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Seems the halcyon days in tech are coming to an end pretty quickly. Maybe when the inflation starts dying down faster + the AI craze will continue to even great
by margorczynski 4y ago
Seems the halcyon days in tech are coming to an end pretty quickly. Maybe when the inflation starts dying down faster + the AI craze will continue to even greater heights then we'll see it coming back in full swing.
Either way it is almost certain that a large amount of people working in these companies don't contribute much to the generated income and now the executives have been given an excuse to perform mass layoffs without scaring off the shareholders.
- roflyear 4y agoSure, but these things come and go. I would not be surprised if in 12-24 months Amazon has more engineers than they do today by a significant margin. And "in tech" is right. At my current company, we have more PMs than we do developers. This leads to a really poor feedback look where the PMs are trying to justify their jobs, so they "look busy" and start generating cruft that is probably not important (like changing text without really a great reason, sure maybe it is "polish" but ... there's real things to do and it distracts the engineers). We don't need more PMs than we have engineers!
- ryanbrunner 4y agoI've worked in this environment and it's always miserable. Developers are constantly frustrated by way too much upstream information and work and PMs feel like they have no ability to do anything. Even if a PM does the right thing by talking to customers and learning about their pain points, the giant bottleneck in dev capacity means that those customer pain points take forever to address, which often leads to more customer frustration than if you had never talked to them in the first place.
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoWhenever something that used to work fine suddenly inexplicably breaks here or changes and is made obviously worse for no discernible reason, the following exchange inevitably occurs… “What the heck happened? This was just working last week! Where’s the… ugh! Where did the button for this go?” “It got Product Managed.” Google Meets and Slack are repeat offenders.
- aaomidi 4y agoHas meet actually had any significant downtime?
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoAvailability isn’t the property of Google Meet that’s troublesome. Itinerant, schizophrenic UI is more its jam.
- nicehill 4y agoFor me, call quality on Meet is absolutely the worst compared w/ Zoom and Teams
- smolder 4y agoI think you misunderstood their post.
- aaomidi 4y agoProbably, I still don't get it :D
- trasz3 4y ago“Downtime” is a meaningless metric. Actually working is what matters. And Meet just broke for me two weeks ago; the video didn’t work. Doesn’t matter it was technically “up”.
- boringuser1 4y ago[dead]
- dboreham 4y agoPeople have short memories. Big companies have always had boom/bust cycles.
- ebiester 4y agoThis is not the first time, it won't be the last time. The next hype round is only a matter of time because rich people need somewhere to put their money. Until you solve the problem of middle management status being based on the number of people you manage, you will keep getting bloated organizations. Until an organization figures out a better way to manage their dependencies on each other, every new thing an organization wants to do will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.) Organizations are just committing on "not growing" in terms of product offerings in the next period of time. The stock market, after some time, will reward growth and the cycle will start again.
- l33t233372 4y ago> will require an n log n number of people. (In bad organizations, it's n^2.) I understand this is signaling that the author understands technical concepts like big-O, but why use technical terms imprecisely when non-technical terms work just fine?
- baremetal 4y agoBecause it's fun, and well suited to the audience.
- margorczynski 4y agoWell it isn't fully clear to me what "n" here would be - seems a bit hand-wavy.
- marcosdumay 4y agoWhat non-technical term would communicate the same idea?
- astroalex 4y agoConsidering the audience, this language is more vivid and precise than saying something like "middle management causes bloat." It puts a picture in your head of how that bloat grows and what causes the bloat (the tree structure of the organization).
- 4y ago
- poisonborz 4y agoTech will always be the star of the investment show. No other industry can or will be able to deliver so cheap and fast.
- Silverback_VII 4y agoNothing remains forever at the top of the food chain.
- 331c8c71 4y agoMore generally, "there is nothing permanent except change"... (c)
- margorczynski 4y agoIt seems Heraclitus was really on point.
- waboremo 4y agoYes but remember, everything now is tech. The days of companies being evaluated at their peak purely because they are "tech" is over.
- mjr00 4y ago> The days of companies being evaluated at their peak purely because they are "tech" is over. Agreed. WeWork being the prime example of something that was evaluated as "tech" despite being anything but.
- eitally 4y agoTech will always be on top. The only thing that will vary based on broad factors is what kind of tech. We've been in computer tech the past twenty years and are only starting to get to the interesting places biotech will take us next. Similarly, we're due a step change in materials sciences, not to mention energy generation & storage, and transportation. Envirotech will continue to thrive, and receive more investment as climate change becomes more extreme. Etcetera.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoLet's hope the shareholders get scared anyway.
- coldtea 4y ago>Maybe when the inflation starts dying down faster + the AI craze will continue to even greater heights then we'll see it coming back in full swing. We might never see it "back in full swing", the same way cobblers never did came back in full swing... https://novum.substack.com/p/what-if-worldview-zero-interest-rates https://novum.substack.com/p/what-if-worldview-zero-interest...
- adam_arthur 4y agoThe employees are shareholders, what do you think an RSU is? (More technically, they aren't shareholders until it vests, but they are long the equity)
- commandlinefan 4y ago> until it vests Usually layoffs include accelerated vesting anyway.
- 0x0000000 4y agoFar from "usually", in my experience.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lamontcg 4y ago> Seems the halcyon days in tech are coming to an end pretty quickly. Did I wake back up this morning in November 2001?