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IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

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Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#551

Post by HDThoreaun »

lesuorac wrote: post #137
linuxftw wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated. I've never personally believed in Twitter as a business model, so you're preaching to the choir there. As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.

> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated. They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that. Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it. > Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill…

Twitter targeting has always been ass though. All the employees they had pre elon were unable to improve it over a decade plus.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#552

Post by HDThoreaun »

ctvo wrote: post #79
lhnz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These issues are caused by (1) the buy-out by Elon Musk involving a large amount of debt, and (2) Elon Musk annoying "woke" advertisers who have subsequently deserted the platform. The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.

> The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs. Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product. Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the…

I think the point is that twitter doesnt need new features. Twitter can just be twitter.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#553

Post by HDThoreaun »

lesuorac wrote: post #133
frontman1988 wrote: post #29

Elon showed with Twitter how you don't need hordes of engineers to run a company. He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise). More engineers lead to more useless bullshit being created(like at Google). A lean mean team seems the way to go.

> still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise) It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case. Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase. You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Adv…

Twitter targeting wasnt any better with 10x as many employees. Its ad system has always largely sucked, Elon was just the push advertisers needed to get out.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#554

Post by unethical_ban »

grotted wrote: post #542
unethical_ban wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're going to the wrong bars!

Last weekend I got free beers for knowing the band on a bartender's shirt. We shot the shit about music while I waited for my friends. Made my day. Pubs started as "public houses". What's the point if you don't know the regulars? Why go out? Imagine Cheers with robo Ted Dansen. (Actually, that might be awesome, for very different reasons...)

Absolutely. I get comped drinks a lot at the places I go. In the past seven days, I have gotten five free drinks (three of them were mocktails) across four places.

I sit at my usual wine bar and chuckle watching across the street, people standing in line for 30 minutes to get into a loud club with mediocre drinks. Then again, that club is hugely profitable.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#555

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tylerhou wrote: post #535
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Base compensation, or GSUs? My base compensation was only maybe 1/3rd of my total comp.

Total, and for L3/L4. But this was my impression a few years ago; Google has changed comp a fair bit since then (e.g. vesting schedule).

It was worsening before I left (end of 2021). But relative to anybody else in Canada it was very high, and competitive with plenty of US companies, though yes, not quite as high as Google in MTV.

Around 2014 I recall a spreadsheet making the rounds that people voluntarily and anonymously submitted to, and it showed, yes, about 3/4 the total comp. But if you live in Kitchener-Waterloo like most SWEs do, that was an incredible package as housing costs there were about half of Toronto's.

In general since then all salaries in Canada have not come close to keeping pace with the broken cost of living / housing price bubble here.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#556

Post by neilv »

cableshaft wrote: post #536
neilv wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear that one would be misinterpreted by a significant percentage of American office workers. And by an even higher percentage of overseas colleagues in some countries.

Look at the timestamps. That exchange extends over three days on that site, showing how useless it is in a subtle way.

Consider all the people who are naturally inclined or conditioned to behave like the example, and then consider that many of them will miss the subtlety.

Especially those who for whom American business culture might be foreign. "Oh, they have politeness and trust-building conventions, much like we do. This is more pleasant than Hollywood led us to believe. It seems the difference is that you also verbalize what you are doing in their conventions. Maybe that's because they are a nation with a diverse immigrant mix, so they evolved that to reduce misunderstandings, and to help integrate people to common conventions. That's nice of them, and I will be sure to emulate."

I think the subtlety on that page is tuned for humor to those who already know, not to educate or persuade those who don't.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#557

Post by dh2022 »

bruce511 wrote: post #436
deathpanels wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bailed on a small local company in early 2021. I checked in with how they were doing recently. They laid off all the local developers, minus management (of course). They're hiring exclusively in Africa, the Middle-East, and South America. My current company has done the same thing by emphasizing that we're only hiring in our EU office. I've not seen many US based roles unless they are customer support related. It i…

>> actually innovate with a remote, largely foreign workforce. As distinct from a remote, largely local, expensive workforce? Innovation is often the mix of vision, direction, and implementation. AWS for example, was implemented by an offshore team. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Web_Services#:~:text=... .

AWS was not implemented by an offshore team. The link you pasted implies that EC2 was implemented by an offshore team - which is not correct either. EC2 had two teams, one of which was in Cape Town. The other team was in Seattle - and larger than the one in Cape Town. The rest of AWS at the time (2007) consisted of S3, SQS, DevPay, CDN, SimpleDB (AWS' own DB implementation at the time) etc... These teams were all in Seattle (in the red brick building by I5).

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#558

Post by iamflimflam1 »

wizerdrobe wrote: post #506
iamflimflam1 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the quality is nearly the same. Productivity is a bit lower Slightly insulting to European developers? Though I suspect a lot of European developers would say the same about their US colleagues…

Don’t Europeans typically work less hours than Americans and do so as a point of pride? I’ve spent over a decade lurking HN, Stack Exchange, later Reddit - and I always seem to see Europeans coming in with the “We work 32 hours at most in my country” or “We have a 35 hour standard here.” Wouldn’t that necessarily imply a reduction in productivity?

I've worked in the UK, Europe and the US. From my personal experience I haven't seen any difference in the amount of effort, productivity or skill level.

Maybe I've just been lucky with the people I've worked with. In one company we had a representative of pretty much every major European country working there along with quite a few guys from the US. Everyone worked hard to get stuff delivered.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#559

Post by cmrdporcupine »

qaq wrote: post #408
sosodev wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that make sense? Canadians are cheaper to hire than Americans but not by that much, right?

Immigration is way easier you can hire people from anywhere in the world. Similar thing is happening in Ireland.

This is the answer. It's just way easier to hire here than in the Bay Area.

Now, unlike a lot of other shops, actually the people Google hired were mostly top notch, regardless of where they came from.

Re: IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023

#560

Post by wait_a_minute »

bruce511 wrote: post #430
wyclif wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just as productively remotely ...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.

The problem with this argument is that it implies "you're special". And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special. But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper. Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you…

Once those 200 posts offshore come up to speed, soon they'll be acquiring incomes at comparable levels since skilled thought-work and crafts are always going to be sought after until labor is meaningless.

We saw this trend happening with manufacturing overseas. Chasing the cheapest labor is not an effective strategy in the mid to long term because it means that eventually your supply chain is at risk and the savings delta shrinks to the savings being irrelevant.

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