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Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

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Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#291

Post by WalterBright »

turdprincess wrote: post #208
gavinmckenzie wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first couple of years I would worry about this, but I haven’t in a very long time. The only occasions when I’ve had a gap between contracts is when I’ve chosen to take a break. I manage my finances to ensure I have several months of equivalent income saved. My process is that 60 days before the end of my current contract, whether my current client has said they intend to renew or not, I start seeking other con…

contacted for many years as well. All my contracts always ran a year or longer. In the end, it felt very similar to full time employment - it was 9 - 5, regular meetings, coworkers, etc.. At the same time, I didn’t get any benefits, health insurance or paid holidays. I am not sure I want to contract like that again. It has most of the downsides of regular employment but none of the benefits. I think in the USA it wou…

When I worked at Boeing in 1980 or so, there were a lot of contract engineers there. We did the same work. The difference was:

1. full time employees got benefits, contractors did not

2. full time employees got notice before layoffs, contractors could get dismissed at a moment's notice

3. contractors got paid double what full time employees did

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#292

Post by IX-103 »

automatom wrote: post #254
2devnull wrote: post #239

No sympathy for the average American worker, who is impacted even more so by inflation, which robs them of their life savings and job security at their min wage job. Over-entitled and over payed young tech workers who have displaced poorer people and haven’t been astute enough to save their extravagant salaries, spending it instead on $30 door dashed organic salads now want to bleat about how “boo hoo life isn’t fair…

It’s the fed dummies! Why is it that the C-suite folks, who are supposed to understand macroeconomic trends or "Economics 101" as you're calling it, didn't see this coming and didn't make better decisions to not over-hire and mitigate reactionary cost-cutting. These companies have billions of cash on hand, but they choose the easy short term route of slashing labor costs to appease shareholders. I would argue this is…

Why didn't the C-suite folks do better? Because their contracts hold stock prices above all else.

That means that making any group of stockholders unhappy risks reducing their earnings. Many stockholders don't understand macroeconomics. Many see the news and start calling for action, however misguided.

When enough demand action, the C-suite is forced to act, even when they know the actions are symbolic at best or counterproductive at worst.

That's assuming they know best. The C-suite command their salaries not because of what they know, but because of who they know. So making economic predictions may not be their strength.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#293

Post by kgwgk »

Aeolun wrote: post #69
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do investors sell if they company income falls for a quarter? I'm guessing yes, and that answers the question of whether the company looks to the short term when seeking only to satisfy investors. The whole system is wrong.

Why would the company care if the investors sell? They’ll happily buy again when things are looking up. Only when things are going so terrible that the board is trying to get you replaced is when it becomes important. If the board aims to replace you because of a bad quarter in a bad economy… find a different company to be CEO of I guess.

Who is "the company"? From your comment it seems that you consider that the board is not part of it.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#294

Post by WalterBright »

gorgoiler wrote: post #7

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…

> So why is their exit equivalent to several mansions and mine is around about a year’s worth of salary?

Because their decisions make or break the company, and your's do not.

For a well known example, Steve Jobs took over Apple when it was 90 days from bankruptcy. With the same group of workers, he took it to the biggest company in the world. Just by making different leadership decisions. That's why he made the big bucks.

For a more recent example, see how James Daunt turned around Barnes&Noble:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barne...

> some pie that was rightfully mine

Found your own company, and the pie will be rightfully yours.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#295

Post by WalterBright »

John23832 wrote: post #249
Aunche wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Regulations should exist. Econ 101 is a prerequisite to learning about exceptions to Econ 101, which evidently the general populous has not. This is why people get surprised when the solution of throwing more money at a limited supply of housing and college slots ends up increasing the price of housing and college. You can make a good argument that protections need to be made to protect income workers and that w…

I'll reply down here. > This narrative is counterfactual to how capitalism actually works. Your worth is determined by supply and demand. Investors would never agree to paying American developers twice as much as European developers if they knew they would be on the hook for them until their cash reserves bled dry. Supply and demand works best when the data about the market is symmetric. In the job market it is not.…

> Supply and demand works best when the data about the market is symmetric.

It works efficiently despite information asymmetry.

It's called "risk". Risk always factors into prices. You pay more at a dealership because your risk is less. You pay less for a used car because your risk is more. A job that is more secure pays less. A job that is less secure pays more.

