[HN Gopher] A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work
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A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work
Author : mertbio
Score : 838 points
Date : 2025-01-27 08:22 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| You'll never be the same again regardless. Food for thought.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Amazing job off capturing nearly word for word what I've said to
| people and thought before, during, and after being laid off. The
| signs, symptoms, and treatment; perfect. To someone who's never
| experienced it, it would seem myopic, but it's not, it's just the
| way it is, do not give more to your company than you can control
| the outcome of having done so. You don't get to decide that
| you're not laid off, and the only thing, as sad as it is, that
| you should be doing, is exactly what you're paid for.
| szundi wrote:
| While being true, this do exactly what you're paid for is so
| dystopian.
| coldpie wrote:
| It is? That's a weird position to me. If I go to a store and
| pay $10 for a sandwich, I don't call it dystopian when I
| don't get two sandwiches. Similarly, if my working agreement
| is $X wage for 40 hours of work per week, I don't give them
| 60 hours, because we agreed on 40. What is dystopian about
| agreeing to terms and then executing on the agreed terms?
| That's just how exchanging money for goods & services works.
| Tainnor wrote:
| It's not "exactly the way it is" everywhere, though. I've
| worked at companies that, whenever they laid someone off, they
| were honest and upfront about it without playing any
| psychological tricks. Not every company has to be this devoid
| of soul.
| brailsafe wrote:
| That's true, I've been directly laid off and fired without
| cause without tricks, but the salient point to me is that
| usually it's a futile and burnout-inducing mission to try and
| put in extra effort to attempt to avoid the impending
| outcome. A manager at any company could just be annoyed with
| how you responded to a question one time and it'll be burned
| into their brain to get rid of you. In retrospect, although
| there have been valid moments where my performance has
| suffered, it's rare for that to be the cause imo, especially
| if they really don't know what you do anyway. You could think
| you're a crucial contributor, and all it takes is
| oversleeping on the wrong day to screw you permanently.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| After being laid off a few times you start to understand it's all
| just a show - theater.
|
| The young employees believe it entirely because they have never
| known any different.
|
| The more experienced become more realistic about the way the
| entire system works.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Oh, I don't know. In my current and previous job I was,
| frankly, amazed at the ronin-like attitude openly expressed by
| those new, young hires. I was nowhere near this radicalized,
| when I started my first 'real' job. Management is in for a
| rather rude awakening.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I'm sympathetic but this person comes across as young and
| (previously) naive. I suppose everyone has to learn the company
| is not their friend someday.
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| yeah this is just someone losing their work virginity
|
| the real pro-level insight is understanding that the people
| left behind are often in a worse position - inertia keeps them
| locked into a dying company
| lm28469 wrote:
| That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago.
| "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business
| is always personal", yadda yadda
|
| Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew
| your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of
| vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your
| accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check
| right away, some people get that way down the line when their
| whole persona has already been built around their job
| 0xEF wrote:
| I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing
| their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy
| thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
| amelius wrote:
| Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first
| AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more
| like 60 years ago, just for clarification.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Thanks for that, now I need a therapist for how old I'm
| feeling
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, but was it FDA approved?
| nthingtohide wrote:
| I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and
| using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had
| to be well read to know these metaphors and life
| experiences of others, but through social media such
| knowledge and other's life experiences are on my
| fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's
| experiences library.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging
| it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the
| rest of your life gets eroded.
| lm28469 wrote:
| At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering
| the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's
| too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my
| job and I would be bored without it")
|
| I know people who could easily retire or at least get a
| much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility
| positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to
| the point of having physical consequences.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in
| our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people's
| existence in their formative years as "a thing that they
| do". Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up
| becoming at least a non-trivial part of people's sense-of-
| self?
| bluGill wrote:
| You have to work. If you really want to you can live on
| much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let
| you live on a tiny income. However most people like
| luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get
| anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember
| what I was doing the day before before I can write code
| again.
|
| For the above reasons you will be working a significant
| number of hours. As such work will be a significant part
| of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you
| enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.
|
| The important thing though is make it an easy to replace
| part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family,
| sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something
| goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to
| replace it. (family is the only one where you should
| strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it
| often does)
| pjc50 wrote:
| We encourage starting work extremely _late_ in advanced
| societies, due to the need to fit in education before
| then.
| sneak wrote:
| I can't imagine how one would do this, period. No job has
| ever come anywhere near my persona.
|
| The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to
| me. It's a business transaction like buying a loaf of
| bread. Why do people act like it's like getting married?
| jajko wrote:
| Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such
| environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva,
| Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus
| on work as a method of self-realization and achieving
| inner happiness by ie working hard consistently,
| finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock
| out and so on.
|
| Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless
| corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in
| the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.
|
| But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion.
| Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that
| will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like
| you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few
| (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas,
| alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I
| juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs
| with their wars and pressures will become just little
| broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger
| wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I agree with the bad idea to put _all_ your persona in a job.
|
| At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn't
| really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making
| enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x
| growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is
| less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is
| non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with
| families and a life outside of work.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > One will have issues if his persona doesn't really match
| with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
|
| I really don't think that this is true. Plenty of people
| work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers.
| Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.
|
| The _dream_ is to work doing something that you love, but
| that's not going to always pan out; and that's ok.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Assembly line workers invariably like assembling things.
| Even if they don't start liking it, they usually change
| their personas.
|
| The one job I can think of where the people really don't
| like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and
| people tend to not stay on it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways
| to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck,
| but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the
| the person at the next station. They challenge themselves
| to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer
| needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a
| challenge)
| tednoob wrote:
| It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout
| during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my
| job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some
| blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make
| the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always
| been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of
| belonging.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with
| burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a
| career that was far more aligned with who I really am than
| my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me
| realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck
| and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL
| conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to
| do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the
| context of HN comments).
|
| But you touched on something that I struggled with for
| years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly
| tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as
| individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting
| on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let
| our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves
| call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into
| religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our
| sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation
| from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns
| things like discontent and resentment that cause more
| irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a
| slippery slope.
|
| What I have found is that being mindful about self-
| validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am
| good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be
| busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and
| perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help
| me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid
| burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very
| well, at this point. The result is most people see and
| respect that about me, where the ones that do not will
| quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can
| successfully abuse.
| floydian10 wrote:
| > Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into
| that false sense of belonging.
|
| Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I
| felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be
| very intoxicating.
| caseyy wrote:
| Do you now have more of a personality outside work?
|
| I'm going through this now, just resigned due to burnout
| while being a "rockstar developer" with no life recently.
| bestouff wrote:
| At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell
| him not to base his whole persona around its job ?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| This is the premise of the movie _Sunset Boulevard_ , and
| of the much newer _The Subtance_. Tl;dr, it 's not healthy
| for celebrities either.
| aredox wrote:
| You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your
| teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all
| the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under
| slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of
| a human being", etc.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You can: that's (part of) what fiction books are for.
| aredox wrote:
| Like _The Fountainhead_?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| _The Fountainhead_ has value in that it helps teach you
| that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn
| 't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are
| better books to learn about the world through. (But if
| you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly
| learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.)
|
| Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are:
| you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that
| you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's
| scorn. So... kinda, yes: even _The Fountainhead_ is worth
| reading, to some people (not that I 'd recommend it).
| bluGill wrote:
| > "socialism", "communism",
|
| Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with
| other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive
| ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other
| ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away
| all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as
| you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have
| to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to
| debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and
| further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't
| just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an
| agreement would be a bad thing.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| Those 'progressive ideologies' with influence from Marx
| are what make all of what we see today happen. From
| killing people if they cant pay for healthcare to these
| sociopathic layoffs 'because AI'. So 'influence from
| Marx' is just nonsense.
|
| The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with
| those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for
| making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's
| why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them
| this is what you end up with.
| aredox wrote:
| Thank you for this unprompted demonstration that the mere
| mention of "communism" sends some into a ferocious - and
| vacuous - crusade.
|
| Meanwhile bosses boss people around.
| agumonkey wrote:
| One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have
| a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most
| jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite
| (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like
| two needs that can never meet.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| The purpose of the system is what it does
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| The whole system of education is designed to channel this
| type of behavior from early childhood.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality
| public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have
| it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Obedient workers.
| agumonkey wrote:
| if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent
| phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by
| businesses because these are strong indicator of what
| ensures survival of the group (we might all study
| cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we
| don't know how to grow food, we're toast)
|
| that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who
| reduce the importance of material economy / business and
| promote real deep and beautiful learning
| ryandrake wrote:
| You can graduate from high school and leave your
| hometown, but the attitudes of high school remain in the
| office: the cliques, the cruelty, the in-groups and out-
| groups, the manipulation, the brown-nosing, the behind-
| the-back-shit-talking. The C students from your high
| school are now mid level managers above you and brought
| the mentality straight from there to the office.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I've been part of two really good teams, one went away
| because the company closed, the other because it was managed
| into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right
| with any level of management to have a bunch of at best
| average teams and then one very good team in the same org
| chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape
| along.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe society is submitted to a law of averages..
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Systems built around profit seek efficiency, thus
| standardization.
| zwnow wrote:
| I dont get it, everyone wants to work for big tech or big
| corporations in general and then wonder why they do stuff like
| this.
|
| Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will
| have real impact and they actually need you.
| n_ary wrote:
| Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I
| had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times
| screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and
| investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management
| starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their
| best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts
| strategic push out by stagnating.
|
| While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at
| Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones
| are just "we are like family right?" and then push out once
| technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I've worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the
| biggest company (100k employees).
|
| Everything can bring you burnout if the management is
| toxic. It's independent on the size of the company. I'm now
| working for a small company that feels like a family even
| if they don't say it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Small companies can have their own problems. They may only
| somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although
| both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're
| far from a panacea.
| klooney wrote:
| Big companies can double your compensation though, it's a
| tradeoff.
| caseyy wrote:
| I also thought that small companies are better in that
| regard. But no, they often have their own toxic
| idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the
| management's heads. A small company that's YOURS is better
| and actually needs you.
| zwnow wrote:
| Maybe its different in Europe due to workers rights? Never
| had bad experience in small companies but plenty in corps.
| j-bos wrote:
| > their whole persona has already been built around their job
|
| Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back
| to the office.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their
| identity around the only community they are a part of -- their
| job.
|
| Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport
| associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was
| also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3
| different employees in their whole career.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job
| during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day
| with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even
| having a contract on paper only for my employer to first
| suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all
| after the first month.
|
| Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how
| naive/stupid I was back then.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Really enjoyed reading this, but I will say that the particular
| circumstances here are a bit rare. Germany got completely gutted
| in this layoff. Almost everyone employed in Germany was cut. I
| know a Senior Staff Engineer from Germany who was laid off then
| re-hired.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's not rare for entire business units or country offices to
| get shut down. That's the easiest way to do a layoff because
| it's mostly isolated from the rest of the company. Executives
| can meet most of their layoff target without having to get into
| the weeds of evaluating individual performance.
|
| Often some functions are moved or merged into another unit, and
| that's the escape hatch for the few people someone really wants
| to save.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It wasn't like that in this case. Rumours were it was because
| people in Germany were thinking of unionizing.
| Tainnor wrote:
| If that were true, then I hope the laid-off people kept a
| paper trail because there's actual laws protecting them in
| such a case.
| shafyy wrote:
| This would not suprise me at all, since Tobi Lutke is
| vocally against unions.
| asim wrote:
| I remember the zoom call when a person from HR was there.
| Instantly you know.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Many companies could be so much more efficient if they were
| actually meritocratic.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| It's very hard to measure this accurately at scale.
|
| If you create metrics, they will be gamed. The people that
| succeed, then, are not necessarily those with the most merit,
| but those who are best at manipulating their metrics.
| anilakar wrote:
| We started measuring progress this month by measuring how
| many percent of last week's planned tasks were completed, and
| it's already showing.
|
| Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably
| doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the
| number up.
|
| One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed
| and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he
| retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as
| unimportant.
| shashanoid wrote:
| Damn I was part of may the 4th lay off from Shopify. They locked
| me out instantly from my crucial immigration related document on
| my work laptop, and there was no help whatsoever. Very ugly.
| Still remember.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Name and shame, good. Only when we name the perpetrators, we
| can help others avoid bad employers, of which there are way to
| many already.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| Was it on your work laptop for a reason?
|
| Good reminder, never mix work and personal. Or at the very
| least maybe use a cloud service or a thumb drive.
| Etheryte wrote:
| In many countries, a number of visas are employer bound or
| sponsored, so there's a wide array of reasons why some
| relevant documents might live in the corporate sphere.
| Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it
| to a personal device. There are often many more documents to
| a visa than just the visa itself.
| another-dave wrote:
| > Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer
| it to a personal device.
|
| That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you
| want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite
| access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling
| to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to
| your machine/the building etc.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| Was also laid of from Qantas when my dad died from cancer 2
| months ago, I'm still flabbergasted by it
| caseyy wrote:
| Well, the person who decided to lay you off probably didn't
| care enough to know, if that makes you feel any better.
| bluGill wrote:
| 40 years ago an autobody shop near me (where I lived at the
| time) went bankrupt. The employees came to work in the morning
| and the door had a new lock. It was 6 months before they could
| get their personal tools back. Mechanics provide their own
| tools, so this meant they couldn't really get a new job (or
| could but only after investing thousands in tools that they
| already owned but couldn't access).
| rsanek wrote:
| this is why I regularly back up important documents to my
| personal computer. payslips, w2's, etc. never know when you
| might be terminated and lose access.
| yumed15 wrote:
| I've been part of layoffs twice (with around 8 years in the
| workforce by now) and yes, I realised the harsh truth that going
| above and beyond, putting in the soul and long hours is not worth
| it. No one cares in the long term, you're just a number in the
| spreadsheet at the end of the day.
|
| But the thing is, I like what I'm working on, I like letting my
| passion dictate my actions. I want to go home at the end of the
| day and be proud of what I have accomplished.
|
| But it's not worth putting in that effort for a company that
| treats you like any other resource. So I'm starting to become one
| of those soulless employees. You can call it quiet quitting or
| whatever. And it's slowly killing my spark.
|
| I started working on my own projects to keep that spark alive.
| But 2h every day is not enough to build something that's worth
| it.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Yep I'm in exactly the same boat. I think I've largely decided
| that tech is just a job now; my motivation to code outside of
| work was tied to also somehow enjoying doing it at work and now
| I don't anymore I also stopped doing it for fun.
|
| So I've replaced advent of code with various other stuff,
| music, woodworking, books, the great outdoors and while my life
| is less rich in technology it's becoming much fuller in other
| ways.
|
| I think I prefer it this way.
| secondcoming wrote:
| For me, coding outside of work becomes unsustainable as you
| age. It's not that you can't, it's because you realise
| there's more to life than staring at a computer screen. I
| love coding, but it's also good to go outside sometimes.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| For me, there was a rebound.
|
| Recent years (40's) I've been on a building spree of sorts
| for my own projects[0]
|
| I'm my 30's, a lot of energy went into home improvement
| projects, establishing a garden, and young kids. Now I find
| a lot of time and energy left for my own passion projects.
|
| [0] https://turas.app and https://coderev.app
| gjadi wrote:
| Like you, I like doing work I enjoy, but I have never been in a
| layoff, so I don't know how I will react to it.
|
| My hope is that after a layoff I would be able to bounce back
| and find a new company where I can keep on doing fun work.
|
| Life has ups and downs. I don't think shielding yourself from
| emotions is a healthy path. Just like you don't have to shield
| yourself from others forever after a breakup. A key ingredient
| is to have other part of your life to support you (family,
| couple, friends, ...) when one is failing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's been 20+ years since I was laid off when the _first_
| internet boom collapsed. I got a decent settlement, spent a while
| experimenting with self employment, and got another interesting
| full-time job which lasted for years. I 'd rate the experience as
| significantly less traumatic than my first relationship breakup.
|
| But yes, the first time you experience redundancies _regardless
| of whether you 're made redundant or survive_ is definitely an
| eye-opener. It's like those financial disclaimers "the value of
| your investment may go down as well as up". There may be very
| little warning. It may even happen at a time that's very bad for
| you personally. And it does break trust among the company.
| Jean-Papoulos wrote:
| I was thinking that it seems strange to fire a 10x dev that has
| regular one-on-one meetings with a VP. OP could have contacted
| said VP and outlined that he was worth keeping, until I got to
| this line :
|
| >the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is
| affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable
| employees
|
| This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high
| performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making
| unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity
| for this.
|
| While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the
| details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone
| involved.
| Tainnor wrote:
| At no point does the law force a company to fire a high
| performer. The company can literally just fire one fewer person
| - if the employee really is 10x and if the company has its shit
| together, that's what would happen.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Let us face it, the European welfare model is a blind alley. No
| one in the world is going to copy this from us again, now that
| it is clear that it makes us
|
| a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for
| people who might not merit it;
|
| b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can
| have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for
| enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually
| stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate
| the discourse;
|
| c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many
| pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified
| migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower
| compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all,
| interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language.
| OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't
| mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system
| will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse
| themselves in the black market.
|
| IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is
| addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections
| like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is
| becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we
| won't be able to afford a system like that.
|
| Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies
| and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the
| 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from
| that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.
|
| The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like
| Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU
| already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the
| elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right,
| but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry
| this obligation out.
|
| The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as
| bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts
| insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and
| Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.
| shafyy wrote:
| What does "European welfare model" even mean? Europe consists
| of many countries, and different countries have significantly
| different welfare models.
|
| Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it
| is unevenly distributed.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Europe consists of many countries, and different countries
| have significantly different welfare models."
|
| In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension
| systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high
| taxation and regulation to support those systems.
|
| Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent.
| But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty
| consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with
| us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.
|
| "Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that
| it is unevenly distributed."
|
| A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the
| GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions.
| The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is
| not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass
| expropriations.
|
| We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More
| punitive taxation = more brain drain.
| shafyy wrote:
| It makes sense to me that a big portion of government
| spending goes towards social welfare and healthcare - at
| the end, that's one of the most important things.
|
| I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU
| countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the
| 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in
| Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its
| heights. The lower investment into defense came not at
| the cost of higher social welfare.
|
| The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we
| need ways to address that.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and
| we need ways to address that."
|
| Do we? For what?
|
| We already have a serious problem in Europe that we
| totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the
| biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants
| dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a
| producer of luxury handbags.
|
| Either we are going to have a robust economy that can
| support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare
| state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to
| become very rich. If someone succeeds in building
| European Amazon, they will be in the same category of
| rich as Jeff Bezos.
|
| Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis
| Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But
| hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
|
| You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the
| poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU
| economy? That is growing pretty fast.
|
| Already we are small brothers to the big brother
| overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation
| and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to
| implement our strict regulations to gain access to our
| markets.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > Do we? For what?
|
| Because when the gap gets too large, you get an
| oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you
| want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.
|
| Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires.
| I literally cannot start a company here in the US because
| even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a
| company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking
| to instead get a visa in another country for starting up
| a business.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| On a global markets, there _always_ will be huge
| corporations, and nowadays they usually grow huge because
| they provide some useful or at least highly sought-after
| services. And their owners are certain to become rich.
|
| You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile,
| but you won't squash them globally, and the result will
| be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As
| Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of
| weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than
| American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all
| the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...
|
| "I literally cannot start a company here in the US
| because even my engineering salary is not enough to
| bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."
|
| You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of
| ambition. You can start a small local company anytime,
| tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but
| your market reach will be naturally limited to one city
| or so.
|
| But if you want to start _a globally relevant
| technological startup_ , hey, that was NEVER in the power
| of a random median engineer. At least you now have
| options, including those VCs. There aren't any such
| options in other places.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in welfare mecca
| with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is
| breaking under the load.
|
| Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial
| procedures can count to decades.
|
| The workforce is aging because young people have stoped
| reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of
| brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent
| foreign non eutopean workforce.
|
| This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not
| sustainable.
|
| This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster
| system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably
| sustain in the long term.
|
| Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current
| system does not work though.
|
| Everyone suffers like this.
|
| Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for
| us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My
| private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.
|
| The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.
|
| Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare
| is??
|
| Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price
| inglor_cz wrote:
| My experience is that many liberal Americans tend to admire
| European welfare systems as a counterpoint to the more cut-
| throat US systems, and really, really don't want to discuss
| the downsides.
|
| People need to dream, I guess.
|
| The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But
| for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the
| high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss
| of income and worsening of many services.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere
| to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a
| major loss of income and worsening of many services.
|
| What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is
| driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in
| autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I
| think "many services" are actually better in many parts
| of Europe (such as public transport).
|
| Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please
| let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight
| of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT
| industry. Yeah, there are outliers again, but that is the
| core demographics here.
|
| The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of
| places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban
| culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.
|
| Public transport is one of the few things in which the US
| is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe,
| but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new
| Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe
| and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this
| regard...
|
| That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no
| doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants
| to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the
| political will is here.
|
| By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners,
| and they don't want any disturbances to the system that
| served their generation well.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US
| IT industry.
|
| You'd be surprised.
|
| I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just
| that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod
| crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities,
| lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than
| a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other
| major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping
| culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the
| political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may
| think differently, that's fine.
| sneak wrote:
| ...and a major reduction in services.
|
| I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the
| year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.
|
| It's crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the
| situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US
| system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore
| economic reality. Single payer doesn't mean that money
| isn't flowing and negotiations don't happen. No
| government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving
| doctors.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The Slovak government literally wants to try slavery
| light for doctors.
|
| They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to
| "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions
| aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency
| due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government
| declares at will.
|
| https://minutovezpravy.cz/clanek/slovensko-chce-prinutit-
| lek...
|
| That made a lot of news. It is every bit as bad as it
| sounds.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Slovakia under its current government is literally the
| second-most anti-EU country of the EU (after Hungary -
| though maybe Austria will soon follow suit), so I'm not
| sure if that illustrates your point well.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| They aren't doing this because they disagree with the EU-
| wide consensus _on general welfare / healthcare
| policies_, though. Fico isn't Javier Milei, he is a pro-
| Russian populist social democrat, precisely the type of
| politican that promises unrealistic levels of welfare for
| a relatively poor state.
|
| As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to
| support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their
| economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia
| will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest
| part of the continent can continue kicking the can down
| the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close
| their eyes.
|
| Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some
| really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all
| again, and dragging down 10 other economically-
| intertwined countries with it.
| brap wrote:
| He is probably getting downvoted by Americans who want to
| implement the same failing policies in the US.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Or by Europeans that don't care for the 1000th cliched
| "EU bad, America good" debate which invariably attracts
| low-quality comment as is immediately evident.
|
| The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it
| was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and
| writing posts like that isn't really engendering
| productive debate.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of
| stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts
| of the world has been rapidly shrinking.
|
| It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and
| a serious investition drain, too. European money
| regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of
| billions. The other way round? Not so much.
|
| But people really don't want to admit that our
| welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with
| aging populations and stagnant economies.
| t43562 wrote:
| When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over
| a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of
| tossing our aging population out onto the street we
| cannot do much more than increase immigration - something
| those old people don't like.
|
| So this could be a debate about something completely
| other than the social model and it's so complicated that
| it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to
| deal with the aging situation than others.
|
| The European social democratic model introduced after war
| relied _a lot_ on having a lot of working age people
| supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It
| was a working assumption - before birth control, few
| could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.
|
| The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that
| "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have
| children.
|
| No, not always, no.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| A mix of capitalism, socialism and communism is the key,
| they complement and balance each other
|
| Trying to ostracize one model to favor the other is the
| recipe for a collapse
|
| Perhaps that's what the USA is, a disposable Empire
| ekidd wrote:
| > _heqlthcare is breaking under the load._
|
| I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an
| absolutely excellent hospital system.
|
| And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not
| literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour
| wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and
| severely dislocated bone.
|
| Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than
| "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily
| approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over
| $50,000, I think?
|
| Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration
| pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from
| 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50
| programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding
| rules for dozens of insurance companies.
|
| Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per
| month for the _employee_ part, with the employer spending
| plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt
| nightmare.
|
| It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest
| costs in the world. And when our local system eventually
| gets around to it, they provide excellent care--but nothing
| dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and
| at a much higher price.
| mnau wrote:
| Please pick any semi-advanced economy other than USA when
| talking about healthcare. USA is well known for its
| corrupt healthcare system. You are picking the worst of
| the worst as an example.
| twixfel wrote:
| Yeah the system doesn't work. Nothing has convinced me more
| of that fact than living in Germany has. If your system only
| works for a single generation in which you have an unusually
| large working population and relatively few children and
| relatively few old people, then your system doesn't work. The
| German system never worked, it was always just running on
| borrowed time.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're expecting demography-wise : would
| you rather have this, an unsustainable population growth or
| an average lifespan of 40 years ?
|
| But also, yes, in the "West" we've been living way above our
| means for almost a century now, and the chickens are starting
| to come home to roost.
| shafyy wrote:
| I had to look this up, and the law states that the
| Sozialauswahl (social selection) only applies to employees who
| have the same qualifcations, rank etc. The law applies when the
| company is doing across-the-board layoffs (e.g. because they
| have become unprofitable).
|
| It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have
| disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last,
| compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank
| etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong - the company
| would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because
| of this law.
|
| Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was
| affected by it.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| OP didn't got it right. It only applies for those with the same
| qualifications (i.e. given two 10x devs, the most vulnerable
| one is kept) so the company gets to keep a 10x dev. He's just
| externalising his problems to the easiest target (ie.
| vulnerable people). His own situation is partially his fault
| and he admits as much when he describes a list of what he would
| have done differently.
|
| People expect things to always work the same way and they get
| upset when they don't.
| MeruMeru wrote:
| Strongly agree with the author. I was laid off two years ago, and
| I am experiencing the same feelings he is describing: I no longer
| want to give my 100%, I no longer overcommit. I do the minimum
| required and feel emotionally detached from the company and my
| colleagues.
|
| It's a waste that so many individual contributors who, as the
| author said, had good performance and were close to the users
| went through a laid off. Now a new generation of previously high
| achievers work force will get back in the market and no longer
| use all their potential for their job. Like it wasn't the fault
| of the new company that hired me, that now I do the bare minimum,
| they won't see the full potential I gave before. And I, I cannot
| prevent it. My work ethics and motivation died after the lay off.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It's disappointing that you feel detached from your colleagues.
| They're in the same boat as you. Also, increasing your network
| doesn't hurt. There's a risk in being known as the quiet or
| moody guy who doesn't interact with anyone. It might make you
| enjoy your work more too.
| MeruMeru wrote:
| Partially agree. I still network, and actually found my
| current job thanks to my network. I still interact with ma
| colleagues, help them, socialize. But I try to keep some
| emotional distance. When I got laid off, my colleagues were
| also my close friends, so on top of the laid off turmoil I
| was living, I was sad I would no longer work with them.
| qwe----3 wrote:
| Well, if this generation is all like you then they'll be
| replaced by the next generation of hungry graduates
| n_ary wrote:
| Hmm... not really, bars are high, no one is hiring fresh
| graduates anymore, and new generation is more detached with
| better sense of real world and focus on work-life balance and
| more personal growth, unlike previous generation who usually
| tied their identity to their work and gave their 500% for
| peanuts and glory(always fake and meaningless).
| drawkward wrote:
| Eh, the kiddos seem to be realizing that the rat race is,
| after all, for rats.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The kids are way smarter than that.
| bowsamic wrote:
| This feels a bit too far in the opposite direction to the point
| of hurting yourself
| MeruMeru wrote:
| I understand. But since I have decided to reduce my time and
| energy dedicated to a company, I put this extra time and
| energy more towards my personal hobbies. I feel like I am
| living two lives in one day, at work I am detached and do
| only what's required, while outside work I am deeply invested
| in my things.
| ipnon wrote:
| I read a book called "The Goal" by Goldratt and he describes
| his theory of constraints. One of the main predictions of his
| theory is that the existence of many resources working at
| maximum capacity is symptomatic of a wildly inefficient
| production system. Thus you shouldn't feel guilty about not
| giving 100% every day. This behavior is necessary to properly
| balance the total throughout of your company. Ideally only one
| person should be giving 100% in any given company, and in a
| fair and balanced system this would be the CEO who is
| concomitantly receiving massive compensation.
| yadaeno wrote:
| This theory feels like it's making tons of assumptions and
| leans heavily on semantics.
|
| In a factory you have many components operating near or at
| capacity. In a high growth environment you want all of your
| components working at capacity to explore the problem space
| and optimize.
| ozgung wrote:
| That was one of the most eye opening books for me. I think it
| all applies to Software development as well. It is not
| uncommon that you work all weekend to finish your task, only
| to see it waits two weeks in the next person's queue.
| datavirtue wrote:
| This is how you generate more layoffs for yourself. Having
| money saved and living within your means greatly reduces the
| impact of being laid off. You need to be impactful and putting
| yourself out there at all times or you lose trust. Several
| people who have allowed themselves to be beat down mentally at
| my company have lost trust and are on the chopping block. It
| can take a year or more before you get sacked. You can also
| reverse the course at almost any time.
| MeruMeru wrote:
| Thank you for your advice. I agree. I am still working and
| completing my tasks, so far I didn't give anyone any reason
| to complain about my work. But I would not put again the
| extra hours or extra creativity. I save money and live within
| my means. And I live in a country with great unemployment
| benefits if it happens again. When I got laid off, I didn't
| suffer financially thanks to our support system, but
| emotionally it was hard.
| bluGill wrote:
| While not bad advice, but careful - you will die and you
| don't know when. You can't take it with you (almost all
| religion agrees on this, though if yours doesn't then I guess
| I won't argue religion here). Have a reasonable amount of
| saved money, but make sure you are using the majority of what
| you earn on things you enjoy (well at least things you enjoy
| consistent with the law and religion should either of those
| conflict with what you enjoy)
| Tainnor wrote:
| I was working for a German startup that had been acquired by a
| big American company. The relationship between my team and the
| big corp was strained from the start - we felt that they simply
| didn't understand what we did and didn't give us the liberty to
| decide how best to do things. They also didn't seem very mindful
| of time zone differences or understanding of German worker
| protection laws.
|
| When they laid off the other team that was working in our office
| (on an entirely different product), they of course assured us
| that we were safe - they believed in our product, yadda yadda.
|
| Then at some point, things started getting weird - a job position
| was cancelled right before we were going to offer the candidate
| the job. A trip to HQ was cancelled last minute. An external team
| was getting increasingly involved.
|
| About a year after the other team had been fired, the second
| highest ranking executive was visiting our office, something he
| would do once in a while. When the visit was announced, we were
| joking that "if he brings Pattie from HR, they'll lay us off". I
| got the message from my coworker on my way to work: "Pattie is
| here."
|
| The speech the executive gave us was the stupidest thing I've
| ever heard somebody say to me. He literally said: "In a couple of
| years, you will look at this as a big opportunity." We just
| rolled our eyes at each other. When he left the room, we picked
| up the remotes and started playing stickman against each other.
| It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.
|
| We had a very nice office and so we were looking forward to be
| able to spend our notice period together, playing video games,
| making music and doing the bare minimum in terms of handover
| duties. Unfortunately, covid happened at right that time and our
| time together was dramatically cut short, which I still consider
| a tragedy.
|
| One woman in our team was pregnant and fought the settlement they
| were offering us. As far as I know, they had to keep her on for
| longer and she eventually negotiated a better deal - pregnant
| people are especially protected under German labour law.
|
| To this day, some in my former team doubt that what they did was
| really all that legal and think we should have fought back,
| because it later turned out that they lied to us about a bunch of
| things. But I doubt it would have been really worth it. They just
| wanted us out.
| strken wrote:
| After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the
| advice a little:
|
| - You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more
| then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of
| it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job
| satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin".
| Consider just not working overtime.
|
| - Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to
| look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and
| just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't
| burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.
|
| - Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need
| another one, but this is a business relationship just like
| renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job
| market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously
| interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company
| in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for
| roles you might actually take.
|
| The last two points are fine, however.
| roenxi wrote:
| Indeed. The real discovery in the article is that the people
| who manage performance and the people who manage headcount were
| completely different people. The article writer had (common
| mistake) assumed that impressing the former would take care of
| the latter. It doesn't; the techniques to manage the headcount
| people are different.
|
| I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go
| above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about
| _why_ beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and
| beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be
| wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly
| without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable
| or looking out for you.
| mcherm wrote:
| > the techniques to manage the headcount people are different
|
| I would like to hear a little bit more about those
| techniques.
|
| The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have
| promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan
| layoffs know very little about the individual's other than
| their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful:
| it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of
| whether to be promoted or something different.
|
| What other techniques are you aware of?
| roenxi wrote:
| Nothing magic or particularly reliable, but a few things
| stemming from the basics - layoffs happen because the
| accountants say there isn't enough money, and [Function X]
| seems to cost more than [Profit/Opportunity Y] that is
| assigned to it. Then a bunch of people have no job the next
| week. So to avoid being picked up in a layoff, it is
| helpful to talk to the accountants, figure out what Y is
| and what X you are in, and if the numbers aren't promising
| work to get re-categorised as a Z, increase Y or negotiate
| to change how things are measured.
|
| Most product teams are organised around the idea that
| someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That
| means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit.
| Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is
| this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.
|
| Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the
| hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the
| time software people show no interest in whether the plans
| they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading
| to more money.
|
| Eg, in the original article I see things like
| "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly
| to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The
| VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate
| on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old
| mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or
| potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate
| build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on
| track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being
| essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts
| of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack
| him.
