9 ms·

Teams are becoming smaller

94 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago
Don’t get pushed to the brink. Just be clear to ‘leadership’ that things take time or money. Clearly communicate much longer timelines, and don’t stress yourself out too much.
- eggsmediumrare 4y ago
  This is much harder to do when you 1) have dependents, 2) are bad at interviewing, 3) don't have time to interview, 4) don't have in-demand skills and/or 5) are not financially stable.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > and/or 5) are not financially stable which many people - even senior developers - aren't because housing and other CoL expenses eat up wages everywhere, and companies exploit that as they wish. Additionally, at least in the US and parts of the EU, the complications of legalized slavery aka H1B / other work visas make protesting against bad conditions much harder.
    - adra 4y ago
      Don't talk about legalized slavery in regards to these programs. They have the right to walk away at any time, and that's their choice. Spend some time to read about kafala if you want to learn about modern slavery.
      - grugagag 4y ago
        They have the right but in reality can’t find another job within the short timespan and after which they become illegal immigrants and have to go back home. Sure, it’s not impossible but on average it’s very hard to break the shackles of the H1B visas. Often these people put up high stakes to obtain these jobs and going back leaves them in debt. It’s a system designed to exploit
      - yeahbutiguess 4y ago
        Both can be true. Just because one is worse does not make the other ok. A worse situation does not trivialize a bad situation.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Oh I'm aware of that. The thing is, modern forms of slavery are varied in forms. Some are based on laws but still criticized as inhumane (e.g. US prison labor, kafala in Arab nations), some are based on laws but widely accepted (H1B, conscription in militaries), and some are completely illegal (e.g. human trafficking for sexual and agricultural exploitation).
        hgsgm 4y ago
        Being sent back home is absolutely not slavery. Not everything bad related to work is slavery.
    - jonfw 4y ago
      For any high cost of living area where a senior developer works, there are plenty of non-developer workers doing the same 9-5s in the same office buildings on a fraction of their salary. Maybe try a longer commute or a roommate before whining about your cost of living W.r.t. immigration- you're certainly right. I would be terrified to rock the boat if my employer could put me at risk of deportation
- zucked 4y ago
  This. Leadership may very well ignore or overlook your perspective, but make sure that your concerns are documented as risks or assumptions somewhere. Businesses almost always CYA, you should, too.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  That only works when you have an alternative job offer, or you are confident your boss is bluffing.
  - Buttons840 4y ago
    Or you have savings. Getting trapped in stressful bullshit that takes years off your life is an unseen price of many purchases; beware people.
- jarjoura 4y ago
  This is something I learned late in my career. Leadership has to constantly justify their priorities and expenses. The goals they set and expect from their teams is also built from the feedback they receive from their teams. What can they realistically build given the resources they have and teams in the time they need to deliver something? It's not magic and too often people fear if they don't commit to aggressive deadlines that they will be punished for it. Yes, this is a tug-of-war, leadership pushes to maximize and the teams push back to minimize until there is an agreement. However, the important take-away, be open and honest about risks, and blockers. Give early and often reports to upper management about the state of things. As long as you're giving visibility to things you help leadership plan and realign on expectations so they can make course corrections if needed. Too often I see things fall apart on the ground and another engineer tries to pick up the slack doing extra work. Leadership is never informed and so believe things are going as expected. They just see the work getting done, even if the team on the ground feels overworked and understaffed and so yea, it's not healthy.
mindvirus 4y ago
I went through some pretty bizarre layoffs. A huge chunk of the ICs got laid off - so managers that had teams of 8-10 now had teams of 3-6. The product org was hit, but proportionally not as heavily. No projects got descoped. The end result was that the engineers were basically in meetings throughout the day every day, as they'd each suddenly have twice as many projects on their plate. Then because things inevitably were moving more slowly, more meetings got added to track progress more closely. This was earlier in the pandemic, so a bunch of engineers just left for greener pastures. And as you can imagine, the whole thing ground to a halt. The big thing I realized is how hard it was to for leadership - whether product or engineering - to say no, or to stack rank priorities. It's hard to blame them, the past decade has been one of abundance. There were always more resources around the next corner, and so having to deal with less wasn't a skill that anyone had developed.
- cheschire 4y ago
  There's a whole book about this sort of thing called The Phoenix Project that you may be interested in reading. A lot of what you're saying falls under "the first way" which covers systems thinking and the flow of work.
  - barbariangrunge 4y ago
    I enjoyed the book, but after looking at the situation from a querying theory pov, I became skeptical of some of the authors claims
    - episteme 4y ago
      Care to elaborate?
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      Kind of a non- statement. The book is fiction, and an extended advertisement for the author's management consulting business. Its "claims" are barely hypotheses.
- treeman79 4y ago
adra 4y ago
Pre-COVID my first management job was working for a company that was chronically understaffed and I ended up spending a good 20% of my time dealing just with hiring for the couple years I was there. Near the end, I could only dedicate about 5% of my time to dev and < 30% to support my largely junior team. The rest of it was wasted on bureaucratic processes that were a vampire of my time. In the end, I didn't think I could honestly protect the team through what was surely to be a painful slide into mediocrity, so opted out. I felt terrible leaving them to whatever came next, but once you realize you're unable to make positive change, it's time to go.
