5 ms·

> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. Yet management always seems to miss the institutional kno

> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less. Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'... It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.

therealdrag0 5mo ago
How do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.
u1hcw9nx 5mo ago
Half of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company. Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.
_carbyau_ 5mo ago
> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate. They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life. Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.
- Haven880 5mo ago
  Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.
  - teiferer 5mo ago
    Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket to moon?
    - microtonal 5mo ago
      Well, rails get made as well, I think the point was that a lot of things require reinventing knowledge that was previously known.
      - consp 5mo ago
        Or phrase it as reusing exiting tech because "it is cheaper" ending in having to reinvent it because all the people who designed it and made it have gone.
        bluGill 5mo ago
        IT isn't even clear that is bad - SpaceX is famous for designing rockets from scratch that are better than the old technology everyone else has been using.
    - wil421 5mo ago
      This is the internet. You can’t expect HN or Reddit to be positive, especially around America. It was the same way before Trump was around. These people and bots have no idea what they are talking about. They’re parrots.
    - spwa4 5mo ago
      That happened in the reverse way. The government fired and underpaid a lot of people at Nasa ... and Musk hired incredibly experienced people, who became experienced on the taxpayers' dime, to build a rocket, for huge payrises. The biggest but not only example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller (yes, lots of subcontractors involved, however, Nasa paid, with a bonus percentage provided by the US military) Note that Mueller gives the payment situation at TRW, and the fact that he "wasn't appreciated" as a direct reason to go to SpaceX. What did you think happened? Does anyone actually believe Musk did the technical design for that engine, just because he claims so? Or I should say he constantly claims it, staying slightly away from direct claims to avoid getting caught in lies (well ... getting caught AGAIN).
  - microtonal 5mo ago
    Relevant post with some military examples as well: https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing... (Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)
  - noobermin 5mo ago
    I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
    - throawayonthe 5mo ago
      what?
    - user_7832 5mo ago
      I'd imagine it's access to capital and resources. I suspect many engineers/professionals (especially in eg consulting or manufacturing) would start their own business if they have the financial stability to do so. A lot of market forces tend to "naturally" create monopolies/oligopolies. For eg if you're the biggest steel plant you can operate efficiently and keep moderate margins, beating any plants not as big (economies of scale). An independent guy (or even the entire team) can't just open a new steel plant shop down the road, even if the current one sucks.
      - noobermin 5mo ago
        Haven't software engineering salaries been like 200K for almost a decade? With very little actual need in capital requirements relative to a host of industries with expensive equipment, I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed. To be a bit honest, I'm a computational scientist who's never seen anything near 100K and likely never will. It's hard to imagine not having around 4 times my salary and not being able to start something myself.
        radicalbyte 5mo ago
        It gets sucked up into housing. So if you're in your early 50s that's fine as you probably brought very cheap. Mid-40s and under? Unlikely unless you were extremely lucky. I'm 45 by the time I've been able to buy housing it has always been peak despite having very high earnings at times.
        5mo ago
- wesleywt 5mo ago
  It takes two years to get up to speed on a job. It seems laying off will cost the company time even if they are saving money.
- tw04 5mo ago
  >If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate. That’s great in theory, it rarely works in reality. Those people almost universally find new work quickly because they’re good, or retire because they can. In both instances the idea of going back to bail out a company that just screwed you, operating with a giant target on your back when the inevitable next layoff occurs, isn’t worth it for 10x the salary. Ignoring the fact a business of any significant size isn’t approving paying someone to come back for 3x, they’ll just caN the manager for the fallout.
farfatched 5mo ago
Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers? This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.
- bluGill 5mo ago
  I've never seen evidence that companies value experience. They hire outside CEOs instead of developing and promoting from within. They move managers to new rolls all the time, and thus everyone needs to learn how to manage a new boss. My local school district did the same when the superintendent retired - found a small local school district and hired their superintendent away instead of using what should have been a pool of assistants who already have experience in local problems. I'm not sure if it matters or not in management. I believe it does in engineering.
nwah1 5mo ago
Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired. Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.
rtgfhyuj 5mo ago
[flagged]
ricardobayes 5mo ago
Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.
- dandellion 5mo ago
  I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review. LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.
  - swader999 5mo ago
    Yeah they seem to just amplify who ever was behind it.
- otikik 5mo ago
  Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership. > noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.
  - athrowaway3z 5mo ago
    Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever. Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with. Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough. Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend. It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess. Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.
zelphirkalt 5mo ago
Can't wait for the next couple of outages! Let's see how long it will take.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Ray20 5mo ago
> seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience Or the exact opposite. Not every institutional experience is good and useful. Some are quite the opposite. I mean, term limits are one of the most common democratic institutions for precisely this reason. We WANT some knowledge and experience to walk out the door.

therealdrag0 5mo ago

How do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.

u1hcw9nx 5mo ago

Half of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company. Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.

