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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

#81

Post by JohnBooty »

whstl wrote: post #77
JohnBooty wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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 m…

Sometimes it's not even about the short game of capitalism. I've seen multiple times undesired meaningless features being highly-prioritized without rhyme or reason because of hunches from some PO, because it was politically good internally for some product manager, or because the designer decided to do some redesign, and no higher-up wanted to intervene and check how important it was. When I saw that happening and I…

    Modern software development is highly dysfunctional 
    but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
And it's just unreasonably difficult.

Climbing mountains is hard, but not unreasonably hard. We don't intentionally cut people's safety lines and roll boulders down the f'ing mountain at them while they're trying to climb. We don't make them carry bowling balls in their backpacks.

Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly.

But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the feet than doing anything else.

Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.

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

#82

Post by innomatics »

throwawaysleep wrote: post #42
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 don’t see a reason to even report money being literally wasted in my current jobs. There is an unused cloud service burning money at one of my jobs. Tens of thousands kind of money. Make a case for me even bothering to tell someone about it. You can’t.

Ok I'll bite.

If management discover that you knew about the wastage, and did nothing, then it can be said that you aren't acting in the best interest of the company. Possibly the opposite, meaning you'd be fired. So there's that.

If there is a culture of apathy and zero oversight and you are 100% sure no will ever care to show that you knew about it, then I pity your situation. Not bothering to tell someone about the wastage it is perpetuating that culture. Eventually company will fail or at best struggle.

I'm my experience it's nicer working at profitable companies where everyone is doing their best to help the company to profit. That doesn't mean your income is less important than company income. But you agree on the former, then do everything in your capability to help with the latter.

If your still not convinced please consider the environment. Cloud services consume not insignificant physical resources.

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

#83

Post by whstl »

giantg2 wrote: post #39
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've worked at my same company for 10 years and I'm disillusioned. There's no real advancement and nowhere else seems any better.

Trust me, there is. But it requires the constant job-hopping and series of mind-numbing interviews everyone is doing.

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

#84

Post by vsareto »

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…

>CAN that even exist?

Fully remote lifestyle business where everyone's workload is around 12-24 hours a week with $100k+ salaries. Everyone in the company makes around the same amount (CEO to junior). Full transparency for the accounting books. Excess profits get evenly distributed to everyone. No investors to answer to. A job that gives enough time and money to do what you want in life.

This is really only for people who are already good at something though.

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

#85

Post by gedy »

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…

My first two jobs out of college, were 14 years combined. End result was had to move away to work remote to afford a house. (Not SF either)

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

#86

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

perfecthjrjth wrote: post #70
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you wander around the Diamond District, in NYC, you'll see all these skinny little guys, in rumpled suits, walking around; very often, accompanied by a much larger guy, in a more fitted suit.

These chaps can have millions of dollars' worth of diamonds in their pockets, and they routinely exchange them on a handshake basis.

Integrity has worked for them for a long, long time.

It's not dead. It's just resting. Probably pining for the Fjords.

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

#88

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

lkrubner wrote: post #50
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In his autobiography Akio Morita (founder at Sony) tells a story in the 1960s, they'd hired an American salesman, who had done very well for them for many years, but then the guy thought he could make better money elsewhere, so he changed jobs. The next year they were all at a big electronics conference in Las Vegas, and Akio Morita was there talking up Sony's latest products, and this American sales guy walks up to…

I remember when a color scientist that we worked with (she was Japanese), left the company, and joined a direct competitor.

Her name was struck from the lists. It's as if she was never there.

Damn good at her job. I suspect that the "classic Japanese" culture of our company didn't give her the opportunities that the more modern company she joined, would.

I'm deliberately being vague, but both companies are household names.

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

#89

Post by soundsgoodtome »

wg0 wrote: post #69
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…

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…

Can you even downvote on HN?

E: For reference, I wouldn’t downvote this because it ain’t wrong.

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

#90

Post by timr »

fzeroracer wrote: post #79
timr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Everything is relative, I suppose, but those are the sorts of things a person might say if they've never actually seen a downturn. When I say "downturn", I mean: 2001. 2008. Compared to that , 2012 was boom times. I was running a startup then, and hiring was a brutal competition. Maybe not compared to 2…

I mean, 2001 and 2008 are all 'boom times' compared to the great depression and other periods of severe economic downturns if we want to be relative. I'm not sure that really matters though to a new grad that took 6+ months to find a job during one of the period of lean times I mentioned in my prior post however. It can always be worse, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.

The point is, I lived through the times you're citing as "a time of large layoffs". I was hiring in at least one of them (actually, all of them, in different contexts). It was very hard to find engineers. By no even semi-objective measurement were 2012, 2016 and 2017 lean times for the industry. Virtually every tech company was hiring like crazy.

Maybe they were bad for someone, but that's always true. I'm sure a brand-new coding school grad has a hard time in most markets, for example.

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