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amazon manager here: it's the same with us. our director gave told us to manage out more people this year to hit our revised headcount targets for next year. there are no layoffs, just larger-than-normal targets for managing out people. I talked with friends across various orgs and the targets seem to range between 10% to 25% for different teams (as opposed to 5% for normal years).
what does "managing out" mean?
It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…
You’re forgetting that they also own WhatsApp, the primary mode of communication for several countries.
Ditto on the AR/VR metaverse thing if macrumors is to be believed.
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Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.
It doesn't have to be this evil (although I have no reason to believe it won't at Amazon). A good manager can do some 'managing out' simply by communicating to her team that there are reduced opportunities for promotion or new projects coming up, and that they may be layoffs. At any time in any workplace a certain fraction of people are actively looking for a new job, and another, usually much larger fraction are ope…
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There's a massive difference between constructive dismissal and managing out. Managing out can often be as simple as a manager saying "Hey, your performance isn't great your not on course to get any bonus or raise this year" and the employee deciding "Fuck this, I'm off". Instead of in normal times, where you're trying to retain people and the conversation is often "Hey, you're making really good progress but there's…
Do I understand correctly, you are saying that 5-20% of your employees will quit after having a conversation simply noting that he or she will not be receiving a bonus or raise this year, or similar? That’s really quite tenuous, especially in this economy.
The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller. (The AI work i…
I've worked at large corporations before and from many accounts on here and elsewhere I get the sense that there are many of the same problems which essentially boil down to being a cog. You might be a cog in fancy wheels with catered lunches and bean bag chairs but in the end its probably difficult to see where contributions are helping actual customers.
I've also heard similar accounts about working for various government levels and suspect its the same conundrum. I think its unavoidable when humans organize a workplace into thousands of people.
Does anyone even remember Libra?
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You’re forgetting that they also own WhatsApp, the primary mode of communication for several countries.
Apple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash. Ditto on the AR/VR metaverse thing if macrumors is to be believed.
iMessage is only really relevant in the USA. Meanwhile, Whatsapp is huge in Latin America, Europe, Africa, parts of Asia
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Hiring graduates at $200k is a major part of where the money goes when you’re spending billions on unprofitable software projects.
I'd wager that astronomical housing costs are the biggest factor in these absurd salaries, followed by healthcare. In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class. Healthcare is just the same.
The causal relationship is in the opposite direction: high salaries cause high housing costs. Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before. There are also plenty of places with low rent that have higher tech salaries than places with higher rents (compare essentially any US city to Toronto).
> In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class.
At least in California, there's not that much overlap between tech company investors and landowners. The housing ownership is much more distributed, and often to "mom and pop" landlords. This is the flow of money in Silicon Valley (expressed in a slightly comic manner): https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1400165321609199620
It's a bit different in other locations with more consolidation in land ownership, but even there, I doubt there's much overlap (I have less knowledge of housing dynamics outside California, because they actually change, so I'm just guessing here).