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After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done with the Full-Time Work

186 points by raunometsa 4y ago

throwawaysleep 4y ago
In the modern work paradigm, I can’t see why I would bother even report a bug in my employers software that was burning money. As an employee, I don’t see much in it for me other than not getting fired, so I do the bare minimum.
- p1esk 4y ago
  As they asked in the “Office Space” - what would motivate you (to report that bug)? More equity?
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    To be fair, i am not sure there is anything anymore as I do not trust employers. I wouldn't trust that I will be there for any significant length of time. I would basically need 20% of the savings of fixing the bug on my next paycheck.
    - p1esk 4y ago
      Okay. What is your long term strategy? Start your own company?
thedriver 4y ago
On the other hand, another way to have more financial security is to save and invest money. That way you have time to figure out something new if your current job ends for whatever reason. If you get paid relatively well, like many tech workers do, it's not that hard to save a decent amount of money. The lifestyle creep just gets most people.
- throwboatyface 4y ago
  Even with considerable savings, it's easy to get "I can take a break" money, but it's very hard to get "fuck you" money. With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry, there's other pressures to stay at shitty employers and stay burnt out because you're risking your future employability. Personally I'm looking to go part-time and have better work life balance because at most places 50% of your time is spent on bullshit anyways.
  - xur17 4y ago
    > With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry Is there a stigma again either of these? In my experience, the stigma against changing jobs is really only if you change jobs a LOT, to the point where the employer is worried your employment won't be worth the investment. And I've taken breaks between jobs with no problems + don't really see it as an issue when I see it on resume in most cases.
  - boring_twenties 4y ago
    What stigma is there against taking breaks? I have long gaps between every single job on my resume, it's never been an issue.
  - neilv 4y ago
    > With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry, Where is the stigma against changing jobs? From everything I've seen, job-hopping every 18 months seems to be the default in the last couple decades, at least for software developers. I personally think that's suboptimal duration for everything except maximizing TC (costing the company institutional knowledge, and costing the employee learning from seeing both cause and effect in lifecycles), but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on that. Maybe VC throwing the brakes on growth theatre will mean that startups will return to business fundamentals, and rethink what engineering practices work for that. There has long been a stigma in tech hiring against candidate not currently employed. Maybe partly due to the job-hopping convention ("if you're not doing that, you must be stupid"), but I think this particular stigma predated techbros, for a variety of reasons. (Though, noteworthy contrary data point: before leaving one place, I did ask a recruiter at my favorite FAANG, who assured me that their process doesn't penalize candidates for not currently being employed. They answered as if that was an FAQ and the company had a policy about that. At least regarding whether an offer is made, at that particular company; I imagine that could affect compensation package.) Maybe the recent rash of big tech layoffs relaxes that particular stigma for everyone in tech.
MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
An interesting case of outsourced externalities: degrading the common pool of workers by lowering loyalty and commitment. Besides that, I can only recommend being your own boss to have more control over your professional destiny.
lordnacho 4y ago
It's not just that people have figured out loyalty isn't rewarded. That has surely been known for a while. With WFH, you can be constantly looking for a new job. Who's going to know if you take an hour to talk to some recruiter? Just like Tinder/etc has upended dating, tech workers can be courted constantly. I take calls from recruiters all the time, I don't even think of it as disloyalty. You can even actually work multiple jobs from home. Tech makes it possible, though you're often going a step deeper into breaking contracts when you do that. Then there's also working on your own side gig, which is much easier to do when WFH is a reality.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Whats the point of constantly talking to recruiter unless you change jobs often But if you do, then arent you worried that it is seen as a res flag which may prevent you later from cool jobs?
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Tells me what the market looks like, plus I often run into some role that I know someone for. I don't see changing roles as a flag at all. Nobody seems to care, especially if you just happened to be at a job that died.
mattw2121 4y ago
Workers aren't done with full-time work. Workers answered a survey saying that they are disillusioned with the idea of full-time work. In their idea of a perfect world, they would do freelance and not tie themselves to one employer. What would be really interesting is to follow up with those 109 that were actually laid off and see where they land. I'd wager 95% of them continue with full-time work, despite their answers on this survey.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  The other side of the field looks much greener when you just got laid off. FTE is a very stable type of employment compared to freelance. And considering that most got laid off from high profile tech companies they should have no issue finding work. Kind of an interesting phenomena lately with all the press around the layoffs, I guess because they are happening in household name companies. It seems wired from my perspective to run to the media about this. If anything, complaining to the media will make you even less hirable because now the company is thinking in the back of it's head if you will badmouth them to the press if they have to lay you off.
- mc32 4y ago
  This is people idealizing things. In best of world, yeah, who wouldn't want to take units[1] of work at will. Have some available time? Put in a bid, do the task and be done. On the other hand, as one can see with Uber on the one hand and 1099s on the other, it's a mixed bag with lots of pros and cons. You manage your own time, but you take on more responsibility. I think, given the realities of life, people will, on balance, choose the stability an FTE position. [1]this isn't always practical as many things are not inherently divisible into units of labor [pregnancy being the iconic example where you can't put 9 women to deliver in one month]
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    Software security and quality is already in a pretty sad state. If the software industry changes to resemble the gig economy we're going to be in trouble.
dcre 4y ago
This is an advertisement for a contracting company posted on that very company’s website.
- oblio 4y ago
  Joke's on them, I only read the comments here!
- SergeAx 4y ago
  This comment should be number one on this discussion.
chrisBob 4y ago
The article repeats over and over that 89% of workers want more flexibility than a normal job offers, but my view is that the pandemic started a trend of more flexibility for existing jobs. My coworkers are mostly on west coast time, but I am on the early end of Eastern Time and our company has no problem with that. I work when I can, get my kid off the bus, and don't have a problem taking a day off here and there with our unlimited PTO policy. A few years ago I felt tied to an 8:30-5 schedule, but I think child care challenges during the pandemic have made a lot of employers more flexible.
deleted 4y ago
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revskill 4y ago
It's a shame that most of people (HR recruiters) consider fulltime work == remote work. They're totally orthogonal concepts. It's a LOL for me. And it's also a sign that an article is written by sales/marketing/HR people. Wake up, non-tech people: Fulltime != Remote.
- bigtunacan 4y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean? Are you saying remote workers aren't working full-time? I'm a remote worker and I work way more than most in office workers.
  - revskill 4y ago
    I mean simply there's no relation between fulltime and remote. Is it hard to understand, or ?
    - snozolli 4y ago
      The article doesn't equate "full-time" and "remote". It simply mentions the interest in remote work as evidence that employees are looking for more flexibility.
      - revskill 4y ago
        It doesn't equate, but it implies remote! That's the issue. If you try contact to any HR people, and they say "fulltime", it means "no remote is allowed". In this case, the title should replace Fulltime with Remote for flexibility.
        snozolli 4y ago
        It doesn't equate, but it implies remote! No, it doesn't. In this case, the title should replace Fulltime with Remote for flexibility. What are you talking about? You think the title should be "After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Remote Work Model"?!
chillbill 4y ago
This is extremely misleading.“500 knowledge workers in the US” hardly constitutes “workers” in the title.
RobertDeNiro 4y ago
Zygmunt Bauman was right on the mark, 25 years ago. > Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.
- jmathai 4y ago
  This may sound silly and be off topic but I believe this is what got me to peruse a career outside of programming. This accurately describes modern life and, I think by extension, modern software development.
  - epups 4y ago
    May I ask why? It seems to me that, facing a fast-changing world as described in the article, you would be best served perfecting a skill such as programming to navigate it.
    - jlarocco 4y ago
      I can't speak for the OP, but I've felt this way too, and for me it's because I feel that while most industries are changing for the better, software development seems unusually short sited in chasing new stuff. Most industries are improving as they change, where software (from my perspective) is regressing or just pointlessly churning. The concepts and abstract skill of programming is undoubtedly useful, but the implementation details and how it's done are going to be replaced by something worse in 3 years. I think it bothers me because I'm attached to it, and it's disappointing to see it move in directions I don't like or that feel wrong to me. It's all "market forces" and "public opinion" and nobody controls it, but it would be less depressing in an industry I didn't care about.
