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Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

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Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#61

Post by _vbnz »

wonderwonder wrote: post #41
kungito wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever

That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity. Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal…

To the suits we're just a translation layer between the business requirements to deployed code. And they'll be happy to reduce the work to story points and neo-Taylorism, so they can try to treat each person as an interchangeable unit of production, and then minimise costs.

In an era of trillon-dollar megacorps and multi-billionaire CEOs, Marx was ahead of his time:

> He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [...] As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#62

Post by throwaway675309 »

Sorry to hear about this, being let go is always a demoralizing experience, but I just can't identify with this type of histrionic response towards being laid off at a company. It's not like you're losing a loved one, and if you properly built up your friendships with your coworkers, they'll still be meaningful relationships even after you're gone. All the lessons and skills that you acquired are still persistent as well.

There must be some kind of cult of personality phenomenon that applies to companies as well as people. I hope that the one good takeaway for this person is that unless you're a majority stakeholder or have ownership in the company, one should learn to be detached about where your paycheck comes from.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#63

Post by fzeroracer »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #25
zerr wrote: post #19

2 hours notice - How do you handover the work? Or is there nothing to handover?

Here's the thing I've learned lately from friends who have survived layoffs: handover often doesn't happen. The company terminates access effective immediately (maybe with gardening leave) for security reasons. The immediate loss of institutional knowledge causes fucking havoc across the board. So some people will be taken back on as contractors for a while at extremely expensive rates. This also means there's a weir…

This happens all the time and the downstream effects of hazardous layoffs are often not seen or felt until Jim the resident container expert isn't around to restart the critical containers that all of your other services need, so you start losing a lot of money and time as John the replacement scrambles to figure out how the system works and what to do.

Or they get hired back as a contractor for 3x-4x the hourly wage as you mentioned.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#64

Post by danesparza »

Why in the world would Twilio take somebody who is this loyal to their culture and put them out on their ear?

This person was a true believer. They stuck with the company for 9 YEARS.

If you want to shift the company, then do that -- and take your true believers WITH YOU.

This isn't leadership on Twilio's part. This is a scared company. They aren't making smart decisions. They're just cowing to investors.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#65

Post by Xeronate »

librish wrote: post #40

Reading the responses to some of these posts it feels like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction in the "the company is not your family" discussion. Yes, if you expect corporate America to always treat you fairly you're going to end up disappointed. But spending 9 years at a place and not even giving a little bit of yourself to the company seems even worse. It's OK to think that your boss cares about…

Your sentiment is nice in theory, but in reality it's just a recipe for getting taken advantage of.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#66

Post by JohnBooty »

goostavos wrote: post #47
wonderwonder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box of his possessions under one arm and a potted plant in the other. Since then I have brought nothing personal into work. If I'm let go I just have to grab my keys and I'm out. Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut…

>I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship. Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taki…

    > > I would love to work in an environment where 
    > > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that

    > CAN that even exist?
Theoretically, yes. Practically... it's always going to be insanely rare.

I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities.

I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers)

Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves.

Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way.

I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity.

As an engineer, I understand (at least at a high level) the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. I wish that product managers and executives expended a fraction of the effort to understand what makes good engineering. Higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months... and that's okay, but they are also aggressively disinterested in actually understanding the processes that produce the product they are selling.

Depressing.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#67

Post by fzeroracer »

timr wrote: post #33
twawaaay wrote: post #13

I wonder if large companies recognise they are shitting in the pond they are floating in. As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and hiring people I notice how candidates change over time (trying to adjust for how I change myself). I notice people care less about the company they work for and, honestly, it is more and more difficult to find arguments against. This whole trend of optimising ev…

> This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life. While I get where you're coming from, it's a pretty big leap to go from what's happening now to "optimizing everything to the max". Twilio tripled in size since the pandemic, and wasn't/isn't profitab…

What are you referring to? We've gone through multiple cold cycles already. 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Some engineers may have gone through these cycles without issue, but everyone was acutely aware of the layoffs when they were occurring and if you graduated during those times it was especially hard to find a job until the job market resumed.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#68

Post by TobyTheDog123 »

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #57
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #12

[flagged]

The guy worked there for 9 years. That's a really long time, longer than many posters here's entire careers (mine included), and longer than most of us will ever work at a given job. Of course he's going to be emotionally invested, and knocking him for this is a bit cruel. Not so long ago, your kids _would_ know you as someone who drives buses for the local bus company, delivers the post, or works down the mine.

This is fair take, but I do think there is an additional difference between being emotionally attached to your job, and the content of the post.

I also think there's a big difference between a very high-visibility job like a bus-driver/mail-delivery-worker/mine-worker (where the labor is very accessible/visible to kids), and one in software engineering (my parents work with computers at some company?)

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#69

Post by wg0 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #23
twawaaay wrote: post #13

I wonder if large companies recognise they are shitting in the pond they are floating in. As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and hiring people I notice how candidates change over time (trying to adjust for how I change myself). I notice people care less about the company they work for and, honestly, it is more and more difficult to find arguments against. This whole trend of optimising ev…

I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box of his possessions under one arm and a potted plant in the other. Since then I have brought nothing personal into work. If I'm let go I just have to grab my keys and I'm out. Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut…

Here's a very controversial and bitter take. Aiming for maximum downvotes.

It's only when you get fired, you start to see clearly and are able to come out of that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family" and all that misplaced rather abused analogies.

It's just a commercial relationship rooted in generating profit (nothing wrong with that) for which have to collaborate with others. There's no team, there's no family.

Any prose and poetry beides that is also about squeezing every ounce of profit. It is a for profit activity so at least be direct and honest about it and refrain from borrowing analogies from other social constructs.

Re: Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio

#70

Post by perfecthjrjth »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30
tptacek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of those things that makes sense in the airless vacuum of a message board that has no connection to ordinary life; the mythical "touchless grass" as the tweeters say. In reality, people in all walks of life form deep emotional attachments to their jobs. Plant closures disrupt the identities of entire cities. People are emotionally attached to jobs as checkout clerks. Hit songs have been written about the…

> You can't just tell people not to have human connections to their work. In my case, it has been required. I'm very fortunate, to have worked for 27 years, for a company that had many, many faults, but always treated their workers as if their career at the company was a critical factor. That's because it was a "classic" Japanese company. The best managers that I had, were Japanese (including one that eventually beca…

Integrity as a virtue is given less weight in almost all business transactions, these days.
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