I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one. The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pile of someone else’s money that will do literally anything, including destroy your life, to become a bigger pile.
You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off—they stand for nothing.
>It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself.
That feels like the correct way to think about it. Everyone else seems to think it's one extreme or the other but really thinking about it on an individual level vs a company level seems more accurate to my own experience.
"Going above and beyond" at a big company, if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted, and getting promoted results in significantly higher pay. I've gotten promoted twice at my current employer over the years, which has roughly doubled my total compensation, and none of that would have happened had I just did my previous level's responsibilities and nothing beyond.
Most people who think they deserve a significant pay raise probably don't (or maybe not enough relative to others competing for limited promotional budget).
I've seen enough people extremely qualified being denied promotions because they were "too good" at their current role. Meanwhile I've also seen as of late "promotions" that are just a title change while only adding to your workload with no extra pay. There's no winning with many companies.
If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people involved. But all that already means it may not be a good fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...
Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!
> Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value.
Ok.
> Is that work something that anyone else could do?
Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.
But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.
Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.
We've all been through this, we know how it works.
I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.
And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.
I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.
The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.
So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.
The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.
I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org.
I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income.
You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization.
My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.
My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.
over the last ten years the tech industry has 10x'd the value it has created, which is obvious if you look at the accrued wealth of the leaders in the industry.
you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been working in this industry? MY SALARY
Why don't you start your own company, make a lot of money and hire people with 10x salary? Who's stoping you? Show us how you pay 1M to each of your SWE.
As with all things, it depends where you are. It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
And these are the biggest employers of talent. It may not be most people in a startup forum, but it’s a lot of people.
For all others, I think it’s because tech isn’t seen as such an important revenue driver. Lots of places we are still seen as a cost center.
Anecdata, for sure, but my experience working at several big companies in tech is that they won’t significantly bump your pay (and especially not your stock grant!) when they promote you. If anything, they will move you to the minimum of the salary band for the new level.
In my experience, you’re better off getting the promo and looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don’t fault people for playing the game that is given.
Commensurate to the risk, of course. If you ignore the risk component then your best bet is to forget having a job and spend your days playing Powerball. The system offers much, much, much greater reward there.
If you keep risk in mind then it's not so clear cut. Staying at the job you have, even with lower pay on paper, may end up being the most profitable option in the end. But sometimes you just have to make the gamble and find out! There are winning opportunities for sure.
Risk depends on the market strength. In good times, you could easily jump to a new job with a raise in weeks and there's little risk as long as you're not outing youself at work.
In bad times like this, probably not worth it. The search takes months not, if not over a year, and there's a non-zero chance you're laid off anyway.
Weeks can be a long time if it doesn't work out. And that is, by your own comment, in the good times. The good times don't last forever. Upon some dice roll it is going to turn, and when that one doesn't work out now you could be looking at months or years.
Staying put isn't risk-free either. Not by any stretch. But is comparatively less risky. It is the devil you know, hence the lower risk premium.
> It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.
I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).
Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp are often very constrained when handling those who negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level raises for a long time until they're lower in their band
Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.
I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.
I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).
Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.
My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.
The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated them for giving up the stock grants of their previous employer, so they probably still received less than you had accumulated.
Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for level + performance rating in their location.
Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.
They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay immediately, while for someone who got promoted internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to catch up
Pay bands for different levels are typically pretty broad, and typically overlap between levels. Just because median pay at level N+1 is significantly higher than at level N, doesn't mean that you will get that being promoted from level N.
It's not an exception at all. People get promoted all the time. Most people I work with have been promoted at least once since joining the company, some multiple times like I have.
Based on my anecdotal experience and the people I've known in industry, job hopping is way way way easier than getting a promo if you're trying to maximize salary. Mine has doubled after a few job hops.
Right because “working for yourself” is likely to lead you to the same profit as even the comp of a mid level employee at any of the BigTech companies.
> if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted
This alludes to the other bit that's not taught enough: Working effectively, efficiently is not about how many problem reports you close, or lines of code you ship or number of hours at your desk. It's about recognition. Pay attention and work toward the stuff that will get you recognized. Pay attention and measure how much effort you put in the day to day stuff and the stuff that will be seen. This work is not "for your company", it's "for your career".
Watch out also for what kind of recognition you get. If you become known as the expert in day to day operation of tool XYZ, you might be parked doing that for the rest of your life. Probably not what you intended.
I don't think this is true of all companies. My current company doesn't base bonuses on individual contributions, and even went so far as to reduce the number of "story points" that top contributors did in sprints so that the rest of the team wouldn't look bad.
Fine, what else counts? A company may deliberately lower the effect of this in order to favor that - which they feel matters more, or which they feel is not done enough at that time. What else did you notice that they favor?
for private companies, it literally is the people you work with (and whatever legal enchantments they've decided on). some of those people will still fuck you over, but it's not a legally-conjured sentient pile of money the way a C-corp is
B-corps are an interesting attempt to avoid being a sentient pile of money. in theory, it's an egregore that is capable of valuing things other than money. (they haven't really been tested in court. and they might fuck you over in pursuit of some other value, even if they do work. or fucking you over for money might not conflict with its other values)
If you’re interested in learning about this, be aware that S-corp and C-corp are widely used misnomers. A corporation is a corporation (and an LLC is not) but they all can be taxed under sub chapters C, S, K, and others based on the specific details of the entity.
C corporation is just a shorthand way of saying “privately incorporated voluntary association taxed under sub c (probably with dreams of being a public company someday, otherwise they’d be sub s).
Not trying to “but acktchually” you, just suggesting that your next stop after reading about corporations is probably the tax code. (Enjoy that).
extra bonus -- actual attorneys who are familiar with those codes learn not to discuss it at all .. for whatever reasons.. it really is valuable information, as in scarcity
turns out, i actually meant benefit corporation. (i've heard people refer to them as b-corporations, but didn't realize there was another thing called b-corporation)
> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...
Right.
The company doesn't care.
But I do.
I don't work hard on my craft, push myself to be better/smarter/have more impact, or go above and beyond for my employer.
My experience has been that caring about your craft is a great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the more happy my managers are with my performance."
That's because time pressure is real. We can't all be Knuth and spend our life looking for the perfect algorithm to solve all problems we could ever have. Most of us must ship something that works well enough for a particular scenario, as soon as possible - tomorrow, next week, next month, not next year. If you care too much about the quality of your work, you might end up never shipping; at some point you have to stop caring and just push the damn button.
It's not always time pressure. It can also be, for example, calling out others for doing things that don't make sense or hinder what's actually needed for the job/company, which in turn makes them uncomfortable and leads to discipline for you and not them. My response after having that happen? Fine, I'll look the other way and not care how much we're getting done anymore.
There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for where you are now.
I have the same exact experience at my current company. My official performance, which is given by my boss, improved since I started to not care. My output fell, the quality of my work is the same, just less quantity, but for some reason my scores are higher.
On the other hand, I had a job where my performance was rewarded greatly, and I was lucky to be at the right place for that. Almost all of the employees at the same company were not that lucky.
Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished products for example) or even methods of creating software. This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some good words in one quarter and not matter the next.
The question to ask yourself then is: why is it that the behaviour that brings you pleasure/meaning/satisfaction happens to align exactly with what the company wants?
I spent most of my career with a similar attitude to yours, and TBH it's still my default. The question I find myself asking more and more is: can I maintain/increase my level of satisfaction while giving less of myself to a company that simply doesn't care?
Perhaps. Pay attention to the time you spend "doing the task well" so that YOU are satisfied. You are now smarter (say) but is your hierarchy going to promote you for this? Or park you and make you do this indefinitely, or blame you for the rest that didn't get done? Is your network as a whole now more inclined to hire you out in their next venture?
The quicker we make peace with the fact that hard work alone will not get us ahead (in most cases) the better it is for our mental health. We can put as much effort into our jobs as long as we accept that the only guaranteed result is our own joy, pride in our work and nothing else (not even a thank you from suits) is guaranteed.
If we are not able to accept that, then just do the bare minimum like most people. OR find a better job, but there is still no guarantee the new job would actually be better than the old job. But hey, at least we might get more compensation in our new job, so there's that
That smells like something a person with very little choice would say. At least I was saying similar things to myself in times I had very little choice. It's a very good way of regaining illusion of agency.
I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of. That doesn't mean going out of my way and overworking myself, but it does mean being a good person to work with and writing quality code.
I tend to stick to the scope of work asked of me (though not always) for the reasons in the article, but I don't just phone it in. I put effort into writing good code, tests, and PR reviews.
In my experience, when it comes to getting the next job the only thing that really matters either way are references. If you were a too co-worker and did at least put in the effort to do good work within bounds of the scope asked for, you shouldn't have a problem.
> I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of.
That's important. I spend more awake time working/thinking about work than really else. I don't know that it's healthy, but at least I want to be proud of the outputs if I am going to spend this much time on something. I just can't really show up and mail it in, I'm just not wired that way, and suspect that a lot if us aren't.
Some of that is inevitable when developing taste, or if the problem has you (so to speak). The problem is when this is the case all the time instead of a season here and there.
Your ability to page out work is a great thing to track.
"The problem is when this is the case all the time instead of a season here and there"
I hope I'm not projecting, and misinterpreting, but I try to explain this to a colleague all the time. His work style is 8 months of the year a couple hours here and then 2-3 months of crazy, intense work.
But I have to show up for 25-30 (I'm self-employed) hours a week, 48 weeks a year, and I find it really difficult to then squeeze in 2-4 months of 50+ hours weeks on top of this.
There is sprinting and there is distance running and for most of us, these are very different things.
Yeah this is super important IMO. Set your own standards for what that means. Makes it much easier to handle the slings and arrows of normal 9-5 headaches, and to understand when you're being pressed to do things you wouldn't be proud of.
I agree with your comment. I have never been laid off, and I hope I don't ever do or at least I see the signs early on to be prepared.
The way I see "work" is that you are going to spend 8hrs of your day doing it, so you better feel positive about it and enjoy it. I couldn't care less about the corporate lords and I very well know I am just a line on an excel, but when I work I want to be sure I feel satisfied, I enjoy it and build trust with my team and meaningful relationships where possible.
I am not a religious person, but there is a famous saying in Hinduism - कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन |
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि|| It roughly translates to "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction."
I love the last line of it where it says "don't be attached to inaction" which means just because the fruit of labour isn't in your control, doesn't mean you can just start behaving like a someone who doesn't care.
> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
Early in my career I watched a coworker get denied a promotion to management and make a hard turn toward cynicism. To be honest, he was not ready for a management promotion and the company made the right call. However, he was so insulted that he immediately started looking for new jobs and stopped doing more than a couple hours of work per week.
I thought his cynicism was going to backfire, but over the next several years he job hopped almost every year, getting bigger titles at every move. For a long time I was jealous that his cynicism and mercenary-style approach to employment was paying off so well.
Years later I went to a fun networking lunch. His name came up and many of us, from different local companies, said we had worked with him. The conversation quickly turned to how he had kind of screwed everyone over by doing Resume Driven Development, starting ambitious projects, and then leaving before he had to deal with consequences of, well, anything.
He hit a wall mid-career where he was having a very hard time getting hired because his resume was full of job hopping. He was requesting reference letters from past bosses multiple times a month because he was always trying to job hop. One admitted that he eventually just stopped responding, because he'd write a lot of reference letters every job-hop cycle only to have him bail on the company with a lot of technical debt later.
He eventually moved away, I suspect partially because the local market had become saturated with people who knew his game. He interviewed extremely well (because he did it so much) but he'd fail out as soon as someone recognized his name or talked to an old coworker.
The last I talked to him, he felt like a really cynical person all around. Like his personality was based on being a mercenary who extracted "TC" from companies by playing all the games. He was out of work, but asked me if I had any leads (no thanks!).
I'm no longer jealous of his mercenary, job-hopping adventure.
I’ve known many people like this throughout my career, and I have seen the absolute opposite that you observed. These people are perfect candidates for management positions and their focus on office politics pays off handsomely. It’s not for me; might not be for you; but in reality these machiavellian tactics work if you wanna move up and get promoted in most large corporations.
The problem with getting ahead via Machiavellian tactics is that it only works at toxic companies.
Every good company I've worked for has been a bad place for politics and Machiavellian personalities.
So if you're using politics and Machiavellian tactics you may get ahead at some company, but then you're going to be surrounded by people who are also toxic and Machiavellian. Perhaps more so than you. Playing politics is often a short-term win at the expensive of the long-term.
I think there are plenty of toxic companies around and your friend's gamble is just another strategy at succeeding in them. I sometimes too feel envious that I don't have the chops to do this job hopping game.
The question isn't what strategy works at miserable companies that expect 60+ hour work weeks: it is what strategy will get me well-paid at a job I actually want.
The standards for managers are also so much lower than for engineers. Most of the time companies don't know how to judge how good a manager is at their job, much less how to interview people for those roles.
Instead, people rely on "how confident do they sound?" as a proxy for competence. It used to be that you could do that in development, but then we started having engineers write code during interviews.
"I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc."
I've been in tech for 15 years and twice was enough for me. I now take on multiple contracts at the same time and make way more than I ever did as a regular employee.
I also won't work for startups as a full-time salaried employee anymore. They will always try to squeeze the hours out of you because they are usually trying to make a fast approaching deadline to get that next round of funding.
I had a well paying 6 month contract last summer and they wanted to hire me as a full-time, salaried employee. The problem was that I worked closely with their salaried employees and they were always overworked (many working on multiple teams) and working long hours on extremely tight deadlines.
The space was also over-saturated and when I researched the company, they were not turning a profit after a couple of years and continuing to take on rounds of funding.
When I refused the offer and wanted to continue as a contractor, they cut off all contact with me and I haven't heard from them since. It really showed me that they just wanted to overwork me and not pay.
How do you define “good”? When I looked at contract work briefly in 2023 and 2024, contract rates for enterprise dev and the type of work you find on Indeed was around $60-$80/hour W2. Which is really on the low to median end of even enterprise dev once you take into account no paid PTO, no health insurance, and you can’t even count on working 1800 hours a year.
> There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one
This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years. Early 2010s it was more common but this practice is dead. Now every company is a new slate. In fact, I've seen people repeatedly rewarded for jumping ship and build there career on that. Companies have stopped investing in devs, so why should devs not reciprocate?
And there are so many startups. More than you can count. There are more new ones every day than you could ever have time to apply to. They don't all have time to talk to each other.
Not saying it's not good to have pride in your work, but within reason, and within a framework of fairness and quid pro quo. Don't let people exploit you any more than you exploit them. Employment is 100% transactional and the moment you forget that is the moment you get taken advantage of.
It's not about references. It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work. Many years ago, when I started doing consulting/contracting work, literally all my of my jobs came through people I had previously worked for or with across a variety of companies. And if you play your cards right, as the years roll on, you won't even have to apply for jobs other than as a formality. Instead, people who's respect you've gained will try to bring you into where they work.
> It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work.
The network is actually holding you back. You don't need a network to get a new job AND if that person in another company has enough pull to get you in it's actually likely a sign they've been there too long themselves if they're not directly in control of the hiring budget.
It's not completely false at all - but it does depend greatly depends on which country you're based in.
Where I am, in Spain, your network, and your reputation within it, are _everything_. Good jobs will sometimes not even be advertised, as the first thing a hirer will do is ask around their network for recommendations, and those recommendations count for _a lot_. On the other side, when you are looking for work, the first thing you do is ask your network for an intro - and again, that intro counts for a lot.
That's not to say that the traditional interview process will be skipped, but candidates coming from recommendations will have a massive head-start over others.
You can still cultivate all these people in random places in your network. Apparently you are in a line of work where other country corporations will do fine, and these people will still need you in their next ventures or posts.
Their point wasn't reference checks it was the power of a network of people who want to work with you again because they know your work is more than just transactional.
And sometimes it's funny how little it takes. Some people called me simply because they knew of me (I barely had heard of them). They did that because that was soooo much more efficient that some automatic "job posting" circus and they valued their time and deadlines.
Reference checks happen a lot. You just don't see them.
Most companies stopped asking for references because everyone just games the system. Managers are afraid of giving anything but glowing references because they want to keep their own network opportunities strong. Giving positive references is basically a networking game these days.
So that's not how people reference check. Now, they go on LinkedIn and look for mutual connections they trust. They check for people they know whose work history overlapped with the candidate's time at a different company. They go ask that person without the candidate ever knowing.
I get probably 10X as many backchannel reference requests as I do formal reference check requests.
The effect’s source is much more direct than that.
It’s not a reference check to see “is sam0x17 a good dev?” at the end of a hiring pipeline, but rather “I’ve got an open role and remember that sam0x17 is one of the best devs I’ve ever worked with; let’s get them into the company!”
“okay boomer” (context: I’m 50, I am being sarcastic/self deprecating).
That might have been feasible pre 2020. But once I started working remotely and looking for jobs outside of the metro area where I spent most of my career, the usefulness of my network dropped dramatically.
In my case, I also did a slight pivot and my old network of people who I worked with for the first 25 years of my career can’t speak to my current suitability for a job.
You would see the same from someone early career. Their skills would progress so fast it would be crazy to ask someone for a reference who worked with them when they were 22-24 and now they are 27-30.
I'm not sure which market you're in, but companies here absolutely do reference checks. They will even reach out people you didn't list if they're a shared connection.
My standing recommendation to everyone is to do good work and get better at advocating for yourself to make sure you're either getting the experience or the comp you need to achieve your goals. If you're not getting that, switch jobs. It's much much better to switch jobs every few years if that's what you need to stay motivated than to stay, do the minimum and collect a paycheck.
I can guarantee you that no large tech company takes the time to find shared connections.
On the other hand, why would I have connections who I didn’t make a good impression on? they are useless to me.
I currently work at a 600 person company, I just invited everyone as reference that popped up as a suggestion - I did the same at AWS. Good luck trying to find the people who actually worked with.
They're talking about referrals, not reference checks. Getting good referrals is hugely important, especially at smaller companies that don't the capacity to do a rigorous hiring process.
I spent the last few months interviewing at various bay area startups for senior SE roles. About half of them wanted references. This was my experience so YMMV
True. In spite of my earlier comment, someone earlier in their career who didn't work out--especially at a smaller company--may have trouble providing a reference. It is also the case that I've seen people get fired who just had no clue that they were obviously unsuited for their job and were totally blindsided.
You’d be surprised by how many people don’t think that through. There are always a surprising number of people apparently just going through the motions.
I've had people not know why I'm reaching out; I've also gotten references selected by the candidate that did not have good things to say. eg "X is difficult to work with."
And most people aren't good impromptu liars. So pushing a bit with a reference on what did you work on together? Why is this person fantastic? Would you hire this person? can get you far. And if the reference has left their shared employment, the classic: why haven't you hired this person?
It's not at all false IME, though I'm not in SV or the US. Most job want up-front references from at least 2 people, one of whom must be your current supervisor/boss (or someone else higher in the chain of command). You can occasionally get away without it, but it's difficult.
> No one is going to let you talk to your current manager and let them know you are looking for a job.
What on earth do you mean? Who is going to stop me from talking to my manager?
Over my 20+ year career, in all-but one case my current manager has always been one of my referees and has known that I'm looking for other jobs.
Maybe this is a cultural thing. Here (Aus) references from colleagues are basically disregarded and all that prospective employers are interested in is referees from current and former managers.
Reference checks aren't what matters, it's referrals and getting a job that wasn't ever advertised, because someone knows you're good and offers you the position directly.
> This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years.
I understand this might not be your experience, but it's far from being "completely false".
I have had background checks/reference checks done on me (thankfully my would-be boss told me they were a formality and nobody cared about the results. I say "thankfully" not because I had anything to hide, but because the contractors doing the background checks asked for the dumbest things). I was also contacted by US-based consulting firms and asked to provide references on a former boss of mine, who was now applying for an engineering position... and to my surprise, the reference check involved getting on a call with me!
More recently, a relative was applying to a fintech and was asked for references for all her pasts jobs since she started working in the relevant field.
I know lots of companies don't care, but many others do.
Besides, like other commenters said, it's not only about formal references checking. It's also about the networks you build with coworkers whom you can potentially meet again in other jobs, and whom you want to speak favorably of you. I know I've informally vetoed coworkers whom I knew were terrible at their jobs and I heard recruiting was thinking of making an offer to. Likewise, I've enthusiastically recommended past coworkers who I would enjoy working with again.
It happens all the time as you get higher and higher on the org tree, I had jobs not only call my references by ask if they could also speak to my former bosses.
When the money is seriously on the line people care.
In 17 years you never had a past co-worker contact you about a job? That's confirmation that your past performance is affecting your future job prospects. And if you have had that kind of contact, then your statement above is a lie.
People are vastly overestimating network effects when you and your peers have similar experience and backgrounds. You'd likely get the job anyways, and the job probably isn't that great (in terms of upward momentum) to begin with.
As someone who's done hiring look at the people who have a list of good references. It's basically just the same position/level for _years_ because that's all your network can give or feels comfortable giving you (why would they give you a better job than they have).
Is all you care about in a job the money? And are you looking at your total comp, or your hourly rate?
In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value all my time, not just my bank account.
What does my reputation buy me? In the worst job market in the last 20 years, I had two offers in hands within three weeks. I can bring top performers willing to work for regular salaries into wherever I land. All of that is because a lot of people who worked with me in the past would like to work with me again, and the companies we build software for benefit.
I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement, not just a bigger number. And it has been plenty lucrative.
Startups don't succeed because the code is good, but they sure can fail because it is bad. When a company needs to save itself after the underqualified mercantile engineers have left a spaghetti mess of lambdas scattered all over the org or a spaghetti mess of a monolith with every model in one folder, they are very happy to pay for actual expertise.
I care about my well-being and being able to float for extended periods of time if necessary. I can go many, many years without a job at this point and suffer absolutely zero quality of life issues.
>the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks.
I mean don't overwork for an employer who doesn't care about you (none of them do)? Just go switch jobs.
>I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement
This just reads like a no true scotsman fallacy. What does "actual" advancement mean here? Again, I have plenty of security (not job security) right now.
>I can bring top performers willing to work for regular salaries into wherever I land.
So you're fine with exploiting people? What? Just because someone is willing to be a fool doesn't mean you should stand by and let them be one.
And also, I question the "top performers" part of this, given your other qualifiers throughout the post. Especially the comment about big tech. The numbers don't add up in your favor.
> In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value all my time, not just my bank account.
This is the type of copium that you usually hear from people who have never worked in BigTech…
BigTech could afford to pay me 50% more as a mid level employee than working a lot harder at a 60 person startup and that company was paying about average for a local enterprise dev in a major metropolitan area.
I’m no longer there. But I had to get a job as a “staff” level employee to even get in the range when I left of my job as a mid level employee at BigTech. Comparing the leveling guidelines, it’s about the same as a “senior” at the equivalent job at BigTech.
That advice is valid for dime-a-dozen coders working dime-a-dozen jobs, which, granted, is the majority of developers, but we're on Hacker News. The more specialized and deeply technical a role is, the smaller the pool of qualified people is and the really senior folks tend to know each other. Networking matters much much more in these smaller tight-knit communities.
I had to look for a job both in 2023 and last year. For me it was both a network and specialized skills.
Specialized skills for me was cloud + app dev consulting and working at AWS (ProServe) and even more specialized was that I was a major contributor on a popular official open source “AWS Solution” in it niche and I had my own published open source solutions on AWS’s official GitHub site.
That led to two interviews and one offer within three weeks.
My network led to offers where a former manager submitted me to a position at the company that had acquired the company we worked for as a “staff architect” over the technical direction of all of their acquisitions. They gave me an offer.
My network also got me an offer from a former coworker who was a director of a F500 non tech company. He was going to make a position for me to be over the cloud architecture and migration strategies. He trusted me and he had just started working there.
Last year, my current job just fell in my lap, the internal recruiter reached out to out to me and that led to an offer.
I also had another former CTO throw a short term contract my way to tide me over.
But on the other hand, my plan B applications as a standard enterprise CRUD developer working remotely led to nothing.
>Then you’ve done a shitty job building your network.
Even better! I've been in a position to see "network effects" over and over and over again at the highest levels.
I'm telling you an uncomfortable truth: Job hop.
>I had several C-level folks reach out with roles.
See, this is how I know we're speaking past each other. You're acting as if this means something. It doesn't. Until you can even being to accept this is just a placebo effect it's unlikely you'll accept the effort was wasted.
Something something can't convince a man he was fooled.
Strong referrals almost always leads to a job that your network can place you in. You might have limited options for companies and teams, based on who is in your network. If the job market is abundant then having a strong referral is less valuable, but is often the best path to more senior positions. If the job market is not abundant then a job referral might be a way to be placed in a position in weeks instead of months.
I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself. I keep good relationships with former co-workers, we maintain group chats for each of my previous companies where we keep each other up on our careers. I even went to barbecues hosted by a former manager, until he moved out of the Bay Area. None of these have ever actually materialized into a job. It just doesn't work that way. We're all entry level worker bees and don't have any way to put our thumb on the scale at our own companies. If someone in my network reaches out to me asking for help with getting a job at MyCompany, the best I can do is review his resume, coach him on interviews, and then ultimately point him to the link in the job board, where 90% chance he will be ghosted.
Where are these companies where I can tell my boss "Hey, Mike is a good programmer and he just applied. Just give him the job without interviewing! Or accelerate him through the process!" I suppose if it were a two person startup where it was me and my boss you could do that, but at a normal 1000 person CRUD shop with dedicated HR machinery? No way.
On the flip side I’ve worked in 4 companies over 12 years and 2/4 were jobs that I got because I knew someone. The other two, a significant cohort of the people who worked there knew each other from previous workplaces.
Nobody is getting jobs without any interviews, but people are absolutely getting interviewed before/without a job listing, or starting the initial screen with recruiter/hiring manager with an upper hand of “Mike said you’re good to work with”. Even at a 1000 person company with HR.
>> I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself.
Same here, also =~ 25 years (working as a professional programmer since 2001). I never had a problem finding a job myself (either switching jobs or being laid off, it happens) but it was always "cold calling", apply on a job board / Linked In and go through the interview without any referral or inside help.
And when I tried to refer someone, they were blissfully ignored. Even had managers / HR go after me: "we need someone ASAP, don't you have some referrals?". Reached my acquaintances among former workmates, convinced them to make a personalized CV so I can send it to HR, nothing happened next. They didn't even call the guy, completely "forget about it".
So I learned my lesson of corporate helplessness and don't give a fuck anymore. Don't recommend anyone, don't care if HR or managers need someone urgently, I do my job and don't get involved with anyone else anymore.
Yup, another similar situation here - ~20 years in Bay Area, almost 15 years at one company, no one in my "network" said anything about jobs. I did contact a few directly and "not hiring right now". A bunch of others (since I was one of the younger ones at this company when I joined in '08) had since retired.
Got a new job through a LinkedIn ad, found a former co-worker here.
I mean, it could be that I'm not a great networking person, but.. I'll agree that network hasn't helped me much so far.
You're going to need to pitch your buddies a lot more aggressively than that.
You've worked closely with Mike in the past at ExampleCorp, where he was one of the team's top contributors. He was great at code reviewing, a calm and reliable voice during production incidents, and always ready to help out new graduates. Mike was the guy people turned to with their most difficult WidgetStack bugs, fixing problems that had stumped other developers. He would be a great asset to the company, and a great fit for this role - which you note needs WidgetStack. He has your strongest possible recommendation.
I'll give you a couple of examples I've been involved with:
1. I was applying for a job at Company A and I had a former co-worker working there. I think it was down to me and 2 other people and the manager asked my former co-worker about me and I believe his feedback tipped the scales in my favor.
2. Same situation as above but in this case it was my feedback. A different former co-worker was applying for a job at Company A(now that I was working there) and the manager hiring asked both me and my former and now present co-worker about the candidate as it was between him and another person.
3. A former manager straight up offered me a position at his new job because I'd be a good fit for the role as they were building exactly what I had done before. I turned him down(nicely) as I had stepped away from that particular type of work.
4. I've given negative feedback on a candidate that I'd worked with that was interviewing for an open role but it wasn't just me. All 3 of us including co-workers from (1) and (2) above had previously worked with the candidate and we didn't think he'd be a good fit for our org but it was ultimately up the manager of the team that was hiring to make the decision.
Granted I'm at a smaller company but these "network placed" jobs do happen. Sometimes it's just tipping the scales and sometimes it's a straight up job and sometimes it could be the reason you didn't get the job.
My first job was a student worker at my school district in Information Services. Got that because my physics teacher put in a word for me (and I interviewed ok).
My first 'real job' out of college was a 'noc techician' at a company a good friend was working at. Although that wasn't a great use of my skills, at least it got me started, and I think there was a chance of moving towards development, eventually.
Next job was through a niche job board.
Since then, I've been hired my original skip level boss from that job twice.
Job interviews are a lot different when they are trying to convince you to join, vs you trying to convince them to let you.
Making an impression on someone who has opportunities for you later can work out well.
I've also had a couple other people reach out for what I think would have been a similarly easy interview for me, but one of them I didn't want to work with again, and the other one, the company location and business wasn't a good fit for me.
Most developers don't work in giant companies, but the programmers who do work in giant companies mostly don't know many programmers who work in the medium-sized companies where most of the jobs are right now.
If you are interested in diversifying your network, you can purposefully choose a job at a different scale of company when you are next looking, but you can also start going to conferences or user groups or get involved with an interesting open-source project.
Not every piece of networking has to be with coworkers. Not putting all your networking eggs into one basket can give you options, especially as the layoffs are flying fast and furious.
Well, there's also a difference between liking someone and liking to work with them. I've had a lot of coworkers I liked that I wouldn't bend over backwards to hire. That said, this process might not work at Google or what have you.
I've never worked in a company so large that I couldn't go a step further and actually talk to the hiring manager and tell them they would be stupid not to take someone's resume seriously. But it's more about fast tracking the interview than skipping it. No one is just going to blindly hire referrals. They shouldn't anyway.
That's not how it works. What happens is an organization decides to hire for some reason, now has the problem that good candidates are hard to find. So people say "well I know this guy who I worked with at xxx that's looking for a job".
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. There’s a great bit in Margin Call about this: Kevin Spacey’s character challenges the plan to sell the firm’s entire MBS portfolio with the point that once their counterparties figure out they’ve been sold a bag, they will never trust them again. The firm insists on the plan anyway, so when Spacey tells his floor the news, he acknowledges that this will be the end of many of their careers, and as compensation the firm is giving each trader a $2m bonus for selling through their slice of the portfolio. They’re basically giving them an advance in exchange for making themselves unhireable, because ultimately the economy is made of people working with other people.
If you can get as good a signal on someone's performance in 5 hours of interviews as you can in five months of working with them, either you are a genius or you are not paying attention at work.
The better someone is at their job, the less I think of what they are doing at work, because they make my problems disappear, so I can actually think of the things that matter to me (e.g. my family/friends and hobbies).
An interview is a process targeted specifically at evaluating performance of a candidate.
If you have time to pay attention to 100 other people at work and think about their performance - you either have a super easy job where you can slack, or should focus more on improving your own work.
Strong referrals may lead to interviews at larger companies. But rarely jobs. You still have to go through the interview process and most of the time how you came in isn’t even known to the interviewer.
Now if your network includes directors and CxOs who can just push a job through specifically for you, that’s different. Especially if it is a strategic hire for them. Those types of jobs usually don’t involve formal interviews and they are more of discussions about mutual fit.
An internal referral by someone at the company you are applying to might carry some weight, or at least get you a foot in the door (interview), but I think it's been years/decades since past employers were willing to say more than "yes, he worked here", for fear of lawsuits.
References these days are usually with individual coworkers, rather than a company reference.
It usually isn't "is this person a good developer?" either. Instead, it is open-ended questions without any one right answer. How much structure did this person like? What about your work place helped them be successful? What role did they play on the project you worked on together? What impact did they have on the team?
If someone's reference didn't work with them closely, that's as strong a no-hire signal as if they outright said "this person sucked." If they don't have anyone they can hand you the phone number for who has specific, detailed praise about them and their work, you can safely move on to the ten other candidates who do.
> good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job
Yeah, no. They're one factor in many. I've managed just fine throughout almost 4 decades of career without referrals.
I'm fairly OK with how that career turned out.
It has drawbacks. Some of my jobs were odd kinks in the career curve - though I did enjoy them. (Roughly, ESA -> Industrial Automation -> Consulting -> Startup -> Video Games -> FAANG. It is not the straightest path :)
Referrals are definitely a large plus (IIRC, the industry stats say about 1/3rd of job offers are internal referrals, even though they are far from 1/3 of the candidates).
Usually when you’re in a shitty situation, all the people who know who you are are also in bad situations and probably can’t hire or protect you. That’s how business works—things go bad at the same time. All correlations go to one in a crash.
Not today or tomorrow, but next month, when one of them has started a cool startup, another is VP at her friend’s company, and the rockstar made it into Big Co
When you are just starting, yes. But after a while, if you pay attention to cultivating it, you amass a significant network. Small factor initially, big one later if you work on it.
What ends up mattering more is your ability to form good relationships with co-workers at your last job and sell yourself on your resume.
Most of the people who end up getting high paying, high ranking jobs are not very skilled technically, but are skilled personally - even engineers.
So I'd say - do your job as well as you can (don't go too crazy with work), be friendly with people in your company, and phrase your achievements in terms of % value/speed/users added.
> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
I sacrifice an evening - but not to my company, but to studying Leetcode to move on to the next company. I also have side hustles that I devote time to.
> when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
I am helpful to most people when they need help, and they remember this. My code is clean and well architected and well tested, and they can see this too. They also know that I know the language and platform we're using, and general programming (and business) knowledge. Few care whether I'm a "standout contributor" in terms of getting many stories done. Actually if I have a good lead or manager I might go above and beyond for them in terms of doing more.
> a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
Well, this is correct. I help my co-workers.
Things are situational. If I got a job helping set up LLM's or something, I might dive in and work a lot of hours just because I feel it is benefiting me too. On the other hand I can be somewhere where it doesn't make sense to work more than forty hours (if that) a week.
Don't really agree. The benefits you mentioned are already there for 50-70 percentile employees. Like doing a bit more than minimum, occasionally helping others, not slacking too much so others had to pick up your work etc. No benefits to bust your ass to be the top 5%.
And when more and more people are like this, the average quality goes down, so it is even easier to be average.
Pride in my work? Sometimes I have pride in my work. Doesn't mean I should open myself to be exploited.
My perception of work changed after a layoff last fall. I had the typical C-Suite reaching out and 6 months of severance. After giving over a decade of my time to a company and given 6 months of pay in return my thought process changed. I was offered a job due to their contacts, but I would be in a similar situation with no laws to protect me, so I decided to decline and left the country. I had a contact in Mexico... after reading about their labor laws I decided while the pay was 50% of what i made in USA. I didn't have to worry about layoffs. For perspective had I been laid off in Mexico and worked the same amount of time my severance by law would have been about 3 years salary. That was the bare minimum by law (if the company offered a savings accounts, which most larger ones have here). A friend in HR down here did some calculations and said I would have been most likely closer to 4-5 years because of stipulations in contracts.
Why would I recommend a standout performer for a position at my company? So they can outshine me? I never recommend the "true believer" tool, always the average performer I got along with.
"A players hire A players and B players hire C players”.
I’m not saying I am necessarily an “A player”. But I am secure in my skills and the ability to convince someone to pay me for my skills. I was instrumental in hiring three people at a job who were all better than me at the time. I learned so much from them while I was there, it helped set me up for my next job that was my first job as a lead.
Why would I want someone that can’t help me be successful at my current job and whom I can’t learn from?
Even there I would ask my then former coworkers first advice.
If you think so, I'm sorry for wherever you've worked.
A vs B vs C isn't some fixed thing we're assigned at birth: it's a matter of learning, investing in ourselves, having both humility and pride in our work, maintaining our boundaries and building up our coworkers.
People who have fully replaced intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation won't ever get to A level, because the incentives are non-linear. Actual A players keep investing and collaborating, whether they get rewarded for it now or later or never, just because it is the right thing to do.
It's a simple numbers game - the A teams hire rarely and don't turn over staff constantly and when they do hire they pick up talent internally if it exists.
The rest hire as per the quote previously, turn over staff, build empires for their own egos etc. This makes up the bulk of market facing hiring.
This is utterly false. My motivation and I assume most people who go to work is their insatiable addiction to food, clothes and shelter. “Passion is Bullshit”.
Everything I do at work is and has been since 2008 (I have been working a lot longer) is to feed those addictions. While we did get off the hedonic treadmill and downsized a couple of years ago and I focus much more on work life balance, I work hard now not for the maximum comp. But to maintain my autonomy at work and be trusted and because my current job is pretty straightforward (for me at least) and has unlimited PTO and allows us to pursue our travel hobbies.
The reality that nobody wasnt to say out loud is that the top 10-20% of the people you interviewed for a role would all have been just as great as the "best" candidate (and often enough the amazing candidate turns out to be terrible anyway).
If you are hiring for your standard enterprise CRUD developer or “full stack” developer, once you have a few seniors (real seniors not “codez real gud” seniors), you can go down to the top 50%
Or you can hire juniors, and after a couple of years have a whole team of A-players.
It's like the story about the coach who watched two runners run the same time, one with perfect form and the other a total mess. He let the total mess onto the team, and the runner with perfect form got mad, "but I ran better than he did!!!" The coach replied, "I can't help you go any faster than you are, but the total mess is going to be incredibly fast with just a little form."
The juniors are doing negative work. I need people who are neutral or positive shortly after they come on board. Besides that, once a junior gets experience, they are going to jump ship.
My expectations of a mid level developer is once given mostly clear business requirements, they should be able to turn those requests into code. They should be able to handle any “straightforward” task I throw at them.
From the definition I have seen from leveling guidelines:
Straightforward problems or efforts have minimal visible risks or obstacles. The goal is clear, but the approach is not, requiring the employee to rely on their knowledge and skills to determine the best course of action.
I expect a senior to handle “complex” tasks.
Complex problems or efforts involve visible risks, obstacles, and constraints. This often requires making trade-offs that demand expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to influence others to build consensus on the best approach.
It should be about raising the bar, not lowering it. You’d grow if you weren’t the smartest person in the room. Unfortunately this stance prevents one from seeing that.
Even if I am,
and I’ve been hired multiple times to be the “smartest person in the room” , I want to hire people who can outshine me because that means I can just delegate high level concepts and they can run with it so I can move on the other initiatives.
While doing that was half the reason that I got let go from my last job, I delegated the work I was doing to the person I hired and moved on to a newer initiative that was pulled, I still have no regrets.
I got a chance to put leading an impressive “AI” project on my resume and it helped me get my current much better job.
Before anyone starts groaning , it was a framework to do better intent based bots for online call centers (Amazon Connect and Lex). The perfect use case for it.
Yeah... the overenthusiastic tool bringing up labor intensive ideas for minimal gain just means I can't hit the gym at lunch. Not putting up with that so a meaningless metric can go up by 0.5%.
true corporate strategist here...
i recommend people i trust and beleive in and want to work with. if they can outshine me i can get better by working with them. i dont give a rats ass about my performance reviews. just quality of work and nice collaboration , preferably with people better than me.
> To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
Yes, and that hurts that first time. Especially when you gave a lot (like some 70hrs weeks and then you immune system shuts down) or working during a funeral, in the back room...
> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
That hasn't really been true in my experience. This might be another one of those cultural shifts. work connections in general are looser and you need to do a lot more than just casually chat at work to really "stand out". People are arguably overworked and have no time to perceive who does what work how efficiently unless you're a direct co-worker or a lead.
I agree with don't be a grouch. No one like a grouch unless its calling out bad leadership. But I think being nice is better than trying to be the best. People remember how you made them feel, and current work (epecially WFH) may limit how much you get to impact a specific person's workload.
>On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
YMMV. how you process that matters a lot. If you use some cynicism you can protect yourself. If youre all cynicism you become a grouch.
>Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
only in a market as bad as this where you don't want to go back to job searching. But normally, I wouldn't do this. Especially in my industty: give them an inch give them a country mile, and then that "crunch" period has become 70 hour workweeks for 6+ months.
"sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...is worth it now and then" That same company will fire you and escort you out but expect you to give 2 weeks notice.
The brutal experience of “fire and escort you out” is a consequence of Usonian fondness for firearms: before that, another typical location for mass shootings besides schools was the workplace, where angry terminated employees would lash out bullets at the “sucks being you” managers that just doled out the news.
Yes, each person's network is more important now than ever - as we seem to have achieved pretty thorough uselessness of classical job postings, job boards and applications. Some parts of building that network are simple: do ask people for contact info for example. And another part is simply showing up, doing work and getting it recognized by the people around you - that's more long term effort certainly but has nothing to do with how much you don't respect the corporation that employs you or the least palatable of your co-workers or managers. On the contrary, find the more competent people in that mess around you, and favor them.
Even the people you don't respect might easily some day be among the people in other companies that will need you. You may then do everything you can not to work for them, but even keeping that lack of respect out of sight is in your interest. (And okay, for some of these people it's hard.)
I'm very cynical but I also kinda agree with this.
Don't be loyal to the company, because the company isn't loyal to you. Don't overwork, don't neglect family, friends and hobbies. It's simply not worth it, you'll burn yourself out, and it won't save you when the ax falls.
But do a good job, because it's good for you, your self-esteem, your mood and your skills. If you "quiet quit", you're doing yourself a disservice. (Barring extreme cases, of course).
I think your comment bears some truth in that turning to bitterness is only going to tint a persons worldview towards an overall undesirable shade.
Also it is absolutely necessary to keep up that "above and beyond" image for coworkers/managers to improve chances of a next successful hire. Mix that with the reality as described in the article and you get the play-pretend so many of us find exhausting
I can strongly agree with you while understanding how the OP feels (and I certainly don't condone all his advice). IMO, culture plays a role in it; as an EU citizen, layoffs are effectively rare here.
I was laid off once, when I was being widely praised for my work. It's been 5 years, financially it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, and it still hurts that it happened. So yeah...
I’ve also been working in tech for almost 30 years - 28.5 to be exact.
Work is purely transactional, I give the company the benefit of all of my accumulated skills and experience for 40 hours per week, they put money in my account and I then use that money to exchange for goods and services.
Whenever one party or the other decides that the transactional relationship is no longer beneficial, we part ways.
If I find a company where the transaction is more beneficial - pay, benefits, work life balance, etc - depending on my priorities at the time, I go work for that company. I’ve worked at 10 companies in the past almost 30 years and 6 of those have been in the past 10 years.
> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
Uh yeah that won’t happen unless it benefits me in some way like I’m learning a new to me technology or finishing a project I am leading will look good on my resume.
I made an exception when I was working for a company that sent nurses to the homes of special needs kids and they wouldn’t get paid on time if the project wasn’t done - before Christmas. They would have gotten paper checks that they would have had to either pick up from their central office or get it mailed to them and when I was working for public sector clients during Covid and it helped them get their disability and unemployment checks on time.