phpisthebest 4y ago
I have to wonder if this is not the goal of many of these companys "Gig Economy" is great for the large companies (at least in the US) , they would much rather higher you as a Freelance contractor then having to pay ever increasing health care costs, more and more regulatory burden on what you have to offer and provide to employee's etc. Must better to just call you a "contractor" and pay you 50% what an employee would cost in totality, but making you believe you are "making more" because you income is higher.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >I have to wonder if this is not the goal of many of these companys Why do you wonder this? Were these people laid off and then replaced with contractors? Why would they do this by laying off 10% of staff instead of just replacing all the new hires going forward with contractors, instead of continuing to hire into full time roles? I have to wonder if this is idle speculation on your part based on no evidence.
- jmartrican 4y ago
  "Gig Economy" is even better for small companies that do not have as much capital, and each hire is a larger percentage of their workforce than in a large company. Because of this, each hire in a small company is a bigger risk.
nszceta 4y ago
But they aren't done with the $4000 a month mortgage with dropping equity value that's holding them hostage.
sva_ 4y ago
Curious domain name.
sfpotter 4y ago
If you work full time, work is your life, or it’s whatever percentage of your life that you spend there on average per week. You can try to ignore this fact and focus on your life outside of work, but you’re just going to build cognitive dissonance over time and delay the day of reckoning. The only path forward is improving the quality of your life at work by improving labor regulations, and the only way to achieve that is through labor organizing, which means unions.
debarshri 4y ago
What I don't understand is the organisations they are laying off are also hiring. For eg. I saw Miro firing bunch of people last week and then hiring new people. I feel this is like bait and switch. CEOs take responsibility of the layoff but it feels like they dont really care. If employers are not loyal then why should the employees be.
peter_retief 4y ago
Layoff's are not new and will continue with the slow down in the world economy, many people will have to reinvent themselves in a world where their skills are no longer needed. I feel for older workers who will find it harder to find new work.
throwaway9191aa 4y ago
I made it for a little over 6 years as a full time freelancer before I went full time (about 6 years ago). If you are going freelance to avoid getting laid off... Since I became a full time employee I have actually gotten paid every month (almost never happened as a freelancer). I have never had to find a new contract, or had a contract fall through after turning down other work. I haven't had 90 day payment terms. I just never found that magical "pick up work when you want, and actually get paid on time" sales pipeline. You are not your own boss. You have clients, who have deadlines, who are paying you to meet those deadlines. If you don't, you suddenly find yourself in violation of contract law. At your full time job if you miss a deadline, how often do you get fired? That has never happened to me. But I have absolutely not been able to deliver on a contract and not gotten paid because of it. Once a client thinks "We don't actually want to move forward with that project", they try to find a way to get out of the contract. There are no severance packages for freelancers. Just months of wasted time that won't be compensated.
- boringg 4y ago
  I would agree to this. I think there is an idea that you become your own boss. In some ways thats true but mostly so you can say that to yourself or someone else. Your destiny is still controlled by clients. If you think about most things -- very few people are their own boss, there are always stakeholders who control your time spent. It's also a lot harder to disconnect for a period of time to go on a vacation. You kind of always have to be on. I'm sure there are some people who can do that and hack that split but when you have to constantly make sure theres a pipeline of work you have to manage client inbound.
  - flavmartins 4y ago
    This. Maybe you can disconnect more if you are single. Or with a SO, but not children. Once you have a family, there's just a lot more demands on you. The safer, more secure route ends up being the more traditional corporate job.
    - jaredcwhite 4y ago
atdrummond 4y ago
Nothing was callous about the Google firings. Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corporate raiders walking off with billions. Not being able to say goodbye on the internal message board is not a violation of your human rights. Enjoy your many months of severance - something almost nobody else in your country enjoys.
- starik36 4y ago
  Well said. I've been laid off a couple of times in the last 5 years. It sucked when I was notified of it. But thinking back, all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Be careful with any use of "all"—there are large numbers of us who have never seen Silicon Valley, many who live in countries with poor standards of living, and even a number who don't work in tech at all. All of these people are also contributing to these conversations, and it would cause a lot of misunderstanding to assume they're all ex-FAANG.
    - rcarmo 4y ago
      This. I am always a bit shocked by the Valley bias to believe you can walk out of a building complex and get a job down the road. Even in the rest of the US it is nowhere that easy, and being in Europe (where many high profile tech companies hire copious amounts of people who can do the same-or better-work than their US counterparts but where the job market is fundamentally different), I sometimes find that worldview borderline insulting. I can only imagine what other countries might be like--I would expect ageism, local laws, market maturity, and even factors like origin and upbringing to still be significant risk factors if people were to be laid off in the casual manner the US seems to take for granted.
      - 4y ago
bmac27 4y ago
Obviously, there's plenty of bias here given the source, but I think on balance it either hinted at or laid out a lot of the issues we know about the state of 9-5 employment, most notably in the U.S, fairly well: -Lack of control over schedule/location -Lack of growth paths at many companies -Lack of leverage/Inputs match outputs almost 1:1 (sell time, make a dollar) -Not getting rewarded for the value you bring to a job; instead that value accruing mostly to people above you -That feeling of being merely a line on a spreadsheet Over time, I've learned that for some people, articles like this will really resonate and shake them to their core. (I happen to be in that category but I've experienced enough in previous entrepreneurial ventures for this enthusiasm to be tempered a little bit with reality every time I read things like this). Others will recoil seeing this, their first instinct going to the (very real) risks in leaving that system and conclude they're far more comfortable optimizing for the familiar. Both reactions are perfectly OK. There's no wrong or right answer. It's just what connects with you, as a person. The key is to understand that, either way, you're in charge of your career, regardless of what kind of professional setup suits you best and makes you happiest.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
As others have pointed out, dubious article. And, dubious proposition. For myself... I quit my GOOG job a year ago, and I certainly felt this was through 2022, and pursued contracting and freelance and startups and open source stuff and enjoyed the freedom. But once layoffs really started to heat up through the summer, I started to feel the push to finding a "stable" fulltime job, found one, and am more than happy to be employed securely, given the market. Especially after yesterday when 150+ of my fellow Canadian ex-Googlers were dumped onto the job market. A fulltime job right now is golden. More and more people are going to feel this way as things become unstable. With thousands of very qualified recently laid-off people dumped onto the market, compensation rates are going to fall, interviewing is going to get tougher, work more stressful, etc. Competition for consulting gigs will also get difficult.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  Yeah - the idea that 90% of workers want to be gig type workers seems insane to me. I’m sure companies will lap this up.
- erikerikson 4y ago
  This seems to be exactly why they were so loud about their layoffs, to produce this perspective. Old is new, right? As noted in TFA, the number of tech jobs increased during the same period. Very glad you're happy though.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    FWIW, I agree re: "why they were so loud". And I agree there's still plenty of hiring and opportunity out there. However, I also lived through the last two rounds of layoffs/contraction in this sector, and (as a jr dev) was unemployed for over a year in the post .com/9-11 crash. For me, I can see the writing on the wall, and have a family to feed. Tech jobs may have increased in the previous interval but it seems plain to me where they're headed over the next 1-2 years. Of course I'd like to be wrong.
jchw 4y ago
The mantra that runs American businesses, certainly American tech businesses, feels broken. Companies bend over backwards to make their financials fit the narrative of constant growth and are rewarded for it even when they get there by callously cutting costs rather than investing in the long term. Nearly no loyalty between employees and employers, and not much between companies and customers either. All that seems to matter anymore is the quarterly financial report. Sometimes it feels like you need to hit the reset button.
- gruez 4y ago
