12 ms·
Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on exist
by deathpanels 3y ago
Everyone is talking about layoffs and lack of hiring, but I've found the problem to be that companies are cutting costs by silently increasing workload on existing employees. Everyone is getting burnt out trying to keep a 300-person engineering team running on only 100 head count. That leads to more incidents, slower delivery, less innovation, longer hours. Even those who are still employed are seeing working conditions deteriorating.
- paxys 3y agoThose are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs and refusing to hire more who is going to take on the work burden? Obviously existing employees.
- benterix 3y ago> Those are two parts of the same problem. If a company is doing layoffs . . . Sometimes, yes, but not always - if the load is high enough, employees are overworked even if headcount increases.
- cdeutsch 3y agoYou just have to be more hardcore joking
- orochimaaru 3y agoI think a lot of big-co are setting up subsidiaries overseas and hiring there. It's different from the contract based offshoring model that happened in 2007 or so which had rather disastrous results. I know my company has and plans to have almost 1/2 its IT workforce as direct employees overseas.
- giantg2 3y agoSame. My "team" is doubling in size, but all the hires are international.
- Mc91 3y agoSame. I work as an SWE at a non-FAANG, non-tech Fortune 100 company. We already had an IT staff in India and would hire consultants in India, but this has been accelerating over the past year - virtually all hires or new consulting contracts have been in India. Some of the SWEs in the US are even being put under PMs in India.
- giantg2 3y agoMy company is actually doing mostly Europe and ex-US North America
- pc86 3y agoI've actually considered setting up a Mexican corporation to run C2C contracts through for those who want LATAM hires, but the logistics seemed pretty onerous, especially since I don't live near the border. I'd be willing to do a single trip there to finalize everything, but it seems like as a US resident/citizen you'd need to basically stay there for weeks/months while everything is set up, or make multiple trips for each step of the process. It's hard not to get angry at the company when you see them hiring at median US wages ($100-120k US equivalent) but specifically refusing to hiring folks in the US, when the company is US-based.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoYeah seeing a lot of Canadian and Mexico hires. Mexico City, especially -- general consensus is that the level of expertise is good, it's not hard to find a Spanish speaker in the US, better cultural fits, and the timezones overlap better; MXC is on Central Time. Not India-level cheap, but competitive enough. Canada is even better in that sense, but at a higher price. NAFTA TN visas are also attractive there, too. No H1B nonsense, and can easily bring personnel over for short (~3 year) tours. Disclaimer: USA-ian of Hispanic extraction in Canada, so I follow these gigs reasonably closely.
- __turbobrew__ 3y agoAt my company many of the new hires are within Canada. You get similar talent, similar culture, native English, and same time zones for about 2/3 the cost of a USA dev. You also don’t have to pay for healthcare of your Canadian employees since they pay for it on their income taxes.
- taude 3y agoYeup, we're expanding and only hiring off-shore.
- rngname22 3y agoWhat industry?
- derwiki 3y agoI worked at a company that was doing this, but the candidates I interviewed were all below [what had been] the bar. Recruiters asked me why no one was passing the interviews; I told them I ran the interview the same way I had been doing for 3 years. I stopped being scheduled for interviews.
- closeparen 3y agoAt the same time, US salaries are either $300k+ in the Bay Area or $0 and unemployed, there's still no appetite to let someone work for e.g. $150k in a normal metro area.
- cableshaft 3y agoThere's definitely $150k jobs in a normal metro area. Chicago, for example, has a lot of posted software engineering jobs in that range (I've even seen more that are lower than that lately after this past year of tech layoffs, like around $120k, unfortunately)
- deathpanels 3y agoThose companies exist but they are being squeezed by borrowing costs so they're either not growing or are cutting staff.
- ptero 3y agoThere are many large, stable, profitable companies that are hiring software engineers. They are not software houses, but they pay well for a comfortable life (outside of NYC and Bay Area) and offer good work-life balance. For some examples you can look at medical devices, utilities, manufacturing, IBMs and Walmarts and R&D departments of virtually any large non-software company. But there are frictions, too. Unless you go into management, comp tops out around $200k in most metros. HR -- instead of write-your-own-rules in a startup you have to take corporate training and get approval for things folks at the startups take for granted. Limited tools, externally managed corporate OS and software, Outlook instead of Slack. Office time requirements -- fully remote is very rare. And so on. Not saying this is the wrong choice, just that there are tradeoffs.
- closeparen 3y agoAbsolutely. It’s weird though that tech focused companies with Silicon Valley style cultures who are looking to cut costs are completely uninterested in those regions. With more developer-friendly working conditions, they wouldn't have to compete as aggressively on TC. And with more normal cost of living, it could be sustainable for senior people who are not independently wealthy to have long tenures there.
- deadghost 3y agoMy previous company was doing this. I basically quit out of frustration. They weren't much better than picking random people off the street and pointing them at code. It bled into my work life when they took over a project I was on and was pinging me constantly with "hello" and "good morning" expecting to jump on calls with their teams to explain exactly how to do their jobs. An example to illustrate what I was working with: Problem: input validation is too restrictive Their solution: remove all input validation For my mental well-being, I couldn't stay on.
- jncfhnb 3y agoGood news, I got rid of ALL the tickets!
- deathanatos 3y agoYou probably say that in jest, but I have seen — multiple times — someone just go and delete all the tickets. Boom! 0 tickets. No bugs, totes. /s
- Tommah 3y agoReposting my comment from a couple of months ago: At one of my jobs, they used Asana when I started. It was too full of backlogged issues, so we moved over to Jira. Then Jira got too full. A month before I was laid off, one of my coworkers said, "Maybe we should try out Asana."
