51–60 of 74 posts
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Amen. I work at a small shop, 3.5 devs. That presents limits to some extent. And yet we were faster and more flexible than a company who had wads of cash thrown at them by some parent company who is now shutting them down.
I’d love to meet this half person
> 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…
I say this as someone who was an unnecessary resource. In the early 10s I got hired into the "machine learning" division of a ~7000 person company, which was a local ML startup that had gotten acquired. After starting there, I quickly realized: the acquisition was just done by an exec/VP who decided the company needed a machine learning strategy, but had no idea what to actually do with the acquisition. I was there for about a year, and I couldn't really tell you what me, or anyone on my team, did that provided any value. We played around with Spark; we hired a few PhD students to mess around with some data, for no real reason; we had a dev who spent 6 months writing an insane purely functional CRUD HTTP framework. We ostensibly had some long-term project we were working on, but literally no functional software to show by the time I left. I was well-compensated and treated extremely well (fully stocked liquor cabinet and we start pouring drinks at 2pm on Friday, whoo!) yet probably the most miserable I had ever been in my professional life.
Anyway... I've found that my experience is not uncommon. Companies of 1000+ people have a lot of entire teams who are not really contributing anything to the business. During the boom times it's simply not worth it for management to spend their time trying to hunt down those teams, though; the salaries of 40 people is a drop in the bucket for a company of that size. Plus you never want to make cuts to your own headcount, as that reduces your power as a manager.
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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. Do…
I have seen this work in the B2B startup world. Hire ambitious ppl with some dev experience, but definitely not from top CS programs, and have them grind to implement custom solutions that steal enough paying customers from some larger co, who will acquire you to force you to stop, even though it is clear that there is no scalable "product" there.
Well-designed and scalable solutions take time to build, even by the best, and sometimes they are simply not necessary. Aggressive and customer-centric ENG-OPS can do wonders.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. I work at a small shop, 3.5 devs. That presents limits to some extent. And yet we were faster and more flexible than a company who had wads of cash thrown at them by some parent company who is now shutting them down.
I’d love to meet this half person
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I am just working from my anecdotal experience hiring engineers into high end infosec consulting and what we were told about other offers. Even now, with companies pushing for in office again and the stock component of BigN salaries crashing down to earth it has changed things in our recruiting pipeline noticeably.
I'm also involved in recruiting, and the biggest change I see is that folks who were laid off or pushed out of prestigious tech companies are now in the market. These are not your "top talent", these folks are still happily employed at their BigN job. I hear similar stories about 2001. The folks who get laid off are mostly the lower performing engineers, who clear the lower hiring bars typical of frothy economic time…
Assuming layoffs are both primarily designed to and effective at retaining general talent, both statements need more corroboration. Will they keep the ones who are "indispensable" in the short term, like an engineer who maintains a specific system? Often yes. Are they the best? Often no, and over-specialized knowledge is particularly irrelevant to another company. Even so, anecdotally Big Co layoffs seemingly affect all levels and all talent, almost indiscriminate. That's probably because there are many other factors before an individual-against-individual comparison is ever made. From a C-level perspective teams and even orgs are more likely to be top-of-mind.
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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?
For me, it's not necessarily derision, but lack of sympathy is natural. If someone in my community (say a teacher) is making 45k a year, and they get laid off through no fault of their own, I will feel sympathy. They were contributing to the community as best they could, they were important, and now they are possibly struggling financially. A developer making $300k? Working for an ad company? Not too much sympathy -…
I have no sympathy for the person laid off or the survivor if they are in a role commanding that level of wage. If you are pushing $300k in salary, you should be able to financially handle a layoff or if you survive the cut— just buck it up, put your head down, and power your way through a leaner operation.
Honestly, I feel like anyone complaining about being a tech layoff survivor must have never worked outside of tech before. I worked in an industrial laundry in college, I can assure you the very worst day I had sitting at a desk typing code into a keyboard for a fat salary was exponentially better than the very best day I had loading dirty shop rags and diapers into a washing machine for minimum wage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am just working from my anecdotal experience hiring engineers into high end infosec consulting and what we were told about other offers. Even now, with companies pushing for in office again and the stock component of BigN salaries crashing down to earth it has changed things in our recruiting pipeline noticeably.
I'm also involved in recruiting, and the biggest change I see is that folks who were laid off or pushed out of prestigious tech companies are now in the market. These are not your "top talent", these folks are still happily employed at their BigN job. I hear similar stories about 2001. The folks who get laid off are mostly the lower performing engineers, who clear the lower hiring bars typical of frothy economic time…
> 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…
I think your statement may be a bit broad here. Let’s say upper management considers they need both feature A and B to win the market by end of quarter. But suddenly your team is half the number of people it used to be. You’re not realistically going to achieve more than you used to just through sheer elasticity. So either A or B will get done and it becomes a matter of prioritization. Smaller companies and shops are…
Your comment is totally fair. I will say though, that the impact of having more people is a function of how independently they can be deployed. One of the biggest challenges for hypergrowth companies is how to decouple things as they scale to keep people productive without drowning the org in communication overhead. Brooks' Law looms large in single product companies when they start to hit 4-figure engineering team sizes.
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> I'm still getting recruiter emails from many of the recent companies that have publicly said they are freezing/slowing down hiring I wonder what a recruiter at a company with a hiring freeze in place is expected to do? I'd be inclined to say, "well then I'll be on vacation until you need me, thanks for keeping the paychecks coming", but I suspect that wouldn't work so well. I think they would want to "keep the pipe…
Fired, probably. Recruiting, as a department, is unfortunately seen as expendable and the pipeline doesn't need to flow. Not that I think that's a smart decision.