It feels like that requires an outgoing personality and great people skills that many people just don't have. There's lots of people who are friendly and pleasant to work with, but they don't have the dynamic personality that's going to lead to someone remembering them when an opportunity arises; even if they have they went above and beyond in their work.
It's certainly true that the charismatic have a better go of this, but after 12 years in the industry I've built up a solid list of quietly excellent engineers. Whenever I see an opportunity they could shine, I reach out to them.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for me), the industry seems to be fairly market efficient, and they're usually already happy at some other highly compensated position (Empirically, 1 M$/yr seems roughly to be the going rate for "Damn, I really wish I could work with that person again")
> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
Totally agreed. A big downside of taking contracting job is that one does not get equity. There can be exceptions but in general equity is reserved for permanent employees.
That aside, I highly recommend people view the employment as an alliance. When employee aligns with the company, work hard. When the alliance is not there, break apart and no hard feelings.
By “equity” do you mean statistically worthless equity in a private company?
Most companies don’t give equity. But even if you are talking about equity in the form of RSUs in public companies. It’s just comp. I’ll take guaranteed cash comp any day. When I was getting RSUs, I had it set to immediately sell as soon as I was vested and diversified.
Employment is not an “alliance” it is a transaction, they pay me money, I give them labor
> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc
Would you consider employers to be "fully cynical" about their affairs and interactions with employees? I do. Being a happy little cog is it's own reward, but ine has to be clear-eyed about it.
> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles.
You are presenting a false dichotomy - one can be an outstanding contributor while working 40 hours per week.
I think employers are, and I think it costs them a ton of money.
My intrinsic responsibility isn't to the person handing me a check: we have an explicit contract. It is first to myself, second to the people whose lives are affected by the software I write, and third to my coworkers.
When developers pretend the relationship with an employer is just the two of them, they are giving up most of the leverage they have to change how their work functions.
My first responsibility is to the people - including myself - who depend on me to have money in my account to support our addictions to food, clothes and shelter
> next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before
I've been in this field for ~7 years and have never found this to be true, yet people parrot it all the same. I have never once received a job via reference, and only once was able to get someone else a job by reference. I feel this is only true when you're at the very senior level.
You are touching on what I would classify as two different kinds of layoffs.
If you're working for a startup, a layoff is a likely outcome. Most startups fail. Those that don't often end up pivoting, often more than once, and cutting costs tends to go hand in hand with that.
Layoffs from big tech companies is a relatively new phenomenon, really only since the pandemic, and they're fundamentally different. It's actually the sort of thing that Corporate America has been doing for decades. In this case, big tech companies make money hand over fist yet they have layoffs, typically ~5% of the workforce every year.
These layoffs will be perpetual because the reasons for them aren't around controlling costs, avoiding bankruptcy or any of the "normal" reasons for layoffs. The goal is suppress labor costs. People fearful for their jobs aren't demanding raises or better benefits. Plus you can dump the work the 5% were doing onto the remaining 95% who won't say no because they're fearful for their own jobs. And that's the point.
The veneer of tech companies being mavericks who were employee-focused is completely over. A lot of the "perks", which are really just part of your cojmpensation package, are getting and will continue to get cut or just made worse through less funding. At some point, you'll start getting charged for those "free" meals.
In 10 years, all the big tech companies will be indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
Actual salaries haven't fallen. The point of paying those salaries is you have to earn every penny. If they overhire and a bunch of people start taking the money for granted, that breaks down the social contract
Half of the perks e.g. sabbaticals or sleeping pods don't even make sense in a competitive working environment
Your base salary won't tend to drop but at the same time you'll get an annual 1.5% increase when inflation is 9% and the company made $300 billion in profits last year.
Bonuses for normal employees (below VP) are essentially formulaic at most big tech companies, for the most part. So if you're a senior SWE with a 15% bonus target, well that's based on yoru base salary. It hasn't gone down in nominal terms but it has in real terms.
Also, depending on your company, there's a pool of discretionary funds on top of the formula. Your bonus can even be taken away and given to someone else on the team (yes, this happens). How big is that pool? Has it increased over time? Decreased? Or stayed the same? On a per-employee basis. You don't have visibility into that unless you're a manager.
Next is stock compensation. Your initial grant is obviously known. Annual refreshes if you get them tend to be formulaic too. But what about discretionary grants? That's where the big money is. How much is being thrown around in total? Is it going up or down over time? You have no visibility into that.
All of the above have, as input, your performance ratings. There are quotas for each performance level at a certain level (usually 150+ people or director level) so not everyone gets Greatly Exceeds Expectations. What are the quotas ("target percentages") for each bucket? Has that changed over time? Some compoanies now have targets for subpar ratings (ie ratings below "Meets Expectations"). It's the pipeline for getting rid of people and getting people to do more for the same money.
So technically you have to do more now to maintain a Meets Expectation rating than you did 5 or 10 years ago. Is that a pay cut?
And then we have promotions. The typical way this works is a company will divide promotion candidates into pools. A promotion committee will essentially rank the packets they have. At a certain level there is a quota for promotions to hand out. Those get distributed to those from the top down until there are no promotions left to give out.
Companies have allegedly reduced costs by simply reducing the promotion target percentages / quotas.
And then there are all the benefits that have a tendency to get worse over time. Health sinsurance, 401k matching and less tangible benefits like food, facilities and so on.
But supposing this happens across the economy, there's less inflation. E.g. if housing costs track tech salaries and soak up most of the surplus available, the relative wealth gained/lost is hard to predict
The most your ex coworkers can do for you at a decently paying corporate job is get you past the resume screen. And even then, there are constant complaints at my employer about our recruiters never contacting our referrals. The person referring can certainly not be allowed even the appearance of influence over the interviews or debrief.
You might be hired on the strength of reputation or recommendation into an early stage startup, but these roles only make sense if you’re 23.
The referrals come from the c-suite. They can call up board they're on and friends that they have. I was laid off last fall and went straight HR told them where i applied and they reached out to the ceo and he called someone with me in the office. Had a job offer 1 week later
People who do good work, and get good at craft, do it as much for their sense of pride as they do for some kind of reward. Rewards are nice, but the joy you get from them are fleeting. Enjoying the work itself is evergreen.
Work is work. Even at a job you like, you'll have days where you'd just rather be out having a day off. Don't get indoctrinated into hustle culture.
But don't get cynical and start being a pleb about jargon or whatever. It's like a person stuck in traffic complaining about traffic as if they aren't... traffic?
That is a double-edged sword. You can do it, but it really should come from a place where you're fully prepared to leave, and you'd really prefer you didn't. Sometimes, companies underpay. You should be continually engaging in price discovery, and you should demand to be paid what you're worth.
Just be aware that your company may well say "oh well, good luck", and the new company may be worse. In smaller companies, you might set yourself up for resentment if you stay. Large tech companies really will just coldly look at "is she/he worth it? Yes/no", make that decision, and move on.
> but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.
You build those contacts by helping people, not by helping the company. (Also, referrals are massively overvalued, IMHO. I'm not seeing them happening very often - but maybe my friend group is an outlier. Wonder if there are stats)
> carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
Realism, however, is helpful. Your company will throw you away like a used paper tissue. Make peace with it. Don't believe the "we're family" BS, because you aren't. You're at best the equivalent to a sports team. And when the team doesn't need you anymore, you'll be let go.
And that's fine. What makes it painful is lying to yourself, pretending a company could actually care about you as a person. (Small carve-out: Tiny companies, with <30 or so people, still can manage to care)
That doesn't mean phoning it in, or doing shoddy work. It does mean being clear about the fact that you have to look out for yourself, your wellbeing, your health, your career.
You're right in that your co-workers are the only ones who have the capacity to love you back. But I can guarantee you that working harder won't make you more loveable. Work well, but be clear where your boundaries are.
> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.
Guess what. That's cynical too.
> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
No, it's not. Cynicism is just having the correct model of reality and learning to thrive with it is the best skill you can possibly develop. But the first step is becoming a cynic. Overwhelming bitterness is of course bad, but it's not the end of the road for cynicism, it's just the beginning. A non-cynic can see only this and it looks to him like a cliff that would crush him. Seasoned cynic sits high on top of the cliff of bitterness he climbed, quite happy, having a clear look on both sides. On the world of people who fear cynicism and on the smooth hills on the other side that non-cynics can't possibly fathom.
> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
This is an argument in favor of managing optics. Whether people perceive you going above and beyond may matter, even if actually going above and beyond truly does not.
> but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one.
[ citation needed ]
Every job I've worked at has specified when we provide references, we're to say "X was employed from Y to Z" and if we would hire them again, yes or no. The employee described here would get a yes from me. The fact that they didn't go "above and beyond" will not help them get a job, at least if they happened to work for any of the companies I have.
> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles.
I guess we could quibble over definitions then, because I as a senior dev managing other devs am perfectly happy with someone who clocks in, does the work on-time and to-spec, and then clocks off as a "standout contributor." I've chastised a few people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job to prevent burnout, voluntary or otherwise.
Burned out devs turn out worse work, and they feel worse in the bargain. Textbook definition of a lose-lose. Whatever code is being a pain in the ass today is just that; code. It will be there when you get back from the weekend, it will be there when you get back from a doctor's appointment, it will be there when your kid is done being sick. Life matters. Code... does, but to a lesser extent.
> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
Which is why I don't want people feeling bitter about their job, and putting in the extra work to, by your own admission, be just as damn likely to get the axe for reasons that are out of your control? That's embittering as fuuuuuuuck.
> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you.
False dichotomy. I love what we build, and I want my subordinates to have fulfilling, happy lives. And I proportion my energy to both of those things in accordance with their importance.
> I've chastised a few people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job to prevent burnout
The best way to avoid burnout in my experience is to work when you have "the itch" to do it. If you're feeling it on a Saturday, why not go for it? You might not be feeling it on Monday and will need the break then instead. If you forego the prime opportunity and then force yourself to do it later when you are not in the right mindset, that is when the burnout is going to get you.
Answering the rhetorical question - because it may set a bad example for other, more junior employees; it may set a new expectation; if the good manager who prevents burnout gets fired, and is replaced with a worse person, they may come to expect you to work six days a week, and instead of preventing burnout by working when you want, you're now being burned out by working not only 5 days a week without any break, but also on one of your weekend days.
Exactly this. I worked for a place long ago, where we had this junior guy who basically didn't have a life. He just wanted to code. He stayed late every day, and would occasionally come in on the weekends and code all day. He was not making any extra (in fact since he was junior he was probably making much less than the rest of the team). He was not angling for a promotion from what I could tell. He just liked to code and that was his entire life. Well, his manager gave him some public praise once over E-mail, basically saying the project was moving along much faster due to how productive you are. That's all it took. Suddenly, the whole team felt pressure to pull 60-80 hour weeks and burn themselves out. And we didn't really get that much more done, because it was 80 low-quality burned out, demoralized hours, not 40 high-quality hours. The team eventually disintegrated along with the company during one of the tech downturns. All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.
> All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.
It reads like the real problem was that the other developers fell into what developers seem to love more than anything: Pedantry. Instead of playing along with the false praise, they set out to prove the claim in the email wrong.
I once had a coworker like that who hadn't taken a vacation in two years. I told him that vacation time was how the company funded his open source work, and suddenly he took his full five weeks off each year to recharge by coding different code.
1. Will you survive to see a new manager if you don't work on the weekend? Without that, under the given scenario you are either:
- Forcing yourself to work on Monday. Burnout ensues. Will you be able to continue while burnt out?
- Skipping Monday too, seeing you only work four days a week. Will you be able to continue under performance expectations?
2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to stick around even if working hours remain the same? He is still going to express his badness in many other ways. He wouldn't be bad otherwise.
> Without that, under the given scenario you are either:
I reject the false dichotomy that my options are "work on the weekend when I'm excited to write code, or suffer and burn out during the week". Maybe that works for you, but I have to show up on Monday regardless of whether I wrote something inspired on Saturday.
> 2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to stick around even if working hours remain the same?
Weirdly, the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.
For what, exactly? If it is simply to appease the whims of your manager, you already have the bad manager. Another hypothetical future bad manager is the least of your concerns at that point. Chances are the hypothetical future bad manager will be less bad than the horror show you are already in.
> the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.
There is some risk there, but most tech people already price in that risk by demanding much higher than normal compensation at their job, allowing them to have their mortgages discharged before the bad manager arrives. You might get caught in the unlucky case, but on balance the good managers don't disappear that quickly.
I don't have coworkers who buy into mob programming. If I write code on Saturday and withhold pushing the commit until Monday afternoon or write the code Monday morning and push the commit thereafter, nobody is ever going to be able to tell the difference.
You must work in one of those cults that stand around the meeting room to recite the commit log as if nobody in the place knows how to read, exclaiming "no blockers" to signify that the metaphorical torch is being passed on to the next person?
If any of that cohort of most tech people has enough money left over to pay off my mortgage, I'd be open to that. But I'm not a member of that hallowed club.
If you are not a member of the tech club then you don't have the tech risk. So, yes, while that may mean it will take longer for you to pay off the mortgage without a high tech salary, you aren't under the pressure that necessities the high tech salary to get the mortgage paid ASAP.
You are running a factory over there? That makes the weekend perspective a bit more reasonable, given the constraints. Tech work, on the other hand, descends from agriculture. You work when the sun is shining and rest when it is stormy, metaphorically speaking. There is no reasonable concept of defined working hours. The brain doesn't operate on a set schedule like that, and trying to ignore that reality is where the burnout stems from.
If we were talking about tech, you certainly would look foolish applying factory concepts to an entirely unrelated field.
I was at one place where we tracked every bug introduced, and discovered more than 90% were in code written after 5pm. We dramatically cut our bug rate just by shutting down PRs outside of business hours.
The problem is that when our performance declines, so does our ability to judge our performance. We can feel more productive while actually doing a much worse job.
Intriguing. Did you find that remained true through DST periods, assuming DST observance? Meaning, did you find that it was literally the clock that determined when bugs would seep in, or did bugs also increase if you didn't counteract times changes for whatever human factor (circadian rhythm?) made 5 PM significant?
> The problem is that when our performance declines, so does our ability to judge our performance.
Sure, but what sees performance magically decline at 5 PM?
If it was the clock, did you try removing the clock from the equation? Did bugs show up the same if developers had no idea what time it was?
If it was some other human factor, did you see uniformity across all participants? Were the "night owls" who were just getting started at 5 PM just as likely to introduce bugs after 5 PM as those who had been working since 9 AM?
That is what the individual is going to end up doing if they encounter the guy who thinks software is built on an assembly line, but is not ideal. The reviewer might get "the itch" before Monday. It would be a waste to see him fall into burnout because he had to artificially wait because you had to pretend to wait.
You don't burn out because you weren't working. That's not a thing.
I am concerned about how you describe coding as an addiction. That sounds like something worth bringing up with a therapist & investigating the root cause of. It can be literally dangerous to identify that much with only our work, especially in this economy.
But if you don't want to do that, if you have some rare code-or-die health condition, just contribute to some Apache project instead. The entire internet is build on projects people wrote that their companies didn't pay them to write. We don't have to give our whole creative selves to our employers.
If you never had to work then you would never burn out, sure. But returning back from la-la land, most people are going to have to work. As was stated before, burnout ensues when one forces themselves to work when they are not in the right frame of mind to do so. If you code by the rule of the calendar, that is what is going to put you at risk of burnout. If you code when your mind says "Let's go" and stop when your mind says "That's enough", chances are you'll never experience it.
Denying a "let's go" moment on Saturday, to fight with a "that's enough" moment on Monday because the calendar says you cannot work on Saturday but must work on Monday is a good way to end up with burnout. But why fight it? Why not just work on Saturday and take Monday off? It is not going to make any difference in the end. The deliverable will be there at the anticipated time either way.
> I am concerned about how you describe coding as an addiction.
What is this addiction you are referring to? I can find no mention of it anywhere in this thread before this.
Not a matter of when the office is open, it's a matter of how many hours have been worked vs what's expected. I'm obviously fine with folks working whenever they want, that's half the benefit of work from home in the first place. What I'm not fine with was this particular dude clocking in code at all hours all week, then putting even more in on the weekend. And mind you this is not simply from commits, it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.
> it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.
I'll grant you that it is red flag that he would want to take your energy telling how long something took. It doesn't even mean anything in the given line of work. An interesting problem might be given hundreds of hours of thought – in the shower, while sleeping, etc. – but only take 15 minutes to type afterwards. What would you report? The 100 hours? The 15 minutes? Invent some kind of weighting system to offset parallel activities? And for what? None of them mean anything.
The manager's job is to take the unnecessary burden of externalities off the rest of the team, but it is a team and that means it has to cut both ways. The rest of the team has to take the unnecessary burden of internality off the manager. If that was the best political way to say "please stop, you are needlessly wasting my energy", then that makes sense, I suppose. Or, perhaps a good manager is brutally honest above being politically sensitive? A team is, after all, characterized by their willingness to remain bonded even amid strife. Without that, you just have a group of people.
FYI that burnout is not "working a lot". Burnout is the feeling of little control, ineffectiveness, COMBINED with stress. Working weekends could instead be an indication of excitement and enthusiasm, which as a manager is worth nurturing. Over time those kinds of people should be given broader ownership and the ability to delegate, where they see fit.
A response to a feeling of ineffectiveness or lack of progress can be 'I need to catch up' which can result in weekend work. That IME can be a spiral. You don't get the rest you need. You feel less effective...
If people are seeing the only way to be a "standout contributor" being about putting in more than 40 hours a week, we may have found the disconnect.
I don't work more than 40 hours a week, but when I slack off I just do the work put in front of me. Rather than hours, it's about energy.
If companies want more than 40 hours a week, we can negotiate overtime. But I put extra energy in during the work week not because I think it makes me extra money or protects me from layoffs. I do it just because I think it is better.
We're not as far apart as you might think. Clock time is correlated with performance, but by no means determinative. More important is initiative, enthusiasm, leadership, reliability, etc. All in, I work very little overtime.
And you're right, this is a marathon, and working sustainably is absolutely the most important thing. One can do both. If you love what you build and you're leading a balanced life then I would say you're Doing It Right.
I’ve never been hired from contacts so maybe they all accurately think I’m a sellsword and it hasnt affected anything
I mean sure I’d love smooth sailing at a FAANG interview with all my friends in the process. I know some of you guys are getting on niche teams that way
but in the mid market and other startups, I’ve found there are enough to go around. Reputation doesn't matter one bit, and the “glut” is in entry level and former FAANG employees only looking for FAANG compensation.
I just keep 2 mid market and start up roles at once if I have some financial goal and its close enough to decent FAANG compensation. I don’t put short stints on my resume, and get exposed to a lot more.
My only studying is bombing another startup’s interview process and using what I had forgotten to ace a subsequent one
I could study to get above average FAANG compensation that would eclipse my 2-job situation. but I’m pretty busy with 2-jobs and the market for speculation and trading carries the rest.
The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.
This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.
“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.
Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.
In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.
There’s the whole capital expenditure vs operating expenses angle too, and depending on a company’s particular situation, one might look better on paper than the other. Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.
This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to win shareholder brownie points.
I am wondering whether a company "optimizing for shareholder brownie points" is a good signal to either look for employment elsewhere or as an investor start investing elsewhere. It seems like a company who prioritizes this either has reached their potential (which might be fine) or is just not able to innovate anymore.
> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
I'm in a VC-owned business with a 50% profit ebitda. But a common trick is to just load it with debt. The VC firm pays out all profits as dividends, all investments into restructuring, M&A and new technology is paid for by high-interest loans from the shareholder. What's left is a company that barely cashflows as all profit goes towards paying interest to the VC firm.
The appointed management team has to operate within that scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50% interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise dying and slowly shrinking business sector.
In other words a terrible place for general salary growth.
So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3) that aren't owned by VC.
Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't really apply as much.
You stated that there aren't many profitable lifestyle companies. And the insinuation put forth is that they are very rare to the point of almost nonexistent.
This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?
No. But I do know statistics. The largest employees in tech are the public companies that we have all heard of. The next largest segment are VC funded companies with the smallest segment by far being the “lifestyle companies”.
Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many of those do you think are going to be profitable, private, lifestyle companies?
I would put money on all of big tech and all public companies combined not employing more than 30% of professional programmers. At least in the US only 15% work at a large company (500+).
There's still a question of what you consider profitable.
A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.
> We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business and acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.
Layoffs in big tech are mostly to place workers in their place and shake the market, they've definitely been able to drive down salaries these past two years.
Large US companies that I’ve worked with or for do this as a SOP. It’s not a calculation being done at the hiring manager level as much as a path of least resistance because that’s the way it’s been done for so long.
> contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure
You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with a depreciation period.
Changing the expenses that way can only increase the company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.
This is exactly what has changed [1]: R&D costs had been an immediate tax break, but since 2022 became an expenditure requiring a 5-year amortization period.
That change had been planned to be canceled before coming into force, but it was not canceled on time.
Hence the wave of layoffs in 2022, as companies were urgently trying to improve their balance sheets, as investors and the Wall Street requested, AFAICT.
If you have time, how can capex, an expense, appear as earnings? (I'm pretty clueless about these things)
Aha, it's that: "Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes" (I see in other comments here),
but capex is not subtracted, so then it looks as if the company is doing better, on paper, although it's not. And this works only for a while, maybe some years? Which might be long enough for the current management, if they leave before things get too bad?
Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money? Or is this all some nonsense setup by the company to shuffle the numbers to look superficially better for a specific metric?
"We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the actual recurring cost number is worse.
(There's also some complexities in some industries around money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on certain types of expenditures...)
It’s all about accounting for the spend. Wall Street often looks at Capital Expenditures as a sign of growth or at least net neutral, but they view Operating Expenses as negative. If you can reduce your operating expenses by 200k, but increase your capital expenditure by 400k, you’ve reduced overall profit in order to increase growth potential because your investing 400k into new stuff that will bring in more revenue.
This strategy cannot work long term unless there is growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number of employees. But it can definitely work short term if the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad, and it has the benefit of giving management someone else to blame when the project work doesn’t get done.
If your company starts replacing employees with contractors, that’s a bad sign.
That might be it, this company was obsessed with CAPEX vs. OPEX. Everything was always put into the context of CAPEX or OPEX. OPEX being bad and CAPEX good.
Wait, when did that change? I thought the prevailing wisdom in our industry is that CAPEX sucks, OPEX rules. I understdood that's what's driving SaaSification of everything - replacing some internal tool and labor with a SaaS is literally turning CAPEX into OPEX, and it was supposedly what the investors liked.
The only real difference is tax treatment. Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes. So opex are more tax-efficient, but they lower your reported earnings.
>Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money?
This may vary due to region. For example in the U.S where you can fire people quickly the contractor benefit is less apparent, but in EU where after a short period you may have to spend a long time to fire someone it may be beneficial to hire a contractor rather than going through a lengthy hiring process only to find out you want to fire them.
Contractors in such an environment often are a reasonable investment for a project that has a particular dedicated timeline. Like we expect 1 year for project to finish. We hire for 1 year, and opportunity to extend for 3 months 2 times in case it goes bad.
Otherwise you have to hire for project and then do these layoffs everybody here is complaining about.
Furthermore in EU if you are paying 10000 for an employee, you probably have extra fees on top of that so you are paying 14000 (estimation) then for contractor you are not paying 28000, but 20000. The pricing is not great, but there are lots of factors that can make it seem more attractive than it might appear on its face.
Finally, Contractors tend not to do any of this quiet quitting or whatever, probably because for them it is more a business and they are also earning significantly more that makes it an interesting business to be in and to maintain.
In my experience long time contractors will absolutely "quiet quit" if put into the same catch-22 situations that push employees to do this.
The main difference at least in my region is that if you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't as strong. In other words, tech workers who become contractors here usually are better contributors and have an easier time finding good offers.
You can give workers temporary contracts and extend them as you see fit. None of what you are saying makes any sense to me.
Also, I will repeat this as many times as possible: you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law. You need to give your employee a WRITTEN letter of termination, to make the termination legally binding. Then all you have to do is give them notice (or pay the salary out immediately if you want to get rid of them immediately).
Paying double so you can fire contractors is illogical. The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months, after working 20 damn years at a single company, which means at worst the company would have to pay half your salary out a single time to get rid of you immediately. None of this 2x every year multi-year bullshit.
The reason why you hire contractors is that you do not need the full output of an employee. You might only need three months or maybe just a week. It's the same reason companies rent equipment instead of buying.
> you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law.
That is overly simplified. First, you have to commit to one of three types of layoffs, only one of which usually is applicable (betriebsbedingte Kündigung). But if you do that you have to consider the social circumstances of the employee and also other comparable employees. Which absolutely can result in not being able to fire the employee you would like to fire without also firing a number of other employees first. That could be really disruptive, so it is not quite so easy for German employers.
Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.
That doesn't make any sense. In any situation in which a contractor expense would be capitalized, an employee's salary would also be capitalized. Labor costs are labor costs; whether someone is a contractor or an employee is a labor law issue, not a tax issue. (Internal R&D was the big exception to the capitalization rule, but that loophole was closed, which is what prompted a lot of tech and videogame layoffs over the past 2 years.)
Management tend to get a bee in their bonnet about headcount, specifically full time employees, while they don't count consultants as being under the same kind of restrictions. It does often end up in the madness you describe, like that time there was a data entry consultant costing at my 0 company 100k, which a full timer would have been paid 35k max.
Outside of the US this optionality does have some value to deserve at least some premium.
Hire an extra dev for the same money looks good on paper, but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
(I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the other direction as well)
> but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark. Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety representative.
And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two months because they decided that they didn't have the budget anyway.
Furthermore, the "additional cost" of an employee in Europe is a further 35% of the salary due to social fees. That is why contractors often don't cost more to the company, although it might seem like that to employees.
In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where employees, just with a different company. They just opted to station the same people at the same client for all those years.
In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently" bump into each other in the cantine, but not go together), or share the same office equipment for coffee, having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.
Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?
Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants.
If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.
If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project?
If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.
But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.
Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.
My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why).
The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.
If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers?
This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.
OK sure, but I never once mentioned any of this and have no idea what the social customs are around hiring general contractors to build buildings or asking CIA-adjacent consulting companies how to jack up the price of bread. I just know that half my coworkers have a slightly different email address for "legal reasons", and they aren't allowed to come to the Christmas party. This is, in my opinion, simply mean. Basically we seem to have invented a kind of at-will apartheid that 0.0001% of the population understand and even fewer benefit from.
That’s staff augmentation which is completely different. If your company doesn’t know anything about Salesforce for instance and you just need a one off large project, you are going to hire a consulting company to go off and do the work and leave.
It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s
I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building
Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties.
I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.
I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.
I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.
Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.
I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.
That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.
Nothing ridiculous about it. That came out of the permatemp lawsuits in the US by contractors a couple of decades ago which resulted in employers avoiding doing anything that made it look like contractors were being treated like permanent employees. Squeezing for money by a few contractors ruined a good thing for the rest of them.
Why is that ridiculous? Contractors are not employees, so why should they be invited to a give thanks party for employees? Become an employee if you want to partake.
Feelings of entitlement are wrong here. Decency though tells us to invite everyone.
Christmas part is not special "give thanks to employees" party, it is more of end of a year party. It makes perfect sense to invite contractors. Even if it was "give thanks" party, contractors worked on projects.
I remember a work Christmas party attended by a contractor. The company was an sme and as usual we closed the office at mid-day and headed for a local restaurant to eat and socialise. The contractor as chatty and sociable, and seemed happy to be dining on the company's bill. Wine flowed.
Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
> Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
I have seen employees doing exactly the same, so I do not see anything worth anger here. It is never the case that everyone goes to christmas party. Unless not going is punished in some way, in which case they go, but only to avoid punishment.
yeah it was just my facetious way of observing that there could be other explanations that he was gone as soon as he couldn't charge for his presence, in fact when I consult I would never charge for going to one of those things - but I would of course expense it on my taxes.
How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.
I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".
Its caste. The cleaning lady is part of the company and its a horror that the dalit are dis-included from all company activities. The only actual reason is to divide and conquer and prevent them being part of any employee unionization.
I've been a consultant/contractor, less than 4 months in, and I still have been invited to (great) Christmas party, and even shared paid buses that took whole company and also given free accommodation.
Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.
There was an lawsuit against Microsoft in the past that they lost because they used to treat contractors almost like employees. I'm guessing that is why these days most contractors are employed by someone else and not truly independent.
That's a manifestation of your specific environment and not a general rule. I guess it is the work of some overeager compliance department, because it is the kind of overreacting self-mutilation that happens if people do not understand a law and want to be absolutely sure (cf. GDPR).
[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!
> In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities
AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.
Consultancy has no such protections.
I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.
What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.
You get that at many companies whose legal department is too worried that AÜG might somehow be triggered for them, or have a strong union that would rather see all consulting folks be gone, which I understand when placed in the shoes of internal folks.
There are soft perks. I have a pension that counts how long I work for the company (I have no idea what the real terms of it are, but that simplification will do for this discussion). Long term than pension is - hopefully - worth far more than a couple years of no raises. Depending of course on how long I live - statistically I will die sometime between 60 and 100 with the most likely age being 80 - the longer I live the more than pension is worth, on the low end it is worthless.
That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation, but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer position in the company that resulted in a nice level promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best option.
I forgot that pensions are still a thing in some places.
But when you calculate the the present value of the pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying to be combative)
> is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it?
That is a great question that is at least partially unknowable. You cannot discount future cash flows without knowing how long you will live and thus how much you should discount. Also things like inflation are unknowable.
As I said, I did leave. I stayed with the same company but found a different division. Which is the best of all worlds. I think, perhaps I could get a better offer elsewhere? If so would that better job still exist or would I now be laid off for months before finding a new job and thus destroying all the income gain from that new job?
There are a ton of unknowable factors. I can say it worked out okay for me so far, but that is about it.
It depends on who you are and what market you are in. Many people in recent years have reported putting in over a thousand job applications and only netting a couple of interviews, none of which resulted in a job offer. But if you have a network into available jobs and can short cut all of the pipeline insanity going on now, making a jump would be smart. Then again, the type of companies that play these games typically don't have top notch talent in the first place. Many people might endure it because they fear they don't have other options.
Exactly. Generally, when one company institutes pay freezes, they're probably also in a hiring freeze, along with the rest of the industry. Everything's nice and coordinated and they all use the same "macroeconomic environment" as the excuse. So an employee doesn't really have the option to just hop jobs, nobody else is hiring. Ironically, the best time to hop jobs is when you're getting raises because the economy is strong and everyone else is hiring.
Think about a wider scale than your employer: if the costs of the consultants goes in fact in the pockets of the investors of your employer, that money is not lost.
In quite many places, hiring consultants has a very high corruption potential (e.g. the hiring manager favoring one of several suppliers). With employees they don't have this leverage.
How exactly does one become a consultant on a 1099? Go work for a consulting company a W-2? That’s how I did it four years ago. Well, the consulting company takes a nice chunk above what they bill you out for.
How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you found ‘em.
You have to legally start a company. That means some legal work (you don't need a lawyer, but it helps). You need to do the books yourself - and because this is very different areas of tax law you really should hire an accountant (only an hour/month, but having extra eyes look at the books is useful). If you do this right you make more money, but there are problems if you miss some legal detail that W-2 employees don't have.
Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places won't work with you. however most of the big consulting companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that work similar)
As I understood it, you're also on the hook for valuing yourself properly. You may think you're making more money, until you factor in vacations and medical and retirement and slack time and...and...and
The easiest way is to reach out to consulting companies and ask if they take subcontractors. Second easiest is to ask companies that want to hire you if they’ll take you as a contractor instead.
I was laid off once. The reason on paper was budgetary, times are tough, etc. But the real reason was that I was a bad fit for the role - for a variety of reasons.
I got pipped, and foolish me tried hard to work on the items in the pip (to no effect). The layoff came right on schedule.
A few years later, I was chatting with an old coworker and I came to find out that the director of engineering had demanded it. It was in direct response to me refusing to participate in building a knowingly DMCA-violating product.
The pip was theater. The "times are tough" bit was theater. The reality is that the director wanted me gone, and that is how they did it for legal coverage reasons.
I don't really blame the company - I was a bad fit, and I can see that clearly in hindsight. But it did teach me never to accept budgetary layoffs at face value.
I don't see the theater as bad or good. If anything, it's slightly good.
It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your work reputation (because layoff is public).
I was never really concerned about the ethics, but was more worried that I'd be personally liable for it. I kept thinking about the VW emissions scandal, where the engineer that implemented it was given prison time.
In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about. I also never should have expected that I'd be able to change the director's mind by refusing to do what he said.
Getting soft-fired really shook me, and it was a hit to my self-confidence. I did learn some valuable life-lessons from it though, and including that nobody should ignore office politics.
Afterwards, I found a job that was a much better fit. That next job changed the direction of my career, and I'm very happy with where I am now.
Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will print money next year, so based on this prediction I will raise the budget for the FY. Then when the prediction of revenue fails, you do cuts, oh well you were wrong. But next year you can do the same thing. Game theory wise this works because if you're right, you bet big, hire big, are ahead next year vs your competitors that invested less. If it goes wrong you are seen as a serious executive that has the courage to have layoffs when needed, and if your market is ebbing your competitors will also be suffering somewhat.
It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.
This happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.
That is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article, government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets approved all the time because it looks good.
One that is functionally different but causes the same type of morale hit is managers and upward equipping themselves with fully loaded MacBooks and iPhones, but equipping rank-and-file employees with shitty Dell laptops and budget tier Android phones.
That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies, but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.
Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit. This is especially true in government, and big companies are similar.
There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.
Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of clueless administrators that can't do much.
Suddenly I'm connecting the relationship between "budget based economics" and "agile" as commonly implemented. It's trying to fit creativity into a budget. In the places that do it well, it's like "We're supposed to make some really great art, here's the crayons we can afford, sorry if it's not exactly right but it's what we could manage, do whatever you can, we will take it!" In places that do it poorly, it's like "we need you to make the Uber of the Mona Lisa, I'm gonna need you to find a way to make that work, but we can totally be flexible on this, which crayons do you need."
The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.
I have never even understood the approach. The sub-budgets within an organization seem so arbitrary and become games in and of themselves, often leading to frivolous purchases just to use up the budget and not get your budget slashed.
Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?
Managers play games because they are looking out for their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is underspending, because they are tying up resources - companies will have a desired internal rate of return (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on their investments then a manger tying up capital is costing a lot.
Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share information. Sharing information at least cuts down on some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it has a limit at scale.
Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses gets done sometimes.
Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I think.
Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my reading is he basically tried to create a system where everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he hoped).
There's better and worse ways to try to get around the Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.
This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.
It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.
Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.
Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may not overlap with reality.
Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom" and thus push to get more and more people (either by grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is indeed how you create a "legible & convincing narrative" to increase your budget (end goal being more people, more power).
In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.
That's because they have a budget which is planned ahead (e.g., 2024 for 2025) for everything.
Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).
I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.
Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which don’t factor in continual employment of staff lead to the morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn’t actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale high is a goal (which it definitely isn’t at many companies.)
Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.
“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.
Playing devil's advocate: Firing people has a huge financial impact - around $100,000 per person per year. The event only cost $50,000 once. So it might not be that significant, and at least the staff gets to enjoy a nice event. Why eliminate both when the event's cost is equivalent to just half a position?
This one's easy. Because you value your people more than the parties they can throw. The cost/benefit are not just monetary. If they were, the event would have no reason to happen under any circumstance.
You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.
I think it has more to do with the psychological effect than with money itself.
We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.
When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".
It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...
I'm not disagreeing - but I think it's worth pointing out that an employee on $40K actually costs the company a lot more ( can be as much as > 2x ) - not just employers tax, pensions contributions etc, but also the cost of factory/lab/office space and equipment and consumables[1].
[1] Assuming the consultants aren't also in the office with a desk etc
Employee headcount is also evaluated less favorably when potential investors evaluate the company's health. They're implicitly seen as a promise to continue paying them in the future, whether that's materially different from what the company does with contractors or not.
And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch of contractors not having their contracts renewed.
$40k is a tiny salary, too. Taxes, facilities, and benefits are going to be more than 2x that. A contractor paid $200k/year is likely cheaper in total cost than an employee paid $100k/year.
Surely this is a question of having skin in the game, where management is all game and employees all skin. If the clowns making decisions would get hit by bad ones, things would look differently. You now, actually "taking full responsibility".
One thing I learned the other day is to never believe the internal corporate newsletters. For an entire year, pretty much every single day would bring in an e-mail from Company BU A, or Cross-Company Initiative X, or Podcast with CEO, or such. Every single one of them would talk about the great successes in recovering from the economic crisis, the amazing results this quarter, the great product release here, another successful merger there, new perspectives on Bitcoin or AI or such from CEO, whatnot - all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed. And then a layoff wave finally reaches your department, and you learn that apparently the whole BU is deep in the red and they're forced to cut staff across the board, and it's been like this forever, and that's why there was an emergency meeting last Thursday (called "Financial Update Q3 for BU Y" or something, non-obligatory and otherwise not announced or discussed), and "don't you ever attend town halls?".
(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)
Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.
Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.
When narratives fail, to casual observers the failure seems sudden and out of the blue, but there are usually unmistakable signs of "narrative breakdown" that often become obvious to most observers only in hindsight. One of the most dramatic stories of a "failed narrative" we have ever read comes from Barton Biggs, in his book "Wealth, War and Wisdom":
>> "...the Japanese official battle reports and the Japanese press reported the Battle of the Coral Sea as a great triumph, and Midway was portrayed as a victory, not a defeat, although some loss of aircraft and ships were admitted. Although casualties must have been noted and grieved, Japanese society at the time was so united behind the war policy and believed so totally in the invincibility of the Japanese military, that defeat and economic failure were virtually inconceivable. It would have been unpatriotic to sell stocks..."
>> "Not every investor in Japan misread the battles at Coral Sea and Midway. Food was in short supply, and railings in the parks around the Imperial Palace were being dismantled for their iron. The Nomura family and Nomura Securities in mid-1942 began to suspect the eventual defeat of Japan. Although the newspapers and radio broadcast only good news about the course of the war, the Nomuras apparently picked up information in the elite tea houses of the upper class. Many of the naval officers and aviators involved in the battles at Midway and the Coral Sea had geishas, and when the officers failed to return, rumors began to circulate."
>> "The Nomura family, sensing something was amiss, began to gradually sell its equity holdings, and even sold short. Later they purchased real assets, probably reasoning that land and real businesses would be the best stores of value in a conquered country. These protected assets allowed the family to have the capital to finance the rapid expansion of Nomura Securities & Research in the immediate postwar years and eventually emerge as the dominant securities firm in Japan."
When did the narrative above "officially" fail? Many date it to August 15, 1945, six days after the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, when Emperor Hirohito addressed Japan on the radio to announce Japan's surrender, noting "...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..."
For most execs/people, there's a big difference between what people will say in a meeting and what they will write down. They feel the permanance of the writing or recording.
one of lessons i learned hard way: do not trust - or avoid - managers/higher-ups who do not want their things in written - even e-mails. While still have you sign all kind of stuff.
"the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small." - https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/
Centralised rule, surveillance, privileging the upper classes, meaningless statistics, perfomative loyalty; things capitalists say they hate about communism, they love when designing companies.
> "all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed."
Everything whizzing rapidly upwards while your cube farm gets more crowded and your tools slower and your once-respected skilled work devalued in favour of pump-n-dump funny-money schemes?
> "The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.
Basically:
* We were spending money like it was going out of style
* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.
* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.
This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech, that you need to try and get as much money out of your initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.
If it makes you feel any better, there is usually little connection between management wasting money last year and laying off employees this year. Downsizing targets are based on predicted future needs so if business is trending down they'll cut just as many employees even if they have an enormous amount of cash saved.
What's even more absurd than cost cutting after mismanagement is a layoff and cost cutting while having record profits. Look at most of the big tech layoffs last year and the year before. Every one of them was reporting more profit and revenue than ever before and still doing layoffs
It doesn't matter what the reason is. The reason is whatever will look least bad in the news (if it ever makes it in the news) - and is legal. Ignore the reason, it has nothing to do with you, it's not about you, it's a technical detail. But yes, it would be nice if the manager was helping their employees understand that.
Even for an investor keeping an eye on their holdings, give minimal weight to the reasons for a detail level layoff.
It's just normal late Capitalism syndrome - no one takes responsibilities, and everyone, at least everyone that is close to the trough tries to get his/her head into it.
From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants, it's everywhere. That's it.
"low level" do count in stats if need to show "savings" and can be easily replaced when needed. Also they do not generate profits but need resources (mentoring etc.). On the other side costs are tax deductible.
We are apparently going through a "year of efficiency" and most of us know what it means. After "more with less" round come layoffs so one might as well do some basic prep work, dust off resume, reach out to your support network.. just saying.
when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money
Working in corporate America has caused me to view layoffs as proof of managerial incompetence. I understand that the market doesn't see it that way, but that's the conclusion I've come to.
I think that the honorable thing in those companies is for a CEO to demand seppuku from a significant portion of the c-suite. At least as a form of solidarity with the workers put to the sword.
Um, I have seen irrationality all across the board. Market participants shooting themselves in the foot.
I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.
When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.
I have even explained to recruiters that there is an opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and don’t want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To their credit, some are not.
And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and then cut their task force. Many of them don’t care about you, but expect you to care about them. They’ll even expect you to stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won’t pay you overtime.
They don't spend $200k on consultants just because it's fun. They do it when there are already difficulties in figuring out how to productively use the employees who make $40k (say 20 of them).
This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.
After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the advice a little:
- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.
- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.
- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.
Indeed. The real discovery in the article is that the people who manage performance and the people who manage headcount were completely different people. The article writer had (common mistake) assumed that impressing the former would take care of the latter. It doesn't; the techniques to manage the headcount people are different.
I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about why beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable or looking out for you.
> the techniques to manage the headcount people are different
I would like to hear a little bit more about those techniques.
The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan layoffs know very little about the individual's other than their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful: it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of whether to be promoted or something different.
1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people above you know it.
2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where you're fixing bugs and making improvements, not just keeping things ticking over.
3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by working in departments that bring in more revenue than they cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success; and in an area where the company's strategy calls for growth.
4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can do about this, except working at the head office, or a very large branch office where important projects are based.
5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to start sending out resumes and maybe getting the unemployment insurance on your car loan.
Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard of some people having great success with the opposite strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of these are hard-and-fast rules.
In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.
As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.
I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.
There is a halfway between 1 and 3 where the manager is told to drop 5% and rather than picking one dev per team the manager just squashes one “nice-to-have” application and drops that team.
There's also the shifting over-correction from "stack ranking is problematic and risks lawsuits about bias in performance counting" (because no one trusts performance metrics anymore) and 1 becomes "layoff a 'random' 5%" because "random" is the new "fair".
There is one other thing you can sometimes pull off: tell your boss you could work for a different division. Often (but not always, perhaps not even the majority of times) when layoffs happen there are also moves to a different division that is hiring people. So you want to make sure you are on the list of people to recommend to the other division. (this sometimes means getting skills the other wants before the layoffs)
> Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving.
