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I wonder if large companies recognise they are shitting in the pond they are floating in. As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and h

I wonder if large companies recognise they are shitting in the pond they are floating in. As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and hiring people I notice how candidates change over time (trying to adjust for how I change myself). I notice people care less about the company they work for and, honestly, it is more and more difficult to find arguments against. This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life. When more and more people started changing jobs every year just to get an incremental raise without even bothering to get the raise at the company I worked for I thought this is shortsighted and it will backfire on them and it will teach them. Well, did not happen. It just became a new normal. I wonder what new things are going to pass as acceptable. Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems. When you run a query on LinkedIn it will show you a list of candidates with their three last jobs. I noticed page after page after page everybody has their third last job starting 2020/2021. Meaning almost all seem to be spending less than a year on each of their jobs in past couple years. And these are all supposed to be senior candidates. It is no way to have a productive employee base. You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
In many positions, and at many points in your career, job hopping or the threat of it is the only real way to get any noticeable raise in actual compensation. Most companies just don't really reward loyalty anymore.
- hypothesis 4y ago
  Is that what they call a “loyalty tax”?
- atemerev 4y ago
  What is it, 80s? There is no “company loyalty” since 2000s, and soon there will be no “jobs” in general. We are all contractors and mercenaries now.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    Anyone staying more than a year is loyal in my book. And plenty stay more than a year.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Which actually illustrates the "no loyalty" point. A year is nothing. Staying that long doesn't demonstrate anything. But nobody should be "loyal" to companies. Companies are certainly not "loyal" to them. To be clear, when I'm on the clock at a company, I'm all in -- they're paying me to be. But off the clock, no. And I have no problem leaving a position when it's no longer beneficial to me. And employer-employee relationship is a business deal, nothing more.
      - atemerev 4y ago
        As it should be.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    There are some companies that behave like its still the 1960's, and try retain employees for the long term (a "job for life"). They are a vanishingly small minority, and usually not tech companies - but traditional companies that use technology and have in house dev teams.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I feel like there’s something weird going on in most companies above a certain size. I’ve worked at small companies with a wonderful culture and people put in lots of work to get a beautiful product shipped. But then when the company grows something changes and pushes those original passionate people out. Everyone else sees the passionate people get treated bad and react appropriately. Suddenly the large company carved its own soul out, and then wonders why its workers come empty. I would do all I could for a job that respected me as a human being. But it’s gotten to the point where you can’t trust anyone above you, no matter what they say. Doing well in a growing company means you have to get more and more cutthroat, so you’re incentivized to try less and less.
- outworlder 4y ago
  Middle management happens. When the company is smaller you get managers that are genuinely interested in growing the company – because that's what they grow too. Forget the 'mission' and such nonsense, noone truly cares about that. And the people that are highly visible early on tend to keep on growing their influence, organically. However, at a certain size, they don't grow all that much if at all. Sure, the company might still be growing on sales numbers, but it's still mostly static. Some new divisions may pop up but they are usually satellite operations that may or may not matter in the long run. The next best alternative is to fight to move up the reporting chain. That means company growth or wellbeing no longer matters; in fact, cannibalizing existing products or whole divisions or bringing them under you is how managers grow. They do not care who or what they have to step on to make that happen.
- sys_64738 4y ago
  I go to work for 40 hours then leave the problems there. Work isn't life.
- ravagat 4y ago
  It's definitely noticeable beyond a certain number. I like to say it's partly a human nature thing. There's some theory/law/term for this where the minority (whether negative or positive) ends up operating as majority and influencing business decisions.
wonderwonder 4y ago
I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box of his possessions under one arm and a potted plant in the other. Since then I have brought nothing personal into work. If I'm let go I just have to grab my keys and I'm out. Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut them they do. Why be loyal in that kind of environment? I will work hard for the money they pay me though. At one point I got a job offer for 25% more than I currently made. I told my current director at the time that I got a job offer for 40% more. The director matched the imaginary 40% and I stayed for another year. This company habitually fired people for the most minor of productivity drop offs. They had just recently promoted me without providing a raise. You reap what you sow. I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Remote work makes that even harder to find now.
- darkstar_16 4y ago
  Are you me ?
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Probably
- kungito 4y ago
  At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity. Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
> When you run a query on LinkedIn... > It is no way to have a productive employee base. Does it follow that LinkedIn's misleading statistics, to filter candidates, is also no way to build a productive employee base?