- democracy 3y agothat could be a great feature of a new product - "your jira is full? time to move on to...." ))
- mewpmewp2 3y agoThat's called ruthless prioritization.
- wyclif 3y ago
- hnthrowaway0328 3y agoYep ours are hiring from India directly. Rumor says head of IT has a affiliated company set up...
- democracy 3y agoIt's possible, in one of my jobs the senior project manager was found to hold a stake in one of the outsourcing companies working for us and was terminated under conflict of interest.
- fuzztester 3y agoThe overseas subsidiary business model was happening well before 2007. I left a company doing it, in 2004, for example. And they had been doing it for some years before I joined. And they were not the only one.
- depereo 3y agoI've seen a bunch of US companies setting up offices here in New Zealand and hiring SRE/DevOps types. Our wages are garbage so it's much cheaper for them! Plus our timezone means having staff here leads to much less on-call requirement for US/UK staff.
- ChumpGPT 3y agoAs soon as your company hires a Indian CIO, you're done. More and more of the staff will be H1B's and over time they will transition the work to India. I could name a very big corporation doing that right now. The CIO they just hired (last 6 months) is an Indian who just finish doing this to the previous corporation he was a CIO at. Both these companies are the largest in their respective industries in the world.
- booleandilemma 3y agoWe don't have an Indian CIO but the trend is generally true. Indian managers hire more Indians.
- avasii 3y agoI will guess that the two industries are agricultural machinery and transportation.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoMy exposure to bigco is they aren’t hiring anywhere.
- freddie_mercury 3y agoThis was a pretty forseeable event after US based developers repeatedly told their bosses that development could be done just as productively remotely.
- wyclif 3y agojust as productively remotely ...with the same staff and teams, that's the important qualifier. Nobody thinks they're going to get the same quality team by body shopping their hiring funnel.
- bruce511 3y agoThe problem with this argument is that it implies "you're special". And you likely have experience, domain knowledge, product knowledge, customer knowledge and so on, so I'd argue you Are special. But then you leave, and need to be replaced. Since I'm hiring from a pool where no-one has this special, I may as well hire from overseas. Its cheaper. Equally, when you work remotely your special is invisible. The way you keep the customer happy is invisible. The way you enable your team (assuming your special is passed on) is invisible. Of course there are very smart people, with lots of experience, and lots of special of their own. Finding them is hard (of course) but the reward for finding them is significant. FAANG companies are skipping the labor broker, and building subsidiaries offshore. Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing. So your point us well made- existing employees have value. But companies deal with churn. And we don't need 300 people onshore with your special skills. We can offshore 200 posts, and wait for them to come up to speed. Being a remote worker makes this process easier.
- marcus0x62 3y ago> Those offices pay local rates, have as-strict hiring policies, and are growing. Everybody goes into these arrangements believing, against all history and experience, that they aren't going to lower their hiring bar. Good luck with that.
- wait_a_minute 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Bluescreenbuddy 3y agoWhen you can hire engineers in South America or Easter Europe for a tiny fraction of US salaries, you bet they're going to do it.
- nobodyandproud 3y agoMy company is doing this, with the end goal of reducing engineering headcount in the US.. The only way for me to protest is to leave, but the job market is terrible.
- Workaccount2 3y agoTo me it looks like tech is just falling more in line with other industries pay/workload. I think there are many who joined the tech workforce during the pandemic thinking the norm was to make $135k while doing 10 hours of real work a week from home, twiddling a few lines of bootcamp level javascript to appease your largely absent boss. Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. The pay was just decent too. Not jaw dropping like today.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>Many may forget, or not have been there, but 10-15 years ago tech jobs were notorious for ridiculous workloads/long hours. Exactly. Look at industries that also recruit smart college grads and pay well: consulting, finance, law. These jobs have very demanding schedules. Not saying that's good, just that it is.
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoTakes a low IQ person to accept ridiculous workload for kinda ok money
- pc86 3y agoOnly when there are better options available in the same industry. Nobody is getting a CS degree from a good school then switching to nursing because they can make the same money with better hours (or better money with the same hours). The gravy train might be ending, I just wish it would end with the jobs that actually do nothing (product) rather than engineering first, but oh well.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoOuch :) I felt that
- epolanski 3y agoYou take what you can find and negotiate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoIs this based on Elon’s idea of trimming the fat? Id like to believe it isnt but its a copycat industry.
- wyclif 3y agoIt's not as if Elon invented the idea. Every successfully entrepreneur who went on to found a large company has done it in one form or another. Maybe it didn't take the form of layoffs, but cost-cutting is a natural behaviour when the soft money disappears. Happened in 2008 as well.
- justinzollars 3y agoI was on a 24 hour on call for months, a two man team, managing Chick-fil-A's Doordash, UberEats and GH Go integrations for thousands of stores. It was literally insane. I survived this recession - but I was way way way overworked. The balance has definitely tipped towards the employer.
- wizerdrobe 3y agoSorry to hear that! I had some clowns reach out to me for the same job it sounds like, promising that I could absolutely move up to employment with Chic-fil-a after my contract was up… As if I haven’t heard that story before.
- notherhacker 3y agoWho was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.
- notherhacker 3y agoWho was the company? I've accepted a job via Experient Group with the Chic-fil-a RIOT team and their relationship with Chic seems odd, trying to sniff it out. I am in a position to walk away.
- justinzollars 3y agoThis was a good position to get me through the tech recession. I was able to continue working on Go, and the system was interesting. But it wasn't an easy job by any means. I ended up going back to startups where I have more ownership.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoAnd - somehow when things slip, the customer is pissed, it's your fault.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoI also am getting multiple reports of fake job ads posted to show health in the market but internally those jobs are understood to never be filled.