I actually thought about doing this early in my career and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few years off their path to being able to (ethically, without lying) put "Senior" on their resume.
It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are considering this I would also suggest you do it in a market/business area that you don't particularly care about. I've been in more than one interview where a senior executive who was very tied in on the business side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc) immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as a red flag.
The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but it's something to consider.
Yes. When the first dot-com bubble burst, my father was working on semiconductor manufacturing machines.
The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day before. The business was cashflow positive, not some crazy gamble.
But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of investors decided to get out of tech stocks.
Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.
The key point is that people need to face today's economic/political realities which is that it is all "Realpolitik" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either learn how to play the game based on circumstances or suffer.
Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected after a setback and constantly strive for self-improvement. “When I look at my own particular responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT – the more people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY – If you get along with people, they are more likely to do things for you. CREDIBILITY – if you are known to be good on words, people take you seriously," he said.
“My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it, you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember and hope what you said was right."
So make sure you have good contact with Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the abnormal (with caveats).
I think it comes down to a previous discussion on HN, "don't just crush tickets".
Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job security but doesn't help when your managers managers manager has to make cuts.
But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and being a person.
It might be. But I’ve been in the room when a very high performing team was given the ax. This was a team that had all kinds of kudos and objective measures showing they were better than their peers.
But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of that magnified the savings.
I’ve done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and the advice I’d tell people is don’t think it’s a reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.
Most of the time it’s just macro factors out of your control.
Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets off the board and my team did $x”
You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).
You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours.
It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
> trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there.
This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.
IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM
or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012.
No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.
When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.
I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.
“By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.”
This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.
I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process.
One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects.
The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.
The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.
But no one to a first approximation is going to do it. Statistics show that on average, people only look at your resume for 6 seconds.
And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.
I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.
I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs
I generally disagree with the CV point but the "6 seconds" anecdote doesn't ring true to me except for obviously unfit applicants. I have definitely spent less than 10 seconds looking at a resume but it's because I immediately rejected the applicant - for example, the role is a solid mid-level or senior role and the applicant just graduated college and has no relevant experience or open source projects.
I want to be interested in your resume. If I'm interviewing you, you can be absolutely sure I've spent at least 20-30 minutes reading over your resume, looking up your past companies/schools, getting a sense of what you've done and pulled out a few relevant or interesting things to ask about.
I think the "6 seconds" thing is mostly HR drones who are barely qualified to write the resumes they're reading, let alone judge them, and are simply sorting into "yes" and "no" piles.
Do you think that most managers spend 30 minutes reading over a resume and do everything else they have to do?
I can guarantee you that none of my managers spent more than 5 minutes looking over my resume and 4 of my six lady jobs have been strategic early hires, 1 was at BigTech where one person in my loop was my eventual manager and my current one was for one of I think 25 highest level IC positions at my current company of 600-700 people.
I am not buying the oft-quoted statistics in HR/Recruiting which like most popular adages is mostly made up from a few anecdotes and widely disseminated which people then accept because "everybody says so". The key is to hook in the reader from the summary/qualifications on the first page.
The "tell me about yourself" question is one of the worst to ask and i never do this. It is so open ended that people start rambling. Instead get them to focus (this also calms their nerves) by asking about notable jobs picked from their resume "what did you do as ... at ..." and dig more as needed. Do this for a couple more jobs if available and you will get to see how confident the candidate is, how he communicates, the depth of his knowledge and his modes of thinking. From here, you generalize to what the job actually needs and give the candidate some idea of the job and its environment and ask how he hopes to fit in and contribute. This makes things clear to both interviewer and interviewee.
I also do not place much weight on personality/psychology tests/questions. People generally cannot be truthful in their answers to questions like "how do you deal with conflict with your co-worker?" etc. Here i trust to "gut feeling" based on non-verbal impressions, verbal communication and pointed questions (challenge the candidate by taking a contrarian stance and see how he responds).
Finally, i make sure that the interviewee at the very outset understands that though i am the interviewer it does not mean that i am more knowledgeable than him in his areas of expertise. This works great by boosting his confidence which then leads to a more natural interaction.
Recruiting/HR is a complex art where you have to consider various factors to build a picture of a person (suited to a role) from factual data and psychology. IMO a good way is to start with an understanding of Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory For a nice overview, see the book Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.
The fact is that every open req especially for remote positions get hundreds of resumes within the first hour, who is going to read that? An 8 page resume goes straight to the trash. Part of a job of a “senior” is good communication skills and knowing your audience. An eight page resume shows laziness since they didn’t take the time to make it shorter and no one is going to listen to or read anything 8 pages especially as a manager who just wants to know what is going on a high level.
I ask the tell me about yourself question partially to assess their communication skills and getting to the point.
Do you think people who are conducting an interview loop at large companies are going to go through an 8 page resume? Yes I’ve been on both sides of a BigTech interview loop and have gone through the interview training process there.
Even at smaller companies when building a team and I’ve had 80% of the say so about who gets hired, I still needed evidence to take the CxO/director and couldn’t go by “gut feel”.
And when dealing with customers (I work in consulting now) or “the business” you have to have a strategy to deal with interdepartmental conflicts, different stakeholders have different priorities, some people don’t want to change etc. I’m not talking about a conflict with another coworker arguing about which design pattern to use.
You have missed the point of the long CV. It is not that the recipient has to read everything. As mentioned, the first couple of pages is the resume. However the details are there to provide more info. as needed. Contrary to what you think i have had very good response to such a layout. Often times they see a company/project/technology there (even if old) which rings a bell with them and which they are then eager to discuss. That is the point; Give them all the info. in which you are strong so that they can make a better informed decision. The same is what i look for when i am the interviewer; a few bullet points on a 2-page resume which basically tell me nothing is useless.
Incidentally, Jeff Bezos does something similar with his 6-page memo (plus annexes) for meetings; Same idea different domain; More details help better decision-making.
"Gut Feel" is absolutely needed to give your input on Team Fit, Conflict Management and similar other intangible Human factors. Some companies are doing Myers-Briggs etc. but i give them lower weightage (because they can be gamed by practice) over subjective feelings.
A report on a interviewee should include objective assessments (knowledge, experience etc. and your inferences based on them) and subjective assessments (temperament, maturity etc.)
I worked at AWS for three years (Professional Services). Using Amazon as an example of a good corporate culture and how companies should behave is not the argument you think it is.
But I see a few scenarios.
You have a strong network and the resume is a formality. In that case it’s easy enough to tailor your resume for the job. I don’t need to put that I wrote FORTRAN and C on VAX and Stratus mainframes in the mid 90s. There is no need for an 8 page resume. The year before last I had two offers for strategic positions based on my network.
The second case you are targeting a company where you know you have a competitive advantage, again in that case, you only need to have a resume that focuses on what gives you a competitive advantage. In my case, now I focus on strategic cloud consulting positions that focus on app development. In that case, I only need to focus on my job at a startup in 2018, talk in broad strokes about my time at AWS (working there automatically gets call backs by the way), and when the day comes, when I leave my current job as a “staff architect”.
The worse case is if you are spamming your resume far and wide and you are looking for any generic job. I look at an 8 page resume and then I have to take the time to see what is this person trying to communicate - it goes in the trash and I move on. I have hundreds of other resumes that I can get through quickly.
Of course if the company is reaching out to me, it’s even easier to tailor my resume for the job requirements. I have my “career document” to pull from either way that is as long as needed.
But even then I’m not going back even to the low level work I did in 2012 for Windows CE devices.
I am not talking about general Amazon corporate culture so your caveat makes no sense. I am talking about the practice of one specific technique which leads to better decision-making and which has also been validated by other people adopting it. Here is Jeff's own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
I consider 2-page resumes no better than a powerpoint presentation (i.e. almost useless) and furthermore when i see people tailor it to what they think i should know i consider it maybe trying to hide something. This is because by omitting companies they take away a vector for me to check references and more. Note that this is different from highlighting relevant experience/knowledge.
Your scenarios are nothing new from what you have already mentioned earlier; And spamming is not what i am talking about. That is a policy decision made by each person based on his circumstances.
You and most folks are simply parroting current practices in HR/Recruiting which are broken and need to be rethought from the ground up. To repeat once more, all details matter at some level in recruiting. As they say "measure twice and cut once" and "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".
Honestly I don't want to read narrative prose which is as likely to be a lie as anything else on the resume/CV. A half page might be fine if you've got a dozen CVs to look at for an ultra-specific role. If you just need a half-decent Golang developer and have 80 resumes that pass the initial screen? I'm not reading 40 pages of fluff, and if I'm not going to read all of its it's unfair to read any of it.
If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.
I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.
I already pointed out in my other comments that the first couple of pages is the resume but the details are given to consult as needed. This is how it should be since more details help one make better decisions. The current Recruiting/HR practices are broken which nobody seems to question. Human Resource is very important in this highly competitive economy where a single employee can change the entire future of the company, and yet people are using keyword searches, bullet point explanations and snap judgements for recruiting. Add in the fact that there is almost no training given to new employees nowadays which means it is even more important to recruit the right person.
You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.
A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?
Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.
That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.
The point of the article isn't to just "work less", but rather that working above and beyond what you're contracted for in a large organization in the long run ultimately won't matter. The takeaway is that your "extra" efforts can be better spent elsewhere: family, personal projects, interviews for next gig, etc.
The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)
I don't think the original post is advocating for just "throwing in the towel" here. Instead they're simply stating that working what you're specifically contracted for is a more reasonable and sustainable model than always going "above and beyond" for little to no gain to your work life and at great cost to your personal life.
Corporations by design don't "care" about you, they only care about maximizing profits and returns for their shareholders. Sure you can get "noticed" by higher ups, but those individuals have no obligations to you in the day to day operations unless you're getting cozy with the (increasingly externally conteacted) deciders/architects of the next upcoming re-org.
It's not explicitly stated in the article, but their call-out of the behavior of large companies speaks to the missing piece of the puzzle here: the "stage" of the company's lifecycle plays a crutial role in how much your "above and beyond" contributions matter. 10 person start-up? Matters significantly. 1000+ person org? Drop in the bucket.
Nothing magic or particularly reliable, but a few things stemming from the basics - layoffs happen because the accountants say there isn't enough money, and [Function X] seems to cost more than [Profit/Opportunity Y] that is assigned to it. Then a bunch of people have no job the next week. So to avoid being picked up in a layoff, it is helpful to talk to the accountants, figure out what Y is and what X you are in, and if the numbers aren't promising work to get re-categorised as a Z, increase Y or negotiate to change how things are measured.
Most product teams are organised around the idea that someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit. Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.
Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the time software people show no interest in whether the plans they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading to more money.
Eg, in the original article I see things like "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack him.
If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to make it so.
[0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something that can be assumed.
I agree with this, maybe I'd summarize things in a slightly different way: think of employment as a mutually beneficial transaction. That doesn't necessarily mean simply working the contracted hours, but keep in mind that jobs are, these days transactional in nature.
I can go above and beyond, work on the weekends etc, but there should be a benefit to me. That could be because I learn something and it sets me up for my next job, I increase my chances of a promotion, or just that it's something interesting to me personally.
I think there is probably less cynicism this way too, because this is how most companies look at employees too.
Just got accepted on my first job last month. Yet, last week, company (>500 ppl) already announced some small layoffs.
Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?
If you're actually down to jump ship you can probably be upfront about it.
It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.
Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of technical knowledge is essentially based on vibes. My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.
If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they agreed.
Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.
I dropped out of university, so in my early years it took a lot of tuning my resume to give the impression that I had a degree without actually saying it. Thankfully I had taken summer courses at a different, nearby university for two years before college. Eventually I would just put the years, the universities, and the major I was pursuing. Now I just leave it off the resume.
I had one manager who found out after the fact and told me he wouldn't have hired me if he realized, but he was glad he did.
I had an interview where they asked for a college transcript and then grilled me on why I failed Martian Geology and why I only got a C in Vector Calculus. I was given an offer, but declined it because of that experience. I dodged a bullet too; I've seen reports that the company sues former employees just to cost them money.
If you just started at your first job i would focus first on becoming an asset for your team.
Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft skills and maintain friendships.
There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.
There's no need. Just tell them that you're keeping tabs on the job market and would switch for a compelling offer. It's up to them whether they have one for you.
Whether or not you start actively looking for other jobs, you can take any opportunities you have to better develop your network. It's harder just starting out but post my first fairly extended role out of grad school, every one of my jobs was through someone I knew.
Well, you say just that. It even demonstrates a beginning of business acumen.
Everyone does it, recruiters aren’t naive. Once I became old enough to hire people, I understood it’s ok (depending on the audience, beware) to say “I can start on Monday but I’ll take two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it’s already planned.” Better have employees who are mature enough to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I told him during the first month he shouldn’t work more than 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental, bank, insurances, child care, etc.).
I was laid off during dot-bomb and was lucky enough to land a good (actually better) job through someone I knew pretty quickly. Pay wasn't great and they barely came through dot-bomb themselves later. But whatever.
I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business. Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job market was really tough at the moment.
But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.
Yeah, I think the first email I dropped was to this guy who owned a small company we had been a client of in an earlier role. He invited me up to lunch and was there with his (later) COO. It was basically a casual interview. Later, we discussed some contract work but he basically decided to just hire me. Which was nice because it was basically nuclear winter during dot-bomb--nothing else that even vaguely resembled a lead.
I think this sort of thing bugs a lot of people here because they think that some sort of theoretical skill assessment should be what matters. But that's not how the world works for the most part.
I never understood the advice of to take on impactful work. How does work? The team is assigned units of work and then individuals are usually assigned the tasks. The only way I see it to work is to be on a team that works on impactful projects.
I know this probably doesn't help you now, but I negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.
I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.
The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.
Also, keep yourself employable. What you get hired to do and what you'll find yourself doing 6 months later, 2 years later, etc. aren't going to be the same. Whatever you are doing, keep in mind how much of it is really a marketable skill and how much of it is specialized to a small slice of the industry or perhaps even just your current company. Move within a company to keep working on what is useful to one's own career. I would only accept dead end work for a significant pay bump or as I'm finalizing for retirement.
Not sure why you got downvoted for this. My current role started very tech-heavy and morphed into almost completely documentation as my management found out I'm one of the only ones at the company who doesn't suck at grammar and photography. Now my day-to-day really wouldn't be useful for getting another job with a similar title (and pay) to my current one, and I need to devote extra time outside of work to keeping up with actual tech skills that I used to be able to develop on-the-job.
One of my earliest jobs was supposedly programming but was actually a slow descent into tech support for in house applications under the hood and I glad I took that as a hint to move elsewhere. Since then, it has always been a balance between doing what the company needs but also making sure I'm positioned to learn new technology or otherwise be growing my career in some fashion.
I've experienced a company not only treating its employees as numbers in a sheet, but also actively lying to them.
I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US. Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to accomplish even more the next year by adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we know that we ended up training our replacements.
Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to take severance and leave as well.
The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends' experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit you.
> adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks
Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they chop our heads off now, you bet they’re gonna be left with ruins. Fuck them.
Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.
I saw IBM uproot an entire support team, persuading them to sell their homes and relocate their children to another U.S. state with more lenient layoff laws. Once the team had moved, the company made everyone redundant.
The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies is off the scale:
"...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of salt.
I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them often in management since they are attracted to pay, power and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and human interactions to almost perfection over years at least under normal, controlled, and previously experienced settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start to show.
Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest concentration. Another areas are those with real power, whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice guy and get, survive and even thrive there.
In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant. Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid off about half the team, most of them being from the subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they were all like “Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!”.
The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract since I was a specialized SME.
Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we want them to level up quickly).
Everything was subtle:
Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"), they were looking at each other often when making decisions (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).
In the final weeks management started suddenly taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that didn't make sense.
That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda
Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job
One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.
The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
You can graduate from high school and leave your hometown, but the attitudes of high school remain in the office: the cliques, the cruelty, the in-groups and out-groups, the manipulation, the brown-nosing, the behind-the-back-shit-talking. The C students from your high school are now mid level managers above you and brought the mentality straight from there to the office.
if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)
that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning
I've been part of two really good teams, one went away because the company closed, the other because it was managed into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right with any level of management to have a bunch of at best average teams and then one very good team in the same org chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape along.
I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")
I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.
We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?
You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.
For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.
The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)
I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.
The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?
Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.
Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.
But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.
I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments).
But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.
What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.
> One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.
The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.
Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)
It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.
>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?
You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)
The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.)
Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).
Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.
And with that you showed exactly why I have the knee jerk reaction to attack communism every time it is brought up. There is a constant play of this type of thing and people are starting to think that because it is unchallenged it might be right.
Those 'progressive ideologies' with influence from Marx are what make all of what we see today happen. From killing people if they cant pay for healthcare to these sociopathic layoffs 'because AI'. So 'influence from Marx' is just nonsense.
The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them this is what you end up with.
I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.
I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their identity around the only community they are a part of -- their job.
Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.
Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even having a contract on paper only for my employer to first suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all after the first month.
Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.
Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating.
While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
I’ve worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the biggest company (100k employees).
Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.
I worked at mostly small companies and had one 3.5 year stint at BigTech.
“pay less” is an understatement. Top of band for most Big enterprise companies or smaller companies is about the same that a new college grad gets at BigTech.
While I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than go back to BigTech at 50, if I were young and unencumbered instead of a 50 year old empty nester, I would make the trade off in a heart beat
Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.
I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.
People have a concept of corporate jobs that is just plain wrong. You are nothing but slave labor. You are treated well only as long as you are needed. But when that is not true, you will be treated for what you are.
You might think this is an anti-corporation view. But the truth is that corporation have become anti-people. Is Purdue Pharma the friend of the people they addicted to ? Is Starbucks the friend of the baristas they squeeze to make a profit?
Some of the "best", as in wealthiest corporations, treat people with contempt. Here's looking at you apple, amazon, google, facebook and microsoft.
Since Citizens United vs FEC these companies now "lobby" to get what they want and have corrupted what should be our democracy into a corpocracy. Union busting Amazon controls one of the major sources of information in the US. How much does microsoft owe in taxes now? How much money is off shore?
Corporations are an outdated, ineffective form of economic collaboration. They are designed to make profit at any cost to customers and employees. Colonialism anyone? And boy, are they stupid. Greedy, ruthless, but stupid.
Supposedly there are a bunch of technically skilled folks here on HN. Maybe they should start thinking about alternatives to corporation style jobs.
I like how Richard Branson does things at Virgin. I have tried to adopt similar practices in mine. Basically we do our best to move you around to somewhere else, but you are never fired. It works really well for us.
This is a very negative to look at employment in general:
Whatever the skill - pushing rocks up a hill or pushing code into a repo - someone with power over you is taking half your waking day to generate disproportionate compensation.
I personally see the alternative viewpoint which is I am able to provide for my entire family a life of non-work because I sacrifice 50% of what would be idle time without them.
Ultimately you need something to do during your waking hours. I give 50% to the company and 50% to my family.
Doesnt it? It requires a $180,000~ minimum to get by as a family of 4 including 2 kids in San Francisco according to statistics. Before taxes and unexpected expenses and other things. And VERY few people get that $500k. The rest get shafted by the system like others.
The zero-sum competition for housing absorbs any wage level you throw at it. If you can fault the employer for something in this scenario, it is for locating the role in the Bay Area. Which they would tell you is a concession to the existing talent pool.
> Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions, the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the company was financially stable, your job was secure.
> But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-breaking financial results.
From the author's website:
> I've been working as a Software Developer since 2016
I've been in the tech industry almost 30 years. I saw the dot com boom and the collapse. Hiring like crazy in the late 1990's with companies have having signs "WE ARE HIRING!" outside their parking lot where you could just stop on your lunch break and have a new job by the end of the day.
I've worked at companies posting big profits but still had layoffs to underperforming groups. When your profit margin is 10% but another group is 40% they will sell off or shut down the lower margin groups. Sometimes there are offers for internal transfers but it depends on the skill set.
After the dot com collapse I've never felt any trust or loyalty to my company. I have felt a huge amount of trust and loyalty to my coworkers. I still work hard. It can still be fun. But if someone needs a job it is great to have a wide network of former coworkers.
I've worked at 8 companies and only at the first 3 did I just blindly apply. The other 5 were former coworkers who recruited me to join. Then I do the same for them.
I've worked with some people for 15 years at 4 different companies sometimes with gaps of 3-4 years in between but we meet for lunch once or twice a month and keep in touch.
I was lucky to dodge the layoff-bullet a few times in my 26 year stint at Apple. (The layoffs were almost exclusively at the start of my career there, mid-90's, as Apple was circling the drain.)
I was told by a coworker, when I was over 50 or so, that they could not fire me because I could turn around and make it about age discrimination at that point. I don't know if my coworker was correct — there is, as was mentioned in the blog post, a weaselly way where they lay off whole teams to avoid the blowback. (And then may cherry-pick a few of the laid-off engineers and make them a quick offer on another team.)
Earlier though in my career I had a very cool manager (hi, Steve!) that made it clear to me that The Corporation doesn't give a fuck about me. That, to that end, I needed to chart my own career path and not rely on might bright-eyed "beamishness" to get me anywhere.
In the end I did stay with Apple for the whole ride but was quicker to switch teams when I thought I was being either overworked or under-compensated. Seeing the company as the cold entity it is was in fact a liberating concept for me. Fortunately I didn't need to be personally impacted by a layoff to find that out.
This. Without going into specifics, I attempted to internally transfer to another team for higher level/better pay position. My current boss said he doesn't have a problem with it. I pre-cleared everything with the possible new boss, but I got mysteriously blocked. Few months later, team member from the other team indicated that they were told not to let it happen ( and who said no ).
Needless to say, I am miffed. The market is what it is right now, but not only am I not 'allowed' to move around, but stuck with the same pay/benefits, because my raise was.. lets say not great.
There is not enough .. not hate.. not enough awareness of how corps fuck you over and HN can help with that a little.
I've seen this but with the guy's manager being the blocker. Manager tells high-performing employee that he's gone (probably for some BS personal reason--the guy was good), but company policy is that he gets two weeks notice before his last day, and if he can find another team to transfer to, then he can stay. Well, since he's a great employee, multiple teams are interested, but Manager blocks them all, and the guy ends up having to leave.
>Fortunately I didn't need to be personally impacted by a layoff to find that out.
I really am perplexed with these kind of articles where the author has an epiphany of sorts, Are they living under a rock? My best guess - it's a click bait article.
> when I was over 50 or so, that they could not fire me because I could turn around and make it about age discrimination at that point.
If that's true, that could explain some of the age discrimination we see in the hiring phase... "if we hire this guy, we can never fire him". Illegal but impossible to prove, just like the reluctance to hire young women because they might get pregnant.
It has been 1.5 years since I was laid off for 6 months. Here is what I learned about this in my 19 year career in software (mostly in JavaScript):
* If you can do the job but nobody else can and it’s a critical role you are probably immune from layoffs even with a horrible annual evaluation. It’s not you that’s critical, it’s the job you fill that’s critical.
* if you take deliberate actions to make yourself critical, such as the only person who knows the code base, it’s only a matter of time before the mega corp dumps you. Self-appointed critical people are too expensive and viewed as toxic by management, but you can probably get away with this at a mom and pops shop.
* once incompetence becomes the universally accepted norm it doesn’t matter that you can do what others cannot. Everybody is a replaceable beginner irrespective of their titles and years of experience and treated exactly as such. The survivors are the people that don’t rock the boat.
* if you have years of experience operating, managing, and authoring both people and technology in side projects you are probably far further along into your career than you are getting paid for. If your career is stagnant trying doing something wildly different and see what happens. I achieved rapid promotion after changing careers.
* don’t ever work more than you have to unless it’s something you want to do knowing you won’t get paid for it. I liked writing personal software outside of work because at work it could do my job for me or it frees me from the restrictions of shitty commercial software.
* the best way to impress management is to 1. do less work and 2. solve tough problems and share your solutions. Don’t be special. Demonstrate value.
> It’s not you that’s critical, it’s the job you fill that’s critical.
I think at a big enough company the people making layoff decisions don't know or care what job is critical. In some cases that means your job wasn't as critical as you thought. But I've also seen layoffs that seem just downright stupid. Literally saw someone laid off then re-hired to a different team a couple weeks later with a substantial bump to their pay.
At a certain level of abstraction nothing will save you. Critical job? Bean counters don't know the specifics of each team or project. High level? Cost too much, not contributing enough to short term goals.
I was once told that a lot of executive level management was based off gut instinct more than cold logical decision making. It would not surprise me if this also applied to deciding who is laid off.
It’s your manager and skip level’s job to make sure your VP knows the company is fucked if they lay your team off. I can guarantee you that no matter how evil Oracle is — the king of bean counters and mismanagement — they aren’t going to accidentally lay off the core Oracle cloud teams. Your job is to get onto those teams.
Every business has key teams, you just have to find them. For some businesses tge key teams are not in your domain (non-tech company) and you are just a cost center. The only option is to jump ship to a tech first company.
> I was once told that a lot of executive level management was based off gut instinct more than cold logical decision making. It would not surprise me if this also applied to deciding who is laid off.
It would surprise me if it didn't apply to deciding who is laid off.
> I liked writing personal software outside of work because at work it could do my job for me or it frees me from the restrictions of shitty commercial software.
You have to be careful on this one.
Often (it varies by jurisdiction), blanket rules by companies that all software you write in your spare time are their property can be safely ignored as invalid. But if it is heavily related to your current job then (again depends on jurisdiction) then they probably do own the copyright, possibly even if they don't have an explicit contractual provision for it.
If you're using your own spare-time software at work and benefiting from it there, it would be hard to argue it's not related.
Yeah, I got stung by that early in my career. So now all my personal software is licensed either CC0 or AGPL3.0. That is first thing I do. Secondly, I don't talk about it at work.
The key here is don't be stupid. Don't write the software on company time or on company equipment. My experience has further taught me:
1. Most employers don't want the software. They want the person writing the software.
2. Once your peers discover that its you writing the software they use there is a good chance they will immediately move on to something else. In JavaScript world "Invented Here" syndrome is extreme and developers do not trust quality software could ever come from people they know.
3. If the software was in use before you got to the organization then you are in the clear.
4. Have multiple lines of alignment, such as a part time job and/or contractual obligations elsewhere. Employers will not fight other employers to gain ownership of your pet project. In my case I have a part time job in the military and the military has the most liberal IP rules on the planet. Now I am a defense contractor on a project with multiple contract vendors, so who would really own my pet project: the contractor that pays my bills, the client that pays the contract, or the other contractor who manages the contract.
5. If its your personal project you are free to abandon it at any time and use your time to play video games. You are also free to abandon that job and go do something else.
If the company owns your software than you don't have the right to set licensing terms. If the company fights things and wins (a big if), your license terms mean nothing. If you contribute to upstream projects they could have big problems backing out your changes.
Which is an argument for better laws around what you do in your personal time.
Of course as you say, most companies don't really care about such work so long as you are not competing with them.
That is entirely a matter of initiation. If the work initiates from the employer there is no question the work is owned by the employer. Less clear, but still very clear, is if the work occurs on employer time and/or equipment. If the work initiates from your personal mind far separated from employer guidance then its a personal project.
Yes, I am aware of some Mattel doll lawsuit where a guy created action figures on his own time outside of work and the toy making employer assumed ownership of that personal project. This is an extreme edge case though, because the employer had to prove the personal project was work residual from employment work and had to go to court and sue their employee. The motivation there is that the employer liked the employee's idea enough to want the freedom to pursue that idea as a future business interest.
This never happens in software unless an employee builds something to compete with the business interests of the employer. That is far easier to prove, malicious intent, and not the same thing.
The reason this never happens in software is that it radically opens a liability window that did not exist before. For example, consider Facebook. Facebook is not a software company, which is a company that sells software. Facebook is a media company that provides advertising and happens to write software for internal use. If Facebook were to sue their own employee to gain a new unrelated software product line then they become a software company and then become open to lawsuits, competition, and trust concerns they didn't have to concern themselves with before. If Facebook did want to assume ownership of an employee's pet project it would be far cheaper to just buy it from the employee or pay the employee to work on that idea as a job function. If the employee did not want to give their personal project to Facebook then Facebook could always fire the employee and start the idea from scratch under Facebook branding, which is also cheaper than suing their employee.
To the last point, there are few ways to lose respect faster than spinning your wheels with all kinds of tasks. Without consciously recognizing it, upper management is looking for people who understand and live the Pareto principle.
> Since I was working for a German entity of a company, I want to address a common myth about job security in Germany. Many people believe that it’s nearly impossible to be fired in Germany. While this is partially true for individuals who have completed their probation period, it doesn’t hold up in the context of layoffs. If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
The author decries how he was laid off despite his contribution then - without a hint of irony - says Germany isn't as safe for employees as most people think because layoffs are legally required to take into account information completely disconnected from your contributions at work.
Of course if you have legal structures that make it harder to fire people based on what they do outside of work, you will be forced to lay off people you otherwise wouldn't.
What are the odds the author got laid off despite his contributions precisely because somebody who earned more than him and did less couldn't be fired because they happened to have children? In the US it would be approximately zero. Even if the person picking names knows you have kids - but they don't because they're usually 3-4 levels above you - they have to justify the names to their boss and "J. Doe just had their second kid so let's keep them around until next year" will absolutely not fly.
> If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this.
At least this part is partially wrong. There is an entire law about how lay offs are only allowed if they are “socially justified” with definitions of acceptable circumstances. An employer can not fire you “at will” in Germany.
I had the same reaction. This sort of law makes it very expensive to keep ambitious young folk like the author in a layoff.
I am very confused about how this works in practice though. Presumably you're not expected to keep an old accountant with a family over a young childless developer, but where is that line actually drawn? Can you make such a distinction between teams, or are you expected to reassign people from a team that is being disbanded? What if they don't have some experience you would like, are you expected to train them?
From this article by a German lawyer, "the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.":
> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG provides four criteria that have to be taken into account in the selection decision: Length of service, age, statutory maintenance obligations and the employee's severe disability.
> The employer must first determine which employees work at the same level in the company and can therefore be replaced. The group of employees determined in this way is what is known as a horizontal comparability. Social selection is then carried out in this group on the basis of the legally prescribed criteria. The members of the respective group are then ranked according to their need for social protection.
> Older employees are more in need of protection than younger ones. A longer period of employment also increases the need for protection, as does the existence of statutory maintenance obligations and the presence of a severe disability.
> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG does not indicate how the social aspects mentioned are to be put in relation to each other, which is why each of the four criteria is to be given equal importance.
> When reducing staff, employers often make use of point schemes through which points are assigned to the individual social criteria. It also gives information through which the need for social protection of the employees in the comparison group can be assessed.
> All employees who are interchangeable must be included in the social selection. Criteria that can be used in this examination are the vocational training as well as the practical experience and knowledge that the respective employees have. If there is comparability, these workers are horizontally interchangeable. In practice, the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this makes it much harder for people with severe disabilities to get hired in the first place, especially for progressive degenerative diseases.
If I'm a company that is expanding at the edge of my capability, I'm not going to hire anyone with any "need for protection" that I'm able to suss out during the application or interview process because if I need to reduce staff I'm stuck with them whether they're the best or not.
The hard to lay off makes it harder to hire as well. Sure you get the 6 month probation period, but it is risky to hire anyone because they might make it past those 6 months before bad times come.
You will have a hard time convincing me that at will employment and hire-fast-fire-fast mentality is not objectively better than whatever you might call the German-style system. (Notice I didn't say it's good, just better)
The German-style system seems to treat a job as something the employee is guaranteed, that it's their inherent right to have, rather than something the employer chooses to give them. It doesn't seem to line up with reality.
At will employment means it is lower risk to pay employees high salaries. People in US tech clear $500k/year because if you are worth the $500k/yr the business keeps you as the arrangement is mutually beneficial and if you are not worth the $500k/yr you are gone.
You cannot have it both ways. Either high salaries and easy to fire or low salaries and hard to fire.
For me personally, at will employment has been beneficial. I make around 4x as much money as my European peers and I aggressively save. At this point I could be out of a job for 10 years and still be ahead of those working in Europe.
Better for whom? I think most people sleep better knowing that they can't be let go for no reason, no notice and no severance tomorrow.
Yes, you can lay off people in Germany, and France, and Italy. But there are rules, notice periods, and mandatory severances, as well as often (country dependent) consultation periods. In what way is that worse for the employee?
It's worse because people don't want to hire in those countries and the conjecture here is also that layoffs are unrelated to productivity, so there is nothing you can personally do to avoid getting laid off except having a family.
So it's worse for people who are productive in their jobs.
We were approached by a French startup looking for an acquihire and well, French labor law was a big reason not to do it (not because the people at the startup weren't good, but because staffing an Eng office around them was seen as too risky).
To some extent perception is reality here; we didn't really know that much about French labor laws, but the reputation and uncertainty is the issue.
I'm not saying there should be no rules but saying "you can't lay off Employee A because he has kids, you have to lay off Employee B instead because they don't" with absolutely no consideration of work product is pretty asinine on its face.
Laying people off is a business decision - forcing a company to justify that from a business context is probably a Good Thing, but injecting weird social requirements on top of that is silly.
It makes sense if you consider the social cost of having children live through their parents' layoff.
Meanwhile businesses enjoy the privilege of operating in a country where contracts are enforced and people are educated. In exchange they're expected to not treat their employees like cattle - that's not a lot to ask IMHO.
What social cost? You should not be so invested in your job that getting layoffs would have any social costs. There might be economic costs, but there are many ways to handle that so they don't become social costs.
I guess it's a matter of perspective.
Duties and rights/freedoms are usually connected. Like you have the right to tiger arms, but that entails the duty to stash and use them responsibly. You have the right to ride your car where you want to go, but that entails the duty of obeying traffic laws.
For this specific example: You have the duty to work, but that entails the right to have a job.
Does it entail the right to have a job you find enjoyable or fulfilling? Hell no! (hour long commutes or jobs you are clearly overqualified for are things you'll just have to accept according to this model still. "Culture mismatch" is not in the vocabulary of social security payout offices, interestingly)
To me it still sounds better than "no job? well guess bad luck for you" though. ymmv
You don't have a right to drive your car anywhere - the state can revoke it. Many states have no laws at all about how to store firearms, and the ones that do in general are pretty hostile to the idea that you have a right to bear arms in the first place. You don't have a duty to work, someone isn't morally wrong because they live off family money. And you absolutely do not have a right to a job, because a job requires someone else to pay you money. Nobody has a right to have someone else pay them money.
> Nobody has a right to have someone else pay them money.
In the not too distant past, you didn't need money to live. If you wanted to brave the elements, make your own shelter, grow/gather/hunt your own food, and deal with the threats on your own, you could do that. Now, you can't do that. Everything is owned. You need to have money to buy or lease land to live on. If nobody gives you money (or land), you can't make a life for yourself, because one must live on land, and all the land is owned.
Does this mean that people have a right to receive money? I'm not sure about that. I think the argument that people should have a right to be able to work and receive money has some merit, although certainly flaws too. It is at least worth considering that the world and society has changed and crystallized substantially over the last couple centuries, and the system of money is forced upon everyone.
> In the not too distant past, you didn't need money to live.
Are you calling prehistory the not too distance past? From what I can tell from history most useful land was owned by someone. How it was owned varied, from tribes that kept other tribes off their land (no personal ownership), villages that kept protected the local's land, "lords" that had control of various amounts of lands.
Sometimes there were plagues and so for a short time you could find land that nobody controlled, but that didn't last long if the land was useful. It might be enough for you to establish yourself on that land, but it wasn't a constant thing.
My recommendation would be: don't make your work be part of your identity, unless it's your work (e.g. your business). The work you do for others is not who you are. Your employer is not your family, nor even your friend. It's a business relationship, and should be taken as such.
This, incidentally is good advice for both sides of an employment relationship: employers sometimes also mistakenly believe that employees are their friends and family and then get a rude awakening when employees suddenly leave with no warning, for a 10% increase in salary.
I agree with the “it’s a business relationship and not family” part, but not with the identity part. Something you spend ~40% of your awake time with is certainly part of one’s identity, and for good mental health should be something one enjoys.
I've been part of layoffs twice (with around 8 years in the workforce by now) and yes, I realised the harsh truth that going above and beyond, putting in the soul and long hours is not worth it. No one cares in the long term, you're just a number in the spreadsheet at the end of the day.
But the thing is, I like what I'm working on, I like letting my passion dictate my actions. I want to go home at the end of the day and be proud of what I have accomplished.
But it's not worth putting in that effort for a company that treats you like any other resource. So I'm starting to become one of those soulless employees. You can call it quiet quitting or whatever. And it's slowly killing my spark.
I started working on my own projects to keep that spark alive. But 2h every day is not enough to build something that's worth it.
Yep I’m in exactly the same boat. I think I’ve largely decided that tech is just a job now; my motivation to code outside of work was tied to also somehow enjoying doing it at work and now I don’t anymore I also stopped doing it for fun.
So I’ve replaced advent of code with various other stuff, music, woodworking, books, the great outdoors and while my life is less rich in technology it’s becoming much fuller in other ways.
For me, coding outside of work becomes unsustainable as you age. It's not that you can't, it's because you realise there's more to life than staring at a computer screen. I love coding, but it's also good to go outside sometimes.
Recent years (40's) I've been on a building spree of sorts for my own projects[0]
I'm my 30's, a lot of energy went into home improvement projects, establishing a garden, and young kids. Now I find a lot of time and energy left for my own passion projects.
Like you, I like doing work I enjoy, but I have never been in a layoff, so I don't know how I will react to it.
My hope is that after a layoff I would be able to bounce back and find a new company where I can keep on doing fun work.
Life has ups and downs. I don't think shielding yourself from emotions is a healthy path. Just like you don't have to shield yourself from others forever after a breakup. A key ingredient is to have other part of your life to support you (family, couple, friends, ...) when one is failing.
I was "fortunate" to live through the dot com crash early in my career.
When the times were good, the messaging was we were all one big family. When the crash came, there were weekly layoffs. Co-workers that thought they were friends turned on each other to keep their jobs.
I learned to keep a fat emergency fund. I learned to work as a mercenary. I get in, I get out, I get paid. Then I live my life, which is not work. I keep no personal effects, and can be out the door in a second. Coworkers are acquaintances, not friends.
My company brought on consultants. They were having us do the absolute strangest things. Pointless meetings. Duplicating infrastructure. Documenting processes so deeply entrenched in what we did they'd never be forgotten. Then they hired another small team that did basically the same things we did on a much smaller scale.
Then my department got sold to another company, and it all made sense.
Looking back it's pretty obvious that they were bifurcating while duplicating important infrastructure. At the time going through it though I just thought the consultants were total morons, not understanding the business and that we'd be doing twice the work by having two of everything.
They sold it to us while it was happening that we were the domestic team and they were the "global" team, and we bought it as a concept, but we all thought it was a stupid distraction. We were absolutely certain we'd be merging our departments within a couple years.
Finding out that they had been actively lying to us about what was going on for almost a year really... Changed how I thought about companies. They had been lying to my face every single day for a very long time, that really violated my trust.
Damn I was part of may the 4th lay off from Shopify. They locked me out instantly from my crucial immigration related document on my work laptop, and there was no help whatsoever. Very ugly. Still remember.
In many countries, a number of visas are employer bound or sponsored, so there's a wide array of reasons why some relevant documents might live in the corporate sphere. Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device. There are often many more documents to a visa than just the visa itself.
Even if it was a sponsorship, I find it strange that you can’t have copies of the immigration docs so that you can at least explain to immigration what’s going on. I’d imagine there is case number or something that you could keep?
Otherwise what happens? You can’t even explain or prove your current situation? Seems draconian.
> Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device.
That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to your machine/the building etc.
40 years ago an autobody shop near me (where I lived at the time) went bankrupt. The employees came to work in the morning and the door had a new lock. It was 6 months before they could get their personal tools back. Mechanics provide their own tools, so this meant they couldn't really get a new job (or could but only after investing thousands in tools that they already owned but couldn't access).
this is why I regularly back up important documents to my personal computer. payslips, w2's, etc. never know when you might be terminated and lose access.
Don't burn yourself out for anyone other than you. Companies have no loyalty whatsoever and will not show gratitude.
In general I don't think that the style of work that leads to burnout is desirable at any stage unless if it's for your own startup and perhaps not even then.
One day I woke up and grey haired and not rich. I felt that my youth had disappeared, I had various minor health problems. Why did I work till 2am for a fortnight to solve problem X? The project was cancelled after I left or never made any money or whatever - it was for no great achievements. I got laid off anyhow.
I encountered plenty of people that generated fear in others pushing towards excessive work but I noticed every one of them going home at 5pm. Do you have to take note of these bullies? Maybe not - I didn't notice them being any worse to the people who ignored their pressure.
Don't encourage other people to overwork either - be part of the solution.
It's the people that you work with who will be grateful sometimes, in small ways and overcoming problems with them creates friendships. So you must obviously try to pull your weight - I'm not advocating cynicism.
This article doesn't mention it, but being laid off will change you at a psychological level. It can be a deeply traumatic event.
I was laid off over 5 years ago, and, as these things usually go, it was a complete shock to me. The company had been acquired, and my services were no longer needed. It ended up being a very positive change for my career, but to this day, if I ever get a moment of déjà vu, my immediate thought is to check my phone and see if I've been fired.
> being laid off will change you at a psychological level
it certainly can do, but it's also fine if it doesn't
when I was laid off, some family members simply refused to believe that it hadn't had a profound negative effect on how I viewed myself. Dealing with that disbelief was by far the most difficult part of the process
I felt absolutely fine, because at the time I had no emotional investment in my job or career
> being laid off will change you at a psychological level. It can be a deeply traumatic event.
I didn't get laid off, but I project I put years of my life into was shut down (in a "row on a spreadsheet" type of way), and it effected me surprisingly deeply. I'm still dealing with the after effects, and reading this thread is making me realize it was cognitively really similar to a layoff.
I wish it didn't bother me as much as it did, but that doesn't change the impact.
I'm 24 years into my career now. I think you just get used to this after a while.
I've worked on several big (at the time) software products that our company built and shipped to customers for a while, that we have since abandoned. And in those cases, the entire organization within the company that owned the code was disbanded, so there was no one left to know about it or care about it. I'm not 100% certain but I strongly suspect that there is not a single copy left anywhere in the company of the code for those products - code that I worked on for years.
It's strange thinking that there is basically no trace left of something that I put years of professional work into, but I think it happens more than most people realize. I suppose it's no different than startups that fail and everything disappears.
I also think this is why so many software people end up enjoying hobbies that revolve around physical things, like woodworking or restoring old cars. Having some physical object that you can point to and say "I built that" is kind of nice compared to everything else you've done living on a flash chip somewhere.
I was laid off in a face to face meeting with the VP.
Checking my phone might be irrational, but irrational thoughts can be a symptom of trauma. Then again, I do work fully remote, so I'm checking for tell tale signs. Mysterious meetings on my calendar, DMs from the CTO, etc.