  >by callously cutting costs rather than investing in the long term Interest rates went up significantly over the past year. As a result, a dollar 10 years from now is now worth far less than it did a year ago. It makes total sense for companies to make money now (by cutting costs) rather than "investing in the long term". Sure, it sucks for the people involved, but it's not as irrational as you make it out to be.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Literally the only concern you even regarded in that entire comment is the bottom line. As far as I can tell, expectations are so gruelingly low that the two things a company is expected to do is (barely) follow the law (but not too closely, as it would be wasteful) and make profit. It's not surprising that companies who just got done squeezing the pandemic economy and growing senselessly for what they knew was temporary had to leak employees, but just because what they did was rational doesn't mean it was good, or respectable. It's not the standard we should want.
    - gruez 4y ago
      >Literally the only concern you even regarded in that entire comment is the bottom line. Going back to your previous comment: "Companies bend over backwards to make their financials fit the narrative of constant growth and are rewarded for it even when they get there by callously cutting costs rather than investing in the long term" Why should they be "investing in the long term"? For the bottom line? Or as some sort of jobs program to keep people employed even if they're not really needed? >As far as I can tell, expectations are so gruelingly low that the two things a company is expected to do is (barely) follow the law (but not too closely, as it would be wasteful) and make profit. Yeah, that's basically the point of a company. Would you rather companies be responsible for making money, and keeping people employed even if they're not really needed? >It's not surprising that companies who just got done squeezing the pandemic economy and growing senselessly for what they knew was temporary had to leak employees, but just because what they did was rational doesn't mean it was good, or respectable. It's not the standard we should want. Would you rather that the people not be employed in the first place?
aynyc 4y ago
1. Denial: nah, google/meta/apple/XXX would never laid me off! 2. Anger: WTF, I dedicated xx years to XXXX, how dare they! 3. Bargaining: I'll never work for the man again! I'll be my own boss! 4. Depression: This sucks, out of work sucks! I don't have a social circle to hang out with. My life sucks! 5. Acceptance: OK. Time to get a new job. Oh, look at that start up, their motto is change the world, join us and be the next xxx(ian/ler/mate, etc). Sounds awesome, let me ask my friend for a referral. I might have taken liberty to the original with sarcasm.
AndrewKemendo 4y ago
Workers have not been getting the benefits of growth since 1971 and we're sick of it It's time to transition from a competition to a cooperation economy and it's going to take centuries - but if we don't do it soon we're going to face a social and ecological calamity that makes COVID-19 look tame in comparison. My opinion is that humanity solved material scarcity by the year 2000 and by continuing on the path of hoarding based capitalism, we now produce the wrong goods which is actively self destructive to the species. I write more about this here: https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Your article sounds great... if you ignore the mountain of skulls left by the Soviets, the Chinese, the Khmer Rouge, etc. There's a much simpler explanation for what caused economic growth and employee compensation in real dollars to decouple in 1971: https://www.barrons.com/articles/gold-standard-dollar-dominance-bretton-woods-51628890861 https://www.barrons.com/articles/gold-standard-dollar-domina...
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    Interesting, I've never heard an answer to "what happened in 1971". So decoupling from gold basically gave the elite a really good handle to manipulate the economy? Fascinating.
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Exactly. I'm not a gold bug (and the last 50 years have shown it doesn't behave too differently from any other commodity) but by requiring the government to tie the value of currency to something, anything, that they can't just create out of thin air limited how much the federal reserve and banks were able to screw over the average citizen.
      - inawarminister 4y ago
        To be fair even ancient Romans used to meddle around with reducing gold and silver content in their physical coinage, resulting in the crisis of the 3rd century. And Spanish silver bullion was too bad... But yes. Much better than limitless fiat being summoned from the void.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I feel that a survey of only 500 people, asking rather softball, "in-a-perfect-world" questions, may not exactly be a bellwether. When it comes to freelancing/contract work, a significant number of folks like the idea of it, but the reality of it is not something they are comfortable with. I think a lot of these folks may find themselves facing the same thing I did. They are now considered "olds," and won't find the doors open as wide as they used to be. Those added jobs are probably a lot of young, fresh, faces.
ergest 4y ago
There have been other periods of massive layoffs. (I’ve personally witnessed 2001 and 2008) Weren’t workers disillusioned with full time work back then or has it become easier and more acceptable to freelance in the last decade? Was it perhaps the callousness of the layoffs that ignited these emotions?
deleted 4y ago
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eigenhombre 4y ago
I've worked less than full time for a good portion of my career -- sometimes salaried, sometimes on contract. If you can make it work financially, I highly recommend it. I can do unrelated personal work at a much higher level when I have 10+ hours per week available to advance it. And my energy for the "day job" is at its best when it doesn't eat up all my time, so my results per hour are better. The pattern is rare enough that there is a cultural barrier, at least in the US (and possibly worse elsewhere?). I accept that there will be fewer opportunities, and plan to do outstanding work during the hours I'm engaged. My employer gets a happy me and benefits from (by now) decades of experience. I hope that more tech (and non-tech) workers will join me in advocating for this sort of arrangement so it becomes more common.
- eigenhombre 4y ago
  Here's the former CTO of my last salaried job talking about part time work and the arrangement I had there: https://youtu.be/Gsai-2ZCHwk?t=431 https://youtu.be/Gsai-2ZCHwk?t=431
ronmoddesette 4y ago
Layoffs have been happening forever, I don't understand why all these stories are raising concerns. Lay-offs suck, but aren't anything new.
- snozolli 4y ago
  It's been 15 years since the start of The Great Recession. There's a generation of tech workers learning that things can quickly turn bad. I would also say that there's something particularly unsettling about these layoffs. We went from "nobody can find enough workers" to "we're shedding thousands of jobs along with all our peers in the industry" seemingly instantaneously. Additionally, the amount of corporate doublespeak is astounding, saying things that boil down to "we hired too many people" without those in charge being held accountable for the mistake.
  - ronmoddesette 4y ago
    Good points. I would also agree that everything these past few years seem off.
taylodl 4y ago
Workers aren't done with full-time work, they're done with allegiance to their employer. They're also done with giving free labor to their employer. * Do I get paid overtime? No? Then I work 40 hours per week. * You expect two weeks notice when I resign? That's cute! * I'm jumping ship as soon as a better opportunity comes along. A better opportunity may be just working on a better project or learning new things. * I will share my salary information. It's not private or top secret. I'm sorry, this is the mess the MBA's made when the neocons took over the country in the 1980's. Everybody at the time saw this coming and now it's here. The employers made their bed and now it's time for them to lie in it. I don't feel a bit sorry for them and I won't shed a single tear when the FAANG companies and their ilk whine that they're having a hard time finding workers, which they will inevitably do. Too bad, so sad.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  << I don't feel a bit sorry for them and I won't shed a single tear when the FAANG companies and their ilk whine that they're having a hard time finding workers, which they will inevitably do. I chuckled, but that is a constant cry, but with varying framing ( "no one wants to work", "we need schools to teach $skill_companies_want to prepare them for jobs of tomorrow" ). Overall, I think I agree. All of the above are gentlemen agreements. If one party does not honor social contact, you don't need to either. Naturally, you want to understand the consequence of those actions ( last time I quit, I gave my boss 3 weeks, but I genuinely liked him so I did not want to leave him stranded; the side benefit that he would likely be in my corner should we meet again - and in my industry, we well might ). Companies and their managers are pissed at the power worker's squirreled away during Covid and want it back. The need for control above all else became clear where record profits and productivity did not translate into WFH forever, but a clear 'now its time to bring us all back together' while also being surprised by 'hey, you are less productive; why?'
  - taylodl 4y ago
    You're absolutely right. You still have agency. If you like your boss and don't want to leave them stranded, you may elect to give them several weeks notice. You just don't owe them that. Just like working more than 40 hours per week. Sometimes you might want to put in more time because you can't turn your mind off and you may just want to continue working on whatever it is you've been working on. The problem arises when they expect you to work more than 40 hours per week. As an aside, my company has been booming with WFH from a productivity standpoint. We're hiring people from all over the country and we've really learned how to make remote teams work. From the news it appears we may be an exception.
tonnydourado 4y ago
> 500 knowledge workers—including 109 that had recently been laid off—in the US Before commenting on the content of the article, I'm wondering if this is a sample worth giving any attention to? I'm no statistician, but drawing from a sample of 500 to make sweeping statements about "Workers" seems disingenuous, at least.
Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
