101–110 of 482 posts
The hedge fund guys would say the same about your team. I know you are emotional but this is uncalled for.
Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C# and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft stack. Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is…
I know this is what everyone says after leaving a company if they don't want to burn bridges, and I bet it's even fairly true to Eric's experience. I'm also entirely sympathetic to his frustration with both the immediate experience of being laid off for any reason and the broader large-organization irrationality about costs.
And yet. We're talking about Facebook, a company whose impact on the world is very hard to see as net positive, from teen mental health to national politics. I just really wish it was the industry norm that people who are, in local ways, genuinely thoughtful and kind, and have many employment options, would also think seriously about what their work is ultimately building.
A graphics artist on a Corridor Crew YouTube video recently said that you must love the day-to-day of your job because a lot of what you make will never see the light of day. I think this is especially true when you are not the owner of your work's fate.
This is not a criticism or judgment on Eric's feelings towards his work being abandoned. He seems like someone who has loved every minute of problem solving. And it doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel feelings when your work gets tossed. But it's something that resonated with me, and it might resonate with you too.
Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C# and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft stack. Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is…
Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal's famous line (that is commonly misattributed to Mark Twain: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up to me and gave me some feedback that none of the business-types had articulated:
Products are either vitamins or painkillers. People buy painkillers, because they're in pain. People postpone vitamins, because nothing is wrong and the benefits are always "later."
I didn't 100% change what I chose to build over the years, but from that time to today, I have worked on always spinning what I sell as an antidote to a customer's pain point, rather than as an investment they make to pay off eventually.
p.s. I don't know where that dev got the "vitamin/painkiller" metaphor, but it's sticky!
3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine a retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they did the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.
There’s a big difference between project work and operational work, including what kind of individuals it attracts and therefore what many of those individuals gain work satisfaction from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year. It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They are…
How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?
However, they’re paying out bonuses twice a year, annual (PB)RSUs, (specifically for us) around almost $30k/yr in employer contributions to health insurance and our HSA combined, music streaming subscription, and so on.
The benefits, the bonuses, the extras, they all add up and are all very company specific. I’m not saying you’re wrong by any stretch. But with the number of extra benefits, healthcare, and everything else that’s different from employer to employer, we are all just guessing.