|
| If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a
| companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your
| job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get
| fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with
| things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to
| make it so.
|
| [0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something
| that can be assumed.
| michaelt wrote:
| There are several types of layoffs:
|
| 1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure
| you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people
| above you know it.
|
| 2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff.
| Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where
| you're fixing bugs _and_ making improvements, not just
| keeping things ticking over.
|
| 3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by
| working in departments that bring in more revenue than they
| cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success;
| and in an area where the company's strategy calls for
| growth.
|
| 4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can
| do about this, except working at the head office, or a very
| large branch office where important projects are based.
|
| 5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-
| business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if
| things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to
| start sending out resumes and maybe getting the
| unemployment insurance on your car loan.
|
| Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard
| of some people having great success with the opposite
| strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy
| mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told
| me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing
| organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of
| these are hard-and-fast rules.
| ghaff wrote:
| I generally agree with all that. You can absolutely be in
| the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes and there's
| not much you can do about it.
| michaelt wrote:
| Yes. When the first dot-com bubble burst, my father was
| working on semiconductor manufacturing machines.
|
| The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the
| day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day
| before. The business was cashflow positive, not some
| crazy gamble.
|
| But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more
| capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth
| plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of
| investors decided to get out of tech stocks.
|
| Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.
| JackFr wrote:
| There is a halfway between 1 and 3 where the manager is
| told to drop 5% and rather than picking one dev per team
| the manager just squashes one "nice-to-have" application
| and drops that team.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| There's also the shifting over-correction from "stack
| ranking is problematic and risks lawsuits about bias in
| performance counting" (because no one trusts performance
| metrics anymore) and 1 becomes "layoff a 'random' 5%"
| because "random" is the new "fair".
| threetonesun wrote:
| Or 5% and someone identifies a certain level that is
| costly and cuts that horizontally across the org to
| backfill with cheaper lower level employees.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is one other thing you can sometimes pull off: tell
| your boss you could work for a different division. Often
| (but not always, perhaps not even the majority of times)
| when layoffs happen there are also moves to a different
| division that is hiring people. So you want to make sure
| you are on the list of people to recommend to the other
| division. (this sometimes means getting skills the other
| wants before the layoffs)
| pc86 wrote:
| > Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior
| title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep
| leaving.
|
| I actually thought about doing this early in my career
| and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few
| years off their path to being able to (ethically, without
| lying) put "Senior" on their resume.
|
| It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are
| considering this I would also suggest you do it in a
| market/business area that you don't particularly care
| about. I've been in more than one interview where a
| senior executive who was very tied in on the business
| side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone
| numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc)
| immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as
| a red flag.
|
| The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but
| it's something to consider.
| rramadass wrote:
| Good points.
|
| The key point is that people need to face today's
| economic/political realities which is that it is all
| "Realpolitik"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either
| learn how to play the game based on circumstances or
| suffer.
|
| S.Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister of India said
| this recently which i think is highly applicable here
| (https://www.news18.com/india/eam-jaishankar-advice-
| stress-ma...);
|
| _Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected
| after a setback and constantly strive for self-
| improvement. "When I look at my own particular
| responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had
| to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT - the more
| people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY - If
| you get along with people, they are more likely to do
| things for you. CREDIBILITY - if you are known to be good
| on words, people take you seriously, " he said.
|
| "My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you
| normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it,
| you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If
| your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and
| go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember
| and hope what you said was right."_
|
| So make sure you have good contact with
| Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your
| Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your
| Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the
| abnormal (with caveats).
| IMTDb wrote:
| Thank you for this.
|
| In the article, the author says that he was fired
| _alongside most of his team_. Then makes a lot of
| statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me
| it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet
| the author did not make a single comment about the
| profitability of the product he was working on, or the
| team performance of the group he was working on.
|
| As an example, he made "features that helped power
| users", without articulating how much additional revenue
| these feature contributed for. How many of those power
| users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were
| they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those
| hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be
| associated to those features. It's all fine if your
| product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current
| headcount - and the vision of your company is that you
| need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But
| otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look
| at and be that happy to spend money on.
|
| I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior:
| If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a
| feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well
| you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver
| quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach
| its audience; well you failed". In our industry,
| seniority is about looking beyond just writing code,
| especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away
| that part of the job.
| mbb70 wrote:
| I think it comes down to a previous discussion on HN,
| "don't just crush tickets".
|
| Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job
| security but doesn't help when your managers managers
| manager has to make cuts.
|
| But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at
| the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level
| calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-
| site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and
| being a person.
| lovedaddy wrote:
| This...
|
| And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs
| like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next
| time I'll work LESS'. Really?
|
| Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you
| think that you are going to get binned no matter what,
| and just cruising until that happens is the solution.
| Just seems like a massively negative outcome.
|
| That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I
| convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others
| get sacked, or so I look good again'.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| The point of the article isn't to just "work less", but
| rather that working above and beyond what you're
| contracted for in a large organization in the long run
| ultimately won't matter. The takeaway is that your
| "extra" efforts can be better spent elsewhere: family,
| personal projects, interviews for next gig, etc.
|
| The article makes it very clear that they're talking
| about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just
| another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's
| seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of
| the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another
| row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks
| otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the
| boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity,
| appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking
| level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)
| kasey_junk wrote:
| It might be. But I've been in the room when a very high
| performing team was given the ax. This was a team that
| had all kinds of kudos and objective measures showing
| they were better than their peers.
|
| But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of
| that magnified the savings.
|
| I've done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and
| the advice I'd tell people is don't think it's a
| reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.
|
| Most of the time it's just macro factors out of your
| control.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Even if that's the case, when it's time to interview for
| your next job, would you rather be able to say "I led
| this major feature" or "I pulled a lot of tickets off the
| board and my team did $x"
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning
| how to describe your work to people well is advantageous,
| it's just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).
| pc86 wrote:
| You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time
| interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out
| what is the work _they personally did_ and what are just
| the thing their team accomplished while they were there.
| If you can 't describe off the top of your head, in
| pretty great detail, the implementation work required for
| these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume
| you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours.
|
| It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for
| that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff
| other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
| rramadass wrote:
| > trying to suss out what is the work _they personally
| did_ and what are just the thing their team accomplished
| while they were there.
|
| This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page
| resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The
| "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of
| the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read
| or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8
| pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies
| :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my
| specific responsibilities for each job.
|
| IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and
| leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I'm probably as old as you are and my resume is two
| pages. I've worked ten jobs and I don't have anything
| going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I
| wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM
| or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This
| was all pre-2012.
|
| No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I
| never depend on my resume to get a job. It's a
| requirement. But I don't blindly submit my resume to an
| ATS. By the time I'm sending my resume, I'm already 99%
| sure I'm going to get an interview because I've already
| talked to someone.
|
| When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the
| managers describe one of the products that I would be
| over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even
| cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I
| had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product
| was based on _and_ I designed the architecture of the
| product.
|
| I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred
| by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of
| the companies acquisitions.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| "By the time I'm sending my resume, I'm already 99% sure
| I'm going to get an interview because I've already talked
| to someone."
|
| This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr
| process it's going through because I position them to
| only be supplied once that's one of the final check
| boxes.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I wouldn't even go that far. I use to have one resume
| that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have
| two. But if I'm going through the network, I already know
| the decision makers are going to pull my resume through
| the HR process.
|
| One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud
| consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to
| customer's sites along with sales and I can do
| requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead
| the projects.
|
| The other is for my "Plan B" jobs and more focused on
| hands on keyboard "senior" enterprise developer jobs.
| rramadass wrote:
| The point was to make explicit one's specific work
| achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via
| contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a
| long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot
| will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.)
| which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other
| details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older
| experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years)
| can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is
| that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the
| person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth
| of thought to understand different concepts, the
| experience to have done it in reality, whether they are
| adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in
| hand i literally have to spend the first half of the
| interview asking them what they actually did before i can
| move on to the interview proper.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| But no one to a first approximation is going to do it.
| Statistics show that on average, people only look at your
| resume for 6 seconds.
|
| And I'm not asking questions about what you did 30 years
| ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer
| "tell me about yourself". I expect you to succinctly walk
| me through the parts of your career that are relevant to
| the job.
|
| I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess
| whether you have the traits I need, the "tell me about a
| time when..." questions to see if you can work at the
| needed level of scope and ambiguity.
|
| I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a
| dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs
| imsaw wrote:
| Just got accepted on my first job last month. Yet, last week,
| company (>500 ppl) already announced some small layoffs.
|
| Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current
| company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to
| explain in the interview that you're currently employed
| somewhere but concerned of their stability?
| ourmandave wrote:
| I read somewhere that 1 in 20 job postings is fake.
|
| So you just explain to the fake job interviewer that you're
| the 1 in 20 fake job candidate.
|
| There's a 5% chance they'll understand.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| If you're actually down to jump ship you can probably be
| upfront about it.
|
| It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were
| usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable
| things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd
| just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.
|
| Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of
| technical knowledge is essentially based on _vibes_. My CV is
| pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but
| after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with
| "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.
|
| If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as
| filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and
| you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common
| that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for
| my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a
| fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter
| notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they
| agreed.
|
| Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't
| want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.
| caminante wrote:
| _> you can probably be upfront about it._
|
| But for the unwritten interview rule: Don't be negative.
|
| Even if the interviewer knows you're in a dumpster fire,
| you have more to lose.
| willismichael wrote:
| > My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to
| graduate
|
| I don't put dates on my education anymore. _shrug_
| shaftway wrote:
| I don't even put education anymore.
|
| I dropped out of university, so in my early years it took
| a lot of tuning my resume to give the impression that I
| had a degree without actually saying it. Thankfully I had
| taken summer courses at a different, nearby university
| for two years before college. Eventually I would just put
| the years, the universities, and the major I was
| pursuing. Now I just leave it off the resume.
|
| I had one manager who found out after the fact and told
| me he wouldn't have hired me if he realized, but he was
| glad he did.
|
| I had an interview where they asked for a college
| transcript and then grilled me on why I failed Martian
| Geology and why I only got a C in Vector Calculus. I was
| given an offer, but declined it because of that
| experience. I dodged a bullet too; I've seen reports that
| the company sues former employees just to cost them
| money.
| ptero wrote:
| If you just started at your first job i would focus first on
| becoming an asset for your team.
|
| Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to
| leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you
| need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft
| skills and maintain friendships.
|
| There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are
| for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk
| better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether or not you start actively looking for other jobs, you
| can take any opportunities you have to better develop your
| network. It's harder just starting out but post my first
| fairly extended role out of grad school, every one of my jobs
| was through someone I knew.
| eastbound wrote:
| Well, you say just that. It even demonstrates a beginning of
| business acumen.
|
| Everyone does it, recruiters aren't naive. Once I became old
| enough to hire people, I understood it's ok (depending on the
| audience, beware) to say "I can start on Monday but I'll take
| two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it's
| already planned." Better have employees who are mature enough
| to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who
| burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I
| told him during the first month he shouldn't work more than
| 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental,
| bank, insurances, child care, etc.).
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's no need. Just tell them that you're keeping tabs on
| the job market and would switch for a compelling offer. It's
| up to them whether they have one for you.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was laid off during dot-bomb and was lucky enough to land a
| good (actually better) job through someone I knew pretty
| quickly. Pay wasn't great and they barely came through dot-bomb
| themselves later. But whatever.
|
| I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things
| weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business.
| Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job
| market was really tough at the moment.
|
| But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't
| worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and
| on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that
| was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.
| foogazi wrote:
| > through someone I knew
|
| The best interview hack
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, I think the first email I dropped was to this guy who
| owned a small company we had been a client of in an earlier
| role. He invited me up to lunch and was there with his
| (later) COO. It was basically a casual interview. Later, we
| discussed some contract work but he basically decided to
| just hire me. Which was nice because it was basically
| nuclear winter during dot-bomb--nothing else that even
| vaguely resembled a lead.
|
| I think this sort of thing bugs a lot of people here
| because they think that some sort of theoretical skill
| assessment should be what matters. But that's not how the
| world works for the most part.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I never understood the advice of to take on impactful work. How
| does work? The team is assigned units of work and then
| individuals are usually assigned the tasks. The only way I see
| it to work is to be on a team that works on impactful projects.
| thechao wrote:
| I know this probably doesn't help you _now_ , but I
| negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed
| up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on
| the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was
| there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed
| interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt
| like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't
| qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.
|
| I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and
| management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must
| finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate
| schedule.
| myself248 wrote:
| > picked up a few low hanging projects
|
| In what industry does a new hire just not have someone
| telling them what to do?
| closeparen wrote:
| >individuals are usually assigned the tasks
|
| The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined,
| the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing
| subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Also, keep yourself employable. What you get hired to do and
| what you'll find yourself doing 6 months later, 2 years later,
| etc. aren't going to be the same. Whatever you are doing, keep
| in mind how much of it is really a marketable skill and how
| much of it is specialized to a small slice of the industry or
| perhaps even just your current company. Move within a company
| to keep working on what is useful to one's own career. I would
| only accept dead end work for a significant pay bump or as I'm
| finalizing for retirement.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted for this. My current role
| started very tech-heavy and morphed into almost completely
| documentation as my management found out I'm one of the only
| ones at the company who doesn't suck at grammar and
| photography. Now my day-to-day really wouldn't be useful for
| getting another job with a similar title (and pay) to my
| current one, and I need to devote extra time outside of work
| to keeping up with actual tech skills that I used to be able
| to develop on-the-job.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| One of my earliest jobs was supposedly programming but was
| actually a slow descent into tech support for in house
| applications under the hood and I glad I took that as a
| hint to move elsewhere. Since then, it has always been a
| balance between doing what the company needs but also
| making sure I'm positioned to learn new technology or
| otherwise be growing my career in some fashion.
| asah wrote:
| this is great and subtle advice worth reading twice. I'd add
| that a great "getting something out of it" reason is learning
| and reputation.
| yibg wrote:
| I agree with this, maybe I'd summarize things in a slightly
| different way: think of employment as a mutually beneficial
| transaction. That doesn't necessarily mean simply working the
| contracted hours, but keep in mind that jobs are, these days
| transactional in nature.
|
| I can go above and beyond, work on the weekends etc, but there
| should be a benefit to me. That could be because I learn
| something and it sets me up for my next job, I increase my
| chances of a promotion, or just that it's something interesting
| to me personally.
|
| I think there is probably less cynicism this way too, because
| this is how most companies look at employees too.
| jwr wrote:
| My recommendation would be: don't make your work be part of your
| identity, unless it's _your_ work (e.g. your business). The work
| you do for others is not who you are. Your employer is not your
| family, nor even your friend. It 's a business relationship, and
| should be taken as such.
|
| This, incidentally is good advice for both sides of an employment
| relationship: employers sometimes also mistakenly believe that
| employees are their friends and family and then get a rude
| awakening when employees suddenly leave with no warning, for a
| 10% increase in salary.
| flymaipie wrote:
| If your business fails you will consider yourself a failure.
| Thus these life lessons leads us to buddhist concept of self-
| detachment.
| layer8 wrote:
| I agree with the "it's a business relationship and not family"
| part, but not with the identity part. Something you spend ~40%
| of your awake time with is certainly part of one's identity,
| and for good mental health should be something one enjoys.
| thomond wrote:
| The first layoff is always the worst. You'll treat future gigs as
| transactional and be better for it. The younger you're laid off
| the sooner you'll learn this.
| magicstefanos wrote:
| I'm so grateful I was laid off just 2 years into my first
| software gig out of school. I graduated, worked my ass off at a
| startup, and theeeen covid! It hurt but that was a permanent
| wisdom upgrade.
| shaftway wrote:
| You forget over time, and obligations grow.
|
| My first layoff was rough. It was in '00 and I was 21, so I
| didn't have too many obligations.
|
| My second layoff was in '23 and I was 44 with kids and a
| mortgage. It hit me a lot harder.
|
| My third was in '24, but I had learned my lessons and had
| positioned myself better, so I wasn't as badly affected.
| xdennis wrote:
| The worst part is finding out how many things depend on your job.
| I needed to move out when I was laid off, but good luck finding
| someone to rent to you when you don't have a job.
| firtoz wrote:
| Yes... I'm in the UK, in London. For renting, even as a founder
| who has a profitable business that was active for a year,
| they're still either asking for upfront payments (12 months...)
| or a guarantor. This was the case for multiple locations (SE13
| + E16).
|
| They said if my business was running for 2 years or more then
| they'd accept that as low enough risk.
|
| A bit understandable in this economical situation, but man,
| it's hard. Even for the guarantor, they need to own a house and
| have at least 40x the monthly rent as proven (PAYE or business
| with 2+ years) yearly income.
|
| I knew only one person who could be a guarantor that fits the
| requirements.
|
| Alternative was AirBnb or other monthly accommodation which was
| of course more expensive.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The worst cases is when they don't even accept the 12 months
| of upfront payment !
| firtoz wrote:
| Wow, I never imagined that to be possible. What was their
| reasoning?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| It was bullshit. The real reasoning was of course, as
| usual : lots of 'buyers', few 'sellers'.
| keiferski wrote:
| The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to "financial
| difficulties" is when you observe management wasting absurd
| amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the
| following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, "low
| level" employees that don't cost much at all.
|
| This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee
| motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job
| security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of
| managing money responsibly.
|
| "Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that
| accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making
| $40k" really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people
| doesn't.
| mk89 wrote:
| That's because they have a budget which is planned ahead (e.g.,
| 2024 for 2025) for everything.
|
| Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they
| will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet
| spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such
| things was planned and approved last year).
|
| I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both
| firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen
| companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.
| keiferski wrote:
| Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which
| don't factor in continual employment of staff lead to the
| morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn't
| actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend
| or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in
| the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale
| high is a goal (which it definitely isn't at many companies.)
|
| Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a
| level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts
| from an actual lack of funds, IMO.
|
| "Sorry, the market has shifted and we can't afford this," is
| at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in
| management's ability. When you don't, it comes unpredictable
| and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.
| mk89 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Mismanagement of funds is one of the worst things. Is it
| pure incompetence?
|
| Or is that they don't give a damn and that "let's get
| together 500+ people for a fully paid weekend" is too cool
| to cancel?
|
| ...like better an egg today than a hen tomorrow. I mean,
| they don't get affected anyways, they do get the egg and
| hen...!
| number6 wrote:
| Playing devil's advocate: Firing people has a huge
| financial impact - around $100,000 per person per year.
| The event only cost $50,000 once. So it might not be that
| significant, and at least the staff gets to enjoy a nice
| event. Why eliminate both when the event's cost is
| equivalent to just half a position?
| mk89 wrote:
| I think it has more to do with the psychological effect
| than with money itself.
|
| We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut
| the useless "fun" expenses.
|
| When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on
| management that already "moved on".
|
| It has to do with how people perceive a company and with
| all that culture that has been pushed down our throats
| for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It
| has also to do somehow with showing some respect...
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| This one's easy. Because you value your people more than
| the parties they can throw. The cost/benefit are not just
| monetary. If they were, the event would have no reason to
| happen under any circumstance.
|
| You fire someone because they are hurting the company?
| That feels like a company that cares about doing well.
| Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question
| the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You
| layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell
| everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a
| top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels
| gross to throw more money away when you're already making
| "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.
| codr7 wrote:
| Let's hope the budget includes success then...
| vasco wrote:
| Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives
| can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will
| print money next year, so based on this prediction I will raise
| the budget for the FY. Then when the prediction of revenue
| fails, you do cuts, oh well you were wrong. But next year you
| can do the same thing. Game theory wise this works because if
| you're right, you bet big, hire big, are ahead next year vs
| your competitors that invested less. If it goes wrong you are
| seen as a serious executive that has the courage to have
| layoffs when needed, and if your market is ebbing your
| competitors will also be suffering somewhat.
|
| It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you
| want since in a small company it's just you saying a number
| that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large
| company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of
| mouth factor of their model or whatever.
| bodegajed wrote:
| This happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched
| PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board
| loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off
| dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past
| engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite
| from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of
| poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what
| now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new
| powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, those hyperspecialized employees that can only work in
| one project and could never do the exact same thing if the
| thing's goal changed...
|
| And yeah, those quick to materialize gains, where the manager
| can easily discover if a project worked within the same
| fiscal year...
|
| Also dragons and unicorns, I guess... what a world those
| people live in!
| bluGill wrote:
| That is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't
| matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article,
| government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever
| writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring
| out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is
| correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even
| know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets
| approved all the time because it looks good.
| wisty wrote:
| Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big
| on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit.
| This is especially true in government, and big companies are
| similar.
|
| There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting
| budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the
| fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and
| that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no
| experience in setting those budgets.
| iovrthoughtthis wrote:
| budget based economics may be the worst thing to happen to
| large organisations
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Suddenly I'm connecting the relationship between "budget
| based economics" and "agile" as commonly implemented. It's
| trying to fit creativity into a budget. In the places that
| do it well, it's like "We're supposed to make some really
| great art, here's the crayons we can afford, sorry if it's
| not exactly right but it's what we could manage, do
| whatever you can, we will take it!" In places that do it
| poorly, it's like "we need you to make the Uber of the Mona
| Lisa, I'm gonna need you to find a way to make that work,
| but we can totally be flexible on this, which crayons do
| you need."
|
| The key differences being that in one case there's well
| defined constraints on resources but open ended results,
| and in the other the resource constraints are poorly
| defined but the end result is much more fixed.
| codr7 wrote:
| Worse is trying to fit creativity into a tight schedule.
|
| Everything gets corrupted, today's agile is way worse
| than what came before in practice.
| bmitc wrote:
| I have never even understood the approach. The sub-budgets
| within an organization seem so arbitrary and become games
| in and of themselves, often leading to frivolous purchases
| just to use up the budget and not get your budget slashed.
|
| Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used
| before? What are the alternatives?
| wisty wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_pro
| ble...
|
| Managers play games because they are looking out for
| their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets
| constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is
| underspending, because they are tying up resources -
| companies will have a desired internal rate of return
| (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on
| their investments then a manger tying up capital is
| costing a lot.
|
| Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-
| identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the
| team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share
| information. Sharing information at least cuts down on
| some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always
| possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder
| / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it
| has a limit at scale.
|
| Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses
| gets done sometimes.
|
| Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I
| think.
|
| Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable
| amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would
| say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my
| reading is he basically tried to create a system where
| everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his
| principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he
| hoped).
|
| There's better and worse ways to try to get around the
| Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The
| consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years
| if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of
| clueless administrators that can't do much.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The government would never pay their internal employees the
| amount that consulting companies pay theirs. It would never
| be approved.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of
| resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random
| number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend
| it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are
| mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in
| the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount
| otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of
| people.
| cmbothwell wrote:
| Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I
| actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in
| life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of
| people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That
| budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to
| the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may
| not overlap with reality.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom"
| and thus push to get more and more people (either by
| grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is
| indeed how you create a " _legible & convincing
| narrative_" to increase your budget (end goal being more
| people, more power).
|
| In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show
| growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your
| typical company.
| aimanbenbaha wrote:
| This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do
| procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that
| contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that
| maximize the budgets set by higher management in government
| focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than
| delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.
|
| It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light
| to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business
| culture. It's this system that encourages managers to
| obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and
| while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting
| solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because
| at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an
| excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises
| of capitalism.
| cies wrote:
| Everybody makes mistakes. Higher up in the company (or
| goverment) mistakes are usually more expensive. Painful, but I
| see no way around this.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Surely this is a question of having skin in the game, where
| management is all game and employees all skin. If the clowns
| making decisions would get hit by bad ones, things would look
| differently. You now, actually "taking full responsibility".
| jojobas wrote:
| They don't spend $200k on consultants just because it's fun.
| They do it when there are already difficulties in figuring out
| how to productively use the employees who make $40k (say 20 of
| them).
|
| This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but
| they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia
| and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to
| hiring or firing some 10-100 people.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants
|
| A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and
| later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a
| colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of
| money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of
| consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like
| getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire
| three developers.
|
| Managements take was that we should keep the consultants,
| because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice,
| compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My
| colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had
| been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of
| their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The
| subject was then promptly changed.
|
| In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18
| months later.
| jddj wrote:
| Outside of the US this optionality does have some value to
| deserve at least some premium.
|
| _Hire an extra dev for the same money_ looks good on paper,
| but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some
| jurisdictions does muddy the water.
|
| (I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in
| mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the
| other direction as well)
| mrweasel wrote:
| > but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in
| some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
|
| Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark.
| Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be
| pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety
| representative.
|
| And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two
| months because they decided that they didn't have the
| budget anyway.
| varjag wrote:
| Two months in much of Europe is within 6-month trial
| period, it's easy to let anyone go.
| yobbo wrote:
| Furthermore, the "additional cost" of an employee in Europe
| is a further 35% of the salary due to social fees. That is
| why contractors often don't cost more to the company,
| although it might seem like that to employees.
| mstaoru wrote:
| 5+ years "consulting" would probably be reclassified as
| employment by most courts.
| mrweasel wrote:
| In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where
| employees, just with a different company. They just opted
| to station the same people at the same client for all those
| years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get
| ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed
| to eat together with team mates from the employer because
| that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently"
| bump into each other in the cantine, but not go
| together), or share the same office equipment for coffee,
| having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees
| get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| The one that is most ridiculous and sad IMO (I'm in the
| US) is that contractors aren't invited to the Christmas
| party.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Why is that ridiculous? Contractors are not employees, so
| why should they be invited to a give thanks party for
| employees? Become an employee if you want to partake.
| Feelings of entitlement are wrong here. Decency though
| tells us to invite everyone.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Yeah, that's the line at a Christmas work party. Is it
| about Christmas, or is it about work
| Keyframe wrote:
| I don't know. We get to invite clients and all the other
| business partners, why not contractors and people that
| work for them with us on a project?
| watwut wrote:
| Christmas part is not special "give thanks to employees"
| party, it is more of end of a year party. It makes
| perfect sense to invite contractors. Even if it was "give
| thanks" party, contractors worked on projects.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I remember a work Christmas party attended by a
| contractor. The company was an sme and as usual we closed
| the office at mid-day and headed for a local restaurant
| to eat and socialise. The contractor as chatty and
| sociable, and seemed happy to be dining on the company's
| bill. Wine flowed.
|
| Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing
| which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled
| his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| wait - was that me? Because I don't drink.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| It was was a long time ago. And based on your id, not
| you.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing
| which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled
| his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
|
| Or, maybe, had better things to do. :)
| guenthert wrote:
| > Become an employee if you want to partake.
|
| It's not necessarily up to them.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Its caste. The cleaning lady is part of the company and
| its a horror that the dalit are dis-included from all
| company activities. The only actual reason is to divide
| and conquer and prevent them being part of any employee
| unionization.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because contractors most of the time deliver as much as
| many employees.
| jajko wrote:
| I've been a consultant/contractor, less than 4 months in,
| and I still have been invited to (great) Christmas party,
| and even shared paid buses that took whole company and
| also given free accommodation.
|
| Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| > Feelings of entitlement are wrong here.
|
| How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors
| (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier
| to fire.
|
| I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but
| at the same time I've developed relationships with the
| people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being
| entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and
| not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I
| expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had
| consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you
| expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?
| close04 wrote:
| Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire
| employees. I've occasionally worked with the same
| consultants for years, with them acting as team mates
| doing the same work as every other internal. And we were
| team mates in everything work related, except the
| parties.
|
| I understand the contractual and financial logic but from
| the human perspective excluding the people who are
| otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is
| definitely eyebrow raising.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I'll admit "consulting" is an overloaded term.
|
| I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5
| years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue
| guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still
| get paid. I report status to the client company and they
| are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But
| they don't manage my work.
|
| I'm not embedded into their team, we might embed them
| into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading
| the projects.
|
| Then you have staff augmentation "consultants" like you
| are referring to.
|
| I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead
| for a company. We hired both staff augmentation
| "consultants" where we paid the contracting agency
| $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also
| paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no
| idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.
|
| That's what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting
| in 2018. I didn't know AWS when we hired the consultants.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees
| work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same
| project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The
| consultants are more like staff augmentation, than
| McKinsey consultants.
|
| If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the
| effect of treating part of my team differently.
|
| If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really
| bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| There is admittedly a difference between staff
| augmentation and McKinsey style strategic "consulting".
| The distinction is usually who owns the project?
|
| If the client company owns the project and you are just
| coming in as a warm body, that's staff augmentation.
|
| But if the client company is putting out Requests for
| Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement
| of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the
| work, that's "consulting". In the latter case, you don't
| usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you -
| ie when you are "on the bench".
|
| Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter
| company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying
| out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be
| doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels
| differently.
|
| My consulting company has internal employee events, is
| responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the
| client.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or
| any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them
| to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite
| "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor,
| or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people
| are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same
| signature on them.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If you were working with a general contractor where you
| signed a contract with them and they just went out and
| led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would
| you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The
| actual construction workers?
|
| This how true "consulting companies" work. You sign a
| statement of work with the requirements and costs and
| then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead
| the project. Your company will probably never interact
| with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the
| people over sub projects of the larger project (work
| streams) and their leads.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| OK sure, but I never once mentioned any of this and have
| no idea what the social customs are around hiring general
| contractors to build buildings or asking CIA-adjacent
| consulting companies how to jack up the price of bread. I
| just know that half my coworkers have a slightly
| different email address for "legal reasons", and they
| aren't allowed to come to the Christmas party. This is,
| in my opinion, simply mean. Basically we seem to have
| invented a kind of at-will apartheid that 0.0001% of the
| population understand and even fewer benefit from.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That's staff augmentation which is completely different.
| If your company doesn't know anything about Salesforce
| for instance and you just need a one off large project,
| you are going to hire a _consulting company_ to go off
| and do the work and leave.
|
| It doesn't make sense to build the competencies in house
| if that's not your core line of business's
|
| I left our part of my explanation of a general
| contractor. I meant when you are having a physical
| structure built like a house or in the case the analogy
| would be adding on to your office building
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| OK, have a good day. Hope you're feeling well.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Nothing ridiculous about it. That came out of the
| permatemp lawsuits in the US by contractors a couple of
| decades ago which resulted in employers avoiding doing
| anything that made it look like contractors were being
| treated like permanent employees. Squeezing for money by
| a few contractors ruined a good thing for the rest of
| them.
| Propelloni wrote:
| That's a manifestation of your specific environment and
| not a general rule. I guess it is the work of some
| overeager compliance department, because it is the kind
| of overreacting self-mutilation that happens if people do
| not understand a law and want to be absolutely sure (cf.
| GDPR).
|
| [1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to
| employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly
| self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all
| you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer
| you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly
| file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when.
| Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but
| established judicature)!
|
| [1] https://www.sup-
| kanzlei.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Scheinselbs...
| close04 wrote:
| > In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you
| get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not
| allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer
| because that is seen as bounding activities
|
| AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency
| staff (AUG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated.
| It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee
| some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair
| treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with
| the protections afforded to permanent employees.
|
| Consultancy has no such protections.
|
| I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal
| employees from socializing with the externals
| (consultants or AUG), or eat together. Bonding can happen
| equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't
| heard of any company or institution enforcing this.
| Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.
|
| What many companies probably enforce is "no internal
| benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee,
| parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not
| available for the externals, and they have to look
| elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to
| discourage bonding.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You get that at many companies whose legal department is
| too worried that AUG might somehow be triggered for them,
| or have a strong union that would rather see all
| consulting folks be gone, which I understand when placed
| in the shoes of internal folks.
| pkaye wrote:
| There was an lawsuit against Microsoft in the past that
| they lost because they used to treat contractors almost
| like employees. I'm guessing that is why these days most
| contractors are employed by someone else and not truly
| independent.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/companies/dont-
| treat...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| In most places, it doesn't work that way.
| pydry wrote:
| Consultanties get brought in to provide ass cover for
| management but they cant just say that.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| There's the whole capital expenditure vs operating expenses
| angle too, and depending on a company's particular situation,
| one might look better on paper than the other. Without going
| into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to
| contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the
| latter.
|
| This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So
| companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to
| win shareholder brownie points.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Or as wind-up to a merger /acquisition.
| Salgat wrote:
| Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for
| tax reasons saves the company money? Or is this all some
| nonsense setup by the company to shuffle the numbers to
| look superficially better for a specific metric?
| rincebrain wrote:
| To my understanding, it's the latter.
|
| "We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future
| growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we
| have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the
| actual recurring cost number is worse.
|
| (There's also some complexities in some industries around
| money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on
| certain types of expenditures...)
| Olreich wrote:
| It's all about accounting for the spend. Wall Street
| often looks at Capital Expenditures as a sign of growth
| or at least net neutral, but they view Operating Expenses
| as negative. If you can reduce your operating expenses by
| 200k, but increase your capital expenditure by 400k,
| you've reduced overall profit in order to increase growth
| potential because your investing 400k into new stuff that
| will bring in more revenue.
|
| This strategy cannot work long term unless there is
| growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for
| the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number
| of employees. But it can definitely work short term if
| the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad,
| and it has the benefit of giving management someone else
| to blame when the project work doesn't get done.
|
| If your company starts replacing employees with
| contractors, that's a bad sign.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That might be it, this company was obsessed with CAPEX
| vs. OPEX. Everything was always put into the context of
| CAPEX or OPEX. OPEX being bad and CAPEX good.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Wait, when did _that_ change? I thought the prevailing
| wisdom in our industry is that CAPEX sucks, OPEX rules. I
| understdood that 's what's driving SaaSification of
| everything - replacing some internal tool and labor with
| a SaaS is literally turning CAPEX into OPEX, and it was
| supposedly what the investors liked.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The only real difference is tax treatment. Opex is
| subtracted from earnings before public reporting and
| before taxes. So opex are more tax-efficient, but they
| lower your reported earnings.
| gosub100 wrote:
| - an employee is an "expense" that bogs down your money-
| machine.
|
| - a contractor provides a "service" that improves your
| money-machine output.
|
| (or so it's said).
| esafak wrote:
| Then simply fire all the employees and hire contractors!