timr 4y ago
> This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life. While I get where you're coming from, it's a pretty big leap to go from what's happening now to "optimizing everything to the max". Twilio tripled in size since the pandemic, and wasn't/isn't profitable. The same arguments can be applied to most large tech companies. Things got insane, and lean times were inevitable. Given your 25+ years in the industry, you must realize that a huge number of younger engineers have never seen anything other than boom years.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  What are you referring to? We've gone through multiple cold cycles already. 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Some engineers may have gone through these cycles without issue, but everyone was acutely aware of the layoffs when they were occurring and if you graduated during those times it was especially hard to find a job until the job market resumed.
  - timr 4y ago
    > 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Everything is relative, I suppose, but those are the sorts of things a person might say if they've never actually seen a downturn. When I say "downturn", I mean: 2001. 2008. Compared to that, 2012 was boom times. I was running a startup then, and hiring was a brutal competition. Maybe not compared to 2020, but again...that's not normal. In 2008 we were hiring Ivy-league grads into hourly customer support roles. Circa 2000, programmers with decades of experience were going on unemployment.
    - fzeroracer 4y ago
      I mean, 2001 and 2008 are all 'boom times' compared to the great depression and other periods of severe economic downturns if we want to be relative. I'm not sure that really matters though to a new grad that took 6+ months to find a job during one of the period of lean times I mentioned in my prior post however. It can always be worse, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.
giantg2 4y ago
I've worked at my same company for 10 years and I'm disillusioned. There's no real advancement and nowhere else seems any better.
- whstl 4y ago
  Trust me, there is. But it requires the constant job-hopping and series of mind-numbing interviews everyone is doing.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
I don’t see a reason to even report money being literally wasted in my current jobs. There is an unused cloud service burning money at one of my jobs. Tens of thousands kind of money. Make a case for me even bothering to tell someone about it. You can’t.
- innomatics 4y ago
  Ok I'll bite. If management discover that you knew about the wastage, and did nothing, then it can be said that you aren't acting in the best interest of the company. Possibly the opposite, meaning you'd be fired. So there's that. If there is a culture of apathy and zero oversight and you are 100% sure no will ever care to show that you knew about it, then I pity your situation. Not bothering to tell someone about the wastage it is perpetuating that culture. Eventually company will fail or at best struggle. I'm my experience it's nicer working at profitable companies where everyone is doing their best to help the company to profit. That doesn't mean your income is less important than company income. But you agree on the former, then do everything in your capability to help with the latter. If your still not convinced please consider the environment. Cloud services consume not insignificant physical resources.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I always mention the waste because it feels like the right thing to do. I explain that we can reduce costs, but it will require some amount of engineering effort. Many times I get "it's not costing enough to worry about, focus on features." Of course, when the shit hit the fan like in 2020, they wanted all that cost reduced as fast as possible... If it's something simple like an unused service, I'll just shut it off.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  I figure that one of the things a company is paying me for is my expertise. I would be negligent in withholding that from them, so I'll always say something. Whether or not they listen isn't my problem -- I've done my duty.
denimnerd42 4y ago
accounting rules need to change such that employees are assets, not liabilities. https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-accounting-for-employees-as-costs-instead-of-assets https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-accounting-for-empl...
fzeroracer 4y ago
We're seeing the consequences of this stuff. Productivity is going down and you have a bunch of your typical CEO-favored sites going on about quiet quitting, ghosted interviews, unthankful employees etc. To counter this issue rather than improving the workplace they're deciding to try and enforce productivity through spying on workers and forcing people back into the office. It's all a symptom of what you mentioned where CEOs, upper level management etc are all so thoroughly disconnected from the workforce that they make boneheaded and bad business decisions that destroy the business 3-5 years out. Though none of them get punished for it because of golden parachutes ensuring even the most failing CEO gets rewarded for destroying the company they were running.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > unthankful employees This always gets me. It's as if they think they're doing people a favor by hiring them -- or at least expect people to think they're doing them a favor. It just ain't so. The reason companies hire people is because they'll make more money by doing so. It's not a favor, it's just cold business. Employees should not feel "thankful", they should feel as if they entered into a business relationship.
noddingham 4y ago
I don't understand how Twilio could need 8500 employees? Atlassian reports 8100 and I'd say they have a much larger and diverse body of work than Twilio. Am I being crass in thinking that this could have been avoided had they not grown headcount "like a rocket ship: straight up and to the right"?
- twawaaay 4y ago