- 317070 4y ago
  What is "meteocracy"?
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    Post-impact constitutional crisis
  - yeahbutiguess 4y ago
    A misspelling of mediocrity, I'd assume?
  - adra 4y ago
    Autocorrect gone wrong
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Rule by weather forecasters.
    - hardlianotion 4y ago
      By the weather gods themselves.
  - 4y ago
simon_o 4y ago
What kind of dystopian bullshit is this? Occurrences of phrases like "better pay"/"higher wages"/"more benefits" in this BBC article: 0 Creative descriptions for intentionally burning people out: I stopped counting, but "maximise their potential" is certainly my favorite euphemism.
0xfeba 4y ago
I've had 2 previous companies do something similar. Team of 5 or so develop a product. It's realeased and they move / layoff all but one or two devs including me. I get overburdened; ask for a raise. The first company that did this, the boss literally scoffed at me. I was gone within a couple months. The second company recognized my value and gave me a very generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I got an offer I couldn't refuse.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  > The second company recognized my value and gave me a very generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I got an offer I couldn't refuse. So they only recognized a portion of your value.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Or the mafia went after them
  - 0xfeba 4y ago
    Considering it was government contracting, it was as good as it was going to get. The offer I got was from a near-tech company.
yeahbutiguess 4y ago
Workers, maybe it's time we started collectively pushing back? I don't care if it's unions, or work stoppages, or guilds, or industrial action, or what. But they've been squeezing workers too hard.
- pixl97 4y ago
  I question if the ruling class has broken the system enough that this doesn't work... Old days: People stop working. Company stops making money. (A|B) Company hires pinkertons to kill off the opposition | Company concedes and gives better working conditions. Today?: People stop working. Companies beg government to give them money because they're too big to fail. Individuals lose their livelihood/homes/next meal long before company has a deep financial impact.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Today: people automate out many low level processes and offshore the rest to India / Mexico City / PI
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I think what’s needed are more along the lines of worker protections on an government level. It should be significantly more difficult to drop 10% of your staff because of market performance, or there should be enforced consequences which are expensive. Several months severance, executive pay clawbacks, stock and options payouts, those sorts of things.
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
The crazy thing is it feels like wages are really set by the standard of living. Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a decent place to live, a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings. This idea that we live in this meritocracy and you get paid for the value you create is completely bunk. Were all basically accepting a livable wage like cattle being farmed for value by rich people.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  This comment shows an extremely privileged perspective. Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a [deleted: decent] place to live, [deleted: a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings].
  - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
    This is a complete fallacy too. We are working harder now than people did before the industrial revolution.
    - eouwt 4y ago
      1) [citation needed] 2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying in our 30s and have things like running water?
      - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
        Productivity has gone way up in the last few decades, and people can afford fewer and fewer children. It used to be common to afford 8 children on one income. Wake up dude
        gruez 4y ago
        >Productivity has gone way up in the last few years, and people can afford fewer and fewer children. That doesn't say much when that's been the long run trend since the industrial revolution.
flappyeagle 4y ago
There was a large tech company I know of which had a practice of laying people off a giving everyone else a raise. I don’t know if it helped any but it seemed quirky and interesting at the time
- petsfed 4y ago
  That lays bare the economics of the layoff in a very easy-to-understand way, provided the raises don't eat up all the savings from the layoffs. Using nice round numbers, the following would need to be true for the layoffs to make sense: You have a team of 20, each making 100k/year, but a lot of downtime for all of them. At your current clip, you can only afford 1.5M/year total for your team. You have enough work for maybe 13 at a reasonable pace for your wages, or 10 at a higher pace. So you could let 7 go and risk morale problems with the unchanged wages, or you let 10 go, give 30% raises to match the raised demands, and your payroll is still less than what you can afford. If all of that was explained, alongside copious expressions of ownership on the part of the people responsible for not driving enough business in, I would gladly work again for the people laying me off.
- asdff 4y ago
  That's like a general fixing a lack of rations by taking on heavy losses in the next battle. I'm sure morale was high at that org.
moneywoes 4y ago
Given teams are shrinking, wages are decreasing etc is it better to be a business owner in this macro environment
overgard 4y ago
I think layoffs tend to always look good to management and investors because of the pareto principle (80% of the work being done by 20% of the people). You certainly get a short term cost saving. The downside though is that other 20% is not necessarily stuff you want your best performers working on, and there's always going to be another 20%.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  And, unfortunately, most companies are terrible at identifying that useful 20%.
- asdff 4y ago
  Its always nice how management uses easy-to-remember mathematical principles without considering the shape of their data or the proportion of variance explained by these factors, and if that principle would even be applicable.