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor
| for tax reasons saves the company money?
|
| This may vary due to region. For example in the U.S where
| you can fire people quickly the contractor benefit is
| less apparent, but in EU where after a short period you
| may have to spend a long time to fire someone it may be
| beneficial to hire a contractor rather than going through
| a lengthy hiring process only to find out you want to
| fire them.
|
| Contractors in such an environment often are a reasonable
| investment for a project that has a particular dedicated
| timeline. Like we expect 1 year for project to finish. We
| hire for 1 year, and opportunity to extend for 3 months 2
| times in case it goes bad.
|
| Otherwise you have to hire for project and then do these
| layoffs everybody here is complaining about.
|
| Furthermore in EU if you are paying 10000 for an
| employee, you probably have extra fees on top of that so
| you are paying 14000 (estimation) then for contractor you
| are not paying 28000, but 20000. The pricing is not
| great, but there are lots of factors that can make it
| seem more attractive than it might appear on its face.
|
| Finally, Contractors tend not to do any of this quiet
| quitting or whatever, probably because for them it is
| more a business and they are also earning significantly
| more that makes it an interesting business to be in and
| to maintain.
| imtringued wrote:
| You can give workers temporary contracts and extend them
| as you see fit. None of what you are saying makes any
| sense to me.
|
| Also, I will repeat this as many times as possible: you
| can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you
| can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the
| damn law. You need to give your employee a WRITTEN letter
| of termination, to make the termination legally binding.
| Then all you have to do is give them notice (or pay the
| salary out immediately if you want to get rid of them
| immediately).
|
| Paying double so you can fire contractors is illogical.
| The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled
| to is 7 months, after working 20 damn years at a single
| company, which means at worst the company would have to
| pay half your salary out a single time to get rid of you
| immediately. None of this 2x every year multi-year
| bullshit.
|
| The reason why you hire contractors is that you do not
| need the full output of an employee. You might only need
| three months or maybe just a week. It's the same reason
| companies rent equipment instead of buying.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > The maximum amount of notice you can be legally
| entitled to is 7 months
|
| I believe the maximum amount of notice you can be legally
| entitled to as a contractor is whatever your contract
| says
| generic92034 wrote:
| > you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way
| you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow
| the damn law.
|
| That is overly simplified. First, you have to commit to
| one of three types of layoffs, only one of which usually
| is applicable (betriebsbedingte Kundigung). But if you do
| that you have to consider the social circumstances of the
| employee and also other comparable employees. Which
| absolutely can result in not being able to fire the
| employee you would like to fire without also firing a
| number of other employees first. That could be really
| disruptive, so it is not quite so easy for German
| employers.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| In my experience long time contractors will absolutely
| "quiet quit" if put into the same catch-22 situations
| that push employees to do this.
|
| The main difference at least in my region is that if
| you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to
| quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't
| as strong. In other words, tech workers who become
| contractors here usually are better contributors and have
| an easier time finding good offers.
| V__ wrote:
| I am wondering whether a company "optimizing for
| shareholder brownie points" is a good signal to either look
| for employment elsewhere or as an investor start investing
| elsewhere. It seems like a company who prioritizes this
| either has reached their potential (which might be fine) or
| is just not able to innovate anymore.
| cj wrote:
| A simple question to ask an employer during an interview
| is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for
| how long?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Most VC backed private companies aren't profitable. If it
| is a public company the information is readily available
| lesuorac wrote:
| There's still a question of what you consider profitable.
|
| A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses
| but stock-based compensation is often not considered an
| expense so if you add those into the expense side it
| could change profitability.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| But honestly, profitability doesn't matter. All of the
| major tech companies were profitable and still had tens
| of thousands of layoffs between them.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Layoffs in big tech are mostly to place workers in their
| place and shake the market, they've definitely been able
| to drive down salaries these past two years.
| grajaganDev wrote:
| Yes - I think layoffs are also backlash against WFH.
|
| Employees were getting a bit too uppity.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Stock-based compensation is absolutely considered an
| expense under US GAAP.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Which is why companies report non-GAAP numbers.
|
| https://abc.xyz/assets/71/a5/78197a7540c987f13d247728a371
| /20...
|
| > We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a
| liquidity measure that provides useful information to
| management and investors about the amount of cash
| generated by the business that can be used for strategic
| opportunities, including investing in our business and
| acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.
| OJFord wrote:
| Sure, and then there's all the private companies backed
| by non-venture capital, and the profitable ones running
| on revenue.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You don't find too many profitable "lifestyle companies"
| in tech.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| You stated that there aren't many profitable lifestyle
| companies. And the insinuation put forth is that they are
| very rare to the point of almost nonexistent.
|
| This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me;
| tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector
| within and adjacent to tech to have reached this
| conclusion?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| No. But I do know statistics. The largest employees in
| tech are the public companies that we have all heard of.
| The next largest segment are VC funded companies with the
| smallest segment by far being the "lifestyle companies".
|
| Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to
| match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many
| of those do you think are going to be profitable,
| private, lifestyle companies?
| tomnipotent wrote:
| I would put money on all of big tech and all public
| companies combined not employing more than 30% of
| professional programmers. At least in the US only 15%
| work at a large company (500+).
| alistairSH wrote:
| There are plenty of mid-size tech companies that are both
| not-public and not-lifestyle.
|
| My employer is one of them. Several thousand employees,
| global reach, and owned by PE (Blackstone and Vista).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Those are the companies he meant by "public companies",
| ie publicly traded not government owned.
| codr7 wrote:
| That would be a red flag to me.
|
| Companies that make a shit ton of money generally don't
| like changes.
|
| They're just looking for the next fool to squeeze.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > A simple question to ask an employer during an
| interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If
| so, for how long?
|
| This is great advice.
|
| For instance, I was once in an interview where they were
| grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the
| first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the
| past five years.
|
| At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that
| my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The
| interviewers were smart and they were asking hard
| questions.
|
| But when I asked them to comment on their two recent
| bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that
| point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It
| became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a
| furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
|
| Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the
| entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer
| in less than twelve hours.
|
| My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees
| (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring
| interviewees off because they were in such terrible
| financial shape.
|
| Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of
| their financial problems, while they were simultaneously
| discussing _technical_ issues when the real issue was
| financial.
|
| I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I
| had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego
| (the florist), and they are kaput:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/flower-delivery-company-
| ftd-...
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| I'm in a VC-owned business with a 50% profit ebitda. But
| a common trick is to just load it with debt. The VC firm
| pays out all profits as dividends, all investments into
| restructuring, M&A and new technology is paid for by
| high-interest loans from the shareholder. What's left is
| a company that barely cashflows as all profit goes
| towards paying interest to the VC firm.
|
| The appointed management team has to operate within that
| scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50%
| interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning
| it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or
| promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise
| dying and slowly shrinking business sector.
|
| In other words a terrible place for general salary
| growth.
|
| So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for
| (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3)
| that aren't owned by VC.
|
| Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't
| really apply as much.
| iknowSFR wrote:
| Large US companies that I've worked with or for do this
| as a SOP. It's not a calculation being done at the hiring
| manager level as much as a path of least resistance
| because that's the way it's been done for so long.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > contractors will be hired typically to contribute to
| capital expenditure
|
| You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an
| immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with
| a depreciation period.
|
| Changing the expenses that way can only increase the
| company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly
| want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently
| show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Most of the people in charge of making these kinds of
| decisions are not that smart.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors
| as earnings
|
| Bingo. That's the main reason to shift opex to capex.
| nine_k wrote:
| This is exactly what has changed [1]: R&D costs had been
| an immediate tax break, but since 2022 became an
| expenditure requiring a 5-year amortization period.
|
| That change had been planned to be canceled before coming
| into force, but it was not canceled on time.
|
| Hence the wave of layoffs in 2022, as companies were
| urgently trying to improve their balance sheets, as
| investors and the Wall Street requested, AFAICT.
|
| [1]: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-
| changes-us-sof...
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _Without going into too much detail, contractors will be
| hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and
| employees to the latter._
|
| That doesn't make any sense. In any situation in which a
| contractor expense would be capitalized, an employee's
| salary would also be capitalized. Labor costs are labor
| costs; whether someone is a contractor or an employee is a
| labor law issue, not a tax issue. (Internal R&D was the big
| exception to the capitalization rule, but that loophole was
| closed, which is what prompted a lot of tech and videogame
| layoffs over the past 2 years.)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| "A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and
| later later start laying off people"
|
| Why would anyone stay at a company that had pay freezes for a
| few years. I would have been looking for another job the
| moment they announced them.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are soft perks. I have a pension that counts how long
| I work for the company (I have no idea what the real terms
| of it are, but that simplification will do for this
| discussion). Long term than pension is - hopefully - worth
| far more than a couple years of no raises. Depending of
| course on how long I live - statistically I will die
| sometime between 60 and 100 with the most likely age being
| 80 - the longer I live the more than pension is worth, on
| the low end it is worthless.
|
| That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my
| displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the
| pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation,
| but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer
| position in the company that resulted in a nice level
| promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best
| option.
|
| Though your mileage will vary.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I forgot that pensions are still a thing in some places.
|
| But when you calculate the the present value of the
| pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the
| difference between staying and going and making more
| money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying
| to be combative)
| bluGill wrote:
| > is the difference between staying and going and making
| more money elsewhere worth it?
|
| That is a great question that is at least partially
| unknowable. You cannot discount future cash flows without
| knowing how long you will live and thus how much you
| should discount. Also things like inflation are
| unknowable.
|
| As I said, I did leave. I stayed with the same company
| but found a different division. Which is the best of all
| worlds. I think, perhaps I could get a better offer
| elsewhere? If so would that better job still exist or
| would I now be laid off for months before finding a new
| job and thus destroying all the income gain from that new
| job?
|
| There are a ton of unknowable factors. I can say it
| worked out okay for me so far, but that is about it.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Depending on your level and how much of your life is built
| around your job - it's not always as easy to leave as you
| might think.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It depends on who you are and what market you are in. Many
| people in recent years have reported putting in over a
| thousand job applications and only netting a couple of
| interviews, none of which resulted in a job offer. But if
| you have a network into available jobs and can short cut
| all of the pipeline insanity going on now, making a jump
| would be smart. Then again, the type of companies that play
| these games typically don't have top notch talent in the
| first place. Many people might endure it because they fear
| they don't have other options.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. Generally, when one company institutes pay
| freezes, they're probably also in a hiring freeze, along
| with the rest of the industry. Everything's nice and
| coordinated and they all use the same "macroeconomic
| environment" as the excuse. So an employee doesn't really
| have the option to just hop jobs, nobody else is hiring.
| Ironically, the best time to hop jobs is when you're
| getting raises because the economy is strong and everyone
| else is hiring.
| EGreg wrote:
| How exactly does one become a consultant on a 1099? Go work
| for a consulting company a W-2? That's how I did it four
| years ago. Well, the consulting company takes a nice chunk
| above what they bill you out for.
|
| How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract
| work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt
| when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you
| found 'em.
| bluGill wrote:
| You have to legally start a company. That means some legal
| work (you don't need a lawyer, but it helps). You need to
| do the books yourself - and because this is very different
| areas of tax law you really should hire an accountant (only
| an hour/month, but having extra eyes look at the books is
| useful). If you do this right you make more money, but
| there are problems if you miss some legal detail that W-2
| employees don't have.
|
| Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places
| won't work with you. however most of the big consulting
| companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will
| be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you
| doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make
| tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can
| give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the
| lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so
| what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that
| work similar)
| Damogran6 wrote:
| As I understood it, you're also on the hook for valuing
| yourself properly. You may think you're making more
| money, until you factor in vacations and medical and
| retirement and slack time and...and...and
| hammock wrote:
| Many companies have a policy like "freelancers, once kept on
| for 12 months, must be either hired full time, or fired" to
| deal with this
| dolmen wrote:
| Think about a wider scale than your employer: if the costs of
| the consultants goes in fact in the pockets of the investors
| of your employer, that money is not lost.
| kavalg wrote:
| In quite many places, hiring consultants has a very high
| corruption potential (e.g. the hiring manager favoring one of
| several suppliers). With employees they don't have this
| leverage.
| jorvi wrote:
| One that is functionally different but causes the same type of
| morale hit is managers and upward equipping themselves with
| fully loaded MacBooks and iPhones, but equipping rank-and-file
| employees with shitty Dell laptops and budget tier Android
| phones.
|
| That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies,
| but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped
| in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.
| skirge wrote:
| "low level" do count in stats if need to show "savings" and can
| be easily replaced when needed. Also they do not generate
| profits but need resources (mentoring etc.). On the other side
| costs are tax deductible.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| It's just normal late Capitalism syndrome - no one takes
| responsibilities, and everyone, at least everyone that is close
| to the trough tries to get his/her head into it.
|
| From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants,
| it's everywhere. That's it.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > management is apparently incapable of managing
|
| That's frequently the fundamental issue really.
|
| Measuring a developer's productivity as an IC is fairly easy.
| Measuring quality of manager's decisions is tricky
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Lets just add a metric (like loc or stockprice) - that will
| solve things. Gambling metrics will continue till lipservice
| improves.
| EGreg wrote:
| Um, I have seen irrationality all across the board. Market
| participants shooting themselves in the foot.
|
| I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and
| then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.
|
| When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission
| from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when
| it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.
|
| I have even explained to recruiters that there is an
| opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent
| or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would
| also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job
| they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their
| counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which
| usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and
| don't want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To
| their credit, some are not.
|
| And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and
| then cut their task force. Many of them don't care about you,
| but expect you to care about them. They'll even expect you to
| stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won't pay you
| overtime.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One thing I learned the other day is to never believe the
| _internal_ corporate newsletters. For an entire year, pretty
| much every single day would bring in an e-mail from Company BU
| A, or Cross-Company Initiative X, or Podcast with CEO, or such.
| Every single one of them would talk about the great successes
| in recovering from the economic crisis, the amazing results
| this quarter, the great product release here, another
| successful merger there, new perspectives on Bitcoin or AI or
| such from CEO, whatnot - all giving you the picture of the
| enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp
| speed. And then a layoff wave finally reaches your department,
| and you learn that apparently the whole BU is deep in the red
| and they 're forced to cut staff across the board, and it's
| been like this forever, and that's why there was an emergency
| meeting last Thursday (called "Financial Update Q3 for BU Y" or
| something, non-obligatory and otherwise not announced or
| discussed), and "don't you ever attend town halls?".
|
| (Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing
| relevant in them. Until one day there is.)
|
| Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even
| greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of
| blockchain or AI or stuff.
|
| Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all
| internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to
| the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. _not at all_.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| For most execs/people, there's a big difference between what
| people will say in a meeting and what they will write down.
| They feel the permanance of the writing or recording.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| one of lessons i learned hard way: do not trust - or avoid
| - managers/higher-ups who do not want their things in
| written - even e-mails. While still have you sign all kind
| of stuff.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| When narratives fail, to casual observers the failure seems
| sudden and out of the blue, but there are usually
| unmistakable signs of "narrative breakdown" that often become
| obvious to most observers only in hindsight. One of the most
| dramatic stories of a "failed narrative" we have ever read
| comes from Barton Biggs, in his book "Wealth, War and
| Wisdom":
|
| >> "...the Japanese official battle reports and the Japanese
| press reported the Battle of the Coral Sea as a great
| triumph, and Midway was portrayed as a victory, not a defeat,
| although some loss of aircraft and ships were admitted.
| Although casualties must have been noted and grieved,
| Japanese society at the time was so united behind the war
| policy and believed so totally in the invincibility of the
| Japanese military, that defeat and economic failure were
| virtually inconceivable. It would have been unpatriotic to
| sell stocks..."
|
| >> "Not every investor in Japan misread the battles at Coral
| Sea and Midway. Food was in short supply, and railings in the
| parks around the Imperial Palace were being dismantled for
| their iron. The Nomura family and Nomura Securities in
| mid-1942 began to suspect the eventual defeat of Japan.
| Although the newspapers and radio broadcast only good news
| about the course of the war, the Nomuras apparently picked up
| information in the elite tea houses of the upper class. Many
| of the naval officers and aviators involved in the battles at
| Midway and the Coral Sea had geishas, and when the officers
| failed to return, rumors began to circulate."
|
| >> "The Nomura family, sensing something was amiss, began to
| gradually sell its equity holdings, and even sold short.
| Later they purchased real assets, probably reasoning that
| land and real businesses would be the best stores of value in
| a conquered country. These protected assets allowed the
| family to have the capital to finance the rapid expansion of
| Nomura Securities & Research in the immediate postwar years
| and eventually emerge as the dominant securities firm in
| Japan."
|
| When did the narrative above "officially" fail? Many date it
| to August 15, 1945, six days after the 2nd atomic bomb was
| dropped on Nagasaki, when Emperor Hirohito addressed Japan on
| the radio to announce Japan's surrender, noting "...the war
| situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's
| advantage..."
| jodrellblank wrote:
| " _the Ministry of Plenty 's forecast had estimated the
| output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five
| million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two
| millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked
| the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for
| the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any
| case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-
| seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions.
| Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier
| still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less
| cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical
| numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half
| the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with
| every class of recorded fact, great or small._" -
| https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/
|
| Centralised rule, surveillance, privileging the upper
| classes, meaningless statistics, perfomative loyalty; things
| capitalists say they hate about communism, they love when
| designing companies.
|
| > "all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like
| literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed."
|
| Everything whizzing rapidly upwards while your cube farm gets
| more crowded and your tools slower and your once-respected
| skilled work devalued in favour of pump-n-dump funny-money
| schemes?
|
| > " _The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the
| telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food,
| more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots,
| more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more
| babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and
| insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and
| everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done
| earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in
| the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table,
| drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated
| resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always
| been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked
| round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls
| grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal
| tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with
| elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white
| mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a
| sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and
| metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and
| in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you
| had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was
| true that he had no memories of anything greatly different.
| In any time that he could accurately remember, there had
| never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or
| underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had
| always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube
| trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-
| coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes
| insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic
| gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one 's body
| aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order
| of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt
| and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of
| one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the
| gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food
| with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be
| intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that
| things had once been different?_"
| nradov wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, there is usually little
| connection between management wasting money last year and
| laying off employees this year. Downsizing targets are based on
| predicted future needs so if business is trending down they'll
| cut just as many employees even if they have an enormous amount
| of cash saved.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I think that the honorable thing in those companies is for a
| CEO to demand seppuku from a significant portion of the
| c-suite. At least as a form of solidarity with the workers put
| to the sword.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| We are apparently going through a "year of efficiency" and most
| of us know what it means. After "more with less" round come
| layoffs so one might as well do some basic prep work, dust off
| resume, reach out to your support network.. just saying.
| donatj wrote:
| In my experience, the consultants likely recommend the layoffs,
| probably even helping select who to let go.
|
| If they cut more than five $40k employees, they've made their
| $200k back.
| DrScientist wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing - but I think it's worth pointing out that
| an employee on $40K actually costs the company a lot more ( can
| be as much as > 2x ) - not just employers tax, pensions
| contributions etc, but also the cost of factory/lab/office
| space and equipment and consumables[1].
|
| [1] Assuming the consultants aren't also in the office with a
| desk etc
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| $40k is a tiny salary, too. Taxes, facilities, and benefits
| are going to be more than 2x that. A contractor paid
| $200k/year is likely cheaper in total cost than an employee
| paid $100k/year.
| moduspol wrote:
| Employee headcount is also evaluated less favorably when
| potential investors evaluate the company's health. They're
| implicitly seen as a promise to continue paying them in the
| future, whether that's materially different from what the
| company does with contractors or not.
|
| And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff
| of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch
| of contractors not having their contracts renewed.
| nrclark wrote:
| I was laid off once. The reason on paper was budgetary, times
| are tough, etc. But the real reason was that I was a bad fit
| for the role - for a variety of reasons.
|
| I got pipped, and foolish me tried hard to work on the items in
| the pip (to no effect). The layoff came right on schedule.
|
| A few years later, I was chatting with an old coworker and I
| came to find out that the director of engineering had demanded
| it. It was in direct response to me refusing to participate in
| building a knowingly DMCA-violating product.
|
| The pip was theater. The "times are tough" bit was theater. The
| reality is that the director wanted me gone, and that is how
| they did it for legal coverage reasons.
|
| I don't really blame the company - I was a bad fit, and I can
| see that clearly in hindsight. But it did teach me never to
| accept budgetary layoffs at face value.
| ergocoder wrote:
| I don't see the theater as bad or good. If anything, it's
| slightly good.
|
| It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because
| you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your
| work reputation (because layoff is public).
| cultureswitch wrote:
| Imagine getting fired because you wanted to respect the DMCA
| of all things. I'd be curious for details, though you
| probably shouldn't tell.
| nrclark wrote:
| I was never really concerned about the ethics, but was more
| worried that I'd be personally liable for it. I kept
| thinking about the VW emissions scandal, where the engineer
| that implemented it was given prison time.
|
| In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to
| worry about. I also never should have expected that I'd be
| able to change the director's mind by refusing to do what
| he said.
| horrible-hilde wrote:
| you absolutely did the right thing. Are you doing well
| now?
| nrclark wrote:
| Yes, I bounced back.
|
| Getting soft-fired really shook me, and it was a hit to
| my self-confidence. I did learn some valuable life-
| lessons from it though, and including that nobody should
| ignore office politics.
|
| Afterwards, I found a job that was a much better fit.
| That next job changed the direction of my career, and I'm
| very happy with where I am now.
| mclau156 wrote:
| not a single comment about overpopulation?
| snozolli wrote:
| _when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money_
|
| Working in corporate America has caused me to view layoffs as
| proof of managerial incompetence. I understand that the market
| doesn't see it that way, but that's the conclusion I've come
| to.
| malfist wrote:
| What's even more absurd than cost cutting after mismanagement
| is a layoff and cost cutting while having record profits. Look
| at most of the big tech layoffs last year and the year before.
| Every one of them was reporting more profit and revenue than
| ever before and still doing layoffs
| jarsin wrote:
| It's not just overspending it's over hiring too. IME they
| always go hand in hand.
|
| Then those who spent years working hard with minimal staff are
| the ones to be laid off.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > "Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that
| accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making
| $40k" really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people
| doesn't.
|
| One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a
| tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a
| million dollars to make a single phone call.
|
| Basically:
|
| * We were spending money like it was going out of style
|
| * We were getting the highest level of support contracts on
| EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean
| that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the
| corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive
| support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack
| and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got
| installed.
|
| * The software support contract from one of our vendors was a
| million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a
| single year, we'd made a single support call.
| brailsafe wrote:
| This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech,
| that you need to try and get as much money out of your
| initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your
| prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked
| away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I feel like that not only due to my recent layoff due to cuts,
| but also due to the job market. I'm tired of applying to ghost
| openings that exist just to signal growth when there's none.
| nickd2001 wrote:
| Q : What's the difference between a permie and a contractor? A:
| The contractor KNOWS they have no job security. ;). Your only
| real job security is your skillset. If that's good, lay-offs are
| often an opportunity rather than something to be feared. I've
| been laid off twice, 20 yrs apart. 1st company folded soon after.
| 2nd got taken over by bigger one. Was glad to be out in both
| cases, not happy place to remain. In both cases quickly got a
| better job, pay rise, and engineered a nice long break between
| jobs. 2cnd time I wasn't super happy there, but risk averse about
| moving due to young family. Lay-off was helpful push to look for
| something else. Found another job, then hopped on in 18 months to
| a great job. Got rid of a nasty commute in the process. Many
| people tell this story. Far too many of us stay places too long,
| we think "better the devil you know". Layoffs can be a
| blessing..... Caveat - if you're working a min wage job without a
| marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared and a totally
| different experience.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| > if you're working a min wage job without a marketable
| skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared and a totally different
| experience.
|
| That's the majority of the population to be honest
| bandrami wrote:
| About 1% of the US workforce works for minimum wage
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| Is that stat accounting for those working in the dark
| market (ie without proper documentation)
| coldpie wrote:
| There's a lot of minimum wages. Are you talking about the
| federal minimum wage ($7.50/hr), or the minimum wage local
| to the worker ($15.00/hr where I live)?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > without a marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be
| feared
|
| Which will probably soon encompass a large amount of Devs.
| large productivity increases usually mean job losses.
| n_ary wrote:
| Lay off is great if economy is booming(some 2012-2018 and then
| 2021) but nightmare if economy is screwed(2024-present).
|
| I recall commenting few days back that, the job market is so
| screwed now that even senior engineers with decades of
| experience are not trusted these days if they are missing minor
| experience in some minor tool.
|
| In 2021, I remember everyone with ability to type some
| code(regardless of quality) land great jobs, remote contracts
| etc. Everyone I know currently looking to change or were laid
| off since mid last year are suffering(real bad) and all of
| these are highly qualified people whom I'd really trust with
| most critical work.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| Ironically, if you are a contractor going through a staffing
| agency, when you are "fired" from a contract, you generally
| still get paid something by the agency and get "bench time" to
| train up your skills or work on internal projects. Sometimes
| contractors have better job security from a paycheck
| perspective.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Depends on the agency. Many will not pay you (and some may
| terminate you themselves if you don't have a contract for
| you, because they are paying your benefits).
| OpenDrapery wrote:
| Being a contractor can be a good play, especially if your
| spouse carries benefits for your family.
|
| Being a contractor is generally considered low status and
| temporary, so if you can get over that, then you can thrive.
|
| The upside to this is the understanding that it is
| transactional and hourly. There is no expectation that you get
| emotionally invested. Which can actually be a much more health
| arrangement.
| otar wrote:
| Mostly a bad advice.
| firtoz wrote:
| Why do you think so?
| mnau wrote:
| Why? Seems pretty sensible. Employer-employee is a business
| relationship. Treat it as such.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Worked with some of the teams making the first iPhone and
| bringing the Internet to everyone in a pocket sized slab was
| way more than a job it was a dream. Didn't turn out quite as
| expected, but this idea that work is only that is in my
| opinion dangerous. Millions are made selling sugar water and
| there is a famous multimillionaire with warehouses full of
| nickles, but business can be much more than that and it is up
| to all participants to build, man, and steer the boats.
| croemer wrote:
| For those wondering, he was laid off from Shopify (quick search
| on LinkedIn revealed, not mentioned in article)
| snozolli wrote:
| He clearly didn't want to mention it, so why 'out' him?
| bodegajed wrote:
| Great read OP. My only hope is that somewhere in the future, when
| these "efficiency-focused" companies close. (Nobody there will
| build anything special soon and they can easily be disrupted.)
| Maybe, just maybe, someone would start something that will do
| things differently, and others will follow.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives. Many companies
| encourage impactful work to earn promotions, but instead of
| chasing internal advancements, focus on switching companies to
| achieve your next career step._
|
| This is probably the most heartbreaking aspect of modern HR
| policy.
|
| It's not just about layoffs. It's about the way the company
| incentivizes (or doesn't) worker loyalty and enthusiasm. You
| could have employees that spend their entire career at a company,
| and refuse to ever "go the extra mile," because there's obviously
| no motivation to do so.
|
| Loyalty, engagement, and morale usually comes from things other
| than paychecks. Often, simple, basic Respect can have _huge_
| impact on the motivation and loyalty of employees.
|
| It's actually quite mystifying [to me], how modern HR practice
| seems to actively discourage things like treating employees with
| Respect.
|
| I worked for a company that was (at the time I joined them) quite
| well-known for employee retention. I think the _average_ length
| of stay was about 25 years, when I joined. They didn't pay
| especially well, so their corporate work environment was
| responsible for that retention.
|
| As the years went on, I watched the HR Department become much
| colder, and more impersonal. They became absolutely _obsessive_
| about constantly reminding employees, at every possible
| opportunity, that we were simply replaceable cogs in the machine,
| and that the company could get rid of us, at a whim. They never
| really improved their compensation, and gradually removed many
| incentives, so it became all stick, and no carrot.
|
| Performance evaluations became insulting and predictable
| exercises in humiliation. I was often told to reduce the
| encouragement in my evaluations (I was a manager, for many
| years). I used to take pride in specific and eloquent praise in
| my evaluations. My employees really appreciated that.
|
| HR definitely wanted to make sure that employees felt insecure in
| their employment. It was obviously a deliberate and calculated
| policy. Our HR was run by the corporate General Counsel, so,
| lawyers set the tone.
|
| By the time I left (as a result of a much-anticipated layoff),
| the employee morale was completely in the shitter, and the
| company's much-vaunted employee retention statistic was no more.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| > the company's much-vaunted employee retention statistic
|
| In a job market with more candidates than jobs, why would you
| need to an employee retention statistic? The reality is that in
| the current job market, regardless of your employment status or
| your work, your value has greatly diminished.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sadly, this is true, but this company was _world-famous_ for
| insanely high-Quality products. It was definitely crucial to
| their brand. They needed to attract top-shelf talent, and
| that brand reputation was important for this. I worked as a
| peer, with some of the top scientists and engineers in my
| field.
|
| That reputation took a _big_ hit, over the the time that I
| worked for them. I think they damn near went belly-up, after
| 100 years.
|
| They seem to be (slowly) getting their act together, once
| again. I sincerely wish them luck.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Rather like "if you've never missed a plane you've spent too
| much time in airports", companies believe that there's such a
| thing as employee retention that's too high; it means you could
| be squeezing their pay more in order to force them to quit.
|
| Doesn't account for all the tacit knowledge and morale effects
| of course. Some people just like running the Hunger Games.
|
| & a good corporate reputation is just another asset like a
| rainforest: something you can burn to top up profits this
| quarter.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| A company having a Human Resources department sounds like a red
| flag. (And who is surprised by this : such an Orwellian term
| !?)
| Muromec wrote:
| A company cop can be called "People's Partner" and North
| Korea could be called Democratic Republic, but everybody
| knows what is happening.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| HR departments are constantly looking at "market rates" for
| jobs which is a fancy way of saying they share salary data or
| get it from ADP and have much more information about what
| people are willing to accept.
|
| At hiring time, they are willing to pay market rate (or some
| percentage of market rate) to get people in the door. Once you
| are employed, they don't care anymore and will let excellent
| people slowly fall behind market compensation with 1% to 2%
| raises.
|
| When those employees get frustrated and leave for 20% bump in
| comp, the companies seem fine replacing them with a new hire at
| market rate. So now, they have a new employee making market
| rate, they have to train the new employee for months before
| they are productive and they've taken on the risk of an unknown
| vs. just giving the existing employee a raise to market rate.
| It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message
| that employees are fungible and you don't really care about
| people.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> you want to telegraph the message that employees are
| fungible and you don 't really care about people._
|
| From my experience, that's _exactly_ what is going on.
|
| HR was _obsessed_ (and that's not hyperbole) with
| _constantly_ telling us that we could be ejected, at any
| time.
|
| I suspect that it had something to do with legal stuff. Our
| HR was run by lawyers.
| Muromec wrote:
| > It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the
| message that employees are fungible and you don't really care
| about people.
|
| I actually makes total sense and a lot of it. I see the take
| that management doesn't know about knowledge being lost, they
| don't understand this, they don't understand that. I believed
| this was case until I started to work for a company that is
| literally 200 years old.
|
| At some point between joining that company and deciding to
| leave the previous, I got it -- nobody is actually that
| stupid, neither people are evil or anything.
|
| Employee being a row in an excel sheet is an important _goal_
| that every big company strives to achieve and all the
| functions, processes and products that are contrary to that
| dogma are actively rejected by the system as dangerous.
|
| For the company to be _the company_ it must never depend on
| this particular employee being very smart. Every bit of
| knowledge that is not written down and confirmed to be in
| accordance to The Policy is a risk and should be forgotten.
| That 's the intended way.
|
| And of course the only way to discover the market price for
| real is to spend the money. The cost of losing mister special
| employee is negative anyway, and for the offchance it's
| positive, it's worth it.
|
| The evil thing is not this, the evil thing is not being
| upfront about it. Get a union, negotiate yourself a nice row
| in the excel sheet and be happy about it or make your own
| company.
| xyst wrote:
| > But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-
| breaking financial results. You work hard, focus on impactful
| projects, and receive praise from your lead--only to find
| yourself let go by someone who likely doesn't even know you exist
|
| This what happens when country policy and businesses are driven
| by awful neoliberal economic theory and neoclassical/orthodox
| economic policy.
|
| For the past 40 years, we have seen:
|
| - wage stagnation for labor
|
| - decreasing worker protections (in tech, this means forced NDAs,
| arbitration, non-compete clauses)
|
| - significant decreases in social safety nets
|
| - increasing wage disparity across the board
|
| - decrease in investment of labor and company and emphasis on
| stock --manipulation-- buy back programs and layoffs for short
| term gains
|
| - decreasing participation in labor unions and thus decrease in
| collective bargaining power for labor
|
| - non-transparent pay grades across the industry
|
| - rampant wage theft in the form of: "instead of paying overtime,
| give you a title, a salary, and expect you to push more than 40
| hrs a week" (or do a job that usually requires 3-4 people)
|
| - decreasing worker loyalty to companies
|
| - increasing consolidation of power and money through monopolies
| and monopsonies
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| If workers don't do something about it (other than complain on
| random websites) and everyone else is happy with their record
| breaking profits, you can possibly expect any changes to do
| this aside from going further in the same direction
| code-blooded wrote:
| I've experienced a company not only treating its employees as
| numbers in a sheet, but also actively lying to them.
|
| I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US.
| Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the
| company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to
| accomplish even more the next year by adding several more
| engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well
| maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory
| meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly
| tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we
| know that we ended up training our replacements.
|
| Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by
| security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to
| even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the
| trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to
| take severance and leave as well.
|
| The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent
| contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation
| or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends'
| experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business
| setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage
| as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's
| required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit
| you.
| belter wrote:
| I saw IBM uproot an entire support team, persuading them to
| sell their homes and relocate their children to another U.S.
| state with more lenient layoff laws. Once the team had moved,
| the company made everyone redundant.
|
| The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies
| is off the scale:
|
| "...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population
| meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further
| claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the
| business world than in the general population. Figures of
| around 3-4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in
| business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers
| found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and
| another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic
| characteristics..." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Reason #54298 why IBM deserves nothing.
| jajko wrote:
| Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of
| salt.
|
| I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them
| often in management since they are attracted to pay, power
| and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard
| working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and
| human interactions to almost perfection over years at least
| under normal, controlled, and previously experienced
| settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start
| to show.
|
| Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest
| concentration. Another areas are those with real power,
| whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary
| but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle
| management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice
| guy and get, survive and even thrive there.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| How many people are involved in scheming such strategies?
| There must be leaks of the planning, right?
| dumbledoren wrote:
| That something like this can be legal shows how f*cked up the
| US is.
| branperr wrote:
| Nothings going to change until consequences for this behavior
| is established.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| > but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with
| management
|
| What signs were there? Or was it simply some subconscious
| feeling?
| code-blooded wrote:
| Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped
| caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really
| cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we
| want them to level up quickly).
|
| Everything was subtle:
|
| Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more
| meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so
| we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"),
| they were looking at each other often when making decisions
| (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to
| handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).
|
| In the final weeks management started suddenly
| taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that
| didn't make sense.
| vachina wrote:
| > adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks
|
| Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet
| we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they
| chop our heads off now, you bet they're gonna be left with
| ruins. Fuck them.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be
| trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that
| we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those
| helping hands.
| temporallobe wrote:
| In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another
| company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The
| new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management
| combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant.
| Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two
| product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid
| off about half the team, most of them being from the
| subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they
| were all like "Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!".
|
| The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract
| since I was a specialized SME.
| secretsatan wrote:
| This hits me 2 ways, I got laid off in my late 30s and had over 4
| years unemeployment. TBH, I'd got bored of what I was doing and
| it was looking like a career dead end. I took a hobby project and
| worked on that, learned iOS and eventually got a job in that.
|
| But one thing got me, I developed an original app for the company
| I work for, that is now one of the focus products. I wish I
| never, I feel like it was literally stolen from me, never ever go
| above and beyond for a company, your managers will get the
| credit.
| achempion wrote:
| Why you think it's stolen when company paid for your time? If
| the app wasn't successful, would you have considered refunding
| your salary back to a company?
| secretsatan wrote:
| There's paying for someones time, and then there's going
| above and beyond. I feel like I shouldn't have gone above and
| beyond
| secretsatan wrote:
| And to throw it the other way around, when someone works over
| hours and contributes significantly, but burns out, does the
| company throw out the unpaid work?