_carbyau_ 5mo ago

> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate. They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life. Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.

Haven880 5mo ago
Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.
- teiferer 5mo ago
  Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket to moon?
  - microtonal 5mo ago
    Well, rails get made as well, I think the point was that a lot of things require reinventing knowledge that was previously known.
    - consp 5mo ago
      Or phrase it as reusing exiting tech because "it is cheaper" ending in having to reinvent it because all the people who designed it and made it have gone.
      - bluGill 5mo ago
        IT isn't even clear that is bad - SpaceX is famous for designing rockets from scratch that are better than the old technology everyone else has been using.
  - wil421 5mo ago
    This is the internet. You can’t expect HN or Reddit to be positive, especially around America. It was the same way before Trump was around. These people and bots have no idea what they are talking about. They’re parrots.
  - spwa4 5mo ago
    That happened in the reverse way. The government fired and underpaid a lot of people at Nasa ... and Musk hired incredibly experienced people, who became experienced on the taxpayers' dime, to build a rocket, for huge payrises. The biggest but not only example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller (yes, lots of subcontractors involved, however, Nasa paid, with a bonus percentage provided by the US military) Note that Mueller gives the payment situation at TRW, and the fact that he "wasn't appreciated" as a direct reason to go to SpaceX. What did you think happened? Does anyone actually believe Musk did the technical design for that engine, just because he claims so? Or I should say he constantly claims it, staying slightly away from direct claims to avoid getting caught in lies (well ... getting caught AGAIN).
- microtonal 5mo ago
  Relevant post with some military examples as well: https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing... (Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)
- noobermin 5mo ago
  I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
  - throawayonthe 5mo ago
    what?
  - user_7832 5mo ago
    I'd imagine it's access to capital and resources. I suspect many engineers/professionals (especially in eg consulting or manufacturing) would start their own business if they have the financial stability to do so. A lot of market forces tend to "naturally" create monopolies/oligopolies. For eg if you're the biggest steel plant you can operate efficiently and keep moderate margins, beating any plants not as big (economies of scale). An independent guy (or even the entire team) can't just open a new steel plant shop down the road, even if the current one sucks.
    - noobermin 5mo ago
      Haven't software engineering salaries been like 200K for almost a decade? With very little actual need in capital requirements relative to a host of industries with expensive equipment, I'd say of the class of workers most poised to start their own businesses, I'd say you guys are the best placed. To be a bit honest, I'm a computational scientist who's never seen anything near 100K and likely never will. It's hard to imagine not having around 4 times my salary and not being able to start something myself.
      - radicalbyte 5mo ago
        It gets sucked up into housing. So if you're in your early 50s that's fine as you probably brought very cheap. Mid-40s and under? Unlikely unless you were extremely lucky. I'm 45 by the time I've been able to buy housing it has always been peak despite having very high earnings at times.
      - 5mo ago
wesleywt 5mo ago
It takes two years to get up to speed on a job. It seems laying off will cost the company time even if they are saving money.
tw04 5mo ago
>If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate. That’s great in theory, it rarely works in reality. Those people almost universally find new work quickly because they’re good, or retire because they can. In both instances the idea of going back to bail out a company that just screwed you, operating with a giant target on your back when the inevitable next layoff occurs, isn’t worth it for 10x the salary. Ignoring the fact a business of any significant size isn’t approving paying someone to come back for 3x, they’ll just caN the manager for the fallout.

farfatched 5mo ago

Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers? This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.

bluGill 5mo ago
I've never seen evidence that companies value experience. They hire outside CEOs instead of developing and promoting from within. They move managers to new rolls all the time, and thus everyone needs to learn how to manage a new boss. My local school district did the same when the superintendent retired - found a small local school district and hired their superintendent away instead of using what should have been a pool of assistants who already have experience in local problems. I'm not sure if it matters or not in management. I believe it does in engineering.

nwah1 5mo ago

Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired. Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.

rtgfhyuj 5mo ago

[flagged]

ricardobayes 5mo ago

Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.

dandellion 5mo ago
I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review. LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.
- swader999 5mo ago
  Yeah they seem to just amplify who ever was behind it.
otikik 5mo ago
Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership. > noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.
- athrowaway3z 5mo ago
  Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever. Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with. Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough. Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend. It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess. Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.

zelphirkalt 5mo ago

Can't wait for the next couple of outages! Let's see how long it will take.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Ray20 5mo ago

> seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience Or the exact opposite. Not every institutional experience is good and useful. Some are quite the opposite. I mean, term limits are one of the most common democratic institutions for precisely this reason. We WANT some knowledge and experience to walk out the door.