  They did not need them. They already admitted in September they overhired just for the sake of growth and they lost focus through the process. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-staff-as-it-aims-for-profitability-in-2023 https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-... It is the same old story, really. First hires are careful and frugal decisions. But at some point when there is money laying around that needed to be spent people will hire almost anybody just for the sake of being able to report progress on the hiring they were supposed to do or to grow their kingdom or to jumpstart a new potential product that wasn't really thought through very well or a lot other reasons.
gedy 4y ago
My first two jobs out of college, were 14 years combined. End result was had to move away to work remote to afford a house. (Not SF either)
tennisflyi 4y ago
No they don't. Look anywhere else besides tech and you'll see. How people were so naive for so long is amazing. High salaries, RSU, whatever plush perks, blah, blah are just love bombing without the romance.
JohnFen 4y ago
> I notice people care less about the company they work for I learned, several decades back, that it's always a mistake to actually, really care about the company you work for. Care about your work, absolutely. Care about your professionalism. Care about your coworkers. But not about the company. No company cares in the slightest about you (and especially not companies who make a big show about how much they care). Caring about them is simply dysfunctional, opens you up to being taken advantage of, and sooner or later, will harm you.
Beaver117 4y ago
I'm only 25 and have had 6 jobs. The longest I've stayed at a company was a year. Just the way we have grown up in the industry, all the smart people giving advice on the internet say to not bother getting raises or promotions, just go and interview and it'll be much more efficient. And it has, I've gotten massive pay bumps every time. How can you for stay loyal to a company when they give a measly 3% raise? And make promotions ridiculously hard? Especially when that company will lay you off after years and escort you from the building with security?
- sys_64738 4y ago
  Each to their own, but I wouldn't hire you - I wouldn't even interview you. You do get to a point where you earn enough and can't be bothered to prove yourself at a new place yet again. It does get tired and boring as you realize that working life isn't really a pursuit that is your most important life goal.
  - throwawaycopter 4y ago
    > Each to their own, but I wouldn't hire you It's okay, a lot of other companies do. There's plenty of fish in this particular ocean. Even if you would hire him, nothing meaningful would change.
    - sys_64738 4y ago
      I agree. Good luck to him with his strategy and I hope it continues to work for him.
drewcoo 4y ago
> shitting in the pond they are floating in Spoken like a manager trying to conserve what remains. That "shit in the pond" is just fertilizer. Enough senior-ish people from big-ish companies are being let go that there are bound to be some startups forming. And likely bootstrapped startups given how frightened VCs seem. They know enough to eat the parent companies' lunches. But that's not the real threat. The real threat is that they know what those companies could have done and exactly how except that those companies were too frightened or conservative to do it. Those people can not just eat their parent companies' lunches, but all tomorrows' lunches. Nom nom nom. All you recently laid off: find one another, band together, turn that spite into progress and kick some ass!
piva00 4y ago
> You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism. Exactly, after 2 decades in this industry I've learned to let myself go with the flow of my build-up of cynicism. I hate interviewing, from both sides, so I tend to stay longer than what most other tech workers do (my stints vary between 2-4 years in general) but it's absurd how the pattern always repeat: I start a new job with a lot of motivation to learn the business, learn how I can have good impact in the product, foster discussions; just to eventually get jaded by management, start being cynical and working with the mindset "it's just a job, do what's expected, take the cash" until eventually I overcome my hatred of interviews and start looking for something else. What surprises me is how long I can keep the game of doing the bare minimum after getting cynical, I don't stop delivering but I know for sure if I was more motivated/less jaded I could deliver more, hell, I've done it at multiple places but it's extremely hard to not get affected by seemingly stupid decisions from upper management. I do my job well because I care about my colleagues and don't want them to have extra work, I don't do my job well for the companies sake or bottom line, not for the past 10-15 years at least. I simply don't care about the business at some point.
ravagat 4y ago
While I think you are right along I'd like to offer a different perspective of what's happening. A lot of what you've said is true-- candidates have changed over time, people are caring less about the company, and the general conscience has definitely shifted towards lesser company loyalty. We, especially Hacker News's readers, workers in tech and tech-adjacent roles are very much a small percentage. If you've read older books, especially autobiographies, biographies, and journal-like books you'll likely see that the following: > This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life. already existed even before during the great industrial revolution. It's very much related to human nature I think. On another point: > Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems. Surprisingly, there ARE a lot of people like this, the biggest problem I've found (having been in the hiring seat) is their competence and skills do not match what the companies need and are looking for. This is also correlated to why outsourcing has become such a big part of large companies today. Not just the cost benefits. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't invest into training and investment and likely if they already are, they cannot get employees to commit because of wages (financials for both the company and employee). > It is no way to have a productive employee base. We are still largely far away from this and likely why cities will still be playing a big part of greater economic change even amidst remote work. I even might venture to write that we have yet to truly see one besides what currently exists akin to Silicon Valley, MIC, and adjacent employee bases. Anyway, I lost my train of thought now. Feel free to discuss

