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Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#251

Post by Temporary_31337 »

username_my1 wrote: post #14
kqr wrote: post #12

> 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…

I agree- someone with money can simply put it in bonds or a savings account. To invest in a company it has to promise to return more than the 5% per annum

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#252

Post by chmod600 »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #34
username_my1 wrote: post #14

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…

Let's do a little root cause analysis. Why do companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, with massive income streams combined with substantial cash holdings, need investor money? Maybe Toyota's "Five Why's" can shed some light on it. 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 pric…

"need investor money?"

There exist large private companies; how do they behave differently? I could imagine it going either way, depending on the owners, employees, and all kinds of other factors.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#253

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

gorgoiler wrote: post #7

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…

I love software development. It's not just a job, but a hobby, as well. My GH Activity Graph is solid green, because I code every day. Sometimes, more, on weekends.

I haven't been paid since 2017. I was laid off, after 27 years. It was totally expected, and I was prepared.

What I wasn't prepared for, was the rejection from the industry.

Once I got over that, I was fine. I found some 501(c)(3) work that interested me, and I've been doing that. I did some writing, started trying to implement many of the ideas I had, while being paid (but were ignored), and found out that I had been absolutely right, the entire time (It is not hubris to postulate that, if I had been allowed to implement my ideas, the layoffs would not have been necessary, but that's all water under the bridge).

I used to say that "My dream is to work for free."

Livin' the dream...

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#254

Post by automatom »

2devnull wrote: post #239

No sympathy for the average American worker, who is impacted even more so by inflation, which robs them of their life savings and job security at their min wage job. Over-entitled and over payed young tech workers who have displaced poorer people and haven’t been astute enough to save their extravagant salaries, spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads now want to bleat about how “boo hoo life isn’t fair…

It’s the fed dummies!

Why is it that the C-suite folks, who are supposed to understand macroeconomic trends or "Economics 101" as you're calling it, didn't see this coming and didn't make better decisions to not over-hire and mitigate reactionary cost-cutting. These companies have billions of cash on hand, but they choose the easy short term route of slashing labor costs to appease shareholders. I would argue this is a terrible long term solution on growth and profits (despite the shareholders impatience.

Besides even the big tech employees are closer to the average American worker than C-suite folks if you look at median salaries. You're talking down to a large group of people as if you somehow saw it coming before everyone else?

spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads

This is effectively the same argument as the one made by the Avocado Toast guy, and it's out of touch. You can empathize with folks that make less than you and still criticize the action of management that could have had the foresight to prioritize people over profit, but chose not to out of greed.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#255

Post by sequoia »

The one thing this is missing is referring to employees with a cutesy company nickname while laying them off. "We'll be parting ways with some talented Floofmates* which is very difficult." It always strikes me that a layoff email is not the right time/place to lean on cutesy "we're a family here! We have fun" company culture schtick.

*or googleers, metamates, plaids, whatever

Incidentally is there a name for these company-nickname-for-employees words?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#256

Post by sybercecurity »

gavinmckenzie wrote: post #213
Swizec wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't the inbetween contract jobs a tenuous time? This is priced into the contract. I've done both FTE and contracting. They both have their benefits. Looking at my FTE job with the attitude of "This is a business relationship – you pay me, I work" has been the best balance for me. You can do more deeper bigger things than you can as a contractor plus the lottery tickets are nice. Honestly, if companies wanna p…

This is very true. Though it’s really tough for most employees (especially the 20-somethings) to resist the internal tribal messaging from their employers and instead see their employment relationship as just transactional.

I wonder if this is due to lack of job experience at that young age? Prior to that, young adults were in school, which fostered a community view beyond just paying for classes/degree. I know I learned about how large corps view labor when I worked summers at a big box retailer. I viewed that as purely transactional as well: I stock shelves, you give me money.

Plus Gen-X often watched our parents get laid off when we were younger, so there's that lesson too.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#257

Post by rightbyte »

ReptileMan wrote: post #89

I kinda like the layoffs of late. We are incredibly spoiled - anyone in IT born past 1985 barely knows what making less money than the previous year is. It will trim the fat, push away people that are in the industry because of the money. I think it will be ok.

> It will trim the fat

More like cutting of fingers. Layoffs at mass scale are not "low performers" or individuals that are (as individuals) redundant. It is just people picked in some Excel sheet.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#258

Post by granshaw »

turdprincess wrote: post #208
gavinmckenzie wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first couple of years I would worry about this, but I haven’t in a very long time. The only occasions when I’ve had a gap between contracts is when I’ve chosen to take a break. I manage my finances to ensure I have several months of equivalent income saved. My process is that 60 days before the end of my current contract, whether my current client has said they intend to renew or not, I start seeking other con…

contacted for many years as well. All my contracts always ran a year or longer. In the end, it felt very similar to full time employment - it was 9 - 5, regular meetings, coworkers, etc.. At the same time, I didn’t get any benefits, health insurance or paid holidays. I am not sure I want to contract like that again. It has most of the downsides of regular employment but none of the benefits. I think in the USA it wou…

Same feeling here. This is called “staff augmentation” contracting and is the easiest to find but the closest to FT employment. It can make sense if you get to a high rate or you can convince clients to do 3/4 days a week kindof arrangements

I too would like to find true consulting opportunities but feel that it’s gonna be tough unless you become well known. Another in between approach is to have a more fixed, productized offering… the only one I can think of for someone with a typical full stack skill set is to build MVPs… you could also teach courses…

Or if you can get together with some friends you enjoy working with and form your own mini agency this can be an enjoyable approach

EDIT: One more idea which I know is done is to develop your own framework or set of processes for your client base, but still charge somewhere in between what you have and building it from scratch. But again this isn’t possible in a staff aug situation as you’ll be beholden to the existing team’s tools and processes.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#259

Post by overrun11 »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #34
username_my1 wrote: post #14

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…

Let's do a little root cause analysis. Why do companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, with massive income streams combined with substantial cash holdings, need investor money? Maybe Toyota's "Five Why's" can shed some light on it. 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 pric…

The median shareholder in Microsoft, Google and Amazon is likely a lower economic class than the median employee at these corporations if I had to guess.

The framing of ordinary workers getting the boot so fat cats can buy bigger yachts is seductive but I can just as easily frame it as:

Fixed income, middle America boomers entrusted these companies to be good stewards of their capital but it was instead spent on paying high six figure salaries to coastal city professionals from elite schools to do work of dubious value.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#260

Post by janalsncm »

Sam Harris talks about how when we get superintelligent AI, our relationship to it will be like ants relationship to humans. Well, we already have a kind of “slow AI” in corporations. Profit-seeking paperclip maximizers.

They don’t hate us, they don’t love us. They keep us around as long as we’re useful and then dispose of us after that point. The fact that corporations are made of meat doesn’t change the ultimate reward function that they all must follow: maximize profit, laws and negative externalities be damned.

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