5 ms·
The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%
by madcadmium 3y ago
The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%
- nine_zeros 3y ago> The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50% Keep in mind that execs will get bonuses for cutting costs but the real workers have additional work without a raise. The downward spiral seems almost inevitable - attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat.
- kibwen 3y ago> attrition, drop in quality, services turn shitty, loss of revenue, repeat Execs are lauded for cutting costs, parasitically enrich themselves on the carcass of a once-productive business, jump ship to a new host before it all comes crashing down, repeat.
- cableshaft 3y agoSome execs have already jumped ship. From the article: "In the final months of 2023, several top executives announced their departures, including Twitch’s chief product officer, chief customer officer and chief content officer. Twitch also lost its chief revenue officer, who worked on Twitch from within Amazon’s Ads unit."
- _jal 3y agoFunny, I read this just recently. https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-company-5f8759ad018e https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-c...
- edgyquant 3y agoSounds like a sweet gig, how do I land one?
- no_wizard 3y agoBe born in the aristocracy[0] or land one of the very small openings where executives get hired from outside the circle via executive recruiting, which usually means networking your way to VP / SVP at a some kind of notable firm or otherwise getting close to attainment of the executive class. I hear being an ex-founder is useful in this regard. Apparently, working at McKinsey or Bain or one of the other large "prestigious" consulting firms is also a good move. Going to Harvard, Yale, Stanford or similar univerisities is almost a hard requirement. Almost[1]. Or, in the rarest of events, found a business that is successful and somehow manages to get big enough that you get status by proxy. In any case, sans the last (and rarest) way, you'll have to walk the walk and talk the talk. It can get unsavory. [0]: Oligarchy and Plutocracy fit too. Take your pick. To grossly oversimplify: If you're part of the Aristrocratic families (Rockefellers, Dursts etc) thats one way. Another is via being apart of the oligarchy (corporate power is alive and well. from oil companies to big tech) which is often intertwined with aristrocratic insitutions (Harvard, Yale etc). Finally, of course, you have the mesh of percentage at the top that fall into Plutocracy, which are wealthy and powerful themselves but are in service of even wealthier and more powerful oligarchs and artistrocrats in many cases. [1]: Somehow around the edges you can find your way into it without this, but its challenging to say the least. Usually (but not entirely) its due to the rarest case, being a successful entreprenuer and surviving long enough to be recongized by proxy. Though, sometimes servant becomes the master. See outside executive recruiting
- VirusNewbie 3y agoIt seems like we could check this. Is your hypothesis that an outsized number of SVP/EVP at top paying tech companies are going to be from either dynastic wealth or from traditional Ivy backgrounds?
- no_wizard 3y agoThey already hail largely from top 50 colleges[0][1], for instance. We know that Ivy League graduates have better access to opportunity and privilege than anyone else, there's enough out there on this that I would consider it common knowledge by now. [0]: https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/schools/which-colleges-most-alumni-ceos-fortune-500-companies https://academicinfluence.com/rankings/schools/which-college... [1]: Note, I didn't say Ivy league, but arisotricatic institutions. These include many state universities with large alumni endowments and historical privileges.
- lanewinfield 3y agoThe American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year is... "enshittification" https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/ https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshitt...
- adamredwoods 3y agoI wished they co-slanged it as "encrapification" because NPR did a report on it and did not mention the word on air. I think it's a valuable web-evolution term.
- ericmcer 3y agoWith the amount of layoffs tech has had in the last year I imagine attrition is less of an issue. Maybe they factored that in.
- matchbok 3y agoThe real workers? So the execs that literally run the company and give people the jobs are... what exactly?
- hock_ads_ad_hoc 3y agoLeeches, arbitraging the labor of the actual, real workers.
- Daz1 3y agoLow IQ opinion
- phist_mcgee 3y agoThe unequal partner in a near/actual exploitative working arrangement
- matchbok 3y agoPlease read Business 101 sweet child.
- BizarreByte 3y agoOverpaid parasites in a lot of cases.
- matchbok 3y agoGreat, if you can do the job, feel free to apply.
- BizarreByte 3y agoPlease, I'm not in the right class nor do I have the right family to get such a position. Are you a C-level exec? It's strange to me when working class people defend them.
