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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?

#141

Post by foofie »

eps wrote: post #134
metabro wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> These are two sides of the same medal.

I don't think it is at all. OP put up a strawman on how the tech world is packed with incompetent new arrivals, but corporations are firing people indiscrimately by blindly cutting branches out of their org tree. Corporate's criteria to fire people is deciding which product they can either slow development, freeze, or even completely eliminate. This has absolutely nothing to do with the skills of whatever employees are covered by the firing rounds. These are pure business decisions which bear no connection with the tech aspect of their services. This is not bloat. In fact, I know for a fact that one FANG was still hiring midway through a round of layoffs and their HR was adamant in not even considering internal transfers for those positions. Are we expected to believe that employees who not only passed last year's hiring bar and received positive performance reviews are bloat, but today's new recruits are competent?

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

#142

Post by whatever1 »

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…

"I think a solid 50% of people in tech are still on the chopping block. You can do much more with tools + really smart people in the year 2024 than you could before."

Absolutely not. So much more red tape now rquires a ton more headcount. Just think how much time we spend these days to fix dependency hells and patching security issues.

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

#143

Post by foofie »

Shatnerz wrote: post #107
Mouse47 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only applies to the median, not the average. Every time I see this quote I can't help but think that. Funny tho

In a normal distribution, like lets say a large population, the mean, median, and mode are all equal. I don't see a problem with the quote.

The set of people who pass the hiring bar at companies like Google are not modelled as the normal distribution of the average person you come across in the grocery store.

Companies like Google are not known for hiring morons.

It is a self-aggrandizing dumb comparison, and should be dismissed as such. It reads as a desperate attempt to rationalize away these layoffs as something that only applies to others.

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

#144

Post by gtirloni »

austin-cheney wrote: post #138

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…

I can totally relate. This is painfully close to my experience (including the junior backstabbing to save their jobs and management not wanting to fix anything).

I can't say if this is common in the industry but it's certainly the most depressing situation to be in. I didn't see a way out of this that wasn't quitting. Changing the culture when people below and above you can't even realize they are drowning in their own mistakes seems like an impossible situation.

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

#145

Post by austin-cheney »

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…

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

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

#146

Post by bennyelv »

kypro wrote: post #67
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 worked has completely nosedived in the last 10-15 years. It's definitely got worse over the last ~10 years, but the pandemic era hiring from 2020-2021 took it to new level of bad at many companies. Anyone who had done some basic coding was getting hired at a great salary in 2021, and these individuals are still around today – some now calling themselves "senior developers". But I co…

I have evidence to support this - I lost people from my team who were offered "senior" or "lead" developer roles when they were nowhere near the level required for that kind of job. The level they were at was already a a stretch that they were growing into.

...and with a salary boost to match.

Now in the UK salaries have flatlined and the number of jobs is way down, and this no longer seems to be a problem.

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

#147

Post by bionsystem »

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…

I'm scared about the skill level of some of my coworkers. They are 30+ yo and I hear them debating about whether or not docker needs vt-d activated, if .msi packages can be customized, if terraform is useful for deploying on a single esxi.... All things that can be foind out with 1s of googling they will talk about it for 5 to 15min in meetings (formal or not) and the conclusion is always "we will have to test this".

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

#148

Post by bennyelv »

theturtletalks wrote: post #110
allturtles wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't seem to me to explain why the layoffs are happening now. AFAIK Google has never done a true layoff until last January in the entire history of the company. Now it seems to be already routine. As someone who grew up in the 80s-90s, my historical sense of layoffs is that they were a response to economic hard times, whether industry-wide or company-specific. Companies laid off when profits fell or disappear…

The simple answer would be AI. That’s been the major change in the past year. I find it odd that everyone thinks Uber’s end game is automated cars, but no one seems to be talking about how tech companies end game is automated coders. LLMs are not even close, but what’s to say internally, they don’t have something that works. Or they have enough data to show they need fewer workers since they can leverage AI now.

A counterpoint would be: if you kept the same number of engineers and increased their productivity with AI, rather than keeping output the same and reducing the number of engineers, wouldn't you be producing more value overall?

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

#149

Post by foofie »

austin-cheney wrote: post #145
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…

My go to example of this: jQuery. Now for JS it’s primarily React, but the nosedive, or rather nosebleed, started with jQuery. You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy. The products were crippled and slow but a new wave of people could suddenly participate.

> You no longer had to understand the technology or data structures because there were declarative APIs that made things easy.

What technology or data structure do you think developers don't understand if they work on React projects?

Isn't it silly to claim any person is suddenly incompetent just because they are assigned to a project which uses a particular framework?

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

#150

Post by austin-cheney »

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…

> 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”

Has it though? In my career I have seen people die on that hill, but only because their entire careers were utterly reliant upon those tools. If you cannot execute without a given set of tools you are in no position of objectivity when it comes to those tools, which results in a lot of catastrophically bad business decisions.

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