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| There is so much to unpack from this post.
|
| 1. Post Dot-com bubble dev naivete: most Post Dot-com devs (ie
| those who joined the work force sometime after the bubble burst)
| have only known the summer of tech (ML flourishing, everyone can
| code movements, nonsensical startups raising ridiculous amounts
| of money, companies hiring devs they don't need to keep
| competitors from having and BigHead kind of devs able to keep a
| job). These are the devs that used to go to r/cscareerquestions
| and tell everyone that they should get everyone to learn to code
| and program, the kind that believed in chasing aggressive salary
| growth at any cost. True summertime devs who have known nothing
| but joy and love in the tech world. These are the devs who OD'ed
| on the tech corpo koolaid
|
| 2. The super-meritocracy fallacy: following from point 1, these
| devs believed in the increasingly rare concept of promotion-only
| growth, the idea that if you worked really hard, your salary and
| your job title willl eventually reflect your hard work. While
| this is somewhat true, the extent to which your hard work is
| actually compensated seems to be overrated by most devs. This a
| rather peculiar thing as you would expect most devs to be data
| driven and to actually research whether this is true in general
| for most companies. Any veteran knows that career progression and
| salary increase by promotion has a very early point of diminished
| returns hence the job-hopping
|
| 3. The existential meaning of a job: this is another peculiar
| aspect of devs given that they see themselves as rational. An
| employeement relationship is a business relationship (like a
| partnership) where continuous work is exchanged for money. Yet
| these devs seem to have somehow assume some kind of existential
| meaning to this transactional relationship the terms of which
| they should have known. Placing the meaning of your life in a
| transaction is clearly misguided and it shouldn't take a layoff
| for someone to realise that. Yet here we are
|
| 4. The Saviour Dev Hero myth: this also follows from point 1.
| Devs being marketed as corpo heros is just that marketing. The
| supply and demand ratio is not a fixed thing. It changes. Devs
| were never going to be in demand forever. Business needs change.
| No one is irreplaceable. No matter how good. There is always
| someone good enough that will work for a similar salary (or
| less). During the summer of tech, the demand was higher than the
| supply so layoffs were rare. But summers don't last forever.
|
| Ultimately, the lesson that devs, for all their self-described
| higher intellect and rationality, never seem to learn is that the
| goal of all companies is to increase their profits, everything
| else is secondary. Other goals exist only to help that. Layoffs
| while declaring record breaking profits is not surprising. Given
| the job market, new hires could be acquired at a lower salary and
| perhaps not as many are needed. As an employee, you are there to
| help increase profits and the company owes you a salary. This
| implied idea that efforts should be rewarded even when it makes
| no business sense, that the company should provide an existential
| meaning to your work or that it should always need you even when
| it makes no business sense is in my opinion delusional and a by-
| product of Post-Dot bubble conditions that no longer exist.
|
| The market has changed (and it will change again) and all agents
| within must do so as well.
| thr02 wrote:
| Thank you. This is a very underrated (yet) thoughtful and wise
| response.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| Perfectly echos my thoughts as a 25+ year veteran engineer who
| has been laid off 3 times. Your writing style is poetic as
| well.
|
| I would add a few more.
|
| 1) There is no permanancy in tech, only impermanancy - hence,
| stay on your toes, be a learning machine, and not be attached
| to your laurels. You could one day be a hero, and the next day
| a zero.
|
| 2) Bandwagons come and go - internet, web, cloud, ml etc etc.
| Be a learning machine with a strong grip on the fundamentals of
| the math and the science.
|
| 3) Most of us are picking up lottery tickets - but confuse
| skill with luck. An early google engineer may walk with a
| swagger, but he/she has been lucky.
|
| 4) Keep saving for the rainy day, as they usually will come. In
| your financial calculations, do not take on long term
| obligations assuming your job will last.
| moomin wrote:
| I've been laid off a few times. I'd add one more "danger sign":
| you're not busy. If the firm/department doesn't seem to be
| achieving very much, it's a good sign that no-one's asking much
| of them. Which means the entire area is possibly for the chop.
|
| But the line in the Excel sheet thing rings _incredibly_ true.
| It's actually surprisingly rare to be laid off by someone who
| knows you. Decision is nearly always made by people who've never
| met you and only have a cursory understanding of what your entire
| team does.
| unknownsky wrote:
| I've been laid off twice, and both times we were very busy.
| There were deadlines we were told were absolutely crucial to
| meet and we were burning ourselves out trying to meet them. The
| product we were making never saw the light of day and to this
| day we don't even know why.
| nottorp wrote:
| It's different when you're contracting and expect your contract
| to end at any minute.
|
| But I was doing some work for this startup ages ago and at some
| point out of the blue one of our full time contacts asked us if
| we've been paid because they haven't been. Must have been a lot
| less fun for them (I had other projects besides them) than for
| me. I only lost the pay for like 1/3 of a full time month.
| acatton wrote:
| > _The Myth of Job Security in Germany_
|
| > _[...] If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40
| employees, German law doesn't prevent this. Instead, the law
| enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected,
| prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees,
| such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to
| layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal._
|
| This is not true, and an over simplification.
|
| Yes, you can always technically layoff in Germany, but it might
| not hold in court. Most people have legal insurance (mine is
| ~EUR300/y) which is tax deductible if it has employment
| protection. Mine will cover costs for an employment-related
| lawsuit.
|
| If you feel that your layoff is not justified, you can always
| sue, the judge could decide that your work contract was
| unlawfully cancelled, leading to the company having to re-hire
| you and paying your salary for every month it didn't do so. The
| company posting record profits could weight in your favor in
| front of a judge. People, especially non-native like me, don't
| know better, they just move-on and go _c 'est la vie._ If you
| sue, win and get re-hired, you can always ask to leave for a
| bigger package.
|
| For companies above a certain amount of employee (50? 75?), if a
| small amount of employees (I think it's 3 or 4) request it, the
| company must run a works council election. For any layoff
| (individual or mass layoff), the work council must be consulted,
| and has co-determination, they can basically block the layoff,
| this was done by Volkswagen's work council recently. [1] For
| large mass layoffs, companies might also have to consult with the
| authorities.
|
| Last thing, the social scoring is much more complicated than
| "those with children." If you have 4 kids and got hired 7 months
| ago, you might be fired, and I, single person, might keep my job
| with my 15 years of tenure. Tenure, disabilities, children, ... a
| lot of things take part into the social scoring.
|
| All and all, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and points of
| the article. But saying that, outside of social scoring, layoffs
| between the US and Germany are the same is simply not true. There
| is a reasonable job security in Germany.
|
| [1] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/press-
| releases/agreement...
| leomos wrote:
| this is very interesting, thanks for sharing it! Are you aware
| of any story involving individuals fighting their case for a
| job in a tech company? Would love to read about it.
| acatton wrote:
| Not in my circle. Usually, threatening to sue is enough. I
| know people who increased their severance package because
| they said that "they wanted to talk to the lawyer from their
| legal insurance before accepting any severance package."
|
| Of course this doesn't work if you have a work council,
| usually the work-council negotiate a severance package
| algorithm (= fix_amount + tenure * amount), and this is
| usually un-negotiable. This makes sense, thanks to collective
| bargaining, it's most likely one the best deal you could have
| gotten. (Even though libertarians will flock-in and start
| going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing
| individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems
| unfair!")
| n_ary wrote:
| > Even though >highly paid SWE< will flock-in and start
| going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing
| individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems
| unfair!")
|
| I made a correction. Also I really hate the tendency of
| tech workers doing everything to stay away from unionizing
| or collective bargaining or establishing work councils.
| There is this bizarre tendency that it is just somekind if
| conspiracy and they are able to bargain better deals. This
| in collective hurts the entire tech crew everywhere.
| n_ary wrote:
| I know of a case where a company laid off a person for
| unjustifiable reasons. Of course the notice period was
| observed but the person decided to press a lawsuit and the
| court decided that the layoff reason was baseless. While they
| did not get rehired(once the moral is hit hard to go back may
| be), but they got awarded to 7-8 months of full salary paid.
| Something that probably played into the favor was that the
| person just recently became a father for a month after which
| he was handed the forced redundancy news and the observance
| of notice period.
|
| According to anti-discrimination law, a ground for layoff(or
| not hiring) can not be tied to parenthood.
| twixfel wrote:
| I understood the claim to be that if you are at the bottom of
| the social points scale then you are sufficiently vulnerable
| for it not to matter. That the people who really benefit from
| Germany's strong labour laws are those with kids, disabled
| people, old, etc... but not just a standard young person.
|
| Germany is just a strange country IMO. Lots of "nice" stuff
| like this that sounds great but really only works for the older
| generation and doesn't really work for young people, who are
| already hugely disadvantage by the German boomerocracy
| (probably one of the worst boomerocracys in the world).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, boomers are on their way out.
|
| But why do you think that Gen X will be better ?
| twixfel wrote:
| I don't think any generation is better than the other. They
| are just the biggest. If Gen X were the biggest then there
| would be some big political distortion in their favour
| instead.
|
| And no they are not on the way out, they are still here and
| will be here for a long time. To the extent that Gen Xers
| will be better or worse, it is only because the demographic
| pyramid won't look quite as crazy or distorted.
| acatton wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but AFAIK, age doesn't influence your
| social score, tenure does. If I'm a 30 year old with 10 years
| in the company, I will have a better score than 50-year-old
| you who got hired 7 months ago.
|
| The idea is that working at a company "squeezes juice out of
| you", so you should not be so easily fired after a long
| tenure, because the company got all the rewards from your
| juice, but you don't have much left. You can agree or
| disagree, but I have to admit that there is a logic.
| twixfel wrote:
| I understood the logic to be instead that older people
| nearing retirement find it much harder to get new jobs.
|
| And I agree there is logic to all of these things we are
| discussing. The problem is rather that everything is
| falling apart in other ways so young people get the raw end
| both times. Many of these older folk will be on rent
| controlled flats that are not available to young people,
| for example.
| lionkor wrote:
| > but not just a standard young person.
|
| This makes sense in a way, since "standard young people" are
| very flexible [in Germany]. There are multiple different
| safety nets and ways to get money, jobs, support, and a lot
| of basic needs are taken care of by the social system.
|
| Source: I'm a "standard young person" German SWE ;)
| twixfel wrote:
| Yes it makes sense, certainly on paper, and in a world in
| which the older generation actually are disadvantaged by
| their age and younger people are not. Actually it's the
| other way around. Like so many things in Germany, it's just
| outdated and from a time when things were actually really
| good and everything was not falling apart. The boomer
| generation are the richest, have pensions we will never
| have, and get to pay far smaller rents than we do. I pay 3x
| the rent that my boomer neighbours pay for a mirror image
| flat across the hall.
| nikodotio wrote:
| What's the legal insurance called in German?
| acatton wrote:
| " _Rechtsschutzversicherung_. " You want it to include "
| _Arbeitsrechtsschutz_ "
|
| I would also advise you to include defamation, in case
| somebody sue you for defaming them. Usually many legal
| insurance exclude "internet" from the protection, this means
| that if you post on hackernews " _Hans is an idiot_ ", and
| Hans sues you, you might have to pay the lawsuit yourself.
| These insurances usually have an "internet" options for
| usually ~20EUR/y which would protect you in this case. You
| can still deduct the entire amount from your taxes, as it's
| still technically a labour-law legal insurance.
| meijer wrote:
| In addition, except for companies with serious economic
| problems, layoffs are also simply much less common in Germany,
| I believe.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| A great heartfelt essay. I got the feeling it was written with
| magnanimous restraint.
|
| It would be good to do a study on how tech workers feel in an era
| of such commonplace betrayal and dehumanisation. If anyone has
| stories they want to share please get in touch at UK Cybershow
| and let's see if there's an episode in it.
| jollyllama wrote:
| > Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a
| developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions,
| the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the
| company was financially stable, your job was secure.
|
| You hear this a lot but it's the result of developers from
| sectors that did well during this time period whistling past the
| graveyard as rolling layoffs hit more mature sectors and firms,
| such as networking (Cisco) and storage. It's surprising to me
| that people who are paid to try to imagine how systems perform in
| different scenarios, and are presumably good at what they are
| paid to do, fail to apply the same thought processes to the
| systems that provide them their salaries.
| jongjong wrote:
| First time I was let go, I was fresh out of university. I had
| only been in the position for around 3 weeks. I came into the
| company at the worst possible time and they gave me a task which,
| in retrospect, was very difficult for a recent graduate; the
| project had around 30K concurrent users at its peak and I had to
| make it so that their results tables would update in realtime...
| They gave me only 3 weeks to do that task (which I had to
| complete along with some other tasks/bug fixing)... Also, I had
| to learn git which was not mainstream at the time (this was
| before GitHub). This was also before WebSockets were widely
| supported and before Socket.io existed. In retrospect, I should
| have asked to be assigned to an easier task as a starter, or
| should have negotiated down the scope. Anyway this was my first
| job and I was deeply passionate about web technologies so it was
| a painful experience to be rejected for something which was the
| center of my universe at the time.
|
| After that, I held onto, in fact, excelled at every job and was
| often one of the top software engineers wherever I worked. I also
| launched some popular open source projects since then. I
| experienced some success in crypto (after facing a lot of
| adversity). I led significant improvements in the crypto project
| I worked on and things were looking up, the blockchain became
| highly stable and supported some unique features which would
| allow it to scale and meet its original vision; but after a
| couple of years, founders decided they wanted to go in a
| different direction which I did not agree with and so I had to
| quit. I made such an impact on that project that I managed to
| earn income from it for about 3 years after quitting the company;
| the biggest crypto voting cartel in that ecosystem broke up and
| re-formed just to include me as a member. Then after 3 years of
| horrible decisions, the founders essentially ran the project into
| the ground (no surprise to me); they did such a bad job that they
| then had to migrate their token to a competitor's platform. I
| lost my passive income... Though I must have earned like 200K EUR
| from it over the years. Best years of my life; no job, earning
| passive income while working voluntarily on open source project I
| cared about. I was not beholden to anyone and had no
| responsibilities besides just keeping my node running.
|
| After that, I had to go back to working 9-to-5 doing the most
| tedious jobs, for lower pay. I was forced to accept work for a
| company in the mainstream finance sector which was the antithesis
| of everything I knew and believed in, literally going to work
| every day believing 100% that I was making the world a worse
| place. I struggled to find motivation; I did my best to hide it
| but I got fired after almost 1 year (coincidentally, just a few
| months before my shares would vest). Talent cannot make up for
| lack of enthusiasm it turns out... It was an unsettling
| experience hearing the CTO tell me how smart I was and that I
| won't have trouble finding other work... while firing me... Like
| 2 weeks after giving me access to their Stripe control panel
| where I could see all company finances! At that point, I had full
| access to everything, all user data, all services, all
| infrastructure. They'd literally put me in a position of ultimate
| trust, before pulling the rug from under me. I left in a very
| classy manner and on decent terms, as I always did before. In
| retrospect, the whole experience working there was very strange.
|
| Anyway it's been a struggle to find motivation since then. I
| don't take my career too seriously now; having seen both the lows
| and the highs and seeing how talent and determination doesn't
| doesn't actually make a difference in the face of political
| machinations (which are pervasive in the industry). I don't think
| I would even care much if I got fired again. I'm now more
| political myself; I do the bare minimum. In effect, I've become
| like the people I used to hate, but I don't hate them anymore
| because I now understand why they might have been that way.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I just started a new job in Hamburg, Germany, same location as
| the author, and one nice thing they have here is an extremely
| negative view on overtime, making it very encouraged to remain
| within hours
| n_ary wrote:
| > one nice thing they have here is an extremely negative view
| on overtime, making it very encouraged to remain within hours
|
| Wait until your probezeit ends and your POs metrics get
| strained.
| bowsamic wrote:
| My coworkers have passed their Probezeit, do you think it's
| also like them too?
|
| Also, what is with the negativity? Are you depressed? I bet
| you're just going to say "I'm a Marxist" or something
| bArray wrote:
| > If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees,
| German law doesn't prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a
| social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing
| the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those
| with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the
| difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
|
| From what I have seen in the past, the set of people with
| children and a mortgage can be difficult. Some really do not want
| to be there, but stay for job security.
|
| I'm also not entirely sold on prioritising those lay-offs based
| on social elements, such as children. I can see incentives being
| good to have more children in a society, but you shouldn't be
| punished for not having them. Ultimately from the company's
| perspective, you want to maximise your company's future success.
|
| I would amend some points:
|
| > Stick to your contract hours.
|
| Do additional hours where required and you are able, but make
| sure they are visible, and compensate yourself them back. It
| increases your perceived value.
|
| > Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives.
|
| For your own sake, take pride in your work. Don't become stale.
|
| > Always keep interviewing.
|
| Many stop doing this because it's a pain and stressful. I think
| it is enough to keep your toes in, try to figure out what
| salaries are being offered, what kinds of jobs are available and
| how desirable you are. Try to learn those things with as minimal
| effort from yourself as possible.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > I can see incentives being good to have more children in a
| society, but you shouldn't be punished for not having them.
|
| Isn't this self-contradictory ?
| soneca wrote:
| > _"Always keep interviewing"_
|
| This seems as exhausting as working more than 40 hours a week
| routinely. I would rather keep a financial reserve to cover the
| time to get a new job.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's one thing to informally cultivate a network and another to
| actively interview all the time. I've done the former which has
| resulted in my three jobs since the late 90s and I've never
| done the latter.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Quite on point, for me it made me value the team, and no longer
| believe in whatever management tells about "we are family",
| "company values", or whatever else they feel like selling as the
| vision and company culture.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Op writes sage advice.
|
| However I would encourage that the "don't give a shit about the
| company and colleagues" is not quite as simplistic.
|
| Yes, fuck the company, they don't care. You should always assume
| this. But you _should_ care about your colleagues. They are your
| network, and greatest asset at the next company. If you are shit
| to them, they will not recommend you.
|
| So my conclusions, and or advice to younger people is this:
|
| o Learn what the business wants, it'll help you make better
| decisions/products, and often gives you fair warning about being
| laid off.
|
| o Be suspicious of the company.
|
| o if there a clash between business priorities and you, you will
| always come off worse.
|
| o Go over and beyond for your colleagues, not your company.
|
| o fight for your colleagues not the company
|
| o your colleagues are your CV.
| wccrawford wrote:
| While true, they might not recommend you anyhow. I thought I
| got along well with my co-workers, and I consistently got
| feedback at year end that they _enjoyed_ working with me, but
| when I was laid off and asked them for a recommendation on
| Linked In, only the most junior of them did it. Even after I
| left all of them great reviews there.
|
| I am still surprised by this. They didn't get laid off. Just
| me.
|
| I'm not angry at them, just very confused about their reasons
| not to leave me a good review to help me get a new job.
| Prunkton wrote:
| good write up, let me share my experience coming from the other
| side.
|
| "3. Lack of Vision from Leadership" comes in different flavors.
|
| One scenario is exactly as described: leadership genuinely lacks
| vision, which inevitably leads to layoffs. Another, is when
| management is already aware of impending layoffs but cannot talk
| about it yet. While this may seem nefarious, it often has legal
| implications that restrict transparency. I've been in the
| difficult position to continue to manage teams while the companys
| closure was already known to management. Not allowed to inform
| people is one thing but trying to emotionally prepare them for
| whats coming is a different, so the drop may not be as high.
|
| Forcefully reducing server costs by 50% and cutting of
| contractors is hardly considered a vision. 'A lack of vision'
| could be the actual message. By the time I knew what is going on
| and costs got reduced I encouraged the best kind of development
| within the team: CV-driven-development with vague sprint goals!
|
| You want to make use of the new fancy LLM APIs and play around
| with it? Sure! Introducing a new tech stack? I can not think of a
| better idea!
|
| While its far from an ideal scenario, its often better than
| wasting energy on dead features. My idea was to giving people the
| opportunity to work on something they find personally meaningful
| and is driven by self motivation. I hope it helped, at least
| after speaking to every one personally after the bomb dropped, no
| one was really surprised.
| hdjeirhj wrote:
| For me layoff was great:
|
| - 3 month severance, free money
|
| - 1 year unemployment support, more free money
|
| - fat tax return, since I falled into lower income bracket, even
| more free money
|
| - moving out out expensive city to countryside, less expenses
| (and yes more money)
|
| I took one year off, finished my opensource project and started
| consulting. Layoff tripled my disposable income and vastly
| improved quality of my life.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| It has been 1.5 years since I was laid off for 6 months. Here is
| what I learned about this in my 19 year career in software
| (mostly in JavaScript):
|
| * If you can do the job but nobody else can and it's a critical
| role you are probably immune from layoffs even with a horrible
| annual evaluation. It's not you that's critical, it's the job you
| fill that's critical.
|
| * if you take deliberate actions to make yourself critical, such
| as the only person who knows the code base, it's only a matter of
| time before the mega corp dumps you. Self-appointed critical
| people are too expensive and viewed as toxic by management, but
| you can probably get away with this at a mom and pops shop.
|
| * once incompetence becomes the universally accepted norm it
| doesn't matter that you can do what others cannot. Everybody is a
| replaceable beginner irrespective of their titles and years of
| experience and treated exactly as such. The survivors are the
| people that don't rock the boat.
|
| * if you have years of experience operating, managing, and
| authoring both people and technology in side projects you are
| probably far further along into your career than you are getting
| paid for. If your career is stagnant trying doing something
| wildly different and see what happens. I achieved rapid promotion
| after changing careers.
|
| * don't ever work more than you have to unless it's something you
| want to do knowing you won't get paid for it. I liked writing
| personal software outside of work because at work it could do my
| job for me or it frees me from the restrictions of shitty
| commercial software.
|
| * the best way to impress management is to 1. do less work and 2.
| solve tough problems and share your solutions. Don't be special.
| Demonstrate value.
| datavirtue wrote:
| To the last point, there are few ways to lose respect faster
| than spinning your wheels with all kinds of tasks. Without
| consciously recognizing it, upper management is looking for
| people who understand and live the Pareto principle.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| > I liked writing personal software outside of work because at
| work it could do my job for me or it frees me from the
| restrictions of shitty commercial software.
|
| You have to be careful on this one.
|
| Often (it varies by jurisdiction), blanket rules by companies
| that all software you write in your spare time are their
| property can be safely ignored as invalid. But if it is heavily
| related to your current job then (again depends on
| jurisdiction) then they probably do own the copyright, possibly
| even if they don't have an explicit contractual provision for
| it.
|
| If you're using your own spare-time software at work and
| benefiting from it there, it would be hard to argue it's not
| related.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Yeah, I got stung by that early in my career. So now all my
| personal software is licensed either CC0 or AGPL3.0. That is
| first thing I do. Secondly, I don't talk about it at work.
|
| The key here is don't be stupid. Don't write the software on
| company time or on company equipment. My experience has
| further taught me:
|
| 1. Most employers don't want the software. They want the
| person writing the software.
|
| 2. Once your peers discover that its you writing the software
| they use there is a good chance they will immediately move on
| to something else. In JavaScript world "Invented Here"
| syndrome is extreme and developers do not trust quality
| software could ever come from people they know.
|
| 3. If the software was in use before you got to the
| organization then you are in the clear.
|
| 4. Have multiple lines of alignment, such as a part time job
| and/or contractual obligations elsewhere. Employers will not
| fight other employers to gain ownership of your pet project.
| In my case I have a part time job in the military and the
| military has the most liberal IP rules on the planet. Now I
| am a defense contractor on a project with multiple contract
| vendors, so who would really own my pet project: the
| contractor that pays my bills, the client that pays the
| contract, or the other contractor who manages the contract.
|
| 5. If its your personal project you are free to abandon it at
| any time and use your time to play video games. You are also
| free to abandon that job and go do something else.
| bluGill wrote:
| If the company owns your software than you don't have the
| right to set licensing terms. If the company fights things
| and wins (a big if), your license terms mean nothing. If
| you contribute to upstream projects they could have big
| problems backing out your changes.
|
| Which is an argument for better laws around what you do in
| your personal time.
|
| Of course as you say, most companies don't really care
| about such work so long as you are not competing with them.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > If the company owns
|
| That is entirely a matter of initiation. If the work
| initiates from the employer there is no question the work
| is owned by the employer. Less clear, but still very
| clear, is if the work occurs on employer time and/or
| equipment. If the work initiates from your personal mind
| far separated from employer guidance then its a personal
| project.
|
| Yes, I am aware of some Mattel doll lawsuit where a guy
| created action figures on his own time outside of work
| and the toy making employer assumed ownership of that
| personal project. This is an extreme edge case though,
| because the employer had to prove the personal project
| was work residual from employment work and had to go to
| court and sue their employee. The motivation there is
| that the employer liked the employee's idea enough to
| want the freedom to pursue that idea as a future business
| interest.
|
| This never happens in software unless an employee builds
| something to compete with the business interests of the
| employer. That is far easier to prove, malicious intent,
| and not the same thing.
|
| The reason this never happens in software is that it
| radically opens a liability window that did not exist
| before. For example, consider Facebook. Facebook is not a
| software company, which is a company that sells software.
| Facebook is a media company that provides advertising and
| happens to write software for internal use. If Facebook
| were to sue their own employee to gain a new unrelated
| software product line then they become a software company
| and then become open to lawsuits, competition, and trust
| concerns they didn't have to concern themselves with
| before. If Facebook did want to assume ownership of an
| employee's pet project it would be far cheaper to just
| buy it from the employee or pay the employee to work on
| that idea as a job function. If the employee did not want
| to give their personal project to Facebook then Facebook
| could always fire the employee and start the idea from
| scratch under Facebook branding, which is also cheaper
| than suing their employee.
| deltaburnt wrote:
| > It's not you that's critical, it's the job you fill that's
| critical.
|
| I think at a big enough company the people making layoff
| decisions don't know or care what job is critical. In some
| cases that means your job wasn't as critical as you thought.
| But I've also seen layoffs that seem just downright stupid.
| Literally saw someone laid off then re-hired to a different
| team a couple weeks later with a substantial bump to their pay.
|
| At a certain level of abstraction nothing will save you.
| Critical job? Bean counters don't know the specifics of each
| team or project. High level? Cost too much, not contributing
| enough to short term goals.
|
| I was once told that a lot of executive level management was
| based off gut instinct more than cold logical decision making.
| It would not surprise me if this also applied to deciding who
| is laid off.
| franktankbank wrote:
| What did you change careers to?
