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Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#131

Post by n_ary »

My speculative pure non-analytic layman take is, these behemoths have reached such a scale and domination by hoarding all talents long enough to build the perpetual revenue machine in the era of free money. All low hanging fruits were picked, regulation shut all doors slowly as majority of market dominators were built on fringe of the law, so any new player will have to fight in impossible odds of both regulation and lack of funding, so chance of competition is very low. Anything that is barely threatening will be acquired and extinguished.

So, now that the money printing machines will continue to print, competition landscape is muddied by regulation hammer, so layoffs left and right. Besides, any bad decision now will bear consequences far ahead in future that by the time most people making the decisions will be retired or moved on to something else. The saying goes, death by a thousand cuts, but for behemoths, bleeding takes a long time before severe disability takes place.

— end of rant/opinion —

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#133

Post by throwaway5959 »

leetharris wrote: post #19

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

There’s also just no process anymore. Product managers can’t even be bothered to fill out more than a title line in a ticket. Burndown charts? Ha who cares about points on the tickets.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#134

Post by eps »

metabro wrote: post #127
leetharris wrote: post #19

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

This doesn’t mesh with my experience. I work at big tech co that went through massive rounds of layoffs. The criteria was a mixed bag. A lot of it was just entire products and associated teams being dismantled. Also, one can make the argument the other way as well. Tools and infra have gotten good enough that the work doesn’t require the “dedicated nerds”. So let’s get rid of the highest paid engineers as that’s the…

These are two sides of the same medal.

What the GP said was how the bloat accumulated and why the professional quality went down. What you are saying is how they are trimming the bloat. It's not possible to trim by skill alone, because it would leave all teams and products understuffed. But the bloat is there and it is insane.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#135

Post by yangcheng »

lubujackson wrote: post #129

One reason I think not given enough weight is that it is now acceptable to do layoffs. These huge companies accrue a ton of dead weight and dead-end projects that they would love to flush routinely, but 5 years ago their stock prices would halve if they suddenly laid off 10% of their work force because of bad optics. Now it has become acceptable for all the various reasons so any company that wants to clean house is…

Agree, twitter layoff set an example that it's ok to layoff. Then all FAANG followed

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#136

Post by throwaway5959 »

sph wrote: post #128
mijamo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do really benefit from finally having a way to use shell scripting. Life is too short to remember hundreds of one letter options with obscure combinations

Back in my day, man pages and --help were enough. The thing about great documentation is that it rarely hallucinates.

I imagine you slapping your knee as you started typing that. :)

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#137

Post by jdksmdbtbdnmsm »

rogerthis wrote: post #5

I've seen these answers: - excess hiring during the pandemic; - interest rates raised; - salaries too high; - cut in remote work (to ease return to office later); - some weird thing coming; - AI; (I could replace all those semi-colons with question marks.) (Edit: formatting)

would love to hear more about the weird thing coming

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#138

Post by austin-cheney »

I don’t know about in general, but I can describe why I was laid off last year.

I was hired by a small consultancy on a software team supporting a dedicated software product for a small but powerful industry. Software was/is an emerging side business for that employer. This team completely lacked discipline and vision from a software execution perspective. The software was horribly organized, 80% of the logic was in SQL stored procedures, there was no test automation, and everything was copy/paste between environments. So, this was extremely high risk. The product side of the team, on the other hand, had extremely good discipline with a solid vision and extremely good documentation.

I was the only senior developer on the team with any advanced experience outside of SQL. It became super clear this employer was a mistake when they didn’t want me to fix anything and my junior peers back-stabbed me during 360s as salvation for their inability to communicate in writing. I just rode out the last several months until they eventually fired me when billable hours evaporated.

After a few months of looking for a new job I made a promise to myself to never EVER return to employment that feels immature. I would never take a job too reliant on frameworks and tools, such that the job/industry are compensating for talent with gimmicks. I abandoned my career writing JavaScript and eventually gained work in data science.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#139

Post by foofie »

leetharris wrote: post #19

This is going to be a controversial opinion. The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. All these huge companies wanted more products, more marketshare, more money, etc. They needed more people to pull this off. They started lowering hiring standards across the board because there just weren't enough people in tech. Simultaneously, a huge portion of the world saw tech sa…

> The quality of your average tech worker has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years.

I don't think your take holds water. It reads as a mix between self-aggrandizing and ladder-pulling, typically pinned on the so-called boomer mindset.

For the past 15 years you have seen universities producing graduates that are far better prepared for a cloud world in every single aspect of the business, and these graduates start off working in cloud-related projects. All frameworks that dominate front-end and back-end components were created in the past decade, and leverage the same cloud-based competencies that new graduates learn.

If anything, new graduates are heads and shoulders above veterans, and the only thing that they miss is two decades of work experience. That can be an asset or a liability.

I also add that the bulk of >15year veterans graduated in the 90s and 80s, which was a time when the academic world was still trying to figure out what it was supposed to teach in terms of software engineering, and most universities had basically scrambling to cover relevant topics. The graduates that went through those programs, unlike today's graduates, were woefully unprepared for the reality of software engineering. Two decades ago you could land a job by passing yourself as a "programmer" which meant you knew the syntax of a programming language such as Pascal or Cobol. That's the technical background of your average veteran with >15years of experience.

Therefore, I think you are entirely wrong. If anything, the quality of your average tech worker improved greatly in the last 15 years. Those who arrived in the field actually hit the ground running in today's tech world and often push over and replace much senior team members. Those who enter the field from non-tech fields have the technical chops ro replace both veterans and new graduates. In today's world you need more than claim to know C or Java to actually land a job.

Disclaimer: I'm a veteran with >15years of experience who worked at and was involved in the hiring process of a FANG.

Re: Ask HN: What is the current driver of tech layoffs?

#140

Post by mike_hearn »

analogwzrd wrote: post #52
megaserg wrote: post #18

Gergely Orosz's theory[1]: > An IRS tax code change in Section 174. This change eliminates the ability for businesses to deduct R&D as an expense. > Hear of lots of layoffs directly because of this, as a start. [1] https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1735030983173230944?...

What does the average company spend on R&D percentage-wise? My old company was a contract engineering company, so they always tried to staff everyone possible on projects being paid for by customers. R&D was used to develop internal tech and build expertise on new technologies so it was only maybe 10-25% of most engineer's timesheets. Do other tech companies spend that much more on R&D?

Tech companies routinely report nearly their entire engineering division as R&D for tax purposes.
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