Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

mcsweeneys.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 333 posts

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#221

Post by cookiengineer »

complianceowl wrote: post #23

Isn't this kind of weird? Some try to blame capitalism, but AI is not capitalism. It is technological progress. Every president and dictator, no matter what type of economy or political system they have, are trying to develop AI right now. It's something that goes beyond any economic system and is a fact and force that can't be stopped and one must simply reckon with. What we have in the US today is not capitalism. I…

"We are the horses building a car to replace horses."

...said the retired horse in its shed in 1886.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#222

Post by importantbrian »

baq wrote: post #182
hadlock wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems t…

It absolutely isn’t functioning the same. Technically maybe everything works more or less as well as before, after a year. …but the experience is quite bad now: every other thread is full of crypto and/or onlyfans promoting bots. The algorithm displays a lot of obvious attention grabbing posts which have 300 replies, 10 of which are from humans. There’s a constant stream of bots trying to connect with you via follows…

I don't think it even technically works as well as before. The iOS app seems mostly fine, but on web the feed or tweet fails to load and shows the blue retry button probably 1/3rd of the time for me now. Combined with all the bot issues you mentioned, that has dramatically reduced my Twitter usage. It's become incredibly frustrating to use. I only use it now when I click on a tweet link that's been shared with me.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#223

Post by danaris »

matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

"If hundreds or thousands of people suddenly have no income, putting them in a position of severe hardship and potential homelessness, but it doesn't have any direct negative effects on me personally, is it really a bad thing?"

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#224

Post by darth_avocado »

hadlock wrote: post #145
Aurornis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future l…

Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems t…

I worked at Twitter and let me tell you that's not how it works. When you whack most of the engineers out of the company, and if it still continues to work, that doesn't mean you don't need that many engineers. It means the following:

1. The ones remaining are practically working 24x7 every day for essentially the same pay, with the promise of more.

2. You keep falling behind on all the things you need to do to keep things alive and compliant. This eventually comes back in the form of outages or worse, FTC fines.

3. There is very little room for forward looking work, which means you are sacrificing opportunities for growth. E.g.

> 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today

These were two very different numbers. The numbers in 2015 were DAUs and the numbers today are mDAU. mDAU are in layman terms users that can be monetized. This number was ~180M in 2018, so the growth was there. Part of the reason why the ad revenue was growing for Twitter during that phase.

4. Safety and Trust on the platform drops quite a bit when you are understaffed. Regardless of your political beliefs or whether you're team Elon, when there are 10 people banning CP instead of 100, there is no way you could argue objectively that the platform stays the same.

There's plenty of other problems, but you would not know they exist unless you're one of the people left after the figurative massacre.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#225

Post by [deleted] »

silverquiet wrote: post #38
Fin_Code wrote: post #21

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is connected to the bond market. Companies are running out of operating capitol. When they try and get an operating loan the terms are onerous. Rather than refinance they are electing to perform layoffs to maintain solvency. It does not matter how good you are doing in contrast to previous years. If your loan comes due and you can't afford another one to keep that revolving credit going…

I work for a company that does something that I guess is a bit unusual - they use the revenue from our customers to pay employee salaries. If you would have asked me, this would seem like the obvious way to do things, but I'm told that debt is very important for some reason or other. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, "I don't know how the economy works".

[deleted]

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#226

Post by tamimio »

matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

Simply because the impact never happens instantly. Companies life span is different than humans, and just because you didn’t see it happening in the coming months right after they did, it doesn’t mean there’s no gradual decline, keep in mind this also does not account the gradual hiring after that event, they news will be reported that they terminated 10%, but who’s going to report a 1% hiring every month in the year after?

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#227

Post by joshjje »

sobriquet9 wrote: post #203
matusp wrote: post #10

If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.

You can fire half the commercial pilots, and planes will continue to fly without a hitch. Why have two pilots, when one will do. Trucks have one driver and work just fine. Eventually some planes will crash, but it's ok as long as it happens after effective management gets their bonus and moves on to optimise another company.

And make them pay for their own diapers.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#228

Post by importantbrian »

pygar wrote: post #202
salad-tycoon wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

I'm getting a lot of "tweets aren't loading right now" type errors. The app keeps jumping to the top when I'm scrolling into someones timeline. Sometimes i see my replies twice. Sometimes things just don't load. It's seems like death by a thousand paper cuts. That said, I'm sure the technical issues can be fixed eventually. I'm also getting a lot of garden variety "West/Christianity vs East/Islam" type race baiters a…

It's so buggy right now. It feels like it's gone back to the old fail whale days. "It works" is a pretty low bar to clear. On the upside, it gave me back a lot of free time, because the Twitter experience is just too frustrating to deal with anymore.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#229

Post by bombcar »

no_wizard wrote: post #143
crazygringo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why are executives who set the company priorities not also axed? They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision. Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not. And managing staff size is like 1% of their job. They're also busy running their divisions, managing roadmaps and objectives and all sorts of non-staff resource planning, etc. It's entirely reasonable to thi…

>Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively…

Sometimes a company is moribund much, much earlier than people realize. When you're faced with "do X or shut down" you will often chose to do X, even if X is pretty likely to result in shut down because you have a "die now, maybe die later" thing.

Or you can do a massive pivot, which has successfully worked at times.

Re: Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

#230

Post by p_l »

ejb999 wrote: post #195
google234123 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about “ I stopped changing my oil every 50 miles and my car runs fine”

that is more like it. Or we fired 1/2 the scrum masters, so now each project only gets 50% of one instead of a FT one, and BTW, all of a sudden developer meetings get cut in half as a side benefit. Every large company I have ever worked for could have easily fired 1/3 the staff and ran just fine indefinitely - but only if they fired the right third.

In my experience usually the real benefit would have been if they hired the right kind of positions. No, not "hire better developers/etc".

Hire for positions they don't hire because they seem superfluous.

I think in every bigger project over the last 10 years I asked, in otherwise reasonably staffed companies, for a technical writer. Even part time one. Fohgeddaboutit. Sometimes the issue is, as sacrilegious as it sounds even to me, not enough managers. Because sometimes you need people whose only role is to be communication points, or people whose job is to be responsible and accountable.

In most of those companies we could probably fire a lot of people too, probably mostly among executives and a lot of those invested in SAFe and the like...

Post reply on HN