nibbleshifter 4y ago

In many positions, and at many points in your career, job hopping or the threat of it is the only real way to get any noticeable raise in actual compensation. Most companies just don't really reward loyalty anymore.

hypothesis 4y ago
Is that what they call a “loyalty tax”?
atemerev 4y ago
What is it, 80s? There is no “company loyalty” since 2000s, and soon there will be no “jobs” in general. We are all contractors and mercenaries now.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  Anyone staying more than a year is loyal in my book. And plenty stay more than a year.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Which actually illustrates the "no loyalty" point. A year is nothing. Staying that long doesn't demonstrate anything. But nobody should be "loyal" to companies. Companies are certainly not "loyal" to them. To be clear, when I'm on the clock at a company, I'm all in -- they're paying me to be. But off the clock, no. And I have no problem leaving a position when it's no longer beneficial to me. And employer-employee relationship is a business deal, nothing more.
    - atemerev 4y ago
      As it should be.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  There are some companies that behave like its still the 1960's, and try retain employees for the long term (a "job for life"). They are a vanishingly small minority, and usually not tech companies - but traditional companies that use technology and have in house dev teams.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

I feel like there’s something weird going on in most companies above a certain size. I’ve worked at small companies with a wonderful culture and people put in lots of work to get a beautiful product shipped. But then when the company grows something changes and pushes those original passionate people out. Everyone else sees the passionate people get treated bad and react appropriately. Suddenly the large company carved its own soul out, and then wonders why its workers come empty. I would do all I could for a job that respected me as a human being. But it’s gotten to the point where you can’t trust anyone above you, no matter what they say. Doing well in a growing company means you have to get more and more cutthroat, so you’re incentivized to try less and less.

