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Your spitball is flying in a completely different universe than my spitball. Imo anytime you have layoffs that cut so deep, you cut through informal capability

by dv_dt 3y ago

Your spitball is flying in a completely different universe than my spitball. Imo anytime you have layoffs that cut so deep, you cut through informal capability, knowledge and relationships that take a long time to form. If anything DEI helps create internal resilience because the personal networks end up a little different, giving you wider and more angles of coverage. HN talks about people in open source holding up major functionality with little to no recognition. That happens within corporations too. Indiscriminate layoffs may directly fire those people, or signal to them that it's better to move elsewhere leaving gaps that only get discovered over time.

lazide 3y ago
Of course, and not breaking anything with layoffs is already hard when your sole criteria as a manager is ‘are they effective’. Which it’s never been that simple, especially in big corp, but it’s waaay more difficult now. And so what happens when you’re required by the gov’t and leadership to also comply with coarse grained population statistics AND you can’t find qualified people that meet those statistics enough? On top of having to make layoffs? My ex was a reasonably qualified software engineer, and even 4 years ago was getting no-interview offers because she was a woman - as explicitly stated by the recruiters. It’s only gotten worse since then for hiring managers. She was offended because they literally didn’t seem to care if she was qualified or not. I can provide links to signed and in force legal agreements between the DOL and Google for instance which formalize the need for this, and can point towards public records of evidence submitted to court of emails (internal) between recruiters which state the same too, btw. Actual job qualifications (as in skills) did not enter the conversation at all. Just course grained DEI attributes. So then they end up disproportionately cutting from the non-protected tranches (the groups that DO have to be qualified to stay) first because your stats still have to look good. I’m not saying DEI folks overall have no one qualified or hard working in them - rather, that there are little to no structural incentives for them to be. In many cases, they’re also unfireable/unlayoffable. And eventually, the non-protected folks leave, burn out, or give up because f-this. Why do so much extra work when you literally can’t even get paid more for it, or be recognized because it will piss everyone else off? And even if you’re superhuman on that front - everyone burns out eventually. Which is also why you tend to see what you see in Open Source. It’s never any one decision, but stochastic movement in this direction has been relentless and inevitable.

by dv_dt 3y ago

lazide 3y ago

Of course, and not breaking anything with layoffs is already hard when your sole criteria as a manager is ‘are they effective’. Which it’s never been that simple, especially in big corp, but it’s waaay more difficult now. And so what happens when you’re required by the gov’t and leadership to also comply with coarse grained population statistics AND you can’t find qualified people that meet those statistics enough? On top of having to make layoffs? My ex was a reasonably qualified software engineer, and even 4 years ago was getting no-interview offers because she was a woman - as explicitly stated by the recruiters. It’s only gotten worse since then for hiring managers. She was offended because they literally didn’t seem to care if she was qualified or not. I can provide links to signed and in force legal agreements between the DOL and Google for instance which formalize the need for this, and can point towards public records of evidence submitted to court of emails (internal) between recruiters which state the same too, btw. Actual job qualifications (as in skills) did not enter the conversation at all. Just course grained DEI attributes. So then they end up disproportionately cutting from the non-protected tranches (the groups that DO have to be qualified to stay) first because your stats still have to look good. I’m not saying DEI folks overall have no one qualified or hard working in them - rather, that there are little to no structural incentives for them to be. In many cases, they’re also unfireable/unlayoffable. And eventually, the non-protected folks leave, burn out, or give up because f-this. Why do so much extra work when you literally can’t even get paid more for it, or be recognized because it will piss everyone else off? And even if you’re superhuman on that front - everyone burns out eventually. Which is also why you tend to see what you see in Open Source. It’s never any one decision, but stochastic movement in this direction has been relentless and inevitable.