94 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

Don’t get pushed to the brink. Just be clear to ‘leadership’ that things take time or money. Clearly communicate much longer timelines, and don’t stress yourself out too much.

eggsmediumrare 4y ago
This is much harder to do when you 1) have dependents, 2) are bad at interviewing, 3) don't have time to interview, 4) don't have in-demand skills and/or 5) are not financially stable.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > and/or 5) are not financially stable which many people - even senior developers - aren't because housing and other CoL expenses eat up wages everywhere, and companies exploit that as they wish. Additionally, at least in the US and parts of the EU, the complications of legalized slavery aka H1B / other work visas make protesting against bad conditions much harder.
  - adra 4y ago
    Don't talk about legalized slavery in regards to these programs. They have the right to walk away at any time, and that's their choice. Spend some time to read about kafala if you want to learn about modern slavery.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      They have the right but in reality can’t find another job within the short timespan and after which they become illegal immigrants and have to go back home. Sure, it’s not impossible but on average it’s very hard to break the shackles of the H1B visas. Often these people put up high stakes to obtain these jobs and going back leaves them in debt. It’s a system designed to exploit
    - yeahbutiguess 4y ago
      Both can be true. Just because one is worse does not make the other ok. A worse situation does not trivialize a bad situation.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Oh I'm aware of that. The thing is, modern forms of slavery are varied in forms. Some are based on laws but still criticized as inhumane (e.g. US prison labor, kafala in Arab nations), some are based on laws but widely accepted (H1B, conscription in militaries), and some are completely illegal (e.g. human trafficking for sexual and agricultural exploitation).
      - hgsgm 4y ago
        Being sent back home is absolutely not slavery. Not everything bad related to work is slavery.
  - jonfw 4y ago
    For any high cost of living area where a senior developer works, there are plenty of non-developer workers doing the same 9-5s in the same office buildings on a fraction of their salary. Maybe try a longer commute or a roommate before whining about your cost of living W.r.t. immigration- you're certainly right. I would be terrified to rock the boat if my employer could put me at risk of deportation
zucked 4y ago
This. Leadership may very well ignore or overlook your perspective, but make sure that your concerns are documented as risks or assumptions somewhere. Businesses almost always CYA, you should, too.
hgsgm 4y ago
That only works when you have an alternative job offer, or you are confident your boss is bluffing.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  Or you have savings. Getting trapped in stressful bullshit that takes years off your life is an unseen price of many purchases; beware people.
jarjoura 4y ago
This is something I learned late in my career. Leadership has to constantly justify their priorities and expenses. The goals they set and expect from their teams is also built from the feedback they receive from their teams. What can they realistically build given the resources they have and teams in the time they need to deliver something? It's not magic and too often people fear if they don't commit to aggressive deadlines that they will be punished for it. Yes, this is a tug-of-war, leadership pushes to maximize and the teams push back to minimize until there is an agreement. However, the important take-away, be open and honest about risks, and blockers. Give early and often reports to upper management about the state of things. As long as you're giving visibility to things you help leadership plan and realign on expectations so they can make course corrections if needed. Too often I see things fall apart on the ground and another engineer tries to pick up the slack doing extra work. Leadership is never informed and so believe things are going as expected. They just see the work getting done, even if the team on the ground feels overworked and understaffed and so yea, it's not healthy.

