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Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#91

Post by noisy_boy »

bootsmann wrote: post #80
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do a little root cause analysis. Why do companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, with massive income streams combined with substantial cash holdings, need investor money? Maybe Toyota's "Five Why's" can shed some light on it. We need to fire thousands of people. Why? Because it will make us more attractive for investors. Why? So they put their money in our company. Why? Because that will buoy our stock pric…

And they didn't think about making shareholders richer the years before when they hired all these people or how do you explain that process?

We need to hire thousands of people.

Why? Because market is booming and we need to make the most of it to increase our profits.

Why? Because it will make us more attractive for investors.

Why? So they put their money in our company.

Why? Because that will buoy our stock price, which is important.

Why? Because it makes shareholders richer.

Oh.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#92

Post by Shish2k »

jerrre wrote: post #21
gorgoiler wrote: post #7

I grind away at our codebase day in day out causing me immense personal anxiety and burnout risk and all for what? Well! The honest answer is because software engineering is an incredibly satisfying intellectual pursuit. So satisfying that outside of work in my spare time I literally do it for free , giving away my work to strangers as free / open source software. Why draw a salary then? Or stock? Well obviously I ha…

> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.

Because it seems like a majority of engineers believe themseles to be above-average, and believe that any kind of collective action would reduce all engineering pay to the lowest common denominator. Additionally in the USA there seems to be a strong belief that union leaders only care about themselves while the company execs have the worker’s best interests at heart.

(I’m not sure where any of these ideas come from)

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#93

Post by pjc50 »

username_my1 wrote: post #14
kqr wrote: post #12

> The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices. Maybe I've hung around in the wrong circles too much recently, but this hit me hard. This is basically how the reasoning behind all top management decisions have been communicated to me in the past year: "There is indeed a clearly better alternative…

wrong view / comparios ... in a 5% interest rate environment, companies fight for investors money .. if you don't do the cuts and find a way to be efficient investors will put their money somewhere else that's more profitable. this reasoning is pure and simple and correct, you start from the top, not from the fact "they can afford it" because their job is not to spend the money they have their job is to increase valu…

It's necessary to divide the companies making layoffs into "profitable" and "unprofitable". It is much easier to make the case for layoffs at an unprofitable company: eventually it will either have to appeal to investors or run out of money, at which point everyone will be laid off anyway.

But the big tech companies are actually profitable. Even Amazon. https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/AMZN/financials/annua...

They put $470 billion through the till and ended up with $33 billion net income, for a margin of 7%. That's a normal profitable company, albeit a huge one that continues to eat the remaining retail world. You can look at the quarterly results too, but there's nothing in the rear view mirror that justifies layoffs.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#94

Post by ponector »

Tade0 wrote: post #63

> Even as we speak, they’re streamlining, optimizing, and booking the best contractors in the Bay Area for the next eighteen months. I suppose the author didn't want to sound racist or the equivalent that concerns people of the same skin tone but, somehow, different economic situations and options in life, but over here in Eastern Europe Google and Amazon have been hiring all this time.

They are hiring all this time simply because they can pay 1/5 salary there for the same role

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#95

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

roenxi wrote: post #31

Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better th…

No it doesn't. It works better for 1% of the population. Everyone else is a health crisis away from bankruptcy.

Literally. That's all it takes in the US for everyone who doesn't have an eight-figure-or-more net worth to be staring ruin in the face.

Your comment is exactly the mythology that perpetuates the problem. Exploitation is sold as participation. "Well we're paid fairly well so I guess we must be privileged and upper class."

If you can't stop working tomorrow without ever having to worry about money again - including health crises - you are not privileged or upper class.

Please stop telling yourself you are.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#96

Post by zmxz »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #71
zmxz wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Um. Last time I checked, Google interviews are not known for being easy to the point that just being interviewed says something about the candidate ( they either have an in with someone or have some level of expertise ) and bestows some credence for recruiters. If that is the case, was the person able to fool the entire sets of panels interviewing that person? If so, the failure may not be of the individual. The syst…

> Um. Last time I checked

So every google interview is for dev position and not other positions? Also, dev interviews depend on the person who interviews and not all people are the same. Plus, the difficulty of interviews means absolutely nothing - checking the ability to solve trigonometry problems using C++ gives literally ZERO insight in how the candidate will be USED, managed, what the interaction with other people in the team will be, how much time will be wasted by using google complex amenities etc.

