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Signal app's president-“layoffs in tech are to keep salaries in check”
- jleyank 4y agoBreak the back of wfh as well…
- blitz-bob 4y agoPeople seem to have forgotten the lessons of The Mythical Man-Month: it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort.
- nix23 4y agoCant remember that sentence. But if your project is late and you put more people onto it (more people more work done..in theory), it gets even worse.
- mjevans 4y agoContext from the book: bringing on new workers has a one time cost of bringing them up to speed and an ongoing cost in synchronization / communications complexity. General consensus, try to assign the optimal number of humans to as specific a task as possible and shard / divide and conqueror the tasks to minimize the headcount per task.
- fatfox 4y agoMore about Brooks’ Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
- jrochkind1 4y agoHe wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? The GP to me seemed to imply that.
- nix23 4y ago>He wasn't blaming that on the quality or nature of the specific people you added though, was he? No you are totally right, it was just about that you then waste even more time to introduce those people to the project then it will save you time.
- jrochkind1 4y agoYep, and in general more time on communication and coordination overhead -- ongoing, not just for the period of introduction -- the more people you have involved. While I find this a very insightful and important observation -- I'm not sure I see much relevance to current tech layoffs.
- cratermoon 4y ago> it's possible to have hired employees who are negatively impacting the overall software development effort. Yes, but Brooks was speaking about the effect of bringing new people on to a project. His words, "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". However, had those same people been brought on board at the start of the project, they would not have had the same negative affect on the timeline. Certainly some people turn out to be what G. Gordon Schulmeyer called "net negative producing programmers" (NNPPs)[1], but presumably they could have been let go before their impact was a problem. Could companies be just now laying off the NNPPs they should have let go long ago? Of course, but the track records of these companies hiring the top talent would suggest that NNPPs don't stick around long. 1 http://web.archive.org/web/20011023084845/http://pyxisinc.com/pyxis_artmain.html http://web.archive.org/web/20011023084845/http://pyxisinc.co...
- darth_avocado 4y agoIt is very much true. It has never been profitability. Just look at this activist letter from an investor from Google. (They had a similar one in Nov. > Competition for talent has fallen significantly in the tech industry, allowing alphabet to materially reduce compensation per employee. Particularly, alphabet should limit stock based compensation given depressed stock price. https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...
- roncesvalles 4y agoAlphabet could've reduced compensation per employee by as much as 50% at any point in its history and still would've had no problem hiring the same number of people. But it didn't, because success in software is extremely sensitive to quality of talent. The best analogy I've come up with is that hiring software engineers is like hiring a bunch of book authors and asking them to write a NY Times bestseller. While your competitors are also trying to do the same. If anything, I'd argue tech compensation isn't high enough. Software has unprecedented reach and (as a corollary) a winner-takes-all flavor. A team of a few hundred tech workers could build a business that brings the company in the order of a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, justifying their own salary by several orders of magnitude. No other profession can do that. An accountant, plumber or lawyer can never create business value that is 1000x their own salary.
- Apocryphon 4y agoHow does this gel with: 1. The widespread meme that Google and other likeminded tech giants snatch up talent for the sake of denying competitors that talent, rather than for developing their own businesses. 2. Google’s seeming inability for the last decade or so to launch new products that stick around, as well as questionable decisions with existing products- with their chat messenger strategy being the intersection of both failings. Maybe the previous post only applies to SWE and not PMs.
- darth_avocado 4y agoYou know this. I know this. Pretty much everyone in tech knows this. But this isn’t about only Google paying lower, Google already pays lower than competitors and still hires talented people. This is more about market wide pressure to suppress wages. If every company does the same, suddenly the quality engineers start getting paid a lot less than they should be. Of course over a course of a longer period, this drives up competition and new startups capitalize on the opportunity, but in the short term it resets the wages until the cycle starts again.
- bobro 4y agovery rare for “its not about the money” to be true in business.
- anthropodie 4y agoBelow comment on another layoff related thread is relevant here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480652 The professor recommends across the board pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs. > One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of the pain. Curious if there is research here on how this impacts the company? Seems like it would also increase stress and encourage top performers to seek new opportunities. He also recommends hiring during a recession: > He actually hired during the 2000 recession and saw it as an opportunity to gain ground on the competition and gain market share when everybody was cutting jobs and stopped innovating. I suppose this works when it works, and then fails completely when it doesn’t. In essence, this increases the risk profile on the company which seems problematic too. Would be curious if there are studies that show the outcomes of these strategies. Perhaps there are no “good” strategies- just those that favor employees or those that favor investors.
- redwood 4y agoI would expect a mix of all of these strategies 1) cut non biz critical distracting scope which sometimes means teams or parts of teams 2) remove underperformed 3) rethink compensation for those who stay and future hires 4) don't always backfill natural attrition This is how things even out
- bluedino 4y agoI worked for company that forced everyone to use their vacation every quarter (right after Covid hit and revenue dropped) Meanwhile they remodeled some executive offices.
- twblalock 4y agoAt a tech company that did this, the best people would leave. The remaining people would be the ones who are below average, or the ones who can’t risk a job loss because of visa issues. What Google is doing now is clearly not great for morale either, but universal compensation cuts would be worse.
- AndyKelley 4y agothe quote in the editorialized HN headline is nowhere to be found in the twitter thread.
- mjevans 4y agoWith non-timeline based, tweets can be deleted / edited, some algorithm decides what each viewer sees (and it might be / will be different per viewer!) - yeah, that's plausible. I've never been a huge fan of dynamic history.