mindvirus 4y ago

I went through some pretty bizarre layoffs. A huge chunk of the ICs got laid off - so managers that had teams of 8-10 now had teams of 3-6. The product org was hit, but proportionally not as heavily. No projects got descoped. The end result was that the engineers were basically in meetings throughout the day every day, as they'd each suddenly have twice as many projects on their plate. Then because things inevitably were moving more slowly, more meetings got added to track progress more closely. This was earlier in the pandemic, so a bunch of engineers just left for greener pastures. And as you can imagine, the whole thing ground to a halt. The big thing I realized is how hard it was to for leadership - whether product or engineering - to say no, or to stack rank priorities. It's hard to blame them, the past decade has been one of abundance. There were always more resources around the next corner, and so having to deal with less wasn't a skill that anyone had developed.

cheschire 4y ago
There's a whole book about this sort of thing called The Phoenix Project that you may be interested in reading. A lot of what you're saying falls under "the first way" which covers systems thinking and the flow of work.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  I enjoyed the book, but after looking at the situation from a querying theory pov, I became skeptical of some of the authors claims
  - episteme 4y ago
    Care to elaborate?
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Kind of a non- statement. The book is fiction, and an extended advertisement for the author's management consulting business. Its "claims" are barely hypotheses.
treeman79 4y ago

adra 4y ago

Pre-COVID my first management job was working for a company that was chronically understaffed and I ended up spending a good 20% of my time dealing just with hiring for the couple years I was there. Near the end, I could only dedicate about 5% of my time to dev and < 30% to support my largely junior team. The rest of it was wasted on bureaucratic processes that were a vampire of my time. In the end, I didn't think I could honestly protect the team through what was surely to be a painful slide into mediocrity, so opted out. I felt terrible leaving them to whatever came next, but once you realize you're unable to make positive change, it's time to go.

317070 4y ago
What is "meteocracy"?
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  Post-impact constitutional crisis
- yeahbutiguess 4y ago
  A misspelling of mediocrity, I'd assume?
- adra 4y ago
  Autocorrect gone wrong
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Rule by weather forecasters.
  - hardlianotion 4y ago
    By the weather gods themselves.
- 4y ago

simon_o 4y ago

What kind of dystopian bullshit is this? Occurrences of phrases like "better pay"/"higher wages"/"more benefits" in this BBC article: 0 Creative descriptions for intentionally burning people out: I stopped counting, but "maximise their potential" is certainly my favorite euphemism.