Being able to solve rather trivial problem(s) that tutorial websites don't cover isn't valid measuring stick to assess someone's potential commercial viability.

> The decision was made despite it.

So you're still in favor of keeping employees who don't contribute for.. what reason exactly? It's not even a secret that everyone over-hired and that IT still suffers lack of skilled, competent, ethical, knowledgeable engineers. We didn't produce hundreds of thousands of experts in the last few years, we merely reported we did - and they're not as good as their CV's say. It reflects in job stability.

I'm not the one who created this situation, but it's trivial to observe. Hire thousands who aren't as good. They underperform. Face huge loss of money OR get rid of dead weight. Yes, the boss wants to remain in the seat and rich, but the consequence did not occur because of the evil boss. It _also_ occurred because of incompetent self-proclaimed engineer.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#97

Post by zmxz »

Aeolun wrote: post #25
zmxz wrote: post #13

[flagged]

Hmm, if your employer waits until they have 12000 of you to fire for not doing any work, that is its own kind of incompetence.

Why would you apply for a job with employer who is known to overhire and the entry level is low?

Does that not speak of incompetence of the employee too?

I'm not advocating that boss is good, worker evil. Both are incompetent AF. It's just easy to jump at the boss because boss rich, worker poor.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#98

Post by Shish2k »

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #73
roenxi wrote: post #31

Management needs to be made up of the sort of people who make economically optimum decisions. Without diminishing the horrible experience of being fired; if we have people who purposefully keep tens of thousands of people working on jobs that don't make sense to them, on aggregate society will be much worse for everyone. We have a system that allows people to do unpopular things, like this, because it works better th…

it would be nicer if they made economically optimal decisions in the first place, instead of making a bad decision in 2022, firing a shitload of people in 2023, and going "ah whoops our bad". competent operators wouldn't get into this problem in the first place (or, alternatively, these layoffs are also an incompetent decision and the C-levels are simply following the herd)

I have a feeling the current actions are economically optimal, and so, they’ll keep happening

- if they optimisitcally hire a ton of people, then fire most of them, that’s expensive in the bad years

- if they only hire as many people as they need, then they’ll be eaten by the bigger-risk-taking competition in the good years

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#99

Post by pjc50 »

Zvez wrote: post #56
jerrre wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would they get it if the other top engineers and I all downed tools or walked out as a group? No Why not try that? Or use it as leverage? If you believe this.

The (not so) fun fact here is that majority of IT workers won't do this. While exec might want their mansions, we want our latte and iphones. I work at a company which recently had big chunk of layoffs and I can clearly see how a lot of people are just relieved that they were not laid off. Yes, there are talks how everyone is outrageous, they are mostly kitchen talks. The company literally fired thousands of people w…

I think, and this will not be well received, that US tech workers actually know they are paid extremely well compared to the rest of the working population, and that they don't have the right social skills and connections to get into the even more inner exec circle (which is also limited in number), and therefore although it's not as good as it was it's still better than 95% of the population.

Re: Macroeconomic changes have made it impossible for me to want to pay you

#100

Post by strix_varius »

mshake2 wrote: post #11

What ever will those TikTok tech workers do now that they can't stream their comped meals and coffee breaks and afternoon relaxation massages?[0] If only it was illegal for The Man to fire these valuable employees! 0. https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1617534649508716544

I've worked in several places like this, with similar over-the-top perks... and they make me cringe. It's a gross, flashy, consumerist, classist use of funds.

Sure, make your office pleasant to work in. Locate it near good lunch places, or even provide lunch. But the hammock room, massage chair lounge, private museum/art collection, and rooftop bar are all aspects of my employers that I'm ashamed to even discuss.

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