31–40 of 414 posts
We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better than the alternatives.
Dons flak jacket
I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…
1) An inflated view of the impact of execs compared to other employees. This is a well studied psychological phenomena. People tend to overestimate their "skill/contribution" even in poor luck or even rigged scenarios. (There was a study which gave some subjects a head start in monopoly, i.e. more money, the subjects tended to talk significantly more about the advantages of "their" strategy in the game, then the subjects that we not given the head start).
2) It's in the interest of execs to keep C-suite salaries high, because it increases their own salary.
So it's not surprising that we have seen a dramatic increase in ratio of exec to average employee compensation, and why execs are typically isolated from economic downturns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase valu…
This might be true of a lot of companies, but then you look at others like Waymo where the revenue is pure projection, the relationship between staff numbers and having a workable product unknown and the pile of cash available to fund it not requiring any borrowing, and it looks suspiciously like trend following (with maybe a bit of actually self driving cars are further off than we thought but, hey, not our mistake…
With 0% rates money is free and you can take forever to make a profit, nobody cares, just borrow more money if you run out.
With 5% rates money is expensive and you have say 2 years to make a profit or everyone loses their job and investors lose their funds.
This doesn’t really apply to massive companies like google or MS of course but it does to anyone smaller without a cash cushion (the majority). Now job cuts may or may not be the right decision but they are triggered by very real and urgent fears about plummeting earnings.
> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…
wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase valu…
We need to fire thousands of people.
Why?
Because it will make us more attractive for investors.
Why?
So they put their money in our company.
Why?
Because that will buoy our stock price, which is important.
Why?
Because it makes shareholders richer.
Oh.
> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…
True...contrast Microsoft's decision to take an $800m hit in letting go 10,000 employees with its earnings report showing $16.4b operating profits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a TikTok tech worker. It's a recruiter depicting an unrealistic - missing all the stress etc - view of the workplace to attract inexperienced employees.As ones with experience mostly don't give a crap about these types amenities. That video was done for The Man, not for the employees well being. And apparently The Man was able to sell you this depiction of the work place so you can now feel smug about all th…
She wasn't a recruiter, she was a Partner Services Program Manager[0]. And there's dozens of videos just like these of employees flexing their perks daily while appearing to do very little work. It's been going on for awhile. If you're asserting that it's all propaganda, you're going to need to give some sources and not half-baked conspiracy theories. 0. https://news.yahoo.com/former-google-employee-documents-day-...
Do you honestly believe those TikToks were made spontaneously and they depict a realistic view of the workplace?
It's not a half baked conspiracy theory - it's called a PR strategy and companies have been doing them on social media for as long as they existed.
Let me give you the benefit of the doubt. Even if the videos are spontaneous, how can you with a straight face use them to judge a workplace and use them as a metric on the amount of work done? Do you really think social media is a realistic depiction of life?
Maybe if you saw a TikTok of how big investors and execs live and how much they would lose (nothing material) by retaining these employees, you would understand the situation better.
What a funny write! Despite it being funny, if it wasn't for the outright satire, it would be virtually indistinguishable from the recent tech layoff messages: Gitpod - https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-for-the-long-run Microsoft (this is maybe the classiest) - https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing... Zuck/Meta - https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes... Stripe - https:/…
> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase valu…
> if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. A company that is cutting staff is creatively bankrupt and has clearly no idea where to spend effort in anything new. I wouldn't invest in a company that is reducing headcount in this manner.
The part I thought was the best was this: "This was not an easy decision to make. It’s weighed heavily on me for the past month, keeping me up at night and nearly causing me to cancel the exec team’s offsite, even though Bad Bunny’s appearance fee was only 50 percent refundable. Let’s not mince words, though; the accountability for this decision rests with me. The consequences, on the other hand, rest with you, but s…
Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.