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OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

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Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#61

I'm always amazed with how big tech companies get in terms of employee count. I once wandered the engineering area of the HQ (with an employee) of a FAANG (MAANG sounds... silly) and made a tick mark on my notebook when I saw someone actually coding - or at least having code on screen. There were over 1200 people on the development team and at the time most worked out of HQ. So... when I was done walking, I had 22 ti…

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#62
Interesting, I had a call with one of their sales people a couple days ago.

The whole product is a glorified spreadsheet. It is super customizable, which is almost a bad thing since you really just want a product like this to kind of guide you through all the laws and regulations. Instead, it is tailored towards creating a job description for someone to sit there and fill in data that nobody will ever look at.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#63

I'm always amazed with how big tech companies get in terms of employee count. I once wandered the engineering area of the HQ (with an employee) of a FAANG (MAANG sounds... silly) and made a tick mark on my notebook when I saw someone actually coding - or at least having code on screen. There were over 1200 people on the development team and at the time most worked out of HQ. So... when I was done walking, I had 22 ti…

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

>Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy exactly what they were going to anyway.

Perhaps they have to pay out some SLA type stuff to advertisers. However I don't think there is a single outage of a major tech company that has lasted 24hrs in the last 20 years. Major tech company is of course debatable.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#64
post #24

OneTrust's cookie consent manager is literally the worst product I have ever used.

Same. I'd have fired all the employees /s

That reminds me of the Monty Python sketch where the head waiter commands to sack the entire washing staff because of a dirty fork.

https://youtu.be/oCLtaK7KLEM?t=72

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

>Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code. I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy e…

Facebook does not make money selling physical items though, it makes money on page views and clicks. If the site is down, they lose all of those ad views and clicks, they are gone because the time needed to view them and all of the other ads is gone.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

>Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code. I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy e…

Atlassian?

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

>Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code. I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy e…

Facebook was down for 6 hours last year during the day (in the western world) so that was very impactful most likely. And as wonderwonder said advertising is an eyeballs game and if no one is on the site then they're not seeing/clicking/attributing to ads. Any non-monopoly would have a decent impact from downtime as customers either spend their time on other sites or buy more time sensitive things on other sites.

edit: There's also a lot of revenue impacting things short of downtime especially given the automated and ML heavy paths for most of these sites. A few slightly broken features in a key model can cause a 1% drop in your revenue which for facebook is over a billion a year.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#68
post #26

The job market for developers right now is tough. My last time interviewing I was 2 offers for 4 interviews. I started looking for a job a month ago and I've gotten 0 offers for probably 10 interviews. It's my first time interviewing over virtual meetings, maybe that's it, but I think it's the general job market. My last feedback was "TL;DR - The general agreement was that you can code, and likely code well. However,…

Then we must live in a different reality. All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

I'm being contacted for rates at 50%+ what the market was 3 years ago and they don't even care what my background is. And these are corporate recruiters, not phonebanks.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#69
post #3

I wonder how many of layoffs that have happened, the ones coming are actually needed financially. For example: I suspect a lot of companies took the opportunity of the first covid lockdowns to fire some people? Nothing against it since every company is just improving its chances of survival, just thinking out loud about the reasons they share publicly. Also, of course there would be some whose survival was in good sh…

Scale up rapidly and then mass fire the bottom 10-25% of performers. This is a well known tactic.

Netflix and Amazon are big, vocal proponents of this.

Re: OneTrust lays off 25% Workforce

#70
post #19
post #3

I wonder how many of layoffs that have happened, the ones coming are actually needed financially. For example: I suspect a lot of companies took the opportunity of the first covid lockdowns to fire some people? Nothing against it since every company is just improving its chances of survival, just thinking out loud about the reasons they share publicly. Also, of course there would be some whose survival was in good sh…

I mean, rarely do companies have a stack of termination paperwork ready just in case - more likely it was handed down to line managers "We're trying to cut X$ out of our budget, you're responsible for Y% of that, please choose accordingly" I've definitely had that list ready to go before (and also been on there fighting to say no, it's not tenable for the business to let Y% of my team go). It depends on circumstances…

There is always a list. When heads need to roll, the list comes out and heads are selected in some meaningful order.
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