I was laid off twice, about a year apart. Both affected me deeply, and clearly in a traumatic way. The last one was about a year ago.
My spidey-sense has been tingling for the last couple weeks, and there's a vesting cliff coming up, so I've been looking at my manager's calendar for suspicious upcoming meetings. I figure there are 8 potential firing days left (Mondays, Fridays, and regular 1:1 meetings) until that cliff, and then I can relax.
One of the things that has helped me cope is to constantly be interviewing at smaller companies. It's a lot less stressful to be laid off when you already have another offer on the table.
This hits me 2 ways, I got laid off in my late 30s and had over 4 years unemeployment. TBH, I'd got bored of what I was doing and it was looking like a career dead end. I took a hobby project and worked on that, learned iOS and eventually got a job in that.
But one thing got me, I developed an original app for the company I work for, that is now one of the focus products. I wish I never, I feel like it was literally stolen from me, never ever go above and beyond for a company, your managers will get the credit.
Why you think it's stolen when company paid for your time? If the app wasn't successful, would you have considered refunding your salary back to a company?
And to throw it the other way around, when someone works over hours and contributes significantly, but burns out, does the company throw out the unpaid work?
> [...] If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
This is not true, and an over simplification.
Yes, you can always technically layoff in Germany, but it might not hold in court. Most people have legal insurance (mine is ~€300/y) which is tax deductible if it has employment protection. Mine will cover costs for an employment-related lawsuit.
If you feel that your layoff is not justified, you can always sue, the judge could decide that your work contract was unlawfully cancelled, leading to the company having to re-hire you and paying your salary for every month it didn't do so. The company posting record profits could weight in your favor in front of a judge. People, especially non-native like me, don't know better, they just move-on and go c'est la vie. If you sue, win and get re-hired, you can always ask to leave for a bigger package.
For companies above a certain amount of employee (50? 75?), if a small amount of employees (I think it's 3 or 4) request it, the company must run a works council election. For any layoff (individual or mass layoff), the work council must be consulted, and has co-determination, they can basically block the layoff, this was done by Volkswagen's work council recently. [1] For large mass layoffs, companies might also have to consult with the authorities.
Last thing, the social scoring is much more complicated than "those with children." If you have 4 kids and got hired 7 months ago, you might be fired, and I, single person, might keep my job with my 15 years of tenure. Tenure, disabilities, children, ... a lot of things take part into the social scoring.
All and all, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and points of the article. But saying that, outside of social scoring, layoffs between the US and Germany are the same is simply not true. There is a reasonable job security in Germany.
this is very interesting, thanks for sharing it!
Are you aware of any story involving individuals fighting their case for a job in a tech company? Would love to read about it.
I know of a case where a company laid off a person for unjustifiable reasons. Of course the notice period was observed but the person decided to press a lawsuit and the court decided that the layoff reason was baseless. While they did not get rehired(once the moral is hit hard to go back may be), but they got awarded to 7-8 months of full salary paid. Something that probably played into the favor was that the person just recently became a father for a month after which he was handed the forced redundancy news and the observance of notice period.
According to anti-discrimination law, a ground for layoff(or not hiring) can not be tied to parenthood.
Not in my circle. Usually, threatening to sue is enough. I know people who increased their severance package because they said that "they wanted to talk to the lawyer from their legal insurance before accepting any severance package."
Of course this doesn't work if you have a work council, usually the work-council negotiate a severance package algorithm (= fix_amount + tenure * amount), and this is usually un-negotiable. This makes sense, thanks to collective bargaining, it's most likely one the best deal you could have gotten. (Even though libertarians will flock-in and start going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems unfair!")
> Even though >highly paid SWE< will flock-in and start going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems unfair!")
I made a correction. Also I really hate the tendency of tech workers doing everything to stay away from unionizing or collective bargaining or establishing work councils. There is this bizarre tendency that it is just somekind if conspiracy and they are able to bargain better deals. This in collective hurts the entire tech crew everywhere.
"Rechtsschutzversicherung." You want it to include "Arbeitsrechtsschutz"
I would also advise you to include defamation, in case somebody sue you for defaming them. Usually many legal insurance exclude "internet" from the protection, this means that if you post on hackernews "Hans is an idiot", and Hans sues you, you might have to pay the lawsuit yourself. These insurances usually have an "internet" options for usually ~20€/y which would protect you in this case. You can still deduct the entire amount from your taxes, as it's still technically a labour-law legal insurance.
I understood the claim to be that if you are at the bottom of the social points scale then you are sufficiently vulnerable for it not to matter. That the people who really benefit from Germany's strong labour laws are those with kids, disabled people, old, etc... but not just a standard young person.
Germany is just a strange country IMO. Lots of "nice" stuff like this that sounds great but really only works for the older generation and doesn't really work for young people, who are already hugely disadvantage by the German boomerocracy (probably one of the worst boomerocracys in the world).
I'm not a lawyer, but AFAIK, age doesn't influence your social score, tenure does. If I'm a 30 year old with 10 years in the company, I will have a better score than 50-year-old you who got hired 7 months ago.
The idea is that working at a company "squeezes juice out of you", so you should not be so easily fired after a long tenure, because the company got all the rewards from your juice, but you don't have much left. You can agree or disagree, but I have to admit that there is a logic.
I understood the logic to be instead that older people nearing retirement find it much harder to get new jobs.
And I agree there is logic to all of these things we are discussing. The problem is rather that everything is falling apart in other ways so young people get the raw end both times. Many of these older folk will be on rent controlled flats that are not available to young people, for example.
This makes sense in a way, since "standard young people" are very flexible [in Germany]. There are multiple different safety nets and ways to get money, jobs, support, and a lot of basic needs are taken care of by the social system.
Source: I'm a "standard young person" German SWE ;)
Yes it makes sense, certainly on paper, and in a world in which the older generation actually are disadvantaged by their age and younger people are not. Actually it's the other way around. Like so many things in Germany, it's just outdated and from a time when things were actually really good and everything was not falling apart. The boomer generation are the richest, have pensions we will never have, and get to pay far smaller rents than we do. I pay 3x the rent that my boomer neighbours pay for a mirror image flat across the hall.
I don't think any generation is better than the other. They are just the biggest. If Gen X were the biggest then there would be some big political distortion in their favour instead.
And no they are not on the way out, they are still here and will be here for a long time. To the extent that Gen Xers will be better or worse, it is only because the demographic pyramid won't look quite as crazy or distorted.
Q : What's the difference between a permie and a contractor? A: The contractor KNOWS they have no job security. ;). Your only real job security is your skillset. If that's good, lay-offs are often an opportunity rather than something to be feared. I've been laid off twice, 20 yrs apart. 1st company folded soon after. 2nd got taken over by bigger one. Was glad to be out in both cases, not happy place to remain. In both cases quickly got a better job, pay rise, and engineered a nice long break between jobs. 2cnd time I wasn't super happy there, but risk averse about moving due to young family. Lay-off was helpful push to look for something else. Found another job, then hopped on in 18 months to a great job. Got rid of a nasty commute in the process. Many people tell this story. Far too many of us stay places too long, we think "better the devil you know". Layoffs can be a blessing..... Caveat - if you're working a min wage job without a marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared and a totally different experience.
Lay off is great if economy is booming(some 2012-2018 and then 2021) but nightmare if economy is screwed(2024-present).
I recall commenting few days back that, the job market is so screwed now that even senior engineers with decades of experience are not trusted these days if they are missing minor experience in some minor tool.
In 2021, I remember everyone with ability to type some code(regardless of quality) land great jobs, remote contracts etc. Everyone I know currently looking to change or were laid off since mid last year are suffering(real bad) and all of these are highly qualified people whom I’d really trust with most critical work.
Being a contractor can be a good play, especially if your spouse carries benefits for your family.
Being a contractor is generally considered low status and temporary, so if you can get over that, then you can thrive.
The upside to this is the understanding that it is transactional and hourly. There is no expectation that you get emotionally invested. Which can actually be a much more health arrangement.
Ironically, if you are a contractor going through a staffing agency, when you are "fired" from a contract, you generally still get paid something by the agency and get "bench time" to train up your skills or work on internal projects. Sometimes contractors have better job security from a paycheck perspective.
Depends on the agency. Many will not pay you (and some may terminate you themselves if you don't have a contract for you, because they are paying your benefits).
There's a lot of minimum wages. Are you talking about the federal minimum wage ($7.50/hr), or the minimum wage local to the worker ($15.00/hr where I live)?
The first layoff is always the worst. You'll treat future gigs as transactional and be better for it. The younger you're laid off the sooner you'll learn this.
I'm so grateful I was laid off just 2 years into my first software gig out of school. I graduated, worked my ass off at a startup, and theeeen covid! It hurt but that was a permanent wisdom upgrade.
> Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company. Instead, continuously explore opportunities so that if a layoff happens, you already have other options lined up.
I personally find interviewing exhausting. I also feel slightly guilty interviewing when I'm happy where I'm at because I have been a hiring manager and know how much goes into a good interview process from the company side. (Not saying don't do that, but it's hard for me to do so.)
If interviewing is tiring, another alternative that requires less work is to be active in a larger tech community. Whether that is here, local meetups, or on social media, being active can raise your profile and keep connections warm. This will help if/when you are laid off.
I was laid off recently. I poured my heart and soul into that role and went far above and beyond in countless ways - even working on a critical business proposal while on vacation with my family. In the end no one cares about your efforts, what you accomplished, your certifications, what kind of SME you are, or what potential you have. If you fit the criteria for a layoff, you will be gone without a second thought. After I was informed, my company reached out to me with a “mobility program” where they supposedly helped me to find a position internally. I talked with several people including a VP who promised to find me something only to be ghosted after my official end date. It’s a very cutthroat industry and there is no such thing as loyalty any more. I know I sound bitter. That’s just the way it is. Save as much money as you can, live frugally, keep your resume updated, and always be prepared to jump ship. Don’t stay in a role too long and try to move on voluntarily at the first hint of trouble.
I was once in a fast-growing startup, where the CEO told us in a company all-hands that we had 18 months of runway and that our future was looking great! Some of us devs booked long-delayed vacations after months of grinding hard on releases.
Turned out that this "runway" factored in dumping all the American devs and replacing us with workers overseas who made ~35-40% of what they paid us.
My recent experience in the "data" world taught me that many companies in the US actually want contractors, but our employment laws make it make being "full-time" not that different than a contractor.
Another thing I learned was to never jump on R&D type projects unless you are in a very close communication loop with the leadership. If they are going to see you as a consultant on retainer, you have to always be delivering and improving on stuff that affects the business. I was put on some sort of "special projects" role in three fast-growing startups and those are always the first on the chopping block when things tighten up (and they almost always do at some point, especially in a startup).
As an "oversees" developer who was getting those 30% and paid almost no taxes for ten years -- thanks for your sacrifice. It was great money for that time and was wisely spent on enjoying life.
It's important to take pride in one's work, but don't forget one second that the relationship is asymmetric; if you choose to be loyal, the company employing you won't be loyal back.
The worst thing you can do is to feel personally and emotionally vested in the relationship, and then be disappointed that "despite" you going full in and giving everything, going above and beyond the expectations, it still affects you.
As the OP correctly states, the decisions are made by others, and they may not know you. But while some people involved may know and value you (e.g. your direct line manager), they will not stand up and fight for you in 99% of cases, because they don't have much power, and they would like to keep their own job.
I've been laid off a few times. I'd add one more "danger sign": you're not busy. If the firm/department doesn't seem to be achieving very much, it's a good sign that no-one's asking much of them. Which means the entire area is possibly for the chop.
But the line in the Excel sheet thing rings _incredibly_ true. It's actually surprisingly rare to be laid off by someone who knows you. Decision is nearly always made by people who've never met you and only have a cursory understanding of what your entire team does.
I've been laid off twice, and both times we were very busy. There were deadlines we were told were absolutely crucial to meet and we were burning ourselves out trying to meet them. The product we were making never saw the light of day and to this day we don't even know why.
The author complains that after all his leadership and hustle:
> to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
But then writes:
> [German] law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children.
It sounds like under German law he had to be treated as a row in a spreadsheet. Cynically, it might have been wiser to spend time having a child rather than hustling for the company.
> It was difficult to process what was happening. Just ten months earlier, the company had gone through another round of layoffs. And at the beginning of the year, during the company’s kick-off event, the president assured us there wouldn’t be any more layoffs.
In my experience, whenever a company assures you there will be no more layoffs, there will 100% be more layoffs. Never make the mistake of believing your employer has any real loyalty to you.
It's been 20+ years since I was laid off when the first internet boom collapsed. I got a decent settlement, spent a while experimenting with self employment, and got another interesting full-time job which lasted for years. I'd rate the experience as significantly less traumatic than my first relationship breakup.
But yes, the first time you experience redundancies regardless of whether you're made redundant or survive is definitely an eye-opener. It's like those financial disclaimers "the value of your investment may go down as well as up". There may be very little warning. It may even happen at a time that's very bad for you personally. And it does break trust among the company.
- fat tax return, since I falled into lower income bracket, even more free money
- moving out out expensive city to countryside, less expenses (and yes more money)
I took one year off, finished my opensource project and started consulting. Layoff tripled my disposable income and vastly improved quality of my life.
Once I read May 4th and 2 emails, I knew it was Shopify. I was also affected.
My view of why it happened is a bit different than the author, but my conclusion is wildly different. I've been on tech for almost 20 years, 11 of them in the US.
On average, I do see people that work hard and on important things getting recognized and promoted. I don't have this bleak view that nobody should do anything, it's all random, nothing matters.
I do agree at the end of the day we're just numbers on a spreadsheet for large companies. Most of the time it's not personal, and Shopify probably decided having engineers in Germany wasn't worth, no matter how good they were (and I personally knew a handful that were really, really good, live there, and lost their job).
Those things aren't contradictory. You can work hard and be promoted and get more recognition, and you still can be cut due to decisions completely out of your control. The opposite is also true. Average people get lucky to be on the right project at the right time, sometimes multiple projects in a row. Peter principle and all.
But on average, companies to reward the people that bring value to the company (and its owners)
Really enjoyed reading this, but I will say that the particular circumstances here are a bit rare. Germany got completely gutted in this layoff. Almost everyone employed in Germany was cut. I know a Senior Staff Engineer from Germany who was laid off then re-hired.
It’s not rare for entire business units or country offices to get shut down. That’s the easiest way to do a layoff because it’s mostly isolated from the rest of the company. Executives can meet most of their layoff target without having to get into the weeds of evaluating individual performance.
Often some functions are moved or merged into another unit, and that’s the escape hatch for the few people someone really wants to save.
What I've learned is that, for employees, job security is never real. There is only silent risk. You might get lucky and go through an entire career never losing Russian roulette...but you're just lucky.
But I've also learned that there is no security of any kind in life. People who've lived nothing but peaceful lives will never understand, and they'll even lecture you about "making your own luck," when they should be thanking God for their good fortune.
Isn’t it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with all the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that something is off? Any seasoned manager will see right through it, but would never call it out directly to you.
Then, let’s say you get an offer, do you say you’ll only sign if you’re laid off? It’s expected you sign the offer and join reasonably soon. I’ve seen offers rescinded after ridiculous start date doubling down by candidates. You will be actively shooting yourself in the foot if you get an offer and don’t take it, because you just wasted many hours of their time, and they may remember that if you apply again…
Outside of all that… where do you even find the time to ALWAYS be interviewing?! I put (exactly) 100% into my current job, so always interviewing means I have much less free time. It guarantees I am always stressed, and being stressed ruins my life. I like the work I do, but find it incredibly exhausting and dehumanizing after long stretches. Five 8 hour days is enough of a long stretch to make me feel I am wasting my life, I can’t even imagine how always interviewing would ruin me…
The better advice in the same light is to always be networking— or at least making sure you HAVE a network. Referrals are your only weapon against the flood of trash applications.
So yes, yes, I get that I am a row in a database, came to terms with that a long time ago— this is the silly game we play for money. Until society collapses, and we miraculously reform it to something better, this silly game we will continue to play. I just want to scrape joy out of as much of that time as I can.
> Isn’t it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with all the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that something is off?
Working and interviewing remotely, it’s definitely easy to work and interview at the same time. No one thinks twice is occasionally it takes an hour to respond to a message.
Heck even when I am not interviewing I close my Slack and email for blocks at a time to do “deep work”
I'm not sure he clearly didn't want to mention it - he didn't state he didn't mention it on purpose. I'm sure many people wondered, and going on LinkedIn is trivial. Had it not been on LinkedIn I wouldn't have looked further. If he didn't want to be outed, he could take Shopify off of Linkedin.
Amazing job off capturing nearly word for word what I've said to people and thought before, during, and after being laid off. The signs, symptoms, and treatment; perfect. To someone who's never experienced it, it would seem myopic, but it's not, it's just the way it is, do not give more to your company than you can control the outcome of having done so. You don't get to decide that you're not laid off, and the only thing, as sad as it is, that you should be doing, is exactly what you're paid for.
It's not "exactly the way it is" everywhere, though. I've worked at companies that, whenever they laid someone off, they were honest and upfront about it without playing any psychological tricks. Not every company has to be this devoid of soul.
That's true, I've been directly laid off and fired without cause without tricks, but the salient point to me is that usually it's a futile and burnout-inducing mission to try and put in extra effort to attempt to avoid the impending outcome. A manager at any company could just be annoyed with how you responded to a question one time and it'll be burned into their brain to get rid of you. In retrospect, although there have been valid moments where my performance has suffered, it's rare for that to be the cause imo, especially if they really don't know what you do anyway. You could think you're a crucial contributor, and all it takes is oversleeping on the wrong day to screw you permanently.
It is? That's a weird position to me. If I go to a store and pay $10 for a sandwich, I don't call it dystopian when I don't get two sandwiches. Similarly, if my working agreement is $X wage for 40 hours of work per week, I don't give them 60 hours, because we agreed on 40. What is dystopian about agreeing to terms and then executing on the agreed terms? That's just how exchanging money for goods & services works.
> Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions, the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the company was financially stable, your job was secure.
You hear this a lot but it's the result of developers from sectors that did well during this time period whistling past the graveyard as rolling layoffs hit more mature sectors and firms, such as networking (Cisco) and storage. It's surprising to me that people who are paid to try to imagine how systems perform in different scenarios, and are presumably good at what they are paid to do, fail to apply the same thought processes to the systems that provide them their salaries.
Agree with the headline but I think the takeaways are a little too cynical. You don't really have to take such a confrontational approach with future employers.
IMO the biggest takeaway I had after a layoff: Always try to navigate your career so that you are doing something valuable to the business. You can tell based on a lot of clues whether you're in a position that's valuable or if you're forgettable. Moving "toward the money" not only helps job security but it helps your compensation too.
Say for example your team has a stretch of a few months without any new high priority requirements or requests. A young developer might think, "Yay, finally we have enough time to do all that refactoring in the backlog." But in reality, that situation should make you very concerned.
Which of them -- the original (and still on TFA), "Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again", or the current one here, "A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work"?
(And YTH did it change to something else??? Weird.)
There was a time when the word "layoff" referred to a TEMPORARY separation due to a lack of demand with the understanding that when activity picked back up you'd be recalled back to work. This was particularly common in the automotive sector and really across manufacturing. These were cyclical industries and while employers couldn't afford to pay idle workers during periods of low economic demand, they also couldn't afford to lose the skillsets. Oftentimes unions would provide partial compensation to these workers until they were recalled.
Somewhere around the mid 1990s, "layoff" became just a euphemism for permanent reductions in force/downsizing.
Nope. Layoffs were always understood to be temporary, up through some point in the 1990s. Furloughs were much shorter in duration, typically days or weeks, and in some cases were partial (one or two days a week).
It feels like a lot of people who joined the workforce after 2008-2010 are experiencing their first "tough times". It's natural to respond in this manner. But there is an important caveat: one must seek out good work and deliver in order to stay employable, and have access to good opportunities. Or, they must develop a good network and essentially hop from one job to another with the exact same set of people (this is much more common than you'd think). For the former, you still need to show up and go above and beyond every once in a while, so getting excited about work is still a prerequisite.
These leave-on-the-day layoffs are really strange to me. Unless there was a bankruptcy or something, I'd most likely be convinced by management to stay my entire period of notice (3 months) because the company would need to PAY me 100% my salary for that period anyway. If they thought I was a risk to keep around, or they had no work for me at all, then they could just give me paid leave for 3 months. But more likely I'd be doing handovers and documentation and whatnot for the 3 months. But like, closing down accounts immediately? Do companies really think any laid off employee is an immediate security risk to the extent they need to lock them out as soon as they lay them off?
I’ve been through several waves of layoffs. Every employee kept on temporarily to transition things over (IMO quite rationally) did the absolute minimum required and I don’t think it was worth the companies money to keep them on. Additionally since their immediate manager was not part of the layoff decision making process, no one cared they were doing nothing.
> Do companies really think any laid off employee is an immediate security risk to the extent they need to lock them out as soon as they lay them off?
Yes. There are a few case (a handful across the world every decade) where a former employee has done bad things in retaliation. Yes extremely rare, but it happens.
Yeah. But again, it basically means you have no handover of anything, and in many (most?) places around the world you are still required to pay employees for a long period after notice. So you have an opportunity for handover that you are paying for, but that you aren't using.
The risk to the business from just dropping things without proper handover shouldn't be ignored in comparison to the risk of an employer going crazy after being notified their last day is 90 days ahead.
"Graveyards are full of essential people" (Bill Clinton). If there is someone who has information such that a handover is needed you as management screwed up by not preventing it in the first place. The person might have died and then there is never a handover possible.
Paying severance is very common even in the US where it isn't required by law (though generally not as long as Europe requires). Severance is what you pay people AFTER their last day.
Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign soldiers. Napoleon’s reply was that it’s simple: soldiers are either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic.
* The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what to do and can rally the troops to do it.
* The smart and lazy I make generals. They also know what to do, but they’re not going to waste energy doing what doesn’t need to be done.
* The dumb and lazy I make foot soldiers.
The takeaway, is that only after you lose your shiny glasses are you ready to take on larger responsibilities.
Don’t become jaded. Don’t carry around resentment - just get on with it - and you’ll
Very much be on your way to career advancement
As heartbreaking as they are for those affected, layoffs provide incredibly useful information for prospective employees.
For example, was it a small number of people who were laid off with decent severance, or was it a huge mass of people let go unceremoniously with minimum severance? And were the layoffs due to a sustained period of unprofitability or did they occur during periods of profitability? In the former case why wasn't the business doing well and has that fundamentally changed? In the latter case, did they first attempt to reallocate people to more productive areas?
> Everything I’ve shared reflects the current state of the tech industry. It might differ at very small companies, but once you work at a company with more than 100 employees, you’ll likely encounter many of the same patterns I’ve described.
Many tech companies have never needed to resort to layoffs -- not just small companies but medium-sized and/or privately held companies. Personally I consider layoffs of any sort to be a major red flag. It means company management makes poor business or organizational decisions and is willing to tank morale and lose their best people to please shareholders. It means that you're going to be a line in a spreadsheet that can be spun up and down as necessary.
Personally I'd steer clear, but if you choose to enter into a relationship with such a company you should appropriately discount any salary they offer to factor in that risk.
> layoffs provide incredibly useful information for prospective employees.
> For example, was it a small number of people who were laid off with decent severance, or was it a huge mass of people let go unceremoniously with minimum severance? And were the layoffs due to...
Fine idea in principle, but not implementable in practice: Prospective employees don't know who got laid off, and even if they did, they most likely don't personally know any of those people. So they have no way of finding out any of those useful things.
> Prospective employees don't know who got laid off, and even if they did, they most likely don't personally know any of those people.
True, I've never interviewed somewhere where someone I know personally got laid off. But for large companies there are typically news articles about layoffs, their size, and occasionally even their generosity. For publicly-traded companies you can wait for the annual/quarterly reports, but these days there's usually a press release or blog post[1] if it's more than a handful of people. For private companies that are too small to be newsworthy you can still scour Glassdoor and other forums.
But regardless, it's definitely something a prospective employee should ask about during the interview e.g. "Tell me about the last time your organization had layoffs...". Obviously you get a positive spin from an HR or hiring manager, but when I'm interviewing I find those answers most informative.
I was laid off from Google in January last year alongside 150 people in my extended team. I managed to find a different team in Gemini, so now I'm part of Deepmind. I have very conflicting feelings because on one hand I really enjoy the work, the team, and the absolute genius of people I get to talk to; but on the other hand, I have some resentment for being so inhumanely laid off, I am sad for the people in my team who were not as lucky as me, and I know it can happen again any time.
I was 15 years in at one company and got an out of the blue mass firing notice over zoom one day. A significant number of developers with over 10 years at the company were let go. It was devastating to think back over the times I decided to work late versus spend those hours with my kids and wife, the times I was at home but decided to "check in" on things at work, and the fact that I had fused my work identity into my personal identity.
I landed a gig at another well known national newspaper and hated every second of that dysfunctional team. I did fully separate my personal life and my work life. I basically punched the clock and worked my 40. Every six weeks or so I had to pull an on-call shift, but the monitoring setup was almost nonexistent so it was cake. I spent just over three years there before they had a significant round of mass firings. However, I did not keep up with interviews and previous relationships made with recruiters during my last round of looking for a gig.
I came pretty close to flat broke in the four months it took to land another job as I had one kid moving to college and another out of school living at home. I'm still at this current gig, and I honestly couldn't care less about it. We are doing so cool stuff, but every Monday I clock in with the expectation of having a mass firing email when I log in. I have kept in contact with all recruiters that were helpful in this last round and I keep applying and interviewing for jobs. I am a terrible interview, but I'm amazed at how well I do when I am interviewing while having a current job. I'm also applying for a wider-range of jobs that I don't quite have the skill sets for and those interviews go well too.
If you are just starting out and think you landed the job you will retire from, I wish you well and hope that works out for you, seriously. It would also be a wise move to prepare for the unexpected by making relationships with recruiters and HR employees at other companies. Don't ever think you are not replaceable. After the first mass firing, our positions were posted to be filled only from Mexico. The second mass firing was to be filled by Brazil.
You owe no allegiance to the company you work for. Do they randomly gift you with extra weekly paychecks for 10 hours of work you did not do? Why gift them with 10 hours of work they don't pay you for?
Join a union. If every worker at a company was willing to go on strike when redundancies are announced, they’d be forced to do better by their workers, or even something else entirely.
Purpose of corporations is to make money. It's a tool. Nothing less and nothing more. Using people work is the way they are doing it. Expecting something different is very naive.
I think the only wise way to cope with that is maximize your output and minimize your input. If you are here not for experience or mission itself there is no point in undercutting yourself. You can't expect loyalty from a tool. You can expect common decency from a management but that's different story.
Don't become only cynical. It's just how it is. It's an opportunity for you to get more money and experience. From finance perspective it's usually a win.
When I read the title, I suspected it might be about Shopify. Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed. The company's handling of layoffs left a sour taste in my mouth.
The way Shopify dealt with its staff departures was unacceptable. The lack of transparency and communication during this period not only eroded trust among employees but also created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. The constant silent firings, combined with the CEO's outbursts during town halls, have severely damaged the company's reputation.
I've seen a similar situation play out in my own experience when new management was brought in. My team members were suddenly being threatened with being put on notice, leading to a nasty shift in morale and productivity.
It's worth noting that Shopify's actions aren't isolated to large corporations like themselves. Unfortunately, this type of cultural shift has become all too common in many industries and companies. Nonetheless, this specific incident left a lasting impact on me, and I actively discourage any who asks me about working at Shopify - something I haven't done for any other company I've left _or_ been let go from.
I have a friend who went into full-on overemployment mode during the pandemic and never stopped once RTO became a thing. Somehow he juggled 2, and sometimes 3, jobs at one time. Of course he was staving off a performance-improvement-plan (pip) at one of his jobs at all times.
He didn't care about work. It was all about money. That worked for him short-term, but longer term Jack became a very VERY dull boy.
It's one thing to informally cultivate a network and another to actively interview all the time. I've done the former which has resulted in my three jobs since the late 90s and I've never done the latter.
I used to work together with Mert at the same company but choose to leave on my own 2 years prior to his layoffs because of similar issues as the one pointed out in this post. Most notably, the lack of vision and the excel table. The company had been dragged down by unbelievably incompetent leadership for some time. You could tell by the composition of teams that employees were not considered based on their qualifications but based on a moving-resources-around-in-an-excel-table strategy. There were also no attempts to gain knowledge from engineers or consider their feedback on decisions. This isn't ultimately something every company needs (bottom up is a double edged sword) but mixed with incompetent management it is a fastlane into chaos.
Hell, searching for my first job changed how I perceive work.
The job market as it is is tough.
Add autism & ADHD to the mix and it gets tougher.
I decided to give as much of a shit about the corporate world as it does to me - which is to say, I stopped searching altogether. I decided I'd rather be unemployed.
I feel like that not only due to my recent layoff due to cuts, but also due to the job market. I'm tired of applying to ghost openings that exist just to signal growth when there's none.
I was laid off from my first engineering role at the age of 22 and it broke me. Poor leadership, and infighting between me and my supervisor who couldn't reasonably manage me and support a new engineer (he monitored my git commit history to see if I was "working," leading me to make smaller and more frequent commits to inflate my work). He clearly was a legacy engineer that didn't code much anymore (I had to teach him how to use Git) and due to his age, was promoted to management. I was mid restructuring the UI on their shitty product and dated codebase when I got the news. Up until that point I had been pretty excited for what was supposed to be my first engineering gig.
My whole view changed on work and tech companies in a second.
The biggest indicator of layoff is when sales are consistently bad. You should always get to know your sales teams. They are the canary in your coal mine.
> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives. Many companies encourage impactful work to earn promotions, but instead of chasing internal advancements, focus on switching companies to achieve your next career step.
This is probably the most heartbreaking aspect of modern HR policy.
It’s not just about layoffs. It’s about the way the company incentivizes (or doesn’t) worker loyalty and enthusiasm. You could have employees that spend their entire career at a company, and refuse to ever “go the extra mile,” because there’s obviously no motivation to do so.
Loyalty, engagement, and morale usually comes from things other than paychecks. Often, simple, basic Respect can have huge impact on the motivation and loyalty of employees.
It’s actually quite mystifying [to me], how modern HR practice seems to actively discourage things like treating employees with Respect.
I worked for a company that was (at the time I joined them) quite well-known for employee retention. I think the average length of stay was about 25 years, when I joined. They didn’t pay especially well, so their corporate work environment was responsible for that retention.
As the years went on, I watched the HR Department become much colder, and more impersonal. They became absolutely obsessive about constantly reminding employees, at every possible opportunity, that we were simply replaceable cogs in the machine, and that the company could get rid of us, at a whim. They never really improved their compensation, and gradually removed many incentives, so it became all stick, and no carrot.
Performance evaluations became insulting and predictable exercises in humiliation. I was often told to reduce the encouragement in my evaluations (I was a manager, for many years). I used to take pride in specific and eloquent praise in my evaluations. My employees really appreciated that.
HR definitely wanted to make sure that employees felt insecure in their employment. It was obviously a deliberate and calculated policy. Our HR was run by the corporate General Counsel, so, lawyers set the tone.
By the time I left (as a result of a much-anticipated layoff), the employee morale was completely in the shitter, and the company’s much-vaunted employee retention statistic was no more.
Rather like "if you've never missed a plane you've spent too much time in airports", companies believe that there's such a thing as employee retention that's too high; it means you could be squeezing their pay more in order to force them to quit.
Doesn't account for all the tacit knowledge and morale effects of course. Some people just like running the Hunger Games.
& a good corporate reputation is just another asset like a rainforest: something you can burn to top up profits this quarter.
HR departments are constantly looking at "market rates" for jobs which is a fancy way of saying they share salary data or get it from ADP and have much more information about what people are willing to accept.
At hiring time, they are willing to pay market rate (or some percentage of market rate) to get people in the door. Once you are employed, they don't care anymore and will let excellent people slowly fall behind market compensation with 1% to 2% raises.
When those employees get frustrated and leave for 20% bump in comp, the companies seem fine replacing them with a new hire at market rate. So now, they have a new employee making market rate, they have to train the new employee for months before they are productive and they've taken on the risk of an unknown vs. just giving the existing employee a raise to market rate. It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.
> It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.
I actually makes total sense and a lot of it. I see the take that management doesn't know about knowledge being lost, they don't understand this, they don't understand that. I believed this was case until I started to work for a company that is literally 200 years old.
At some point between joining that company and deciding to leave the previous, I got it -- nobody is actually that stupid, neither people are evil or anything.
Employee being a row in an excel sheet is an important goal that every big company strives to achieve and all the functions, processes and products that are contrary to that dogma are actively rejected by the system as dangerous.
For the company to be the company it must never depend on this particular employee being very smart. Every bit of knowledge that is not written down and confirmed to be in accordance to The Policy is a risk and should be forgotten. That's the intended way.
And of course the only way to discover the market price for real is to spend the money. The cost of losing mister special employee is negative anyway, and for the offchance it's positive, it's worth it.
The evil thing is not this, the evil thing is not being upfront about it. Get a union, negotiate yourself a nice row in the excel sheet and be happy about it or make your own company.
Well I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that made top-shelf optical equipment, for 100 years. They were able to mix heavy process and exceptional employees. It can be done, but is not easy (which is why it’s so rare).
It had lots of frustration and flaws, but consistently, repeatedly, delivered equipment, costing tens of thousands of dollars, that people based their entire careers on.
The trouble came, when they tried to change to a more modern model.
They made a lot of money, for a few years, but ended up crashing and burning. Their brand suffered extinction-level damage.
I’m really hoping that they get their mojo back. There’s a better than even chance they will.
Their structure works really well, for the specialized (smallish) market they occupied for decades, but sucked, in the new market.
I think they may get their groove back, because their core is true, and they are tough. They are a Japanese company that has gone through world wars, depressions, recessions, etc. They are also very conservative, fiscally. That helps you to get past the rough patches.
> the company’s much-vaunted employee retention statistic
In a job market with more candidates than jobs, why would you need to an employee retention statistic? The reality is that in the current job market, regardless of your employment status or your work, your value has greatly diminished.
Sadly, this is true, but this company was world-famous for insanely high-Quality products. It was definitely crucial to their brand. They needed to attract top-shelf talent, and that brand reputation was important for this. I worked as a peer, with some of the top scientists and engineers in my field.
That reputation took a big hit, over the the time that I worked for them. I think they damn near went belly-up, after 100 years.
They seem to be (slowly) getting their act together, once again. I sincerely wish them luck.
Great read OP. My only hope is that somewhere in the future, when these "efficiency-focused" companies close. (Nobody there will build anything special soon and they can easily be disrupted.) Maybe, just maybe, someone would start something that will do things differently, and others will follow.
Without reading the post. Why is the person changing their view of their relationship with their job in the first place?
Doesn't he/she know of people who have been laid off before, among their family/friends etc? Even reading anecdotes of layoffs on the internet will reveal that one ought not be too psychologically entrenched in one's job.
Sorry to hear that. I could imagine that leadership actually didn't know you were being laid off. So the VPs and C-level execs might actually be pissed that someone laid off their go to person.
Another perspective I'd like to offer is one of renewal. You can move forward and find something that suits you even more. Something I am quite envious about right now to be honest. Maybe a sabbatical?
good write up, let me share my experience coming from the other side.
"3. Lack of Vision from Leadership" comes in different flavors.
One scenario is exactly as described: leadership genuinely lacks vision, which inevitably leads to layoffs.
Another, is when management is already aware of impending layoffs but cannot talk about it yet. While this may seem nefarious, it often has legal implications that restrict transparency.
I've been in the difficult position to continue to manage teams while the companys closure was already known to management. Not allowed to inform people is one thing but trying to emotionally prepare them for whats coming is a different, so the drop may not be as high.
Forcefully reducing server costs by 50% and cutting of contractors is hardly considered a vision. 'A lack of vision' could be the actual message. By the time I knew what is going on and costs got reduced I encouraged the best kind of development within the team: CV-driven-development with vague sprint goals!
You want to make use of the new fancy LLM APIs and play around with it? Sure!
Introducing a new tech stack? I can not think of a better idea!
While its far from an ideal scenario, its often better than wasting energy on dead features. My idea was to giving people the opportunity to work on something they find personally meaningful and is driven by self motivation. I hope it helped, at least after speaking to every one personally after the bomb dropped, no one was really surprised.
"You should never worry about betraying your workplace because given the chance, your workplace will definitely betray you. Loyalty to individuals. Relationships. That's what makes the world go round."
It's hard to read posters in this thread that disagree with the article when citing their 15+ years of experience. Sounds like a mix of time healing all wounds, survivorship bias, and maybe a little Stockholm syndrome.
"Just be positive" about wasting almost 1/2 of your waking hours a week once the curtain drops doesn't sound like a very sustainable solution to life to me.
Or maybe it just hasn't been long enough since my burnout and layoff ;)
The author's advice to do as little as possible will ensure a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In every company I've worked for, everyone knew who the "little as possible" workers were. They were not respected by their coworkers. When people left to do startups, those people were not invited. When layoffs came to town, those people were the first to go.
If you're confident in your abilities, use the layoff as the kick in the butt needed to found your own startup. Invite the high performers at the previous workplace. (I've known people who did this, and would relate to me much later how the layoff was the best thing that happened to their career.)
> Those who made the poor decisions remain, and some are even promoted, while the people carrying out the work are let go.
That's usually accompanied by some mealy mouthed communication from the CEO that "the decision rests with me" or some other poor faith mea culpa while you end up scrambling to get health cover for your wife and kids and figure it how far and severance will get you
I've been laid off a few times in my 35-year career. Being laid off felt like a betrayal to me for a long time. But I was operating under a false model: that because I worked hard and did good work, that the company would value me and take care of me.
I also used to shake my fist at the bad outcomes of stupid decisions made by people above me.
It took me this long to realize that this is all a game of chance. Me choosing a company to work for is me playing the odds. The decisions my superiors make are bets, too. And sometimes, even good bets don't work out.
It's still worth it to work hard and deliver what your management wants in spades. I've been brought along to any number of new employment opportunities because I'm remembered well for being a person who did those things.
I've come to see my career as a series of stops, and my current stop is just what I'm doing right now.
It's very hard to measure this accurately at scale.
If you create metrics, they will be gamed. The people that succeed, then, are not necessarily those with the most merit, but those who are best at manipulating their metrics.
We started measuring progress this month by measuring how many percent of last week's planned tasks were completed, and it's already showing.
Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the number up.
One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as unimportant.
I've never been laid off, but once was part of a company that went bankrupt and was one of the last people to leave the payroll (which is like being laid off, but where your employer is dead so at least you can console yourself with being the guy turning off the lights)... That said I did a lot of laying off for that company. Almost everyone ended up much better off after a few weeks or a month or so of searching. People would rightfully worry about if their actions caused it or why me instead of ___. The truth was that it was really about spreadsheets.
For me, I ended up getting a much better job that paid 2x what I made at the bankrupt company. But the feelings of having your livelihood rug-pulled are really difficult.
I'm convinced layoffs are a persistent management memetic where we've convinced ourselves these are necessary, good, and magically creates efficiencies.
In reality it's a desperate shotgunning your org chart since you've apparently no better way to figure out what you need or don't. It's incredibly destabilizing and demotivating and creates a culture as seen in this post where you no longer have workers that feel aligned with the success of the company (because you're telling them they aren't). It should be reserved for absolutely existential moments in the company, not when you're seeing record profitability.
I think the article, although well built and clearly criticising crucial points in the modern work structure, fails to see the fundamental issue that is at the core of these layoffs.
In fact, the recommendation for those who are still employed is incomplete and therefore doubles down on the issue without realising it.
While everything in the article is true, that you shouldn't romanticise your job, focussing on the job description only, only ever working the amount required and making lean résumés will reaffirm the status quo and aggravate the situation long term.
It does this because it doubles down on what fractured the working landscape to begin with, which is individuality, competitiveness and alienation.
You can't treat an alienating job as if it was already the job you dream of. This is wishful thinking. But going full hostile to your job won't make your situation any better.
Here's what I suggest instead.
Do everything the article says if you identified your work environment in the descriptions in the article.
At the same time do a honest and deep evaluation of your values and what you aim to be in 5, 10 years time. Thinking long term will have first the effect of putting the immediate problems into perspective and will highlight what's missing in your career today in order to get the job you'd want for you.
Invest in your portfolio. Keep doing interviews. Don't compromise on deliverable quality, because if you go down the road of actively crippling your performance, you will eventually become the bad developer you are allowing yourself to be just to get back at the current company that doesn't value you.
Remember, you don't get a dream job and then you become the great developer you think you should be. It's unfair, but the reality is you first become the great professional you want to be and then you get the dream job you want, if you are lucky.
It's never guaranteed. It's always a game of probability. The only constant and the only thing you can control is you and your relationship with your work as an ever flowing, ever changing process.
Do NOT work only your contract hours. It might seem like the logical choice but it rarely is because of following reasons :
1. You cannot build strong skills working just contract hours.
2. You cannot market your achievements by working only 40 hours. And in turn this makes you dispensable and more disposable.
3. You can't control your work which is probably the most important element of all this.
4. you can't search for great positions with the new skills you achieved if you only work 40 hours ...
Work in such a way that you get recognition for the hours worked.
Do important projects, not crappy side projects and MARKET THE HELL out of your work. Everyone should know what you are doing.
Every day at a job is a campaign to increase your salary massively - either at the job or somewhere else. (Btw, this is how most people in NYC think thought they may not admit it.)
You have to do impressive things and then use 3x your time marketing them to everyone else in the company. Everything else - money and promotions will follow.
(Process won't be pretty - but you won't be floundering nearly as much as others who don't take this advice.)
> they only do what’s strictly required to avoid a performance improvement plan. No one goes above and beyond anymore; no one takes initiative to improve things. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.
I see this at large Canadian financial institutions, too, but for the opposite reasons - employees recognize that it's really difficult to fire people based on performance. It's so hard, in fact, that it's easier to talk them up and get them hired internally by another team and make it someone else's problem.
You can strike the word Canadian out of it just fine. And anyway, it's not like firing a person is any different -- they just become a problem of somebody else.
> For those like me who’ve experienced layoffs, work has become just that—work. You do what’s assigned, and if your company squanders your potential or forces you to waste time on unnecessary projects, you simply stop caring. You collect your paycheck at the end of the month, and that’s it. This is the new modern work: no more striving to be 40% better every year.
This is why I've always enjoyed working at startups or being a consultant on my own. You have more risk, but you also reap the rewards of getting better.
The author was young and learned the hard way. There is no single country on Earth that is integrated in the ultra-financiarized western economic sphere that is not potentially affected. It is the end of stable jobs and pretty much the end of all economy altogether, except for the crony capitalists that leech off the printer. Every company is owned by Blackrock. They take major shortsighted decissions to the tune of the imaginary casinos ("investors", or "the market") or fund scorings. Productive activity no longer matters. Experienced people no longer matter. The game is a different one and you are not even a player.
