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What Happens Now to All the Laid Off Tech Workers? [audio]
- gkanai 4y agoOdd Lots Podcast interviews patio11
- joseph_grobbles 4y ago[dead]
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoHopefully their skills get redistributed to the wider market so more companies can ship decent products and innovate instead of only a few ones holding the brainpower hostage
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ak_111 4y agoI think there is a bit of a contradiction in this logic. Why would redistributing 'skills' that lead other companies to lose cash at an astronomical scale help other companies improve? If their product and innovation was truly transformative perhaps the tech industry wouldn't be in the state it is in as sustainable business.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoHow many engineers feel restricted by management? Putting them in smaller and more flexible companies can help them shine and finally put their experience to full use
- ak_111 4y agoYou are assuming that in these companies the managers are a completely separate class, but the truth is in most of big tech most senior developers / architects feed directly into product roadmap and management. In fact most of big tech make a point of trying not to hire pure managerial folks. In other words it is not purely management who are responsible for most user-hostile interfaces, ethically dubious business models (how to optimise gaming addiction) or bloated infrastructure (kubernetes when it is not needed,...), highly-skilled tech folks need to own up for these low-interest rate phenomena as well.
- cousin_it 4y agoI think the companies got worse because they changed organizationally, not because their programmers got worse.
- throwme_123 4y agoPart of the problem is they hired way too many non-programmers. Became like construction work with one guy working and 4 planning around.
- ClumsyPilot 4y agoWhy do you believe this was a widespread problem?
- whstl 4y agoThat seems plausible to me, at least in some cases. I don't know the full picture in other companies, but in the case of Meta/Facebook, the company actually asked managers to transition to individual contributor jobs.
- stakhanov 4y ago> Why would redistributing 'skills' that lead other companies to lose cash [...] help [...]? My guess at the parent commenter's presupposition would be that they had been overpaid and will now be forced to work for normal wages. At those lower wages, it might become economical to employ them, while those same people weren't economical at silicon-valley-scale wages.
- bee_rider 4y agoIf someone is fired from a start-up that just has some kind of nebulous speculated future value, it doesn’t mean they lacked skills — they might have been successfully creating some part of it. The market just has decided that what they were working on might not actually have that nebulous future value. They might be able to for example go work for a company that produces objects, and then sells them to consumers in exchange for money. Then the value of their skills will be a little more obvious I guess.
- dhfbshfbu4u3 4y agoThere are good products shipping now?
- yourapostasy 4y ago> ...their skills get redistributed to the wider market so more companies can ship decent products and innovate... There is a larger technical culture and corporate political element with a strong undercurrent of budgets that has more to do with "products and innovate" at these non-BigTech companies, than someone from leading edge BigTech might be used to. BigTech companies also have such characteristics in most teams, but those leading edge teams due to incentives get all the public relations press internally and even externally. Many of my non-BigTech clients have some full time staff who are plenty proficient in technical matters to seek BigTech employment. However, the rank and file staff of developers are almost invariably majority outsourced H1B's for budgetary reasons. This sets up a perverse incentive. No matter how much the developers might agree with the advanced concepts promulgated by the full time staff developers, at the end of the day their outsourcing companies' contract renewals rely upon how many tasks assigned to them get "done" on time. And the project managers / scrum masters / etc. all the way up to and including middle management do not act upon the full-timers' advice (pretty basic, like build security and SRE in from the beginning) and encode it into the definition of "done" because they don't directly benefit from doing so. There are ways to fix this situation, but they don't directly involve fancy tech or tech stacks.
- mkr-hn 4y agoI wonder what the industry attrition rate is. How many move to another tech company, and how many move on to a new career? This boom is old enough that a large portion of people who got in at the start out of college (or by skipping college) should be in or approaching their 30s where people start reevaluating their priorities.
- ak_111 4y agoI am interested in the attrition rate from Big Tech to traditional tech (such as enterprise software at banks or government). This will probably be a very hard adjustment for many in terms of salary, tech stack, benefits, work hours, culture,... But I still think many will prefer it over leaving tech all together., since as you said they wouldn't have learnt any other discipline if it was their first job out of college.
