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

Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 136 posts

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#31

Post by eddsh1994 »

_xnmw wrote: post #13
anthropodie wrote: post #5

I am happy with my current employer but I always liked Paul Graham's idea of not having a boss[0]. I had read it quite a while back but here's the gist of it: Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of…

> 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do Citation needed. Even wolf packs have alphas, as I understand "hunter gatherer" societies were even less flat, if you disobeyed the leader you had your head chopped off.

I looked into the whole Alpha thing when I was training my husky and found it’s actually an outdated model/idea

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#32

Post by giancarlostoro »

anthropodie wrote: post #5

I am happy with my current employer but I always liked Paul Graham's idea of not having a boss[0]. I had read it quite a while back but here's the gist of it: Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of…

WhatsApp had 55 employees when Facebook bought them out.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#33

Post by ghaff »

generalizations wrote: post #24
_gabe_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve would like to disagree with this sentiment ;) Sure valve isn't making GPUs or CPUs, but they did make the steam deck, in addition to the largest online game store, and several high quality AAA games, and the valve index. They apparently have around 250 people according to a quick Google search, but that still goes against the mindset that you need 10s of thousands of employees to make a successful large scale t…

A 250 person organization assembling semi-off-the-shelf components and gluing mostly-preexisting software together is a very different proposition than 20-50 people building a modern CPU from scratch. That's an order of magnitude more complexity than the steam deck, and an order of magnitude fewer people.

Right. It means there's a lot of things that don't get created--or companies cooperate in some sort of fairly tightly coupled network that doesn't look that different from one big company. (But probably less efficient if you follow Coase.)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#34

Post by waynesonfire »

sameEvrWuz wrote: post #14
anthropodie wrote: post #5

I am happy with my current employer but I always liked Paul Graham's idea of not having a boss[0]. I had read it quite a while back but here's the gist of it: Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of…

Paul does not have a , he has bosses; it’s called economic demand. His privilege evaporates if the mind palace built to empower VCs, b2b SaaS vanishes. He adjusts to government policy. More bosses. He’s just trying to sound like he lives on his own world, like the entitled child he is.

and yours flourishes? thanks for your feedback, now go sweep the entry-way.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#35

Post by _jcrossley »

I’m taking some time to study classical guitar with a private teacher at ~conservatory level. Feels like my form of “quitting tech to work on a farm”.

I’ll also work on my own personal projects and see if any of them can gain enough momentum as a lifestyle business to avoid returning to soul-sucking BigTech.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#36

Post by don-code »

f6v wrote: post #2

Your employer doesn’t care about you the same way your parents would. Good employers care about enabling you to do your job effectively and efficiently. But it’s all transactional. Doesn’t mean that you can’t find an arrangement that’s good for both you and employer. But don’t ever think it’s like a family. Saves you a lot of frustration. See it for what it is.

It feels easy to think that it's the case that your employer and coworkers are a family.

In my case, I stayed six years in my first job out of college - as did most of my coworkers (the company was pretty stable up until the very end, when I left). I made a lateral shift within the company, and also made it to senior, under their wing.

The illusion started to come apart after a layoff (35% company-wide, 45% in my department, 60% of my team). I started looking for another employer at that point, because it was pretty obvious I'd only been retained to keep the lights on. When I gave my resignation, I wasn't met with any attempt at retention like higher pay. I _was_ told that it'd be personally detrimental for me to leave, because the company was my family (they knew I'd had some unrelated domestic issues that year), and without them, I'd be lost.

And of course, I agreed with them - for one week, after which I shook my head, said "what on earth am I thinking?", and resigned again. It took some time to realize that it was mostly a manipulative attempt on their part.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#37

Post by etempleton »

anthropodie wrote: post #5

I am happy with my current employer but I always liked Paul Graham's idea of not having a boss[0]. I had read it quite a while back but here's the gist of it: Paul mentions that we work best when we work in a group of 8-20 people in a flat structure like our hunter gatherer ancestors use to do. Each member have their own roles and responsibilities and each individual contributes the well being and future security of…

I agree. From my experience a team of about 20 individuals treated as roughly equal works best. Their likely need to be some hierarchy, but it should be a high amount of trust. I think this works well to about 25-30 individuals at which point splitting the teams might be considered.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone doing some absurd stuff after getting laid off?

#39

Post by noahth »

I worked for several years as an independent contractor; when my last big project ended several months ago, I decided to take a sabbatical for the climate. So far that has meant spending more time with my kids, learning to compost, building some new raised garden beds, mending some clothes that I previously would've replaced, reading more books, and various other little things. I plan to start volunteering soon with the local tool library, and there are tons of other things we'd like to do to reduce our budget and carbon footprint, when we can get to them.

I know not everyone can afford to "just take time off" but among those laid off from a tech company and browsing HN, surely some fraction of you could afford to do the same. You will still have a career to come back to if you spend a year turning your attention and energy to the climate crisis. BUT if you're under 40 or so (I'm 37), you may find that there is not a recognizable planet to come back to if you continue to focus on your career until the retirement age we were brought up to expect.

Post reply on HN