I know some folks that very much take the cynical approach to work. They work very hard to eek out every penny they can from each employer and switch jobs a moments notice for more money.
I feel like this has a strange re-enforcing cycle that they find employers who are just like they are (looking to eek out every hour from their employees) and so they get more cynical.
>Always keep interviewing
Man that sounds like a full time job on its own...
This really seems to me like a big warning that says to avoid hiring people that were laid off.
Better advice. Be who you are. Work for and with people you like. Do what interests you where you are valued. You will spend a lot of time at work. Try to make sure it feels good.
This article is wrong in so many ways and not generalizable. I can see on bigger companies, you may be an excel sheet row. But, the reason why someone would get laid-off is the exact opposite IMO - not adding value. But in a smaller early stage company, you are responsible for team's success or failure and you are the only reason why someone are getting laid-off.
I was laid off about a month ago. I worked as a software designer and one of the top experts in the world on the software and its subject matter. Didn't matter, they broomed me anyway.
I once contracted for a company that laid off 6 of my bosses in 7 months. The one who hired me was fired 2 days after I started. In the end, they didn't extend my contract, basically because nobody knew anymore where I belonged in the company structure, who do I report to, and who should actually extend my contract :-)
I'm sure that the author who is capable of writing such a post is also capable of reading other post/articles of people who have had layoffs in the past, and hence none of anything that happened should be a surprise for him.
So my guess is that he has written it for the clicks.
It's different when you're contracting and expect your contract to end at any minute.
But I was doing some work for this startup ages ago and at some point out of the blue one of our full time contacts asked us if we've been paid because they haven't been. Must have been a lot less fun for them (I had other projects besides them) than for me. I only lost the pay for like 1/3 of a full time month.
My first layoff was in 2011 when the company was sold for scraps and they let everyone go. We all knew it was coming. Management was up front with us about the difficulties the companies was facing and that kept us apprised of the companies that our investors were looking to for acquisitions. Our investors also promised us that we would get paid for every hour we worked.
Most of us stuck around to the bitter end, when the time came, they gave us our notice, we all went to lunch together and came back to the office and just joked around for awhile.
The CTO had a couple of recruiter friends reach out to us. From looking at LinkedIn, everyone got a better job within a month. Our major customer arranged for me to finish my work as a contractor for them after making an agreement with the acquirer to let me keep the code while working for the customer.
The second time was the year before last and it was Amazon. I commented here about four months after it happened.
I honestly didn’t think about the layoff three weeks after it happened. It was then my 8th job since 1996, I got my severance and moved on to my ninth job three weeks later.
The next job after that one ended up being mote shitty than I could imagine. I got laid off from there last year. I replied to an internal recruiter from my current company and again had a job three weeks later.
It's important to note that not all organizations operate in this manner. My own experience with a layoff last year included a two-month notice period and a severance package equivalent to nearly a year's salary. During my notice period, our manager encouraged everyone to prioritize their job search.
The guy mentions layoffs between Germany and US are the same. They are not.
After probation is harder to lay off people (you have 3 months notice) and usually good severance packages. I have friends who were laid off and actually they made a buck.
This hit home for me, thank you for sharing. I was a bit surprised that you didn't mention or explore a path outside of employment, rather chose the content path of receiving paychecks and wasting time not being very motivated to push yourself. Don't give up on your potential!
> If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
From what I have seen in the past, the set of people with children and a mortgage can be difficult. Some really do not want to be there, but stay for job security.
I'm also not entirely sold on prioritising those lay-offs based on social elements, such as children. I can see incentives being good to have more children in a society, but you shouldn't be punished for not having them. Ultimately from the company's perspective, you want to maximise your company's future success.
I would amend some points:
> Stick to your contract hours.
Do additional hours where required and you are able, but make sure they are visible, and compensate yourself them back. It increases your perceived value.
> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives.
For your own sake, take pride in your work. Don't become stale.
> Always keep interviewing.
Many stop doing this because it's a pain and stressful. I think it is enough to keep your toes in, try to figure out what salaries are being offered, what kinds of jobs are available and how desirable you are. Try to learn those things with as minimal effort from yourself as possible.
Layoff culture will create companies full of Dyatlovs from Chernobyl, covering their ass, not that brave, not that innovative. Focused on maybe a promotion or surviving the next round of firings. It's sad to see the tech industry self-sabotage this way.
I’ve been through multiple layoffs in my life and I’m going through them again, but this is the first time I’ve heard the term “impacted” used so often in this context. It’s used 5 times in this article and it’s said constantly in our company town hall meetings when discussing the current rounds of layoffs.
However I would encourage that the "don't give a shit about the company and colleagues" is not quite as simplistic.
Yes, fuck the company, they don't care. You should always assume this. But you _should_ care about your colleagues. They are your network, and greatest asset at the next company. If you are shit to them, they will not recommend you.
So my conclusions, and or advice to younger people is this:
o Learn what the business wants, it'll help you make better decisions/products, and often gives you fair warning about being laid off.
o Be suspicious of the company.
o if there a clash between business priorities and you, you will always come off worse.
o Go over and beyond for your colleagues, not your company.
While true, they might not recommend you anyhow. I thought I got along well with my co-workers, and I consistently got feedback at year end that they enjoyed working with me, but when I was laid off and asked them for a recommendation on Linked In, only the most junior of them did it. Even after I left all of them great reviews there.
I am still surprised by this. They didn't get laid off. Just me.
I'm not angry at them, just very confused about their reasons not to leave me a good review to help me get a new job.
As an employer, I remain confused about the common notion that being an employee is somehow safer than owning a business.
The opposite is true.
First, I don't have need unemployment insurance. You are my unemployment insurance. I am hedging against your mistakes, as well as mine.
Second, I assess the situation to the best of my abilities, but also: How I see fit. As an employee, on the other hand, not being able to decide might as well feel like getting struck by lightning. (Here I would only add that as an employer it also feels like that if people fire you — as in: they quit — for any reason. It's just that you get more chances to practice it.)
Reconsidering the supposed safety aspect of an employment (since it's such a sticky idea) is certainly one thing I hope we would do. Unfortunately, when trying to discuss the issue with employees (not necessarily those who work for me), they mostly seem to rather not want to think about it.
Other thoughts. Why I run a company: It's certainly not money. I would even argue I (and most people I know running SMBs) relatively care a lot less about job money than the average employee does. I do it because would hate to work on something I think is bad and where attention is not spent, where it should be (so exactly what a lot of employees complain about in their company).
Best I can tell, a good reason to work for a company is getting to work on stuff that excited you and that you could not do better on your own. But I think more people should consider doing their own things more often! I would welcome more meta-competition in organizing work in a better way.
Points of disagreement with the post:
- People will miss things and systems fail, but I can't think of any reason why a CEO would not want to be able to spot the people who a) are not assholes and b) gel really well with the company. I don't want anyone to work overtime for me, but the above will still hold true. A company is complicated, and you being a considerate human being makes everything so much better.
- Yes, Excel is how you work with numbers, also those pertaining to human beings. That's just the responsible way to organize information about things. But if you think that robs me of my ability to think about or care for human beings, I am mostly confused. Can you not think of humans when you write code, because it's digital characters on a screen? Still, it's of note that even highly analytical people find something dehumanizing in that, when it pertains to themselves.
> I can't think of any reason why a CEO would not want to be able to spot the people who a) are not assholes and b) gel really well with the company.
The CEO might want to be able to spot that, but in any company of some size they won't be able to spot it. Simply because they're the CEO, and there's far too many people working under them for them to keep that close track of every one. A team lead (of a not-too-big team) may be able to do that, but then they'd have to simultaneously be the CEO. i.e: It only works for companies the size of not-too-big teams.
First time I was let go, I was fresh out of university. I had only been in the position for around 3 weeks. I came into the company at the worst possible time and they gave me a task which, in retrospect, was very difficult for a recent graduate; the project had around 30K concurrent users at its peak and I had to make it so that their results tables would update in realtime... They gave me only 3 weeks to do that task (which I had to complete along with some other tasks/bug fixing)... Also, I had to learn git which was not mainstream at the time (this was before GitHub). This was also before WebSockets were widely supported and before Socket.io existed. In retrospect, I should have asked to be assigned to an easier task as a starter, or should have negotiated down the scope. Anyway this was my first job and I was deeply passionate about web technologies so it was a painful experience to be rejected for something which was the center of my universe at the time.
After that, I held onto, in fact, excelled at every job and was often one of the top software engineers wherever I worked. I also launched some popular open source projects since then. I experienced some success in crypto (after facing a lot of adversity). I led significant improvements in the crypto project I worked on and things were looking up, the blockchain became highly stable and supported some unique features which would allow it to scale and meet its original vision; but after a couple of years, founders decided they wanted to go in a different direction which I did not agree with and so I had to quit. I made such an impact on that project that I managed to earn income from it for about 3 years after quitting the company; the biggest crypto voting cartel in that ecosystem broke up and re-formed just to include me as a member. Then after 3 years of horrible decisions, the founders essentially ran the project into the ground (no surprise to me); they did such a bad job that they then had to migrate their token to a competitor's platform. I lost my passive income... Though I must have earned like 200K EUR from it over the years. Best years of my life; no job, earning passive income while working voluntarily on open source project I cared about. I was not beholden to anyone and had no responsibilities besides just keeping my node running.
After that, I had to go back to working 9-to-5 doing the most tedious jobs, for lower pay. I was forced to accept work for a company in the mainstream finance sector which was the antithesis of everything I knew and believed in, literally going to work every day believing 100% that I was making the world a worse place. I struggled to find motivation; I did my best to hide it but I got fired after almost 1 year (coincidentally, just a few months before my shares would vest). Talent cannot make up for lack of enthusiasm it turns out... It was an unsettling experience hearing the CTO tell me how smart I was and that I won't have trouble finding other work... while firing me... Like 2 weeks after giving me access to their Stripe control panel where I could see all company finances! At that point, I had full access to everything, all user data, all services, all infrastructure. They'd literally put me in a position of ultimate trust, before pulling the rug from under me. I left in a very classy manner and on decent terms, as I always did before. In retrospect, the whole experience working there was very strange.
Anyway it's been a struggle to find motivation since then. I don't take my career too seriously now; having seen both the lows and the highs and seeing how talent and determination doesn't doesn't actually make a difference in the face of political machinations (which are pervasive in the industry). I don't think I would even care much if I got fired again. I'm now more political myself; I do the bare minimum. In effect, I've become like the people I used to hate, but I don't hate them anymore because I now understand why they might have been that way.
If you were on such good terms with VP of Eng and C-levels, why didn't you reach out to them and ask what's going on? They could interfere and prevent your layoff.
Quite on point, for me it made me value the team, and no longer believe in whatever management tells about "we are family", "company values", or whatever else they feel like selling as the vision and company culture.
The last 2 years fundamentally changed how a lot of people perceive work. I've witnessed layoffs in the past, but they didn't seem to hit as many people as hard as they did this time.
That said - having seen how layoffs are organized from the inside (multiple times), I can _guarantee_ that the list of suggestions on this post ("Suggestions for Those Who Haven’t Been Laid Off (Yet)" - particularly the first 2 points) are the best way to get included on the layoff sheet, in almost any organization. They might be good ideas for mental health reasons, but definitely an easy "name on the list" if you're perceived as "just doing the minimum" (I know that doesn't sound fair, but that's how boards think).
Though it was about the finance sector in ‘07/‘08 and its obviously different circumstances, I enjoyed the way the movie Margin Call portrayed layoffs as the author here described them—cold and myopic.
I’m the cofounder of Life360, a company I’ve grown from seed to IPO, now with about 600 employees. This whole issue can be addressed by embracing a straightforward social contract, something I share openly with everyone I hire:
No promises of lifetime employment. I’m focused on the long-term health of the company, and our needs will inevitably change. If we continue to grow, it’s almost guaranteed that not everyone will be the right fit at every stage.
No expectation of loyalty. The flip side is that we aim to attract ambitious, hungry people, which means we need to provide real opportunities for career advancement. If we can’t, I understand you’ll move on.
If we let someone go after a single bad quarter, that’s on us for being shortsighted. We know people have ups and downs, and we don’t want to be overly sentimental, but we also don’t want to act rashly. On the other hand, if someone’s job-hopping every year, that’s usually a sign of short-term thinking. From 2014–2021, job-hopping didn’t matter much. Now, it’s becoming clear that those signals are important again.
At the end of the day, it’s not about judgment—no good/bad or right/wrong here (aside from obvious dealbreakers like dishonesty). It’s just adults making tradeoffs.
That said, I’ve seen how some companies shy away from being upfront about this, which leads to cynicism. We’ve had moments like that too—at some point, we started calling ourselves “a family.” I shut that down fast. It wasn’t popular, but it helped clarify our stance. You know what you’re signing up for with us.
I was working for a German startup that had been acquired by a big American company. The relationship between my team and the big corp was strained from the start - we felt that they simply didn't understand what we did and didn't give us the liberty to decide how best to do things. They also didn't seem very mindful of time zone differences or understanding of German worker protection laws.
When they laid off the other team that was working in our office (on an entirely different product), they of course assured us that we were safe - they believed in our product, yadda yadda.
Then at some point, things started getting weird - a job position was cancelled right before we were going to offer the candidate the job. A trip to HQ was cancelled last minute. An external team was getting increasingly involved.
About a year after the other team had been fired, the second highest ranking executive was visiting our office, something he would do once in a while. When the visit was announced, we were joking that "if he brings Pattie from HR, they'll lay us off". I got the message from my coworker on my way to work: "Pattie is here."
The speech the executive gave us was the stupidest thing I've ever heard somebody say to me. He literally said: "In a couple of years, you will look at this as a big opportunity." We just rolled our eyes at each other. When he left the room, we picked up the remotes and started playing stickman against each other. It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.
We had a very nice office and so we were looking forward to be able to spend our notice period together, playing video games, making music and doing the bare minimum in terms of handover duties. Unfortunately, covid happened at right that time and our time together was dramatically cut short, which I still consider a tragedy.
One woman in our team was pregnant and fought the settlement they were offering us. As far as I know, they had to keep her on for longer and she eventually negotiated a better deal - pregnant people are especially protected under German labour law.
To this day, some in my former team doubt that what they did was really all that legal and think we should have fought back, because it later turned out that they lied to us about a bunch of things. But I doubt it would have been really worth it. They just wanted us out.
Oh, I don't know. In my current and previous job I was, frankly, amazed at the ronin-like attitude openly expressed by those new, young hires. I was nowhere near this radicalized, when I started my first 'real' job. Management is in for a rather rude awakening.
"कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन |
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि" - Bhagvad gita, chapter 2, verse 47.
You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.
A great heartfelt essay. I got the feeling it was written with
magnanimous restraint.
It would be good to do a study on how tech workers feel in an era of
such commonplace betrayal and dehumanisation. If anyone has stories
they want to share please get in touch at UK Cybershow and let's see
if there's an episode in it.
From my stint at a big corporation, the person I knew most closely who "succeeded" the most (for themselves, not for the company) would routinely interview for competitive offers and threaten to leave. I saw on a few occasions this same person lie in meetings to cover their ass to people who were less technical. I know of one person who has somehow managed to do the bare minimum at two full time remote jobs simultaneously.
To everyone reading the comments that describe corporations as the ones who treat their employees with contempt, it's sadly a two way street. It comes down to shitty people polluting expectations at all levels of society, and people dialing back their expectations accordingly.
With all the Luigi talk in the air, it's important to remember this goes for insurance companies as well. Insurance fraud is a huge drain on the industry and it's folks of all levels of wealth committing it. It's a part of the reason why insurers squeeze harder to keep the profits flowing. That's obviously no excuse for delay/deny/depose tactics--I'm just saying that in an environment of fraudsters who add friction to a company that does business honestly, you will find that the cheaters and bad actors will bubble to the top, more so than usual.
"However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. "
And that is exactly how corporate America works. Shareholder value before everything. The billionaire keep the stock price up not for the value, but for their simple greed. F** you and your self-worth.
RIF. Reduction in force. Spend every end of week, on the clock making three envelopes: your resume, an envelope which says 'blame everything on the previous guy' and the last envelope? 'make three envelopes'
That's why all of the bootlicking wording from employees now makes me puke:
"teamwork" "passionate about my work" "making an impact" "standups" "going above and beyond"... all of that is bs.
Go to work, collect a paychech and leave as early as possible. Reserve teamwork for your group of friends, passion for your hobbies, raising a family or having fun out of work.
And never, ever give them 2 weeks notice. When you find a better job, just walk away and email them when you are at home. Fire the company that will not give you 2 weeks notice for layoffs.
>> ...to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
TL;DR it won't make you feel better but you're not a row in a spreadsheet; you're a fungible generic resource.
<For all but the smallest organizations>
At a certain level and/or for specific events, executive leadership is playing checkers not chess. You see this in overall staffing, budgets and lay-offs. Your executive is tasked with very excel-like tasks, such as "cut n people" or "trim your budget xx%". They then get political and attack specific initiatives or teams, or peanut-butter it across everyone. By definition they need to work at a generic level to "scale". When it gets to selecting the actual people, it's either done by the people who DO know individuals but you might not have credibility and a good reputation (or worse, they actively target you), or at an even less related metric, like a calc that provides the perception of "fairness" (true story: I saw HR try and calc how much "experience" we could get for each dollar of salary). IME only if it's a very small layoff (~ < 10-15%) and selected by the front-line manager do you see the high performers saved, and it's still political.
Context: I report to the CTO but still have lots of direct interaction with ICs. I struggle to meld these worlds at the intersection almost daily. I've been involved it doing the lay-offs at two companies.
Aside: there are TWO failures in doing what is the incredibly unpleasant job of laying people off:
1. Everyone knows you only get one lay-off before it's all over. After the second round nothing gets done. You almost always hear "this is the only round" and I believe leadership actually believes this, there's just know way they can know for sure.
2. Botching the order of operations. You need to get your sh!t in order and not do stuff like send out the laptop return courier before the announcement, or cause extra panic and confusion with timing and poor messaging. Ignorance, Incompetence or Schadenfreude; I have no sympathy for less than perfect behaviour and execution here.
> Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job.
I'm in the US.
I'm mid career, entered the job market 22 years ago, and have another ~22 years before I retire.
Layoffs were very common in the 1990s when I was teenager. In the US, if you think layoffs are a "new thing," you're very naive. (Remember, the author is from Germany.)
One thing I did very early in my career was learn enough about business to know that businesses, markets, and products don't last forever. Most don't even last a whole career. Sticking in a job long enough to get laid off with a severance is a good thing: You don't get money when you leave a job voluntarily.
(Granted, there are good reasons to leave before the layoff, but keep in mind that if you loose out on a severance, you've left money on the table, especially if you can get a job before the severance runs out.)
I feel fortunate it's not layoffs that made me cynical. But working for mid and big companies.
I had the incredible luck of starting my career as the first hire and thus lead developer right out of college. The startup which hired me eventually ran out of steam, but the experience I got is priceless.
Now big corporations on the other hand are a shit show, and from what I can tell have always been a shit show. Have laid me off 3 times. And none of it has affected me much. Always quickly found another good position, and that's with being absolutely terrible at live coding challenges.
I'd say try to find work you're interested in. If you can, also try to keep your commute as short as possible. And live in a place you like.
The author seems to have just discovered that capitalism does not have loyalty to anyone other than the shareholders. And those shareholders do not care whether you have contributed to their profits much more than anyone in the recent past - if it looks like they can make more profit that quarter by laying you off, they do it.
Maybe we should start calling this the "enshttification" of work? As capitalism is enshttifying everything, it was unimaginable that work would not get affected...
Getting laid off was the best thing to ever happen to me.
It woke me up from a dream I was in. I believed if you worked hard and provided great value to a startup you would be valued and have a place.
After five years at the company (as employee #1), I was laid off. I realized my mindset was delusional and I swore to never work for anyone ever again.
Several years later, the founder that laid me off asked if I wanted to co-found a new company he was creating. I sorta felt vindicated then :)
I am honestly confused by how much people are willing to sacrifice for the false sense of security of a big company job. Folks seem to see employment as something akin to marriage, while I'm completely unable to see it as anything other than a transaction.
1. Post Dot-com bubble dev naivete: most Post Dot-com devs (ie those who joined the work force sometime after the bubble burst) have only known the summer of tech (ML flourishing, everyone can code movements, nonsensical startups raising ridiculous amounts of money, companies hiring devs they don't need to keep competitors from having and BigHead kind of devs able to keep a job). These are the devs that used to go to r/cscareerquestions and tell everyone that they should get everyone to learn to code and program, the kind that believed in chasing aggressive salary growth at any cost. True summertime devs who have known nothing but joy and love in the tech world. These are the devs who OD'ed on the tech corpo koolaid
2. The super-meritocracy fallacy: following from point 1, these devs believed in the increasingly rare concept of promotion-only growth, the idea that if you worked really hard, your salary and your job title willl eventually reflect your hard work. While this is somewhat true, the extent to which your hard work is actually compensated seems to be overrated by most devs. This a rather peculiar thing as you would expect most devs to be data driven and to actually research whether this is true in general for most companies. Any veteran knows that career progression and salary increase by promotion has a very early point of diminished returns hence the job-hopping
3. The existential meaning of a job: this is another peculiar aspect of devs given that they see themselves as rational. An employeement relationship is a business relationship (like a partnership) where continuous work is exchanged for money. Yet these devs seem to have somehow assume some kind of existential meaning to this transactional relationship the terms of which they should have known. Placing the meaning of your life in a transaction is clearly misguided and it shouldn't take a layoff for someone to realise that. Yet here we are
4. The Saviour Dev Hero myth: this also follows from point 1. Devs being marketed as corpo heros is just that marketing. The supply and demand ratio is not a fixed thing. It changes. Devs were never going to be in demand forever. Business needs change. No one is irreplaceable. No matter how good. There is always someone good enough that will work for a similar salary (or less). During the summer of tech, the demand was higher than the supply so layoffs were rare. But summers don't last forever.
Ultimately, the lesson that devs, for all their self-described higher intellect and rationality, never seem to learn is that the goal of all companies is to increase their profits, everything else is secondary. Other goals exist only to help that. Layoffs while declaring record breaking profits is not surprising. Given the job market, new hires could be acquired at a lower salary and perhaps not as many are needed. As an employee, you are there to help increase profits and the company owes you a salary. This implied idea that efforts should be rewarded even when it makes no business sense, that the company should provide an existential meaning to your work or that it should always need you even when it makes no business sense is in my opinion delusional and a by-product of Post-Dot bubble conditions that no longer exist.
The market has changed (and it will change again) and all agents within must do so as well.
Perfectly echos my thoughts as a 25+ year veteran engineer who has been laid off 3 times. Your writing style is poetic as well.
I would add a few more.
1) There is no permanancy in tech, only impermanancy - hence, stay on your toes, be a learning machine, and not be attached to your laurels. You could one day be a hero, and the next day a zero.
2) Bandwagons come and go - internet, web, cloud, ml etc etc. Be a learning machine with a strong grip on the fundamentals of the math and the science.
3) Most of us are picking up lottery tickets - but confuse skill with luck. An early google engineer may walk with a swagger, but he/she has been lucky.
4) Keep saving for the rainy day, as they usually will come. In your financial calculations, do not take on long term obligations assuming your job will last.
It's been my experience that accepting whatever dumb challenge management presents is how you get kept on. The advice that "your job is to make your manager look good to his manager" rings true to me. I would add that boosting your manager's ego goes pretty far, too. I find both activities detestable, but necessary in corporate life.
Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company.
I've never understood how people can muster the energy for this. I'm sure it's a great idea, but I would burn out immediately.
I am in the middle of being laid off right now, and might as well share some of the details, because my situation is a bit weird.
My team of 12 was reduced by half in November. They told us that 6 would stay and 6 would go. I was told I was staying, and that my position was "unaffected", but I was also told that I was going to have an end date in either February or March, which to me sounds like my position is pretty well affected...
They have refused to give any of us an official end date, or discuss our severance terms in writing. Right now, I have been assured that my last day will be 2/28 and that I'll get 2 months if severance, but they could change their mind if they wanted to since they won't commit. I have voiced that this keeps me from effectively planning my next career move. What if I'm offered a job starting in March, and my current employer decides to they want to keep me until April? I'd be forced to choose between receiving a severance vs. accepting the new job.
All the while, they have us training our replacements in India, as if we have the motivation to do anything that benefits the company right now. Most of us are only cooperating at all because we want out in March and don't want to be dragged along for months while they try to keep the product afloat.
And the reason they aren't terminating our entire department and product is because they want to maintain the few million dollars in ARR they get from our customers, even though that ARR is 1/10,000 of the company's total revenue.
And they won't keep that ARR because they're getting rid of the entire customer success team and transferring the responsibility to a call center in India that is demanding to only work on India time (ending business hour product support entirely for our predominantly North American customers). They also have zero experience with the kind of product we make, and have no chance of successfully addressing the kind of work they're going to be expected to do for our customers.
All because the people who made these decisions have absolutely no clue what anyone in our org does. We really are just lines in an Excel sheet. We were a startup a few years ago that this much larger company purchased because they wanted to use our solution massively at scale inside of the company. Revenue wasn't even how we were supposed to be measured, and they're going to actively destroy the entire product that they spent so much time and energy implementing across the business.
Alternatively the real lesson here is to put less effort into coding and engineering and more into organization. Small groups that handle entire business verticals are the future. Modern tools and machine learning can enable small groups to outperform big organizations without the wretched chaos that leads to ruthless and unfeeling reorgs and pivots. And clients large and small often prefer dealing with small and focused groups more than large and hard to handle giants that currently dominate markets.
"prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children"
This is so discriminatory, I don't even know where to start. Also, employees with children are more likely to need urgent time off, and have more stringent time constraints than the ones who don't.
Worked with some of the teams making the first iPhone and bringing the Internet to everyone in a pocket sized slab was way more than a job it was a dream. Didn't turn out quite as expected, but this idea that work is only that is in my opinion dangerous. Millions are made selling sugar water and there is a famous multimillionaire with warehouses full of nickles, but business can be much more than that and it is up to all participants to build, man, and steer the boats.
I skimmed this and I'm glad this person learned this.
I don't think you need to be laid off to learn this, you can just OBSERVE reality and will find this to be true easily. I did and hopefully don't get to suffer what OP did but I know it's just one random event from happening.
I'd add another: don't trust future plans or promises. Get yours now or assume it won't happen because "circumstances changed" is a typical trick that's pulled on people.
Modern finance is the true villain; it removes businesses from the hands of the real founders who understand it and puts it in the hands of clueless MBAs.
> However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. In most cases, the decision is made by people who don’t even know you.
I think this is a key observation. I of course cannot speak for every case, but in the couple of layoff rounds I've been witness to, for unrelated companies, layoffs are done without relation to individual skills or contribution.
Or rather: they may start with low performers, but these aren't enough, and then the next people that get axed are good performers (sometimes brilliant in my experience) for areas that the execs deemed not important enough for the company. Key words "not important enough", not unimportant. They are also done by people who don't know the team or its members, resulting in firing people who were later found to be essential, and their manager cannot speak for them because the manager was also laid off.
In the end, remember this when judging your "loyalty" to a company.
One warning sign not listed, if your company has lots of offices around the world and leadership visit your office when they never do before. They're talking about changes within that office which is generally the structure of the office.
I just started a new job in Hamburg, Germany, same location as the author, and one nice thing they have here is an extremely negative view on overtime, making it very encouraged to remain within hours
It's not just a "negative view on overtime", there are also very strict laws around the amount of overtime, how much rest you need between workdays and compensation.
>> Stick to your contract hours. If your contract says 40 hours, work 40 hours—no more, no less. Protect your personal time and well-being.
100% agree, a company is (almost) never going to say "that's enough, you shouldn't work so much". They will say they only want you to work XX hours but they aren't going to chide you for going over.
>> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives. Many companies encourage impactful work to earn promotions, but instead of chasing internal advancements, focus on switching companies to achieve your next career step.
Ehh, I mean don't kill yourself for a company that doesn't care but the idea of jumping companies every few years is not appealing. You might make more money but I kind of doubt you'll be happier, to each their own.
>> Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company. Instead, continuously explore opportunities so that if a layoff happens, you already have other options lined up.
Gross. Interviewing sucks and the idea of trying to onboard at a new company while interviewing sounds horrible.
>> Leverage external offers for salary growth. Companies often resist giving substantial raises to existing employees but pay top dollar for new hires. Regularly interview elsewhere, and if you get an offer with a 20% or higher salary increase, consider taking it. Many people have seen their compensation triple or quadruple this way in just a few years.
You can do this 1, maybe 2 times at a company before you paint a target on your back. This will work in the short term but not in the long term (At a single company)
>> Don’t overthink your résumé. Worrying about short experiences on your CV isn’t worth it. You can always tailor your résumé—leave out brief roles, or consolidate short-term jobs as freelance experience. Ultimately, your résumé is just a starting point; your skills will be assessed during the interview process.
Completely agree, your resume is not your record, it's not "official", you tailor to the job you want. Leave off technologies you don't want to work with, leave off jobs that aren't the type of thing you want to do, etc.
The worst part is finding out how many things depend on your job. I needed to move out when I was laid off, but good luck finding someone to rent to you when you don't have a job.
Yes... I'm in the UK, in London. For renting, even as a founder who has a profitable business that was active for a year, they're still either asking for upfront payments (12 months...) or a guarantor. This was the case for multiple locations (SE13 + E16).
They said if my business was running for 2 years or more then they'd accept that as low enough risk.
A bit understandable in this economical situation, but man, it's hard. Even for the guarantor, they need to own a house and have at least 40x the monthly rent as proven (PAYE or business with 2+ years) yearly income.
I knew only one person who could be a guarantor that fits the requirements.
Alternative was AirBnb or other monthly accommodation which was of course more expensive.
> But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-breaking financial results. You work hard, focus on impactful projects, and receive praise from your lead—only to find yourself let go by someone who likely doesn’t even know you exist
This what happens when country policy and businesses are driven by awful neoliberal economic theory and neoclassical/orthodox economic policy.
For the past 40 years, we have seen:
- wage stagnation for labor
- decreasing worker protections (in tech, this means forced NDAs, arbitration, non-compete clauses)
- significant decreases in social safety nets
- increasing wage disparity across the board
- decrease in investment of labor and company and emphasis on stock —manipulation— buy back programs and layoffs for short term gains
- decreasing participation in labor unions and thus decrease in collective bargaining power for labor
- non-transparent pay grades across the industry
- rampant wage theft in the form of: “instead of paying overtime, give you a title, a salary, and expect you to push more than 40 hrs a week” (or do a job that usually requires 3-4 people)
- decreasing worker loyalty to companies
- increasing consolidation of power and money through monopolies and monopsonies
If workers don't do something about it (other than complain on random websites) and everyone else is happy with their record breaking profits, you can possibly expect any changes to do this aside from going further in the same direction
At any large commercial organization, you either represent capital or you do not. If you are not part of the ownership class, you are entirely disposable - whether or not you are in actuality critical to the business functioning. There are many situations in which the financial incentives of ownership are directly opposed to those of the hired help. Took me a long time to realize this because most people aren't sociopaths, while corporate management and certainly the super wealthy have a significant proportion.
I've been laid off many times, for many reasons (mostly startup financial issues), but what I've taken away from it a mantra that's a bit different.
I need mutual respect. I want to believe in whatever the company is doing and enjoy my work there. At the same time, I want the company to respect my personal time and further my career growth. This enables me to give my best effort. I have no delusions about the workforce - I am a cog in the machine as we all are, but I will at least be a well greased cog.
When it's all said and done, I would like to leave a company feeling good about my time spent there, and if I am happy with how I am treated and the work I do from the start to the end, then however it ends, I feel good about it.
Strongly agree with the author.
I was laid off two years ago, and I am experiencing the same feelings he is describing: I no longer want to give my 100%, I no longer overcommit.
I do the minimum required and feel emotionally detached from the company and my colleagues.
It's a waste that so many individual contributors who, as the author said, had good performance and were close to the users went through a laid off. Now a new generation of previously high achievers work force will get back in the market and no longer use all their potential for their job.
Like it wasn't the fault of the new company that hired me, that now I do the bare minimum, they won't see the full potential I gave before. And I, I cannot prevent it. My work ethics and motivation died after the lay off.
I read a book called “The Goal” by Goldratt and he describes his theory of constraints. One of the main predictions of his theory is that the existence of many resources working at maximum capacity is symptomatic of a wildly inefficient production system. Thus you shouldn’t feel guilty about not giving 100% every day. This behavior is necessary to properly balance the total throughout of your company. Ideally only one person should be giving 100% in any given company, and in a fair and balanced system this would be the CEO who is concomitantly receiving massive compensation.
That was one of the most eye opening books for me. I think it all applies to Software development as well. It is not uncommon that you work all weekend to finish your task, only to see it waits two weeks in the next person's queue.
I've applied it to my studies as well. You will achieve little by learning a bit of everything. There is always one area of knowledge you are urgently lacking in, that you should hyperfocus on, in order to alleviate the information bottleneck of the system you are working on. It's the same as in the book: the teacher is always whittling down the incoherent problem space to the critical piece of wisdom that the protagonist then has to discover on his own.
This theory feels like it’s making tons of assumptions and leans heavily on semantics.
In a factory you have many components operating near or at capacity. In a high growth environment you want all of your components working at capacity to explore the problem space and optimize.
Hmm… not really, bars are high, no one is hiring fresh graduates anymore, and new generation is more detached with better sense of real world and focus on work-life balance and more personal growth, unlike previous generation who usually tied their identity to their work and gave their 500% for peanuts and glory(always fake and meaningless).
I understand.
But since I have decided to reduce my time and energy dedicated to a company, I put this extra time and energy more towards my personal hobbies.
I feel like I am living two lives in one day, at work I am detached and do only what's required, while outside work I am deeply invested in my things.
It's disappointing that you feel detached from your colleagues. They're in the same boat as you. Also, increasing your network doesn't hurt. There's a risk in being known as the quiet or moody guy who doesn't interact with anyone. It might make you enjoy your work more too.
Partially agree.
I still network, and actually found my current job thanks to my network.
I still interact with ma colleagues, help them, socialize. But I try to keep some emotional distance.
When I got laid off, my colleagues were also my close friends, so on top of the laid off turmoil I was living, I was sad I would no longer work with them.
This is how you generate more layoffs for yourself. Having money saved and living within your means greatly reduces the impact of being laid off. You need to be impactful and putting yourself out there at all times or you lose trust. Several people who have allowed themselves to be beat down mentally at my company have lost trust and are on the chopping block. It can take a year or more before you get sacked. You can also reverse the course at almost any time.
While not bad advice, but careful - you will die and you don't know when. You can't take it with you (almost all religion agrees on this, though if yours doesn't then I guess I won't argue religion here). Have a reasonable amount of saved money, but make sure you are using the majority of what you earn on things you enjoy (well at least things you enjoy consistent with the law and religion should either of those conflict with what you enjoy)
Thank you for your advice. I agree.
I am still working and completing my tasks, so far I didn't give anyone any reason to complain about my work. But I would not put again the extra hours or extra creativity.
I save money and live within my means. And I live in a country with great unemployment benefits if it happens again. When I got laid off, I didn't suffer financially thanks to our support system, but emotionally it was hard.
OP sounds very bitter and - frankly - melodramatic. Getting laid off is terrible, but this person makes it sounds like they'll never heal/never be the same/all companies suck/etc. when none of those things are true. There is an implied business relationship with an employer that can end anytime, and that's expected because it's a two-way street.
I agree with the top commenter - seanc - when he says:
> Carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
Finally, income diversification pays huge dividends. I had a startup job where suddenly I found myself with a $65k/year pay cut one week. I had side work from folks who were asking me for more anyways so I quit that same week on Friday. Now I employ 10 people and pull in nearly a million a year. Really makes the emotional part of having lost income that week completely meaningless in the long run.
I was thinking that it seems strange to fire a 10x dev that has regular one-on-one meetings with a VP. OP could have contacted said VP and outlined that he was worth keeping, until I got to this line :
>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees
This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.
While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.
I had to look this up, and the law states that the Sozialauswahl (social selection) only applies to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. The law applies when the company is doing across-the-board layoffs (e.g. because they have become unprofitable).
It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last, compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong – the company would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because of this law.
Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was affected by it.
At no point does the law force a company to fire a high performer. The company can literally just fire one fewer person - if the employee really is 10x and if the company has its shit together, that's what would happen.
Let us face it, the European welfare model is a blind alley. No one in the world is going to copy this from us again, now that it is clear that it makes us
a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;
b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;
c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.
IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.
Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.
The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.
The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.
I'm not sure what you're expecting demography-wise : would you rather have this, an unsustainable population growth or an average lifespan of 40 years ?
But also, yes, in the "West" we've been living way above our means for almost a century now, and the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
Yeah the system doesn't work. Nothing has convinced me more of that fact than living in Germany has. If your system only works for a single generation in which you have an unusually large working population and relatively few children and relatively few old people, then your system doesn't work. The German system never worked, it was always just running on borrowed time.
Back when the life expectancy at birth was forty you mean? And the system has expanded greatly since then. Handouts for almost everyone except normal workers who pay the highest taxes on labour in the world after Belgium. And yes the system has stopped working now the population has stopped growing. Germany as an antiquated boomerocracy is unrivalled as far as I am aware.
Life expectancy at birth is irrelevant, people who die in infancy don't consume many resources at all. What matters is the percentage of the population that's of working age, and here Germany is fairly typical for a developed country.
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
I live in welfare mecca with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is breaking under the load.
Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.
The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.
This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.
This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.
Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.
Everyone suffers like this.
Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics.
My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.
The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.
Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??
Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price
I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.
And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.
Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?
Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.
Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.
It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.
Please pick any semi-advanced economy other than USA when talking about healthcare. USA is well known for its corrupt healthcare system. You are picking the worst of the worst as an example.
They're picking the US as an example because the person who started this discussion was saying that the European model is in their view unsustainable. It's possible that that person wants to change Europe into Singapore or something, but given this site, I consider it much more likely that they meant "unsustainable compared to the US".
Or by Europeans that don't care for the 1000th clichéd "EU bad, America good" debate which invariably attracts low-quality comment as is immediately evident.
The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.
It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts of the world has been rapidly shrinking.
It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.
But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.
When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of tossing our aging population out onto the street we cannot do much more than increase immigration - something those old people don't like.
So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.
Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to deal with the aging situation than others.
The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.
The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.
My experience is that many liberal Americans tend to admire European welfare systems as a counterpoint to the more cut-throat US systems, and really, really don't want to discuss the downsides.
People need to dream, I guess.
The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
> But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).
Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.
A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry. Yeah, there are outliers again, but that is the core demographics here.
The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.
Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...
That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.
By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.
> A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry.
You'd be surprised.
I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.
I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.
It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.
The Slovak government literally wants to try slavery light for doctors.
They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.
Slovakia under its current government is literally the second-most anti-EU country of the EU (after Hungary - though maybe Austria will soon follow suit), so I'm not sure if that illustrates your point well.
They aren't doing this because they disagree with the EU-wide consensus on general welfare / healthcare policies, though. Fico isn't Javier Milei, he is a pro-Russian populist social democrat, precisely the type of politican that promises unrealistic levels of welfare for a relatively poor state.
As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.
Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.
"Europe consists of many countries, and different countries have significantly different welfare models."
In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high taxation and regulation to support those systems.
Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent. But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.
"Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed."
A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions. The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass expropriations.
We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More punitive taxation = more brain drain.
It makes sense to me that a big portion of government spending goes towards social welfare and healthcare – at the end, that's one of the most important things.
I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its heights. The lower investment into defense came not at the cost of higher social welfare.
The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that.
"The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that."
Do we? For what?
We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.
Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.
Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.
Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.
Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.
Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.
On a global markets, there always will be huge corporations, and nowadays they usually grow huge because they provide some useful or at least highly sought-after services. And their owners are certain to become rich.
You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...
"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."
You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.
But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.
OP didn't got it right. It only applies for those with the same qualifications (i.e. given two 10x devs, the most vulnerable one is kept) so the company gets to keep a 10x dev. He's just externalising his problems to the easiest target (ie. vulnerable people). His own situation is partially his fault and he admits as much when he describes a list of what he would have done differently.
People expect things to always work the same way and they get upset when they don't.
I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one. The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pile of someone else’s money that will do literally anything, including destroy your life, to become a bigger pile.
You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off—they stand for nothing.
>It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself.
That feels like the correct way to think about it. Everyone else seems to think it's one extreme or the other but really thinking about it on an individual level vs a company level seems more accurate to my own experience.
"Going above and beyond" at a big company, if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted, and getting promoted results in significantly higher pay. I've gotten promoted twice at my current employer over the years, which has roughly doubled my total compensation, and none of that would have happened had I just did my previous level's responsibilities and nothing beyond.
That's the exception rather than the rule. Most people have to switch employers to get a significant pay raise.
Most people who think they deserve a significant pay raise probably don't (or maybe not enough relative to others competing for limited promotional budget).
I've seen enough people extremely qualified being denied promotions because they were "too good" at their current role. Meanwhile I've also seen as of late "promotions" that are just a title change while only adding to your workload with no extra pay. There's no winning with many companies.
If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people involved. But all that already means it may not be a good fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...
Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!
> Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value.
Ok.
> Is that work something that anyone else could do?
Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.
But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.
Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.
We've all been through this, we know how it works.
I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.
And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.
I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.
The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.
So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.
The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.
I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org. I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income. You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization. My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.
> If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business
This is an uncharitable response, no need for that.
My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.
It doesn't matter if you "deserve" the raise or not. If someone else will pay you more, the raise is yours.
If I can find someone to pay me more, whether I deserve it or not is irrelevant.
Pay isn't about "deserve". It's about the intersection of supply and demand curves and the amount of friction.
Companies have low friction firing you to get someone cheaper. Will you have low friction firing your company to get more expensive?
over the last ten years the tech industry has 10x'd the value it has created, which is obvious if you look at the accrued wealth of the leaders in the industry.
you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been working in this industry? MY SALARY
we all deserve a significant pay raise you scab
Why don't you start your own company, make a lot of money and hire people with 10x salary? Who's stoping you? Show us how you pay 1M to each of your SWE.
He cant start one because he doesn't have enough money lol
You’re hired! /s
As with all things, it depends where you are. It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
And these are the biggest employers of talent. It may not be most people in a startup forum, but it’s a lot of people.
For all others, I think it’s because tech isn’t seen as such an important revenue driver. Lots of places we are still seen as a cost center.
Anecdata, for sure, but my experience working at several big companies in tech is that they won’t significantly bump your pay (and especially not your stock grant!) when they promote you. If anything, they will move you to the minimum of the salary band for the new level.
In my experience, you’re better off getting the promo and looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don’t fault people for playing the game that is given.
> that is what the system rewards
Commensurate to the risk, of course. If you ignore the risk component then your best bet is to forget having a job and spend your days playing Powerball. The system offers much, much, much greater reward there.
