601–610 of 1001 posts
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He's also giving out massive severance packages
Is four and a half month's pay considered massive in the US? What do you normally get when you're made redundant?
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Now imagine you run a mowing service with 4 employees. Suddenly an unbounded number of people appear on the job market who are ready to work for your company at a 5% the cost of your previous employees. Best of all, they become more competent and less expensive over time. You can't yet fire your entire original roster all at once since they need to teach the new hires the specifics of the job, but after that's done,…
No sane person is claiming AI can fully replace a human worker today. It is a productivity multiplier at least for now.
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> I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023 because apparently they thought that these no-interest loans/free money would just last forever. Partially. The first nail in the coffin was the change in assumptions around output. Before 2023, there was an assumption that more bodies means more output. After the massive X/Twitter…
>After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false. I agree with your sentiment, but this example is awful. Twitter cut engineering staffed, pissed off advertisers that caused an exodus, had its stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again. Only to be "aquired" by Musk's AI wing. Maybe there was a la…
I'm not agreeing with Musk - his personal brand is toxic and destroyed X/Twitter's fairly healthy ad revenue machine. That said he was right to highlight that X/Twitter was extremely overstaffed, and it was his mass layoff that showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.
> I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.
Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media (the M in TMT), especially given the overlap with VFX.
As such, being close to where much of the business of media/entertainment exists is the best for your career - LA, NYC, ATL, SeaTac, and ATX, but not the Bay.
> I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.
Yep. But if you are in the gaming industry, it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.
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The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say. If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one
Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs. It didn't. Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt. I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices. Even within large compani…
It did, just not obviously. Twitter used to be the store brand social network, vanilla and reliable but not overly obnoxious. It made good money from brand advertisers like Ford, General Mills, and Sony. City governments felt ok with using it to distribute community information. The platform tried its hardest to stay middle of the road and not let things sway too far one way or the other.
Today it is a real time bidding marketplace for changing public discourse. You simply buy blue checkmark accounts in bulk and spread your message free of any content moderation or safeguards. So the Chinese, Russians, and Saudis can get into a bidding war over what rural whites believe to be fact.
With the ad revenue sharing program you don't even need to write the content anymore (one of the biggest things foreign influence campaigns struggle with). Just find someone who is saying the "right" thing already and promote them. Twitter in turn underscores the authenticity of these voices by adding "transparency" features that list where someone is from - because your average person does not know a damn thing about proxies.
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If you make bad enough decisions, your customers leave, your company dies, and/or you are fired by the board. CEOs get fired all the time, and companies die all the time. It's part of life, and so are layoffs. There's no need for some sort of additional punitive actions to be taken. If you control a company, you have the right to do layoffs, and if you're an employee, you take that risk of being laid off because you…
It’s fine if someone doesn’t believe that executives should not be held to additional high consequence standard, but you’re boiling down this argument without addressing the central element at play which is viability and wealth gap. Now, you can absolutely hold a different position here, that’s okay, I’m fine with that, but at least address it head on. Consider the fact that those getting laid off have disproportiona…
Yes, yes, they do. So what?
All else being equal, greater wealth generally brings greater ease and comfort. A billionaire’s life is easier than a millionaire’s, a millionaire’s life is easier than being a middle-class Westerner, middle class living is easier than living below the poverty line, living below the poverty line in a wealthy country is easier than being poor in a developing country, and being poor in a developing country is easier than surviving as a subsistence farmer or living without shelter at all.
All else being equal, if you're a majority owner in a company, you're going to get away with a lot more than if you are a smaller owner, or a non-owner, or an employee, or a customer. All else being equal, if you're a general in the military, you're going to have more power and more leeway than if you're a lieutenant or a private.
Etc etc.
I fail to see what is wrong with this.
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I feel like the idea that X doesn't owe you Y is fundamentally at odds with the fact that humans are a cooperative species and survive the best when they are cooperating. A choir can hold a note together because individuals can stop singing to breathe, safely covered by peers who will take their turn to breathe later. What is the point of organizing socially if not for the benefit of all society members? I know we ha…
"humans are a cooperative species" Humans are violent, self-centered tribalists. What species are you referring to? Not homo sapiens.
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it's already there in a large part of the country. being a swe in SF or NY is way different than being a swe in Birmingham, Alabama or Tampa, Florida or even a truly large city like Houston where you're writing internal software for a bank, or an oil company, or a hospital system. Most software jobs are not sexy startups or working for Netflix
Yeah but why is working for Netflix even sexy? At the end of the day it is almost a telecom.
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To be fair X has significantly declined as an experience since Elon laid of 80%. I assume many of those he laid off were soft skill people that helped curate the experience.
As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.) And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then. https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...
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If LLMs really multiply productivity, why would you fire people and handicap the boost? I have 100 people that can now do the work of 200 people thanks to a new tool. How is the logical response to fire half of them and bring my productivity back to where it was before?
Because there isn't an unlimited amount of productive work to be done. Sure, a bowling ball factory in a world that demands unlimited bowling balls should take the productivity multiplier AND retain the employees, because they ought to make all the bowling balls they possibly can. But CashApp jira tickets are not a bowling ball factory in a world with unlimited bowling ball demand. At a certain point, you're just pay…
This is admitting the company is in maintenance mode at best