71–80 of 354 posts
Personally I try and get a job at a company whose mission and ethics I believe in so I don't feel like a hapless techno-weenie cog in some generic startup wheel whose driving purpose is to give the founders a nice exit.
Sadly for my skillset, the people hiring are generally evil or their net effect on the world is negative. Looking into goat farming.
I don't understand this fascination with central offices. We live in the year 2024. We should be able to look at our workforce, find small offices, and have hub and spoke networks of offices - and work from home as a fallback. Rent a condo, do a communal office, if you want more close collaboration - shuffle your teams to colocate them - not force them into 1hr commutes into a fucking empty office. Our infrastructure…
People collaborate easier in person. Travel is a downside.
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 useful.
To me, when someone says "there is no replacement for face to face communication", what that usually means is "we distrust people here".
I dislike offices, they are cesspools of misery, dominance and fake smiles. Long live remote work.
I think that's probably true, if you are a company of people who are good at what they do, and if what they do is what is now needed.
But most tech companies seem to be either bad at what they do, or only good at things that are no longer the needed operating mode (e.g., the very common mode of Potemkin Village startup appearance of "growth", in what's essentially an investment scam).
In those situations, it might make sense to wring remaining value of the company, while cutting the highest salaries. If all you need is warm bodies, such as for appearances/obligations, or because you're going to do bad work in any case, then juniors tend cost less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People collaborate easier in person. Travel is a downside.
Other downside: way more coffee breaks and private discussions.
Other signs for me personally: * Sales schedules dictate product development timelines rather than the other way around * Leadership thinks about practical operational/logistics issues only when forced to * The importance of "culture" is brought up without fail when talking about working from the office, and never at other times * Leadership is fond of setting goals and deathly allergic to providing incentives
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you’re right in that I haven’t been looking for jobs recently, but I find it extremely hard to believe that large grants and salaries are no longer a thing in the software industry at large. A few friends-of-friends I know very recently got nice grants and salaries, with large Mega Corps, but that’s always where the money was?
Everyone on HN knows someone's brother's nephew's wife's cousin's former roommate who makes $600K at MegaCorp FAANG but those kinds of opportunities aren't (and have never been) common. Especially now during our first tech bear market in what, 13 years?
At the same time, it’s 13 years of data backing up the claim, though they probably said the same thing before the dotcom bubble exploded, didn’t they, weee
"the product teams that are left after pruning should try to keep the most experienced employees, lay off the junior ones" This inevitably leads to your product being owned by a few devs with no one else who has the org knowledge necessary to make meaningful changes. Your org should be making experienced devs. If it isn't, you don't own your product. Junior devs are your future. They have motivation and want to be ap…
"... the product teams that are left after pruning should try to keep the most experienced employees, lay off the junior ones, and return managers to individual contributor positions where possible. Experienced employees have been through this before, make better judgement calls under stress, and communicate better."
So writes the experienced employee. Adding to the parent comment, experienced employees also may have vested interests and cognitive inertia based on the current situation, the way things have been done until now. If you want new growth, new perspective, new ideas, new energy, new blood can help. They don't know that 'back when Eddie was here, we did it this way ...' and they don't care.
The OP also writes,
managers start to hoard ... and play politics to preserve their products.
That applies to the experienced employees too.
Signs that I've seen before leaving: * There are more VPs than there are restrooms. * The free coffee and soda is no more. * Engineers are co-opted as salespeople ("... and why is the project late?").
from what i understand, pre-COVID this company had a robust corporate culture, even at their satellite offices, and they mentioned i could participate in that, if i chose to do so (i live within 50km of a satellite office). unfortunately, the financial winds also shifted during this limbo time and the company cut a lot of what they did to develop this corporate cultureto accommodate the generous remote/WFH stipends that they gave to their employees as they transitioned from traditional employment arrangements.
however, the (former) CEO of my company mandated RTO two days per week. all remote employees were re-categorized as traditional if they lived within 50km of an office, regardless of employment agreements. hr did a great job sorting through this mess and remote-hire employees were re-re-categorized so there was no mandate.
unfortunately, there's been no re-investment in the corporate culture-building in the satellite offices (hq has gotten quite a few benefits for RTO restored), so those employees are left with no stipend, and no "corporate culture" incentivisation which was a hallmark by which many of them were hired. attrition has skyrocketed and now it's a bigger problem for the company to manage: employee shortages, physical plant underuse, and general mistrust in leadership.
ultimately this all feels like the post-911 airline industry. they instituted baggage fees to compensate for all of their lost revenue and once air travel began booming again, they kept the fees.
as i talk with other people (colloquialism, i know) i dont sense that everyone thinks that RTO is bad, per se, but it seems like many companies are looking to mandate an RTO without investing in restoring the previous environmental and cultural agreements that employees came to understand as a "fringe benefit" within their employment agreement.