If you keep risk in mind then it's not so clear cut. Staying at the job you have, even with lower pay on paper, may end up being the most profitable option in the end. But sometimes you just have to make the gamble and find out! There are winning opportunities for sure.
Risk depends on the market strength. In good times, you could easily jump to a new job with a raise in weeks and there's little risk as long as you're not outing youself at work.
In bad times like this, probably not worth it. The search takes months not, if not over a year, and there's a non-zero chance you're laid off anyway.
Weeks can be a long time if it doesn't work out. And that is, by your own comment, in the good times. The good times don't last forever. Upon some dice roll it is going to turn, and when that one doesn't work out now you could be looking at months or years.
Staying put isn't risk-free either. Not by any stretch. But is comparatively less risky. It is the devil you know, hence the lower risk premium.
> It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.
You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.
I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).
Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp are often very constrained when handling those who negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level raises for a long time until they're lower in their band
I've always called that a "diagonal promotion" because it's over-and-up.
It's also the only way I have ever gotten a significant increase in compensation, responsibility, and title.
Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.
I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.
I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).
Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.
My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.
The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated them for giving up the stock grants of their previous employer, so they probably still received less than you had accumulated.
Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for level + performance rating in their location.
Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.
They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay immediately, while for someone who got promoted internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to catch up
Pay bands for different levels are typically pretty broad, and typically overlap between levels. Just because median pay at level N+1 is significantly higher than at level N, doesn't mean that you will get that being promoted from level N.
It's not an exception at all. People get promoted all the time. Most people I work with have been promoted at least once since joining the company, some multiple times like I have.
Based on my anecdotal experience and the people I've known in industry, job hopping is way way way easier than getting a promo if you're trying to maximize salary. Mine has doubled after a few job hops.
Even better is working for yourself.
Right because “working for yourself” is likely to lead you to the same profit as even the comp of a mid level employee at any of the BigTech companies.
At least your performance has 100% impact, so it's all up to you rather than someone else.
Can I exchange those good feelings for goods and services?
CydeWays post is very similar to my experience as well
> if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted
This alludes to the other bit that's not taught enough: Working effectively, efficiently is not about how many problem reports you close, or lines of code you ship or number of hours at your desk. It's about recognition. Pay attention and work toward the stuff that will get you recognized. Pay attention and measure how much effort you put in the day to day stuff and the stuff that will be seen. This work is not "for your company", it's "for your career".
Watch out also for what kind of recognition you get. If you become known as the expert in day to day operation of tool XYZ, you might be parked doing that for the rest of your life. Probably not what you intended.
I don't think this is true of all companies. My current company doesn't base bonuses on individual contributions, and even went so far as to reduce the number of "story points" that top contributors did in sprints so that the rest of the team wouldn't look bad.
I don't think that's a good thing? (rest of the team wouldn't look bad part)
Fine, what else counts? A company may deliberately lower the effect of this in order to favor that - which they feel matters more, or which they feel is not done enough at that time. What else did you notice that they favor?
I don't think it's just about who will repay you. Our responsibility to each other is not nearly that transactional.
For example, the individual who is most likely to live with the consequences of your decision is... future you.
Future-me isn't going to pay me back, but I am always grateful to past-me when I set future-me up for success.
that's true with publicly traded C-corporations
for private companies, it literally is the people you work with (and whatever legal enchantments they've decided on). some of those people will still fuck you over, but it's not a legally-conjured sentient pile of money the way a C-corp is
B-corps are an interesting attempt to avoid being a sentient pile of money. in theory, it's an egregore that is capable of valuing things other than money. (they haven't really been tested in court. and they might fuck you over in pursuit of some other value, even if they do work. or fucking you over for money might not conflict with its other values)
Was not familiar with the terms C & B - corp. For others in the same boat:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/c-corporation.asp
If you’re interested in learning about this, be aware that S-corp and C-corp are widely used misnomers. A corporation is a corporation (and an LLC is not) but they all can be taxed under sub chapters C, S, K, and others based on the specific details of the entity.
C corporation is just a shorthand way of saying “privately incorporated voluntary association taxed under sub c (probably with dreams of being a public company someday, otherwise they’d be sub s).
Not trying to “but acktchually” you, just suggesting that your next stop after reading about corporations is probably the tax code. (Enjoy that).
extra bonus -- actual attorneys who are familiar with those codes learn not to discuss it at all .. for whatever reasons.. it really is valuable information, as in scarcity
Why did I just discuss them, then?
glad to see an exception to that rule :-)
turns out, i actually meant benefit corporation. (i've heard people refer to them as b-corporations, but didn't realize there was another thing called b-corporation)
> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...
Right.
The company doesn't care.
But I do.
I don't work hard on my craft, push myself to be better/smarter/have more impact, or go above and beyond for my employer.
I do it for myself.
My experience has been that caring about your craft is a great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the more happy my managers are with my performance."
That's because time pressure is real. We can't all be Knuth and spend our life looking for the perfect algorithm to solve all problems we could ever have. Most of us must ship something that works well enough for a particular scenario, as soon as possible - tomorrow, next week, next month, not next year. If you care too much about the quality of your work, you might end up never shipping; at some point you have to stop caring and just push the damn button.
It's not always time pressure. It can also be, for example, calling out others for doing things that don't make sense or hinder what's actually needed for the job/company, which in turn makes them uncomfortable and leads to discipline for you and not them. My response after having that happen? Fine, I'll look the other way and not care how much we're getting done anymore.
There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for where you are now.
This is the wise, pragmatic answer indeed!
Find the Middle Path.
Neither extreme is correct.
Doing the absolute bare minimum to not get PIP'ed is corrosive to your own soul.
Going "above and beyond" when you might get laid off tomorrow, is naive and opening yourself up for exploitation.
I have the same exact experience at my current company. My official performance, which is given by my boss, improved since I started to not care. My output fell, the quality of my work is the same, just less quantity, but for some reason my scores are higher.
On the other hand, I had a job where my performance was rewarded greatly, and I was lucky to be at the right place for that. Almost all of the employees at the same company were not that lucky.
Was that before or after “the consultants?”
time is always going to be a valid term in the equation, probably with an exponent > 1
Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished products for example) or even methods of creating software. This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some good words in one quarter and not matter the next.
The question to ask yourself then is: why is it that the behaviour that brings you pleasure/meaning/satisfaction happens to align exactly with what the company wants?
I spent most of my career with a similar attitude to yours, and TBH it's still my default. The question I find myself asking more and more is: can I maintain/increase my level of satisfaction while giving less of myself to a company that simply doesn't care?
Perhaps. Pay attention to the time you spend "doing the task well" so that YOU are satisfied. You are now smarter (say) but is your hierarchy going to promote you for this? Or park you and make you do this indefinitely, or blame you for the rest that didn't get done? Is your network as a whole now more inclined to hire you out in their next venture?
The quicker we make peace with the fact that hard work alone will not get us ahead (in most cases) the better it is for our mental health. We can put as much effort into our jobs as long as we accept that the only guaranteed result is our own joy, pride in our work and nothing else (not even a thank you from suits) is guaranteed.
If we are not able to accept that, then just do the bare minimum like most people. OR find a better job, but there is still no guarantee the new job would actually be better than the old job. But hey, at least we might get more compensation in our new job, so there's that
That smells like something a person with very little choice would say. At least I was saying similar things to myself in times I had very little choice. It's a very good way of regaining illusion of agency.
Well said.
I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of. That doesn't mean going out of my way and overworking myself, but it does mean being a good person to work with and writing quality code.
I tend to stick to the scope of work asked of me (though not always) for the reasons in the article, but I don't just phone it in. I put effort into writing good code, tests, and PR reviews.
In my experience, when it comes to getting the next job the only thing that really matters either way are references. If you were a too co-worker and did at least put in the effort to do good work within bounds of the scope asked for, you shouldn't have a problem.
> I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of.
That's important. I spend more awake time working/thinking about work than really else. I don't know that it's healthy, but at least I want to be proud of the outputs if I am going to spend this much time on something. I just can't really show up and mail it in, I'm just not wired that way, and suspect that a lot if us aren't.
Some of that is inevitable when developing taste, or if the problem has you (so to speak). The problem is when this is the case all the time instead of a season here and there.
Your ability to page out work is a great thing to track.
"The problem is when this is the case all the time instead of a season here and there"
I hope I'm not projecting, and misinterpreting, but I try to explain this to a colleague all the time. His work style is 8 months of the year a couple hours here and then 2-3 months of crazy, intense work.
But I have to show up for 25-30 (I'm self-employed) hours a week, 48 weeks a year, and I find it really difficult to then squeeze in 2-4 months of 50+ hours weeks on top of this.
There is sprinting and there is distance running and for most of us, these are very different things.
Yeah this is super important IMO. Set your own standards for what that means. Makes it much easier to handle the slings and arrows of normal 9-5 headaches, and to understand when you're being pressed to do things you wouldn't be proud of.
I agree with your comment. I have never been laid off, and I hope I don't ever do or at least I see the signs early on to be prepared.
The way I see "work" is that you are going to spend 8hrs of your day doing it, so you better feel positive about it and enjoy it. I couldn't care less about the corporate lords and I very well know I am just a line on an excel, but when I work I want to be sure I feel satisfied, I enjoy it and build trust with my team and meaningful relationships where possible.
I am not a religious person, but there is a famous saying in Hinduism - कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन | मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि|| It roughly translates to "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction."
I love the last line of it where it says "don't be attached to inaction" which means just because the fruit of labour isn't in your control, doesn't mean you can just start behaving like a someone who doesn't care.
[dead]
> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
Early in my career I watched a coworker get denied a promotion to management and make a hard turn toward cynicism. To be honest, he was not ready for a management promotion and the company made the right call. However, he was so insulted that he immediately started looking for new jobs and stopped doing more than a couple hours of work per week.
I thought his cynicism was going to backfire, but over the next several years he job hopped almost every year, getting bigger titles at every move. For a long time I was jealous that his cynicism and mercenary-style approach to employment was paying off so well.
Years later I went to a fun networking lunch. His name came up and many of us, from different local companies, said we had worked with him. The conversation quickly turned to how he had kind of screwed everyone over by doing Resume Driven Development, starting ambitious projects, and then leaving before he had to deal with consequences of, well, anything.
He hit a wall mid-career where he was having a very hard time getting hired because his resume was full of job hopping. He was requesting reference letters from past bosses multiple times a month because he was always trying to job hop. One admitted that he eventually just stopped responding, because he'd write a lot of reference letters every job-hop cycle only to have him bail on the company with a lot of technical debt later.
He eventually moved away, I suspect partially because the local market had become saturated with people who knew his game. He interviewed extremely well (because he did it so much) but he'd fail out as soon as someone recognized his name or talked to an old coworker.
The last I talked to him, he felt like a really cynical person all around. Like his personality was based on being a mercenary who extracted "TC" from companies by playing all the games. He was out of work, but asked me if I had any leads (no thanks!).
I'm no longer jealous of his mercenary, job-hopping adventure.
I’ve known many people like this throughout my career, and I have seen the absolute opposite that you observed. These people are perfect candidates for management positions and their focus on office politics pays off handsomely. It’s not for me; might not be for you; but in reality these machiavellian tactics work if you wanna move up and get promoted in most large corporations.
The problem with getting ahead via Machiavellian tactics is that it only works at toxic companies.
Every good company I've worked for has been a bad place for politics and Machiavellian personalities.
So if you're using politics and Machiavellian tactics you may get ahead at some company, but then you're going to be surrounded by people who are also toxic and Machiavellian. Perhaps more so than you. Playing politics is often a short-term win at the expensive of the long-term.
I think there are plenty of toxic companies around and your friend's gamble is just another strategy at succeeding in them. I sometimes too feel envious that I don't have the chops to do this job hopping game.
This is a great point!
The question isn't what strategy works at miserable companies that expect 60+ hour work weeks: it is what strategy will get me well-paid at a job I actually want.
Welcome to every company that pays at top of band…
In my experience this tactic tends to work well for manager positions and backfire easily for technical positions.
If a manager screws things up they get pro or side moted. If an expert screws up and leaves technical debt behind, they just get a bad name.
The standards for managers are also so much lower than for engineers. Most of the time companies don't know how to judge how good a manager is at their job, much less how to interview people for those roles.
Instead, people rely on "how confident do they sound?" as a proxy for competence. It used to be that you could do that in development, but then we started having engineers write code during interviews.
"I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc."
I've been in tech for 15 years and twice was enough for me. I now take on multiple contracts at the same time and make way more than I ever did as a regular employee.
I also won't work for startups as a full-time salaried employee anymore. They will always try to squeeze the hours out of you because they are usually trying to make a fast approaching deadline to get that next round of funding.
I had a well paying 6 month contract last summer and they wanted to hire me as a full-time, salaried employee. The problem was that I worked closely with their salaried employees and they were always overworked (many working on multiple teams) and working long hours on extremely tight deadlines.
The space was also over-saturated and when I researched the company, they were not turning a profit after a couple of years and continuing to take on rounds of funding.
When I refused the offer and wanted to continue as a contractor, they cut off all contact with me and I haven't heard from them since. It really showed me that they just wanted to overwork me and not pay.
What sites do you use to find good contract work?
The usual job sites like indeed.com. Even when I have enough work, I look a couple of times/day.
How do you define “good”? When I looked at contract work briefly in 2023 and 2024, contract rates for enterprise dev and the type of work you find on Indeed was around $60-$80/hour W2. Which is really on the low to median end of even enterprise dev once you take into account no paid PTO, no health insurance, and you can’t even count on working 1800 hours a year.
What types of contracts / work do you do? Website design type stuff (front/backend)? Mobile apps? Other?
backend development.
> There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one
This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years. Early 2010s it was more common but this practice is dead. Now every company is a new slate. In fact, I've seen people repeatedly rewarded for jumping ship and build there career on that. Companies have stopped investing in devs, so why should devs not reciprocate?
And there are so many startups. More than you can count. There are more new ones every day than you could ever have time to apply to. They don't all have time to talk to each other.
Not saying it's not good to have pride in your work, but within reason, and within a framework of fairness and quid pro quo. Don't let people exploit you any more than you exploit them. Employment is 100% transactional and the moment you forget that is the moment you get taken advantage of.
It's not about references. It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work. Many years ago, when I started doing consulting/contracting work, literally all my of my jobs came through people I had previously worked for or with across a variety of companies. And if you play your cards right, as the years roll on, you won't even have to apply for jobs other than as a formality. Instead, people who's respect you've gained will try to bring you into where they work.
> It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work.
The network is actually holding you back. You don't need a network to get a new job AND if that person in another company has enough pull to get you in it's actually likely a sign they've been there too long themselves if they're not directly in control of the hiring budget.
Just job hop. This ain't your daddy's profession.
> This is completely false.
It's not completely false at all - but it does depend greatly depends on which country you're based in.
Where I am, in Spain, your network, and your reputation within it, are _everything_. Good jobs will sometimes not even be advertised, as the first thing a hirer will do is ask around their network for recommendations, and those recommendations count for _a lot_. On the other side, when you are looking for work, the first thing you do is ask your network for an intro - and again, that intro counts for a lot.
That's not to say that the traditional interview process will be skipped, but candidates coming from recommendations will have a massive head-start over others.
Well... That doesn't bode well for me. I'm in Spain but I've always worked for companies in other countries (including my current remote job).
You can still cultivate all these people in random places in your network. Apparently you are in a line of work where other country corporations will do fine, and these people will still need you in their next ventures or posts.
Their point wasn't reference checks it was the power of a network of people who want to work with you again because they know your work is more than just transactional.
And sometimes it's funny how little it takes. Some people called me simply because they knew of me (I barely had heard of them). They did that because that was soooo much more efficient that some automatic "job posting" circus and they valued their time and deadlines.
Reference checks happen a lot. You just don't see them.
Most companies stopped asking for references because everyone just games the system. Managers are afraid of giving anything but glowing references because they want to keep their own network opportunities strong. Giving positive references is basically a networking game these days.
So that's not how people reference check. Now, they go on LinkedIn and look for mutual connections they trust. They check for people they know whose work history overlapped with the candidate's time at a different company. They go ask that person without the candidate ever knowing.
I get probably 10X as many backchannel reference requests as I do formal reference check requests.
Why would I even have as a connection on LinkedIn with people who I don’t think I made a good impression on? They are useless to me.
The effect’s source is much more direct than that.
It’s not a reference check to see “is sam0x17 a good dev?” at the end of a hiring pipeline, but rather “I’ve got an open role and remember that sam0x17 is one of the best devs I’ve ever worked with; let’s get them into the company!”
Or you can drop a line to someone who you've worked with in some manner and ask to meet. That's how I got my last 14-year job.
“okay boomer” (context: I’m 50, I am being sarcastic/self deprecating).
That might have been feasible pre 2020. But once I started working remotely and looking for jobs outside of the metro area where I spent most of my career, the usefulness of my network dropped dramatically.
In my case, I also did a slight pivot and my old network of people who I worked with for the first 25 years of my career can’t speak to my current suitability for a job.
You would see the same from someone early career. Their skills would progress so fast it would be crazy to ask someone for a reference who worked with them when they were 22-24 and now they are 27-30.
I'm not sure which market you're in, but companies here absolutely do reference checks. They will even reach out people you didn't list if they're a shared connection.
My standing recommendation to everyone is to do good work and get better at advocating for yourself to make sure you're either getting the experience or the comp you need to achieve your goals. If you're not getting that, switch jobs. It's much much better to switch jobs every few years if that's what you need to stay motivated than to stay, do the minimum and collect a paycheck.
I can guarantee you that no large tech company takes the time to find shared connections.
On the other hand, why would I have connections who I didn’t make a good impression on? they are useless to me.
I currently work at a 600 person company, I just invited everyone as reference that popped up as a suggestion - I did the same at AWS. Good luck trying to find the people who actually worked with.
They're talking about referrals, not reference checks. Getting good referrals is hugely important, especially at smaller companies that don't the capacity to do a rigorous hiring process.
I spent the last few months interviewing at various bay area startups for senior SE roles. About half of them wanted references. This was my experience so YMMV
A lot of companies tend to ask for them. No idea how many actually follow through and contact them.
When I was a hiring manager, I found that reference checks were _more_ predictive of eventual performance than the interview cycle was.
After the first time I got burned hiring someone I couldn't get a strong reference for, I got over my laziness and did my job.
How so? I’m never going to give you a reference of someone who isn’t going to say glowing things about me
Truly bad candidates can’t provide references at all, or are entirely oblivious to how poorly they are perceived.
True. In spite of my earlier comment, someone earlier in their career who didn't work out--especially at a smaller company--may have trouble providing a reference. It is also the case that I've seen people get fired who just had no clue that they were obviously unsuited for their job and were totally blindsided.
Seems a bit weird. Unless you're really bad, surely you can round up a few buds who who will say glowing things about you.
You’d be surprised by how many people don’t think that through. There are always a surprising number of people apparently just going through the motions.
2 points:
I've had people not know why I'm reaching out; I've also gotten references selected by the candidate that did not have good things to say. eg "X is difficult to work with."
And most people aren't good impromptu liars. So pushing a bit with a reference on what did you work on together? Why is this person fantastic? Would you hire this person? can get you far. And if the reference has left their shared employment, the classic: why haven't you hired this person?
It's not at all false IME, though I'm not in SV or the US. Most job want up-front references from at least 2 people, one of whom must be your current supervisor/boss (or someone else higher in the chain of command). You can occasionally get away without it, but it's difficult.
No one is going to let you talk to your current manager and let them know you are looking for a job.
On the other hand, many companies don’t allow managers to give references.
> No one is going to let you talk to your current manager and let them know you are looking for a job.
What on earth do you mean? Who is going to stop me from talking to my manager?
Over my 20+ year career, in all-but one case my current manager has always been one of my referees and has known that I'm looking for other jobs.
Maybe this is a cultural thing. Here (Aus) references from colleagues are basically disregarded and all that prospective employers are interested in is referees from current and former managers.
Typo, I meant no one is going to let you talk to their current manager.
There is no way I’m going to let my current job know that I’m looking for a job. That would be completely illegal advised.
reference checks are pointless if employee gives you a list of favorable references
Reference checks aren't what matters, it's referrals and getting a job that wasn't ever advertised, because someone knows you're good and offers you the position directly.
> This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years.
I understand this might not be your experience, but it's far from being "completely false".
I have had background checks/reference checks done on me (thankfully my would-be boss told me they were a formality and nobody cared about the results. I say "thankfully" not because I had anything to hide, but because the contractors doing the background checks asked for the dumbest things). I was also contacted by US-based consulting firms and asked to provide references on a former boss of mine, who was now applying for an engineering position... and to my surprise, the reference check involved getting on a call with me!
More recently, a relative was applying to a fintech and was asked for references for all her pasts jobs since she started working in the relevant field.
I know lots of companies don't care, but many others do.
Besides, like other commenters said, it's not only about formal references checking. It's also about the networks you build with coworkers whom you can potentially meet again in other jobs, and whom you want to speak favorably of you. I know I've informally vetoed coworkers whom I knew were terrible at their jobs and I heard recruiting was thinking of making an offer to. Likewise, I've enthusiastically recommended past coworkers who I would enjoy working with again.
It happens all the time as you get higher and higher on the org tree, I had jobs not only call my references by ask if they could also speak to my former bosses.
When the money is seriously on the line people care.
Can confirm 17 years in, past performance has never impacted future job prospects.
In 17 years you never had a past co-worker contact you about a job? That's confirmation that your past performance is affecting your future job prospects. And if you have had that kind of contact, then your statement above is a lie.
People are vastly overestimating network effects when you and your peers have similar experience and backgrounds. You'd likely get the job anyways, and the job probably isn't that great (in terms of upward momentum) to begin with.
As someone who's done hiring look at the people who have a list of good references. It's basically just the same position/level for _years_ because that's all your network can give or feels comfortable giving you (why would they give you a better job than they have).
It's a socioeconomic trap.
Just job hop. I promise you nothing else matters.
Is all you care about in a job the money? And are you looking at your total comp, or your hourly rate?
In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value all my time, not just my bank account.
What does my reputation buy me? In the worst job market in the last 20 years, I had two offers in hands within three weeks. I can bring top performers willing to work for regular salaries into wherever I land. All of that is because a lot of people who worked with me in the past would like to work with me again, and the companies we build software for benefit.
I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement, not just a bigger number. And it has been plenty lucrative.
Startups don't succeed because the code is good, but they sure can fail because it is bad. When a company needs to save itself after the underqualified mercantile engineers have left a spaghetti mess of lambdas scattered all over the org or a spaghetti mess of a monolith with every model in one folder, they are very happy to pay for actual expertise.
I care about my well-being and being able to float for extended periods of time if necessary. I can go many, many years without a job at this point and suffer absolutely zero quality of life issues.
>the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks.
I mean don't overwork for an employer who doesn't care about you (none of them do)? Just go switch jobs.
>I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement
This just reads like a no true scotsman fallacy. What does "actual" advancement mean here? Again, I have plenty of security (not job security) right now.
>I can bring top performers willing to work for regular salaries into wherever I land.
So you're fine with exploiting people? What? Just because someone is willing to be a fool doesn't mean you should stand by and let them be one.
And also, I question the "top performers" part of this, given your other qualifiers throughout the post. Especially the comment about big tech. The numbers don't add up in your favor.
> In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value all my time, not just my bank account.
This is the type of copium that you usually hear from people who have never worked in BigTech…
BigTech could afford to pay me 50% more as a mid level employee than working a lot harder at a 60 person startup and that company was paying about average for a local enterprise dev in a major metropolitan area.
I’m no longer there. But I had to get a job as a “staff” level employee to even get in the range when I left of my job as a mid level employee at BigTech. Comparing the leveling guidelines, it’s about the same as a “senior” at the equivalent job at BigTech.
That advice is valid for dime-a-dozen coders working dime-a-dozen jobs, which, granted, is the majority of developers, but we're on Hacker News. The more specialized and deeply technical a role is, the smaller the pool of qualified people is and the really senior folks tend to know each other. Networking matters much much more in these smaller tight-knit communities.
It's the opposite? You don't need someone to vouch for you if you have a highly specialized skill set. I certainly haven't.
You might rely more on your network when you don't have any notable skill sets that set you apart from other developers.
Your claim isn't rational or practical?
This is what I mean, your attributing certain outcomes to an action that's effectively just a placebo effect. It doesn't actually matter.
I had to look for a job both in 2023 and last year. For me it was both a network and specialized skills.
Specialized skills for me was cloud + app dev consulting and working at AWS (ProServe) and even more specialized was that I was a major contributor on a popular official open source “AWS Solution” in it niche and I had my own published open source solutions on AWS’s official GitHub site.
That led to two interviews and one offer within three weeks.
My network led to offers where a former manager submitted me to a position at the company that had acquired the company we worked for as a “staff architect” over the technical direction of all of their acquisitions. They gave me an offer.
My network also got me an offer from a former coworker who was a director of a F500 non tech company. He was going to make a position for me to be over the cloud architecture and migration strategies. He trusted me and he had just started working there.
Last year, my current job just fell in my lap, the internal recruiter reached out to out to me and that led to an offer.
I also had another former CTO throw a short term contract my way to tide me over.
But on the other hand, my plan B applications as a standard enterprise CRUD developer working remotely led to nothing.
We also get paid a lot more than the dime-a-dozen coders.
As is so often the case, optimizing for the short term comes at the cost of the long-term.
My go to reference is a CTO of a startup I worked for. He is now semi retired and a “fractional CTO”.
But honestly, I’ve leveled up so much in the past five years, anything that any of my previous coworkers could say about me would be outdated
Relevant username
By all means, feel free to demonstrate where your network has gotten you. I'm sure we'll all be envious!
> when you and your peers have similar experience and backgrounds.
Then you’ve done a shitty job building your network. No wonder you don’t see any value.
I got laid off a bit ago - after announcing I was looking, I had several C-level folks reach out with roles.
You’re hot shit on an island until the day you aren’t. shrug
>Then you’ve done a shitty job building your network.
Even better! I've been in a position to see "network effects" over and over and over again at the highest levels.
I'm telling you an uncomfortable truth: Job hop.
>I had several C-level folks reach out with roles.
See, this is how I know we're speaking past each other. You're acting as if this means something. It doesn't. Until you can even being to accept this is just a placebo effect it's unlikely you'll accept the effort was wasted.
Something something can't convince a man he was fooled.
Job hop. Get more money. Retire.
> your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one
Don't over index on this. It's a small factor among many.
strong disagree. from extensive experience. it's a huge factor, and good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job
Strong referrals almost always leads to a job that your network can place you in. You might have limited options for companies and teams, based on who is in your network. If the job market is abundant then having a strong referral is less valuable, but is often the best path to more senior positions. If the job market is not abundant then a job referral might be a way to be placed in a position in weeks instead of months.
I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself. I keep good relationships with former co-workers, we maintain group chats for each of my previous companies where we keep each other up on our careers. I even went to barbecues hosted by a former manager, until he moved out of the Bay Area. None of these have ever actually materialized into a job. It just doesn't work that way. We're all entry level worker bees and don't have any way to put our thumb on the scale at our own companies. If someone in my network reaches out to me asking for help with getting a job at MyCompany, the best I can do is review his resume, coach him on interviews, and then ultimately point him to the link in the job board, where 90% chance he will be ghosted.
Where are these companies where I can tell my boss "Hey, Mike is a good programmer and he just applied. Just give him the job without interviewing! Or accelerate him through the process!" I suppose if it were a two person startup where it was me and my boss you could do that, but at a normal 1000 person CRUD shop with dedicated HR machinery? No way.
On the flip side I’ve worked in 4 companies over 12 years and 2/4 were jobs that I got because I knew someone. The other two, a significant cohort of the people who worked there knew each other from previous workplaces.
Nobody is getting jobs without any interviews, but people are absolutely getting interviewed before/without a job listing, or starting the initial screen with recruiter/hiring manager with an upper hand of “Mike said you’re good to work with”. Even at a 1000 person company with HR.
>> I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself.
Same here, also =~ 25 years (working as a professional programmer since 2001). I never had a problem finding a job myself (either switching jobs or being laid off, it happens) but it was always "cold calling", apply on a job board / Linked In and go through the interview without any referral or inside help.
And when I tried to refer someone, they were blissfully ignored. Even had managers / HR go after me: "we need someone ASAP, don't you have some referrals?". Reached my acquaintances among former workmates, convinced them to make a personalized CV so I can send it to HR, nothing happened next. They didn't even call the guy, completely "forget about it".
So I learned my lesson of corporate helplessness and don't give a fuck anymore. Don't recommend anyone, don't care if HR or managers need someone urgently, I do my job and don't get involved with anyone else anymore.
Yup, another similar situation here - ~20 years in Bay Area, almost 15 years at one company, no one in my "network" said anything about jobs. I did contact a few directly and "not hiring right now". A bunch of others (since I was one of the younger ones at this company when I joined in '08) had since retired.
Got a new job through a LinkedIn ad, found a former co-worker here.
I mean, it could be that I'm not a great networking person, but.. I'll agree that network hasn't helped me much so far.
> We're all entry level worker bees
You're going to need to pitch your buddies a lot more aggressively than that.
You've worked closely with Mike in the past at ExampleCorp, where he was one of the team's top contributors. He was great at code reviewing, a calm and reliable voice during production incidents, and always ready to help out new graduates. Mike was the guy people turned to with their most difficult WidgetStack bugs, fixing problems that had stumped other developers. He would be a great asset to the company, and a great fit for this role - which you note needs WidgetStack. He has your strongest possible recommendation.
The thing is - the pitch also has to be true.
I'll give you a couple of examples I've been involved with:
1. I was applying for a job at Company A and I had a former co-worker working there. I think it was down to me and 2 other people and the manager asked my former co-worker about me and I believe his feedback tipped the scales in my favor.
2. Same situation as above but in this case it was my feedback. A different former co-worker was applying for a job at Company A(now that I was working there) and the manager hiring asked both me and my former and now present co-worker about the candidate as it was between him and another person.
3. A former manager straight up offered me a position at his new job because I'd be a good fit for the role as they were building exactly what I had done before. I turned him down(nicely) as I had stepped away from that particular type of work.
4. I've given negative feedback on a candidate that I'd worked with that was interviewing for an open role but it wasn't just me. All 3 of us including co-workers from (1) and (2) above had previously worked with the candidate and we didn't think he'd be a good fit for our org but it was ultimately up the manager of the team that was hiring to make the decision.
Granted I'm at a smaller company but these "network placed" jobs do happen. Sometimes it's just tipping the scales and sometimes it's a straight up job and sometimes it could be the reason you didn't get the job.
My first job was a student worker at my school district in Information Services. Got that because my physics teacher put in a word for me (and I interviewed ok).
My first 'real job' out of college was a 'noc techician' at a company a good friend was working at. Although that wasn't a great use of my skills, at least it got me started, and I think there was a chance of moving towards development, eventually.
Next job was through a niche job board.
Since then, I've been hired my original skip level boss from that job twice.
Job interviews are a lot different when they are trying to convince you to join, vs you trying to convince them to let you.
Making an impression on someone who has opportunities for you later can work out well.
I've also had a couple other people reach out for what I think would have been a similarly easy interview for me, but one of them I didn't want to work with again, and the other one, the company location and business wasn't a good fit for me.
There's a power law here.
Most developers don't work in giant companies, but the programmers who do work in giant companies mostly don't know many programmers who work in the medium-sized companies where most of the jobs are right now.
If you are interested in diversifying your network, you can purposefully choose a job at a different scale of company when you are next looking, but you can also start going to conferences or user groups or get involved with an interesting open-source project.
Not every piece of networking has to be with coworkers. Not putting all your networking eggs into one basket can give you options, especially as the layoffs are flying fast and furious.
Well, there's also a difference between liking someone and liking to work with them. I've had a lot of coworkers I liked that I wouldn't bend over backwards to hire. That said, this process might not work at Google or what have you.
I've never worked in a company so large that I couldn't go a step further and actually talk to the hiring manager and tell them they would be stupid not to take someone's resume seriously. But it's more about fast tracking the interview than skipping it. No one is just going to blindly hire referrals. They shouldn't anyway.
> We're all entry level worker bees
Not one of your former managers that like you has gone on to high-level positions?
That's not how it works. What happens is an organization decides to hire for some reason, now has the problem that good candidates are hard to find. So people say "well I know this guy who I worked with at xxx that's looking for a job".
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This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. There’s a great bit in Margin Call about this: Kevin Spacey’s character challenges the plan to sell the firm’s entire MBS portfolio with the point that once their counterparties figure out they’ve been sold a bag, they will never trust them again. The firm insists on the plan anyway, so when Spacey tells his floor the news, he acknowledges that this will be the end of many of their careers, and as compensation the firm is giving each trader a $2m bonus for selling through their slice of the portfolio. They’re basically giving them an advance in exchange for making themselves unhireable, because ultimately the economy is made of people working with other people.
That's maybe true in finance / investment / hedge funds. I don't think it applies to tech / software much..
If you can get as good a signal on someone's performance in 5 hours of interviews as you can in five months of working with them, either you are a genius or you are not paying attention at work.
I have a guess as to which it is.
The better someone is at their job, the less I think of what they are doing at work, because they make my problems disappear, so I can actually think of the things that matter to me (e.g. my family/friends and hobbies).
An interview is a process targeted specifically at evaluating performance of a candidate.
If you have time to pay attention to 100 other people at work and think about their performance - you either have a super easy job where you can slack, or should focus more on improving your own work.
Lol wut? Where are you getting this?
Strong referrals may lead to interviews at larger companies. But rarely jobs. You still have to go through the interview process and most of the time how you came in isn’t even known to the interviewer.
Now if your network includes directors and CxOs who can just push a job through specifically for you, that’s different. Especially if it is a strategic hire for them. Those types of jobs usually don’t involve formal interviews and they are more of discussions about mutual fit.
At least for me that was not true, I came back to Google after more than two years and did not have to interview.
That's returning to a former employer. That's very different if you left on good terms - they already "interviewed" you for some number of years.
Referrals may operate within a network, but references do not necessarily so.
An internal referral by someone at the company you are applying to might carry some weight, or at least get you a foot in the door (interview), but I think it's been years/decades since past employers were willing to say more than "yes, he worked here", for fear of lawsuits.
References these days are usually with individual coworkers, rather than a company reference.
It usually isn't "is this person a good developer?" either. Instead, it is open-ended questions without any one right answer. How much structure did this person like? What about your work place helped them be successful? What role did they play on the project you worked on together? What impact did they have on the team?
If someone's reference didn't work with them closely, that's as strong a no-hire signal as if they outright said "this person sucked." If they don't have anyone they can hand you the phone number for who has specific, detailed praise about them and their work, you can safely move on to the ten other candidates who do.
This is true in giant companies, but in smaller companies it is less true.
In smaller companies, "I worked with this person and they are really solid." carries a lot of weight.
Yeah, and companies pushing that angle are losing top employees because of it.
Because it's stupid.
Kissing ass and doing good work are two entirely different activities.
> good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job
Yeah, no. They're one factor in many. I've managed just fine throughout almost 4 decades of career without referrals.
I'm fairly OK with how that career turned out.
It has drawbacks. Some of my jobs were odd kinks in the career curve - though I did enjoy them. (Roughly, ESA -> Industrial Automation -> Consulting -> Startup -> Video Games -> FAANG. It is not the straightest path :)
Referrals are definitely a large plus (IIRC, the industry stats say about 1/3rd of job offers are internal referrals, even though they are far from 1/3 of the candidates).
They aren't the only way, though.
I respectfully disagree. Parent comment is hardly over-indexing; it's a big factor. The world may be big but the communities are small.
Usually when you’re in a shitty situation, all the people who know who you are are also in bad situations and probably can’t hire or protect you. That’s how business works—things go bad at the same time. All correlations go to one in a crash.
Not today or tomorrow, but next month, when one of them has started a cool startup, another is VP at her friend’s company, and the rockstar made it into Big Co
When you are just starting, yes. But after a while, if you pay attention to cultivating it, you amass a significant network. Small factor initially, big one later if you work on it.
What ends up mattering more is your ability to form good relationships with co-workers at your last job and sell yourself on your resume.
Most of the people who end up getting high paying, high ranking jobs are not very skilled technically, but are skilled personally - even engineers.
So I'd say - do your job as well as you can (don't go too crazy with work), be friendly with people in your company, and phrase your achievements in terms of % value/speed/users added.
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> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
I sacrifice an evening - but not to my company, but to studying Leetcode to move on to the next company. I also have side hustles that I devote time to.
> when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
I am helpful to most people when they need help, and they remember this. My code is clean and well architected and well tested, and they can see this too. They also know that I know the language and platform we're using, and general programming (and business) knowledge. Few care whether I'm a "standout contributor" in terms of getting many stories done. Actually if I have a good lead or manager I might go above and beyond for them in terms of doing more.
> a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
Well, this is correct. I help my co-workers.
Things are situational. If I got a job helping set up LLM's or something, I might dive in and work a lot of hours just because I feel it is benefiting me too. On the other hand I can be somewhere where it doesn't make sense to work more than forty hours (if that) a week.
Don't really agree. The benefits you mentioned are already there for 50-70 percentile employees. Like doing a bit more than minimum, occasionally helping others, not slacking too much so others had to pick up your work etc. No benefits to bust your ass to be the top 5%.
And when more and more people are like this, the average quality goes down, so it is even easier to be average.
Pride in my work? Sometimes I have pride in my work. Doesn't mean I should open myself to be exploited.
My perception of work changed after a layoff last fall. I had the typical C-Suite reaching out and 6 months of severance. After giving over a decade of my time to a company and given 6 months of pay in return my thought process changed. I was offered a job due to their contacts, but I would be in a similar situation with no laws to protect me, so I decided to decline and left the country. I had a contact in Mexico... after reading about their labor laws I decided while the pay was 50% of what i made in USA. I didn't have to worry about layoffs. For perspective had I been laid off in Mexico and worked the same amount of time my severance by law would have been about 3 years salary. That was the bare minimum by law (if the company offered a savings accounts, which most larger ones have here). A friend in HR down here did some calculations and said I would have been most likely closer to 4-5 years because of stipulations in contracts.
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Why would I recommend a standout performer for a position at my company? So they can outshine me? I never recommend the "true believer" tool, always the average performer I got along with.
"A players hire A players and B players hire C players”.
I’m not saying I am necessarily an “A player”. But I am secure in my skills and the ability to convince someone to pay me for my skills. I was instrumental in hiring three people at a job who were all better than me at the time. I learned so much from them while I was there, it helped set me up for my next job that was my first job as a lead.
Why would I want someone that can’t help me be successful at my current job and whom I can’t learn from?
Even there I would ask my then former coworkers first advice.
99% of people hiring are "B/C players”
If you think so, I'm sorry for wherever you've worked.
A vs B vs C isn't some fixed thing we're assigned at birth: it's a matter of learning, investing in ourselves, having both humility and pride in our work, maintaining our boundaries and building up our coworkers.
People who have fully replaced intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation won't ever get to A level, because the incentives are non-linear. Actual A players keep investing and collaborating, whether they get rewarded for it now or later or never, just because it is the right thing to do.
It's a simple numbers game - the A teams hire rarely and don't turn over staff constantly and when they do hire they pick up talent internally if it exists.
The rest hire as per the quote previously, turn over staff, build empires for their own egos etc. This makes up the bulk of market facing hiring.
This is utterly false. My motivation and I assume most people who go to work is their insatiable addiction to food, clothes and shelter. “Passion is Bullshit”.
Everything I do at work is and has been since 2008 (I have been working a lot longer) is to feed those addictions. While we did get off the hedonic treadmill and downsized a couple of years ago and I focus much more on work life balance, I work hard now not for the maximum comp. But to maintain my autonomy at work and be trusted and because my current job is pretty straightforward (for me at least) and has unlimited PTO and allows us to pursue our travel hobbies.
I don't think most people would agree on what is an A, B or C.
I don't think it is consistent company to company what is an A, B or C.
And that’s often good enough depending on what your needs are…
The reality that nobody wasnt to say out loud is that the top 10-20% of the people you interviewed for a role would all have been just as great as the "best" candidate (and often enough the amazing candidate turns out to be terrible anyway).
If you are hiring for your standard enterprise CRUD developer or “full stack” developer, once you have a few seniors (real seniors not “codez real gud” seniors), you can go down to the top 50%
Or you can hire juniors, and after a couple of years have a whole team of A-players.
It's like the story about the coach who watched two runners run the same time, one with perfect form and the other a total mess. He let the total mess onto the team, and the runner with perfect form got mad, "but I ran better than he did!!!" The coach replied, "I can't help you go any faster than you are, but the total mess is going to be incredibly fast with just a little form."
The juniors are doing negative work. I need people who are neutral or positive shortly after they come on board. Besides that, once a junior gets experience, they are going to jump ship.
My expectations of a mid level developer is once given mostly clear business requirements, they should be able to turn those requests into code. They should be able to handle any “straightforward” task I throw at them.
From the definition I have seen from leveling guidelines:
Straightforward problems or efforts have minimal visible risks or obstacles. The goal is clear, but the approach is not, requiring the employee to rely on their knowledge and skills to determine the best course of action.
I expect a senior to handle “complex” tasks.
Complex problems or efforts involve visible risks, obstacles, and constraints. This often requires making trade-offs that demand expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to influence others to build consensus on the best approach.
It should be about raising the bar, not lowering it. You’d grow if you weren’t the smartest person in the room. Unfortunately this stance prevents one from seeing that.
Even if I am, and I’ve been hired multiple times to be the “smartest person in the room” , I want to hire people who can outshine me because that means I can just delegate high level concepts and they can run with it so I can move on the other initiatives.
While doing that was half the reason that I got let go from my last job, I delegated the work I was doing to the person I hired and moved on to a newer initiative that was pulled, I still have no regrets.
I got a chance to put leading an impressive “AI” project on my resume and it helped me get my current much better job.
Before anyone starts groaning , it was a framework to do better intent based bots for online call centers (Amazon Connect and Lex). The perfect use case for it.
Yeah... the overenthusiastic tool bringing up labor intensive ideas for minimal gain just means I can't hit the gym at lunch. Not putting up with that so a meaningless metric can go up by 0.5%.
true corporate strategist here... i recommend people i trust and beleive in and want to work with. if they can outshine me i can get better by working with them. i dont give a rats ass about my performance reviews. just quality of work and nice collaboration , preferably with people better than me.
So you don't have to spend a lot of time cleaning up their messes.
I bet you're a joy to work with.
> To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.
Yes, and that hurts that first time. Especially when you gave a lot (like some 70hrs weeks and then you immune system shuts down) or working during a funeral, in the back room...
> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
That hasn't really been true in my experience. This might be another one of those cultural shifts. work connections in general are looser and you need to do a lot more than just casually chat at work to really "stand out". People are arguably overworked and have no time to perceive who does what work how efficiently unless you're a direct co-worker or a lead.
