4 ms·

>Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} man

>Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)? If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.

dagw 4y ago
I've spent most of my career at places that most people here would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time there working with programming, statistics and data analysis and data science research.
c03 4y ago
On point. It would be nice with insight into the roles of the lay-offs.
rcarmo 4y ago
There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.
madeofpalk 4y ago
I disagree with both sentiments that PMs etc are non-technical roles, and that they're not useful. I would say they're just as useful as developers - plenty of developers are bad at their job or are employed extraneously to begin with.
ThunderSizzle 4y ago
I find that an odd question. My initial take was that they went to non-tech companies that have substantial internal IT presence.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  From the original post, the next biggest category after “tech” is “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment. With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence. The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering, health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
  - wincy 4y ago
    I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.
rmchugh 4y ago
Also possible that they joined a "non-tech" company that needs technical roles.
imwithstoopid 4y ago
[flagged]
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Hey, never said otherwise! Just wondering if non-devs are being laid off disproportionately. For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have only managed to stick around because the process to PIP them is too onerous. Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
  - dickersnoodle 4y ago
    >Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies. That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for performance".
    - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies. A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.) At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
looping__lui 4y ago
I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier. I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer". I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric". A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects". But, perhaps this is a good thing.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361319883506 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613198835...
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough. You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
    - estebank 4y ago
      I find that people that conform to the "asshole genius" trope are far outnumbered by the assholes that believe themselves to be geniuses.
908B64B197 4y ago
> Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)? A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal. [0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other-departments https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layoffs-are-hitting-diversity-and-inclusion-jobs-hard https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo... [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-tech-layoff-headlines-most-companies-arent-firing-it-workers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te... [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-07-do-recent-layoffs-mean-the-tech-talent-crunch-is-over https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0... [4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics-and-society-team-fired/ https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...

dagw 4y ago

I've spent most of my career at places that most people here would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time there working with programming, statistics and data analysis and data science research.

c03 4y ago

On point. It would be nice with insight into the roles of the lay-offs.

rcarmo 4y ago

There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.

madeofpalk 4y ago

I disagree with both sentiments that PMs etc are non-technical roles, and that they're not useful. I would say they're just as useful as developers - plenty of developers are bad at their job or are employed extraneously to begin with.

ThunderSizzle 4y ago

I find that an odd question. My initial take was that they went to non-tech companies that have substantial internal IT presence.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
From the original post, the next biggest category after “tech” is “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment. With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence. The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering, health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
- wincy 4y ago
  I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.

rmchugh 4y ago

Also possible that they joined a "non-tech" company that needs technical roles.

imwithstoopid 4y ago

[flagged]

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Hey, never said otherwise! Just wondering if non-devs are being laid off disproportionately. For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have only managed to stick around because the process to PIP them is too onerous. Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
- dickersnoodle 4y ago
  >Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies. That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for performance".
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies. A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.) At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.

looping__lui 4y ago

I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier. I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer". I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric". A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects". But, perhaps this is a good thing.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361319883506 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13623613198835...
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough. You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
  - estebank 4y ago
    I find that people that conform to the "asshole genius" trope are far outnumbered by the assholes that believe themselves to be geniuses.

908B64B197 4y ago

> Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)? A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal. [0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other-departments https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layoffs-are-hitting-diversity-and-inclusion-jobs-hard https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo... [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-tech-layoff-headlines-most-companies-arent-firing-it-workers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te... [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-07-do-recent-layoffs-mean-the-tech-talent-crunch-is-over https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0... [4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics-and-society-team-fired/ https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...