People who are done with the Full-Time Work can always try a few other options: - Starting their own company (and good luck managing all that stress and uncertainty while trying to do some work while securing a steady income) - Becoming a freelancer (be your own boss, pick up work when you want it... at least that's how it goes in theory) - Retiring (this one is not bad but only limited for people of appropriate age or with significant savings) - Being unemployed (that really sucks, as you might imagine, especially if you have a family to feed) - And, as a last resort, looking for a Full-time job again.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  I did school / retraining as another option. Also hard financially, but it's an option to get ahead in the long run.
CommanderData 4y ago
I can see alot of emotion filled posts on here and LinkedIn about layoffs. It sucks but us employees service our employers. They will fire and hire as they choose, emotions mean nothing in a business decision like this. If you're hurt and don't want to play along. They will find someone who does. It's as simple as this. Also contracting offers you less job security, I don't think you realise.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  << They will fire and hire as they choose, emotions mean nothing in a business decision like this. It is a way distance oneself from the decision and rationalize it, but I assure you that emotion absolutely plays into this. Especially at smaller companies, there is a reason recurring layoffs do not initially touch employees that manager likes.
say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
I want everyone to know that I personally hold myself responsible for these failures, but I won't be stepping down from my leadership position. It weighs heavy on my heart losing so many of my corporate family members. I love you all. Please don't say bad things about me in public because I will be trying to convince investors of my next big revolutionary opportunity, distancing myself from the current failures that I hold myself responsible for.
tr3ntg 4y ago
I’m in the A.Team network (the group behind this post) and I’ll say that they don’t even have many contracts available right now. If their own ability to find work for contractors is any signal, contracting is a horrible replacement for full time opportunities. It’s unpredictable.
rcarmo 4y ago
This reads like a very biased, clickbait extrapolation from a highly localized sample population, and barely registers as realistic when read from outside the US, and should be flagged as opportunistic clickbait. (About the only thing I can relate to in the title is the callousness/corporate insensitivity of the layoff process)
incrudible 4y ago
You don't want to feel "disposable"? Don't go work for a company with tens of thousands of employees where literally everyone is disposable, up to and including the C-suites, by design. You want to work part-time? Guess what, you are asking for a job that is disposable, because someone else needs to even out the work gap you left. That said, being disposable also comes with less responsibility and, by extension, less pressure. You want to feel important and valued? Go work at a small shop that isn't lavishly funded by OPM, where your work helps keep the company solvent. Or, go work for yourself. You'll learn to appreciate the peace of mind of having a paycheck magically show up at the end of month, or getting at least some benefits when it doesn't anymore.
naltroc 4y ago
There is nothing good about losing a job, no doubt. What I find interesting is how this becomes another example of software engineers facing the same struggles that artists have always faced. It happened first with open source software. People want to build cool stuff and make it freely available, asking for support in return. Reality check, nobody is paying your rent for your OSS. This is life-as-an-artist 101. Wanting more control over your schedule and the work you take is super liberating! It comes at a lot of costs. There is the time cost of finding clients and negotiating contracts. There is the billing cost, of invoicing your customer and finding a secure way to receive payments. Many platforms take a cut. There are the additional taxes of being self-employed: "In addition to regular income tax, freelancers are responsible for paying the self-employment tax of 15.3% in 2022" (https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/self-employment-tax https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/self-employment-tax) There is the stress of not knowing how long your current clients need you, and when you will have to start hustling again. Historically, full-time work fixes this issue. It is currently in question with the state of the news. It is generally easier to find freelance work for knowledge workers compared to creative workers. With the state of the news, the competition has become extremely fierce. The freelancer life is a very different reality that you really have to check before committing. Myself, I have absolutely enjoyed my experiences with freelance, and I believe it helped me develop an independent way of moving through the world. Now I'm happy to have gone from being a freelance musician of 9 years to full time tech worker. Food is great.
nsmog767 4y ago
The idea behind this is nice - "people want to diversify their risk and not be 'owned' by one company" - but I don't think it's in line with the way people are, unfortunately. People like the simple, dependable nature of the biweekly paycheck — full stop. I run a services business, and I've talked to many amazing in-house folks who I'm sure could do the same (and be more successful than I am). What I've found is that for many people, the concept of not being sure what they'll make is simply unpalatable. This article cites survey results but doesn't talk about all the reasons people don't enjoy or have success when they go it alone.
sequoia 4y ago
News flash: the grass looks greener on the other side! I’ve done both, most of my advice is the same as others who’ve contracted. One thing I’ll add: get retainer contracts! I had one contract that paid a couple hundred per month for me to be “on-call” if the main programmer was out in a small one-man shop. If they didn’t use their allotted hours, every couple months we’d check in, review something etc. I got a full time job but if I were still contracting this is where I’d focus a lot of attention: finding gigs that pay you monthly for maintenance, on-call etc.
didgetmaster 4y ago
It seems to me that to be a successful contractor, you usually have to have a certain personality type. In addition to doing the actual work, you have to be able to drum up business on a regular basis. This requires someone who can build a good network of friends, colleagues, and clients and interact with them regularly. Many programmers are introverted by nature. They went into programming because the idea of sitting alone in front of a computer all day did not cause a panic attack. They enjoy those long hours of 'solving a problem' using an IDE and testing the code over and over until it is right. They can sometimes go a whole week without engaging in a conversation longer than 10 minutes. This personality type does not match up well with a contracting business that has to 'wine and dine' potential clients; come up with proposals and present them to others; and regularly interact with existing clients to work out details.
shanedanger 4y ago
gigantic surprise: you're "family" when it means sacrificing for the company, and you're a human sacrifice when the company needs to make its shareholders feel better about the economy.
StevePerkins 4y ago
It should be called out more prominently that this website belongs to a freelancer firm. This thread is free advertising for a corporate P.R. piece, and doesn't reflect anything more broad and genuine than that. If you're going into freelancing because you don't like layoffs, then good luck with that.
dasil003 4y ago
I get that this is an advertisement, but the message lacks credibility. Workers that are most impacted and feel "betrayed" by layoffs are likely to value stability. Giving up full-time work is not a path to greater stability. If that's what you want, it's still better to go full-time, and just temper your expectations about the durability of your employment.
xianshou 4y ago
This article perfectly illustrates how small, steady distortions give birth to hyperbolic claims. Actual question (in article): 62% [of knowledge workers] said that the recent waves of layoffs have made them feel less secure committing to one employer. Preview text (below headline): 62% of knowledge workers say they don’t feel secure committing to one employer anymore. Headline: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model As Scott Alexander might say, the media rarely lies, but it loves to play telephone with itself.
yalogin 4y ago
I can confidently say nothing is going to change. People will forget this soon. There will be new companies and new “geniuses” and people will blindly pledge allegiance. It’s not meant to be disparaging, people always want to align with good positive growth stories and they will. The same thing happened in 1999, 2008 too. The cycle continued between 99-08 and then again between 08-now. If anything the idol worship of entrepreneurs increased and became more fervent. May be entrepreneurs became adept at marketing themselves or people became desperate but the worshipping culture got worse. Forget about workers are done with loyalty, I will consider it a win if the blind worshipping of entrepreneurs is dialed down.
Bhilai 4y ago
> In a survey of 500 knowledge workers in the US ... Apparently none of these folks were on a visa because to my knowledge, work visa holders cant really do freelance work. Nor can the folks on visa work for multiple employers. Surprisingly this article does not even mention visa based restrictions on employees and their state after being laid off. So I am not sure how representative this is of any sentiment amongst laid off people.
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gajus 4y ago
Hey there, I'm co-founder of contra.com - we started our platform for people that wanted to be independent, set their own rules for working and carve their own path to success. Nearly everyone on our team has current or previous experience as a contractor or freelancer and we're really focused on making the best place for everyone to be successful. Whether you're new to the work of indy working or have been doing it for years, check us out. We don't charge any commissions on your work, since you worked hard to make that money. In the second half of the year we even rolled out a feature that allows you to migrate your work easier from other contractor/freelancing sites to our platform so you can retain more of the money you've earned.