0xfeba 4y ago

I've had 2 previous companies do something similar. Team of 5 or so develop a product. It's realeased and they move / layoff all but one or two devs including me. I get overburdened; ask for a raise. The first company that did this, the boss literally scoffed at me. I was gone within a couple months. The second company recognized my value and gave me a very generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I got an offer I couldn't refuse.

hgsgm 4y ago
> The second company recognized my value and gave me a very generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I got an offer I couldn't refuse. So they only recognized a portion of your value.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Or the mafia went after them
- 0xfeba 4y ago
  Considering it was government contracting, it was as good as it was going to get. The offer I got was from a near-tech company.

yeahbutiguess 4y ago

Workers, maybe it's time we started collectively pushing back? I don't care if it's unions, or work stoppages, or guilds, or industrial action, or what. But they've been squeezing workers too hard.

pixl97 4y ago
I question if the ruling class has broken the system enough that this doesn't work... Old days: People stop working. Company stops making money. (A|B) Company hires pinkertons to kill off the opposition | Company concedes and gives better working conditions. Today?: People stop working. Companies beg government to give them money because they're too big to fail. Individuals lose their livelihood/homes/next meal long before company has a deep financial impact.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Today: people automate out many low level processes and offshore the rest to India / Mexico City / PI
colechristensen 4y ago
I think what’s needed are more along the lines of worker protections on an government level. It should be significantly more difficult to drop 10% of your staff because of market performance, or there should be enforced consequences which are expensive. Several months severance, executive pay clawbacks, stock and options payouts, those sorts of things.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

The crazy thing is it feels like wages are really set by the standard of living. Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a decent place to live, a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings. This idea that we live in this meritocracy and you get paid for the value you create is completely bunk. Were all basically accepting a livable wage like cattle being farmed for value by rich people.

hgsgm 4y ago
This comment shows an extremely privileged perspective. Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a [deleted: decent] place to live, [deleted: a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings].
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  This is a complete fallacy too. We are working harder now than people did before the industrial revolution.
  - eouwt 4y ago
    1) [citation needed] 2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying in our 30s and have things like running water?
    - fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
      Productivity has gone way up in the last few decades, and people can afford fewer and fewer children. It used to be common to afford 8 children on one income. Wake up dude
      - gruez 4y ago
        >Productivity has gone way up in the last few years, and people can afford fewer and fewer children. That doesn't say much when that's been the long run trend since the industrial revolution.

flappyeagle 4y ago

There was a large tech company I know of which had a practice of laying people off a giving everyone else a raise. I don’t know if it helped any but it seemed quirky and interesting at the time

petsfed 4y ago
That lays bare the economics of the layoff in a very easy-to-understand way, provided the raises don't eat up all the savings from the layoffs. Using nice round numbers, the following would need to be true for the layoffs to make sense: You have a team of 20, each making 100k/year, but a lot of downtime for all of them. At your current clip, you can only afford 1.5M/year total for your team. You have enough work for maybe 13 at a reasonable pace for your wages, or 10 at a higher pace. So you could let 7 go and risk morale problems with the unchanged wages, or you let 10 go, give 30% raises to match the raised demands, and your payroll is still less than what you can afford. If all of that was explained, alongside copious expressions of ownership on the part of the people responsible for not driving enough business in, I would gladly work again for the people laying me off.
asdff 4y ago
That's like a general fixing a lack of rations by taking on heavy losses in the next battle. I'm sure morale was high at that org.

moneywoes 4y ago

Given teams are shrinking, wages are decreasing etc is it better to be a business owner in this macro environment

overgard 4y ago

I think layoffs tend to always look good to management and investors because of the pareto principle (80% of the work being done by 20% of the people). You certainly get a short term cost saving. The downside though is that other 20% is not necessarily stuff you want your best performers working on, and there's always going to be another 20%.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
And, unfortunately, most companies are terrible at identifying that useful 20%.
asdff 4y ago
Its always nice how management uses easy-to-remember mathematical principles without considering the shape of their data or the proportion of variance explained by these factors, and if that principle would even be applicable.