- fredoliveira 4y agoThis isn't about the algorithmic feed. The linked tweet explicitly says the opposite of what the editorialized title here says it does.
- fatfox 4y agoagree, it’s misleading
- killingtime74 4y agoTech probably hired without regard to true business requirements as well. Makes sense they layoff in similar fashion. When you are talking this many number of positions, can they really connect each position with profit/revenue/cost
- twblalock 4y agoEven if salaries get cut significantly, they might only drop to pre-2020 levels. The job market was insane in 2021. New grads getting stock comp that used to be reserved for senior engineers. Constant emails from recruiters. Nobody seemed to have only one offer when they negotiated their comp. Companies all thought they would miss out on talent and growth if they didn’t participate in this, and most did participate. It was a job market bubble, driven by low interest rates and naive optimism caused by inflated stock prices. More people should have seen it for what it was. Some companies didn’t let themselves go crazy, and they aren’t the ones doing layoffs. What we are seeing now is a reversion to how things were before.
- TheFattestNinja 4y agoIdk about you, but im getting more cold emails from recruiters now than i did in 2021/22. Admittedly the compensations advertised do not seem to have kepy up with inflation though and are relatively stuck in 2020.
- klyrs 4y agoThe title is literally the opposite of what the tweet is saying. > Now a hint of recession = excuse to break promises/reestablish dominance over workers. It's not about $ The claim is that this isn't about keeping salaries in check; it's about keeping working conditions in check.
- c7b 4y agoHN Title: Signal app's president-"layoffs in tech are to keep salaries in check" That's not what the linked tweet says. Not literally and not implicitly. The tweet literally says "It's not about $" - which presumably means that salary costs aren't the main reason for the layoffs, which still doesn't support what the title claims. The point of the post is that it's about power dynamics and reining in "perks/freedom", not salaries.
- arcticbull 4y agoThere's a really good general rule - if someone says it's not about the money, it's literally always about the money. Tech layoffs from my perspective were about many companies hiring in 2021/2022 in line with the explosive growth they saw during COVID. They hired in accordance with the new trend instead of the longer-term trend. Once we reverted to the mean, most tech companies had too many employees. Because all the tech companies were chasing the same employees, each individual employee was paid more than historical average too so it was a double-whammy. It's not about lowering individual salaries it's about lowering aggregate salary expenses. But doing one will cause the other, too.
- klyrs 4y ago> There's a really good general rule - if someone says it's not about the money, it's literally always about the money. Horse shit. But independently from that: your rule of thumb, good or bad, does not justify editorializing the headline to literally opposite of what's linked.
- arcticbull 4y agoI wasn't suggesting editorializing the headline.
- d23 4y agoYou're right. This is one of the most misleading titles I've seen on here.
- mort96 4y ago
- machina_ex_deus 4y agoThere's no reason to have any narrative other than the Fed raising rates. If you've watched with absolute astonishment how despite the COVID crisis the stock market kept on climbing because of the Fed printing press, then you'll learn the lesson never to fight the Fed. Now the directions are reversed. If the Fed could pump the stock market despite the worst economic doom and gloom, when the Fed raises rates this high into a powder keg, I expect to be surprised even more. I wasn't surprised yet. We're not even at the same peak level of interest rates of the 2008 recession, and we're still in high inflation. I think companies are starting to dread the depth of the incoming recession.
- arcticbull 4y ago> ...and we're still in high inflation. This actually isn't true. On a month-over-month basis CPI was negative. If you look at the three-month moving average, it's pretty clear the inflation crisis is over at least for now. The annual 6% number or whatever is the wrong thing to look at, look at month over month numbers. The Fed's goal isn't to zero out the price growth before throwing in the towel. Their goal is to bring annualized month over month numbers back in line with their historical 2% target on a forward-looking basis. It's very unlikely we'll deflate back to pre-crisis pricing unless the Fed makes a big mistake. > I think companies are starting to dread the depth of the incoming recession. For what it's worth, we're not seeing one yet. It may happen, I guess, but so far the numbers all look quite good. That said, expectations in this regard tend to become self-fulfilling.
- Panzer04 4y agoHopefully we can buck that - things have been going swimmingly for the better part of a year despite said recession expectations. At this point I feel like we may well get the best of all worlds - inflation dealt with, roaring economy, recession averted. We even still have a fairly tight labor market pushing up wages a bit.
- arcticbull 4y agoYup, the 'soft landing' narrative we put to bed 6 months ago or so seems to be making a comeback. Fingers crossed.
- jmyeet 4y agoPeople saying the title doesn't match the tweet are incorrect. When she says "it's not about the $", she doesn't mean "it's not about salaries". She means "it's not about the (supposed) cost savings". And this is correct. The power and flexibility gained by workers in the late 2010s being "reined in" is exactly about suppressing worker compensation and benefits. In a tight labor market, keeping and hiring employees gets real expensive. Coordinated layoffs are to shift that power balance back in the employer's favor and if you think that won't reflect in salaries, you're crazy. Remember that many of these companies generate in excess of $1 million in profit per employee. That's profit. As good as tech workers have (had?) it, the fundamental forces pushing the exploitation of labor still apply. EDIT: corrected gender.
- fredoliveira 4y ago> When he says Meredith is a woman.
- d23 4y agoIt really doesn't matter. The text in question is put in quotation marks, and it's not even close to an exact quote.
- ta9876789 4y ago[flagged]
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago[dead]
- fmajid 4y agoKeep in mind she was fired from Google in retaliation for speaking out against what she considered unethical behavior, so she knows exactly what is going on. That’s more relevant than her current job at Open Whisper Systems.