Quoted post unavailable.
Well, we should all be very very worried when companies with 1m profit per employee start laying people off. Excesses of SV aren’t really relevant from my point of view
Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
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Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#12People have had 10 year careers in tech thinking the world is a permanent bull market. I can imagine how this feels like the world is collapsing around them. For those of us who have weathered previous recessions, we know the world moves on. Things will be rough, for a while, we will rebound, and hopefully we will thrive again. I feel the current situation is more representative of the long term job market than the l…
Young, bright, engineers fresh out of college sliding into a big tech firm making 300k-500k / year and being told they are the most important resource in the universe. If you started this train 3-5 years ago you probably just assumed the gravy train would never stop.
I really hope they squirreled away some of those $$ and then moved to a low cost of living area during the pandemic.
I have some sympathy, but it made the tech universe warp around their stock prices. It was very hard to recruit when all the best and above average talent just got sucked up into the giant companies that build advertising machines in SV.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#13Quoted post unavailable.
Well, we should all be very very worried when companies with 1m profit per employee start laying people off. Excesses of SV aren’t really relevant from my point of view
Agreed. Tech workers at large companies often earn income commensurate with the economic value they produce. When each employee nets the company 7 figures on average, it's hard to make a case that they shouldn't earn some meaningful fraction of that IMO.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is getting better benefits and perks deemed worthy of derision rather than an admission that most employees in the world are treated like garbage? They aren't being completely exploited by their companies so they deserve to be taken down a peg to the sorry state you're in?
I think he's making the point that SV layoffs are not worthy of more sympathy than other layoffs, but maybe less.
If this were a Reddit thread or a Facebook thread I'd agree with him, but it's a thread on a site for those SV engineers to hang out. So I don't think every article and comment here should be required to kowtow to Overtonwindow and the Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr users' demands to apologize for our success
Getting laid off or being in a company with layoffs sucks even if you're making a lot of money. Especially for younger engineers where this is their introduction to this particular harsh reality
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#15Quoted post unavailable.
Why is getting better benefits and perks deemed worthy of derision rather than an admission that most employees in the world are treated like garbage? They aren't being completely exploited by their companies so they deserve to be taken down a peg to the sorry state you're in?
Yeah but for whatever elite Stanford rich kid CS grad strawman you have invented for this uh... person experiencing laidoffness, have you considered that this imaginary person probably kept their job and the try-hards like basically all of the rest of us got the shaft? These are unlikely the spoiled brats you're envisioning.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#16> The situation is bad enough that the Snap employee said they’d considered quitting since then.
So, only bad enough that an employee might consider quitting? That... really suggests it's not a particularly bad situation.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#17> from a Snap survivor: ”So it’s frustrating; they expect us to still go out and win with these products, yet we have fewer resources.”
I don’t know what function this is it their manager is telling them, but this quote really reflects a bull market mentality that success is a function of resources applied without acknowledging the inefficiency of throwing money at a problem. People who want to be successful over the next 5 years really should be thinking in terms of how to operate efficiently and leverage what they do have. I think a lot of young VC-funded tech workers misunderstand how elastic resourcing actually can be in the software world, and how much past resourcing was speculative and incremental-not essential.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#18After a layoff, a lot of the best people among the remaining staff end up leaving as well. In addition to the extra work, the workplace acquires a bunch of mental tombstones of a time that would never repeat itself. If you are any good, that lowers the threshold of reasons not to quit, and the upside of quitting remains untouched (higher salary, new experiences, better title elsewhere, more learning). The reasons to…
The best people leave first, triggering the death spiral.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#19> from a Snap survivor: ”So it’s frustrating; they expect us to still go out and win with these products, yet we have fewer resources.” I don’t know what function this is it their manager is telling them, but this quote really reflects a bull market mentality that success is a function of resources applied without acknowledging the inefficiency of throwing money at a problem. People who want to be successful over the…
This is so well said.
Re: Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’
#20People have had 10 year careers in tech thinking the world is a permanent bull market. I can imagine how this feels like the world is collapsing around them. For those of us who have weathered previous recessions, we know the world moves on. Things will be rough, for a while, we will rebound, and hopefully we will thrive again. I feel the current situation is more representative of the long term job market than the l…
Young, bright, engineers fresh out of college sliding into a big tech firm making 300k-500k / year and being told they are the most important resource in the universe. If you started this train 3-5 years ago you probably just assumed the gravy train would never stop. I really hope they squirreled away some of those $$ and then moved to a low cost of living area during the pandemic. I have some sympathy, but it made t…
Fresh-out-of-college engineers weren't making $300k, let alone $500k. I'm not sure where you got these numbers. Even at the highest paying BigN, fresh grads don't typically get over $200k.
> It was very hard to recruit when all the best and above average talent just got sucked up into the giant companies that build advertising machines in SV.
The talent crunch has been getting worse for the past couple of decades. Don't expect this bear market to be some sort of cataclysmic change that would reverse the trend permanently, not anymore than 2008 was. Even 2001 only lasted for a fairly short while, and demand for top tech talent back then was a tiny fraction of what it is now.
That, essentially, is why this crunch exists: the number of highly talented engineers has remained about the same for decades, while demand skyrocketed.
Also, what other companies stand ready to receive all this "above average" talent? Small companies, which in this market, are having an even tougher time? BigN by and large haven't gone through massive layoffs, while small and medium-sized companies are getting massacred. Like Snap which lost 90% of its value.
Startups are in an even worse spot. Funding is going to be very tough for the next couple of years, and startups have been extremely stingy with their equity. That's why they're having trouble recruiting: BigN are paying far better, while startup are much riskier, and if they do succeed, there's very little upside for engineers who are granted ridiculously small amounts of equity.
I wouldn't hold my breath for all these "above average" talents being desperate enough to accept bad deals from startups that don't want to give out equity, nor is that a desirable outcome of this situation. Startups should either start granting more equity, or start gasp targeting less talented people.