311–320 of 354 posts
Sustainable growth is far better than boom and bust cycles. I guess if you're shutting down entire product verticals you can reduce the blast radius. Doing partial cuts across the board can cause top talent to look elsewhere.
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People collaborate easier in person. Travel is a downside.
Except, some jobs really really don't require much if any collaboration. We've been having to come back into the office since last September. In all that time, I've only spoken to another person a single time. Literally one hour in one day in the past 5 months. All meetings are still over zoom and when I'm not in a meeting, I just find some place in the building to sit and work. Except many people still weren't comin…
Whereas in my previous role, going remote would have had a negative effect, because we liked talking to each other and working with each other. I believe that on that team our online communication would have been more and better-quality than what I have now, but still less collaborative than in-person.
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People collaborate easier in person. Travel is a downside.
Many of the largest software projects in history have been implemented by remote workers. Like the Linux kernel. But if you require to read people's reactions and body language and try to figure out if they are telling the truth, or brag about your socioeconomic status or appearance, or if you need to assert dominance over others, or do social engineering like mirroring other's movements, then face to face is perhaps…
There was an interesting graph a few years back about amazon and all the warehouses they are building. They had grown from ~100,000 employees in 2013 to 1.5 million in 2021. The growth rate would suggest they'd employ everyone in north america in only a few years. While possible in theory, the government could never allow it. If a corporation were able to grow to that size, they essentially become the government. Bez…
> the government could never allow it. If a corporation were able to grow to that size, they essentially become the government the US government is already overwhelmingly something that is structured by and for the benefit of corporations
This is an interesting subject.
The majority of tax revenue for the federal government comes from income taxes.
Only about 10% comes from corporations. But it's easier to deal with corporations and there is no income tax without corporations. So it makes sense to mostly work with corporations.
What's also quite interesting, in the last 50 years, there's no functional change to taxation in the USA. Politicians are afraid to make any major changes in fears of screwing it all up.
But worse,during the financial crisis, the USA basically went bankrupt. There is no such thing as bankrupt though.
The USA needs to find about 7 trillion $ in the next couple years. That's a pretty big, that's another great depression.
For me, the main sign that it's time to leave a company is when I start fantasizing regularly about leaving the company. My gut seems to be wiser than my head on this stuff. Nearly every time that I've moved on, it's turned out to be the right call in hindsight.
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Nailed it. In fact, individual contributor salaries were public and constituted ~80% of the company's entire annual budget. Rent, utilities and all management salaries were contained in the remaining 20%.
And how much was... profit? When you say budget that's not directly tied to the revenues of the company, that's just the amount they decide to spend this year.
Definitely feeling this at another FAANG I think there’s something about post-pandemic work in software that just isn’t working. I don’t think it’s just interest rates or a hiring downturn, nor immediate causes like founders leaving (because I see this sickness at most big tech companies these days). Personally, I believe that hybrid work is not going well. Fully remote teams are good, fully onsite teams are good. Wi…
Those people already did not really contribute before, it just wasn't so visible maybe.
And I think this is highly demotivating for the people who do actually contribute.
It will take some time for people to internalize this.
Of course it all changes if money becomes free again.
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That sounds like you are totally winning! If everything is urgent, that is a strong symptom that you completely lost control and you should not be running a project. The value you add as a decision maker is making decisions that mitigate the risk of being in a scenario where everything is urgent, that is, a crisis . If you are constantly in crisis mode running for your life because you failed catastrophically.
I’m not sure why you’re being so hostile here. I agree everything can’t be a crisis, and if there were a way to have people in the office only when something important is happening, I think quite a lot of companies would go for it. But you can’t set remote work as the standard and then announce that there’s crunch time in July so everyone has to come in 5 days a week.
Remote work is the future, and irrational environment-ruining offices are the past.
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If they can't justify a few dollars for snacks, what do you think they're gonna do about your six digit salary...
Can't justify money for snacks but can justify executive bonuses is why we need unions.