The market efficiently prices in information asymmetry.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#296

Post by linkjuice4all »

coldpie wrote: post #164
safety1st wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I've lost my heart but it's hard for me to find fault with the way Nadella communicated MSFT's layoffs. They're a business, they need to reallocate capital and headcount, he doesn't shed any crocodile tears, but they are providing above market severance benefits, end of transmission. If I have to be laid off I want it to go something like this.

> They're a business, they need to reallocate capital and headcount Consider this: no, they don't.

To that point - didn't these companies and their investors "invest" in a bunch of human resources and then devalue them by either laying them off or giving the work of laid-off workers to the remaining resources?

If executives at a company rented a bunch of store fronts expecting to increase their footprint and then said "we're bad at our jobs and didn't realize we weren't going to do anything with these store fronts" the investors would (presumably) ask them to leave or cut their performance bonuses. It's not like these companies don't have massive amounts of data (I'm looking at you Google) to analyze and estimate a market and determine if they needed the resources to begin with.

Another thing I don't see mentioned often enough is the impact that this has on state governments. I can imagine that the people working in the California state government would be concerned if several large companies took a bunch of store fronts off the market and then just dumped them all in one fell swoop.

Are these managers, executives, and presidents so bad at their job that they can't find anything to do with a bunch of talented employees that they spent time and money on-boarding?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#297

Post by t-writescode »

brookst wrote: post #289
t-writescode wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment thread you're responding to is reflecting on how painful it is to be laid off when: * showing profits * showing multi-billion in investments in new companies * when the money saved is tiny compared to the increased year-over-year profits on a topic that's a short story in the form of a letter written by someone pretending to be a CEO and telling the story's real truth about a layoff: that they don't feel…

Apologies if I sounded like I was unsympathetic to the people. I’ve been laid off, I know it hurts. But I guess I don’t see how empathizing with that means. . . What? Microsoft should cancel an investment they think is strategic? Microsoft should keep job roles they no longer things are important? Highly profitable companies like Microsoft are not zero sum. Nobody said “let’s lay people off so that we can invest in o…

A useful question I think can be asked in circumstances like this is "what value does this new comment bring to the table?"

If a family in financial trouble just lost their son to a car accident, for example, is it the right time to say "well, at least you won't need to pay for his college."?

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#298

Post by no-s »

kqr wrote: post #12

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…

> “...The fact is that's not what we have chosen in reality, so we must shoulder the heavy burden of choosing the inferior alternative and give it our best shot.”

HaHaOnlySerious. A stepping stone on the mysterious garden path of bad decision-making that leads to consultant$, ho$tile takeover$, etc.

Aligns with the news that ChatGPT could pass b-school exams[1]. I think this should be very threatening for low skilled middle management.

[1] https://nypost.com/2023/01/23/chatgpt-outperforms-humans-on-...

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#299

Post by projectazorian »

Jensson wrote: post #231
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think people underestimate what a CEO does. On HN coding is more respected than social skills. A software engineer is likely to crumble in 30 seconds when they are interviewed on CNBC.

> On HN coding is more respected than social skills No it isn't, you see people saying "social skills are more important than technical skills" everywhere people discuss such things, and they get upvoted a lot. People saying the opposite tend to get heavily downvoted. So to me it looks like even on HN social skills are more respected than technical skills, at least in threads where we discuss what skills are importan…

Maybe on HN, but not in practice in the industry. The general rule at most SV companies is that poor leetcode performance in interviews is an automatic no hire. Poor social skills, on the other hand, are handwaved away unless the candidate did something really egregious.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#300

Post by ajuc »

gavinmckenzie wrote: post #218
turdprincess wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

contacted for many years as well. All my contracts always ran a year or longer. In the end, it felt very similar to full time employment - it was 9 - 5, regular meetings, coworkers, etc.. At the same time, I didn’t get any benefits, health insurance or paid holidays. I am not sure I want to contract like that again. It has most of the downsides of regular employment but none of the benefits. I think in the USA it wou…

It’s definitely not for everyone, and certainly living in a locale without social safety nets like healthcare would add to the stress.

This is the funny stuff - contracting in countries with public healthcare has very little downsides.
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