At this point it's beginning to look like tech companies are doing this because it's the trendy thing to do, along with inserting a few words about AI in their websites and pitch decks.
[deleted]
Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
511–520 of 622 posts
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at a bigco that followed this approach. I think the alleged fungibility of programmers is surface-level. Sure - ~any decent programmer can jump into ~any codebase and do your JIRA tickets. But there's a more holistic ownership you miss out on that's going to be the difference between a system aging gracefully and a system becoming a giant hunk of butchered junk that's been one-small-jira-ticket-ed to death o…
> One of my coworkers literally went into his first oncall shift, [...], and resigned the next morning I've seen people nope right out of there, and (anecdotally) it's always been an experienced person seeing something that was worse than they should've expected, and having an idea how unusually bad it is.
I did this at Netflix when I saw their (then) HTML mobile app. Yikes. Moving on to option #2.
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#513What’s annoying is these companies maintain a “Careers” page with a bunch of job openings. “Oh look we’re the ones who are still hiring. Psych! We’ve been working on firing thousands!” At least GitHub shut down their careers page weeks before they announced their cut.
They removed about 60% of listings back in January (without notifying candidates, mind you), and seem to have removed another chunk today.
An optimist might assume that the remaining listings are legitimate, although it's possible that some recruiters are yet to come online and remove further listings today.
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these…
Why would actual top performers care this much if they would find new job easily + theyre probably not being targeted
You typically are asked to work longer hours to make up for missing staff, deal with a lot of nonsense and get "at least you didn't get laid off" as a reward at the end of it. When the money people turn out their pockets (become low performers in their role) no point in sticking around or at very least, no reason to coutinue to be a high performer when the business is signaling its going to be a low performer in regards to the value its going to be able to deliver to you.
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great anecdote, but burnout generally isn't caused by that for most people. At its core, it's because of stress. Incompetent coworkers and organizations may certainly cause stress, but rarely is it so bad that it causes burnout. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in... https://www.helpguide.org/articles/stress/burnout-prevention...
The ambitious people who take 500k/year jobs at HFT firms are to top .25% of "workers" in some abstract measure, and have different expectations and causes of burnout relative to the median burnout experiencer who is for example a school teacher or administrative assistant in an office job. Some people have an addiction to the fast pace, feeling of being need, and stress.
This is a really good insight! I am not an HFT guy but ex hedge fund and I think this is spot on with my experience and former colleagues.
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startups. Top performers at Google, if they've been smart about their finances, are sitting on a few million in the bank and have runways between ~10 years to infinity. They can afford to work for equity for a few years to take a slice of the pie when the company takes over another industry.
Exactly. My own pet theory about this round of layoffs is as follows. The tech companies spent 2021 massively over-estimating the value of boot camp folks and new grads. They spent 2022 learning a tough lesson. I saw this first hand. So much lost time mentoring low-quality hires. Now they will spend 2023 massively underestimating the value of their senior folks (10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertis…
> Doing this at a FAANG would require pulling in 20+ full timers for a year before shipping our first line of code.
Why are these large companies so slow? Are the 10+ yoe engineers, scientists with deep domain expertise, experienced people managers, etc. helping or hurting this?
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#517It's weird because I've seen job posts for them running for 6 months now and still not be filled. Are they running job ads but not hiring?
There is a reason why they made their compensation calculators private.
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#518Listened to a great podcast about layoffs yesterday ( https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layof... ) The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive. Both with direct and indirect costs (lack of engagement from employees, etc).
It takes long time for the layoff effects to hit the company. The main effect is that you lose the trust of the top performers. These will be the in the lookout for new opportunities the day after the layoffs are done. If you cut 10%, expect 10% from the top to flee within a couple of years. The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these…
> The second effect is related to the fact that companies usually target older people with expensive jobs. In an a big org these are the wizards who have the unwritten cookbooks in their brains. When they leave en masse, a lot of the organizational memory is gone, and expensive operational mistakes of the past are forgotten. These have longer effects that will haunt the company for many years.
This can be a good thing. In my experience these people are generally unambitious people who's claim to fame is that they held a job for a long period of time rather than any innate talent.
And when you have a majority of seniors who's only value is in being a well of knowledge, they're resistant to any change that reduces the value of that knowledge. This can quash innovation and perpetuates the anti-pattern of information hording.
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#519Listened to a great podcast about layoffs yesterday ( https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/02/why-many-companies-get-layof... ) The takeaway is that layoffs are extremely trust destroying for employees NOT laid off, and in the end not clear they're a financial net positive. Both with direct and indirect costs (lack of engagement from employees, etc).
What are the different kinds of layoffs? 7% sounds like one person from every-other-pizza-team but in practice isn’t it more like “we laid off the self driving garbage truck team (70 of 1000 employees) in order to focus on our core infrastructure and future as a builder of large language models”?
Re: Gitlab to lay off 7% of staff
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These companies overhired and now they are realizing that the positive cash flow to justify all of these new employees isn't existing. This is false in a broad sense - the majority of CEOs plan to increase headcount this year in spite of layoffs . You can find examples here and there where it is true, but in general it is not. There's tons of literature of this readily available, but here is an example from as rece…
>the majority of CEOs plan to increase headcount this year in spite of layoffs. This just means that companies are continuing to hirer. It doesn't mean that they plan on increasing headcount to above where it was before the layoff.
[deleted]