outworlder 4y ago
Middle management happens. When the company is smaller you get managers that are genuinely interested in growing the company – because that's what they grow too. Forget the 'mission' and such nonsense, noone truly cares about that. And the people that are highly visible early on tend to keep on growing their influence, organically. However, at a certain size, they don't grow all that much if at all. Sure, the company might still be growing on sales numbers, but it's still mostly static. Some new divisions may pop up but they are usually satellite operations that may or may not matter in the long run. The next best alternative is to fight to move up the reporting chain. That means company growth or wellbeing no longer matters; in fact, cannibalizing existing products or whole divisions or bringing them under you is how managers grow. They do not care who or what they have to step on to make that happen.
sys_64738 4y ago
I go to work for 40 hours then leave the problems there. Work isn't life.
ravagat 4y ago
It's definitely noticeable beyond a certain number. I like to say it's partly a human nature thing. There's some theory/law/term for this where the minority (whether negative or positive) ends up operating as majority and influencing business decisions.

wonderwonder 4y ago

I very much take a mercenary approach to my jobs. At my very first software job I remember seeing a let go employee walking sadly through the office with a box of his possessions under one arm and a potted plant in the other. Since then I have brought nothing personal into work. If I'm let go I just have to grab my keys and I'm out. Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut them they do. Why be loyal in that kind of environment? I will work hard for the money they pay me though. At one point I got a job offer for 25% more than I currently made. I told my current director at the time that I got a job offer for 40% more. The director matched the imaginary 40% and I stayed for another year. This company habitually fired people for the most minor of productivity drop offs. They had just recently promoted me without providing a raise. You reap what you sow. I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Remote work makes that even harder to find now.

darkstar_16 4y ago
Are you me ?
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Probably
kungito 4y ago
At my first job our manager was fired around the time his partner died of cancer and he was left with 2 little kids. He was slacking but also they knew about the whole situation. He was there for over 10 years. That changed me forever
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  That's really harsh. At the job I mentioned in the above they pip'd me because I delivered 8 points per week instead of 10 for 2 weeks right when COVID lockdown hit. They couldn't understand why the world melting down and my kids suddenly home schooling would have any affect on my productivity. Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

> When you run a query on LinkedIn... > It is no way to have a productive employee base. Does it follow that LinkedIn's misleading statistics, to filter candidates, is also no way to build a productive employee base?

timr 4y ago

> This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life. While I get where you're coming from, it's a pretty big leap to go from what's happening now to "optimizing everything to the max". Twilio tripled in size since the pandemic, and wasn't/isn't profitable. The same arguments can be applied to most large tech companies. Things got insane, and lean times were inevitable. Given your 25+ years in the industry, you must realize that a huge number of younger engineers have never seen anything other than boom years.

fzeroracer 4y ago
What are you referring to? We've gone through multiple cold cycles already. 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Some engineers may have gone through these cycles without issue, but everyone was acutely aware of the layoffs when they were occurring and if you graduated during those times it was especially hard to find a job until the job market resumed.
- timr 4y ago
  > 2012 was a year of large layoffs and tough hiring, so was 2016/2017 and now 2022 for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Everything is relative, I suppose, but those are the sorts of things a person might say if they've never actually seen a downturn. When I say "downturn", I mean: 2001. 2008. Compared to that, 2012 was boom times. I was running a startup then, and hiring was a brutal competition. Maybe not compared to 2020, but again...that's not normal. In 2008 we were hiring Ivy-league grads into hourly customer support roles. Circa 2000, programmers with decades of experience were going on unemployment.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    I mean, 2001 and 2008 are all 'boom times' compared to the great depression and other periods of severe economic downturns if we want to be relative. I'm not sure that really matters though to a new grad that took 6+ months to find a job during one of the period of lean times I mentioned in my prior post however. It can always be worse, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.

giantg2 4y ago

I've worked at my same company for 10 years and I'm disillusioned. There's no real advancement and nowhere else seems any better.

whstl 4y ago
Trust me, there is. But it requires the constant job-hopping and series of mind-numbing interviews everyone is doing.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

