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The sucky reality is that employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business. We want constant team growth, ne

• maxlamb 4y ago
  “employees at big tech companies have little interest in running a sustainable and resilient business” By “employees” in your first sentence I assume you mean the C-suite?
  • hashtag-til 4y ago
    As a regular “individual contributor” it is very hard to fight ill thought plans coming “from above”. Those who complain are usually cast as “negative thinking folks” and get subtle punishments. If you are on a mid career senior salary range, are you going to pick a fight and risk being punished or carry on getting your good salary, bonus, stocks, insurance, retirement plan and perks - in exchange for slighly useless work?
    • rektide 4y ago
      Not even just fighting ill fought plans but whether we decide to execute well or dial it in. The pressure to ship ship ship comes from a lot of places, and relatively few of them have the technical competence to assess, care about, or evaluate code & quality. They don't actually understand what they're pressuring forward, so often. And most of them face no real consequences. They don't have to maintain or repair some grossly abomination of a system, that's the engineers job. They'll be leading new feature dev new business dev forever & ever.
    • 8note 4y ago
      As a regular IC, the things you do are largely disconnected from whatever leadership is thinking. You have a lot of leeway to do what you want as long as it implements things that leadership cares about. Eg. You can build a section of a tunnel to be wider where you think there should be a subway station, even if the president's wife doesn't think there should be a station there. Eventually the station will exist
      • dilyevsky 4y ago
        > Eg. You can build a section of a tunnel to be wider where you think there should be a subway station And what is your explanation for why it took you twice as long as it did Bob who just plowed that thing with uniform width?
        • komadori 4y ago
          The ground was harder.
• the_gipsy 4y ago
  We don't want constant team growth. It's the managers, the psychopaths, the ladder-climbers that do. And they are rewarded for any growth, as that's the only measure the higher-ups know, and the one they used to get where they are so it can't be so bad. For startups, it's the investors who know only to measure growth because there is no expected profit until the bing bang happens.
• bambataa 4y ago
  I’m going to go out on a limb and claim that the large majority of big tech workers would be perfectly happy with a few promotions over a career and annual inflation-matching pay rises. Except you rarely get inflation-matching pay rises, so the only way to prevent the annual erosion of your situation is the constant team growth and never-ending promotions.
  • hashtag-til 4y ago
    True. Those who never complain about salary and are perceived as “happy” are in the bottom of salary increase priorities. I learned that the hard way a few years back, then got my act together and made sure I’m always perceived unhappy with salary - to pull that off, you need to be backed by delivering stuff and being seen. Do your homework, and ask for the recognition, that’s my tip.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    I just got told by my company this year that they can’t afford to keep up with inflation. I really don’t see how they expect this to go.
    • doktorhladnjak 4y ago
      They expect that the competition will do the same--raise wages below inflation. Then you've got nowhere to go to make more. Even if it doesn't work out that way, most employees complain a bit but don't leave.
      • oxfordmale 4y ago
        Competition will do the same initially, until the growth curves reverses. At that point, when you really need your experienced staff to drive growth, moat of them will be busy finding new positions.
      • whateveracct 4y ago
        I think they'll be surprised. I have noticed that recruiter outreach to me has picked back up. I'm pretty senior and they're offering me senior roles that could pay more. My current employer has benefitted from current events though so I'm staying put. But if I ever want to fuck off, I easily can. I have a friend who is very junior. He got promoted but still fucked off to a new better job because his current employer treated him poorly. I think people are gonna start remembering they can fuck off again, and we're gonna end up somewhere between here and where we were when the job market was on fire pandemic and pre-pandemic.
• black_13 4y ago
  [dead]
• voidfunc 4y ago
  You're not wrong - The real problem is I don't give a shit about the product. I'm here to make money and retire. It's the companies job to either figure out to how to eliminate needing me or make the job compelling enough that I give a shit (which is extremely difficult).
  • flyinglizard 4y ago
    I always tell our candidates that the only thread connecting all our employees — some as young as 20, other 50+, some are mechanical engineers, some technicians, others are algorithm researchers etc - is that all of them personally care about doing a good job, just like a craftsman of old who is proud of their work. It makes for an awesome work environment, even if slightly emotionally elevated.
    • rektide 4y ago
      It's wild host so many companies make doing the right thing extremely hard. I've never been at a big org, and sometimes we are super profitable & trying to make big long term investments in the future, and folks seem to want to rush & smash code & go go go. My pace has almost always felt a bit off, but I've always hated shipping subpar systems. Whether it's other engineers or some local managers or the business, there's always been extreme pressure in competition with my desire to just do a good damned job. It's been isolating & draining. Sometimes it's just a matter of spending 3x as long as it would have taken to line up the 300 reasons why at each spot the shit slapdash plan is shit and the good plan is good. Trying to be OK with the process, walking through people who really barely can understand any of... You have to just keep saying to yourself, fine, this is my job, I'm the expert, it's OK that you don't know, & I'm not sure that you do need to know, but here we are & this talking it through is how we're going to decide where we go I guess.