I agree with don't be a grouch. No one like a grouch unless its calling out bad leadership. But I think being nice is better than trying to be the best. People remember how you made them feel, and current work (epecially WFH) may limit how much you get to impact a specific person's workload.
>On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
YMMV. how you process that matters a lot. If you use some cynicism you can protect yourself. If youre all cynicism you become a grouch.
>Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
only in a market as bad as this where you don't want to go back to job searching. But normally, I wouldn't do this. Especially in my industty: give them an inch give them a country mile, and then that "crunch" period has become 70 hour workweeks for 6+ months.
"sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...is worth it now and then" That same company will fire you and escort you out but expect you to give 2 weeks notice.
The brutal experience of “fire and escort you out” is a consequence of Usonian fondness for firearms: before that, another typical location for mass shootings besides schools was the workplace, where angry terminated employees would lash out bullets at the “sucks being you” managers that just doled out the news.
> If people know you are a standout contributor
Yes, each person's network is more important now than ever - as we seem to have achieved pretty thorough uselessness of classical job postings, job boards and applications. Some parts of building that network are simple: do ask people for contact info for example. And another part is simply showing up, doing work and getting it recognized by the people around you - that's more long term effort certainly but has nothing to do with how much you don't respect the corporation that employs you or the least palatable of your co-workers or managers. On the contrary, find the more competent people in that mess around you, and favor them.
Even the people you don't respect might easily some day be among the people in other companies that will need you. You may then do everything you can not to work for them, but even keeping that lack of respect out of sight is in your interest. (And okay, for some of these people it's hard.)
I'm very cynical but I also kinda agree with this.
Don't be loyal to the company, because the company isn't loyal to you. Don't overwork, don't neglect family, friends and hobbies. It's simply not worth it, you'll burn yourself out, and it won't save you when the ax falls.
But do a good job, because it's good for you, your self-esteem, your mood and your skills. If you "quiet quit", you're doing yourself a disservice. (Barring extreme cases, of course).
I'd rephrase this to: don't be loyal to work but be loyal to your coworkers. Be the person everyone wants to work with.
Love this distillation!
I would nit and say "quiet-quit" to give you the time to work on finding your next job. Do it as a means, not an end.
Yeah - hard agree with this. There's a lot to be said about giving your best effort in proportion to all the other things you're doing in your life.
I think your comment bears some truth in that turning to bitterness is only going to tint a persons worldview towards an overall undesirable shade. Also it is absolutely necessary to keep up that "above and beyond" image for coworkers/managers to improve chances of a next successful hire. Mix that with the reality as described in the article and you get the play-pretend so many of us find exhausting
I can strongly agree with you while understanding how the OP feels (and I certainly don't condone all his advice). IMO, culture plays a role in it; as an EU citizen, layoffs are effectively rare here.
I was laid off once, when I was being widely praised for my work. It's been 5 years, financially it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, and it still hurts that it happened. So yeah...
I’ve also been working in tech for almost 30 years - 28.5 to be exact.
Work is purely transactional, I give the company the benefit of all of my accumulated skills and experience for 40 hours per week, they put money in my account and I then use that money to exchange for goods and services.
Whenever one party or the other decides that the transactional relationship is no longer beneficial, we part ways.
If I find a company where the transaction is more beneficial - pay, benefits, work life balance, etc - depending on my priorities at the time, I go work for that company. I’ve worked at 10 companies in the past almost 30 years and 6 of those have been in the past 10 years.
> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
Uh yeah that won’t happen unless it benefits me in some way like I’m learning a new to me technology or finishing a project I am leading will look good on my resume.
I made an exception when I was working for a company that sent nurses to the homes of special needs kids and they wouldn’t get paid on time if the project wasn’t done - before Christmas. They would have gotten paper checks that they would have had to either pick up from their central office or get it mailed to them and when I was working for public sector clients during Covid and it helped them get their disability and unemployment checks on time.
I can relate. My perception is that a company is for me, not the other way around. This really flips how work is handled.
It feels like that requires an outgoing personality and great people skills that many people just don't have. There's lots of people who are friendly and pleasant to work with, but they don't have the dynamic personality that's going to lead to someone remembering them when an opportunity arises; even if they have they went above and beyond in their work.
It's certainly true that the charismatic have a better go of this, but after 12 years in the industry I've built up a solid list of quietly excellent engineers. Whenever I see an opportunity they could shine, I reach out to them.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for me), the industry seems to be fairly market efficient, and they're usually already happy at some other highly compensated position (Empirically, 1 M$/yr seems roughly to be the going rate for "Damn, I really wish I could work with that person again")
> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
Totally agreed. A big downside of taking contracting job is that one does not get equity. There can be exceptions but in general equity is reserved for permanent employees.
That aside, I highly recommend people view the employment as an alliance. When employee aligns with the company, work hard. When the alliance is not there, break apart and no hard feelings.
By “equity” do you mean statistically worthless equity in a private company?
Most companies don’t give equity. But even if you are talking about equity in the form of RSUs in public companies. It’s just comp. I’ll take guaranteed cash comp any day. When I was getting RSUs, I had it set to immediately sell as soon as I was vested and diversified.
Employment is not an “alliance” it is a transaction, they pay me money, I give them labor
I'd go with transactions too. Either way, a company is not a family. No hard feelings if I leave my company or my company lets me go.
Contractors can get equity, it depends on the contract. But ISOs are available to contractors, and RSUs are too.
> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc
Would you consider employers to be "fully cynical" about their affairs and interactions with employees? I do. Being a happy little cog is it's own reward, but ine has to be clear-eyed about it.
> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles.
You are presenting a false dichotomy - one can be an outstanding contributor while working 40 hours per week.
I think employers are, and I think it costs them a ton of money.
My intrinsic responsibility isn't to the person handing me a check: we have an explicit contract. It is first to myself, second to the people whose lives are affected by the software I write, and third to my coworkers.
When developers pretend the relationship with an employer is just the two of them, they are giving up most of the leverage they have to change how their work functions.
My first responsibility is to the people - including myself - who depend on me to have money in my account to support our addictions to food, clothes and shelter
> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you.
My thoughts, exactly.
I do good work, because I can’t live with myself, if I don’t.
> next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before
I've been in this field for ~7 years and have never found this to be true, yet people parrot it all the same. I have never once received a job via reference, and only once was able to get someone else a job by reference. I feel this is only true when you're at the very senior level.
Only my first job after university was via a regular advertisement and application. The other jobs and contracts happened thanks to:
- one of my bosses
- me talking at an event and meeting another speaker
- getting recommended by a person that knew me
You are touching on what I would classify as two different kinds of layoffs.
If you're working for a startup, a layoff is a likely outcome. Most startups fail. Those that don't often end up pivoting, often more than once, and cutting costs tends to go hand in hand with that.
Layoffs from big tech companies is a relatively new phenomenon, really only since the pandemic, and they're fundamentally different. It's actually the sort of thing that Corporate America has been doing for decades. In this case, big tech companies make money hand over fist yet they have layoffs, typically ~5% of the workforce every year.
These layoffs will be perpetual because the reasons for them aren't around controlling costs, avoiding bankruptcy or any of the "normal" reasons for layoffs. The goal is suppress labor costs. People fearful for their jobs aren't demanding raises or better benefits. Plus you can dump the work the 5% were doing onto the remaining 95% who won't say no because they're fearful for their own jobs. And that's the point.
The veneer of tech companies being mavericks who were employee-focused is completely over. A lot of the "perks", which are really just part of your cojmpensation package, are getting and will continue to get cut or just made worse through less funding. At some point, you'll start getting charged for those "free" meals.
In 10 years, all the big tech companies will be indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
Actual salaries haven't fallen. The point of paying those salaries is you have to earn every penny. If they overhire and a bunch of people start taking the money for granted, that breaks down the social contract
Half of the perks e.g. sabbaticals or sleeping pods don't even make sense in a competitive working environment
Compensation gets attacked in a number of ways.
Your base salary won't tend to drop but at the same time you'll get an annual 1.5% increase when inflation is 9% and the company made $300 billion in profits last year.
Bonuses for normal employees (below VP) are essentially formulaic at most big tech companies, for the most part. So if you're a senior SWE with a 15% bonus target, well that's based on yoru base salary. It hasn't gone down in nominal terms but it has in real terms.
Also, depending on your company, there's a pool of discretionary funds on top of the formula. Your bonus can even be taken away and given to someone else on the team (yes, this happens). How big is that pool? Has it increased over time? Decreased? Or stayed the same? On a per-employee basis. You don't have visibility into that unless you're a manager.
Next is stock compensation. Your initial grant is obviously known. Annual refreshes if you get them tend to be formulaic too. But what about discretionary grants? That's where the big money is. How much is being thrown around in total? Is it going up or down over time? You have no visibility into that.
All of the above have, as input, your performance ratings. There are quotas for each performance level at a certain level (usually 150+ people or director level) so not everyone gets Greatly Exceeds Expectations. What are the quotas ("target percentages") for each bucket? Has that changed over time? Some compoanies now have targets for subpar ratings (ie ratings below "Meets Expectations"). It's the pipeline for getting rid of people and getting people to do more for the same money.
So technically you have to do more now to maintain a Meets Expectation rating than you did 5 or 10 years ago. Is that a pay cut?
And then we have promotions. The typical way this works is a company will divide promotion candidates into pools. A promotion committee will essentially rank the packets they have. At a certain level there is a quota for promotions to hand out. Those get distributed to those from the top down until there are no promotions left to give out.
Companies have allegedly reduced costs by simply reducing the promotion target percentages / quotas.
And then there are all the benefits that have a tendency to get worse over time. Health sinsurance, 401k matching and less tangible benefits like food, facilities and so on.
But supposing this happens across the economy, there's less inflation. E.g. if housing costs track tech salaries and soak up most of the surplus available, the relative wealth gained/lost is hard to predict
>There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one.
No it doesn't.
Also you get payed 60% for a year on unemployment benifits in germany (or until you find a new job), which is amazing.
The most your ex coworkers can do for you at a decently paying corporate job is get you past the resume screen. And even then, there are constant complaints at my employer about our recruiters never contacting our referrals. The person referring can certainly not be allowed even the appearance of influence over the interviews or debrief.
You might be hired on the strength of reputation or recommendation into an early stage startup, but these roles only make sense if you’re 23.
The referrals come from the c-suite. They can call up board they're on and friends that they have. I was laid off last fall and went straight HR told them where i applied and they reached out to the ceo and he called someone with me in the office. Had a job offer 1 week later
This is good advice.
People who do good work, and get good at craft, do it as much for their sense of pride as they do for some kind of reward. Rewards are nice, but the joy you get from them are fleeting. Enjoying the work itself is evergreen.
Work is work. Even at a job you like, you'll have days where you'd just rather be out having a day off. Don't get indoctrinated into hustle culture.
But don't get cynical and start being a pleb about jargon or whatever. It's like a person stuck in traffic complaining about traffic as if they aren't... traffic?
> your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one
Not my experience.
> leveraging job offers for raises, etc.
That is a double-edged sword. You can do it, but it really should come from a place where you're fully prepared to leave, and you'd really prefer you didn't. Sometimes, companies underpay. You should be continually engaging in price discovery, and you should demand to be paid what you're worth.
Just be aware that your company may well say "oh well, good luck", and the new company may be worse. In smaller companies, you might set yourself up for resentment if you stay. Large tech companies really will just coldly look at "is she/he worth it? Yes/no", make that decision, and move on.
> but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.
You build those contacts by helping people, not by helping the company. (Also, referrals are massively overvalued, IMHO. I'm not seeing them happening very often - but maybe my friend group is an outlier. Wonder if there are stats)
> carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
Realism, however, is helpful. Your company will throw you away like a used paper tissue. Make peace with it. Don't believe the "we're family" BS, because you aren't. You're at best the equivalent to a sports team. And when the team doesn't need you anymore, you'll be let go.
And that's fine. What makes it painful is lying to yourself, pretending a company could actually care about you as a person. (Small carve-out: Tiny companies, with <30 or so people, still can manage to care)
That doesn't mean phoning it in, or doing shoddy work. It does mean being clear about the fact that you have to look out for yourself, your wellbeing, your health, your career.
You're right in that your co-workers are the only ones who have the capacity to love you back. But I can guarantee you that working harder won't make you more loveable. Work well, but be clear where your boundaries are.
Anger can be a strong motivator. It's a double-edged sword, you don't want to sustain it.
> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.
Guess what. That's cynical too.
> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
No, it's not. Cynicism is just having the correct model of reality and learning to thrive with it is the best skill you can possibly develop. But the first step is becoming a cynic. Overwhelming bitterness is of course bad, but it's not the end of the road for cynicism, it's just the beginning. A non-cynic can see only this and it looks to him like a cliff that would crush him. Seasoned cynic sits high on top of the cliff of bitterness he climbed, quite happy, having a clear look on both sides. On the world of people who fear cynicism and on the smooth hills on the other side that non-cynics can't possibly fathom.
> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.
This is an argument in favor of managing optics. Whether people perceive you going above and beyond may matter, even if actually going above and beyond truly does not.
> but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one.
[ citation needed ]
Every job I've worked at has specified when we provide references, we're to say "X was employed from Y to Z" and if we would hire them again, yes or no. The employee described here would get a yes from me. The fact that they didn't go "above and beyond" will not help them get a job, at least if they happened to work for any of the companies I have.
> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles.
I guess we could quibble over definitions then, because I as a senior dev managing other devs am perfectly happy with someone who clocks in, does the work on-time and to-spec, and then clocks off as a "standout contributor." I've chastised a few people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job to prevent burnout, voluntary or otherwise.
Burned out devs turn out worse work, and they feel worse in the bargain. Textbook definition of a lose-lose. Whatever code is being a pain in the ass today is just that; code. It will be there when you get back from the weekend, it will be there when you get back from a doctor's appointment, it will be there when your kid is done being sick. Life matters. Code... does, but to a lesser extent.
> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.
Which is why I don't want people feeling bitter about their job, and putting in the extra work to, by your own admission, be just as damn likely to get the axe for reasons that are out of your control? That's embittering as fuuuuuuuck.
> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you.
False dichotomy. I love what we build, and I want my subordinates to have fulfilling, happy lives. And I proportion my energy to both of those things in accordance with their importance.
> I've chastised a few people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job to prevent burnout
The best way to avoid burnout in my experience is to work when you have "the itch" to do it. If you're feeling it on a Saturday, why not go for it? You might not be feeling it on Monday and will need the break then instead. If you forego the prime opportunity and then force yourself to do it later when you are not in the right mindset, that is when the burnout is going to get you.
Answering the rhetorical question - because it may set a bad example for other, more junior employees; it may set a new expectation; if the good manager who prevents burnout gets fired, and is replaced with a worse person, they may come to expect you to work six days a week, and instead of preventing burnout by working when you want, you're now being burned out by working not only 5 days a week without any break, but also on one of your weekend days.
Exactly this. I worked for a place long ago, where we had this junior guy who basically didn't have a life. He just wanted to code. He stayed late every day, and would occasionally come in on the weekends and code all day. He was not making any extra (in fact since he was junior he was probably making much less than the rest of the team). He was not angling for a promotion from what I could tell. He just liked to code and that was his entire life. Well, his manager gave him some public praise once over E-mail, basically saying the project was moving along much faster due to how productive you are. That's all it took. Suddenly, the whole team felt pressure to pull 60-80 hour weeks and burn themselves out. And we didn't really get that much more done, because it was 80 low-quality burned out, demoralized hours, not 40 high-quality hours. The team eventually disintegrated along with the company during one of the tech downturns. All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.
> All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.
It reads like the real problem was that the other developers fell into what developers seem to love more than anything: Pedantry. Instead of playing along with the false praise, they set out to prove the claim in the email wrong.
Regardless, there was a problem.
Yes, no doubt the person who sent the email ended up feeling a little silly when the pendants showed him.
This is what open source was made for.
I once had a coworker like that who hadn't taken a vacation in two years. I told him that vacation time was how the company funded his open source work, and suddenly he took his full five weeks off each year to recharge by coding different code.
There sounds a lot more issues with that team, personalities, and company vs "one guy doesn't have a family or hobby"...
1. Will you survive to see a new manager if you don't work on the weekend? Without that, under the given scenario you are either:
- Forcing yourself to work on Monday. Burnout ensues. Will you be able to continue while burnt out?
- Skipping Monday too, seeing you only work four days a week. Will you be able to continue under performance expectations?
2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to stick around even if working hours remain the same? He is still going to express his badness in many other ways. He wouldn't be bad otherwise.
> Without that, under the given scenario you are either:
I reject the false dichotomy that my options are "work on the weekend when I'm excited to write code, or suffer and burn out during the week". Maybe that works for you, but I have to show up on Monday regardless of whether I wrote something inspired on Saturday.
> 2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to stick around even if working hours remain the same?
Weirdly, the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.
> I have to show up on Monday
For what, exactly? If it is simply to appease the whims of your manager, you already have the bad manager. Another hypothetical future bad manager is the least of your concerns at that point. Chances are the hypothetical future bad manager will be less bad than the horror show you are already in.
> the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.
There is some risk there, but most tech people already price in that risk by demanding much higher than normal compensation at their job, allowing them to have their mortgages discharged before the bad manager arrives. You might get caught in the unlucky case, but on balance the good managers don't disappear that quickly.
Do you not have coworkers?
There are more people involved in software creation than just you and your manager.
I don't have coworkers who buy into mob programming. If I write code on Saturday and withhold pushing the commit until Monday afternoon or write the code Monday morning and push the commit thereafter, nobody is ever going to be able to tell the difference.
You must work in one of those cults that stand around the meeting room to recite the commit log as if nobody in the place knows how to read, exclaiming "no blockers" to signify that the metaphorical torch is being passed on to the next person?
If any of that cohort of most tech people has enough money left over to pay off my mortgage, I'd be open to that. But I'm not a member of that hallowed club.
If you are not a member of the tech club then you don't have the tech risk. So, yes, while that may mean it will take longer for you to pay off the mortgage without a high tech salary, you aren't under the pressure that necessities the high tech salary to get the mortgage paid ASAP.
To add: it also sets bad expectations from other leadership. If managers consistently see your guys putting in off the clock hours:
a) it makes me look a bit of a moron, because it implies they can't get their work done within office hours, and my job is to ensure that
b) they then expect that level of work regularly and will feel slighted if it stops being put in. See aforementioned comments about burnout.
> within office hours
You are running a factory over there? That makes the weekend perspective a bit more reasonable, given the constraints. Tech work, on the other hand, descends from agriculture. You work when the sun is shining and rest when it is stormy, metaphorically speaking. There is no reasonable concept of defined working hours. The brain doesn't operate on a set schedule like that, and trying to ignore that reality is where the burnout stems from.
If we were talking about tech, you certainly would look foolish applying factory concepts to an entirely unrelated field.
I was at one place where we tracked every bug introduced, and discovered more than 90% were in code written after 5pm. We dramatically cut our bug rate just by shutting down PRs outside of business hours.
The problem is that when our performance declines, so does our ability to judge our performance. We can feel more productive while actually doing a much worse job.
> more than 90% were in code written after 5pm.
Intriguing. Did you find that remained true through DST periods, assuming DST observance? Meaning, did you find that it was literally the clock that determined when bugs would seep in, or did bugs also increase if you didn't counteract times changes for whatever human factor (circadian rhythm?) made 5 PM significant?
> The problem is that when our performance declines, so does our ability to judge our performance.
Sure, but what sees performance magically decline at 5 PM?
If it was the clock, did you try removing the clock from the equation? Did bugs show up the same if developers had no idea what time it was?
If it was some other human factor, did you see uniformity across all participants? Were the "night owls" who were just getting started at 5 PM just as likely to introduce bugs after 5 PM as those who had been working since 9 AM?
If it were me, I would write the code, commit it, and open the PR Monday afternoon
That is what the individual is going to end up doing if they encounter the guy who thinks software is built on an assembly line, but is not ideal. The reviewer might get "the itch" before Monday. It would be a waste to see him fall into burnout because he had to artificially wait because you had to pretend to wait.
You don't burn out because you weren't working. That's not a thing.
I am concerned about how you describe coding as an addiction. That sounds like something worth bringing up with a therapist & investigating the root cause of. It can be literally dangerous to identify that much with only our work, especially in this economy.
But if you don't want to do that, if you have some rare code-or-die health condition, just contribute to some Apache project instead. The entire internet is build on projects people wrote that their companies didn't pay them to write. We don't have to give our whole creative selves to our employers.
> You don't burn out because you weren't working.
If you never had to work then you would never burn out, sure. But returning back from la-la land, most people are going to have to work. As was stated before, burnout ensues when one forces themselves to work when they are not in the right frame of mind to do so. If you code by the rule of the calendar, that is what is going to put you at risk of burnout. If you code when your mind says "Let's go" and stop when your mind says "That's enough", chances are you'll never experience it.
Denying a "let's go" moment on Saturday, to fight with a "that's enough" moment on Monday because the calendar says you cannot work on Saturday but must work on Monday is a good way to end up with burnout. But why fight it? Why not just work on Saturday and take Monday off? It is not going to make any difference in the end. The deliverable will be there at the anticipated time either way.
> I am concerned about how you describe coding as an addiction.
What is this addiction you are referring to? I can find no mention of it anywhere in this thread before this.
Not a matter of when the office is open, it's a matter of how many hours have been worked vs what's expected. I'm obviously fine with folks working whenever they want, that's half the benefit of work from home in the first place. What I'm not fine with was this particular dude clocking in code at all hours all week, then putting even more in on the weekend. And mind you this is not simply from commits, it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.
> it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.
I'll grant you that it is red flag that he would want to take your energy telling how long something took. It doesn't even mean anything in the given line of work. An interesting problem might be given hundreds of hours of thought – in the shower, while sleeping, etc. – but only take 15 minutes to type afterwards. What would you report? The 100 hours? The 15 minutes? Invent some kind of weighting system to offset parallel activities? And for what? None of them mean anything.
The manager's job is to take the unnecessary burden of externalities off the rest of the team, but it is a team and that means it has to cut both ways. The rest of the team has to take the unnecessary burden of internality off the manager. If that was the best political way to say "please stop, you are needlessly wasting my energy", then that makes sense, I suppose. Or, perhaps a good manager is brutally honest above being politically sensitive? A team is, after all, characterized by their willingness to remain bonded even amid strife. Without that, you just have a group of people.
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FYI that burnout is not "working a lot". Burnout is the feeling of little control, ineffectiveness, COMBINED with stress. Working weekends could instead be an indication of excitement and enthusiasm, which as a manager is worth nurturing. Over time those kinds of people should be given broader ownership and the ability to delegate, where they see fit.
A response to a feeling of ineffectiveness or lack of progress can be 'I need to catch up' which can result in weekend work. That IME can be a spiral. You don't get the rest you need. You feel less effective...
Yeah, but what always happens is the more you give, the more they squeeze, until you have nothing left.
I don't think it's references that matter, as much as reaching out to former coworkers who have jobs elsewhere, and can be your "in" to a new job.
If people are seeing the only way to be a "standout contributor" being about putting in more than 40 hours a week, we may have found the disconnect.
I don't work more than 40 hours a week, but when I slack off I just do the work put in front of me. Rather than hours, it's about energy.
If companies want more than 40 hours a week, we can negotiate overtime. But I put extra energy in during the work week not because I think it makes me extra money or protects me from layoffs. I do it just because I think it is better.
We're not as far apart as you might think. Clock time is correlated with performance, but by no means determinative. More important is initiative, enthusiasm, leadership, reliability, etc. All in, I work very little overtime.
And you're right, this is a marathon, and working sustainably is absolutely the most important thing. One can do both. If you love what you build and you're leading a balanced life then I would say you're Doing It Right.
spoken like a person with other people in their lives that they care about. You seem good to work for. Thanks.
You have no self respect.
I’ve never been hired from contacts so maybe they all accurately think I’m a sellsword and it hasnt affected anything
I mean sure I’d love smooth sailing at a FAANG interview with all my friends in the process. I know some of you guys are getting on niche teams that way
but in the mid market and other startups, I’ve found there are enough to go around. Reputation doesn't matter one bit, and the “glut” is in entry level and former FAANG employees only looking for FAANG compensation.
I just keep 2 mid market and start up roles at once if I have some financial goal and its close enough to decent FAANG compensation. I don’t put short stints on my resume, and get exposed to a lot more.
My only studying is bombing another startup’s interview process and using what I had forgotten to ace a subsequent one
I could study to get above average FAANG compensation that would eclipse my 2-job situation. but I’m pretty busy with 2-jobs and the market for speculation and trading carries the rest.
The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.
This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.
“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
> Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants
A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.
Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.
In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.
There’s the whole capital expenditure vs operating expenses angle too, and depending on a company’s particular situation, one might look better on paper than the other. Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.
This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to win shareholder brownie points.
I am wondering whether a company "optimizing for shareholder brownie points" is a good signal to either look for employment elsewhere or as an investor start investing elsewhere. It seems like a company who prioritizes this either has reached their potential (which might be fine) or is just not able to innovate anymore.
A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/flower-delivery-company-ftd-...
I'm in a VC-owned business with a 50% profit ebitda. But a common trick is to just load it with debt. The VC firm pays out all profits as dividends, all investments into restructuring, M&A and new technology is paid for by high-interest loans from the shareholder. What's left is a company that barely cashflows as all profit goes towards paying interest to the VC firm.
The appointed management team has to operate within that scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50% interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise dying and slowly shrinking business sector.
In other words a terrible place for general salary growth.
So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3) that aren't owned by VC.
Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't really apply as much.
Most VC backed private companies aren’t profitable. If it is a public company the information is readily available
Sure, and then there's all the private companies backed by non-venture capital, and the profitable ones running on revenue.
You don’t find too many profitable “lifestyle companies” in tech.
There are plenty of mid-size tech companies that are both not-public and not-lifestyle.
My employer is one of them. Several thousand employees, global reach, and owned by PE (Blackstone and Vista).
You stated that there aren't many profitable lifestyle companies. And the insinuation put forth is that they are very rare to the point of almost nonexistent.
This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?
No. But I do know statistics. The largest employees in tech are the public companies that we have all heard of. The next largest segment are VC funded companies with the smallest segment by far being the “lifestyle companies”.
Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many of those do you think are going to be profitable, private, lifestyle companies?
I would put money on all of big tech and all public companies combined not employing more than 30% of professional programmers. At least in the US only 15% work at a large company (500+).
Those are the companies he meant by "public companies", ie publicly traded not government owned.
There's still a question of what you consider profitable.
A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.
Stock-based compensation is absolutely considered an expense under US GAAP.
Which is why companies report non-GAAP numbers.
https://abc.xyz/assets/71/a5/78197a7540c987f13d247728a371/20...
> We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business and acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.
But honestly, profitability doesn’t matter. All of the major tech companies were profitable and still had tens of thousands of layoffs between them.
Layoffs in big tech are mostly to place workers in their place and shake the market, they've definitely been able to drive down salaries these past two years.
Yes - I think layoffs are also backlash against WFH.
Employees were getting a bit too uppity.
That would be a red flag to me.
Companies that make a shit ton of money generally don't like changes.
They're just looking for the next fool to squeeze.
Large US companies that I’ve worked with or for do this as a SOP. It’s not a calculation being done at the hiring manager level as much as a path of least resistance because that’s the way it’s been done for so long.
> contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure
You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with a depreciation period.
Changing the expenses that way can only increase the company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.
This is exactly what has changed [1]: R&D costs had been an immediate tax break, but since 2022 became an expenditure requiring a 5-year amortization period.
That change had been planned to be canceled before coming into force, but it was not canceled on time.
Hence the wave of layoffs in 2022, as companies were urgently trying to improve their balance sheets, as investors and the Wall Street requested, AFAICT.
[1]: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof...
> to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings
Bingo. That's the main reason to shift opex to capex.
If you have time, how can capex, an expense, appear as earnings? (I'm pretty clueless about these things)
Aha, it's that: "Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes" (I see in other comments here),
but capex is not subtracted, so then it looks as if the company is doing better, on paper, although it's not. And this works only for a while, maybe some years? Which might be long enough for the current management, if they leave before things get too bad?
"Capex expenses" are investments. And the investment is one of the two things a company may do with profits, the other is paying dividends.
Just by classifying something as capex, it's automatically classified as profit already.
Thanks!
Most of the people in charge of making these kinds of decisions are not that smart.
Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money? Or is this all some nonsense setup by the company to shuffle the numbers to look superficially better for a specific metric?
To my understanding, it's the latter.
"We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the actual recurring cost number is worse.
(There's also some complexities in some industries around money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on certain types of expenditures...)
It’s all about accounting for the spend. Wall Street often looks at Capital Expenditures as a sign of growth or at least net neutral, but they view Operating Expenses as negative. If you can reduce your operating expenses by 200k, but increase your capital expenditure by 400k, you’ve reduced overall profit in order to increase growth potential because your investing 400k into new stuff that will bring in more revenue.
This strategy cannot work long term unless there is growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number of employees. But it can definitely work short term if the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad, and it has the benefit of giving management someone else to blame when the project work doesn’t get done.
If your company starts replacing employees with contractors, that’s a bad sign.
That might be it, this company was obsessed with CAPEX vs. OPEX. Everything was always put into the context of CAPEX or OPEX. OPEX being bad and CAPEX good.
Wait, when did that change? I thought the prevailing wisdom in our industry is that CAPEX sucks, OPEX rules. I understdood that's what's driving SaaSification of everything - replacing some internal tool and labor with a SaaS is literally turning CAPEX into OPEX, and it was supposedly what the investors liked.
The only real difference is tax treatment. Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes. So opex are more tax-efficient, but they lower your reported earnings.
>Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money?
This may vary due to region. For example in the U.S where you can fire people quickly the contractor benefit is less apparent, but in EU where after a short period you may have to spend a long time to fire someone it may be beneficial to hire a contractor rather than going through a lengthy hiring process only to find out you want to fire them.
Contractors in such an environment often are a reasonable investment for a project that has a particular dedicated timeline. Like we expect 1 year for project to finish. We hire for 1 year, and opportunity to extend for 3 months 2 times in case it goes bad.
Otherwise you have to hire for project and then do these layoffs everybody here is complaining about.
Furthermore in EU if you are paying 10000 for an employee, you probably have extra fees on top of that so you are paying 14000 (estimation) then for contractor you are not paying 28000, but 20000. The pricing is not great, but there are lots of factors that can make it seem more attractive than it might appear on its face.
Finally, Contractors tend not to do any of this quiet quitting or whatever, probably because for them it is more a business and they are also earning significantly more that makes it an interesting business to be in and to maintain.
In my experience long time contractors will absolutely "quiet quit" if put into the same catch-22 situations that push employees to do this.
The main difference at least in my region is that if you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't as strong. In other words, tech workers who become contractors here usually are better contributors and have an easier time finding good offers.
You can give workers temporary contracts and extend them as you see fit. None of what you are saying makes any sense to me.
Also, I will repeat this as many times as possible: you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law. You need to give your employee a WRITTEN letter of termination, to make the termination legally binding. Then all you have to do is give them notice (or pay the salary out immediately if you want to get rid of them immediately).
Paying double so you can fire contractors is illogical. The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months, after working 20 damn years at a single company, which means at worst the company would have to pay half your salary out a single time to get rid of you immediately. None of this 2x every year multi-year bullshit.
The reason why you hire contractors is that you do not need the full output of an employee. You might only need three months or maybe just a week. It's the same reason companies rent equipment instead of buying.
> you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law.
That is overly simplified. First, you have to commit to one of three types of layoffs, only one of which usually is applicable (betriebsbedingte Kündigung). But if you do that you have to consider the social circumstances of the employee and also other comparable employees. Which absolutely can result in not being able to fire the employee you would like to fire without also firing a number of other employees first. That could be really disruptive, so it is not quite so easy for German employers.
> The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months
I believe the maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to as a contractor is whatever your contract says
- an employee is an "expense" that bogs down your money-machine.
- a contractor provides a "service" that improves your money-machine output.
(or so it's said).
Then simply fire all the employees and hire contractors!
Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.
That doesn't make any sense. In any situation in which a contractor expense would be capitalized, an employee's salary would also be capitalized. Labor costs are labor costs; whether someone is a contractor or an employee is a labor law issue, not a tax issue. (Internal R&D was the big exception to the capitalization rule, but that loophole was closed, which is what prompted a lot of tech and videogame layoffs over the past 2 years.)
Or as wind-up to a merger /acquisition.
Management tend to get a bee in their bonnet about headcount, specifically full time employees, while they don't count consultants as being under the same kind of restrictions. It does often end up in the madness you describe, like that time there was a data entry consultant costing at my 0 company 100k, which a full timer would have been paid 35k max.
Outside of the US this optionality does have some value to deserve at least some premium.
Hire an extra dev for the same money looks good on paper, but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
(I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the other direction as well)
> but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.
Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark. Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety representative.
And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two months because they decided that they didn't have the budget anyway.
Two months in much of Europe is within 6-month trial period, it's easy to let anyone go.
Furthermore, the "additional cost" of an employee in Europe is a further 35% of the salary due to social fees. That is why contractors often don't cost more to the company, although it might seem like that to employees.
5+ years "consulting" would probably be reclassified as employment by most courts.
In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where employees, just with a different company. They just opted to station the same people at the same client for all those years.
In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently" bump into each other in the cantine, but not go together), or share the same office equipment for coffee, having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.
The one that is most ridiculous and sad IMO (I'm in the US) is that contractors aren't invited to the Christmas party.
Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?
Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants.
If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.
If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.
There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project?
If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.
But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.
Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.
My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.
At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why).
The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know
No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.
If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers?
This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.
OK sure, but I never once mentioned any of this and have no idea what the social customs are around hiring general contractors to build buildings or asking CIA-adjacent consulting companies how to jack up the price of bread. I just know that half my coworkers have a slightly different email address for "legal reasons", and they aren't allowed to come to the Christmas party. This is, in my opinion, simply mean. Basically we seem to have invented a kind of at-will apartheid that 0.0001% of the population understand and even fewer benefit from.
That’s staff augmentation which is completely different. If your company doesn’t know anything about Salesforce for instance and you just need a one off large project, you are going to hire a consulting company to go off and do the work and leave.
It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s
I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building
OK, have a good day. Hope you're feeling well.
Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties.
I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.
I’ll admit “consulting” is an overloaded term.
I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.
I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.
Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.
I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.
That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.
Nothing ridiculous about it. That came out of the permatemp lawsuits in the US by contractors a couple of decades ago which resulted in employers avoiding doing anything that made it look like contractors were being treated like permanent employees. Squeezing for money by a few contractors ruined a good thing for the rest of them.
Why is that ridiculous? Contractors are not employees, so why should they be invited to a give thanks party for employees? Become an employee if you want to partake. Feelings of entitlement are wrong here. Decency though tells us to invite everyone.
> Become an employee if you want to partake.
It's not necessarily up to them.
I don't know. We get to invite clients and all the other business partners, why not contractors and people that work for them with us on a project?
Christmas part is not special "give thanks to employees" party, it is more of end of a year party. It makes perfect sense to invite contractors. Even if it was "give thanks" party, contractors worked on projects.
I remember a work Christmas party attended by a contractor. The company was an sme and as usual we closed the office at mid-day and headed for a local restaurant to eat and socialise. The contractor as chatty and sociable, and seemed happy to be dining on the company's bill. Wine flowed.
Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
> Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.
Or, maybe, had better things to do. :)
I have seen employees doing exactly the same, so I do not see anything worth anger here. It is never the case that everyone goes to christmas party. Unless not going is punished in some way, in which case they go, but only to avoid punishment.
wait - was that me? Because I don't drink.
It was was a long time ago. And based on your id, not you.
yeah it was just my facetious way of observing that there could be other explanations that he was gone as soon as he couldn't charge for his presence, in fact when I consult I would never charge for going to one of those things - but I would of course expense it on my taxes.
Because contractors most of the time deliver as much as many employees.
> Feelings of entitlement are wrong here.
How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.
I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".
Its caste. The cleaning lady is part of the company and its a horror that the dalit are dis-included from all company activities. The only actual reason is to divide and conquer and prevent them being part of any employee unionization.
I've been a consultant/contractor, less than 4 months in, and I still have been invited to (great) Christmas party, and even shared paid buses that took whole company and also given free accommodation.
Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.
Yeah, that's the line at a Christmas work party. Is it about Christmas, or is it about work
There was an lawsuit against Microsoft in the past that they lost because they used to treat contractors almost like employees. I'm guessing that is why these days most contractors are employed by someone else and not truly independent.
https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/companies/dont-treat...
That's a manifestation of your specific environment and not a general rule. I guess it is the work of some overeager compliance department, because it is the kind of overreacting self-mutilation that happens if people do not understand a law and want to be absolutely sure (cf. GDPR).
[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!
[1] https://www.sup-kanzlei.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Scheinselbs...
> In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities
AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.
Consultancy has no such protections.
I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.
What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.
You get that at many companies whose legal department is too worried that AÜG might somehow be triggered for them, or have a strong union that would rather see all consulting folks be gone, which I understand when placed in the shoes of internal folks.
In most places, it doesn't work that way.
“A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people”
Why would anyone stay at a company that had pay freezes for a few years. I would have been looking for another job the moment they announced them.
There are soft perks. I have a pension that counts how long I work for the company (I have no idea what the real terms of it are, but that simplification will do for this discussion). Long term than pension is - hopefully - worth far more than a couple years of no raises. Depending of course on how long I live - statistically I will die sometime between 60 and 100 with the most likely age being 80 - the longer I live the more than pension is worth, on the low end it is worthless.
That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation, but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer position in the company that resulted in a nice level promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best option.
Though your mileage will vary.
I forgot that pensions are still a thing in some places.
But when you calculate the the present value of the pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying to be combative)
> is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it?
That is a great question that is at least partially unknowable. You cannot discount future cash flows without knowing how long you will live and thus how much you should discount. Also things like inflation are unknowable.
As I said, I did leave. I stayed with the same company but found a different division. Which is the best of all worlds. I think, perhaps I could get a better offer elsewhere? If so would that better job still exist or would I now be laid off for months before finding a new job and thus destroying all the income gain from that new job?
There are a ton of unknowable factors. I can say it worked out okay for me so far, but that is about it.
Depending on your level and how much of your life is built around your job - it's not always as easy to leave as you might think.
It depends on who you are and what market you are in. Many people in recent years have reported putting in over a thousand job applications and only netting a couple of interviews, none of which resulted in a job offer. But if you have a network into available jobs and can short cut all of the pipeline insanity going on now, making a jump would be smart. Then again, the type of companies that play these games typically don't have top notch talent in the first place. Many people might endure it because they fear they don't have other options.
Exactly. Generally, when one company institutes pay freezes, they're probably also in a hiring freeze, along with the rest of the industry. Everything's nice and coordinated and they all use the same "macroeconomic environment" as the excuse. So an employee doesn't really have the option to just hop jobs, nobody else is hiring. Ironically, the best time to hop jobs is when you're getting raises because the economy is strong and everyone else is hiring.
Think about a wider scale than your employer: if the costs of the consultants goes in fact in the pockets of the investors of your employer, that money is not lost.
In quite many places, hiring consultants has a very high corruption potential (e.g. the hiring manager favoring one of several suppliers). With employees they don't have this leverage.
Many companies have a policy like “freelancers, once kept on for 12 months, must be either hired full time, or fired” to deal with this
Consultanties get brought in to provide ass cover for management but they cant just say that.
How exactly does one become a consultant on a 1099? Go work for a consulting company a W-2? That’s how I did it four years ago. Well, the consulting company takes a nice chunk above what they bill you out for.
How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you found ‘em.
You have to legally start a company. That means some legal work (you don't need a lawyer, but it helps). You need to do the books yourself - and because this is very different areas of tax law you really should hire an accountant (only an hour/month, but having extra eyes look at the books is useful). If you do this right you make more money, but there are problems if you miss some legal detail that W-2 employees don't have.
Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places won't work with you. however most of the big consulting companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that work similar)
As I understood it, you're also on the hook for valuing yourself properly. You may think you're making more money, until you factor in vacations and medical and retirement and slack time and...and...and
In the United States you can create a company just by operating as one — “sole proprietorship.” A 1099 can also be issued to an individual.
It’s useful for a variety of reasons to have an LLC or an S-corp but you don’t need one to get started as a software contractor.
dang wont let u see this
but that's a good way to set sued as an individual
if ur serious, have multiple clients, can't guarantee u won't piss off a client somehow... get an LLC
The easiest way is to reach out to consulting companies and ask if they take subcontractors. Second easiest is to ask companies that want to hire you if they’ll take you as a contractor instead.
I was laid off once. The reason on paper was budgetary, times are tough, etc. But the real reason was that I was a bad fit for the role - for a variety of reasons.
I got pipped, and foolish me tried hard to work on the items in the pip (to no effect). The layoff came right on schedule.
A few years later, I was chatting with an old coworker and I came to find out that the director of engineering had demanded it. It was in direct response to me refusing to participate in building a knowingly DMCA-violating product.
The pip was theater. The "times are tough" bit was theater. The reality is that the director wanted me gone, and that is how they did it for legal coverage reasons.
I don't really blame the company - I was a bad fit, and I can see that clearly in hindsight. But it did teach me never to accept budgetary layoffs at face value.
I don't see the theater as bad or good. If anything, it's slightly good.
It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your work reputation (because layoff is public).
Imagine getting fired because you wanted to respect the DMCA of all things. I'd be curious for details, though you probably shouldn't tell.
I was never really concerned about the ethics, but was more worried that I'd be personally liable for it. I kept thinking about the VW emissions scandal, where the engineer that implemented it was given prison time.
In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about. I also never should have expected that I'd be able to change the director's mind by refusing to do what he said.
> In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about.
Wrong take.
You did the right thing. Fuck that guy.
you absolutely did the right thing. Are you doing well now?
Yes, I bounced back.
Getting soft-fired really shook me, and it was a hit to my self-confidence. I did learn some valuable life-lessons from it though, and including that nobody should ignore office politics.
Afterwards, I found a job that was a much better fit. That next job changed the direction of my career, and I'm very happy with where I am now.
Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will print money next year, so based on this prediction I will raise the budget for the FY. Then when the prediction of revenue fails, you do cuts, oh well you were wrong. But next year you can do the same thing. Game theory wise this works because if you're right, you bet big, hire big, are ahead next year vs your competitors that invested less. If it goes wrong you are seen as a serious executive that has the courage to have layoffs when needed, and if your market is ebbing your competitors will also be suffering somewhat.
It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.
This happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.
That is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article, government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets approved all the time because it looks good.
Oh, those hyperspecialized employees that can only work in one project and could never do the exact same thing if the thing's goal changed...
And yeah, those quick to materialize gains, where the manager can easily discover if a project worked within the same fiscal year...
Also dragons and unicorns, I guess... what a world those people live in!