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I was hired as a developer of APIs on this big enterprise API
| management system, but then promoted to lead of operations on
| the project.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > Those who made the poor decisions remain, and some are even
| promoted, while the people carrying out the work are let go.
|
| That's usually accompanied by some mealy mouthed communication
| from the CEO that "the decision rests with me" or some other poor
| faith mea culpa while you end up scrambling to get health cover
| for your wife and kids and figure it how far and severance will
| get you
| DDickson wrote:
| This article doesn't mention it, but being laid off will change
| you at a psychological level. It can be a deeply traumatic event.
|
| I was laid off over 5 years ago, and, as these things usually go,
| it was a complete shock to me. The company had been acquired, and
| my services were no longer needed. It ended up being a very
| positive change for my career, but to this day, if I ever get a
| moment of deja vu, my immediate thought is to check my phone and
| see if I've been fired.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Wow, I would not expect this kind of news to come via txt or
| email. This should be manager/supervisor face to face.
| DDickson wrote:
| I was laid off in a face to face meeting with the VP.
| Checking my phone might be irrational, but irrational
| thoughts can be a symptom of trauma. Then again, I do work
| fully remote, so I'm checking for tell tale signs. Mysterious
| meetings on my calendar, DMs from the CTO, etc.
| shaftway wrote:
| I was laid off twice, about a year apart. Both affected me
| deeply, and clearly in a traumatic way. The last one was
| about a year ago.
|
| My spidey-sense has been tingling for the last couple
| weeks, and there's a vesting cliff coming up, so I've been
| looking at my manager's calendar for suspicious upcoming
| meetings. I figure there are 8 potential firing days left
| (Mondays, Fridays, and regular 1:1 meetings) until that
| cliff, and then I can relax.
|
| One of the things that has helped me cope is to constantly
| be interviewing at smaller companies. It's a lot less
| stressful to be laid off when you already have another
| offer on the table.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > being laid off will change you at a psychological level. It
| can be a deeply traumatic event.
|
| I didn't get laid off, but I project I put years of my life
| into was shut down (in a "row on a spreadsheet" type of way),
| and it effected me surprisingly deeply. I'm still dealing with
| the after effects, and reading this thread is making me realize
| it was cognitively really similar to a layoff.
|
| I wish it didn't bother me as much as it did, but that doesn't
| change the impact.
| dave78 wrote:
| I'm 24 years into my career now. I think you just get used to
| this after a while.
|
| I've worked on several big (at the time) software products
| that our company built and shipped to customers for a while,
| that we have since abandoned. And in those cases, the entire
| organization within the company that owned the code was
| disbanded, so there was no one left to know about it or care
| about it. I'm not 100% certain but I strongly suspect that
| there is not a single copy left anywhere in the company of
| the code for those products - code that I worked on for
| years.
|
| It's strange thinking that there is basically no trace left
| of something that I put years of professional work into, but
| I think it happens more than most people realize. I suppose
| it's no different than startups that fail and everything
| disappears.
|
| I also think this is why so many software people end up
| enjoying hobbies that revolve around physical things, like
| woodworking or restoring old cars. Having some physical
| object that you can point to and say "I built that" is kind
| of nice compared to everything else you've done living on a
| flash chip somewhere.
| ipsento606 wrote:
| > being laid off will change you at a psychological level
|
| it certainly can do, but it's also fine if it doesn't
|
| when I was laid off, some family members simply refused to
| believe that it hadn't had a profound negative effect on how I
| viewed myself. Dealing with that disbelief was by far the most
| difficult part of the process
|
| I felt absolutely fine, because at the time I had no emotional
| investment in my job or career
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Signs of a Layoff
|
| 6) Senior management is mysteriously missing and impossible to
| get ahold of. (They're not allowed to say anything to anyone.)
| eadmund wrote:
| The author complains that after all his leadership and hustle:
|
| > to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
|
| But then writes:
|
| > [German] law enforces a social scoring system to determine who
| is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable
| employees, such as those with children.
|
| It sounds like under German law he had to be treated as a row in
| a spreadsheet. Cynically, it might have been wiser to spend time
| having a child rather than hustling for the company.
| biohcacker84 wrote:
| I feel fortunate it's not layoffs that made me cynical. But
| working for mid and big companies.
|
| I had the incredible luck of starting my career as the first hire
| and thus lead developer right out of college. The startup which
| hired me eventually ran out of steam, but the experience I got is
| priceless.
|
| Now big corporations on the other hand are a shit show, and from
| what I can tell have always been a shit show. Have laid me off 3
| times. And none of it has affected me much. Always quickly found
| another good position, and that's with being absolutely terrible
| at live coding challenges.
|
| I'd say try to find work you're interested in. If you can, also
| try to keep your commute as short as possible. And live in a
| place you like.
|
| And good luck.
| Havoc wrote:
| It feels like companies are moving towards annual layoffs akin to
| stack ranking and removing bottom.
|
| ie annual cull rather than oh no financial results are weak.
|
| Last round did spook me a bit too. Decided to up the emergency
| reserves as a result
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Join a union. If every worker at a company was willing to go on
| strike when redundancies are announced, they'd be forced to do
| better by their workers, or even something else entirely.
| physhster wrote:
| "prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees,
| such as those with children"
|
| This is so discriminatory, I don't even know where to start.
| Also, employees with children are more likely to need urgent time
| off, and have more stringent time constraints than the ones who
| don't.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I've been working for almost 30 years and I've had 10 jobs. A
| layoff for me has not been "traumatic". It's a nuisance.
|
| "Always keep your running shoes around your neck".
|
| After staying at my second job too long and becoming an "expert
| beginner" in 2008 and being stuck, I said "never again"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39629190
|
| 1. I keep enough savings in a liquid account to pay my expenses
| between 9-12 months.
|
| 2. I keep my skills up to date.
|
| 3. Don't be a "ticket taker". This link I posted to HN describes
| my thoughts perfectly (It isn't my blog)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42818169
|
| 4. Keep your network strong.
|
| My first layoff was in 2011 when the company was sold for scraps
| and they let everyone go. We all knew it was coming. Management
| was up front with us about the difficulties the companies was
| facing and that kept us apprised of the companies that our
| investors were looking to for acquisitions. Our investors also
| promised us that we would get paid for every hour we worked.
|
| Most of us stuck around to the bitter end, when the time came,
| they gave us our notice, we all went to lunch together and came
| back to the office and just joked around for awhile.
|
| The CTO had a couple of recruiter friends reach out to us. From
| looking at LinkedIn, everyone got a better job within a month.
| Our major customer arranged for me to finish my work as a
| contractor for them after making an agreement with the acquirer
| to let me keep the code while working for the customer.
|
| The second time was the year before last and it was Amazon. I
| commented here about four months after it happened.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988
|
| I honestly didn't think about the layoff three weeks after it
| happened. It was then my 8th job since 1996, I got my severance
| and moved on to my ninth job three weeks later.
|
| The next job after that one ended up being mote shitty than I
| could imagine. I got laid off from there last year. I replied to
| an internal recruiter from my current company and again had a job
| three weeks later.
| agtech_andy wrote:
| I was once in a fast-growing startup, where the CEO told us in a
| company all-hands that we had 18 months of runway and that our
| future was looking great! Some of us devs booked long-delayed
| vacations after months of grinding hard on releases.
|
| Turned out that this "runway" factored in dumping all the
| American devs and replacing us with workers overseas who made
| ~35-40% of what they paid us.
|
| My recent experience in the "data" world taught me that many
| companies in the US actually want contractors, but our employment
| laws make it make being "full-time" not that different than a
| contractor.
|
| Another thing I learned was to never jump on R&D type projects
| unless you are in a very close communication loop with the
| leadership. If they are going to see you as a consultant on
| retainer, you have to always be delivering and improving on stuff
| that affects the business. I was put on some sort of "special
| projects" role in three fast-growing startups and those are
| always the first on the chopping block when things tighten up
| (and they almost always do at some point, especially in a
| startup).
| Muromec wrote:
| As an "oversees" developer who was getting those 30% and paid
| almost no taxes for ten years -- thanks for your sacrifice. It
| was great money for that time and was wisely spent on enjoying
| life.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _4. Sudden, Vague Meetings_
|
| These aren't actually that rare.
| not_the_fda wrote:
| I was "fortunate" to live through the dot com crash early in my
| career.
|
| When the times were good, the messaging was we were all one big
| family. When the crash came, there were weekly layoffs. Co-
| workers that thought they were friends turned on each other to
| keep their jobs.
|
| I learned to keep a fat emergency fund. I learned to work as a
| mercenary. I get in, I get out, I get paid. Then I live my life,
| which is not work. I keep no personal effects, and can be out the
| door in a second. Coworkers are acquaintances, not friends.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I was lucky to dodge the layoff-bullet a few times in my 26 year
| stint at Apple. (The layoffs were almost exclusively at the start
| of my career there, mid-90's, as Apple was circling the drain.)
|
| I was told by a coworker, when I was over 50 or so, that they
| could not fire me because I could turn around and make it about
| age discrimination at that point. I don't know if my coworker was
| correct -- there is, as was mentioned in the blog post, a
| weaselly way where they lay off whole teams to avoid the
| blowback. (And then may cherry-pick a few of the laid-off
| engineers and make them a quick offer on another team.)
|
| Earlier though in my career I had a very cool manager (hi,
| Steve!) that made it clear to me that The Corporation doesn't
| give a fuck about me. That, to that end, I needed to chart my
| _own_ career path and not rely on might bright-eyed
| "beamishness" to get me anywhere.
|
| In the end I did stay with Apple for the whole ride but was
| quicker to switch teams when I thought I was being either
| overworked or under-compensated. Seeing the company as the cold
| entity it is was in fact a liberating concept for me. Fortunately
| I didn't need to be personally impacted by a layoff to find that
| out.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _was quicker to switch teams when I thought I was being
| either overworked or under-compensated_
|
| Calling out internal mobility (and normalized support for
| taking advantage of it!) as a key corporate culture value.
|
| I've worked for companies that make this hard/toxic/impossible
| and companies that make this easier/normal.
|
| The latter are always better, healthier companies.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| This. Without going into specifics, I attempted to internally
| transfer to another team for higher level/better pay
| position. My current boss said he doesn't have a problem with
| it. I pre-cleared everything with the possible new boss, but
| I got mysteriously blocked. Few months later, team member
| from the other team indicated that they were told not to let
| it happen ( and who said no ).
|
| Needless to say, I am miffed. The market is what it is right
| now, but not only am I not 'allowed' to move around, but
| stuck with the same pay/benefits, because my raise was.. lets
| say not great.
|
| There is not enough .. not hate.. not enough awareness of how
| corps fuck you over and HN can help with that a little.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've seen this but with the guy's manager being the
| blocker. Manager tells high-performing employee that he's
| gone (probably for some BS personal reason--the guy was
| good), but company policy is that he gets two weeks notice
| before his last day, and if he can find another team to
| transfer to, then he can stay. Well, since he's a great
| employee, multiple teams are interested, but Manager blocks
| them all, and the guy ends up having to leave.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > when I was over 50 or so, that they could not fire me because
| I could turn around and make it about age discrimination at
| that point.
|
| If that's true, that could explain some of the age
| discrimination we see in the hiring phase... "if we hire this
| guy, we can never fire him". Illegal but impossible to prove,
| just like the reluctance to hire young women because they might
| get pregnant.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Alternatively the real lesson here is to put less effort into
| coding and engineering and more into organization. Small groups
| that handle entire business verticals are the future. Modern
| tools and machine learning can enable small groups to outperform
| big organizations without the wretched chaos that leads to
| ruthless and unfeeling reorgs and pivots. And clients large and
| small often prefer dealing with small and focused groups more
| than large and hard to handle giants that currently dominate
| markets.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I've been through multiple layoffs in my life and I'm going
| through them again, but this is the first time I've heard the
| term "impacted" used so often in this context. It's used 5 times
| in this article and it's said constantly in our company town hall
| meetings when discussing the current rounds of layoffs.
| t43562 wrote:
| Don't burn yourself out for anyone other than you. Companies have
| no loyalty whatsoever and will not show gratitude.
|
| In general I don't think that the style of work that leads to
| burnout is desirable at any stage unless if it's for your own
| startup and perhaps not even then.
|
| One day I woke up and grey haired and not rich. I felt that my
| youth had disappeared, I had various minor health problems. Why
| did I work till 2am for a fortnight to solve problem X? The
| project was cancelled after I left or never made any money or
| whatever - it was for no great achievements. I got laid off
| anyhow.
|
| I encountered plenty of people that generated fear in others
| pushing towards excessive work but I noticed every one of them
| going home at 5pm. Do you have to take note of these bullies?
| Maybe not - I didn't notice them being any worse to the people
| who ignored their pressure.
|
| Don't encourage other people to overwork either - be part of the
| solution.
|
| It's the people that you work with who will be grateful
| sometimes, in small ways and overcoming problems with them
| creates friendships. So you must obviously try to pull your
| weight - I'm not advocating cynicism.
| codr7 wrote:
| "It feels as though the trust between companies and employees is
| now broken."
|
| I'm afraid we haven't hit rock bottom yet, they won't change
| until no one applies anymore.
|
| Huge opportunity for companies willing to do the right thing!
| alkonaut wrote:
| These leave-on-the-day layoffs are really strange to me. Unless
| there was a bankruptcy or something, I'd most likely be convinced
| by management to stay my entire period of notice (3 months)
| because the company would need to PAY me 100% my salary for that
| period anyway. If they thought I was a risk to keep around, or
| they had no work for me at all, then they could just give me paid
| leave for 3 months. But more likely I'd be doing handovers and
| documentation and whatnot for the 3 months. But like, closing
| down accounts immediately? Do companies really think any laid off
| employee is an immediate security risk to the extent they need to
| lock them out as soon as they lay them off?
| bluGill wrote:
| > Do companies really think any laid off employee is an
| immediate security risk to the extent they need to lock them
| out as soon as they lay them off?
|
| Yes. There are a few case (a handful across the world every
| decade) where a former employee has done bad things in
| retaliation. Yes extremely rare, but it happens.
| alkonaut wrote:
| If I was hellbent on doing that, I'd likely pull it off
| anyway. It seems like a massive trouble to avoid something
| quite rare.
| bluGill wrote:
| Not getting in the door or havng access to systems limits
| the damage you can do. You can still do much but it won't
| be near as bad.
| elijaht wrote:
| I've been through several waves of layoffs. Every employee kept
| on temporarily to transition things over (IMO quite rationally)
| did the absolute minimum required and I don't think it was
| worth the companies money to keep them on. Additionally since
| their immediate manager was not part of the layoff decision
| making process, no one cared they were doing nothing.
| entropyneur wrote:
| I am honestly confused by how much people are willing to
| sacrifice for the false sense of security of a big company job.
| Folks seem to see employment as something akin to marriage, while
| I'm completely unable to see it as anything other than a
| transaction.
| frenchwhisker wrote:
| Though it was about the finance sector in '07/'08 and its
| obviously different circumstances, I enjoyed the way the movie
| Margin Call portrayed layoffs as the author here described them--
| cold and myopic.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I mean, the author needed a layoff to understand this?
|
| I thought it was a given.
| mooreds wrote:
| > For those like me who've experienced layoffs, work has become
| just that--work. You do what's assigned, and if your company
| squanders your potential or forces you to waste time on
| unnecessary projects, you simply stop caring. You collect your
| paycheck at the end of the month, and that's it. This is the new
| modern work: no more striving to be 40% better every year.
|
| This is why I've always enjoyed working at startups or being a
| consultant on my own. You have more risk, but you also reap the
| rewards of getting better.
| seanc wrote:
| I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many
| times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree
| with a fully cynical response of working only to contract,
| leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
|
| There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that
| your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one.
| The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save
| you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job
| often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job,
| or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor
| then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people
| think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that
| next role will be harder to find.
|
| On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just
| bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact
| on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means
| making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a
| company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it
| now and then.
|
| To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that
| exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you
| back. But your co-workers will.
| ericjmorey wrote:
| > your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next
| one
|
| Don't over index on this. It's a small factor among many.
| milkshakes wrote:
| strong disagree. from extensive experience. it's a huge
| factor, and good referrals are really the only way to
| definitely get the job
| codr7 wrote:
| Yeah, and companies pushing that angle are losing top
| employees because of it.
|
| Because it's stupid.
|
| Kissing ass and doing good work are two entirely different
| activities.
| hx8 wrote:
| Strong referrals almost always leads to a job that your
| network can place you in. You might have limited options
| for companies and teams, based on who is in your network.
| If the job market is abundant then having a strong referral
| is less valuable, but is often the best path to more senior
| positions. If the job market is not abundant then a job
| referral might be a way to be placed in a position in weeks
| instead of months.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN,
| but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself. I keep good
| relationships with former co-workers, we maintain group
| chats for each of my previous companies where we keep
| each other up on our careers. I even went to barbecues
| hosted by a former manager, until he moved out of the Bay
| Area. None of these have ever actually materialized into
| a job. It just doesn't work that way. We're all entry
| level worker bees and don't have any way to put our thumb
| on the scale at our own companies. If someone in my
| network reaches out to me asking for help with getting a
| job at MyCompany, the best I can do is review his resume,
| coach him on interviews, and then ultimately point him to
| the link in the job board, where 90% chance he will be
| ghosted.
|
| Where are these companies where I can tell my boss "Hey,
| Mike is a good programmer and he just applied. Just give
| him the job without interviewing! Or accelerate him
| through the process!" I suppose if it were a two person
| startup where it was me and my boss you could do that,
| but at a normal 1000 person CRUD shop with dedicated HR
| machinery? No way.
| maccard wrote:
| On the flip side I've worked in 4 companies over 12 years
| and 2/4 were jobs that I got because I knew someone. The
| other two, a significant cohort of the people who worked
| there knew each other from previous workplaces.
|
| Nobody is getting jobs without any interviews, but people
| are absolutely getting interviewed before/without a job
| listing, or starting the initial screen with
| recruiter/hiring manager with an upper hand of "Mike said
| you're good to work with". Even at a 1000 person company
| with HR.
| pts_ wrote:
| 90% of the times referrals result in corruption. If I am
| investing, I do not want my money being usurped by the
| corrupt. I want profit from the competent.
| dcrazy wrote:
| This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the
| world works. There's a great bit in Margin Call about
| this: Kevin Spacey's character challenges the plan to
| sell the firm's entire MBS portfolio with the point that
| once their counterparties figure out they've been sold a
| bag, they will never trust them again. The firm insists
| on the plan anyway, so when Spacey tells his floor the
| news, he acknowledges that this will be the end of many
| of their careers, and as compensation the firm is giving
| each trader a $2m bonus for selling through their slice
| of the portfolio. They're basically giving them an
| advance in exchange for making themselves unhireable,
| because ultimately the economy is made of people working
| with other people.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| That's maybe true in finance / investment / hedge funds.
| I don't think it applies to tech / software much..
| jayd16 wrote:
| Lol wut? Where are you getting this?
| roguecoder wrote:
| If you can get as good a signal on someone's performance
| in 5 hours of interviews as you can in five months of
| working with them, either you are a genius or you are not
| paying attention at work.
|
| I have a guess as to which it is.
| dboreham wrote:
| That's not how it works. What happens is an organization
| decides to hire for some reason, now has the problem that
| good candidates are hard to find. So people say "well I
| know this guy who I worked with at xxx that's looking for
| a job".
| jayd16 wrote:
| Well, there's also a difference between liking someone
| and liking to work with them. I've had a lot of coworkers
| I liked that I wouldn't bend over backwards to hire. That
| said, this process might not work at Google or what have
| you.
|
| I've never worked in a company so large that I couldn't
| go a step further and actually talk to the hiring manager
| and tell them they would be stupid not to take someone's
| resume seriously. But it's more about fast tracking the
| interview than skipping it. No one is just going to
| blindly hire referrals. They shouldn't anyway.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| >> I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on
| HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself.
|
| Same here, also =~ 25 years (working as a professional
| programmer since 2001). I never had a problem finding a
| job myself (either switching jobs or being laid off, it
| happens) but it was always "cold calling", apply on a job
| board / Linked In and go through the interview without
| any referral or inside help.
|
| And when I tried to refer someone, they were blissfully
| ignored. Even had managers / HR go after me: "we need
| someone ASAP, don't you have some referrals?". Reached my
| acquaintances among former workmates, convinced them to
| make a personalized CV so I can send it to HR, nothing
| happened next. They didn't even call the guy, completely
| "forget about it".
|
| So I learned my lesson of corporate helplessness and
| don't give a fuck anymore. Don't recommend anyone, don't
| care if HR or managers need someone urgently, I do my job
| and don't get involved with anyone else anymore.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Yup, another similar situation here - ~20 years in Bay
| Area, almost 15 years at one company, no one in my
| "network" said anything about jobs. I did contact a few
| directly and "not hiring right now". A bunch of others
| (since I was one of the younger ones at this company when
| I joined in '08) had since retired.
|
| Got a new job through a LinkedIn ad, found a former co-
| worker here.
|
| I mean, it could be that I'm not a great networking
| person, but.. I'll agree that network hasn't helped me
| much so far.
| triceratops wrote:
| > We're all entry level worker bees
|
| Not one of your former managers that like you has gone on
| to high-level positions?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> We 're all entry level worker bees_
|
| You're going to need to pitch your buddies a lot more
| aggressively than that.
|
| You've worked closely with Mike in the past at
| ExampleCorp, where he was one of the team's top
| contributors. He was great at code reviewing, a calm and
| reliable voice during production incidents, and always
| ready to help out new graduates. Mike was the guy people
| turned to with their most difficult WidgetStack bugs,
| fixing problems that had stumped other developers. He
| would be a great asset to the company, and a great fit
| for this role - which you note needs WidgetStack. He has
| your strongest possible recommendation.
|
| The thing is - the pitch also has to be _true_.
| h1srf wrote:
| I'll give you a couple of examples I've been involved
| with:
|
| 1. I was applying for a job at Company A and I had a
| former co-worker working there. I think it was down to me
| and 2 other people and the manager asked my former co-
| worker about me and I believe his feedback tipped the
| scales in my favor.
|
| 2. Same situation as above but in this case it was my
| feedback. A different former co-worker was applying for a
| job at Company A(now that I was working there) and the
| manager hiring asked both me and my former and now
| present co-worker about the candidate as it was between
| him and another person.
|
| 3. A former manager straight up offered me a position at
| his new job because I'd be a good fit for the role as
| they were building exactly what I had done before. I
| turned him down(nicely) as I had stepped away from that
| particular type of work.
|
| 4. I've given negative feedback on a candidate that I'd
| worked with that was interviewing for an open role but it
| wasn't just me. All 3 of us including co-workers from (1)
| and (2) above had previously worked with the candidate
| and we didn't think he'd be a good fit for our org but it
| was ultimately up the manager of the team that was hiring
| to make the decision.
|
| Granted I'm at a smaller company but these "network
| placed" jobs do happen. Sometimes it's just tipping the
| scales and sometimes it's a straight up job and sometimes
| it could be the reason you didn't get the job.
| roguecoder wrote:
| There's a power law here.
|
| Most developers don't work in giant companies, but the
| programmers who do work in giant companies mostly don't
| know many programmers who work in the medium-sized
| companies where most of the jobs are right now.
|
| If you are interested in diversifying your network, you
| can purposefully choose a job at a different scale of
| company when you are next looking, but you can also start
| going to conferences or user groups or get involved with
| an interesting open-source project.
|
| Not every piece of networking has to be with coworkers.
| Not putting all your networking eggs into one basket can
| give you options, especially as the layoffs are flying
| fast and furious.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Strong referrals may lead to _interviews_ at larger
| companies. But rarely jobs. You still have to go through
| the interview process and most of the time how you came
| in isn't even known to the interviewer.
|
| Now if your network includes directors and CxOs who can
| just push a job through specifically for you, that's
| different. Especially if it is a strategic hire for them.
| Those types of jobs usually don't involve formal
| interviews and they are more of discussions about mutual
| fit.
| kmonsen wrote:
| At least for me that was not true, I came back to Google
| after more than two years and did not have to interview.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| That's returning to a former employer. That's very
| different if you left on good terms - they already
| "interviewed" you for some number of years.
| kazinator wrote:
| _Referrals_ may operate within a network, but
| _references_ do not necessarily so.
| groby_b wrote:
| > good referrals are really the only way to definitely get
| the job
|
| Yeah, no. They're one factor in many. I've managed just
| fine throughout almost 4 decades of career without
| referrals.
|
| I'm fairly OK with how that career turned out.
|
| It has drawbacks. Some of my jobs were odd kinks in the
| career curve - though I did enjoy them. (Roughly, ESA ->
| Industrial Automation -> Consulting -> Startup -> Video
| Games -> FAANG. It is not the straightest path :)
|
| Referrals are definitely a large plus (IIRC, the industry
| stats say about 1/3rd of job offers are internal referrals,
| even though they are far from 1/3 of the candidates).
|
| They aren't the only way, though.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| An internal referral by someone at the company you are
| applying to might carry some weight, or at least get you a
| foot in the door (interview), but I think it's been
| years/decades since past employers were willing to say more
| than "yes, he worked here", for fear of lawsuits.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| This is true in giant companies, but in smaller companies
| it is less true.
|
| In smaller companies, "I worked with this person and they
| are really solid." carries a lot of weight.
| roguecoder wrote:
| References these days are usually with individual
| coworkers, rather than a company reference.
|
| It usually isn't "is this person a good developer?"
| either. Instead, it is open-ended questions without any
| one right answer. How much structure did this person
| like? What about your work place helped them be
| successful? What role did they play on the project you
| worked on together? What impact did they have on the
| team?
|
| If someone's reference didn't work with them closely,
| that's as strong a no-hire signal as if they outright
| said "this person sucked." If they don't have anyone they
| can hand you the phone number for who has specific,
| detailed praise about them and their work, you can safely
| move on to the ten other candidates who do.
| pknomad wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. Parent comment is hardly over-
| indexing; it's a _big_ factor. The world may be big but the
| communities are small.
| maiar wrote:
| Usually when you're in a shitty situation, all the people
| who know who you are are also in bad situations and
| probably can't hire or protect you. That's how business
| works--things go bad at the same time. All correlations go
| to one in a crash.
| bckr wrote:
| Not today or tomorrow, but next month, when one of them
| has started a cool startup, another is VP at her friend's
| company, and the rockstar made it into Big Co
| 65 wrote:
| What ends up mattering more is your ability to form good
| relationships with co-workers at your last job and sell
| yourself on your resume.
|
| Most of the people who end up getting high paying, high
| ranking jobs are not very skilled technically, but are
| skilled personally - even engineers.
|
| So I'd say - do your job as well as you can (don't go too
| crazy with work), be friendly with people in your company,
| and phrase your achievements in terms of % value/speed/users
| added.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has
| an impact on getting the next one.
|
| [ citation needed ]
|
| Every job I've worked at has specified when we provide
| references, we're to say "X was employed from Y to Z" and if we
| would hire them again, yes or no. The employee described here
| would get a yes from me. The fact that they didn't go "above
| and beyond" will not help them get a job, at least if they
| happened to work for any of the companies I have.
|
| > If people know you are a standout contributor then you will
| be hired quickly into desirable roles.
|
| I guess we could quibble over definitions then, because I as a
| senior dev managing other devs am perfectly happy with someone
| who clocks in, does the work on-time and to-spec, and then
| clocks off as a "standout contributor." I've chastised a few
| people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not
| because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I
| consider it part of my job to prevent burnout, voluntary or
| otherwise.
|
| Burned out devs turn out worse work, and they feel worse in the
| bargain. Textbook definition of a lose-lose. Whatever code is
| being a pain in the ass today is just that; code. It will be
| there when you get back from the weekend, it will be there when
| you get back from a doctor's appointment, it will be there when
| your kid is done being sick. Life matters. Code... does, but to
| a lesser extent.
|
| > On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is
| just bad for you.
|
| Which is why I don't want people feeling bitter about their
| job, and putting in the extra work to, by your own admission,
| be just as damn likely to get the axe for reasons that are out
| of your control? That's embittering as fuuuuuuuck.
|
| > Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on
| customers and coworkers is good for you.
|
| False dichotomy. I love what we build, _and_ I want my
| subordinates to have fulfilling, happy lives. And I proportion
| my energy to both of those things in accordance with their
| importance.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I don't think it's references that matter, as much as
| reaching out to former coworkers who have jobs elsewhere, and
| can be your "in" to a new job.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I 've chastised a few people in my time for committing
| code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate
| their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job
| to prevent burnout_
|
| The best way to avoid burnout in my experience is to work
| when you have "the itch" to do it. If you're feeling it on a
| Saturday, why not go for it? You might not be feeling it on
| Monday and will need the break then instead. If you forego
| the prime opportunity and then force yourself to do it later
| when you are not in the right mindset, that is when the
| burnout is going to get you.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Answering the rhetorical question - because it may set a
| bad example for other, more junior employees; it may set a
| new expectation; if the good manager who prevents burnout
| gets fired, and is replaced with a worse person, they may
| come to expect you to work six days a week, and instead of
| preventing burnout by working when you want, you're now
| being burned out by working not only 5 days a week without
| any break, but also on one of your weekend days.
| 9rx wrote:
| 1. Will you survive to see a new manager if you don't
| work on the weekend? Without that, under the given
| scenario you are either:
|
| - Forcing yourself to work on Monday. Burnout ensues.
| Will you be able to continue while burnt out?
|
| - Skipping Monday too, seeing you only work four days a
| week. Will you be able to continue under performance
| expectations?
|
| 2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical
| future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to
| stick around even if working hours remain the same? He is
| still going to express his badness in many other ways. He
| wouldn't be bad otherwise.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Without that, under the given scenario you are
| either:_
|
| I reject the false dichotomy that my options are "work on
| the weekend when I'm excited to write code, or suffer and
| burn out during the week". Maybe that works for you, but
| I have to show up on Monday regardless of whether I wrote
| something inspired on Saturday.
|
| > _2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical
| future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to
| stick around even if working hours remain the same?_
|
| Weirdly, the bank expects monthly mortgage payments
| regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I have to show up on Monday_
|
| For what, exactly? If it is simply to appease the whims
| of your manager, you _already have_ the bad manager.
| Another hypothetical future bad manager is the least of
| your concerns at that point. Chances are the hypothetical
| future bad manager will be less bad than the horror show
| you are already in.
|
| _> the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless
| of whether my manager is bad or not._
|
| There is some risk there, but most tech people already
| price in that risk by demanding much higher than normal
| compensation at their job, allowing them to have their
| mortgages discharged before the bad manager arrives. You
| might get caught in the unlucky case, but on balance the
| good managers don't disappear that quickly.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| If any of that cohort of most tech people has enough
| money left over to pay off _my_ mortgage, I 'd be open to
| that. But I'm not a member of that hallowed club.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Do you not have coworkers?
|
| There are more people involved in software creation than
| just you and your manager.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| To add: it also sets bad expectations from other
| leadership. If managers consistently see your guys
| putting in off the clock hours:
|
| a) it makes me look a bit of a moron, because it implies
| they can't get their work done within office hours, and
| my job is to ensure that
|
| b) they then expect that level of work regularly and will
| feel slighted if it stops being put in. See
| aforementioned comments about burnout.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> within office hours_
|
| You are running a factory over there? That makes the
| weekend perspective a bit more reasonable, given the
| constraints. Tech work, on the other hand, descends from
| agriculture. You work when the sun is shining and rest
| when it is stormy, metaphorically speaking. There is no
| reasonable concept of defined working hours. The brain
| doesn't operate on a set schedule like that, and trying
| to ignore that reality is where the burnout stems from.
|
| If we were talking about tech, you certainly would look
| foolish applying factory concepts to an entirely
| unrelated field.
| bckr wrote:
| If it were me, I would write the code, commit it, and
| open the PR Monday afternoon
| 9rx wrote:
| That is what the individual is going to end up doing if
| they encounter the guy who thinks software is built on an
| assembly line, but is not ideal. The reviewer might get
| "the itch" before Monday. It would be a waste to see him
| fall into burnout because he had to artificially wait
| because you had to pretend to wait.
| roguecoder wrote:
| You don't burn out because you weren't working. That's
| not a thing.
|
| I am concerned about how you describe coding as an
| addiction. That sounds like something worth bringing up
| with a therapist & investigating the root cause of. It
| can be literally dangerous to identify that much with
| only our work, especially in this economy.
|
| But if you don't want to do that, if you have some rare
| code-or-die health condition, just contribute to some
| Apache project instead. The entire internet is build on
| projects people wrote that their companies didn't pay
| them to write. We don't have to give our whole creative
| selves to our employers.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Not a matter of when the office is open, it's a matter of
| how many hours have been worked vs what's expected. I'm
| obviously fine with folks working whenever they want,
| that's half the benefit of work from home in the first
| place. What I'm not fine with was this particular dude
| clocking in code at all hours all week, then putting even
| more in on the weekend. And mind you this is not simply
| from commits, it's from when he's emailing me his time
| spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing
| the 40 hour mark.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> it 's from when he's emailing me his time spent on
| various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40
| hour mark._
|
| I'll grant you that it is red flag that he would want to
| take your energy telling how long something took. It
| doesn't even mean anything in the given line of work. An
| interesting problem might be given hundreds of hours of
| thought - in the shower, while sleeping, etc. - but only
| take 15 minutes to type afterwards. What would you
| report? The 100 hours? The 15 minutes? Invent some kind
| of weighting system to offset parallel activities? And
| for what? None of them mean anything.
|
| The manager's job is to take the unnecessary burden of
| externalities off the rest of the team, but it is a team
| and that means it has to cut both ways. The rest of the
| team has to take the unnecessary burden of internality
| off the manager. If that was the best political way to
| say "please stop, you are needlessly wasting my energy",
| then that makes sense, I suppose. Or, perhaps a good
| manager is brutally honest above being politically
| sensitive? A team is, after all, characterized by their
| willingness to remain bonded even amid strife. Without
| that, you just have a group of people.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I was at one place where we tracked every bug introduced,
| and discovered more than 90% were in code written after
| 5pm. We dramatically cut our bug rate just by shutting
| down PRs outside of business hours.
|
| The problem is that when our performance declines, so
| does our ability to judge our performance. We can feel
| more productive while actually doing a much worse job.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly this. I worked for a place long ago, where we had
| this junior guy who basically didn't have a life. He just
| wanted to code. He stayed late every day, and would
| occasionally come in on the weekends and code all day. He
| was not making any extra (in fact since he was junior he
| was probably making much less than the rest of the team).
| He was not angling for a promotion from what I could
| tell. He just liked to code and that was his entire life.
| Well, his manager gave him some public praise once over
| E-mail, basically saying the project was moving along
| much faster due to how productive you are. That's all it
| took. Suddenly, the whole team felt pressure to pull
| 60-80 hour weeks and burn themselves out. And we didn't
| really get that much more done, because it was 80 low-
| quality burned out, demoralized hours, not 40 high-
| quality hours. The team eventually disintegrated along
| with the company during one of the tech downturns. All
| that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family
| or hobby.
| gedy wrote:
| There sounds a lot more issues with that team,
| personalities, and company vs "one guy doesn't have a
| family or hobby"...
| 9rx wrote:
| _> All that wasted stress because one guy doesn 't have a
| family or hobby._
|
| It reads like the real problem was that the other
| developers fell into what developers seem to love more
| than anything: Pedantry. Instead of playing along with
| the false praise, they set out to prove the claim in the
| email wrong.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Regardless, there was a problem.
| roguecoder wrote:
| This is what open source was made for.
|
| I once had a coworker like that who hadn't taken a
| vacation in two years. I told him that vacation time was
| how the company funded his open source work, and suddenly
| he took his full five weeks off each year to recharge by
| coding different code.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| FYI that burnout is not "working a lot". Burnout is the
| feeling of little control, ineffectiveness, COMBINED with
| stress. Working weekends could instead be an indication of
| excitement and enthusiasm, which as a manager is worth
| nurturing. Over time those kinds of people should be given
| broader ownership and the ability to delegate, where they see
| fit.
| codr7 wrote:
| Yeah, but what always happens is the more you give, the
| more they squeeze, until you have nothing left.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| A response to a feeling of ineffectiveness or lack of
| progress can be 'I need to catch up' which can result in
| weekend work. That IME can be a spiral. You don't get the
| rest you need. You feel less effective...
