241–250 of 451 posts
Laid-off tech worker here. (backend engineer, ruby/rails/javascript). 5 years of experience. I'm working on not ever going back into tech. I've changed careers a number of times in my 34 years of life, and am doing it again. I'm only a mediocre software developer, have always had strong people/business skills, informed by my pre-software experience of commercial construction, teaching/training at a climbing gym, cust…
We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs. Here's the summary: - 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022. - Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company. - 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups. See the full blog post here: https://nubela…
> 56.7% Do you know what a sigfig is?
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> You really don't need a Peloton bike and other conspicuous consumption signs. This kind of just general bashing on tech people is so conceited. You're acting like a $2,000 stationary bike is really worth fussing over when you're making $400-500k/yr. Very few people at these incomes in tech are living month to month. They're overall saving a fuckload even if they own a 911.
Go to the local gym and work on actual social networking. Peloton is just goofy.
This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP). It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be…
I suspect you'll never be able to compete, is the problem. You might not be a profit maximizer, but everyone you interact with is a cost minimizer, and ethical solutions will inevitably be more expensive. This is not to rain on your parade (I agree with you!) but I see the only solution as political via vastly higher taxes on higher incomes to support social services. The only place we are remotely close to having an…
Thanks! (I think?)
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And probably leading to the next wave of innovation and/or unicorns. https://www.wired.com/story/tech-layoffs-are-feeding-a-new-s...
the next wave of innovation will be things like battery tech, deep AI in other words, nothing a React dev is going to put together in their kitchen realistically, the unemployed will end up competing with the ten of thousands of new devs coming out of college and bootcamps...the guy who cleans our pool is learning python as part of his online coding degree (really)
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If you're hiring for a specific skill set it might be because you have a target you're trying to hit. In my experience purse strings typically open because the company has a new project they want to complete in N time, and need X additional headcount to accomplish the goal in the time required. If it takes 3-6 months to onboard someone, you might not get your new headcount fully onboarded before v1 of the project shi…
It doesn’t take 3 months to do this even at wholly internal faang environments except in some special cases. Most of what people are talking about can be learned in days because they’re 90% the same as other products. Sometimes it's hours as someone else said because they're just generic databases or a pubsub system.
Or the design is wonky because the new platform isn't a 1:1 match to the proprietary solution.
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Stripe. They are a payment processor and work in Finance. What significant contributions to tech have they produced? I'm not being snarky, I'm just not familiar with any off the top of my head like I know React came from FB/Meta, Google & Amazon produce all sorts of cloud computing stuff, Apple produces lots of libraries/frameworks (most likely for their own hardware/ecosystem), Bootstrap came out of Twitter, etc.
Providing an API abstracting over the complexity of payment processing is the technology. Google's search engine is technology but you would probably say "isn't that just a researching documents"? A bit weird how you only deem companies technological if they have released popular OSS or Apple because they produce libraries/frameworks they use internally. Pretty sure all software companies use internal libraries.
Stripe is a payment processor with the most disruptive automation, competing with other payment processors older than the web. Every industry will be shrinking in people per net work, few industries are new things (at least for the public) enabled by automation.
If we want to call all disruptors tech companies, why not also call the old companies that transform to compete with them tech companies too? Then every industry is tech. But really it is the opposite, tech as it ages becomes regular business that is more dependent on trademarks, relationships, etc, so some things we consider tech from recent decades are less so now and companies that stay primarily in them are more like old industry than tech companies that compete for the newly emerging fields.
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> FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had wa…
i got into an argument with a bigtech employee (outside of work, in a social setting) that senior engineers should spend 25% of their time mentoring junior hires. he literally could not understand that a small company can't afford to do this. not only that, he also could not understand that small companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody to mentor! and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whate…
This whole debacle really made it clear that there is no way to be an ethical success in capitalism at the highest levels (CEO, Board, C-Suite generally, SVP). It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be…
Bingo.