There's no recession, though. There may be one this year, but it didn't exist before all of these layoffs. It may not be a conspiracy, but it seems questionable to believe these companies are not willing a recession into existence through, charitably, pessimism.
I think it is less pessimism and more realism. The fed clearly indicated that it will raise rates until the market cools
As far as the Fed is concerned inflation, unemployment & GDP growth are all definitely higher priorities than the stock market.
Just last week MSFT nixed the accrual PTO benefit employees enjoyed and opted for the rouse of 'unlimited' PTO. Effectively, ending a liability/cash outlay they would pay when folks quit, or get fired. I hope those who were affected today receive severance that makes up for them losing this benefit. -James
I had a friend who actually took the “unlimited PTO” thing at face value when he was fresh out of college and joined a cool tech company. He was literally traveling every 2-3 weeks and bragging about it. He was let go for performance reasons within 6 months lol.
Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt. It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination. Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company. Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.
He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.
It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.
So one 1 out of 20 are getting let go. Looking around near 50 employee company I work for I easily see 2.5 employees I would let go just because they're near useless. Hell, I'd say it's at least 5. I'd say unless you've got a good manager, really good hiring, and are keeping close tabs on the technical people (just to make clear, I'm one of them those technical people) I figure you've at least got 1 our of 20 you sho…
This logic has a nice way of being used against you. I think the employees you feel are useless would sack you if they could.
Focusing on productivity is of course the right metric, but the metric that gets used in practice is “Which of you helped advance your manager’s career?” After all, your manager is the one who decides who goes, and there’s no incentive to keep someone that does nothing for them over someone who helps them look good to the VP — which is who decides whether your manager goes. Same rule applies recursively.
These layoff articles are incomplete without mentioning how many they hired and when. This brings Microsoft back to their staffing levels of when exactly? March 2021?
What’s the relevance of knowing a previous employee count? How does this information “complete” the story?
So one 1 out of 20 are getting let go. Looking around near 50 employee company I work for I easily see 2.5 employees I would let go just because they're near useless. Hell, I'd say it's at least 5. I'd say unless you've got a good manager, really good hiring, and are keeping close tabs on the technical people (just to make clear, I'm one of them those technical people) I figure you've at least got 1 our of 20 you sho…
Eventually you'll run out of bad ones to sack and then the that's when the good ones leave because they don't want to play the ladder game. You're left with middling who might have a hard time finding other jobs but could play the ladder game well enough - potentially with devastating consequence for health of the technical stack as more "features" get developed.
In my experience you’re right that the best devs don’t care to play the ladder game, but they’re generally pretty okay at it. It’s not that much of a distraction from your regular work to think about “How can I help my manager look good to their manager?” which is all the ladder game is.
Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon. I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors. Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and l…
"Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years," What in earth are you talking about? He brought his way into those companies. I think you are confusing Elon Musk the fictional PR character who exists only in paid press releases with Elon Musk. Elon Musk's success was being the CEO of a slimy payment processor.
your forgot '... until he was shown the door.' on that last sentence.
Bloat is real, but there's another labor market dynamic in play here. There was a huge run-up in corporate employee compensation in the tech sector over the last few years. (Some called it a "shortage," remember. Some of it is genuine growth in the sector, some of it was definitely "labor hoarding" by large companies that could afford to carry excess staff in a tight market as a hedge against being unable to fill cri…
You're describing a monopolized labor market. Sure, there may not be felonious collusion, but many of the illegal elements of a monopoly are very much present.. as you essentially point out. I'm also not sure why you would be surprised to learn there is collusion, the size and timing of these blocks are certainly curious, and I think further investigation would reveal quite a bit more than you're imagining here. I al…
The war on wages is being waged (? is that the same word?) by the Fed. Companies just follow.
Bloat can be all over the place, it’s not exclusive to the top of org charts
Bloat at the top, whether people, process, or organizational bloat, has an amplification effect that isn’t found at the bottom.
It's a trap companies can easily find themselves in. If you're looking to cut costs, the first thing the C-Suite will look at is all the workers that aren't adding immediate business value, so you cut them first; simple and easy. Then as tech debt and issues pile up, you, as management, figure that your first approach to figuring out what's going wrong is to hire managers and consultants to understand why your workers aren't as productive as before. Unfortunately all of these middle managers just create more burden on workers as they are micromanaged and sent to meetings more by managers looking to justify their existence. Of course these managers will say whatever the C-Suite wants to hear to keep their jobs, so more blame is pushed onto the lowest level, more managers are hired to try to make them more productive, and a vicious cycle continues.
They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were
Not willingly: Twitter to Devs: Don't Make Twitter Clients... Or Else [2011] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-clients Twitter's API Update Cuts Off Oxygen to Third-Party Clients [2012] https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-big-changes (how could Elon do this!?)
But amazingly third party clients still thrived even after those API nerfs for over 10 years.
I mean it's within his right to do it, and I can even see the arguments. However, to do it without even a press release let alone notice. Without even answering support tickets from those third party clients. Just an utter failure of management.