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You're overlooking the main issue with firing half your staff: you've just lost a huge swath of your institutional knowledge. That's what turns your living code
by OkayPhysicist 3y ago
You're overlooking the main issue with firing half your staff: you've just lost a huge swath of your institutional knowledge. That's what turns your living codebase into legacy code. A new hire, even a fantastic code ninja guru rockstar 10x unassailable god king new hire, is going to have to spend a lot of time learning your codebase. Even when they are at a level when they can productively dig through it to do bugfixes and feature implementations, they'll likely have big holes in their knowledge: Was this weird hack a temporary solution gone permanent, or the result of an important tradeoff between elegance and performance? Is the new hire going to find the relevant pre-existing extension point to add their new feature, or are they just going to build a new one?
The reason you hire software engineers on salary instead of just hiring contractors is because you need vessels to store knowledge in. That knowledge can be passed down and maintained with a relatively low rate of turnover, which is the opposite of "in 2 days we're replacing half our workforce".
- KptMarchewa 3y agoI agree - but I think this decision was made pretty consciously. As in, they did internal equivalent of PE buyout. Accept you're not growth company, get rid of large portion of the staff, cut all new developments and prospects, rest of remaining stuff just supports existing business. And extract all the wealth from this position that you can.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoOh, in this case it was just shameless union busting. Taking an axe to your company yourself is a helluva lot cheaper than hiring the Pinkertons.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIt'a a mix of a declining economy and convinient union busting. Many other companies are ding this sot layoff strategy and don't have looming unions to worry about.
- ericmcer 3y agoI am really surprised more CEOs don't do this. If I got a business to a few million in recurring revenue it would be very tempting to slice expenses down to just maintenance mode, take a huge salary while riding it into the dirt for a few years and then retire.
- johnnyanmac 3y agopublicly traded companies don't want steady profits. They want infinite growth, and growth requires investment in R&D. Hence the huge hiring sprees over the pandemic. But prospects point towards a recession, the boons of the pandemic are over, and interest rates aren't dirt low anymore. Which is why companies are indeed shifting down to "maintenance mode".
- Aloha 3y agoThe market doesnt reward to, effectively. The real thing is to treat a product as a sustaining engineer product, so minor new features, catering to the users you already have rather than trying to chase growth, etc.
- deeviant 3y agoOne of the more insightful comments I've read on HN, thank you.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoreal life example: there are comments in code I've seen that are like "don't delete this or it breaks X" but there is no X, no mention of what X does in any Confluence page, and deleting it borks stuff badly. asking around and no one is sure what X is or does, and short of refactoring the code, no one has bothered to get rid of it. a simple question of "wtf is X?" turns into multiple meetings, failed QA tests, general custerfuckery, all of which have a $$$ cost in hours wasted. the people that knew are gone and DGAF, but would happily consult for a heafty fee.