- rsynnott 4y ago> This will probably be a very hard adjustment for many in terms of salary, tech stack, benefits, work hours, culture Work hours? I would think that _work hours_ would be a particularly _easy_ adjustment going from Big Tech to a bank; those are normally 9-5.
- ak_111 4y agoI think hard to compare in the abstract due to huge level of variance, probably if you working at palantir, uber or amazon you are working longer hours than say if you are working for apple, google or microsoft.
- Yuioup 4y agoThey go out and get jobs at more financially responsible companies, or start their own. There is plenty of work.
- jossclimb 4y agoI never got laid off, but the whole thing left me with a bad taste, so I have decided to go out on my own. Sure, there is risk, however there is also risk being with a large company and the whole 'we are family' culture kool aid is show to be the BS most of us knew it was. Recently we have seen profitable companies drop workers for no reason other than to appease activist investors. Now sure, this is their prerogative, can't argue with that, it's my prerogative to give (or not give) them my time. So just as my own business could fail, so could my position with a corp be liquidated, yet without being able to read the financial tea leafs and see it coming. At the end of the day though, I am going to regret not trying then I am giving it a go. Right now I am in my thirties and have some flexibility to roll with the punches of capitalism, but that won't be the case when I hit 40/50+ when the one acceptable 'ism that everyone turns a blind eye to starts to playout ; ageism.
- matwood 4y ago> Right now I am in my thirties and have some flexibility to roll with the punches of capitalism, but that won't be the case when I hit 40/50+ when the one acceptable 'ism that everyone turns a blind eye to starts to playout ; ageism. There have been studies which put the average age of successful founders in their mid-40s. We romanticize the kid in college making something happen, but the reality is that people need experience to see problems worth solving. Found it: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
- jossclimb 4y agoright gotcha, I was more referencing being 40+ in a corp. I remember IBM trying to cull older workers and then getting caught out.
- DigitalSea 4y agoThey go and get jobs at fiscally responsible competitors.
- dgb23 4y agoSomething that isn't clear to me is what "tech workers" means and what kind of "tech workers" have been laid off. Is it backend engineers, operations, UI designers, marketing/HR/management working in tech? Is an accountant a tech worker if they use slick, modern software? Does it matter where they work or who they're working with? What is a "tech company"?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FL410 4y agoAs far as I can tell, it's programmers and adjacent. I am currently hiring for an infrastructure role (sr. network engineer/architect) and it has been miserable, even for remote positions. Certainly don't see an influx of available talent happening in the infrastructure world.
- noknownsender 4y agoI'd add my anecdote to that assessment: I'm a Sysadmin with some networking certs, and the linkedin messages have started coming in more frequently, and stating (quite good) salaries up front. So it certainly does not seem like are 100,000 unemployed sysadmins in the job market currently.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI get the feeling it's seen as an unattractive janitorial job which is perhaps why there are so many attempts to re-title the job as Devops or SRE or Platform Engineer or whatever the de jure is. I suppose if I had to pick my title, I'd just say "Infrastructure Engineer" because that seems to strike the right balance of vague yet fancy enough to put in an email signature. Really it would be "IT Dude (open source focused)". As much as companies want to seem to believe they can get rid of them, they need someone generalist around who understands how things fit together and can take on the occaisional maintenance task.
- jimbo9991 4y ago
- lylejantzi3rd 4y agoDo we have numbers on what percentage of laid off "tech workers" are programmers vs IT, management, hr, product, design, scrum masters, marketing, sales, accounting, philanthropy, etc?
- throwme_123 4y agoThis feels relevant. https://blog.johndowning.ca/2013/12/getting-screwed-by-public-sector.html https://blog.johndowning.ca/2013/12/getting-screwed-by-publi...
- hotpotamus 4y agoI've dug holes with hand tools and I've been the IT guy getting managed by a team of different types of managers, so I can say in defense of those municipal workers that I couldn't dig a hole for 8 hours straight - it's more of a relay marathon than a sprint. But yes, I've been on calls with managers that basically boil down to, "which peon can we find to do this work?", to which I'd say, "you're talking to him". Didn't stop me from getting laid off though.
