from that new job?
There are a ton of unknowable factors. I can say it worked out okay for me so far, but that is about it.
How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you found ‘em.
Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places won't work with you. however most of the big consulting companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that work similar)
It’s useful for a variety of reasons to have an LLC or an S-corp but you don’t need one to get started as a software contractor.
but that's a good way to set sued as an individual
if ur serious, have multiple clients, can't guarantee u won't piss off a client somehow... get an LLC
That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies, but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.
From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants, it's everywhere. That's it.
That’s frequently the fundamental issue really.
Measuring a developer’s productivity as an IC is fairly easy. Measuring quality of manager’s decisions is tricky
I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.
When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.
I have even explained to recruiters that there is an opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and don’t want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To their credit, some are not.
And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and then cut their task force. Many of them don’t care about you, but expect you to care about them. They’ll even expect you to stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won’t pay you overtime.
(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)
Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.
Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.
>> "...the Japanese official battle reports and the Japanese press reported the Battle of the Coral Sea as a great triumph, and Midway was portrayed as a victory, not a defeat, although some loss of aircraft and ships were admitted. Although casualties must have been noted and grieved, Japanese society at the time was so united behind the war policy and believed so totally in the invincibility of the Japanese military, that defeat and economic failure were virtually inconceivable. It would have been unpatriotic to sell stocks..."
>> "Not every investor in Japan misread the battles at Coral Sea and Midway. Food was in short supply, and railings in the parks around the Imperial Palace were being dismantled for their iron. The Nomura family and Nomura Securities in mid-1942 began to suspect the eventual defeat of Japan. Although the newspapers and radio broadcast only good news about the course of the war, the Nomuras apparently picked up information in the elite tea houses of the upper class. Many of the naval officers and aviators involved in the battles at Midway and the Coral Sea had geishas, and when the officers failed to return, rumors began to circulate."
>> "The Nomura family, sensing something was amiss, began to gradually sell its equity holdings, and even sold short. Later they purchased real assets, probably reasoning that land and real businesses would be the best stores of value in a conquered country. These protected assets allowed the family to have the capital to finance the rapid expansion of Nomura Securities & Research in the immediate postwar years and eventually emerge as the dominant securities firm in Japan."
When did the narrative above "officially" fail? Many date it to August 15, 1945, six days after the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, when Emperor Hirohito addressed Japan on the radio to announce Japan's surrender, noting "...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..."
Centralised rule, surveillance, privileging the upper classes, meaningless statistics, perfomative loyalty; things capitalists say they hate about communism, they love when designing companies.
> "all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed."
Everything whizzing rapidly upwards while your cube farm gets more crowded and your tools slower and your once-respected skilled work devalued in favour of pump-n-dump funny-money schemes?
> "The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
If they cut more than five $40k employees, they've made their $200k back.
[1] Assuming the consultants aren't also in the office with a desk etc
And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch of contractors not having their contracts renewed.
I got pipped, and foolish me tried hard to work on the items in the pip (to no effect). The layoff came right on schedule.
A few years later, I was chatting with an old coworker and I came to find out that the director of engineering had demanded it. It was in direct response to me refusing to participate in building a knowingly DMCA-violating product.
The pip was theater. The "times are tough" bit was theater. The reality is that the director wanted me gone, and that is how they did it for legal coverage reasons.
I don't really blame the company - I was a bad fit, and I can see that clearly in hindsight. But it did teach me never to accept budgetary layoffs at face value.
It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your work reputation (because layoff is public).
In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about. I also never should have expected that I'd be able to change the director's mind by refusing to do what he said.
Getting soft-fired really shook me, and it was a hit to my self-confidence. I did learn some valuable life-lessons from it though, and including that nobody should ignore office politics.
Afterwards, I found a job that was a much better fit. That next job changed the direction of my career, and I'm very happy with where I am now.
Wrong take.
You did the right thing. Fuck that guy.
Working in corporate America has caused me to view layoffs as proof of managerial incompetence. I understand that the market doesn't see it that way, but that's the conclusion I've come to.
Then those who spent years working hard with minimal staff are the ones to be laid off.
One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.
Basically:
* We were spending money like it was going out of style
* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.
* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.
Even for an investor keeping an eye on their holdings, give minimal weight to the reasons for a detail level layoff.
That's the majority of the population to be honest
Which will probably soon encompass a large amount of Devs. large productivity increases usually mean job losses.
I recall commenting few days back that, the job market is so screwed now that even senior engineers with decades of experience are not trusted these days if they are missing minor experience in some minor tool.
In 2021, I remember everyone with ability to type some code(regardless of quality) land great jobs, remote contracts etc. Everyone I know currently looking to change or were laid off since mid last year are suffering(real bad) and all of these are highly qualified people whom I’d really trust with most critical work.
Being a contractor is generally considered low status and temporary, so if you can get over that, then you can thrive.
The upside to this is the understanding that it is transactional and hourly. There is no expectation that you get emotionally invested. Which can actually be a much more health arrangement.
If you own the galley you're a "participant"; if your job is rowing it, you're something else entirely.
You could also comment the same on the 3 other comments that "out" him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839195, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42843755, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42842682