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| spoken like a person with other people in their lives that
| they care about. You seem good to work for. Thanks.
| seanc wrote:
| We're not as far apart as you might think. Clock time is
| correlated with performance, but by no means determinative.
| More important is initiative, enthusiasm, leadership,
| reliability, etc. All in, I work very little overtime.
|
| And you're right, this is a marathon, and working sustainably
| is absolutely the most important thing. One can do both. If
| you love what you build and you're leading a balanced life
| then I would say you're Doing It Right.
| roguecoder wrote:
| If people are seeing the only way to be a "standout
| contributor" being about putting in more than 40 hours a
| week, we may have found the disconnect.
|
| I don't work more than 40 hours a week, but when I slack off
| I just do the work put in front of me. Rather than hours,
| it's about energy.
|
| If companies want more than 40 hours a week, we can negotiate
| overtime. But I put extra energy in during the work week not
| because I think it makes me extra money or protects me from
| layoffs. I do it just because I think it is better.
| the_af wrote:
| I'm very cynical but I also kinda agree with this.
|
| Don't be loyal to the company, because the company isn't loyal
| to you. Don't overwork, don't neglect family, friends and
| hobbies. It's simply not worth it, you'll burn yourself out,
| and it won't save you when the ax falls.
|
| But do a good job, because it's good for you, your self-esteem,
| your mood and your skills. If you "quiet quit", you're doing
| yourself a disservice. (Barring extreme cases, of course).
| tajd wrote:
| Yeah - hard agree with this. There's a lot to be said about
| giving your best effort in proportion to all the other things
| you're doing in your life.
| deeg wrote:
| I'd rephrase this to: don't be loyal to work but be loyal to
| your coworkers. Be the person everyone wants to work with.
| usixk wrote:
| Love this distillation!
| Spivak wrote:
| I would nit and say "quiet-quit" to give you the time to work
| on finding your next job. Do it as a means, not an end.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Anger can be a strong motivator. It's a double-edged sword, you
| don't want to sustain it.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of. That
| doesn't mean going out of my way and overworking myself, but it
| does mean being a good person to work with and writing quality
| code.
|
| I tend to stick to the scope of work asked of me (though not
| always) for the reasons in the article, but I don't just phone
| it in. I put effort into writing good code, tests, and PR
| reviews.
|
| In my experience, when it comes to getting the next job the
| only thing that really matters either way are references. If
| you were a too co-worker and did at least put in the effort to
| do good work within bounds of the scope asked for, you
| shouldn't have a problem.
| apercu wrote:
| > I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of.
|
| That's important. I spend more awake time working/thinking
| about work than really else. I don't know that it's healthy,
| but at least I want to be proud of the outputs if I am going
| to spend this much time on something. I just can't really
| show up and mail it in, I'm just not wired that way, and
| suspect that a lot if us aren't.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Some of that is inevitable when developing taste, or if the
| problem has you (so to speak). The problem is when this is
| the case all the time instead of a season here and there.
|
| Your ability to page out work is a great thing to track.
| apercu wrote:
| "The problem is when this is the case all the time
| instead of a season here and there"
|
| I hope I'm not projecting, and misinterpreting, but I try
| to explain this to a colleague all the time. His work
| style is 8 months of the year a couple hours here and
| then 2-3 months of crazy, intense work.
|
| But I have to show up for 25-30 (I'm self-employed) hours
| a week, 48 weeks a year, and I find it really difficult
| to then squeeze in 2-4 months of 50+ hours weeks on top
| of this.
|
| There is sprinting and there is distance running and for
| most of us, these are very different things.
| djtriptych wrote:
| Yeah this is super important IMO. Set your own standards for
| what that means. Makes it much easier to handle the slings
| and arrows of normal 9-5 headaches, and to understand when
| you're being pressed to do things you wouldn't be proud of.
| nelblu wrote:
| I agree with your comment. I have never been laid off, and I
| hope I don't ever do or at least I see the signs early on to be
| prepared.
|
| The way I see "work" is that you are going to spend 8hrs of
| your day doing it, so you better feel positive about it and
| enjoy it. I couldn't care less about the corporate lords and I
| very well know I am just a line on an excel, but when I work I
| want to be sure I feel satisfied, I enjoy it and build trust
| with my team and meaningful relationships where possible.
|
| I am not a religious person, but there is a famous saying in
| Hinduism - krmnnyevaadhikaarste maa phlessu kdaacn | maa
| krmphlheturbhuurmaa te snggo'stvkrmnni|| It roughly translates
| to "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you
| are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider
| yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor
| be attached to inaction."
|
| I love the last line of it where it says "don't be attached to
| inaction" which means just because the fruit of labour isn't in
| your control, doesn't mean you can just start behaving like a
| someone who doesn't care.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I've also been working in tech for almost 30 years - 28.5 to be
| exact.
|
| Work is purely transactional, I give the company the benefit of
| all of my accumulated skills and experience for 40 hours per
| week, they put money in my account and I then use that money to
| exchange for goods and services.
|
| Whenever one party or the other decides that the transactional
| relationship is no longer beneficial, we part ways.
|
| If I find a company where the transaction is more beneficial -
| pay, benefits, work life balance, etc - depending on my
| priorities at the time, I go work for that company. I've worked
| at 10 companies in the past almost 30 years and 6 of those have
| been in the past 10 years.
|
| > _Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like
| sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn 't care, but IMO
| that sort of thing is worth it now and then._
|
| Uh yeah that won't happen unless it benefits me in some way
| like I'm learning a new to me technology or finishing a project
| _I am leading_ will look good on my resume.
|
| I made an exception when I was working for a company that sent
| nurses to the homes of special needs kids and they wouldn't get
| paid on time if the project wasn't done - before Christmas.
| They would have gotten paper checks that they would have had to
| either pick up from their central office or get it mailed to
| them and when I was working for public sector clients during
| Covid and it helped them get their disability and unemployment
| checks on time.
| franczesko wrote:
| I can relate. My perception is that a company is for me, not
| the other way around. This really flips how work is handled.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Don't really agree. The benefits you mentioned are already
| there for 50-70 percentile employees. Like doing a bit more
| than minimum, occasionally helping others, not slacking too
| much so others had to pick up your work etc. No benefits to
| bust your ass to be the top 5%.
|
| And when more and more people are like this, the average
| quality goes down, so it is even easier to be average.
|
| Pride in my work? Sometimes I have pride in my work. Doesn't
| mean I should open myself to be exploited.
| maiar wrote:
| It's worthwhile to "go above and beyond" for individuals who
| will help you, who may exist in a company... but never for the
| company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pile of
| someone else's money that will do literally anything, including
| destroy your life, to become a bigger pile.
|
| You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you
| later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off--they
| stand for nothing.
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| that's true with publicly traded C-corporations
|
| for private companies, it literally is the people you work
| with (and whatever legal enchantments they've decided on).
| some of those people will still fuck you over, but it's not a
| legally-conjured sentient pile of money the way a C-corp is
|
| B-corps are an interesting attempt to avoid being a sentient
| pile of money. in theory, it's an egregore that is capable of
| valuing things other than money. (they haven't really been
| tested in court. and they might fuck you over in pursuit of
| some other value, even if they do work. or fucking you over
| for money might not conflict with its other values)
| sertsa wrote:
| Was not familiar with the terms C & B - corp. For others in
| the same boat:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/c-corporation.asp
| harrison_clarke wrote:
| turns out, i actually meant benefit corporation. (i've
| heard people refer to them as b-corporations, but didn't
| realize there was another thing called b-corporation)
| singleshot_ wrote:
| If you're interested in learning about this, be aware
| that S-corp and C-corp are widely used misnomers. A
| corporation is a corporation (and an LLC is not) but they
| all can be taxed under sub chapters C, S, K, and others
| based on the specific details of the entity.
|
| C corporation is just a shorthand way of saying
| "privately incorporated voluntary association taxed under
| sub c (probably with dreams of being a public company
| someday, otherwise they'd be sub s).
|
| Not trying to "but acktchually" you, just suggesting that
| your next stop after reading about corporations is
| probably the tax code. (Enjoy that).
| mistrial9 wrote:
| extra bonus -- actual attorneys who are familiar with
| those codes learn not to discuss it _at all_ .. for
| whatever reasons.. it really is valuable information, as
| in scarcity
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Why did I just discuss them, then?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| glad to see an exception to that rule :-)
| CydeWeys wrote:
| "Going above and beyond" at a big company, if done in a smart
| strategic way, is the best way to get promoted, and getting
| promoted results in significantly higher pay. I've gotten
| promoted twice at my current employer over the years, which
| has roughly doubled my total compensation, and none of that
| would have happened had I just did my previous level's
| responsibilities and nothing beyond.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That's the exception rather than the rule. Most people have
| to switch employers to get a significant pay raise.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| As with all things, it depends where you are. It's not
| the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very
| clear "levels" and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi)
| it's often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
|
| And these are the biggest employers of talent. It may not
| be most people in a startup forum, but it's a lot of
| people.
|
| For all others, I think it's because tech isn't seen as
| such an important revenue driver. Lots of places we are
| still seen as a cost center.
| delroth wrote:
| > It's not the case for big tech employers, who tend to
| have very clear "levels" and (from what I can tell on
| levels.fyi) it's often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
|
| You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see
| for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their
| reported salary by being promoted within the company or
| by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting
| hired at a higher level at a competitor.
|
| I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company
| hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google,
| after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary
| less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at
| L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly
| higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like,
| around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly
| grant refreshes).
| compiler-guy wrote:
| I've always called that a "diagonal promotion" because
| it's over-and-up.
|
| It's also the only way I have ever gotten a significant
| increase in compensation, responsibility, and title.
| vkou wrote:
| Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see
| stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for
| level + performance rating in their location.
|
| Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively
| squishing the pay bands.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay
| immediately, while for someone who got promoted
| internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to
| catch up
| somanyphotons wrote:
| Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp
| are often very constrained when handling those who
| negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level
| raises for a long time until they're lower in their band
| ctrlw wrote:
| The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated
| them for giving up the stock grants of their previous
| employer, so they probably still received less than you
| had accumulated.
| Aqua_Geek wrote:
| Anecdata, for sure, but my experience working at several
| big companies in tech is that they won't significantly
| bump your pay (and especially not your stock grant!) when
| they promote you. If anything, they will move you to the
| minimum of the salary band for the new level.
|
| In my experience, you're better off getting the promo and
| looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that
| that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don't
| fault people for playing the game that is given.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> that is what the system rewards_
|
| Commensurate to the risk, of course. If you ignore the
| risk component then your best bet is to forget having a
| job and spend your days playing Powerball. The system
| offers much, much, much greater reward there.
|
| If you keep risk in mind then it's not so clear cut.
| Staying at the job you have, even with lower pay on
| paper, may end up being the most profitable option in the
| end. But sometimes you just have to make the gamble and
| find out! There are winning opportunities for sure.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Risk depends on the market strength. In good times, you
| could easily jump to a new job with a raise in weeks and
| there's little risk as long as you're not outing youself
| at work.
|
| In bad times like this, probably not worth it. The search
| takes months not, if not over a year, and there's a non-
| zero chance you're laid off anyway.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Pay bands for different levels are typically pretty
| broad, and typically overlap between levels. Just because
| median pay at level N+1 is significantly higher than at
| level N, doesn't mean that you will get that being
| promoted from level N.
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| CydeWays post is very similar to my experience as well
| 627467 wrote:
| Most people who think they deserve a significant pay
| raise probably don't (or maybe not enough relative to
| others competing for limited promotional budget).
| dingnuts wrote:
| over the last ten years the tech industry has 10x'd the
| value it has created, which is obvious if you look at the
| accrued wealth of the leaders in the industry.
|
| you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been
| working in this industry? MY SALARY
|
| we all deserve a significant pay raise you scab
| cudgy wrote:
| You're hired! /s
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It doesn't matter if you "deserve" the raise or not. If
| someone else will pay you more, the raise is yours.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I've seen enough people extremely qualified being denied
| promotions because they were "too good" at their current
| role. Meanwhile I've also seen as of late "promotions"
| that are just a title change while only adding to your
| workload with no extra pay. There's no winning with many
| companies.
|
| If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp
| in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion
| tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people
| involved. But all that already means it may not be a good
| fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If I can find someone to pay me more, whether I deserve
| it or not is irrelevant.
| amykhar wrote:
| I don't think this is true of all companies. My current
| company doesn't base bonuses on individual contributions, and
| even went so far as to reduce the number of "story points"
| that top contributors did in sprints so that the rest of the
| team wouldn't look bad.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| I don't think that's a good thing? (rest of the team
| wouldn't look bad part)
| Suppafly wrote:
| >It's worthwhile to "go above and beyond" for individuals who
| will help you, who may exist in a company... but never for
| the company itself.
|
| That feels like the correct way to think about it. Everyone
| else seems to think it's one extreme or the other but really
| thinking about it on an individual level vs a company level
| seems more accurate to my own experience.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I don't think it's just about who will repay you. Our
| responsibility to each other is not nearly that
| transactional.
|
| For example, the individual who is most likely to live with
| the consequences of your decision is... future you.
|
| Future-me isn't going to pay me back, but I am always
| grateful to past-me when I set future-me up for success.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| I think your comment bears some truth in that turning to
| bitterness is only going to tint a persons worldview towards an
| overall undesirable shade. Also it is absolutely necessary to
| keep up that "above and beyond" image for coworkers/managers to
| improve chances of a next successful hire. Mix that with the
| reality as described in the article and you get the play-
| pretend so many of us find exhausting
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| Why would I recommend a standout performer for a position at my
| company? So they can outshine me? I never recommend the "true
| believer" tool, always the average performer I got along with.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| true corporate strategist here... i recommend people i trust
| and beleive in and want to work with. if they can outshine me
| i can get better by working with them. i dont give a rats ass
| about my performance reviews. just quality of work and nice
| collaboration , preferably with people better than me.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| I bet you're a joy to work with.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| "A players hire A players and B players hire C players".
|
| I'm not saying I am necessarily an "A player". But I am
| secure in my skills and the ability to convince _someone_ to
| pay me for my skills. I was instrumental in hiring three
| people at a job who were all better than me at the time. I
| learned so much from them while I was there, it helped set me
| up for my next job that was my first job as a lead.
|
| Why would I want someone that can't help me be successful at
| my current job and whom I can't learn from?
|
| Even there I would ask my then former coworkers first advice.
| blitzar wrote:
| 99% of people hiring are "B/C players"
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And that's often good enough depending on what your needs
| are...
| blitzar wrote:
| The reality that nobody wasnt to say out loud is that the
| top 10-20% of the people you interviewed for a role would
| all have been just as great as the "best" candidate (and
| often enough the amazing candidate turns out to be
| terrible anyway).
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If you are hiring for your standard enterprise CRUD
| developer or "full stack" developer, once you have a few
| seniors (real seniors not "codez real gud" seniors), you
| can go down to the top 50%
| roguecoder wrote:
| Or you can hire juniors, and after a couple of years have
| a whole team of A-players.
|
| It's like the story about the coach who watched two
| runners run the same time, one with perfect form and the
| other a total mess. He let the total mess onto the team,
| and the runner with perfect form got mad, "but I ran
| better than he did!!!" The coach replied, "I can't help
| you go any faster than you are, but the total mess is
| going to be incredibly fast with just a little form."
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The juniors are doing negative work. I need people who
| are neutral or positive shortly after they come on board.
| Besides that, once a junior gets experience, they are
| going to jump ship.
|
| My expectations of a mid level developer is once given
| mostly clear business requirements, they should be able
| to turn those requests into code. They should be able to
| handle any "straightforward" task I throw at them.
|
| From the definition I have seen from leveling guidelines:
|
| _Straightforward problems or efforts have minimal
| visible risks or obstacles. The goal is clear, but the
| approach is not, requiring the employee to rely on their
| knowledge and skills to determine the best course of
| action._
|
| I expect a senior to handle "complex" tasks.
|
| _Complex problems or efforts involve visible risks,
| obstacles, and constraints. This often requires making
| trade-offs that demand expertise, sound judgment, and the
| ability to influence others to build consensus on the
| best approach._
| kmonsen wrote:
| I don't think most people would agree on what is an A, B
| or C.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I don't think it is consistent company to company what is
| an A, B or C.
| roguecoder wrote:
| If you think so, I'm sorry for wherever you've worked.
|
| A vs B vs C isn't some fixed thing we're assigned at
| birth: it's a matter of learning, investing in ourselves,
| having both humility and pride in our work, maintaining
| our boundaries and building up our coworkers.
|
| People who have fully replaced intrinsic motivation with
| extrinsic motivation won't ever get to A level, because
| the incentives are non-linear. Actual A players keep
| investing and collaborating, whether they get rewarded
| for it now or later or never, just because it is the
| right thing to do.
| reactordev wrote:
| It should be about raising the bar, not lowering it. You'd
| grow if you weren't the smartest person in the room.
| Unfortunately this stance prevents one from seeing that.
| 4fterd4rk wrote:
| Yeah... the overenthusiastic tool bringing up labor
| intensive ideas for minimal gain just means I can't hit the
| gym at lunch. Not putting up with that so a meaningless
| metric can go up by 0.5%.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Even if I am, and I've been hired multiple times to be the
| "smartest person in the room" , I want to hire people who
| can outshine me because that means I can just delegate high
| level concepts and they can run with it so I can move on
| the other initiatives.
|
| While doing that was half the reason that I got let go from
| my last job, I delegated the work I was doing to the person
| I hired and moved on to a newer initiative that was pulled,
| I still have no regrets.
|
| I got a chance to put leading an impressive "AI" project on
| my resume and it helped me get my current much better job.
|
| Before anyone starts groaning , it was a framework to do
| better intent based bots for online call centers (Amazon
| Connect and Lex). The perfect use case for it.
| jimbokun wrote:
| So you don't have to spend a lot of time cleaning up their
| messes.
| jmull wrote:
| > Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on
| customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means
| making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a
| company that doesn't care...
|
| Right.
|
| The company _doesn 't_ care.
|
| But _I do_.
|
| I don't work hard on my craft, push myself to be
| better/smarter/have more impact, or go above and beyond for my
| employer.
|
| I do it for myself.
| v3xro wrote:
| Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work
| that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency
| (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished
| products for example) or even methods of creating software.
| This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I
| guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author
| - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some
| good words in one quarter and not matter the next.
| trentnix wrote:
| Well said.
| harimau777 wrote:
| My experience has been that caring about your craft is a
| great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once
| told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the
| more happy my managers are with my performance."
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| Was that before or after "the consultants?"
| ruszki wrote:
| I have the same exact experience at my current company. My
| official performance, which is given by my boss, improved
| since I started to not care. My output fell, the quality of
| my work is the same, just less quantity, but for some
| reason my scores are higher.
|
| On the other hand, I had a job where my performance was
| rewarded greatly, and I was lucky to be at the right place
| for that. Almost all of the employees at the same company
| were not that lucky.
| awkward wrote:
| There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job
| to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial
| inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for
| where you are now.
| disqard wrote:
| This is the wise, pragmatic answer indeed!
|
| Find the Middle Path.
|
| Neither extreme is correct.
|
| Doing the absolute bare minimum to not get PIP'ed is
| corrosive to your own soul.
|
| Going "above and beyond" when you might get laid off
| tomorrow, is naive and opening yourself up for
| exploitation.
| toyg wrote:
| That's because time pressure is real. We can't all be Knuth
| and spend our life looking for the perfect algorithm to
| solve all problems we could ever have. Most of us must ship
| something that works well enough for a particular scenario,
| as soon as possible - tomorrow, next week, next month, not
| next year. If you care too much about the quality of your
| work, you might end up never shipping; at some point you
| have to stop caring and just push the damn button.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| It's not always time pressure. It can also be, for
| example, calling out others for doing things that don't
| make sense or hinder what's actually needed for the
| job/company, which in turn makes them uncomfortable and
| leads to discipline for you and not them. My response
| after having that happen? Fine, I'll look the other way
| and not care how much we're getting done anymore.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| time is always going to be a valid term in the equation,
| probably with an exponent > 1
| akudha wrote:
| The quicker we make peace with the fact that hard work alone
| will not get us ahead (in most cases) the better it is for
| our mental health. We can put as much effort into our jobs
| _as long as_ we accept that the only guaranteed result is our
| own joy, pride in our work and nothing else (not even a
| _thank you_ from suits) is guaranteed.
|
| If we are not able to accept that, then just do the bare
| minimum like most people. OR find a better job, but there is
| still no guarantee the new job would actually be better than
| the old job. But hey, at least we might get more compensation
| in our new job, so there's that
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is
| that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the
| next one
|
| This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a
| reference check once in the last 10 years. Early 2010s it was
| more common but this practice is dead. Now every company is a
| new slate. In fact, I've seen people repeatedly rewarded for
| jumping ship and build there career on that. Companies have
| stopped investing in devs, so why should devs not reciprocate?
|
| And there are so many startups. More than you can count. There
| are more new ones every day than you could ever have time to
| apply to. They don't all have time to talk to each other.
|
| Not saying it's not good to have pride in your work, but within
| reason, and within a framework of fairness and quid pro quo.
| Don't let people exploit you any more than you exploit them.
| Employment is 100% transactional and the moment you forget that
| is the moment you get taken advantage of.
| collingreen wrote:
| Their point wasn't reference checks it was the power of a
| network of people who want to work with you again because
| they know your work is more than just transactional.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The effect's source is much more direct than that.
|
| It's not a reference check to see "is sam0x17 a good dev?" at
| the end of a hiring pipeline, but rather "I've got an open
| role and remember that sam0x17 is one of the best devs I've
| ever worked with; let's get them into the company!"
| ghaff wrote:
| Or you can drop a line to someone who you've worked with in
| some manner and ask to meet. That's how I got my last
| 14-year job.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Can confirm 17 years in, past performance has never impacted
| future job prospects.
| samspot wrote:
| In 17 years you never had a past co-worker contact you
| about a job? That's confirmation that your past performance
| is affecting your future job prospects. And if you have had
| that kind of contact, then your statement above is a lie.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| People are vastly overestimating network effects when you
| and your peers have similar experience and backgrounds.
| You'd likely get the job anyways, and the job probably
| isn't that great (in terms of upward momentum) to begin
| with.
|
| As someone who's done hiring look at the people who have
| a list of good references. It's basically just the same
| position/level for _years_ because that's all your
| network can give or feels comfortable giving you (why
| would they give you a better job than they have).
|
| It's a socioeconomic trap.
|
| Just job hop. I promise you nothing else matters.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| Relevant username
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| By all means, feel free to demonstrate where your network
| has gotten you. I'm sure we'll all be envious!
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| That advice is valid for dime-a-dozen coders working
| dime-a-dozen jobs, which, granted, is the majority of
| developers, but we're on Hacker News. The more
| specialized and deeply technical a role is, the smaller
| the pool of qualified people is and the really senior
| folks tend to know each other. Networking matters much
| much more in these smaller tight-knit communities.
| roguecoder wrote:
| We also get paid a lot more than the dime-a-dozen coders.
|
| As is so often the case, optimizing for the short term
| comes at the cost of the long-term.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| It's the opposite? You don't need someone to vouch for
| you if you have a highly specialized skill set. I
| certainly haven't.
|
| You might rely more on your network when you don't have
| any notable skill sets that set you apart from other
| developers.
|
| Your claim isn't rational or practical?
|
| This is what I mean, your attributing certain outcomes to
| an action that's effectively just a placebo effect. It
| doesn't actually matter.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I had to look for a job both in 2023 and last year. For
| me it was both a network and specialized skills.
|
| Specialized skills for me was cloud + app dev consulting
| and working at AWS (ProServe) and even more specialized
| was that I was a major contributor on a popular official
| open source "AWS Solution" in it niche and I had my own
| published open source solutions on AWS's official GitHub
| site.
|
| That led to two interviews and one offer within three
| weeks.
|
| My network led to offers where a former manager submitted
| me to a position at the company that had acquired the
| company we worked for as a "staff architect" over the
| technical direction of all of their acquisitions. They
| gave me an offer.
|
| My network also got me an offer from a former coworker
| who was a director of a F500 non tech company. He was
| going to make a position for me to be over the cloud
| architecture and migration strategies. He trusted me and
| he had just started working there.
|
| Last year, my current job just fell in my lap, the
| internal recruiter reached out to out to me and that led
| to an offer.
|
| I also had another former CTO throw a short term contract
| my way to tide me over.
|
| But on the other hand, my plan B applications as a
| standard enterprise CRUD developer working remotely led
| to nothing.
| roguecoder wrote:
| Is all you care about in a job the money? And are you
| looking at your total comp, or your hourly rate?
|
| In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to
| pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you
| divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at
| FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value
| all my time, not just my bank account.
|
| What does my reputation buy me? In the worst job market
| in the last 20 years, I had two offers in hands within
| three weeks. I can bring top performers willing to work
| for regular salaries into wherever I land. All of that is
| because a lot of people who worked with me in the past
| would like to work with me again, and the companies we
| build software for benefit.
|
| I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement,
| not just a bigger number. And it has been plenty
| lucrative.
|
| Startups don't succeed because the code is good, but they
| sure can fail because it is bad. When a company needs to
| save itself after the underqualified mercantile engineers
| have left a spaghetti mess of lambdas scattered all over
| the org or a spaghetti mess of a monolith with every
| model in one folder, they are very happy to pay for
| actual expertise.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I care about my well-being and being able to float for
| extended periods of time if necessary. I can go many,
| many years without a job at this point and suffer
| absolutely zero quality of life issues.
|
| >the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much
| because the job sucks.
|
| I mean don't overwork for an employer who doesn't care
| about you (none of them do)? Just go switch jobs.
|
| >I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement
|
| This just reads like a no true scotsman fallacy. What
| does "actual" advancement mean here? Again, I have plenty
| of security (not job security) right now.
|
| >I can bring top performers willing to work for regular
| salaries into wherever I land.
|
| So you're fine with exploiting people? What? Just because
| someone is willing to be a fool doesn't mean you should
| stand by and let them be one.
|
| And also, I question the "top performers" part of this,
| given your other qualifiers throughout the post.
| Especially the comment about big tech. The numbers don't
| add up in your favor.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_
| to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you
| divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at
| FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value
| all my time, not just my bank account._
|
| This is the type of copium that you usually hear from
| people who have never worked in BigTech...
|
| BigTech could afford to pay me 50% more as a mid level
| employee than working a lot harder at a 60 person startup
| and that company was paying about average for a local
| enterprise dev in a major metropolitan area.
|
| I'm no longer there. But I had to get a job as a "staff"
| level employee to even get in the range when I left of my
| job as a mid level employee at BigTech. Comparing the
| leveling guidelines, it's about the same as a "senior" at
| the equivalent job at BigTech.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| My go to reference is a CTO of a startup I worked for. He
| is now semi retired and a "fractional CTO".
|
| But honestly, I've leveled up so much in the past five
| years, anything that any of my previous coworkers could
| say about me would be outdated
| AlunAlun wrote:
| > This is completely false.
|
| It's not completely false at all - but it does depend greatly
| depends on which country you're based in.
|
| Where I am, in Spain, your network, and your reputation
| within it, are _everything_. Good jobs will sometimes not
| even be advertised, as the first thing a hirer will do is ask
| around their network for recommendations, and those
| recommendations count for _a lot_. On the other side, when
| you are looking for work, the first thing you do is ask your
| network for an intro - and again, that intro counts for a
| lot.
|
| That's not to say that the traditional interview process will
| be skipped, but candidates coming from recommendations will
| have a massive head-start over others.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Well... That doesn't bode well for me. I'm in Spain but
| I've always worked for companies in other countries
| (including my current remote job).
| rmah wrote:
| It's not about references. It's about building a network of
| colleagues who respect you and your work. Many years ago,
| when I started doing consulting/contracting work, literally
| _all_ my of my jobs came through people I had previously
| worked for or with across a variety of companies. And if you
| play your cards right, as the years roll on, you won 't even
| have to apply for jobs other than as a formality. Instead,
| people who's respect you've gained will try to bring you into
| where they work.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| > It's about building a network of colleagues who respect
| you and your work.
|
| The network is actually holding you back. You don't need a
| network to get a new job AND if that person in another
| company has enough pull to get you in it's actually likely
| a sign they've been there too long themselves if they're
| not directly in control of the hiring budget.
|
| Just job hop. This ain't your daddy's profession.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| They're talking about referrals, not reference checks.
| Getting good referrals is hugely important, especially at
| smaller companies that don't the capacity to do a rigorous
| hiring process.
| educasean wrote:
| I spent the last few months interviewing at various bay area
| startups for senior SE roles. About half of them wanted
| references. This was my experience so YMMV
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of companies tend to ask for them. No idea how many
| actually follow through and contact them.
| roguecoder wrote:
| When I was a hiring manager, I found that reference
| checks were _more_ predictive of eventual performance
| than the interview cycle was.
|
| After the first time I got burned hiring someone I
| couldn't get a strong reference for, I got over my
| laziness and did my job.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How so? I'm never going to give you a reference of
| someone who isn't going to say glowing things about me
| knowitnone wrote:
| reference checks are pointless if employee gives you a list
| of favorable references
| the_af wrote:
| > _This is completely false. I literally haven 't seen
| someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years._
|
| I understand this might not be your experience, but it's far
| from being "completely false".
|
| I have had background checks/reference checks done on me
| (thankfully my would-be boss told me they were a formality
| and nobody cared about the results. I say "thankfully" not
| because I had anything to hide, but because the contractors
| doing the background checks asked for the dumbest things). I
| was also contacted by US-based consulting firms and asked to
| provide references on a former boss of mine, who was now
| applying for an engineering position... and to my surprise,
| the reference check involved getting on a call with me!
|
| More recently, a relative was applying to a fintech and was
| asked for references for all her pasts jobs since she started
| working in the relevant field.
|
| I _know_ lots of companies don 't care, but many others do.
|
| Besides, like other commenters said, it's not only about
| formal references checking. It's also about the networks you
| build with coworkers whom you can potentially meet again in
| other jobs, and whom you _want_ to speak favorably of you. I
| know I 've informally vetoed coworkers whom I knew were
| terrible at their jobs and I heard recruiting was thinking of
| making an offer to. Likewise, I've enthusiastically
| recommended past coworkers who I would enjoy working with
| again.
| hobs wrote:
| It happens all the time as you get higher and higher on the
| org tree, I had jobs not only call my references by ask if
| they could also speak to my former bosses.
|
| When the money is seriously on the line people care.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'm not sure which market you're in, but companies here
| _absolutely_ do reference checks. They will even reach out
| people you _didn 't_ list if they're a shared connection.
|
| My standing recommendation to everyone is to do good work and
| get better at advocating for yourself to make sure you're
| either getting the experience or the comp you need to achieve
| your goals. If you're not getting that, switch jobs. It's
| _much_ much better to switch jobs every few years if that 's
| what you need to stay motivated than to stay, do the minimum
| and collect a paycheck.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Reference checks aren't what matters, it's referrals and
| getting a job that wasn't ever advertised, because someone
| knows you're good and offers you the position directly.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Reference checks happen a lot. You just don't see them.
|
| Most companies stopped asking for references because everyone
| just games the system. Managers are afraid of giving anything
| but glowing references because they want to keep _their own_
| network opportunities strong. Giving positive references is
| basically a networking game these days.
|
| So that's not how people reference check. Now, they go on
| LinkedIn and look for mutual connections they trust. They
| check for people they know whose work history overlapped with
| the candidate's time at a different company. They go ask that
| person without the candidate ever knowing.
|
| I get probably 10X as many backchannel reference requests as
| I do formal reference check requests.
| groby_b wrote:
| > leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
|
| That is a double-edged sword. You can do it, but it really
| should come from a place where you're fully prepared to leave,
| _and_ you 'd really prefer you didn't. Sometimes, companies
| underpay. You _should_ be continually engaging in price
| discovery, and you should demand to be paid what you 're worth.
|
| Just be aware that your company may well say "oh well, good
| luck", and the new company may be worse. In smaller companies,
| you might set yourself up for resentment if you stay. Large
| tech companies really will just coldly look at "is she/he worth
| it? Yes/no", make that decision, and move on.
|
| > but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts
| that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.
|
| You build those contacts by helping people, not by helping the
| company. (Also, referrals are massively overvalued, IMHO. I'm
| not seeing them happening very often - but maybe my friend
| group is an outlier. Wonder if there are stats)
|
| > carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
|
| Realism, however, is helpful. Your company _will_ throw you
| away like a used paper tissue. Make peace with it. Don 't
| believe the "we're family" BS, because you aren't. You're at
| best the equivalent to a sports team. And when the team doesn't
| need you anymore, you'll be let go.
|
| And that's fine. What makes it painful is lying to yourself,
| pretending a company could actually care about you as a person.
| (Small carve-out: Tiny companies, with <30 or so people, still
| can manage to care)
|
| That doesn't mean phoning it in, or doing shoddy work. It does
| mean being clear about the fact that you have to look out for
| yourself, your wellbeing, your health, your career.
|
| You're right in that your co-workers are the only ones who have
| the capacity to love you back. But I can guarantee you that
| working harder won't make you more loveable. Work well, but be
| clear where your boundaries are.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of
| working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc
|
| Would you consider employers to be "fully cynical" about
| _their_ affairs and interactions with employees? I do. Being a
| happy little cog is it 's own reward, but ine has to be clear-
| eyed about it.
|
| > If people know you are a standout contributor then you will
| be hired quickly into desirable roles.
|
| You are presenting a false dichotomy - one can be an
| outstanding contributor while working 40 hours per week.
| roguecoder wrote:
| I think employers are, and I think it costs them a ton of
| money.
|
| My intrinsic responsibility isn't to the person handing me a
| check: we have an explicit contract. It is first to myself,
| second to the people whose lives are affected by the software
| I write, and third to my coworkers.
|
| When developers pretend the relationship with an employer is
| just the two of them, they are giving up most of the leverage
| they have to change how their work functions.
| jmyeet wrote:
| You are touching on what I would classify as two different
| kinds of layoffs.
|
| If you're working for a startup, a layoff is a likely outcome.
