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Laid-off masses have a message for Zuckerberg, Benioff: We'll never come back
- progne 3y agosheep: we love our freedom, we'll never come baaack farmer: no problem, i'll just be over here by the food if you change your mind
- turndown 3y agoWait til you learn what sheep eat and where one can find it
- b112 3y agoWith the farmer? Because it's farmer's fields, as far as you can see? And he harvests and holds the crops? Guess the sheep have little choice.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoThis is not the model of the world I want. See also, Ken Burns documenting the death of the American Buffalo. Endless habitant encroachment keeps killing great parts of the earth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38056854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38056854
- idiotsecant 3y agoInteresting metaphor. In this case there are way more sheep then there are farmers. What happens if they organize?
- bratwurst3000 3y agoThey will become the farmers and need new sheep.
- aaron695 3y agoSheep die in the wild. Farmers protect sheep, supplement their feed, have medical care and also keep the grass healthy. But tech workers know how to fend for themselves, like using their hands and traveling and social skills and they know how society and things like farms work, right? Sadly tech works have become so useless they don't have multiple tech skills anymore, many don't have any tech skills, just look at HN. Many blame Google because they can't even use search.
- shaky-carrousel 3y agoSaid the farmer, not realising that there were grass everywhere, not just on his farm.
- mc32 3y agoThought the sheep not knowing all the other grass was owned by other farmers…
- justinjlynn 3y agoThere are a lot more sheep than farmers...
- mc32 3y agoThere are many self employed or employed by coöperatives but the majority aren’t and moreover most likely would not take either path, but I’m willing to revisit the question in a few years. I don’t think the dial will move much.
- timeon 3y agoAnalogies are double-edged sword [0]. [0] sorry for the analogy.
- Guvante 3y agoBecause big tech is the only job available... Many tech workers are paid well but overworked so even if they can't find an equivalent paying job you can still find a less stressful still comfortable to live on wage.
- mc32 3y agoThis is true. It remains to be seen if they’re (as in most) willing to readjust their expectations.
- 4death4 3y agoThis is like the exact opposite of my experience. They’re paid well and have so little to do they invent meaningless problems to solve. Most big tech companies I’ve seen could easily operate with 50% of the engineers.
- YLYvYkHeB2NRNT 3y agothose tik tok videos of showing those techies that do nothing at work.
- Guvante 3y agoThe idea of not having enough work is foreign to me. Sounds like bad prioritization of what needs to be done or a mismatch of roles leading to a dry pipeline of feature requests. After all the improvements are infinite time is finite.
- 26fingies 3y agoPretty damning view of the shape of society if we think this is accurate.
- jprete 3y agoI can understand someone believing that this is how the world is, but I can’t see why you’d phrase it in such a nasty way.
- lmm 3y agoOnly yesterday I was reading of a "lost" sheep that's been living on its own for 2 years (it's at the bottom of a cliff, people can see it from the sea but not reach it) and apparently doing great.
- bratwurst3000 3y agohttps://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/27/britains-loneliest-sheep-marooned-at-foot-of-scottish-cliff-for-two-years https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/27/britains-lon...
- progne 3y agoPSA: when you renegotiate the most important issue is, mutton or wool.
- fakecontent000 3y ago[dead]
- rvz 3y agoNarrator: They will be back soon and Zuckerberg, Benioff et al. already knows it and don't care. Just attach more c̶a̶r̶r̶o̶t̶s̶ cash on the stick when their employees rent rises and they will start running back.
- erik_seaberg 3y agoThe title kind of buried the lede that nearly half of tech workers say they are willing to return after a layoff. This fits my own it’s-just-business attitude, but I thought spite would be more common.
- altano 3y agoThat's not burying the lede, which means not putting the most important thing in the title or intro paragraph. It's lying for clicks and engagement.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoDon't know if it's lying. >Over half (58%) of 6,000 professionals who responded to a recent Glassdoor poll said they’d never return to a company who laid them off. In the tech sector specifically, just 46% of workers said they’d boomerang. Men were slightly more likely to consider boomeranging than women, and older workers were more open-minded than younger ones. It's not a super majority, but 54-58% does feel like "masses". I can see it both ways here.
- readthenotes1 3y agoIt's meaningless until after those people are offered a substantial wage after living through food insecurity for a while.