186 points by raunometsa 4y ago

In the modern work paradigm, I can’t see why I would bother even report a bug in my employers software that was burning money. As an employee, I don’t see much in it for me other than not getting fired, so I do the bare minimum.

p1esk 4y ago
As they asked in the “Office Space” - what would motivate you (to report that bug)? More equity?
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  To be fair, i am not sure there is anything anymore as I do not trust employers. I wouldn't trust that I will be there for any significant length of time. I would basically need 20% of the savings of fixing the bug on my next paycheck.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    Okay. What is your long term strategy? Start your own company?

thedriver 4y ago

On the other hand, another way to have more financial security is to save and invest money. That way you have time to figure out something new if your current job ends for whatever reason. If you get paid relatively well, like many tech workers do, it's not that hard to save a decent amount of money. The lifestyle creep just gets most people.

throwboatyface 4y ago
Even with considerable savings, it's easy to get "I can take a break" money, but it's very hard to get "fuck you" money. With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry, there's other pressures to stay at shitty employers and stay burnt out because you're risking your future employability. Personally I'm looking to go part-time and have better work life balance because at most places 50% of your time is spent on bullshit anyways.
- xur17 4y ago
  > With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry Is there a stigma again either of these? In my experience, the stigma against changing jobs is really only if you change jobs a LOT, to the point where the employer is worried your employment won't be worth the investment. And I've taken breaks between jobs with no problems + don't really see it as an issue when I see it on resume in most cases.
- boring_twenties 4y ago
  What stigma is there against taking breaks? I have long gaps between every single job on my resume, it's never been an issue.
- neilv 4y ago
  > With the stigma against changing jobs and taking breaks in the IT industry, Where is the stigma against changing jobs? From everything I've seen, job-hopping every 18 months seems to be the default in the last couple decades, at least for software developers. I personally think that's suboptimal duration for everything except maximizing TC (costing the company institutional knowledge, and costing the employee learning from seeing both cause and effect in lifecycles), but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority on that. Maybe VC throwing the brakes on growth theatre will mean that startups will return to business fundamentals, and rethink what engineering practices work for that. There has long been a stigma in tech hiring against candidate not currently employed. Maybe partly due to the job-hopping convention ("if you're not doing that, you must be stupid"), but I think this particular stigma predated techbros, for a variety of reasons. (Though, noteworthy contrary data point: before leaving one place, I did ask a recruiter at my favorite FAANG, who assured me that their process doesn't penalize candidates for not currently being employed. They answered as if that was an FAQ and the company had a policy about that. At least regarding whether an offer is made, at that particular company; I imagine that could affect compensation package.) Maybe the recent rash of big tech layoffs relaxes that particular stigma for everyone in tech.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

An interesting case of outsourced externalities: degrading the common pool of workers by lowering loyalty and commitment. Besides that, I can only recommend being your own boss to have more control over your professional destiny.

lordnacho 4y ago

It's not just that people have figured out loyalty isn't rewarded. That has surely been known for a while. With WFH, you can be constantly looking for a new job. Who's going to know if you take an hour to talk to some recruiter? Just like Tinder/etc has upended dating, tech workers can be courted constantly. I take calls from recruiters all the time, I don't even think of it as disloyalty. You can even actually work multiple jobs from home. Tech makes it possible, though you're often going a step deeper into breaking contracts when you do that. Then there's also working on your own side gig, which is much easier to do when WFH is a reality.

hardware2win 4y ago
Whats the point of constantly talking to recruiter unless you change jobs often But if you do, then arent you worried that it is seen as a res flag which may prevent you later from cool jobs?
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Tells me what the market looks like, plus I often run into some role that I know someone for. I don't see changing roles as a flag at all. Nobody seems to care, especially if you just happened to be at a job that died.

mattw2121 4y ago

Workers aren't done with full-time work. Workers answered a survey saying that they are disillusioned with the idea of full-time work. In their idea of a perfect world, they would do freelance and not tie themselves to one employer. What would be really interesting is to follow up with those 109 that were actually laid off and see where they land. I'd wager 95% of them continue with full-time work, despite their answers on this survey.

_fat_santa 4y ago
The other side of the field looks much greener when you just got laid off. FTE is a very stable type of employment compared to freelance. And considering that most got laid off from high profile tech companies they should have no issue finding work. Kind of an interesting phenomena lately with all the press around the layoffs, I guess because they are happening in household name companies. It seems wired from my perspective to run to the media about this. If anything, complaining to the media will make you even less hirable because now the company is thinking in the back of it's head if you will badmouth them to the press if they have to lay you off.
mc32 4y ago
This is people idealizing things. In best of world, yeah, who wouldn't want to take units[1] of work at will. Have some available time? Put in a bid, do the task and be done. On the other hand, as one can see with Uber on the one hand and 1099s on the other, it's a mixed bag with lots of pros and cons. You manage your own time, but you take on more responsibility. I think, given the realities of life, people will, on balance, choose the stability an FTE position. [1]this isn't always practical as many things are not inherently divisible into units of labor [pregnancy being the iconic example where you can't put 9 women to deliver in one month]
- Buttons840 4y ago
  Software security and quality is already in a pretty sad state. If the software industry changes to resemble the gig economy we're going to be in trouble.

dcre 4y ago

This is an advertisement for a contracting company posted on that very company’s website.

oblio 4y ago
Joke's on them, I only read the comments here!
SergeAx 4y ago
This comment should be number one on this discussion.

chrisBob 4y ago

The article repeats over and over that 89% of workers want more flexibility than a normal job offers, but my view is that the pandemic started a trend of more flexibility for existing jobs. My coworkers are mostly on west coast time, but I am on the early end of Eastern Time and our company has no problem with that. I work when I can, get my kid off the bus, and don't have a problem taking a day off here and there with our unlimited PTO policy. A few years ago I felt tied to an 8:30-5 schedule, but I think child care challenges during the pandemic have made a lot of employers more flexible.

deleted 4y ago

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revskill 4y ago

It's a shame that most of people (HR recruiters) consider fulltime work == remote work. They're totally orthogonal concepts. It's a LOL for me. And it's also a sign that an article is written by sales/marketing/HR people. Wake up, non-tech people: Fulltime != Remote.

bigtunacan 4y ago
I'm not sure what you mean? Are you saying remote workers aren't working full-time? I'm a remote worker and I work way more than most in office workers.
- revskill 4y ago
  I mean simply there's no relation between fulltime and remote. Is it hard to understand, or ?
  - snozolli 4y ago
    The article doesn't equate "full-time" and "remote". It simply mentions the interest in remote work as evidence that employees are looking for more flexibility.
    - revskill 4y ago
      It doesn't equate, but it implies remote! That's the issue. If you try contact to any HR people, and they say "fulltime", it means "no remote is allowed". In this case, the title should replace Fulltime with Remote for flexibility.
      - snozolli 4y ago
        It doesn't equate, but it implies remote! No, it doesn't. In this case, the title should replace Fulltime with Remote for flexibility. What are you talking about? You think the title should be "After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Remote Work Model"?!

chillbill 4y ago

This is extremely misleading.“500 knowledge workers in the US” hardly constitutes “workers” in the title.

RobertDeNiro 4y ago

Zygmunt Bauman was right on the mark, 25 years ago. > Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects – but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To ‘be modern’ means to modernize – compulsively, obsessively; not so much just ‘to be’, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever ‘becoming’, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement – acknowledged as temporary and ‘until further notice’. Being always, at any stage and at all times, ‘post-something’ is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, ‘modernity’ changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus . . . What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) 'post-modernity' and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, 'liquid modernity', is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago 'to be modern' meant to chase 'the final state of perfection' -- now it means an infinity of improvement, with no 'final state' in sight and none desired.

jmathai 4y ago
This may sound silly and be off topic but I believe this is what got me to peruse a career outside of programming. This accurately describes modern life and, I think by extension, modern software development.
- epups 4y ago
  May I ask why? It seems to me that, facing a fast-changing world as described in the article, you would be best served perfecting a skill such as programming to navigate it.
  - jlarocco 4y ago
    I can't speak for the OP, but I've felt this way too, and for me it's because I feel that while most industries are changing for the better, software development seems unusually short sited in chasing new stuff. Most industries are improving as they change, where software (from my perspective) is regressing or just pointlessly churning. The concepts and abstract skill of programming is undoubtedly useful, but the implementation details and how it's done are going to be replaced by something worse in 3 years. I think it bothers me because I'm attached to it, and it's disappointing to see it move in directions I don't like or that feel wrong to me. It's all "market forces" and "public opinion" and nobody controls it, but it would be less depressing in an industry I didn't care about.