| Most startups fail. Those that don't often end up pivoting,
| often more than once, and cutting costs tends to go hand in
| hand with that.
|
| Layoffs from big tech companies is a relatively new phenomenon,
| really only since the pandemic, and they're fundamentally
| different. It's actually the sort of thing that Corporate
| America has been doing for decades. In this case, big tech
| companies make money hand over fist yet they have layoffs,
| typically ~5% of the workforce every year.
|
| These layoffs will be perpetual because the reasons for them
| aren't around controlling costs, avoiding bankruptcy or any of
| the "normal" reasons for layoffs. The goal is suppress labor
| costs. People fearful for their jobs aren't demanding raises or
| better benefits. Plus you can dump the work the 5% were doing
| onto the remaining 95% who won't say no because they're fearful
| for their own jobs. And _that 's the point_.
|
| The veneer of tech companies being mavericks who were employee-
| focused is completely over. A lot of the "perks", which are
| really just part of your cojmpensation package, are getting and
| will continue to get cut or just made worse through less
| funding. At some point, you'll start getting charged for those
| "free" meals.
|
| In 10 years, all the big tech companies will be
| indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop
| Grumman.
| matrix87 wrote:
| Actual salaries haven't fallen. The point of paying those
| salaries is you have to earn every penny. If they overhire
| and a bunch of people start taking the money for granted,
| that breaks down the social contract
|
| Half of the perks e.g. sabbaticals or sleeping pods don't
| even make sense in a competitive working environment
| jmyeet wrote:
| Compensation gets attacked in a number of ways.
|
| Your base salary won't tend to drop but at the same time
| you'll get an annual 1.5% increase when inflation is 9% and
| the company made $300 billion in profits last year.
|
| Bonuses for normal employees (below VP) are essentially
| formulaic at most big tech companies, for the most part. So
| if you're a senior SWE with a 15% bonus target, well that's
| based on yoru base salary. It hasn't gone down in nominal
| terms but it has in real terms.
|
| Also, depending on your company, there's a pool of
| discretionary funds on top of the formula. Your bonus can
| even be taken away and given to someone else on the team
| (yes, this happens). How big is that pool? Has it increased
| over time? Decreased? Or stayed the same? On a per-employee
| basis. You don't have visibility into that unless you're a
| manager.
|
| Next is stock compensation. Your initial grant is obviously
| known. Annual refreshes if you get them tend to be
| formulaic too. But what about discretionary grants? That's
| where the big money is. How much is being thrown around in
| total? Is it going up or down over time? You have no
| visibility into that.
|
| All of the above have, as input, your performance ratings.
| There are quotas for each performance level at a certain
| level (usually 150+ people or director level) so not
| everyone gets Greatly Exceeds Expectations. What are the
| quotas ("target percentages") for each bucket? Has that
| changed over time? Some compoanies now have targets for
| subpar ratings (ie ratings below "Meets Expectations").
| It's the pipeline for getting rid of people and getting
| people to do more for the same money.
|
| So technically you have to do more now to maintain a Meets
| Expectation rating than you did 5 or 10 years ago. Is that
| a pay cut?
|
| And then we have promotions. The typical way this works is
| a company will divide promotion candidates into pools. A
| promotion committee will essentially rank the packets they
| have. At a certain level there is a quota for promotions to
| hand out. Those get distributed to those from the top down
| until there are no promotions left to give out.
|
| Companies have allegedly reduced costs by simply reducing
| the promotion target percentages / quotas.
|
| And then there are all the benefits that have a tendency to
| get worse over time. Health sinsurance, 401k matching and
| less tangible benefits like food, facilities and so on.
| matrix87 wrote:
| But supposing this happens across the economy, there's
| less inflation. E.g. if housing costs track tech salaries
| and soak up most of the surplus available, the relative
| wealth gained/lost is hard to predict
| Mc91 wrote:
| > Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like
| sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO
| that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
|
| I sacrifice an evening - but not to my company, but to studying
| Leetcode to move on to the next company. I also have side
| hustles that I devote time to.
|
| > when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts
| that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If
| people know you are a standout contributor then you will be
| hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a
| hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be
| harder to find.
|
| I am helpful to most people when they need help, and they
| remember this. My code is clean and well architected and well
| tested, and they can see this too. They also know that I know
| the language and platform we're using, and general programming
| (and business) knowledge. Few care whether I'm a "standout
| contributor" in terms of getting many stories done. Actually if
| I have a good lead or manager I might go above and beyond for
| them in terms of doing more.
|
| > a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
|
| Well, this is correct. I help my co-workers.
|
| Things are situational. If I got a job helping set up LLM's or
| something, I might dive in and work a lot of hours just because
| I feel it is benefiting me too. On the other hand I can be
| somewhere where it doesn't make sense to work more than forty
| hours (if that) a week.
| harimau777 wrote:
| It feels like that requires an outgoing personality and great
| people skills that many people just don't have. There's lots of
| people who are friendly and pleasant to work with, but they
| don't have the dynamic personality that's going to lead to
| someone remembering them when an opportunity arises; even if
| they have they went above and beyond in their work.
| akavi wrote:
| It's certainly true that the charismatic have a better go of
| this, but after 12 years in the industry I've built up a
| solid list of quietly excellent engineers. Whenever I see an
| opportunity they could shine, I reach out to them.
|
| Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for me), the industry
| seems to be fairly market efficient, and they're usually
| already happy at some other highly compensated position
| (Empirically, 1 M$/yr seems roughly to be the going rate for
| "Damn, I really wish I could work with that person again")
| jcmfernandes wrote:
| I can strongly agree with you while understanding how the OP
| feels (and I certainly don't condone all his advice). IMO,
| culture plays a role in it; as an EU citizen, layoffs are
| effectively rare here.
|
| I was laid off once, when I was being widely praised for my
| work. It's been 5 years, financially it was probably the best
| thing that ever happened to me, and it still hurts that it
| happened. So yeah...
| billy99k wrote:
| "I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off
| many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_
| disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to
| contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc."
|
| I've been in tech for 15 years and twice was enough for me. I
| now take on multiple contracts at the same time and make way
| more than I ever did as a regular employee.
|
| I also won't work for startups as a full-time salaried employee
| anymore. They will always try to squeeze the hours out of you
| because they are usually trying to make a fast approaching
| deadline to get that next round of funding.
|
| I had a well paying 6 month contract last summer and they
| wanted to hire me as a full-time, salaried employee. The
| problem was that I worked closely with their salaried employees
| and they were always overworked (many working on multiple
| teams) and working long hours on extremely tight deadlines.
|
| The space was also over-saturated and when I researched the
| company, they were not turning a profit after a couple of years
| and continuing to take on rounds of funding.
|
| When I refused the offer and wanted to continue as a
| contractor, they cut off all contact with me and I haven't
| heard from them since. It really showed me that they just
| wanted to overwork me and not pay.
| low_common wrote:
| What sites do you use to find good contract work?
| billy99k wrote:
| The usual job sites like indeed.com. Even when I have
| enough work, I look a couple of times/day.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| What types of contracts / work do you do? Website design
| type stuff (front/backend)? Mobile apps? Other?
| asdf6969 wrote:
| You have no self respect.
| spandrew wrote:
| This is good advice.
|
| People who do good work, and get good at craft, do it as much
| for their sense of pride as they do for some kind of reward.
| Rewards are nice, but the joy you get from them are fleeting.
| Enjoying the work itself is evergreen.
|
| Work is work. Even at a job you like, you'll have days where
| you'd just rather be out having a day off. Don't get
| indoctrinated into hustle culture.
|
| But don't get cynical and start being a pleb about jargon or
| whatever. It's like a person stuck in traffic complaining about
| traffic as if they aren't... traffic?
| closeparen wrote:
| The most your ex coworkers can do for you at a decently paying
| corporate job is get you past the resume screen. And even then,
| there are constant complaints at my employer about our
| recruiters never contacting our referrals. The person referring
| can certainly not be allowed even the appearance of influence
| over the interviews or debrief.
|
| You might be hired on the strength of reputation or
| recommendation into an early stage startup, but these roles
| only make sense if you're 23.
| cricketsandmops wrote:
| The referrals come from the c-suite. They can call up board
| they're on and friends that they have. I was laid off last
| fall and went straight HR told them where i applied and they
| reached out to the ceo and he called someone with me in the
| office. Had a job offer 1 week later
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on
| customers and coworkers is good for you._
|
| My thoughts, exactly.
|
| I do good work, because I can't live with myself, if I don't.
| cricketsandmops wrote:
| My perception of work changed after a layoff last fall. I had
| the typical C-Suite reaching out and 6 months of severance.
| After giving over a decade of my time to a company and given 6
| months of pay in return my thought process changed. I was
| offered a job due to their contacts, but I would be in a
| similar situation with no laws to protect me, so I decided to
| decline and left the country. I had a contact in Mexico...
| after reading about their labor laws I decided while the pay
| was 50% of what i made in USA. I didn't have to worry about
| layoffs. For perspective had I been laid off in Mexico and
| worked the same amount of time my severance by law would have
| been about 3 years salary. That was the bare minimum by law (if
| the company offered a savings accounts, which most larger ones
| have here). A friend in HR down here did some calculations and
| said I would have been most likely closer to 4-5 years because
| of stipulations in contracts.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is
| that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the
| next one.
|
| No it doesn't.
| knowitnone wrote:
| "sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...is
| worth it now and then" That same company will fire you and
| escort you out but expect you to give 2 weeks notice.
| betaby wrote:
| > your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next
| one
|
| Not my experience.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| > next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the
| current job, or jobs before
|
| I've been in this field for ~7 years and have never found this
| to be true, yet people parrot it all the same. I have never
| once received a job via reference, and only once was able to
| get someone else a job by reference. I feel this is only true
| when you're at the very senior level.
| krab wrote:
| Only my first job after university was via a regular
| advertisement and application. The other jobs and contracts
| happened thanks to:
|
| - one of my bosses
|
| - me talking at an event and meeting another speaker
|
| - getting recommended by a person that knew me
| some_furry wrote:
| > The author is correct that exemplary performance will not
| save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next
| job often comes from contacts that you built up from the
| current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout
| contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable
| roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the
| bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
|
| This is an argument in favor of managing optics. Whether people
| perceive you going above and beyond may matter, even if
| _actually going above and beyond_ truly does not.
| anotheryou wrote:
| Also you get payed 60% for a year on unemployment benifits in
| germany (or until you find a new job), which is amazing.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of
| working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises,
| etc.
|
| Early in my career I watched a coworker get denied a promotion
| to management and make a hard turn toward cynicism. To be
| honest, he was not ready for a management promotion and the
| company made the right call. However, he was so insulted that
| he immediately started looking for new jobs and stopped doing
| more than a couple hours of work per week.
|
| I thought his cynicism was going to backfire, but over the next
| several years he job hopped almost every year, getting bigger
| titles at every move. For a long time I was jealous that his
| cynicism and mercenary-style approach to employment was paying
| off so well.
|
| Years later I went to a fun networking lunch. His name came up
| and many of us, from different local companies, said we had
| worked with him. The conversation quickly turned to how he had
| kind of screwed everyone over by doing Resume Driven
| Development, starting ambitious projects, and then leaving
| before he had to deal with consequences of, well, anything.
|
| He hit a wall mid-career where he was having a very hard time
| getting hired because his resume was full of job hopping. He
| was requesting reference letters from past bosses multiple
| times a month because he was always trying to job hop. One
| admitted that he eventually just stopped responding, because
| he'd write a lot of reference letters every job-hop cycle only
| to have him bail on the company with a lot of technical debt
| later.
|
| He eventually moved away, I suspect partially because the local
| market had become saturated with people who knew his game. He
| interviewed extremely well (because he did it so much) but he'd
| fail out as soon as someone recognized his name or talked to an
| old coworker.
|
| The last I talked to him, he felt like a really cynical person
| all around. Like his personality was based on being a mercenary
| who extracted "TC" from companies by playing all the games. He
| was out of work, but asked me if I had any leads (no thanks!).
|
| I'm no longer jealous of his mercenary, job-hopping adventure.
| cudgy wrote:
| I've known many people like this throughout my career, and I
| have seen the absolute opposite that you observed. These
| people are perfect candidates for management positions and
| their focus on office politics pays off handsomely. It's not
| for me; might not be for you; but in reality these
| machiavellian tactics work if you wanna move up and get
| promoted in most large corporations.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The problem with getting ahead via Machiavellian tactics is
| that it only works at toxic companies.
|
| Every good company I've worked for has been a bad place for
| politics and Machiavellian personalities.
|
| So if you're using politics and Machiavellian tactics you
| may get ahead at some company, but then you're going to be
| surrounded by people who are also toxic and Machiavellian.
| Perhaps more so than you. Playing politics is often a
| short-term win at the expensive of the long-term.
| roguecoder wrote:
| This is a great point!
|
| The question isn't what strategy works at miserable
| companies that expect 60+ hour work weeks: it is what
| strategy will get me well-paid at a job I actually want.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think there are plenty of toxic companies around and
| your friend's gamble is just another strategy at
| succeeding in them. I sometimes too feel envious that I
| don't have the chops to do this job hopping game.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Welcome to every company that pays at top of band...
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| In my experience this tactic tends to work well for manager
| positions and backfire easily for technical positions.
|
| If a manager screws things up they get pro or side moted.
| If an expert screws up and leaves technical debt behind,
| they just get a bad name.
| roguecoder wrote:
| The standards for managers are also so much lower than
| for engineers. Most of the time companies don't know how
| to judge how good a manager is at their job, much less
| how to interview people for those roles.
|
| Instead, people rely on "how confident do they sound?" as
| a proxy for competence. It used to be that you could do
| that in development, but then we started having engineers
| write code during interviews.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > If people know you are a standout contributor then you will
| be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are
| a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will
| be harder to find.
|
| That hasn't really been true in my experience. This might be
| another one of those cultural shifts. work connections in
| general are looser and you need to do a lot more than just
| casually chat at work to really "stand out". People are
| arguably overworked and have no time to perceive who does what
| work how efficiently unless you're a direct co-worker or a
| lead.
|
| I agree with don't be a grouch. No one like a grouch unless its
| calling out bad leadership. But I think being nice is better
| than trying to be the best. People remember how you made them
| feel, and current work (epecially WFH) may limit how much you
| get to impact a specific person's workload.
|
| >On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is
| just bad for you.
|
| YMMV. how you process that matters a lot. If you use some
| cynicism you can protect yourself. If youre all cynicism you
| become a grouch.
|
| >Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like
| sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO
| that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
|
| only in a market as bad as this where you don't want to go back
| to job searching. But normally, I wouldn't do this. Especially
| in my industty: give them an inch give them a country mile, and
| then that "crunch" period has become 70 hour workweeks for 6+
| months.
| hintymad wrote:
| > I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of
| working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises,
| etc.
|
| Totally agreed. A big downside of taking contracting job is
| that one does not get equity. There can be exceptions but in
| general equity is reserved for permanent employees.
|
| That aside, I highly recommend people view the employment as an
| alliance. When employee aligns with the company, work hard.
| When the alliance is not there, break apart and no hard
| feelings.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| By "equity" do you mean statistically worthless equity in a
| private company?
|
| Most companies don't give equity. But even if you are talking
| about equity in the form of RSUs in public companies. It's
| just comp. I'll take guaranteed cash comp any day. When I was
| getting RSUs, I had it set to immediately sell as soon as I
| was vested and diversified.
|
| Employment is not an "alliance" it is a transaction, they pay
| me money, I give them labor
| hintymad wrote:
| I'd go with transactions too. Either way, a company is not
| a family. No hard feelings if I leave my company or my
| company lets me go.
| pc86 wrote:
| > The Myth of Job Security in Germany
|
| > Since I was working for a German entity of a company, I want to
| address a common myth about job security in Germany. Many people
| believe that it's nearly impossible to be fired in Germany. While
| this is partially true for individuals who have completed their
| probation period, it doesn't hold up in the context of layoffs.
| If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees,
| German law doesn't prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a
| social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing
| the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those
| with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the
| difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
|
| The author decries how he was laid off despite his contribution
| then - without a hint of irony - says Germany isn't as safe for
| employees as most people think because layoffs are legally
| required to take into account information completely disconnected
| from your contributions at work.
|
| Of course if you have legal structures that make it harder to
| fire people based on what they do outside of work, you will be
| forced to lay off people you otherwise wouldn't.
|
| What are the odds the author got laid off despite his
| contributions precisely because somebody who earned more than him
| and did less couldn't be fired because they happened to have
| children? In the US it would be approximately zero. Even if the
| person picking names knows you have kids - but they don't because
| they're usually 3-4 levels above you - they have to justify the
| names to _their_ boss and "J. Doe just had their second kid so
| let's keep them around until next year" will absolutely not fly.
| bluGill wrote:
| The hard to lay off makes it harder to hire as well. Sure you
| get the 6 month probation period, but it is risky to hire
| anyone because they might make it past those 6 months before
| bad times come.
|
| There is no good answer.
| pc86 wrote:
| You will have a hard time convincing me that at will
| employment and hire-fast-fire-fast mentality is not
| objectively better than whatever you might call the German-
| style system. (Notice I didn't say it's good, just better)
|
| The German-style system seems to treat a job as something the
| employee is guaranteed, that it's their inherent right to
| have, rather than something the employer chooses to give
| them. It doesn't seem to line up with reality.
| sofixa wrote:
| Better _for whom_? I think most people sleep better knowing
| that they can 't be let go for no reason, no notice and no
| severance _tomorrow_.
|
| Yes, you can lay off people in Germany, and France, and
| Italy. But there are rules, notice periods, and mandatory
| severances, as well as often (country dependent)
| consultation periods. In what way is that worse for the
| employee?
| Eridrus wrote:
| It's worse because people don't want to hire in those
| countries and the conjecture here is also that layoffs
| are unrelated to productivity, so there is nothing you
| can personally do to avoid getting laid off except having
| a family.
|
| So it's worse for people who are productive in their
| jobs.
|
| We were approached by a French startup looking for an
| acquihire and well, French labor law was a big reason not
| to do it (not because the people at the startup weren't
| good, but because staffing an Eng office around them was
| seen as too risky).
|
| To some extent perception is reality here; we didn't
| really know that much about French labor laws, but the
| reputation and uncertainty is the issue.
| pc86 wrote:
| I'm not saying there should be no rules but saying "you
| can't lay off Employee A because he has kids, you have to
| lay off Employee B instead because they don't" with
| absolutely no consideration of work product is pretty
| asinine on its face.
|
| Laying people off is a business decision - forcing a
| company to justify that from a business context is
| probably a Good Thing, but injecting weird social
| requirements on top of that is silly.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It makes sense if you consider the social cost of having
| children live through their parents' layoff.
|
| Meanwhile businesses enjoy the privilege of operating in
| a country where contracts are enforced and people are
| educated. In exchange they're expected to not treat their
| employees like cattle - that's not a lot to ask IMHO.
| s1mplicissimus wrote:
| I guess it's a matter of perspective. Duties and
| rights/freedoms are usually connected. Like you have the
| right to tiger arms, but that entails the duty to stash and
| use them responsibly. You have the right to ride your car
| where you want to go, but that entails the duty of obeying
| traffic laws. For this specific example: You have the duty
| to work, but that entails the right to have a job. Does it
| entail the right to have a job you find enjoyable or
| fulfilling? Hell no! (hour long commutes or jobs you are
| clearly overqualified for are things you'll just have to
| accept according to this model still. "Culture mismatch" is
| not in the vocabulary of social security payout offices,
| interestingly) To me it still sounds better than "no job?
| well guess bad luck for you" though. ymmv
| pc86 wrote:
| This just doesn't match up with reality IME.
|
| You don't have a right to drive your car anywhere - the
| state can revoke it. Many states have no laws at all
| about how to store firearms, and the ones that do in
| general are pretty hostile to the idea that you have a
| right to bear arms in the first place. You don't have a
| duty to work, someone isn't morally wrong because they
| live off family money. And you absolutely do not have a
| right to a job, because a job requires someone else to
| pay you money. Nobody has a _right_ to have someone else
| pay them money.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I had the same reaction. This sort of law makes it very
| expensive to keep ambitious young folk like the author in a
| layoff.
|
| I am very confused about how this works in practice though.
| Presumably you're not expected to keep an old accountant with a
| family over a young childless developer, but where is that line
| actually drawn? Can you make such a distinction between teams,
| or are you expected to reassign people from a team that is
| being disbanded? What if they don't have some experience you
| would like, are you expected to train them?
| jjmarr wrote:
| From this article by a German lawyer, "the question will
| always be whether one employee can replace the other in the
| event of illness or absence on leave.":
|
| https://www.kuhlen-berlin.de/en/glossary/sozialauswahl
|
| > Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG provides four criteria that
| have to be taken into account in the selection decision:
| Length of service, age, statutory maintenance obligations and
| the employee's severe disability.
|
| > The employer must first determine which employees work at
| the same level in the company and can therefore be replaced.
| The group of employees determined in this way is what is
| known as a horizontal comparability. Social selection is then
| carried out in this group on the basis of the legally
| prescribed criteria. The members of the respective group are
| then ranked according to their need for social protection.
|
| > Older employees are more in need of protection than younger
| ones. A longer period of employment also increases the need
| for protection, as does the existence of statutory
| maintenance obligations and the presence of a severe
| disability.
|
| > Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG does not indicate how the
| social aspects mentioned are to be put in relation to each
| other, which is why each of the four criteria is to be given
| equal importance.
|
| > When reducing staff, employers often make use of point
| schemes through which points are assigned to the individual
| social criteria. It also gives information through which the
| need for social protection of the employees in the comparison
| group can be assessed.
|
| > All employees who are interchangeable must be included in
| the social selection. Criteria that can be used in this
| examination are the vocational training as well as the
| practical experience and knowledge that the respective
| employees have. If there is comparability, these workers are
| horizontally interchangeable. In practice, the question will
| always be whether one employee can replace the other in the
| event of illness or absence on leave.
| pgorczak wrote:
| > If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees,
| German law doesn't prevent this.
|
| At least this part is partially wrong. There is an entire law
| about how lay offs are only allowed if they are "socially
| justified" with definitions of acceptable circumstances. An
| employer can not fire you "at will" in Germany.
| mooreds wrote:
| > Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen
| is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the
| company. Instead, continuously explore opportunities so that if a
| layoff happens, you already have other options lined up.
|
| I personally find interviewing exhausting. I also feel slightly
| guilty interviewing when I'm happy where I'm at because I have
| been a hiring manager and know how much goes into a good
| interview process from the company side. (Not saying don't do
| that, but it's hard for me to do so.)
|
| If interviewing is tiring, another alternative that requires less
| work is to be active in a larger tech community. Whether that is
| here, local meetups, or on social media, being active can raise
| your profile and keep connections warm. This will help if/when
| you are laid off.
| dolmen wrote:
| networking vs interviewing
| temporallobe wrote:
| I was laid off recently. I poured my heart and soul into that
| role and went far above and beyond in countless ways - even
| working on a critical business proposal while on vacation with my
| family. In the end no one cares about your efforts, what you
| accomplished, your certifications, what kind of SME you are, or
| what potential you have. If you fit the criteria for a layoff,
| you will be gone without a second thought. After I was informed,
| my company reached out to me with a "mobility program" where they
| supposedly helped me to find a position internally. I talked with
| several people including a VP who promised to find me something
| only to be ghosted after my official end date. It's a very
| cutthroat industry and there is no such thing as loyalty any
| more. I know I sound bitter. That's just the way it is. Save as
| much money as you can, live frugally, keep your resume updated,
| and always be prepared to jump ship. Don't stay in a role too
| long and try to move on voluntarily at the first hint of trouble.
| erellsworth wrote:
| > It was difficult to process what was happening. Just ten months
| earlier, the company had gone through another round of layoffs.
| And at the beginning of the year, during the company's kick-off
| event, the president assured us there wouldn't be any more
| layoffs.
|
| In my experience, whenever a company assures you there will be no
| more layoffs, there will 100% be more layoffs. Never make the
| mistake of believing your employer has any real loyalty to you.
| inahga wrote:
| That matches my experience too. If leadership even uses the
| word "layoff", no matter the context, it's coming.
| duxup wrote:
| I know some folks that very much take the cynical approach to
| work. They work very hard to eek out every penny they can from
| each employer and switch jobs a moments notice for more money.
|
| I feel like this has a strange re-enforcing cycle that they find
| employers who are just like they are (looking to eek out every
| hour from their employees) and so they get more cynical.
|
| >Always keep interviewing
|
| Man that sounds like a full time job on its own...
| magicstefanos wrote:
| What I've learned is that, for employees, job security is never
| real. There is only silent risk. You might get lucky and go
| through an entire career never losing Russian roulette...but
| you're just lucky.
|
| But I've also learned that there is no security of any kind in
| life. People who've lived nothing but peaceful lives will never
| understand, and they'll even lecture you about "making your own
| luck," when they should be thanking God for their good fortune.
| Twizzlewhisker wrote:
| I was 15 years in at one company and got an out of the blue mass
| firing notice over zoom one day. A significant number of
| developers with over 10 years at the company were let go. It was
| devastating to think back over the times I decided to work late
| versus spend those hours with my kids and wife, the times I was
| at home but decided to "check in" on things at work, and the fact
| that I had fused my work identity into my personal identity.
|
| I landed a gig at another well known national newspaper and hated
| every second of that dysfunctional team. I did fully separate my
| personal life and my work life. I basically punched the clock and
| worked my 40. Every six weeks or so I had to pull an on-call
| shift, but the monitoring setup was almost nonexistent so it was
| cake. I spent just over three years there before they had a
| significant round of mass firings. However, I did not keep up
| with interviews and previous relationships made with recruiters
| during my last round of looking for a gig.
|
| I came pretty close to flat broke in the four months it took to
| land another job as I had one kid moving to college and another
| out of school living at home. I'm still at this current gig, and
| I honestly couldn't care less about it. We are doing so cool
| stuff, but every Monday I clock in with the expectation of having
| a mass firing email when I log in. I have kept in contact with
| all recruiters that were helpful in this last round and I keep
| applying and interviewing for jobs. I am a terrible interview,
| but I'm amazed at how well I do when I am interviewing while
| having a current job. I'm also applying for a wider-range of jobs
| that I don't quite have the skill sets for and those interviews
| go well too.
|
| If you are just starting out and think you landed the job you
| will retire from, I wish you well and hope that works out for
| you, seriously. It would also be a wise move to prepare for the
| unexpected by making relationships with recruiters and HR
| employees at other companies. Don't ever think you are not
| replaceable. After the first mass firing, our positions were
| posted to be filled only from Mexico. The second mass firing was
| to be filled by Brazil.
|
| You owe no allegiance to the company you work for. Do they
| randomly gift you with extra weekly paychecks for 10 hours of
| work you did not do? Why gift them with 10 hours of work they
| don't pay you for?
| jll29 wrote:
| It's important to take pride in one's work, but don't forget one
| second that the relationship is asymmetric; if you choose to be
| loyal, the company employing you won't be loyal back.
|
| The worst thing you can do is to feel personally and emotionally
| vested in the relationship, and then be disappointed that
| "despite" you going full in and giving everything, going above
| and beyond the expectations, it still affects you.
|
| As the OP correctly states, the decisions are made by others, and
| they may not know you. But while some people involved may know
| and value you (e.g. your direct line manager), they will not
| stand up and fight for you in 99% of cases, because they don't
| have much power, and they would like to keep their own job.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| One warning sign not listed, if your company has lots of offices
| around the world and leadership visit your office when they never
| do before. They're talking about changes within that office which
| is generally the structure of the office.
| the_af wrote:
| > _However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what
| you do doesn't matter. In most cases, the decision is made by
| people who don't even know you._
|
| I think this is a key observation. I of course cannot speak for
| every case, but in the couple of layoff rounds I've been witness
| to, for unrelated companies, layoffs are done without relation to
| individual skills or contribution.
|
| Or rather: they may _start_ with low performers, but these aren
| 't enough, and then the next people that get axed are good
| performers (sometimes brilliant in my experience) for areas that
| the execs deemed not important enough for the company. Key words
| "not important enough", not _unimportant_. They are also done by
| people who don 't know the team or its members, resulting in
| firing people who were later found to be essential, and their
| manager cannot speak for them because the manager was also laid
| off.
|
| In the end, remember this when judging your "loyalty" to a
| company.
| joshstrange wrote:
| In response to the suggestions at the end:
|
| >> Stick to your contract hours. If your contract says 40 hours,
| work 40 hours--no more, no less. Protect your personal time and
| well-being.
|
| 100% agree, a company is (almost) never going to say "that's
| enough, you shouldn't work so much". They will say they only want
| you to work XX hours but they aren't going to chide you for going
| over.
|
| >> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives. Many companies
| encourage impactful work to earn promotions, but instead of
| chasing internal advancements, focus on switching companies to
| achieve your next career step.
|
| Ehh, I mean don't kill yourself for a company that doesn't care
| but the idea of jumping companies every few years is not
| appealing. You might make more money but I kind of doubt you'll
| be happier, to each their own.
|
| >> Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I've
| seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in
| the company. Instead, continuously explore opportunities so that
| if a layoff happens, you already have other options lined up.
|
| Gross. Interviewing sucks and the idea of trying to onboard at a
| new company while interviewing sounds horrible.
|
| >> Leverage external offers for salary growth. Companies often
| resist giving substantial raises to existing employees but pay
| top dollar for new hires. Regularly interview elsewhere, and if
| you get an offer with a 20% or higher salary increase, consider
| taking it. Many people have seen their compensation triple or
| quadruple this way in just a few years.
|
| You can do this 1, maybe 2 times at a company before you paint a
| target on your back. This will work in the short term but not in
| the long term (At a single company)
|
| >> Don't overthink your resume. Worrying about short experiences
| on your CV isn't worth it. You can always tailor your resume--
| leave out brief roles, or consolidate short-term jobs as
| freelance experience. Ultimately, your resume is just a starting
| point; your skills will be assessed during the interview process.
|
| Completely agree, your resume is not your record, it's not
| "official", you tailor to the job you want. Leave off
| technologies you don't want to work with, leave off jobs that
| aren't the type of thing you want to do, etc.
| RIMR wrote:
| I am in the middle of being laid off right now, and might as well
| share some of the details, because my situation is a bit weird.
|
| My team of 12 was reduced by half in November. They told us that
| 6 would stay and 6 would go. I was told I was staying, and that
| my position was "unaffected", but I was also told that I was
| going to have an end date in either February or March, which to
| me sounds like my position is pretty well affected...
|
| They have refused to give any of us an official end date, or
| discuss our severance terms in writing. Right now, I have been
| assured that my last day will be 2/28 and that I'll get 2 months
| if severance, but they could change their mind if they wanted to
| since they won't commit. I have voiced that this keeps me from
| effectively planning my next career move. What if I'm offered a
| job starting in March, and my current employer decides to they
| want to keep me until April? I'd be forced to choose between
| receiving a severance vs. accepting the new job.
|
| All the while, they have us training our replacements in India,
| as if we have the motivation to do anything that benefits the
| company right now. Most of us are only cooperating at all because
| we want out in March and don't want to be dragged along for
| months while they try to keep the product afloat.
|
| And the reason they aren't terminating our entire department and
| product is because they want to maintain the few million dollars
| in ARR they get from our customers, even though that ARR is
| 1/10,000 of the company's total revenue.
|
| And they won't keep that ARR because they're getting rid of the
| entire customer success team and transferring the responsibility
| to a call center in India that is demanding to only work on India
| time (ending business hour product support entirely for our
| predominantly North American customers). They also have zero
| experience with the kind of product we make, and have no chance
| of successfully addressing the kind of work they're going to be
| expected to do for our customers.
|
| All because the people who made these decisions have absolutely
| no clue what anyone in our org does. We really are just lines in
| an Excel sheet. We were a startup a few years ago that this much
| larger company purchased because they wanted to use our solution
| massively at scale inside of the company. Revenue wasn't even how
| we were supposed to be measured, and they're going to actively
| destroy the entire product that they spent so much time and
| energy implementing across the business.
| talkingtab wrote:
| People have a concept of corporate jobs that is just plain wrong.
| You are nothing but slave labor. You are treated well only as
| long as you are needed. But when that is not true, you will be
| treated for what you are.
|
| You might think this is an anti-corporation view. But the truth
| is that corporation have become anti-people. Is Purdue Pharma the
| friend of the people they addicted to ? Is Starbucks the friend
| of the baristas they squeeze to make a profit?
|
| Some of the "best", as in wealthiest corporations, treat people
| with contempt. Here's looking at you apple, amazon, google,
| facebook and microsoft.
|
| Since Citizens United vs FEC these companies now "lobby" to get
| what they want and have corrupted what should be _our_ democracy
| into a corpocracy. Union busting Amazon controls one of the major
| sources of information in the US. How much does microsoft owe in
| taxes now? How much money is off shore?
|
| Corporations are an outdated, ineffective form of economic
| collaboration. They are designed to make profit at any cost to
| customers and employees. Colonialism anyone? And boy, are they
| stupid. Greedy, ruthless, but stupid.
|
| Supposedly there are a bunch of technically skilled folks here on
| HN. Maybe they should start thinking about alternatives to
| corporation style jobs.
| ergocoder wrote:
| I know what you mean, but a 500K software engineering job
| doesn't seem to match what you say...
| dumbledoren wrote:
| Doesnt it? It requires a $180,000~ minimum to get by as a
| family of 4 including 2 kids in San Francisco according to
| statistics. Before taxes and unexpected expenses and other
| things. And VERY few people get that $500k. The rest get
| shafted by the system like others.