I don’t see a reason to even report money being literally wasted in my current jobs. There is an unused cloud service burning money at one of my jobs. Tens of thousands kind of money. Make a case for me even bothering to tell someone about it. You can’t.

innomatics 4y ago
Ok I'll bite. If management discover that you knew about the wastage, and did nothing, then it can be said that you aren't acting in the best interest of the company. Possibly the opposite, meaning you'd be fired. So there's that. If there is a culture of apathy and zero oversight and you are 100% sure no will ever care to show that you knew about it, then I pity your situation. Not bothering to tell someone about the wastage it is perpetuating that culture. Eventually company will fail or at best struggle. I'm my experience it's nicer working at profitable companies where everyone is doing their best to help the company to profit. That doesn't mean your income is less important than company income. But you agree on the former, then do everything in your capability to help with the latter. If your still not convinced please consider the environment. Cloud services consume not insignificant physical resources.
icedchai 4y ago
I always mention the waste because it feels like the right thing to do. I explain that we can reduce costs, but it will require some amount of engineering effort. Many times I get "it's not costing enough to worry about, focus on features." Of course, when the shit hit the fan like in 2020, they wanted all that cost reduced as fast as possible... If it's something simple like an unused service, I'll just shut it off.
JohnFen 4y ago
I figure that one of the things a company is paying me for is my expertise. I would be negligent in withholding that from them, so I'll always say something. Whether or not they listen isn't my problem -- I've done my duty.

denimnerd42 4y ago

accounting rules need to change such that employees are assets, not liabilities. https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-accounting-for-employees-as-costs-instead-of-assets https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-accounting-for-empl...

fzeroracer 4y ago

We're seeing the consequences of this stuff. Productivity is going down and you have a bunch of your typical CEO-favored sites going on about quiet quitting, ghosted interviews, unthankful employees etc. To counter this issue rather than improving the workplace they're deciding to try and enforce productivity through spying on workers and forcing people back into the office. It's all a symptom of what you mentioned where CEOs, upper level management etc are all so thoroughly disconnected from the workforce that they make boneheaded and bad business decisions that destroy the business 3-5 years out. Though none of them get punished for it because of golden parachutes ensuring even the most failing CEO gets rewarded for destroying the company they were running.

JohnFen 4y ago
> unthankful employees This always gets me. It's as if they think they're doing people a favor by hiring them -- or at least expect people to think they're doing them a favor. It just ain't so. The reason companies hire people is because they'll make more money by doing so. It's not a favor, it's just cold business. Employees should not feel "thankful", they should feel as if they entered into a business relationship.

noddingham 4y ago

I don't understand how Twilio could need 8500 employees? Atlassian reports 8100 and I'd say they have a much larger and diverse body of work than Twilio. Am I being crass in thinking that this could have been avoided had they not grown headcount "like a rocket ship: straight up and to the right"?

twawaaay 4y ago
They did not need them. They already admitted in September they overhired just for the sake of growth and they lost focus through the process. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-staff-as-it-aims-for-profitability-in-2023 https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-... It is the same old story, really. First hires are careful and frugal decisions. But at some point when there is money laying around that needed to be spent people will hire almost anybody just for the sake of being able to report progress on the hiring they were supposed to do or to grow their kingdom or to jumpstart a new potential product that wasn't really thought through very well or a lot other reasons.

gedy 4y ago

My first two jobs out of college, were 14 years combined. End result was had to move away to work remote to afford a house. (Not SF either)

tennisflyi 4y ago

No they don't. Look anywhere else besides tech and you'll see. How people were so naive for so long is amazing. High salaries, RSU, whatever plush perks, blah, blah are just love bombing without the romance.

JohnFen 4y ago

> I notice people care less about the company they work for I learned, several decades back, that it's always a mistake to actually, really care about the company you work for. Care about your work, absolutely. Care about your professionalism. Care about your coworkers. But not about the company. No company cares in the slightest about you (and especially not companies who make a big show about how much they care). Caring about them is simply dysfunctional, opens you up to being taken advantage of, and sooner or later, will harm you.