      • YuriNiyazov 4y ago
        I’m usually on the other side of this. I regularly request that people spend 3x the time it would take something to prove to me that it’s a good idea, so maybe let me offer you some perspective - the outside view, if you will. The primary job of an executive is risk management. Let’s say I run an engineering team where people have good ideas 70% of the time, and bad ideas 30% of the time. Famously, it takes 10x the number of resources it originally took to develop and deploy, to remove a bad system from production and replace it. .7 * 4 + .3 * 3 = 3.7 .3 * 11 + 0.7 = 4.0 An engineering team that doesn’t take 3x the time it takes to do something to verify it ahead of time is actually slightly less efficient overall ( assuming that 3x the time it takes reduces the error rate to 0) Yea there are lots of simplifying assumptions here, these are all averages, plans don’t all take the same time, etc, etc, etc, and a more sophisticated system would take it all into account. But the results don’t usually change, unless in very special circumstances.
• seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  Inflation has a made it that FAANG salaries aren’t really excessive, just slightly better than middle class. Salaries are really just messed up related to costs ATM. We need to get a handle on inflation and the housing bubble first before we can figure out what reasonable salaries are again, and that’s going to hurt all around.
  • rnk 4y ago
    I disagree with that. First, Faang salaries are way over middle class. If inflation reduced your salary by a bit, think about how much more ia reduction impacted the salary of an average middle class person. As you make more money you have more disposable income so the impact of little bit less money when you make more is smaller.
    • fzeroracer 4y ago
      FAANG salaries are not over middle class and this kind of rhetoric is used to fuel class warfare by businesses and companies among the poor and middle classes. The fact is that in the modern day even on a FAANG salary a lot of people cannot afford to buy a home of their own. And the salary band at those companies is incredibly wide, owing in fact due to the wide disconnect in salary between engineers, middle management and the c-suite.
      • VirusNewbie 4y ago
        What are you talking about? Maybe for entry level with only a couple years they couldn’t own a home but come on? You think there are mid/senior level people with 5+ years working there who cannot afford a home??
        • photonbeam 4y ago
          Yes there are, as the homes they want to buy are near work and those are really expensive
      • jghn 4y ago
• fzeroracer 4y ago
  Whose fault is it exactly when staying at a company results in my salary going down over time? No one is asking for endless growth on the employee side. But growth should match responsibilities, and if I gain more responsibility over time then pay should match. And if my salary can't match inflation at minimum then you're telling me I should be paid less for my current work. Companies prefer to funnel that money to investors and as a result this is where we're at. Note that privately owned companies or worker owned companies avoid this issue more often.
• coldtea 4y ago
  Yes, it's the employees fault. They were "asking for it", dressing their LinkedIn profile too provocatively /s Employees in tech wanted, and were fine with, and even cherished "a sustainable and resilient business". That's the golden age IBM, Intel, AT&T, and so on employee for example. Then companies started being about the stock market, and short term profit, throwing them under the bus whenever they had a chance, while still paying nice bonuses to the C-level and middle managers even when they run the companies to the ground. So, yes, they felt little loyalty not to "jump ship" to a company didn't give a shit abotu them. Hell, the C-level execs that are paid 10-100x better than the employees would not think twice to jump ship at any chance they got, and somehow the employees are at fault for doing the same?
  • rodgerd 4y ago
    > Yes, it's the employees fault. I mean I half agree. There's been factions in side the tech industry for years trying to get people to think about what would happen in this sort of scenario, to understand that "tech workers" have more in common with working-class factory workers in the 50s and 60s that with Peter Thiel and Sam Altman. That faction has pointed how IBM or HP acted when they were on a downward slope. To think about collective action, solidarity, other measures that might help ensure that good jobs don't become bad jobs become no jobs to further enrich a handful of factory owners. But the braying voices places like here have always shouted those down. Always.
• jzb 4y ago
  Wow. This is the most amazing take I have seen. It is truly boggling to see somebody trying to lay this at the feet of the employees. It’s not that activist billionaire, shareholders are demanding layoffs. It’s the workers fault for wanting a share of the pie and not just taking what they’re given quietly and meekly. You’re right, it’s not a class struggle. For it to be a struggle both parties have to recognize that it’s actually a struggle. This argument would make sense if the companies doing the layoffs were largely unprofitable, and not spending huge sums of money on stock buybacks and inflated executive salaries.
  • jzb 4y ago
    To further elaborate, a big part of running a sustainable business is the leadership. I keep seeing this idea that people need to work harder and you’ve got the Mark Zuckerberg‘s of the world pushing this idea that the Meta employees aren’t working hard enough and that’s why they are flailing. Not that the actual core strategy and shit like the Metaverse are bullshit. Or Google that has had some thing like 3 to 5 different chat systems over the past 10 years and utterly baffling product strategies along with a reputation of killing products or neglecting them. But it’s clearly the employees fault and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with completely bullshit leadership.