| closeparen wrote:
| The zero-sum competition for housing absorbs any wage level
| you throw at it. If you can fault the employer for
| something in this scenario, it is for locating the role in
| the Bay Area. Which they would tell you is a concession to
| the existing talent pool.
| BizarreByte wrote:
| 500k/y jobs are not common and as such the vast majority of
| us are not making that much.
| seneca wrote:
| > You are nothing but slave labor
|
| This is an absurd and out of touch thing to say to a crowd
| mostly made up of highly paid engineers.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| This is a very negative to look at employment in general:
|
| Whatever the skill - pushing rocks up a hill or pushing code
| into a repo - someone with power over you is taking half your
| waking day to generate disproportionate compensation.
|
| I personally see the alternative viewpoint which is I am able
| to provide for my entire family a life of non-work because I
| sacrifice 50% of what would be idle time without them.
|
| Ultimately you need something to do during your waking hours.
| I give 50% to the company and 50% to my family.
| hattmall wrote:
| Historically the slaves of the ultrawealthy often lived much
| better lives than common free people.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I like how Richard Branson does things at Virgin. I have tried
| to adopt similar practices in mine. Basically we do our best to
| move you around to somewhere else, but you are never fired. It
| works really well for us.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I think the article, although well built and clearly criticising
| crucial points in the modern work structure, fails to see the
| fundamental issue that is at the core of these layoffs.
|
| In fact, the recommendation for those who are still employed is
| incomplete and therefore doubles down on the issue without
| realising it.
|
| While everything in the article is true, that you shouldn't
| romanticise your job, focussing on the job description only, only
| ever working the amount required and making lean resumes will
| reaffirm the status quo and aggravate the situation long term.
|
| It does this because it doubles down on what fractured the
| working landscape to begin with, which is individuality,
| competitiveness and alienation.
|
| You can't treat an alienating job as if it was already the job
| you dream of. This is wishful thinking. But going full hostile to
| your job won't make your situation any better.
|
| Here's what I suggest instead.
|
| Do everything the article says if you identified your work
| environment in the descriptions in the article.
|
| At the same time do a honest and deep evaluation of your values
| and what you aim to be in 5, 10 years time. Thinking long term
| will have first the effect of putting the immediate problems into
| perspective and will highlight what's missing in your career
| today in order to get the job you'd want for you.
|
| Invest in your portfolio. Keep doing interviews. Don't compromise
| on deliverable quality, because if you go down the road of
| actively crippling your performance, you will eventually become
| the bad developer you are allowing yourself to be just to get
| back at the current company that doesn't value you.
|
| Remember, you don't get a dream job and then you become the great
| developer you think you should be. It's unfair, but the reality
| is you first become the great professional you want to be and
| then you get the dream job you want, if you are lucky.
|
| It's never guaranteed. It's always a game of probability. The
| only constant and the only thing you can control is you and your
| relationship with your work as an ever flowing, ever changing
| process.
| snozolli wrote:
| _Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives._
|
| It's been my experience that accepting whatever dumb challenge
| management presents is how you get kept on. The advice that "your
| job is to make your manager look good to his manager" rings true
| to me. I would add that boosting your manager's ego goes pretty
| far, too. I find both activities detestable, but necessary in
| corporate life.
|
| _Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen
| is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the
| company._
|
| I've never understood how people can muster the energy for this.
| I'm sure it's a great idea, but I would burn out immediately.
| sakex wrote:
| I was laid off from Google in January last year alongside 150
| people in my extended team. I managed to find a different team in
| Gemini, so now I'm part of Deepmind. I have very conflicting
| feelings because on one hand I really enjoy the work, the team,
| and the absolute genius of people I get to talk to; but on the
| other hand, I have some resentment for being so inhumanely laid
| off, I am sad for the people in my team who were not as lucky as
| me, and I know it can happen again any time.
| donatj wrote:
| My company brought on consultants. They were having us do the
| absolute strangest things. Pointless meetings. Duplicating
| infrastructure. Documenting processes so deeply entrenched in
| what we did they'd never be forgotten. Then they hired another
| small team that did basically the same things we did on a much
| smaller scale.
|
| Then my department got sold to another company, and it all made
| sense.
|
| Looking back it's pretty obvious that they were bifurcating while
| duplicating important infrastructure. At the time going through
| it though I just thought the consultants were total morons, not
| understanding the business and that we'd be doing twice the work
| by having two of everything.
|
| They sold it to us while it was happening that we were the
| domestic team and they were the "global" team, and we bought it
| as a concept, but we all thought it was a stupid distraction. We
| were absolutely certain we'd be merging our departments within a
| couple years.
|
| Finding out that they had been actively lying to us about what
| was going on for almost a year really... Changed how I thought
| about companies. They had been lying to my face every single day
| for a very long time, that really violated my trust.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The biggest indicator of layoff is when sales are consistently
| bad. You should always get to know your sales teams. They are the
| canary in your coal mine.
| ideashower wrote:
| I was laid off from my first engineering role at the age of 22
| and it broke me. Poor leadership, and infighting between me and
| my supervisor who couldn't reasonably manage me and support a new
| engineer (he monitored my git commit history to see if I was
| "working," leading me to make smaller and more frequent commits
| to inflate my work). He clearly was a legacy engineer that didn't
| code much anymore (I had to teach him how to use Git) and due to
| his age, was promoted to management. I was mid restructuring the
| UI on their shitty product and dated codebase when I got the
| news. Up until that point I had been pretty excited for what was
| supposed to be my first engineering gig.
|
| My whole view changed on work and tech companies in a second.
| libpcap wrote:
| It's important to note that not all organizations operate in this
| manner. My own experience with a layoff last year included a two-
| month notice period and a severance package equivalent to nearly
| a year's salary. During my notice period, our manager encouraged
| everyone to prioritize their job search.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| > Always keep interviewing
|
| Isn't it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with all
| the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that
| something is off? Any seasoned manager will see right through it,
| but would never call it out directly to you.
|
| Then, let's say you get an offer, do you say you'll only sign if
| you're laid off? It's expected you sign the offer and join
| reasonably soon. I've seen offers rescinded after ridiculous
| start date doubling down by candidates. You will be actively
| shooting yourself in the foot if you get an offer and don't take
| it, because you just wasted many hours of their time, and they
| may remember that if you apply again...
|
| Outside of all that... where do you even find the time to ALWAYS
| be interviewing?! I put (exactly) 100% into my current job, so
| always interviewing means I have much less free time. It
| guarantees I am always stressed, and being stressed ruins my
| life. I like the work I do, but find it incredibly exhausting and
| dehumanizing after long stretches. Five 8 hour days is enough of
| a long stretch to make me feel I am wasting my life, I can't even
| imagine how always interviewing would ruin me...
|
| The better advice in the same light is to always be networking--
| or at least making sure you HAVE a network. Referrals are your
| only weapon against the flood of trash applications.
|
| So yes, yes, I get that I am a row in a database, came to terms
| with that a long time ago-- this is the silly game we play for
| money. Until society collapses, and we miraculously reform it to
| something better, this silly game we will continue to play. I
| just want to scrape joy out of as much of that time as I can.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _Isn't it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with
| all the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that
| something is off?_
|
| Working and interviewing remotely, it's definitely easy to work
| and interview at the same time. No one thinks twice is
| occasionally it takes an hour to respond to a message.
|
| Heck even when I am not interviewing I close my Slack and email
| for blocks at a time to do "deep work"
| notyourwork wrote:
| If a full time job makes you feel like you're wasting your
| life, you may never find happiness or solace in life without a
| winning lottery ticket.
| froggertoaster wrote:
| Full disclosure, I've never been laid off.
|
| OP sounds very bitter and - frankly - melodramatic. Getting laid
| off is terrible, but this person makes it sounds like they'll
| never heal/never be the same/all companies suck/etc. when none of
| those things are true. There is an implied business relationship
| with an employer that can end anytime, and that's expected
| because it's a two-way street.
|
| I agree with the top commenter - seanc - when he says:
|
| > Carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
| Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers
| and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb
| business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that
| doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and
| then.
|
| Finally, income diversification pays huge dividends. I had a
| startup job where suddenly I found myself with a $65k/year pay
| cut one week. I had side work from folks who were asking me for
| more anyways so I quit that same week on Friday. Now I employ 10
| people and pull in nearly a million a year. Really makes the
| emotional part of having lost income that week completely
| meaningless in the long run.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a
| developer felt like an incredibly safe job.
|
| I'm in the US.
|
| I'm mid career, entered the job market 22 years ago, and have
| another ~22 years before I retire.
|
| Layoffs were very common in the 1990s when I was teenager. In the
| US, if you think layoffs are a "new thing," you're very naive.
| (Remember, the author is from Germany.)
|
| One thing I did very early in my career was learn enough about
| business to know that businesses, markets, and products don't
| last forever. Most don't even last a whole career. Sticking in a
| job long enough to get laid off with a severance is a good thing:
| You don't get money when you leave a job voluntarily.
|
| (Granted, there are good reasons to leave before the layoff, but
| keep in mind that if you loose out on a severance, you've left
| money on the table, especially if you can get a job before the
| severance runs out.)
| herval wrote:
| The last 2 years fundamentally changed how a lot of people
| perceive work. I've witnessed layoffs in the past, but they
| didn't seem to hit as many people as hard as they did this time.
|
| That said - having seen how layoffs are organized from the inside
| (multiple times), I can _guarantee_ that the list of suggestions
| on this post ("Suggestions for Those Who Haven't Been Laid Off
| (Yet)" - particularly the first 2 points) are the best way to get
| included on the layoff sheet, in almost any organization. They
| might be good ideas for mental health reasons, but definitely an
| easy "name on the list" if you're perceived as "just doing the
| minimum" (I know that doesn't sound fair, but that's how boards
| think).
| lizknope wrote:
| > The Broken Trust of Modern Work
|
| > Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a
| developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions,
| the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the
| company was financially stable, your job was secure.
|
| > But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-
| breaking financial results.
|
| From the author's website:
|
| > I've been working as a Software Developer since 2016
|
| I've been in the tech industry almost 30 years. I saw the dot com
| boom and the collapse. Hiring like crazy in the late 1990's with
| companies have having signs "WE ARE HIRING!" outside their
| parking lot where you could just stop on your lunch break and
| have a new job by the end of the day.
|
| I've worked at companies posting big profits but still had
| layoffs to underperforming groups. When your profit margin is 10%
| but another group is 40% they will sell off or shut down the
| lower margin groups. Sometimes there are offers for internal
| transfers but it depends on the skill set.
|
| After the dot com collapse I've never felt any trust or loyalty
| to my company. I have felt a huge amount of trust and loyalty to
| my coworkers. I still work hard. It can still be fun. But if
| someone needs a job it is great to have a wide network of former
| coworkers.
|
| I've worked at 8 companies and only at the first 3 did I just
| blindly apply. The other 5 were former coworkers who recruited me
| to join. Then I do the same for them.
|
| I've worked with some people for 15 years at 4 different
| companies sometimes with gaps of 3-4 years in between but we meet
| for lunch once or twice a month and keep in touch.
| devmor wrote:
| I've been laid off many times, for many reasons (mostly startup
| financial issues), but what I've taken away from it a mantra
| that's a bit different.
|
| I need mutual respect. I want to believe in whatever the company
| is doing and enjoy my work there. At the same time, I want the
| company to respect my personal time and further my career growth.
| This enables me to give my best effort. I have no delusions about
| the workforce - I am a cog in the machine as we all are, but I
| will at least be a well greased cog.
|
| When it's all said and done, I would like to leave a company
| feeling good about my time spent there, and if I am happy with
| how I am treated and the work I do from the start to the end,
| then however it ends, I feel good about it.
| dandare wrote:
| I keep saying this: A company is a legal person, and you should
| not try to be loyal to a legal person because legal person can
| not be loyal to you,
|
| You can, however, be loyal to your boss, and your boss can be
| loyal to you, as long as this does not conflicts with his duties
| to the company.
| almost_usual wrote:
| Always prioritize physical and mental health over work. Only go
| above and beyond for your employer after you've done so for
| yourself.
| jwmoz wrote:
| A job is a means to an end.
| kazinator wrote:
| LinkedIn bellyaching is hitting HackerNews now, good grief.
| terhechte wrote:
| I used to work together with Mert at the same company but choose
| to leave on my own 2 years prior to his layoffs because of
| similar issues as the one pointed out in this post. Most notably,
| the lack of vision and the excel table. The company had been
| dragged down by unbelievably incompetent leadership for some
| time. You could tell by the composition of teams that employees
| were not considered based on their qualifications but based on a
| moving-resources-around-in-an-excel-table strategy. There were
| also no attempts to gain knowledge from engineers or consider
| their feedback on decisions. This isn't ultimately something
| every company needs (bottom up is a double edged sword) but mixed
| with incompetent management it is a fastlane into chaos.
| atmb4u wrote:
| This article is wrong in so many ways and not generalizable. I
| can see on bigger companies, you may be an excel sheet row. But,
| the reason why someone would get laid-off is the exact opposite
| IMO - not adding value. But in a smaller early stage company, you
| are responsible for team's success or failure and you are the
| only reason why someone are getting laid-off.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| The author seems to have just discovered that capitalism does not
| have loyalty to anyone other than the shareholders. And those
| shareholders do not care whether you have contributed to their
| profits much more than anyone in the recent past - if it looks
| like they can make more profit that quarter by laying you off,
| they do it.
|
| Maybe we should start calling this the "ensh _ttification " of
| work? As capitalism is ensh_ttifying everything, it was
| unimaginable that work would not get affected...
| mobilene wrote:
| I've been laid off a few times in my 35-year career. Being laid
| off felt like a betrayal to me for a long time. But I was
| operating under a false model: that because I worked hard and did
| good work, that the company would value me and take care of me.
|
| I also used to shake my fist at the bad outcomes of stupid
| decisions made by people above me.
|
| It took me this long to realize that this is all a game of
| chance. Me choosing a company to work for is me playing the odds.
| The decisions my superiors make are bets, too. And sometimes,
| even good bets don't work out.
|
| It's still worth it to work hard and deliver what your management
| wants in spades. I've been brought along to any number of new
| employment opportunities because I'm remembered well for being a
| person who did those things.
|
| I've come to see my career as a series of stops, and my current
| stop is just what I'm doing right now.
| gmd63 wrote:
| From my stint at a big corporation, the person I knew most
| closely who "succeeded" the most (for themselves, not for the
| company) would routinely interview for competitive offers and
| threaten to leave. I saw on a few occasions this same person lie
| in meetings to cover their ass to people who were less technical.
| I know of one person who has somehow managed to do the bare
| minimum at two full time remote jobs simultaneously.
|
| To everyone reading the comments that describe corporations as
| the ones who treat their employees with contempt, it's sadly a
| two way street. It comes down to shitty people polluting
| expectations at all levels of society, and people dialing back
| their expectations accordingly.
|
| With all the Luigi talk in the air, it's important to remember
| this goes for insurance companies as well. Insurance fraud is a
| huge drain on the industry and it's folks of all levels of wealth
| committing it. It's a part of the reason why insurers squeeze
| harder to keep the profits flowing. That's obviously no excuse
| for delay/deny/depose tactics--I'm just saying that in an
| environment of fraudsters who add friction to a company that does
| business honestly, you will find that the cheaters and bad actors
| will bubble to the top, more so than usual.
| AutistiCoder wrote:
| Hell, searching for my first job changed how _I_ perceive work.
|
| The job market as it is is tough.
|
| Add autism & ADHD to the mix and it gets tougher.
|
| I decided to give as much of a shit about the corporate world as
| it does to me - which is to say, I stopped searching altogether.
| I decided I'd rather be unemployed.
| gsck wrote:
| Thats the go getter attitude companies are looking for!
|
| Something to hard? Give up. That's sure to get you hired
| Muromec wrote:
| You can still steal the proverbal catalystic convertor even
| if its not your employer's truck.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I mean...
|
| Strategy not yielding results as expected? Better change it
| up!
|
| Honestly, good for them.
| AutistiCoder wrote:
| I didn't give up.
|
| I pivoted to content creation.
| silexia wrote:
| Modern finance is the true villain; it removes businesses from
| the hands of the real founders who understand it and puts it in
| the hands of clueless MBAs.
| throw01272025 wrote:
| When I read the title, I suspected it might be about Shopify.
| Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed. The company's
| handling of layoffs left a sour taste in my mouth.
|
| The way Shopify dealt with its staff departures was unacceptable.
| The lack of transparency and communication during this period not
| only eroded trust among employees but also created an atmosphere
| of fear and paranoia. The constant silent firings, combined with
| the CEO's outbursts during town halls, have severely damaged the
| company's reputation.
|
| I've seen a similar situation play out in my own experience when
| new management was brought in. My team members were suddenly
| being threatened with being put on notice, leading to a nasty
| shift in morale and productivity.
|
| It's worth noting that Shopify's actions aren't isolated to large
| corporations like themselves. Unfortunately, this type of
| cultural shift has become all too common in many industries and
| companies. Nonetheless, this specific incident left a lasting
| impact on me, and I actively discourage any who asks me about
| working at Shopify - something I haven't done for any other
| company I've left _or_ been let go from.
| darafsheh wrote:
| This hit home for me, thank you for sharing. I was a bit
| surprised that you didn't mention or explore a path outside of
| employment, rather chose the content path of receiving paychecks
| and wasting time not being very motivated to push yourself. Don't
| give up on your potential!
| asoneth wrote:
| As heartbreaking as they are for those affected, layoffs provide
| incredibly useful information for prospective employees.
|
| For example, was it a small number of people who were laid off
| with decent severance, or was it a huge mass of people let go
| unceremoniously with minimum severance? And were the layoffs due
| to a sustained period of unprofitability or did they occur during
| periods of profitability? In the former case why wasn't the
| business doing well and has that fundamentally changed? In the
| latter case, did they first attempt to reallocate people to more
| productive areas?
|
| > Everything I've shared reflects the current state of the tech
| industry. It might differ at very small companies, but once you
| work at a company with more than 100 employees, you'll likely
| encounter many of the same patterns I've described.
|
| Many tech companies have never needed to resort to layoffs -- not
| just small companies but medium-sized and/or privately held
| companies. Personally I consider layoffs of any sort to be a
| major red flag. It means company management makes poor business
| or organizational decisions and is willing to tank morale and
| lose their best people to please shareholders. It means that
| you're going to be a line in a spreadsheet that can be spun up
| and down as necessary.
|
| Personally I'd steer clear, but if you choose to enter into a
| relationship with such a company you should appropriately
| discount any salary they offer to factor in that risk.
| pards wrote:
| > they only do what's strictly required to avoid a performance
| improvement plan. No one goes above and beyond anymore; no one
| takes initiative to improve things. Why? Because it doesn't
| matter.
|
| I see this at large Canadian financial institutions, too, but for
| the opposite reasons - employees recognize that it's really
| difficult to fire people based on performance. It's so hard, in
| fact, that it's easier to talk them up and get them hired
| internally by another team and make it someone else's problem.
| Muromec wrote:
| You can strike the word Canadian out of it just fine. And
| anyway, it's not like firing a person is any different -- they
| just become a problem of somebody else.
| josefrichter wrote:
| I once contracted for a company that laid off 6 of my bosses in 7
| months. The one who hired me was fired 2 days after I started. In
| the end, they didn't extend my contract, basically because nobody
| knew anymore where I belonged in the company structure, who do I
| report to, and who should actually extend my contract :-)
| jstummbillig wrote:
| As an employer, I remain confused about the common notion that
| being an employee is somehow safer than owning a business.
|
| The opposite is true.
|
| First, I don't have need unemployment insurance. You are my
| unemployment insurance. I am hedging against your mistakes, as
| well as mine.
|
| Second, I assess the situation to the best of my abilities, but
| also: How I see fit. As an employee, on the other hand, not being
| able to decide might as well feel like getting struck by
| lightning. (Here I would only add that as an employer it also
| feels like that if people fire _you_ -- as in: they quit -- for
| any reason. It 's just that you get more chances to practice it.)
|
| Reconsidering the supposed safety aspect of an employment (since
| it's such a sticky idea) is certainly one thing I hope we would
| do. Unfortunately, when trying to discuss the issue with
| employees (not necessarily those who work for me), they mostly
| seem to rather not want to think about it.
|
| Other thoughts. Why I run a company: It's certainly not money. I
| would even argue I (and most people I know running SMBs)
| relatively care a lot less about job money than the average
| employee does. I do it because would hate to work on something I
| think is bad and where attention is not spent, where it should be
| (so exactly what a lot of employees complain about in their
| company).
|
| Best I can tell, a _good_ reason to work for a company is getting
| to work on stuff that excited you and that you could not do
| better on your own. But I think more people should consider doing
| their own things more often! I would welcome more meta-
| competition in organizing work in a better way.
|
| Points of disagreement with the post:
|
| - People will miss things and systems fail, but I can't think of
| any reason why a CEO would not want to be able to spot the people
| who a) are not assholes and b) gel really well with the company.
| I don't want anyone to work overtime for me, but the above will
| still hold true. A company is complicated, and you being a
| considerate human being makes everything so much better.
|
| - Yes, Excel is how you work with numbers, also those pertaining
| to human beings. That's just the responsible way to organize
| information about things. But if you think that robs me of my
| ability to think about or care for human beings, I am mostly
| confused. Can you not think of humans when you write code,
| because it's digital characters on a screen? Still, it's of note
| that even highly analytical people find something dehumanizing in
| that, when it pertains to themselves.
| sghiassy wrote:
| Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign
| soldiers. Napoleon's reply was that it's simple: soldiers are
| either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic.
|
| * The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what
| to do and can rally the troops to do it.
|
| * The smart and lazy I make generals. They also know what to do,
| but they're not going to waste energy doing what doesn't need to
| be done.
|
| * The dumb and lazy I make foot soldiers.
|
| The takeaway, is that only after you lose your shiny glasses are
| you ready to take on larger responsibilities.
|
| Don't become jaded. Don't carry around resentment - just get on
| with it - and you'll Very much be on your way to career
| advancement
| redlock wrote:
| What did he do with the dumb and energetic?
| wsgeorge wrote:
| My guess, frontlines.
| lenocinor wrote:
| You get rid of them:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
| incognito124 wrote:
| "I shot them", he said.
| FaceValuable wrote:
| Did he say anything about the dumb and energetic?
| incognito124 wrote:
| "I shot them", he said.
| kbr- wrote:
| To the author, if you're reading this:
|
| If you were on such good terms with VP of Eng and C-levels, why
| didn't you reach out to them and ask what's going on? They could
| interfere and prevent your layoff.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| There was a time when the word "layoff" referred to a TEMPORARY
| separation due to a lack of demand with the understanding that
| when activity picked back up you'd be recalled back to work. This
| was particularly common in the automotive sector and really
| across manufacturing. These were cyclical industries and while
| employers couldn't afford to pay idle workers during periods of
| low economic demand, they also couldn't afford to lose the
| skillsets. Oftentimes unions would provide partial compensation
| to these workers until they were recalled.
|
| Somewhere around the mid 1990s, "layoff" became just a euphemism
| for permanent reductions in force/downsizing.
| cj wrote:
| I think the word you're looking for is furlough.
| rsanek wrote:
| i was surprised when I looked it up too but it looks like
| this was true of layoffs as well
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Nope. Layoffs were always understood to be temporary, up
| through some point in the 1990s. Furloughs were much shorter
| in duration, typically days or weeks, and in some cases were
| partial (one or two days a week).
| crhulls wrote:
| I'm the cofounder of Life360, a company I've grown from seed to
| IPO, now with about 600 employees. This whole issue can be
| addressed by embracing a straightforward social contract,
| something I share openly with everyone I hire:
|
| No promises of lifetime employment. I'm focused on the long-term
| health of the company, and our needs will inevitably change. If
| we continue to grow, it's almost guaranteed that not everyone
| will be the right fit at every stage.
|
| No expectation of loyalty. The flip side is that we aim to
| attract ambitious, hungry people, which means we need to provide
| real opportunities for career advancement. If we can't, I
| understand you'll move on.
|
| If we let someone go after a single bad quarter, that's on us for
| being shortsighted. We know people have ups and downs, and we
| don't want to be overly sentimental, but we also don't want to
| act rashly. On the other hand, if someone's job-hopping every
| year, that's usually a sign of short-term thinking. From
| 2014-2021, job-hopping didn't matter much. Now, it's becoming
| clear that those signals are important again.
|
| At the end of the day, it's not about judgment--no good/bad or
| right/wrong here (aside from obvious dealbreakers like
| dishonesty). It's just adults making tradeoffs.
|
| That said, I've seen how some companies shy away from being
| upfront about this, which leads to cynicism. We've had moments
| like that too--at some point, we started calling ourselves "a
| family." I shut that down fast. It wasn't popular, but it helped
| clarify our stance. You know what you're signing up for with us.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| I'm convinced layoffs are a persistent management memetic where
| we've convinced ourselves these are necessary, good, and
| magically creates efficiencies.
|
| In reality it's a desperate shotgunning your org chart since
| you've apparently no better way to figure out what you need or
| don't. It's incredibly destabilizing and demotivating and creates
| a culture as seen in this post where you no longer have workers
| that feel aligned with the success of the company (because you're
| telling them they aren't). It should be reserved for absolutely
| existential moments in the company, not when you're seeing record
| profitability.
| meganeko4545 wrote:
| The author was young and learned the hard way. There is no single
| country on Earth that is integrated in the ultra-financiarized
| western economic sphere that is not potentially affected. It is
| the end of stable jobs and pretty much the end of all economy
| altogether, except for the crony capitalists that leech off the
| printer. Every company is owned by Blackrock. They take major
| shortsighted decissions to the tune of the imaginary casinos
| ("investors", or "the market") or fund scorings. Productive
| activity no longer matters. Experienced people no longer matter.
| The game is a different one and you are not even a player.
| matrix87 wrote:
| Layoffs are just a symptom. Overhiring and easy money are the
| cause. Companies aren't there to "take care of you", they aren't
| welfare departments
|
| They hired a bunch of people who took the money for granted, and
| at some point that's no longer going to sustain itself
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you
| do doesn't matter. "
|
| And that is exactly how corporate America works. Shareholder
| value before everything. The billionaire keep the stock price up
| not for the value, but for their simple greed. F** you and your
| self-worth.
|
| RIF. Reduction in force. Spend every end of week, on the clock
| making three envelopes: your resume, an envelope which says
| 'blame everything on the previous guy' and the last envelope?
| 'make three envelopes'
| yborg wrote:
| At any large commercial organization, you either represent
| capital or you do not. If you are not part of the ownership
| class, you are entirely disposable - whether or not you are in
| actuality critical to the business functioning. There are many
| situations in which the financial incentives of ownership are
| directly opposed to those of the hired help. Took me a long time
| to realize this because most people aren't sociopaths, while
| corporate management and certainly the super wealthy have a
| significant proportion.
| spandrew wrote:
| I have a friend who went into full-on overemployment mode during
| the pandemic and never stopped once RTO became a thing. Somehow
| he juggled 2, and sometimes 3, jobs at one time. Of course he was
| staving off a performance-improvement-plan (pip) at one of his
| jobs at all times.
|
| He didn't care about work. It was all about money. That worked
| for him short-term, but longer term Jack became a very VERY dull
| boy.
| indymike wrote:
| I've never been laid off, but once was part of a company that
| went bankrupt and was one of the last people to leave the payroll
| (which is like being laid off, but where your employer is dead so
| at least you can console yourself with being the guy turning off
| the lights)... That said I did a lot of laying off for that
| company. Almost everyone ended up much better off after a few
| weeks or a month or so of searching. People would rightfully
| worry about if their actions caused it or why me instead of ___.
| The truth was that it was really about spreadsheets.
|
| For me, I ended up getting a much better job that paid 2x what I
| made at the bankrupt company. But the feelings of having your
| livelihood rug-pulled are really difficult.
| inerte wrote:
| Once I read May 4th and 2 emails, I knew it was Shopify. I was
| also affected.
|
| My view of why it happened is a bit different than the author,
| but my conclusion is wildly different. I've been on tech for
| almost 20 years, 11 of them in the US.
|
| On average, I do see people that work hard and on important
| things getting recognized and promoted. I don't have this bleak
| view that nobody should do anything, it's all random, nothing
| matters.
|
| I do agree at the end of the day we're just numbers on a
| spreadsheet for large companies. Most of the time it's not
| personal, and Shopify probably decided having engineers in
| Germany wasn't worth, no matter how good they were (and I
| personally knew a handful that were really, really good, live
| there, and lost their job).
|
| Those things aren't contradictory. You can work hard and be
| promoted and get more recognition, and you still can be cut due
| to decisions completely out of your control. The opposite is also
| true. Average people get lucky to be on the right project at the
| right time, sometimes multiple projects in a row. Peter principle
| and all.
|
| But on average, companies to reward the people that bring value
| to the company (and its owners)
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Layoff culture will create companies full of Dyatlovs from
| Chernobyl, covering their ass, not that brave, not that
| innovative. Focused on maybe a promotion or surviving the next
| round of firings. It's sad to see the tech industry self-sabotage
| this way.
| rmk wrote:
| It feels like a lot of people who joined the workforce after
| 2008-2010 are experiencing their first "tough times". It's
| natural to respond in this manner. But there is an important
| caveat: one must seek out good work and deliver in order to stay
| employable, and have access to good opportunities. Or, they must
| develop a good network and essentially hop from one job to
| another with the exact same set of people (this is much more
| common than you'd think). For the former, you still need to show
| up and go above and beyond every once in a while, so getting
| excited about work is still a prerequisite.
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| >> ...to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
|
| TL;DR it won't make you feel better but you're not a row in a
| spreadsheet; you're a fungible generic resource.
|
| <For all but the smallest organizations>
|
| At a certain level and/or for specific events, executive
| leadership is playing checkers not chess. You see this in overall
| staffing, budgets and lay-offs. Your executive is tasked with
| very excel-like tasks, such as "cut n people" or "trim your
| budget xx%". They then get political and attack specific
| initiatives or teams, or peanut-butter it across everyone. By
| definition they need to work at a generic level to "scale". When
| it gets to selecting the actual people, it's either done by the
| people who DO know individuals but you might not have credibility
| and a good reputation (or worse, they actively target you), or at
| an even less related metric, like a calc that provides the
| perception of "fairness" (true story: I saw HR try and calc how
| much "experience" we could get for each dollar of salary). IME
| only if it's a very small layoff (~ < 10-15%) and selected by the
| front-line manager do you see the high performers saved, and it's
| still political.
|
| Context: I report to the CTO but still have lots of direct
| interaction with ICs. I struggle to meld these worlds at the
| intersection almost daily. I've been involved it doing the lay-
| offs at two companies.
|
| Aside: there are TWO failures in doing what is the incredibly
| unpleasant job of laying people off:
|
| 1. Everyone knows you only get one lay-off before it's all over.
| After the second round nothing gets done. You almost always hear
| "this is the only round" and I believe leadership actually
| believes this, there's just know way they can know for sure.
|
| 2. Botching the order of operations. You need to get your sh!t in
| order and not do stuff like send out the laptop return courier
| before the announcement, or cause extra panic and confusion with
| timing and poor messaging. Ignorance, Incompetence or
| Schadenfreude; I have no sympathy for less than perfect behaviour
| and execution here.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| > Stick to your contract hours. If your contract says 40 hours,
| work 40 hours--no more, no less.
|
| Why not work less?
| saos wrote:
| Op missed a sign..."Sudden C-Suite departure". Just be sure a
| lay-off is near!
| mattapcba wrote:
| The guy mentions layoffs between Germany and US are the same.
| They are not. After probation is harder to lay off people (you
| have 3 months notice) and usually good severance packages. I have
| friends who were laid off and actually they made a buck.
| sim30n wrote:
| > You're Just a Row in an Excel Table
|
| Usually those just above the layoff line will have a fun time
| inheriting the work of those below the line.
| paulhodge wrote:
| Agree with the headline but I think the takeaways are a little
| too cynical. You don't really have to take such a confrontational
| approach with future employers.
|
| IMO the biggest takeaway I had after a layoff: Always try to
| navigate your career so that you are doing something valuable to
| the business. You can tell based on a lot of clues whether you're
| in a position that's valuable or if you're forgettable. Moving
| "toward the money" not only helps job security but it helps your
| compensation too.
|
| Say for example your team has a stretch of a few months without
| any new high priority requirements or requests. A young developer
| might think, "Yay, finally we have enough time to do all that
| refactoring in the backlog." But in reality, that situation
| should make you very concerned.
| bitbasher wrote:
| Getting laid off was the best thing to ever happen to me.
|
| It woke me up from a dream I was in. I believed if you worked
| hard and provided great value to a startup you would be valued
| and have a place.
|
| After five years at the company (as employee #1), I was laid off.
| I realized my mindset was delusional and I swore to never work
| for anyone ever again.
|
| Several years later, the founder that laid me off asked if I
| wanted to co-found a new company he was creating. I sorta felt
| vindicated then :)
|
| _insert godfather meme_
| kartoolOz wrote:
| "krmnnyevaadhikaarste maa phlessu kdaacn | maa
| krmphlheturbhuurmaa te snggo'stvkrmnni" - Bhagvad gita, chapter
| 2, verse 47.
|
| You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are
| not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider
| yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor
| be attached to inaction.
| Anamon wrote:
| > 3. Lack of Vision from Leadership
|
| I think layoffs at my employer have been imminent for 5 years...
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