4 ms·

Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? That, of course, is

Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? That, of course, is absurd on the surface. Hiring people for the sake of hiring ... so they can stand around the watercooler discussing the weather. That led to double or triple the headcount! 85,000+ employees to work on Instagram, Facebook, and pet projects. That number alone boggles my mind. I work with three other senior developers and we run an entire phone company with five-nines uptime. Yes, three. And now suddenly everyone is shocked about layoffs!

loeg 3y ago
You started with an absurd conspiracy theory and just ran with it. > Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? No! No one does this!
- EMM_386 3y ago
  Oh, come on. Yes they do. > Is Apple throwing enough money at key engineers to prevent defection to Meta? https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching-restricted-stock-bonuses/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching...
  - colecut 3y ago
    Paying enough to keep key engineers is not the same as hiring new ones they don't need
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    Supposedly, there is software that uses "internet-based signals" behavioral predictions to identify which key technical people are being courted and/or are considering moving to a new gig. Poaching is a big part of the game. You can't get a raise compared to what you can playing the game.
    - boomerango 3y ago
      “Hey this guy just updated his linked-in for the first time in two years!”
  - guiambros 3y ago
    I love how people assume that a poorly written and tangentially related article, with a question mark in the title nonetheless, becomes the official proof of <wild speculation that bigcorp is doing X>. Wait until we see the flood of ChatGPT-generated articles. Oh, wait...
    - pc86 3y ago
      Are you not familiar with the world-class investigative tech journalism coming out of iDownloadBlog.com? I mean the guy lying about his day job posted it so clearly it's a very legitimate and prestigious publication.
1letterunixname 3y ago
The public already knows: the headcount graph trended upwards and accelerated in recent years until recently. I joke with people in another department that we're a poaching ground for TikTok. Mostly, I work with people who have been at the company many years and are senior production engineers, so I can't appreciate dotcom-style spending in non-engineering business units. For the same space, Alphabet has 10x headcount compared to us.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Is this actually true though? The data seems to suggest that for most companies the trend was constant, and they just reached a point where it was no longer economical, which was exacerbated by hiring freezes halting attrition. https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-rates-microsofts-vr-layoffs/ https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
mupuff1234 3y ago
Perhaps one way to view hiring (at the scale of big tech) is a bit like a VC, you hire 100 people knowing 99 of them won't do anything special, but that 1/100 will make it worth it. And like VCs the math makes more sense when money is cheap and there's a bull market.
- selcuka 3y ago
  An SAP consultant once told me that they had a term that can roughly translate to "make a crowd" (sorry, no idea about the actual phrase used by consultants in English speaking countries, if there is one). It basically means that whenever a big customer have an issue, they send more people than actually needed, and one senior consultant works on solving the problem while others just walk around and look busy. It gives the impression that they are taking the issue seriously.
  - redeeman 3y ago
    this would explain the cost surrounding SAP :)
  - tmpz22 3y ago