Beaver117 4y ago

I'm only 25 and have had 6 jobs. The longest I've stayed at a company was a year. Just the way we have grown up in the industry, all the smart people giving advice on the internet say to not bother getting raises or promotions, just go and interview and it'll be much more efficient. And it has, I've gotten massive pay bumps every time. How can you for stay loyal to a company when they give a measly 3% raise? And make promotions ridiculously hard? Especially when that company will lay you off after years and escort you from the building with security?

sys_64738 4y ago
Each to their own, but I wouldn't hire you - I wouldn't even interview you. You do get to a point where you earn enough and can't be bothered to prove yourself at a new place yet again. It does get tired and boring as you realize that working life isn't really a pursuit that is your most important life goal.
- throwawaycopter 4y ago
  > Each to their own, but I wouldn't hire you It's okay, a lot of other companies do. There's plenty of fish in this particular ocean. Even if you would hire him, nothing meaningful would change.
  - sys_64738 4y ago
    I agree. Good luck to him with his strategy and I hope it continues to work for him.

drewcoo 4y ago

> shitting in the pond they are floating in Spoken like a manager trying to conserve what remains. That "shit in the pond" is just fertilizer. Enough senior-ish people from big-ish companies are being let go that there are bound to be some startups forming. And likely bootstrapped startups given how frightened VCs seem. They know enough to eat the parent companies' lunches. But that's not the real threat. The real threat is that they know what those companies could have done and exactly how except that those companies were too frightened or conservative to do it. Those people can not just eat their parent companies' lunches, but all tomorrows' lunches. Nom nom nom. All you recently laid off: find one another, band together, turn that spite into progress and kick some ass!

piva00 4y ago

> You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism. Exactly, after 2 decades in this industry I've learned to let myself go with the flow of my build-up of cynicism. I hate interviewing, from both sides, so I tend to stay longer than what most other tech workers do (my stints vary between 2-4 years in general) but it's absurd how the pattern always repeat: I start a new job with a lot of motivation to learn the business, learn how I can have good impact in the product, foster discussions; just to eventually get jaded by management, start being cynical and working with the mindset "it's just a job, do what's expected, take the cash" until eventually I overcome my hatred of interviews and start looking for something else. What surprises me is how long I can keep the game of doing the bare minimum after getting cynical, I don't stop delivering but I know for sure if I was more motivated/less jaded I could deliver more, hell, I've done it at multiple places but it's extremely hard to not get affected by seemingly stupid decisions from upper management. I do my job well because I care about my colleagues and don't want them to have extra work, I don't do my job well for the companies sake or bottom line, not for the past 10-15 years at least. I simply don't care about the business at some point.

ravagat 4y ago

While I think you are right along I'd like to offer a different perspective of what's happening. A lot of what you've said is true-- candidates have changed over time, people are caring less about the company, and the general conscience has definitely shifted towards lesser company loyalty. We, especially Hacker News's readers, workers in tech and tech-adjacent roles are very much a small percentage. If you've read older books, especially autobiographies, biographies, and journal-like books you'll likely see that the following: > This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life. already existed even before during the great industrial revolution. It's very much related to human nature I think. On another point: > Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems. Surprisingly, there ARE a lot of people like this, the biggest problem I've found (having been in the hiring seat) is their competence and skills do not match what the companies need and are looking for. This is also correlated to why outsourcing has become such a big part of large companies today. Not just the cost benefits. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't invest into training and investment and likely if they already are, they cannot get employees to commit because of wages (financials for both the company and employee). > It is no way to have a productive employee base. We are still largely far away from this and likely why cities will still be playing a big part of greater economic change even amidst remote work. I even might venture to write that we have yet to truly see one besides what currently exists akin to Silicon Valley, MIC, and adjacent employee bases. Anyway, I lost my train of thought now. Feel free to discuss