- tonnydourado 4y agoOther than the meme illustrating the article, I'd say there is nothing in any way whatsoever at all relevant on this very old, drowned on clichês, disconnected, and somewhat pointless, rant.
- donkeyd 4y agoIs it though? > and those useless HR departments staffed by those who can't do real work As written by a guy who is: > author, reporter, editor, blogger and columnist So he just writes about stuff others are doing. Would that be real work then? There seems to be an incredible arrogance in the tech community (and especially among devs) that only devs are real tech workers. That all these other roles like HR, legal, marketing, recruitment and management are just fluff and everything would be better and more efficient without them. This stuff is short sighted and wrong. As a developer, do you want to write employment contracts? Do you want to think of benefits packages? Do you want to make sure the WiFi network is functioning correctly? You you want to change the ink cartridges on the printers? You you want to write down list of keywords for ad campaigns? Do you want to sit through sessions with investors who want to know everything about a product they hardly understand? No, you don't and all these people exist because you don't have to all that stuff. They exist because they're good at handling those things while a dev is good at writing code. Are they annoying sometimes? Sure. Are there some people in those roles who don't add much value? Probably, but I've seen plenty of devs who didn't add much value. Why do discussions in dev communities keep discounting all the layoff because "it's probably just recruitment"? These are still people who lost their jobs and need to find other jobs and their lives aren't worth less because the don't push code.
- theGnuMe 4y agoThey go off and invent the future.
- have_faith 4y agoWith employment numbers so high here in the UK and in the US people need to remember that there are massive amounts of "tech" jobs in non-tech companies and they generally haven't been doing massive layoffs. The demand is still there if you don't mind doing the same job in a less sexy company.
- sheepscreek 4y agoTL;DR Sorry for the long comment. This should have been a blog post somewhere (but I don’t have a blog). Companies and people have a mutual agreement that either can walk away from. There may be a slight power disbalance in the company’s favour. How individuals are fired and laid off should be regulated to provide basic decency/courtesy (give them basic rights such as being informed by/having the chance to talk to their manager 1:1). I don’t know the labor laws, this may already be the case. But not knowing my/our rights is also a failing of the system. ————— Why do companies exist? What should be the role of a good corporate citizen? These are questions that have puzzled me for the last decade or so. I think, depending on the context - the answer can change. Depending on role of the individual at the company, the answer can change too. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, a company limits their (otherwise unlimited) liability. That’s another way of saying, a company limits the personal liability of its leadership in all matters concerning the company (eg. so they don’t end up losing their homes and bank accounts in the case of a bankruptcy). For those of you well versed in this topic, I am referring to a company being an incorporated entity (an S corporation in the US, or a federal/provincial corporation in Canada). From an investors perspective, it’s a way to multiply their large investment while having some say in the company’s running. From a board of directors perspective, it’s a way to share your learned experience of running a company with other executives without being directly involved in operations. And acting as the first line of representatives (of the shareholders) to hold the company leadership accountable. They get modestly compensated for their troubles (compared to executives). Now the best part - from an employees’ perspective, a company is provides them/their family security and shelter (Maslov’s bottom hierarchy). Some of us luck out and work at companies where we believe in their mission (upper half of the hierarchy of needs). I’ve always known the above, but writing it down at once gave me a profound realization - a company is a mutual agreement. Doing work that is valued by the company in exchange for personal security (money, benefits, perks, etc). Either side can choose to walk away any time and they have control over how they do it. This is the part that sucks the most and is least consistent. Like getting laid off over zoom, all access being immediately revoked, etc vs more humane layoffs such as Gitlabs - where each affected individuals manager reached out to them. This should be non-negotiable in my opinion. Dehumanizing the act of laying off someone is the most selfish and disrespectful thing an organization can ever do. To think about it - this isn’t all that different from a breakup. In any case, I think the law can work on the last thing above and maybe - just maybe - there is also an opportunity to revisit the notice period (esp. in the case of a layoff/firing an employee). Mandatory 2 weeks or pay in lieu seems little/too short, especially for an employee who may have worked somewhere for years. I don’t know if there are labor laws surrounding severance, but I am clear now that we need them to fix the disbalance of power between a company (say 100 people or more) and an employee.