    I’ve seen a version of this in sales where you have a welcoming call with the new client with the entire service team acting all cheery. Leaves the impression that their spend gets all those people when in reality it does not.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    'Tis true with Incident Mgmt and some highly sensitive projects, too. Nothing SAP related at all, but gives the appearance to PMs and Ops leaderships that we're going extra hard on the issue. And to be fair, it's useful for incident mgmt since you don't know what you'll find, and will often have lots of people up your ass; having supernumerary bodies means I can throw them at something if I find an artifact or concern, and it also gives me a distraction-shield: I communicate only to Senior Engineer X, and all inquiries from Mgmt and Customers go to X; I only have to update X instead of 10+ irritated users/owners.
- 3y ago
noisenotsignal 3y ago
4 engineers for an entire phone company sounds scary. I’m sure your engineering is robust enough such that outages are minimal, but that still sounds like a lot of on call (rotation of 4 = once a month?). Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over! Even if you don’t worry in the psychological sense, you still have to schedule around it.
- EMM_386 3y ago
  I actually screwed that up, we only have 3 total software engineers. Including myself. We do have other employees who maintain the hardware, on-call DBAs to manage issues, etc. I'm only speaking to the software engineers. And we have lots of hardware and lots of open-source solutions that handle the actual calls. I'm full-stack but lead on the front-end, a complex Angular application to manage everything from huge call centers to small restaurants. We have C# for APIs, cloud Oracle for the database, and a whole slew of other software and services to manage the actual calls. Each of us is specialized in specific parts. Our up-time is tremendous given the amount of code we've written. It's extremely stable. I've been at this 20+ years, as have the other 2. We know enough between us to get this done. I've never been called after normal work hours. We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into that ... that's a lot of my job. It's well-architectured, well-tested, fault-tolerant software.
  - throwaway1946 3y ago
    Sorry, but I'm skeptical that you actually run "an entire phone company" in the way that most people understand the term. You mention that you use lots of open-source solutions, and I'm guessing you outsource the build and operation of the network to a real phone company, probably similar to an MVNO. Am I wrong? Meta is very different from that, they build the products that users interact with, but also build things at the bottom of the tech stack. At their scale, this makes business sense to do so, and comparing your headcount with theirs makes no sense. I don't really understand why software engineers keep dunking on each other like this. I get that people want to broadcast how smart they are, but in reality we're just giving the general public a warped sense of how much work is actually involved in building large-scale software systems.
charcircuit 3y ago
With three people there are limits with what you can build and how fast you can build it. At large tech companies there is a gigantic amount of scope. People will make up scope to justify their job, or to justify why they need to grow their teams to accomplish goals. If a company wants to invest into doing everything over prioriting what should be worked on then headcount will explode.
hintymad 3y ago
> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them People say this from time to time, but have we ever got evidence from any company? A director or VP gave such mandates, a leaked email that discussed such strategy?
- asdfman123 3y ago
  No one ever seems to explain how the companies are coordinating to suck up talent. Otherwise, there would be a free rider problem. Why not let Google suck it up instead?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 3y ago
> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? Rumor.
papito 3y ago
A team of 3 star engineers can take on the world. It's a killer setup.

