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Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

wsj.com

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Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#521

Post by pstuart »

fastball wrote: post #496
tenpies wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet tech is such a small portion of the labor force that layoffs here basically mean zilch when it comes to the unemployment rate/inflation, and thus there's a long way for it to fall before the Fed adjusts policy The really scary thing for me is the possible macro environment for tech. Indians will soon overtake any of the Western countries as the largest English-speaking population on the internet. As I'm sure ma…

Damn 30 hours a day sounds like a slog though.

That one weird trick is to sleep -6 hours to fit it all in.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#522

Post by adam_arthur »

sumedh wrote: post #433
adam_arthur wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't. That being said there are some intangibles, like morale etc. It's possible there are people that benefit the team while having low personal productivity. But anyway, no need to approach in th…

> (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) What about Dev leads who mentor/architect stuff instead of writing code day to day. How will you measure that?

Well then they have artifacts to prove the designs they came up with, right? Or record of their PR reviews/feedback?

If not, they are coasting and doing very little

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#523

Post by adam_arthur »

reiichiroh wrote: post #517
adam_arthur wrote: post #358

The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…

Aren’t we complaining we can’t reach anyone human at Google Support?

They could hire entire call centers in poorer countries for the cost of a few engineers. That's a prioritization issue on their end

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#524

Post by Foobar8568 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #470
nfiedel wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lines or amount of code written is a terrible, and easily gamed metric. Some of the very best engineers write the fewest lines of code, often making fewer yet better abstractions that fulfill more business use cases more simply. They might also help others write less code. Some of the most prolific coders are great. And some are terrible. The challenge is discerning the two. Coaching a prolific yet bad coder to slow…

I understand this as theoretical possibility, and it could lead you astray if you're trying to tell a 40% developer from a 60% developer... but in practice I have never met a superstar IC who doesn't also ship a ton of code (even while they help out others). If you fire the 10% of ICs who push the least code, to within a rounding error you're extremely unlikely to regret it.

Your best engineers are facilitators, not coding monkeys.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#525

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

reiichiroh wrote: post #517
adam_arthur wrote: post #358

The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…

Aren’t we complaining we can’t reach anyone human at Google Support?

So nothing will change then? Instead of 135k people not answering the phone and telling you to go F… yourself you’ll only have 120k people not answering the phone and telling you to go F… yourself. Or maybe Google has amassed so much AI knowledge that all of its employees can be replaced by a single Raspberry Pi that doesn’t answer the phone and responds to all inputs with go F… yourself! A hundred years ago you would have had to pay a million people a penny a week to sit around not answering the phone and telling you to go F… yourself to achieve the same effect. Hard to believe the human race has come so far so little time.

But what’s more amazing is AWS support, because they answer the phone, and they solve your issue, and that’s the trick nobody else seems to be able to master.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#526

Post by bpodgursky »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #524
bpodgursky wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this as theoretical possibility, and it could lead you astray if you're trying to tell a 40% developer from a 60% developer... but in practice I have never met a superstar IC who doesn't also ship a ton of code (even while they help out others). If you fire the 10% of ICs who push the least code, to within a rounding error you're extremely unlikely to regret it.

Your best engineers are facilitators, not coding monkeys.

Your best engineers are both.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#527

Post by cudgy »

fsckboy wrote: post #423
roughly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone had any notion that the markets were efficient or rational in any way regarding the actual underlying value of the companies they purport to represent, I certainly hope that notion didn’t survive the pandemic - I’m not sure what world stocks were pricing in over the last two years, but it didn’t pass even a cursory smell test.

the market is the most efficient place you can put your money, and the companies that underlie the market are the greatest stores of value with the best growth opportunities we know of, and the pandemic didn't change that. Dying to hear where else you suggest putting investments...?

Yes, the market is very efficient at losing money as well by punishing foolish people that believe the market is only efficient at making money. Buy, buy, buy!

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#528

Post by Foobar8568 »

tenpies wrote: post #473
adam_arthur wrote: post #358

The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…

> Yet tech is such a small portion of the labor force that layoffs here basically mean zilch when it comes to the unemployment rate/inflation, and thus there's a long way for it to fall before the Fed adjusts policy The really scary thing for me is the possible macro environment for tech. Indians will soon overtake any of the Western countries as the largest English-speaking population on the internet. As I'm sure ma…

Have you ever worked with an Indian company? I am just laughing each time I hear huge talent pool. So maybe your top 1% is incredible but they already left the country.

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#529

Post by wly_cdgr »

adam_arthur wrote: post #358

The truth is that a majority of tech companies don't need 50%+ of their employees. Google could lay off vast swathes tomorrow and be immensely more profitable without any loss in revenue. The 2010s will be remembered as the golden era for tech employment. The second we start getting industry wide layoffs, the insanely high wage inflation we've seen will kick into reverse much faster than you probably believe possible…

That's probably true-ish, but remember the saying, "keep your friends close and your enemies closer"

Re: Robinhood lays off 23% of staff

#530

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #505
nemo44x wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part of this to me to deal with is that it’s the truth. For decades, the conservative line was if you give people money they’ll just blow it on gambling and booze. Turns out it’s true.

Ah yes, it’s completely fair that the only people who should be morally allowed to participate in the financial apparatus that sometimes leads to getting rich, are the people who are already rich. I see no incongruities whatsoever with this logic. rapid eye blinking Bunch of people lost money. Some of them got rich. Booze is good and gambling is fun and it’s ok to blow their own money on exactly the things that every…

[deleted]
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