phpisthebest 4y ago

I have to wonder if this is not the goal of many of these companys "Gig Economy" is great for the large companies (at least in the US) , they would much rather higher you as a Freelance contractor then having to pay ever increasing health care costs, more and more regulatory burden on what you have to offer and provide to employee's etc. Must better to just call you a "contractor" and pay you 50% what an employee would cost in totality, but making you believe you are "making more" because you income is higher.

drstewart 4y ago
>I have to wonder if this is not the goal of many of these companys Why do you wonder this? Were these people laid off and then replaced with contractors? Why would they do this by laying off 10% of staff instead of just replacing all the new hires going forward with contractors, instead of continuing to hire into full time roles? I have to wonder if this is idle speculation on your part based on no evidence.
jmartrican 4y ago
"Gig Economy" is even better for small companies that do not have as much capital, and each hire is a larger percentage of their workforce than in a large company. Because of this, each hire in a small company is a bigger risk.

nszceta 4y ago

But they aren't done with the $4000 a month mortgage with dropping equity value that's holding them hostage.

sva_ 4y ago

Curious domain name.

sfpotter 4y ago

If you work full time, work is your life, or it’s whatever percentage of your life that you spend there on average per week. You can try to ignore this fact and focus on your life outside of work, but you’re just going to build cognitive dissonance over time and delay the day of reckoning. The only path forward is improving the quality of your life at work by improving labor regulations, and the only way to achieve that is through labor organizing, which means unions.

debarshri 4y ago

What I don't understand is the organisations they are laying off are also hiring. For eg. I saw Miro firing bunch of people last week and then hiring new people. I feel this is like bait and switch. CEOs take responsibility of the layoff but it feels like they dont really care. If employers are not loyal then why should the employees be.

peter_retief 4y ago

Layoff's are not new and will continue with the slow down in the world economy, many people will have to reinvent themselves in a world where their skills are no longer needed. I feel for older workers who will find it harder to find new work.

throwaway9191aa 4y ago

I made it for a little over 6 years as a full time freelancer before I went full time (about 6 years ago). If you are going freelance to avoid getting laid off... Since I became a full time employee I have actually gotten paid every month (almost never happened as a freelancer). I have never had to find a new contract, or had a contract fall through after turning down other work. I haven't had 90 day payment terms. I just never found that magical "pick up work when you want, and actually get paid on time" sales pipeline. You are not your own boss. You have clients, who have deadlines, who are paying you to meet those deadlines. If you don't, you suddenly find yourself in violation of contract law. At your full time job if you miss a deadline, how often do you get fired? That has never happened to me. But I have absolutely not been able to deliver on a contract and not gotten paid because of it. Once a client thinks "We don't actually want to move forward with that project", they try to find a way to get out of the contract. There are no severance packages for freelancers. Just months of wasted time that won't be compensated.

boringg 4y ago
I would agree to this. I think there is an idea that you become your own boss. In some ways thats true but mostly so you can say that to yourself or someone else. Your destiny is still controlled by clients. If you think about most things -- very few people are their own boss, there are always stakeholders who control your time spent. It's also a lot harder to disconnect for a period of time to go on a vacation. You kind of always have to be on. I'm sure there are some people who can do that and hack that split but when you have to constantly make sure theres a pipeline of work you have to manage client inbound.
- flavmartins 4y ago
  This. Maybe you can disconnect more if you are single. Or with a SO, but not children. Once you have a family, there's just a lot more demands on you. The safer, more secure route ends up being the more traditional corporate job.
  - jaredcwhite 4y ago

atdrummond 4y ago

Nothing was callous about the Google firings. Real callous firings are when you wake up to your entire company no longer existing, your pension gone and corporate raiders walking off with billions. Not being able to say goodbye on the internal message board is not a violation of your human rights. Enjoy your many months of severance - something almost nobody else in your country enjoys.

starik36 4y ago
Well said. I've been laid off a couple of times in the last 5 years. It sucked when I was notified of it. But thinking back, all of us here on HN are incredibly privileged. We get laid off with months of severance and basically get another well paying job nearly immediately.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Be careful with any use of "all"—there are large numbers of us who have never seen Silicon Valley, many who live in countries with poor standards of living, and even a number who don't work in tech at all. All of these people are also contributing to these conversations, and it would cause a lot of misunderstanding to assume they're all ex-FAANG.
  - rcarmo 4y ago
    This. I am always a bit shocked by the Valley bias to believe you can walk out of a building complex and get a job down the road. Even in the rest of the US it is nowhere that easy, and being in Europe (where many high profile tech companies hire copious amounts of people who can do the same-or better-work than their US counterparts but where the job market is fundamentally different), I sometimes find that worldview borderline insulting. I can only imagine what other countries might be like--I would expect ageism, local laws, market maturity, and even factors like origin and upbringing to still be significant risk factors if people were to be laid off in the casual manner the US seems to take for granted.
    - 4y ago

bmac27 4y ago

Obviously, there's plenty of bias here given the source, but I think on balance it either hinted at or laid out a lot of the issues we know about the state of 9-5 employment, most notably in the U.S, fairly well: -Lack of control over schedule/location -Lack of growth paths at many companies -Lack of leverage/Inputs match outputs almost 1:1 (sell time, make a dollar) -Not getting rewarded for the value you bring to a job; instead that value accruing mostly to people above you -That feeling of being merely a line on a spreadsheet Over time, I've learned that for some people, articles like this will really resonate and shake them to their core. (I happen to be in that category but I've experienced enough in previous entrepreneurial ventures for this enthusiasm to be tempered a little bit with reality every time I read things like this). Others will recoil seeing this, their first instinct going to the (very real) risks in leaving that system and conclude they're far more comfortable optimizing for the familiar. Both reactions are perfectly OK. There's no wrong or right answer. It's just what connects with you, as a person. The key is to understand that, either way, you're in charge of your career, regardless of what kind of professional setup suits you best and makes you happiest.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

As others have pointed out, dubious article. And, dubious proposition. For myself... I quit my GOOG job a year ago, and I certainly felt this was through 2022, and pursued contracting and freelance and startups and open source stuff and enjoyed the freedom. But once layoffs really started to heat up through the summer, I started to feel the push to finding a "stable" fulltime job, found one, and am more than happy to be employed securely, given the market. Especially after yesterday when 150+ of my fellow Canadian ex-Googlers were dumped onto the job market. A fulltime job right now is golden. More and more people are going to feel this way as things become unstable. With thousands of very qualified recently laid-off people dumped onto the market, compensation rates are going to fall, interviewing is going to get tougher, work more stressful, etc. Competition for consulting gigs will also get difficult.

onphonenow 4y ago
Yeah - the idea that 90% of workers want to be gig type workers seems insane to me. I’m sure companies will lap this up.
erikerikson 4y ago
This seems to be exactly why they were so loud about their layoffs, to produce this perspective. Old is new, right? As noted in TFA, the number of tech jobs increased during the same period. Very glad you're happy though.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  FWIW, I agree re: "why they were so loud". And I agree there's still plenty of hiring and opportunity out there. However, I also lived through the last two rounds of layoffs/contraction in this sector, and (as a jr dev) was unemployed for over a year in the post .com/9-11 crash. For me, I can see the writing on the wall, and have a family to feed. Tech jobs may have increased in the previous interval but it seems plain to me where they're headed over the next 1-2 years. Of course I'd like to be wrong.

jchw 4y ago

The mantra that runs American businesses, certainly American tech businesses, feels broken. Companies bend over backwards to make their financials fit the narrative of constant growth and are rewarded for it even when they get there by callously cutting costs rather than investing in the long term. Nearly no loyalty between employees and employers, and not much between companies and customers either. All that seems to matter anymore is the quarterly financial report. Sometimes it feels like you need to hit the reset button.