loeg 3y ago

You started with an absurd conspiracy theory and just ran with it. > Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? No! No one does this!

EMM_386 3y ago
Oh, come on. Yes they do. > Is Apple throwing enough money at key engineers to prevent defection to Meta? https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching-restricted-stock-bonuses/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching...
- colecut 3y ago
  Paying enough to keep key engineers is not the same as hiring new ones they don't need
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Supposedly, there is software that uses "internet-based signals" behavioral predictions to identify which key technical people are being courted and/or are considering moving to a new gig. Poaching is a big part of the game. You can't get a raise compared to what you can playing the game.
  - boomerango 3y ago
    “Hey this guy just updated his linked-in for the first time in two years!”
- guiambros 3y ago
  I love how people assume that a poorly written and tangentially related article, with a question mark in the title nonetheless, becomes the official proof of <wild speculation that bigcorp is doing X>. Wait until we see the flood of ChatGPT-generated articles. Oh, wait...
  - pc86 3y ago
    Are you not familiar with the world-class investigative tech journalism coming out of iDownloadBlog.com? I mean the guy lying about his day job posted it so clearly it's a very legitimate and prestigious publication.

1letterunixname 3y ago

The public already knows: the headcount graph trended upwards and accelerated in recent years until recently. I joke with people in another department that we're a poaching ground for TikTok. Mostly, I work with people who have been at the company many years and are senior production engineers, so I can't appreciate dotcom-style spending in non-engineering business units. For the same space, Alphabet has 10x headcount compared to us.

vineyardmike 3y ago
Is this actually true though? The data seems to suggest that for most companies the trend was constant, and they just reached a point where it was no longer economical, which was exacerbated by hiring freezes halting attrition. https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-rates-microsofts-vr-layoffs/ https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...

mupuff1234 3y ago

Perhaps one way to view hiring (at the scale of big tech) is a bit like a VC, you hire 100 people knowing 99 of them won't do anything special, but that 1/100 will make it worth it. And like VCs the math makes more sense when money is cheap and there's a bull market.

selcuka 3y ago
An SAP consultant once told me that they had a term that can roughly translate to "make a crowd" (sorry, no idea about the actual phrase used by consultants in English speaking countries, if there is one). It basically means that whenever a big customer have an issue, they send more people than actually needed, and one senior consultant works on solving the problem while others just walk around and look busy. It gives the impression that they are taking the issue seriously.
- redeeman 3y ago
  this would explain the cost surrounding SAP :)
- tmpz22 3y ago
  I’ve seen a version of this in sales where you have a welcoming call with the new client with the entire service team acting all cheery. Leaves the impression that their spend gets all those people when in reality it does not.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  'Tis true with Incident Mgmt and some highly sensitive projects, too. Nothing SAP related at all, but gives the appearance to PMs and Ops leaderships that we're going extra hard on the issue. And to be fair, it's useful for incident mgmt since you don't know what you'll find, and will often have lots of people up your ass; having supernumerary bodies means I can throw them at something if I find an artifact or concern, and it also gives me a distraction-shield: I communicate only to Senior Engineer X, and all inquiries from Mgmt and Customers go to X; I only have to update X instead of 10+ irritated users/owners.
3y ago

noisenotsignal 3y ago

4 engineers for an entire phone company sounds scary. I’m sure your engineering is robust enough such that outages are minimal, but that still sounds like a lot of on call (rotation of 4 = once a month?). Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over! Even if you don’t worry in the psychological sense, you still have to schedule around it.

EMM_386 3y ago
I actually screwed that up, we only have 3 total software engineers. Including myself. We do have other employees who maintain the hardware, on-call DBAs to manage issues, etc. I'm only speaking to the software engineers. And we have lots of hardware and lots of open-source solutions that handle the actual calls. I'm full-stack but lead on the front-end, a complex Angular application to manage everything from huge call centers to small restaurants. We have C# for APIs, cloud Oracle for the database, and a whole slew of other software and services to manage the actual calls. Each of us is specialized in specific parts. Our up-time is tremendous given the amount of code we've written. It's extremely stable. I've been at this 20+ years, as have the other 2. We know enough between us to get this done. I've never been called after normal work hours. We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into that ... that's a lot of my job. It's well-architectured, well-tested, fault-tolerant software.
- throwaway1946 3y ago
  Sorry, but I'm skeptical that you actually run "an entire phone company" in the way that most people understand the term. You mention that you use lots of open-source solutions, and I'm guessing you outsource the build and operation of the network to a real phone company, probably similar to an MVNO. Am I wrong? Meta is very different from that, they build the products that users interact with, but also build things at the bottom of the tech stack. At their scale, this makes business sense to do so, and comparing your headcount with theirs makes no sense. I don't really understand why software engineers keep dunking on each other like this. I get that people want to broadcast how smart they are, but in reality we're just giving the general public a warped sense of how much work is actually involved in building large-scale software systems.

charcircuit 3y ago

With three people there are limits with what you can build and how fast you can build it. At large tech companies there is a gigantic amount of scope. People will make up scope to justify their job, or to justify why they need to grow their teams to accomplish goals. If a company wants to invest into doing everything over prioriting what should be worked on then headcount will explode.

hintymad 3y ago

> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them People say this from time to time, but have we ever got evidence from any company? A director or VP gave such mandates, a leaked email that discussed such strategy?

asdfman123 3y ago
No one ever seems to explain how the companies are coordinating to suck up talent. Otherwise, there would be a free rider problem. Why not let Google suck it up instead?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

andsoitis 3y ago

> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? Rumor.

papito 3y ago

A team of 3 star engineers can take on the world. It's a killer setup.