- tensor 3y agoEven this isn't very relevant. So they won't return to the company that laid them off, but that doesn't mean they won't work for a different company that laid off other people. I highly doubt any of these companies will have a hard time hiring people because of their layoffs. In the end, people will still go work for them because they pay at the top of the market.
- JohnFen 3y ago> but that doesn't mean they won't work for a different company The title didn't imply otherwise to me.
- Thrir94994i 3y ago> And if they do come back, they’re likely expecting an average pay bump of 25%, Wong added Single tech position gets like 100 applications, thousands of its remote. I think this guy is out of reality! Devs in countries like Poland are now thriving, many of those jobs moved into cheaper regions!
- jacobkg 3y agoWould love to see statistics on how many and which software jobs are moving from US to other countries now that these roles are 100% remote. Anyone know where to find this data?
- taylodl 3y agoLet's not pretend life offshoring is a new phenomena. It's been going on for 30 years now. It's been going on long enough that many of those jobs came back onshore and legions of books have been written as to why somehow the purported savings never materialized.
- SoftTalker 3y agoYes but the pandemic forced nearly everyone to figure out how to get work done with nearly everyone remote. A lot of the roadblocks to remote work in the last two decades finally got solved. There are really no technical barriers of any kind anymore.
- taylodl 3y agoThere aren't technical barriers but two huge social barriers immediately come to mind: - Timezone - Culture Working with people in vastly different timezones is difficult. Just ask anybody working with people from the the US East coast and West coast. That's only a 3 hour time difference and it gets difficult. Culture is another barrier. One of the things that's been hard for US-based companies to learn with working with people from India is in their culture it's impolite to say "no." They use other signals to indicate no. Americans miss those cues. They don't hear what the think is pushback and so they proceed as though everything were fine. Americans also find it difficult to work with Germans as their bluntness is seen as being rude. This is just scratching the surface for the culture barriers that abound. This is why I say remote work != offshoring. They're two completely different animals.
- vsareto 3y agoI just don't see it mattering long-term. We bounced back from the dotcom crash to even higher levels. Same with other downturns. The importance of tech hasn't declined any. There are plenty of tech companies to find good jobs at that you can afford to carry a grudge, while companies have plenty of people to hire from still. If some don't return, they'll relax hiring requirements until they're filled. Hiring requirements from top companies have a lot of room to relax - easier questions, less interview rounds, etc. Maybe this time is different with higher interest rates?
- ghaff 3y agoThough in the case of dot-bomb a fair number of people left the industry and stayed left or at least switched out of SV-type company space. People need to eat and once many switch tracks they may not switch back—especially if they move.
- ben_jones 3y agoAnd a fresh wave of undergrads will take their place. CS programs have ramped way up though and will probably over saturate the market.
- okaram 3y agoExcept we'll not always get those undergrads ... When most of the stories are about layoffs, we won't get any more majors, but it takes ~5 years to start (not that many people will change majors).
- ghaff 3y agoWell, they will need to major in something--assuming they want to get a degree. It's not clear that hiring (and pay) in other engineering fields is necessarily a whole lot better, even today. And, while I don't think there's anything especially wrong with majoring in English or history, it's also not necessarily a better path if you can handle and at least somewhat enjoy CS.
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- j45 3y agoFormer junior recruits forget how relatively inexperienced and well paid they were when they started. They might not come back but there will be plenty of new people willing to. It’s nice they are finding more to life and about themselves to enjoy. Maybe the greybeards they made fun of had it figure it out all along and welcome you to your future.
- throw_a_grenade 3y agohttps://archive.ph/7nfAX https://archive.ph/7nfAX
- spandextwins 3y agoGreat! Not build something great and change the world again! Quit writing blogs and crap until you have a product. Get to work!
- givemeethekeys 3y agoIt doesn't matter. If a company is able to figure out how to build a great, high performing team without the office overhead, then they will have a significant advantage, especially in an environment where financing becomes more difficult.
- NewJazz 3y agoOrganize.
- exabrial 3y agoFacebook could be ran with 500 employees
- fredsmith219 3y agoGood for them, I guess? As an independent contractor with a mercenary attitude, thanks for the reduced competition.
- aj7 3y agoSo what? “That’s foootball”
- Nevicar 3y agobutthurt zoomers decide to give up high paying jobs because theyre mad they got laid off. ok i guess. more room for us.
- jeo123 3y agoShould add one more maxim...we will work actively against you even if it takes decades like Goujian.