- huytersd 3y agoThey’ll probably give them all chatGPT subscriptions and ask them to deal with it. If that goes well they’ll probably cut the staff in half again.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoOr dogfood their Amazon Q AI
- neom 3y agoNot an engineer so I'm curious... Is this actually a thing that's happening in Eng orgs these days?
- sneed_chucker 3y agoCan't speak for other places, but at Meta everyone effectively has a free GPT4 subscription.
- huytersd 3y agoIf you’re an eng and not using ChatGPT/copilot you’re going to get left behind pretty soon.
- password54321 3y agoSure, if you are doing unoriginal low quality work.
- golly_ned 3y agoIt's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong about something that I can easily see and point out and often verify by finding documentation or testing. I don't know how many times I've asked a question and told the wrong thing.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> It's unsettling how many times GPT 4.5 has been wrong There is no GPT-4.5. Current OpenAI GPT models include various date and context-size checkpoints of 3.5-turbo, 4, and (in preview) 4-turbo.
- seoulmetro 3y ago[flagged]
- aaomidi 3y agoThis is the best substantive response I can give to this: lol
- golly_ned 3y agoWhat makes you think the workload at Twitch must be minimal?
- seoulmetro 3y agoWhat makes me think this? Well to start, the app does not change, it's core product is old and it is a piece of finished product to do a very physical thing. All this said, they have way too many people for this. It ain't rocket science to know why tech hires (and fires) too many people.
- llm_nerd 3y agoThis sort of comment always seems to be made based on the idea that Twitch was 1430 employees all writing HTML or something. In reality it's a company that operates around the world across an enormous number of jurisdictions, dealing with governments and censorship and laws and regulations. That has a significant legal operation, a significant moderation operation, and deals with payments to many streamers, again in many jurisdictions. The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable. Twitch has seen collapsing revenue and they need to right-size, but these sort of peanut gallery "hurrr how can they have so many employees" narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled.
- seoulmetro 3y agoYeah no one thinks Twitch employees are writing HTML. Especially not on a programmers forum... I took into account it's worldwide stage. >The non-"tech" part of the organization has to be considerable. Not really. Contract work exists for new market capture. >narrative about virtually every tech company is always so...misled. Not misled at all. It's very much a reality. It only upsets those who are part of waste.
- matrix_overload 3y agoPeople fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 50%, instead of doing 30% of the infinitely growing backlog, you'll do 15%. Since most of the completed work gets obsoleted or thrown away due to various inefficiencies, there will be some effect, but it will be far from dramatic. As for the individual workload, you'll carry as much as you let the company put on your back. And that mostly depends on your negotiating skill, and somewhat on the supply/demand dynamics of the current labour market. The latter will tough for the couple of years, but the former is up to you to level up.
- aaomidi 3y agoThat is true for some teams, not true for others. I've never seen a layoff actually care about what team they're removing from when it comes to ENG. In this case it's probably 500 across twitch, which for some teams is going to be devastating.
- refulgentis 3y agoThe problem is people misunderstand how this works, so none of that happens. Instead the competition goes to 11 while work is cut by upper managers, leading to "non-business decisions" made by lower managers to cling to their bit, leading to less productivity both in absolute & unit terms. Also, I think A) is a little bit of red herring designed to create agency and opportunity where there is none. If we mean "negotiate" in an airy high-minded vague sense of "negotiate but don't", sure. At the end of the day these moves, whether intended to or not, leave less room for negotiation.
- hakdbha 3y ago[dead]
- itsdrewmiller 3y ago
- whatyesaid 3y agoYou're overestimating things like Twitter and Twitch. The reason these layoffs can occur is that these products are solidified, you can't really improve them much, there's not much real work there. And Twitter apparently had 20 million lines of microservices so it's not like their engineers were doing a good job, despite it being a legacy codebase, all they shipped for 10 years was 1 major redesign and Spaces + NFTs before Dorsey was fully out. That said if they fired the report moderation team then yes it scales linearly.
- soared 3y agoThe consumer facing product is closer to solidified, but advertising, moderation, etc features need to change over time.
- Daz1 3y agoNow they'll have to jiggle their mouse to appear online twice as often!