gruez 4y ago
>by callously cutting costs rather than investing in the long term Interest rates went up significantly over the past year. As a result, a dollar 10 years from now is now worth far less than it did a year ago. It makes total sense for companies to make money now (by cutting costs) rather than "investing in the long term". Sure, it sucks for the people involved, but it's not as irrational as you make it out to be.
- jchw 4y ago
  Literally the only concern you even regarded in that entire comment is the bottom line. As far as I can tell, expectations are so gruelingly low that the two things a company is expected to do is (barely) follow the law (but not too closely, as it would be wasteful) and make profit. It's not surprising that companies who just got done squeezing the pandemic economy and growing senselessly for what they knew was temporary had to leak employees, but just because what they did was rational doesn't mean it was good, or respectable. It's not the standard we should want.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >Literally the only concern you even regarded in that entire comment is the bottom line. Going back to your previous comment: "Companies bend over backwards to make their financials fit the narrative of constant growth and are rewarded for it even when they get there by callously cutting costs rather than investing in the long term" Why should they be "investing in the long term"? For the bottom line? Or as some sort of jobs program to keep people employed even if they're not really needed? >As far as I can tell, expectations are so gruelingly low that the two things a company is expected to do is (barely) follow the law (but not too closely, as it would be wasteful) and make profit. Yeah, that's basically the point of a company. Would you rather companies be responsible for making money, and keeping people employed even if they're not really needed? >It's not surprising that companies who just got done squeezing the pandemic economy and growing senselessly for what they knew was temporary had to leak employees, but just because what they did was rational doesn't mean it was good, or respectable. It's not the standard we should want. Would you rather that the people not be employed in the first place?

aynyc 4y ago

1. Denial: nah, google/meta/apple/XXX would never laid me off! 2. Anger: WTF, I dedicated xx years to XXXX, how dare they! 3. Bargaining: I'll never work for the man again! I'll be my own boss! 4. Depression: This sucks, out of work sucks! I don't have a social circle to hang out with. My life sucks! 5. Acceptance: OK. Time to get a new job. Oh, look at that start up, their motto is change the world, join us and be the next xxx(ian/ler/mate, etc). Sounds awesome, let me ask my friend for a referral. I might have taken liberty to the original with sarcasm.

AndrewKemendo 4y ago

Workers have not been getting the benefits of growth since 1971 and we're sick of it It's time to transition from a competition to a cooperation economy and it's going to take centuries - but if we don't do it soon we're going to face a social and ecological calamity that makes COVID-19 look tame in comparison. My opinion is that humanity solved material scarcity by the year 2000 and by continuing on the path of hoarding based capitalism, we now produce the wrong goods which is actively self destructive to the species. I write more about this here: https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

HideousKojima 4y ago
Your article sounds great... if you ignore the mountain of skulls left by the Soviets, the Chinese, the Khmer Rouge, etc. There's a much simpler explanation for what caused economic growth and employee compensation in real dollars to decouple in 1971: https://www.barrons.com/articles/gold-standard-dollar-dominance-bretton-woods-51628890861 https://www.barrons.com/articles/gold-standard-dollar-domina...
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Interesting, I've never heard an answer to "what happened in 1971". So decoupling from gold basically gave the elite a really good handle to manipulate the economy? Fascinating.
  - HideousKojima 4y ago
    Exactly. I'm not a gold bug (and the last 50 years have shown it doesn't behave too differently from any other commodity) but by requiring the government to tie the value of currency to something, anything, that they can't just create out of thin air limited how much the federal reserve and banks were able to screw over the average citizen.
    - inawarminister 4y ago
      To be fair even ancient Romans used to meddle around with reducing gold and silver content in their physical coinage, resulting in the crisis of the 3rd century. And Spanish silver bullion was too bad... But yes. Much better than limitless fiat being summoned from the void.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I feel that a survey of only 500 people, asking rather softball, "in-a-perfect-world" questions, may not exactly be a bellwether. When it comes to freelancing/contract work, a significant number of folks like the idea of it, but the reality of it is not something they are comfortable with. I think a lot of these folks may find themselves facing the same thing I did. They are now considered "olds," and won't find the doors open as wide as they used to be. Those added jobs are probably a lot of young, fresh, faces.

ergest 4y ago

There have been other periods of massive layoffs. (I’ve personally witnessed 2001 and 2008) Weren’t workers disillusioned with full time work back then or has it become easier and more acceptable to freelance in the last decade? Was it perhaps the callousness of the layoffs that ignited these emotions?

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eigenhombre 4y ago

I've worked less than full time for a good portion of my career -- sometimes salaried, sometimes on contract. If you can make it work financially, I highly recommend it. I can do unrelated personal work at a much higher level when I have 10+ hours per week available to advance it. And my energy for the "day job" is at its best when it doesn't eat up all my time, so my results per hour are better. The pattern is rare enough that there is a cultural barrier, at least in the US (and possibly worse elsewhere?). I accept that there will be fewer opportunities, and plan to do outstanding work during the hours I'm engaged. My employer gets a happy me and benefits from (by now) decades of experience. I hope that more tech (and non-tech) workers will join me in advocating for this sort of arrangement so it becomes more common.

eigenhombre 4y ago
Here's the former CTO of my last salaried job talking about part time work and the arrangement I had there: https://youtu.be/Gsai-2ZCHwk?t=431 https://youtu.be/Gsai-2ZCHwk?t=431

ronmoddesette 4y ago

Layoffs have been happening forever, I don't understand why all these stories are raising concerns. Lay-offs suck, but aren't anything new.

snozolli 4y ago
It's been 15 years since the start of The Great Recession. There's a generation of tech workers learning that things can quickly turn bad. I would also say that there's something particularly unsettling about these layoffs. We went from "nobody can find enough workers" to "we're shedding thousands of jobs along with all our peers in the industry" seemingly instantaneously. Additionally, the amount of corporate doublespeak is astounding, saying things that boil down to "we hired too many people" without those in charge being held accountable for the mistake.
- ronmoddesette 4y ago
  Good points. I would also agree that everything these past few years seem off.

taylodl 4y ago

Workers aren't done with full-time work, they're done with allegiance to their employer. They're also done with giving free labor to their employer. * Do I get paid overtime? No? Then I work 40 hours per week. * You expect two weeks notice when I resign? That's cute! * I'm jumping ship as soon as a better opportunity comes along. A better opportunity may be just working on a better project or learning new things. * I will share my salary information. It's not private or top secret. I'm sorry, this is the mess the MBA's made when the neocons took over the country in the 1980's. Everybody at the time saw this coming and now it's here. The employers made their bed and now it's time for them to lie in it. I don't feel a bit sorry for them and I won't shed a single tear when the FAANG companies and their ilk whine that they're having a hard time finding workers, which they will inevitably do. Too bad, so sad.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< I don't feel a bit sorry for them and I won't shed a single tear when the FAANG companies and their ilk whine that they're having a hard time finding workers, which they will inevitably do. I chuckled, but that is a constant cry, but with varying framing ( "no one wants to work", "we need schools to teach $skill_companies_want to prepare them for jobs of tomorrow" ). Overall, I think I agree. All of the above are gentlemen agreements. If one party does not honor social contact, you don't need to either. Naturally, you want to understand the consequence of those actions ( last time I quit, I gave my boss 3 weeks, but I genuinely liked him so I did not want to leave him stranded; the side benefit that he would likely be in my corner should we meet again - and in my industry, we well might ). Companies and their managers are pissed at the power worker's squirreled away during Covid and want it back. The need for control above all else became clear where record profits and productivity did not translate into WFH forever, but a clear 'now its time to bring us all back together' while also being surprised by 'hey, you are less productive; why?'
- taylodl 4y ago
  You're absolutely right. You still have agency. If you like your boss and don't want to leave them stranded, you may elect to give them several weeks notice. You just don't owe them that. Just like working more than 40 hours per week. Sometimes you might want to put in more time because you can't turn your mind off and you may just want to continue working on whatever it is you've been working on. The problem arises when they expect you to work more than 40 hours per week. As an aside, my company has been booming with WFH from a productivity standpoint. We're hiring people from all over the country and we've really learned how to make remote teams work. From the news it appears we may be an exception.

tonnydourado 4y ago

> 500 knowledge workers—including 109 that had recently been laid off—in the US Before commenting on the content of the article, I'm wondering if this is a sample worth giving any attention to? I'm no statistician, but drawing from a sample of 500 to make sweeping statements about "Workers" seems disingenuous, at least.

Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago

People who are done with the Full-Time Work can always try a few other options: - Starting their own company (and good luck managing all that stress and uncertainty while trying to do some work while securing a steady income) - Becoming a freelancer (be your own boss, pick up work when you want it... at least that's how it goes in theory) - Retiring (this one is not bad but only limited for people of appropriate age or with significant savings) - Being unemployed (that really sucks, as you might imagine, especially if you have a family to feed) - And, as a last resort, looking for a Full-time job again.

xen2xen1 4y ago
I did school / retraining as another option. Also hard financially, but it's an option to get ahead in the long run.

CommanderData 4y ago

I can see alot of emotion filled posts on here and LinkedIn about layoffs. It sucks but us employees service our employers. They will fire and hire as they choose, emotions mean nothing in a business decision like this. If you're hurt and don't want to play along. They will find someone who does. It's as simple as this. Also contracting offers you less job security, I don't think you realise.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
<< They will fire and hire as they choose, emotions mean nothing in a business decision like this. It is a way distance oneself from the decision and rationalize it, but I assure you that emotion absolutely plays into this. Especially at smaller companies, there is a reason recurring layoffs do not initially touch employees that manager likes.

say_it_as_it_is 4y ago

I want everyone to know that I personally hold myself responsible for these failures, but I won't be stepping down from my leadership position. It weighs heavy on my heart losing so many of my corporate family members. I love you all. Please don't say bad things about me in public because I will be trying to convince investors of my next big revolutionary opportunity, distancing myself from the current failures that I hold myself responsible for.

tr3ntg 4y ago

I’m in the A.Team network (the group behind this post) and I’ll say that they don’t even have many contracts available right now. If their own ability to find work for contractors is any signal, contracting is a horrible replacement for full time opportunities. It’s unpredictable.

rcarmo 4y ago

This reads like a very biased, clickbait extrapolation from a highly localized sample population, and barely registers as realistic when read from outside the US, and should be flagged as opportunistic clickbait. (About the only thing I can relate to in the title is the callousness/corporate insensitivity of the layoff process)

incrudible 4y ago

You don't want to feel "disposable"? Don't go work for a company with tens of thousands of employees where literally everyone is disposable, up to and including the C-suites, by design. You want to work part-time? Guess what, you are asking for a job that is disposable, because someone else needs to even out the work gap you left. That said, being disposable also comes with less responsibility and, by extension, less pressure. You want to feel important and valued? Go work at a small shop that isn't lavishly funded by OPM, where your work helps keep the company solvent. Or, go work for yourself. You'll learn to appreciate the peace of mind of having a paycheck magically show up at the end of month, or getting at least some benefits when it doesn't anymore.

naltroc 4y ago

There is nothing good about losing a job, no doubt. What I find interesting is how this becomes another example of software engineers facing the same struggles that artists have always faced. It happened first with open source software. People want to build cool stuff and make it freely available, asking for support in return. Reality check, nobody is paying your rent for your OSS. This is life-as-an-artist 101. Wanting more control over your schedule and the work you take is super liberating! It comes at a lot of costs. There is the time cost of finding clients and negotiating contracts. There is the billing cost, of invoicing your customer and finding a secure way to receive payments. Many platforms take a cut. There are the additional taxes of being self-employed: "In addition to regular income tax, freelancers are responsible for paying the self-employment tax of 15.3% in 2022" (https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/self-employment-tax https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/self-employment-tax) There is the stress of not knowing how long your current clients need you, and when you will have to start hustling again. Historically, full-time work fixes this issue. It is currently in question with the state of the news. It is generally easier to find freelance work for knowledge workers compared to creative workers. With the state of the news, the competition has become extremely fierce. The freelancer life is a very different reality that you really have to check before committing. Myself, I have absolutely enjoyed my experiences with freelance, and I believe it helped me develop an independent way of moving through the world. Now I'm happy to have gone from being a freelance musician of 9 years to full time tech worker. Food is great.

nsmog767 4y ago

The idea behind this is nice - "people want to diversify their risk and not be 'owned' by one company" - but I don't think it's in line with the way people are, unfortunately. People like the simple, dependable nature of the biweekly paycheck — full stop. I run a services business, and I've talked to many amazing in-house folks who I'm sure could do the same (and be more successful than I am). What I've found is that for many people, the concept of not being sure what they'll make is simply unpalatable. This article cites survey results but doesn't talk about all the reasons people don't enjoy or have success when they go it alone.

sequoia 4y ago

News flash: the grass looks greener on the other side! I’ve done both, most of my advice is the same as others who’ve contracted. One thing I’ll add: get retainer contracts! I had one contract that paid a couple hundred per month for me to be “on-call” if the main programmer was out in a small one-man shop. If they didn’t use their allotted hours, every couple months we’d check in, review something etc. I got a full time job but if I were still contracting this is where I’d focus a lot of attention: finding gigs that pay you monthly for maintenance, on-call etc.

didgetmaster 4y ago

It seems to me that to be a successful contractor, you usually have to have a certain personality type. In addition to doing the actual work, you have to be able to drum up business on a regular basis. This requires someone who can build a good network of friends, colleagues, and clients and interact with them regularly. Many programmers are introverted by nature. They went into programming because the idea of sitting alone in front of a computer all day did not cause a panic attack. They enjoy those long hours of 'solving a problem' using an IDE and testing the code over and over until it is right. They can sometimes go a whole week without engaging in a conversation longer than 10 minutes. This personality type does not match up well with a contracting business that has to 'wine and dine' potential clients; come up with proposals and present them to others; and regularly interact with existing clients to work out details.

shanedanger 4y ago

gigantic surprise: you're "family" when it means sacrificing for the company, and you're a human sacrifice when the company needs to make its shareholders feel better about the economy.

StevePerkins 4y ago

It should be called out more prominently that this website belongs to a freelancer firm. This thread is free advertising for a corporate P.R. piece, and doesn't reflect anything more broad and genuine than that. If you're going into freelancing because you don't like layoffs, then good luck with that.

dasil003 4y ago

I get that this is an advertisement, but the message lacks credibility. Workers that are most impacted and feel "betrayed" by layoffs are likely to value stability. Giving up full-time work is not a path to greater stability. If that's what you want, it's still better to go full-time, and just temper your expectations about the durability of your employment.

xianshou 4y ago

This article perfectly illustrates how small, steady distortions give birth to hyperbolic claims. Actual question (in article): 62% [of knowledge workers] said that the recent waves of layoffs have made them feel less secure committing to one employer. Preview text (below headline): 62% of knowledge workers say they don’t feel secure committing to one employer anymore. Headline: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model As Scott Alexander might say, the media rarely lies, but it loves to play telephone with itself.

yalogin 4y ago

I can confidently say nothing is going to change. People will forget this soon. There will be new companies and new “geniuses” and people will blindly pledge allegiance. It’s not meant to be disparaging, people always want to align with good positive growth stories and they will. The same thing happened in 1999, 2008 too. The cycle continued between 99-08 and then again between 08-now. If anything the idol worship of entrepreneurs increased and became more fervent. May be entrepreneurs became adept at marketing themselves or people became desperate but the worshipping culture got worse. Forget about workers are done with loyalty, I will consider it a win if the blind worshipping of entrepreneurs is dialed down.

Bhilai 4y ago

> In a survey of 500 knowledge workers in the US ... Apparently none of these folks were on a visa because to my knowledge, work visa holders cant really do freelance work. Nor can the folks on visa work for multiple employers. Surprisingly this article does not even mention visa based restrictions on employees and their state after being laid off. So I am not sure how representative this is of any sentiment amongst laid off people.

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gajus 4y ago

Hey there, I'm co-founder of contra.com - we started our platform for people that wanted to be independent, set their own rules for working and carve their own path to success. Nearly everyone on our team has current or previous experience as a contractor or freelancer and we're really focused on making the best place for everyone to be successful. Whether you're new to the work of indy working or have been doing it for years, check us out. We don't charge any commissions on your work, since you worked hard to make that money. In the second half of the year we even rolled out a feature that allows you to migrate your work easier from other contractor/freelancing sites to our platform so you can retain more of the money you've earned.