One that is functionally different but causes the same type of morale hit is managers and upward equipping themselves with fully loaded MacBooks and iPhones, but equipping rank-and-file employees with shitty Dell laptops and budget tier Android phones.
That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies, but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.
Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit. This is especially true in government, and big companies are similar.
There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.
Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of clueless administrators that can't do much.
The government would never pay their internal employees the amount that consulting companies pay theirs. It would never be approved.
budget based economics may be the worst thing to happen to large organisations
Suddenly I'm connecting the relationship between "budget based economics" and "agile" as commonly implemented. It's trying to fit creativity into a budget. In the places that do it well, it's like "We're supposed to make some really great art, here's the crayons we can afford, sorry if it's not exactly right but it's what we could manage, do whatever you can, we will take it!" In places that do it poorly, it's like "we need you to make the Uber of the Mona Lisa, I'm gonna need you to find a way to make that work, but we can totally be flexible on this, which crayons do you need."
The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.
Worse is trying to fit creativity into a tight schedule.
Everything gets corrupted, today's agile is way worse than what came before in practice.
I have never even understood the approach. The sub-budgets within an organization seem so arbitrary and become games in and of themselves, often leading to frivolous purchases just to use up the budget and not get your budget slashed.
Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
Managers play games because they are looking out for their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is underspending, because they are tying up resources - companies will have a desired internal rate of return (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on their investments then a manger tying up capital is costing a lot.
Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share information. Sharing information at least cuts down on some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it has a limit at scale.
Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses gets done sometimes.
Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I think.
Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my reading is he basically tried to create a system where everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he hoped).
There's better and worse ways to try to get around the Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.
This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.
It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.
Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.
Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may not overlap with reality.
Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom" and thus push to get more and more people (either by grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is indeed how you create a "legible & convincing narrative" to increase your budget (end goal being more people, more power).
In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.
That's because they have a budget which is planned ahead (e.g., 2024 for 2025) for everything.
Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).
I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.
Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which don’t factor in continual employment of staff lead to the morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn’t actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale high is a goal (which it definitely isn’t at many companies.)
Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.
“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.
I agree.
Mismanagement of funds is one of the worst things. Is it pure incompetence?
Or is that they don't give a damn and that "let's get together 500+ people for a fully paid weekend" is too cool to cancel?
...like better an egg today than a hen tomorrow. I mean, they don't get affected anyways, they do get the egg and hen...!
Playing devil's advocate: Firing people has a huge financial impact - around $100,000 per person per year. The event only cost $50,000 once. So it might not be that significant, and at least the staff gets to enjoy a nice event. Why eliminate both when the event's cost is equivalent to just half a position?
This one's easy. Because you value your people more than the parties they can throw. The cost/benefit are not just monetary. If they were, the event would have no reason to happen under any circumstance.
You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.
I think it has more to do with the psychological effect than with money itself.
We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.
When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".
It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...
Let's hope the budget includes success then...
I'm not disagreeing - but I think it's worth pointing out that an employee on $40K actually costs the company a lot more ( can be as much as > 2x ) - not just employers tax, pensions contributions etc, but also the cost of factory/lab/office space and equipment and consumables[1].
[1] Assuming the consultants aren't also in the office with a desk etc
Employee headcount is also evaluated less favorably when potential investors evaluate the company's health. They're implicitly seen as a promise to continue paying them in the future, whether that's materially different from what the company does with contractors or not.
And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch of contractors not having their contracts renewed.
$40k is a tiny salary, too. Taxes, facilities, and benefits are going to be more than 2x that. A contractor paid $200k/year is likely cheaper in total cost than an employee paid $100k/year.
Surely this is a question of having skin in the game, where management is all game and employees all skin. If the clowns making decisions would get hit by bad ones, things would look differently. You now, actually "taking full responsibility".
One thing I learned the other day is to never believe the internal corporate newsletters. For an entire year, pretty much every single day would bring in an e-mail from Company BU A, or Cross-Company Initiative X, or Podcast with CEO, or such. Every single one of them would talk about the great successes in recovering from the economic crisis, the amazing results this quarter, the great product release here, another successful merger there, new perspectives on Bitcoin or AI or such from CEO, whatnot - all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed. And then a layoff wave finally reaches your department, and you learn that apparently the whole BU is deep in the red and they're forced to cut staff across the board, and it's been like this forever, and that's why there was an emergency meeting last Thursday (called "Financial Update Q3 for BU Y" or something, non-obligatory and otherwise not announced or discussed), and "don't you ever attend town halls?".
(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)
Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.
Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.
When narratives fail, to casual observers the failure seems sudden and out of the blue, but there are usually unmistakable signs of "narrative breakdown" that often become obvious to most observers only in hindsight. One of the most dramatic stories of a "failed narrative" we have ever read comes from Barton Biggs, in his book "Wealth, War and Wisdom":
>> "...the Japanese official battle reports and the Japanese press reported the Battle of the Coral Sea as a great triumph, and Midway was portrayed as a victory, not a defeat, although some loss of aircraft and ships were admitted. Although casualties must have been noted and grieved, Japanese society at the time was so united behind the war policy and believed so totally in the invincibility of the Japanese military, that defeat and economic failure were virtually inconceivable. It would have been unpatriotic to sell stocks..."
>> "Not every investor in Japan misread the battles at Coral Sea and Midway. Food was in short supply, and railings in the parks around the Imperial Palace were being dismantled for their iron. The Nomura family and Nomura Securities in mid-1942 began to suspect the eventual defeat of Japan. Although the newspapers and radio broadcast only good news about the course of the war, the Nomuras apparently picked up information in the elite tea houses of the upper class. Many of the naval officers and aviators involved in the battles at Midway and the Coral Sea had geishas, and when the officers failed to return, rumors began to circulate."
>> "The Nomura family, sensing something was amiss, began to gradually sell its equity holdings, and even sold short. Later they purchased real assets, probably reasoning that land and real businesses would be the best stores of value in a conquered country. These protected assets allowed the family to have the capital to finance the rapid expansion of Nomura Securities & Research in the immediate postwar years and eventually emerge as the dominant securities firm in Japan."
When did the narrative above "officially" fail? Many date it to August 15, 1945, six days after the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, when Emperor Hirohito addressed Japan on the radio to announce Japan's surrender, noting "...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..."
For most execs/people, there's a big difference between what people will say in a meeting and what they will write down. They feel the permanance of the writing or recording.
one of lessons i learned hard way: do not trust - or avoid - managers/higher-ups who do not want their things in written - even e-mails. While still have you sign all kind of stuff.
"the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small." - https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/
Centralised rule, surveillance, privileging the upper classes, meaningless statistics, perfomative loyalty; things capitalists say they hate about communism, they love when designing companies.
> "all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed."
Everything whizzing rapidly upwards while your cube farm gets more crowded and your tools slower and your once-respected skilled work devalued in favour of pump-n-dump funny-money schemes?
> "The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"
> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.
Basically:
* We were spending money like it was going out of style
* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.
* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.
This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech, that you need to try and get as much money out of your initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.
If it makes you feel any better, there is usually little connection between management wasting money last year and laying off employees this year. Downsizing targets are based on predicted future needs so if business is trending down they'll cut just as many employees even if they have an enormous amount of cash saved.
What's even more absurd than cost cutting after mismanagement is a layoff and cost cutting while having record profits. Look at most of the big tech layoffs last year and the year before. Every one of them was reporting more profit and revenue than ever before and still doing layoffs
It doesn't matter what the reason is. The reason is whatever will look least bad in the news (if it ever makes it in the news) - and is legal. Ignore the reason, it has nothing to do with you, it's not about you, it's a technical detail. But yes, it would be nice if the manager was helping their employees understand that.
Even for an investor keeping an eye on their holdings, give minimal weight to the reasons for a detail level layoff.
It's just normal late Capitalism syndrome - no one takes responsibilities, and everyone, at least everyone that is close to the trough tries to get his/her head into it.
From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants, it's everywhere. That's it.
"low level" do count in stats if need to show "savings" and can be easily replaced when needed. Also they do not generate profits but need resources (mentoring etc.). On the other side costs are tax deductible.
In my experience, the consultants likely recommend the layoffs, probably even helping select who to let go.
If they cut more than five $40k employees, they've made their $200k back.
Everybody makes mistakes. Higher up in the company (or goverment) mistakes are usually more expensive. Painful, but I see no way around this.
We are apparently going through a "year of efficiency" and most of us know what it means. After "more with less" round come layoffs so one might as well do some basic prep work, dust off resume, reach out to your support network.. just saying.
when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money
Working in corporate America has caused me to view layoffs as proof of managerial incompetence. I understand that the market doesn't see it that way, but that's the conclusion I've come to.
I think that the honorable thing in those companies is for a CEO to demand seppuku from a significant portion of the c-suite. At least as a form of solidarity with the workers put to the sword.
> management is apparently incapable of managing
That’s frequently the fundamental issue really.
Measuring a developer’s productivity as an IC is fairly easy. Measuring quality of manager’s decisions is tricky
Lets just add a metric (like loc or stockprice) - that will solve things. Gambling metrics will continue till lipservice improves.
not a single comment about overpopulation?
It's not just overspending it's over hiring too. IME they always go hand in hand.
Then those who spent years working hard with minimal staff are the ones to be laid off.
Um, I have seen irrationality all across the board. Market participants shooting themselves in the foot.
I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.
When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.
I have even explained to recruiters that there is an opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and don’t want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To their credit, some are not.
And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and then cut their task force. Many of them don’t care about you, but expect you to care about them. They’ll even expect you to stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won’t pay you overtime.
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They don't spend $200k on consultants just because it's fun. They do it when there are already difficulties in figuring out how to productively use the employees who make $40k (say 20 of them).
This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.
After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the advice a little:
- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.
- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.
- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.
The last two points are fine, however.
Indeed. The real discovery in the article is that the people who manage performance and the people who manage headcount were completely different people. The article writer had (common mistake) assumed that impressing the former would take care of the latter. It doesn't; the techniques to manage the headcount people are different.
I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about why beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable or looking out for you.
> the techniques to manage the headcount people are different
I would like to hear a little bit more about those techniques.
The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan layoffs know very little about the individual's other than their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful: it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of whether to be promoted or something different.
What other techniques are you aware of?
There are several types of layoffs:
1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people above you know it.
2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where you're fixing bugs and making improvements, not just keeping things ticking over.
3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by working in departments that bring in more revenue than they cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success; and in an area where the company's strategy calls for growth.
4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can do about this, except working at the head office, or a very large branch office where important projects are based.
5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to start sending out resumes and maybe getting the unemployment insurance on your car loan.
Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard of some people having great success with the opposite strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of these are hard-and-fast rules.
Thank you for this.
In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.
As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.
I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.
There is a halfway between 1 and 3 where the manager is told to drop 5% and rather than picking one dev per team the manager just squashes one “nice-to-have” application and drops that team.
There's also the shifting over-correction from "stack ranking is problematic and risks lawsuits about bias in performance counting" (because no one trusts performance metrics anymore) and 1 becomes "layoff a 'random' 5%" because "random" is the new "fair".
Or 5% and someone identifies a certain level that is costly and cuts that horizontally across the org to backfill with cheaper lower level employees.
There is one other thing you can sometimes pull off: tell your boss you could work for a different division. Often (but not always, perhaps not even the majority of times) when layoffs happen there are also moves to a different division that is hiring people. So you want to make sure you are on the list of people to recommend to the other division. (this sometimes means getting skills the other wants before the layoffs)
> Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving.
I actually thought about doing this early in my career and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few years off their path to being able to (ethically, without lying) put "Senior" on their resume.
It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are considering this I would also suggest you do it in a market/business area that you don't particularly care about. I've been in more than one interview where a senior executive who was very tied in on the business side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc) immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as a red flag.
The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but it's something to consider.
I generally agree with all that. You can absolutely be in the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes and there's not much you can do about it.
Yes. When the first dot-com bubble burst, my father was working on semiconductor manufacturing machines.
The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day before. The business was cashflow positive, not some crazy gamble.
But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of investors decided to get out of tech stocks.
Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.
Good points.
The key point is that people need to face today's economic/political realities which is that it is all "Realpolitik" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either learn how to play the game based on circumstances or suffer.
S.Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister of India said this recently which i think is highly applicable here (https://www.news18.com/india/eam-jaishankar-advice-stress-ma...);
Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected after a setback and constantly strive for self-improvement. “When I look at my own particular responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT – the more people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY – If you get along with people, they are more likely to do things for you. CREDIBILITY – if you are known to be good on words, people take you seriously," he said.
“My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it, you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember and hope what you said was right."
So make sure you have good contact with Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the abnormal (with caveats).
I think it comes down to a previous discussion on HN, "don't just crush tickets".
Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job security but doesn't help when your managers managers manager has to make cuts.
But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and being a person.
It might be. But I’ve been in the room when a very high performing team was given the ax. This was a team that had all kinds of kudos and objective measures showing they were better than their peers.
But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of that magnified the savings.
I’ve done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and the advice I’d tell people is don’t think it’s a reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.
Most of the time it’s just macro factors out of your control.
Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets off the board and my team did $x”
You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).
You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours.
It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
> trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there.
This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.
IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012.
No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.
When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.
I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.
“By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.”
This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.
I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process.
One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects.
The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.
The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.
But no one to a first approximation is going to do it. Statistics show that on average, people only look at your resume for 6 seconds.
And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.
I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.
I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs
I generally disagree with the CV point but the "6 seconds" anecdote doesn't ring true to me except for obviously unfit applicants. I have definitely spent less than 10 seconds looking at a resume but it's because I immediately rejected the applicant - for example, the role is a solid mid-level or senior role and the applicant just graduated college and has no relevant experience or open source projects.
I want to be interested in your resume. If I'm interviewing you, you can be absolutely sure I've spent at least 20-30 minutes reading over your resume, looking up your past companies/schools, getting a sense of what you've done and pulled out a few relevant or interesting things to ask about.
I think the "6 seconds" thing is mostly HR drones who are barely qualified to write the resumes they're reading, let alone judge them, and are simply sorting into "yes" and "no" piles.
Do you think that most managers spend 30 minutes reading over a resume and do everything else they have to do?
I can guarantee you that none of my managers spent more than 5 minutes looking over my resume and 4 of my six lady jobs have been strategic early hires, 1 was at BigTech where one person in my loop was my eventual manager and my current one was for one of I think 25 highest level IC positions at my current company of 600-700 people.
I am not buying the oft-quoted statistics in HR/Recruiting which like most popular adages is mostly made up from a few anecdotes and widely disseminated which people then accept because "everybody says so". The key is to hook in the reader from the summary/qualifications on the first page.
The "tell me about yourself" question is one of the worst to ask and i never do this. It is so open ended that people start rambling. Instead get them to focus (this also calms their nerves) by asking about notable jobs picked from their resume "what did you do as ... at ..." and dig more as needed. Do this for a couple more jobs if available and you will get to see how confident the candidate is, how he communicates, the depth of his knowledge and his modes of thinking. From here, you generalize to what the job actually needs and give the candidate some idea of the job and its environment and ask how he hopes to fit in and contribute. This makes things clear to both interviewer and interviewee.
I also do not place much weight on personality/psychology tests/questions. People generally cannot be truthful in their answers to questions like "how do you deal with conflict with your co-worker?" etc. Here i trust to "gut feeling" based on non-verbal impressions, verbal communication and pointed questions (challenge the candidate by taking a contrarian stance and see how he responds).
Finally, i make sure that the interviewee at the very outset understands that though i am the interviewer it does not mean that i am more knowledgeable than him in his areas of expertise. This works great by boosting his confidence which then leads to a more natural interaction.
Recruiting/HR is a complex art where you have to consider various factors to build a picture of a person (suited to a role) from factual data and psychology. IMO a good way is to start with an understanding of Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory For a nice overview, see the book Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.
The fact is that every open req especially for remote positions get hundreds of resumes within the first hour, who is going to read that? An 8 page resume goes straight to the trash. Part of a job of a “senior” is good communication skills and knowing your audience. An eight page resume shows laziness since they didn’t take the time to make it shorter and no one is going to listen to or read anything 8 pages especially as a manager who just wants to know what is going on a high level.
I ask the tell me about yourself question partially to assess their communication skills and getting to the point.
Do you think people who are conducting an interview loop at large companies are going to go through an 8 page resume? Yes I’ve been on both sides of a BigTech interview loop and have gone through the interview training process there.
Even at smaller companies when building a team and I’ve had 80% of the say so about who gets hired, I still needed evidence to take the CxO/director and couldn’t go by “gut feel”.
And when dealing with customers (I work in consulting now) or “the business” you have to have a strategy to deal with interdepartmental conflicts, different stakeholders have different priorities, some people don’t want to change etc. I’m not talking about a conflict with another coworker arguing about which design pattern to use.
You have missed the point of the long CV. It is not that the recipient has to read everything. As mentioned, the first couple of pages is the resume. However the details are there to provide more info. as needed. Contrary to what you think i have had very good response to such a layout. Often times they see a company/project/technology there (even if old) which rings a bell with them and which they are then eager to discuss. That is the point; Give them all the info. in which you are strong so that they can make a better informed decision. The same is what i look for when i am the interviewer; a few bullet points on a 2-page resume which basically tell me nothing is useless.
Incidentally, Jeff Bezos does something similar with his 6-page memo (plus annexes) for meetings; Same idea different domain; More details help better decision-making.
"Gut Feel" is absolutely needed to give your input on Team Fit, Conflict Management and similar other intangible Human factors. Some companies are doing Myers-Briggs etc. but i give them lower weightage (because they can be gamed by practice) over subjective feelings.
A report on a interviewee should include objective assessments (knowledge, experience etc. and your inferences based on them) and subjective assessments (temperament, maturity etc.)
I worked at AWS for three years (Professional Services). Using Amazon as an example of a good corporate culture and how companies should behave is not the argument you think it is.
But I see a few scenarios.
You have a strong network and the resume is a formality. In that case it’s easy enough to tailor your resume for the job. I don’t need to put that I wrote FORTRAN and C on VAX and Stratus mainframes in the mid 90s. There is no need for an 8 page resume. The year before last I had two offers for strategic positions based on my network.
The second case you are targeting a company where you know you have a competitive advantage, again in that case, you only need to have a resume that focuses on what gives you a competitive advantage. In my case, now I focus on strategic cloud consulting positions that focus on app development. In that case, I only need to focus on my job at a startup in 2018, talk in broad strokes about my time at AWS (working there automatically gets call backs by the way), and when the day comes, when I leave my current job as a “staff architect”.
The worse case is if you are spamming your resume far and wide and you are looking for any generic job. I look at an 8 page resume and then I have to take the time to see what is this person trying to communicate - it goes in the trash and I move on. I have hundreds of other resumes that I can get through quickly.
Of course if the company is reaching out to me, it’s even easier to tailor my resume for the job requirements. I have my “career document” to pull from either way that is as long as needed.
But even then I’m not going back even to the low level work I did in 2012 for Windows CE devices.
I am not talking about general Amazon corporate culture so your caveat makes no sense. I am talking about the practice of one specific technique which leads to better decision-making and which has also been validated by other people adopting it. Here is Jeff's own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
I consider 2-page resumes no better than a powerpoint presentation (i.e. almost useless) and furthermore when i see people tailor it to what they think i should know i consider it maybe trying to hide something. This is because by omitting companies they take away a vector for me to check references and more. Note that this is different from highlighting relevant experience/knowledge.
Your scenarios are nothing new from what you have already mentioned earlier; And spamming is not what i am talking about. That is a policy decision made by each person based on his circumstances.
You and most folks are simply parroting current practices in HR/Recruiting which are broken and need to be rethought from the ground up. To repeat once more, all details matter at some level in recruiting. As they say "measure twice and cut once" and "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".
Honestly I don't want to read narrative prose which is as likely to be a lie as anything else on the resume/CV. A half page might be fine if you've got a dozen CVs to look at for an ultra-specific role. If you just need a half-decent Golang developer and have 80 resumes that pass the initial screen? I'm not reading 40 pages of fluff, and if I'm not going to read all of its it's unfair to read any of it.
If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.
I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.
I already pointed out in my other comments that the first couple of pages is the resume but the details are given to consult as needed. This is how it should be since more details help one make better decisions. The current Recruiting/HR practices are broken which nobody seems to question. Human Resource is very important in this highly competitive economy where a single employee can change the entire future of the company, and yet people are using keyword searches, bullet point explanations and snap judgements for recruiting. Add in the fact that there is almost no training given to new employees nowadays which means it is even more important to recruit the right person.
You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.
A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg
This...
And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?
Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.
That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.
The point of the article isn't to just "work less", but rather that working above and beyond what you're contracted for in a large organization in the long run ultimately won't matter. The takeaway is that your "extra" efforts can be better spent elsewhere: family, personal projects, interviews for next gig, etc.
The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)
Nah, its just them playing the victim. You can totally get noticed in a big company. Or overlooked in a small.
Throwing in the towel and saying I'm not going to bother in the future... yeah I'd never be hiring you in the first place.
I don't think the original post is advocating for just "throwing in the towel" here. Instead they're simply stating that working what you're specifically contracted for is a more reasonable and sustainable model than always going "above and beyond" for little to no gain to your work life and at great cost to your personal life.
Corporations by design don't "care" about you, they only care about maximizing profits and returns for their shareholders. Sure you can get "noticed" by higher ups, but those individuals have no obligations to you in the day to day operations unless you're getting cozy with the (increasingly externally conteacted) deciders/architects of the next upcoming re-org.
It's not explicitly stated in the article, but their call-out of the behavior of large companies speaks to the missing piece of the puzzle here: the "stage" of the company's lifecycle plays a crutial role in how much your "above and beyond" contributions matter. 10 person start-up? Matters significantly. 1000+ person org? Drop in the bucket.
Nothing magic or particularly reliable, but a few things stemming from the basics - layoffs happen because the accountants say there isn't enough money, and [Function X] seems to cost more than [Profit/Opportunity Y] that is assigned to it. Then a bunch of people have no job the next week. So to avoid being picked up in a layoff, it is helpful to talk to the accountants, figure out what Y is and what X you are in, and if the numbers aren't promising work to get re-categorised as a Z, increase Y or negotiate to change how things are measured.
Most product teams are organised around the idea that someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit. Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.
Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the time software people show no interest in whether the plans they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading to more money.
Eg, in the original article I see things like "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack him.
If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to make it so.
[0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something that can be assumed.
I agree with this, maybe I'd summarize things in a slightly different way: think of employment as a mutually beneficial transaction. That doesn't necessarily mean simply working the contracted hours, but keep in mind that jobs are, these days transactional in nature.
I can go above and beyond, work on the weekends etc, but there should be a benefit to me. That could be because I learn something and it sets me up for my next job, I increase my chances of a promotion, or just that it's something interesting to me personally.
I think there is probably less cynicism this way too, because this is how most companies look at employees too.
Just got accepted on my first job last month. Yet, last week, company (>500 ppl) already announced some small layoffs.
Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?
If you're actually down to jump ship you can probably be upfront about it.
It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.
Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of technical knowledge is essentially based on vibes. My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.
If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they agreed.
Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.
> My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate
I don't put dates on my education anymore. shrug
I don't even put education anymore.
I dropped out of university, so in my early years it took a lot of tuning my resume to give the impression that I had a degree without actually saying it. Thankfully I had taken summer courses at a different, nearby university for two years before college. Eventually I would just put the years, the universities, and the major I was pursuing. Now I just leave it off the resume.
I had one manager who found out after the fact and told me he wouldn't have hired me if he realized, but he was glad he did.
I had an interview where they asked for a college transcript and then grilled me on why I failed Martian Geology and why I only got a C in Vector Calculus. I was given an offer, but declined it because of that experience. I dodged a bullet too; I've seen reports that the company sues former employees just to cost them money.
> you can probably be upfront about it.
But for the unwritten interview rule: Don't be negative.
Even if the interviewer knows you're in a dumpster fire, you have more to lose.
If you just started at your first job i would focus first on becoming an asset for your team.
Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft skills and maintain friendships.
There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.
There's no need. Just tell them that you're keeping tabs on the job market and would switch for a compelling offer. It's up to them whether they have one for you.
Whether or not you start actively looking for other jobs, you can take any opportunities you have to better develop your network. It's harder just starting out but post my first fairly extended role out of grad school, every one of my jobs was through someone I knew.
I read somewhere that 1 in 20 job postings is fake.
So you just explain to the fake job interviewer that you're the 1 in 20 fake job candidate.
There's a 5% chance they'll understand.
Well, you say just that. It even demonstrates a beginning of business acumen.
Everyone does it, recruiters aren’t naive. Once I became old enough to hire people, I understood it’s ok (depending on the audience, beware) to say “I can start on Monday but I’ll take two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it’s already planned.” Better have employees who are mature enough to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I told him during the first month he shouldn’t work more than 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental, bank, insurances, child care, etc.).
I was laid off during dot-bomb and was lucky enough to land a good (actually better) job through someone I knew pretty quickly. Pay wasn't great and they barely came through dot-bomb themselves later. But whatever.
I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business. Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job market was really tough at the moment.
But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.
> through someone I knew
The best interview hack
Yeah, I think the first email I dropped was to this guy who owned a small company we had been a client of in an earlier role. He invited me up to lunch and was there with his (later) COO. It was basically a casual interview. Later, we discussed some contract work but he basically decided to just hire me. Which was nice because it was basically nuclear winter during dot-bomb--nothing else that even vaguely resembled a lead.
I think this sort of thing bugs a lot of people here because they think that some sort of theoretical skill assessment should be what matters. But that's not how the world works for the most part.
I never understood the advice of to take on impactful work. How does work? The team is assigned units of work and then individuals are usually assigned the tasks. The only way I see it to work is to be on a team that works on impactful projects.
I know this probably doesn't help you now, but I negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.
I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.
> picked up a few low hanging projects
In what industry does a new hire just not have someone telling them what to do?
>individuals are usually assigned the tasks
The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.
this is great and subtle advice worth reading twice. I'd add that a great "getting something out of it" reason is learning and reputation.
Also, keep yourself employable. What you get hired to do and what you'll find yourself doing 6 months later, 2 years later, etc. aren't going to be the same. Whatever you are doing, keep in mind how much of it is really a marketable skill and how much of it is specialized to a small slice of the industry or perhaps even just your current company. Move within a company to keep working on what is useful to one's own career. I would only accept dead end work for a significant pay bump or as I'm finalizing for retirement.
Not sure why you got downvoted for this. My current role started very tech-heavy and morphed into almost completely documentation as my management found out I'm one of the only ones at the company who doesn't suck at grammar and photography. Now my day-to-day really wouldn't be useful for getting another job with a similar title (and pay) to my current one, and I need to devote extra time outside of work to keeping up with actual tech skills that I used to be able to develop on-the-job.
One of my earliest jobs was supposedly programming but was actually a slow descent into tech support for in house applications under the hood and I glad I took that as a hint to move elsewhere. Since then, it has always been a balance between doing what the company needs but also making sure I'm positioned to learn new technology or otherwise be growing my career in some fashion.
I've experienced a company not only treating its employees as numbers in a sheet, but also actively lying to them.
I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US. Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to accomplish even more the next year by adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we know that we ended up training our replacements.
Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to take severance and leave as well.
The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends' experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit you.
> adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks
Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they chop our heads off now, you bet they’re gonna be left with ruins. Fuck them.
Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.
I saw IBM uproot an entire support team, persuading them to sell their homes and relocate their children to another U.S. state with more lenient layoff laws. Once the team had moved, the company made everyone redundant.
The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies is off the scale:
"...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace
Nothings going to change until consequences for this behavior is established.
Reason #54298 why IBM deserves nothing.
That something like this can be legal shows how f*cked up the US is.
How many people are involved in scheming such strategies? There must be leaks of the planning, right?
Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of salt.
I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them often in management since they are attracted to pay, power and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and human interactions to almost perfection over years at least under normal, controlled, and previously experienced settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start to show.
Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest concentration. Another areas are those with real power, whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice guy and get, survive and even thrive there.
In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant. Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid off about half the team, most of them being from the subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they were all like “Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!”.
The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract since I was a specialized SME.
> but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management
What signs were there? Or was it simply some subconscious feeling?
Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we want them to level up quickly).
Everything was subtle:
Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"), they were looking at each other often when making decisions (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).
In the final weeks management started suddenly taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that didn't make sense.
That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda
Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job
One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.
The purpose of the system is what it does
The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.
You can graduate from high school and leave your hometown, but the attitudes of high school remain in the office: the cliques, the cruelty, the in-groups and out-groups, the manipulation, the brown-nosing, the behind-the-back-shit-talking. The C students from your high school are now mid level managers above you and brought the mentality straight from there to the office.
>The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.
So what exactly are the parent doing all along?
(I think I know the answer - they are inexperienced/dysfunctional themselves)
if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)
that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning
Obedient workers.
I've been part of two really good teams, one went away because the company closed, the other because it was managed into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right with any level of management to have a bunch of at best average teams and then one very good team in the same org chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape along.
Maybe society is submitted to a law of averages..
True, one can build a society with no layoffs etc. but collectively we are just not smart enough to do it.
Systems built around profit seek efficiency, thus standardization.
even without the notion of profit, averages reduce risks and helps survival imo
>One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best..
What astonishes me is that people fall for that BS.
I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.
At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")
I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.
We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?
You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.
For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.
The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)
We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.
I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.
The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?
Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.
Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.
But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.
It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.
I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments).
But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.
What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.
> Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.
Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.
Do you now have more of a personality outside work?
I’m going through this now, just resigned due to burnout while being a “rockstar developer” with no life recently.
I agree with the bad idea to put all your persona in a job.
At the same time One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
> One will have issues if his persona doesn’t really match with his (min)8h/day 5days/week activity.
I really don’t think that this is true. Plenty of people work boring repetitive jobs such as assembly line workers. Pick up the pay check, commence actual living.
The dream is to work doing something that you love, but that’s not going to always pan out; and that’s ok.
Most people who work those "boring" jobs have found ways to make it enjoyable. They still pick up their paycheck, but they have found some way to enjoy it. They talk the the person at the next station. They challenge themselves to how fast they can do thing (often the safety officer needs to stop them from getting better, which is itself a challenge)
Assembly line workers invariably like assembling things. Even if they don't start liking it, they usually change their personas.
The one job I can think of where the people really don't like is telemarketing. But it's a rare exception, and people tend to not stay on it.
It helps to find smallish but stable companies, making enough to be safe while not having crazy ambitions of 2x growth every xx months. It's much more relaxed, there is less office politics, churn rates are much lower, stress is non existent, &c. Usually they have older employees with families and a life outside of work.
>I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.
True, I got to wonder if people who write these posts have any healthy relationships at all? Surely they would have had parents/relatives/friends etc. speak of layoffs?
You can't be aware of the toxicity when your parents, your teachers, your mentors, your bosses and your friends have all the same ethos (and actively put down any other opinion under slurs such as "socialism", "communism", "sloth", "failure of a human being", etc.)
You can: that's (part of) what fiction books are for.
Like The Fountainhead?
Can add Atlas Shrugged and Nineteen Eighty-Four to the list.
The Fountainhead has value in that it helps teach you that there are people who think like Ayn Rand. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic, though: there are better books to learn about the world through. (But if you read more than two or three books, you'll quickly learn the problems with Ayn Rand's worldview.)
Books aren't mutable in the same way that arguments are: you can actually sit and dissect a book, in a way that you can't dissect a politician's rhetoric or a parent's scorn. So… kinda, yes: even The Fountainhead is worth reading, to some people (not that I'd recommend it).
> "socialism", "communism",
Both of them as Marx defined them are incompatible with other ideas and so deserve slurs. There are progressive ideologies with influence from Marx that do allow for other ideas to exist. There are many people who will throw away all of liberal philosophy for pure socialism. As soon as you allow for the liberal differences in outcome you have to agree for there won't be true socialism and you have to debate what (if any!) level of safety net you provide and further accept there should not be agreement. This isn't just that we won't agree, but the strong statement that an agreement would be a bad thing.
Thank you for this unprompted demonstration that the mere mention of "communism" sends some into a ferocious - and vacuous - crusade.
Meanwhile bosses boss people around.
> Meanwhile bosses boss people around
And with that you showed exactly why I have the knee jerk reaction to attack communism every time it is brought up. There is a constant play of this type of thing and people are starting to think that because it is unchallenged it might be right.
Those 'progressive ideologies' with influence from Marx are what make all of what we see today happen. From killing people if they cant pay for healthcare to these sociopathic layoffs 'because AI'. So 'influence from Marx' is just nonsense.
The simple reason why other ideas are not compatible with those two are because those 'other ideas' are geared for making this happen to maximize profit of the few. That's why they are incompatible and whenever you allow them this is what you end up with.
That is a completely false representation of what then other ideas really are about.
At one extremum there's e.g. Brad Pitt, how could you tell him not to base his whole persona around its job ?
This is the premise of the movie Sunset Boulevard, and of the much newer The Subtance. Tl;dr, it's not healthy for celebrities either.
Someone should develop an LLM-therapist for this situation.
Little did he know that the therapist was one of the first AI that got invented, 40 years ago or so.
Eliza was developed in the mid-1960's, so that was more like 60 years ago, just for clarification.
Thanks for that, now I need a therapist for how old I'm feeling
I feel like therapy is common-sense pattern matching and using evocative metaphors. Ofcourse, in old days, one had to be well read to know these metaphors and life experiences of others, but through social media such knowledge and other's life experiences are on my fingertips. Very glad that I can tap into society's experiences library.
Yes, but was it FDA approved?
I think a fundamental reason is that some people build their identity around the only community they are a part of -- their job.
Like, book clubs, political parties, community centres, sport associations etc used to be the place for that. And work was also a place for that. My parent generation worked at like 3 different employees in their whole career.
> their whole persona has already been built around their job
Maybe this is one of the unspoken goals of bringing people back to the office.
> we're family
My family doesn't give me performance reviews.
Mine was before my career started in earnest as I took a job during one of the summer breaks in college, worked 10-11h a day with a commute of 3h in total on top of that without even having a contract on paper only for my employer to first suggest I work for minimum wage and then not pay me at all after the first month.
Naturally, I walked, but to this day I can't believe how naive/stupid I was back then.
I dont get it, everyone wants to work for big tech or big corporations in general and then wonder why they do stuff like this.
Go to small companies, yes they pay less but also yes: you will have real impact and they actually need you.
Nah, small companies are burnout mills. Early in my career, I had explicitly worked on small companies and 4/4 times screwed over. Immediately when the big work is done and investments(or major profits) are in, suddenly the management starts replacing everyone with expensive consultants or their best chums from some failed business somewhere and starts strategic push out by stagnating.
While my experience can be rare/unique, at least at Medium/BigCo, my soul burning gets compensated, small ones are just “we are like family right?” and then push out once technical/financial growth starts rearing its head.
I’ve worked for the smallest startups (2 employees) to the biggest company (100k employees).
Everything can bring you burnout if the management is toxic. It’s independent on the size of the company. I’m now working for a small company that feels like a family even if they don’t say it.
I worked at mostly small companies and had one 3.5 year stint at BigTech.
“pay less” is an understatement. Top of band for most Big enterprise companies or smaller companies is about the same that a new college grad gets at BigTech.
While I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than go back to BigTech at 50, if I were young and unencumbered instead of a 50 year old empty nester, I would make the trade off in a heart beat
Small companies can have their own problems. They may only somewhat overlap with the problems at big companies--although both need to make money at the end of the day. But they're far from a panacea.
I also thought that small companies are better in that regard. But no, they often have their own toxic idiosyncrasies, like when a little power goes too much to the management’s heads. A small company that’s YOURS is better and actually needs you.
Maybe its different in Europe due to workers rights? Never had bad experience in small companies but plenty in corps.
Big companies can double your compensation though, it's a tradeoff.
People have a concept of corporate jobs that is just plain wrong. You are nothing but slave labor. You are treated well only as long as you are needed. But when that is not true, you will be treated for what you are.
You might think this is an anti-corporation view. But the truth is that corporation have become anti-people. Is Purdue Pharma the friend of the people they addicted to ? Is Starbucks the friend of the baristas they squeeze to make a profit?
Some of the "best", as in wealthiest corporations, treat people with contempt. Here's looking at you apple, amazon, google, facebook and microsoft.
Since Citizens United vs FEC these companies now "lobby" to get what they want and have corrupted what should be our democracy into a corpocracy. Union busting Amazon controls one of the major sources of information in the US. How much does microsoft owe in taxes now? How much money is off shore?
Corporations are an outdated, ineffective form of economic collaboration. They are designed to make profit at any cost to customers and employees. Colonialism anyone? And boy, are they stupid. Greedy, ruthless, but stupid.
Supposedly there are a bunch of technically skilled folks here on HN. Maybe they should start thinking about alternatives to corporation style jobs.
I like how Richard Branson does things at Virgin. I have tried to adopt similar practices in mine. Basically we do our best to move you around to somewhere else, but you are never fired. It works really well for us.
> You are nothing but slave labor
This is an absurd and out of touch thing to say to a crowd mostly made up of highly paid engineers.
This is a very negative to look at employment in general:
Whatever the skill - pushing rocks up a hill or pushing code into a repo - someone with power over you is taking half your waking day to generate disproportionate compensation.
I personally see the alternative viewpoint which is I am able to provide for my entire family a life of non-work because I sacrifice 50% of what would be idle time without them.
Ultimately you need something to do during your waking hours. I give 50% to the company and 50% to my family.
Historically the slaves of the ultrawealthy often lived much better lives than common free people.
No it is not, just because one slave is paid more than another slave it does not make the former a less of a slave.
But it's good that you think that way. Keeps the system going. We need more of you guys.
[dead]
I know what you mean, but a 500K software engineering job doesn't seem to match what you say...
Doesnt it? It requires a $180,000~ minimum to get by as a family of 4 including 2 kids in San Francisco according to statistics. Before taxes and unexpected expenses and other things. And VERY few people get that $500k. The rest get shafted by the system like others.
The zero-sum competition for housing absorbs any wage level you throw at it. If you can fault the employer for something in this scenario, it is for locating the role in the Bay Area. Which they would tell you is a concession to the existing talent pool.
It's not about fault. It's about business. Corporations have no moral obligation to you and you have no moral obligation to corporations.
500k/y jobs are not common and as such the vast majority of us are not making that much.
> The Broken Trust of Modern Work
> Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions, the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the company was financially stable, your job was secure.
> But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-breaking financial results.
From the author's website:
> I've been working as a Software Developer since 2016
I've been in the tech industry almost 30 years. I saw the dot com boom and the collapse. Hiring like crazy in the late 1990's with companies have having signs "WE ARE HIRING!" outside their parking lot where you could just stop on your lunch break and have a new job by the end of the day.
I've worked at companies posting big profits but still had layoffs to underperforming groups. When your profit margin is 10% but another group is 40% they will sell off or shut down the lower margin groups. Sometimes there are offers for internal transfers but it depends on the skill set.
After the dot com collapse I've never felt any trust or loyalty to my company. I have felt a huge amount of trust and loyalty to my coworkers. I still work hard. It can still be fun. But if someone needs a job it is great to have a wide network of former coworkers.
I've worked at 8 companies and only at the first 3 did I just blindly apply. The other 5 were former coworkers who recruited me to join. Then I do the same for them.
I've worked with some people for 15 years at 4 different companies sometimes with gaps of 3-4 years in between but we meet for lunch once or twice a month and keep in touch.
I was lucky to dodge the layoff-bullet a few times in my 26 year stint at Apple. (The layoffs were almost exclusively at the start of my career there, mid-90's, as Apple was circling the drain.)
I was told by a coworker, when I was over 50 or so, that they could not fire me because I could turn around and make it about age discrimination at that point. I don't know if my coworker was correct — there is, as was mentioned in the blog post, a weaselly way where they lay off whole teams to avoid the blowback. (And then may cherry-pick a few of the laid-off engineers and make them a quick offer on another team.)
Earlier though in my career I had a very cool manager (hi, Steve!) that made it clear to me that The Corporation doesn't give a fuck about me. That, to that end, I needed to chart my own career path and not rely on might bright-eyed "beamishness" to get me anywhere.
In the end I did stay with Apple for the whole ride but was quicker to switch teams when I thought I was being either overworked or under-compensated. Seeing the company as the cold entity it is was in fact a liberating concept for me. Fortunately I didn't need to be personally impacted by a layoff to find that out.
> was quicker to switch teams when I thought I was being either overworked or under-compensated
Calling out internal mobility (and normalized support for taking advantage of it!) as a key corporate culture value.
I've worked for companies that make this hard/toxic/impossible and companies that make this easier/normal.
The latter are always better, healthier companies.
This. Without going into specifics, I attempted to internally transfer to another team for higher level/better pay position. My current boss said he doesn't have a problem with it. I pre-cleared everything with the possible new boss, but I got mysteriously blocked. Few months later, team member from the other team indicated that they were told not to let it happen ( and who said no ).
Needless to say, I am miffed. The market is what it is right now, but not only am I not 'allowed' to move around, but stuck with the same pay/benefits, because my raise was.. lets say not great.
There is not enough .. not hate.. not enough awareness of how corps fuck you over and HN can help with that a little.
I've seen this but with the guy's manager being the blocker. Manager tells high-performing employee that he's gone (probably for some BS personal reason--the guy was good), but company policy is that he gets two weeks notice before his last day, and if he can find another team to transfer to, then he can stay. Well, since he's a great employee, multiple teams are interested, but Manager blocks them all, and the guy ends up having to leave.
Yeah, I have heard about "black balling" within a company.
>Fortunately I didn't need to be personally impacted by a layoff to find that out.
I really am perplexed with these kind of articles where the author has an epiphany of sorts, Are they living under a rock? My best guess - it's a click bait article.
> when I was over 50 or so, that they could not fire me because I could turn around and make it about age discrimination at that point.
If that's true, that could explain some of the age discrimination we see in the hiring phase... "if we hire this guy, we can never fire him". Illegal but impossible to prove, just like the reluctance to hire young women because they might get pregnant.
It has been 1.5 years since I was laid off for 6 months. Here is what I learned about this in my 19 year career in software (mostly in JavaScript):
* If you can do the job but nobody else can and it’s a critical role you are probably immune from layoffs even with a horrible annual evaluation. It’s not you that’s critical, it’s the job you fill that’s critical.
* if you take deliberate actions to make yourself critical, such as the only person who knows the code base, it’s only a matter of time before the mega corp dumps you. Self-appointed critical people are too expensive and viewed as toxic by management, but you can probably get away with this at a mom and pops shop.
* once incompetence becomes the universally accepted norm it doesn’t matter that you can do what others cannot. Everybody is a replaceable beginner irrespective of their titles and years of experience and treated exactly as such. The survivors are the people that don’t rock the boat.
* if you have years of experience operating, managing, and authoring both people and technology in side projects you are probably far further along into your career than you are getting paid for. If your career is stagnant trying doing something wildly different and see what happens. I achieved rapid promotion after changing careers.
* don’t ever work more than you have to unless it’s something you want to do knowing you won’t get paid for it. I liked writing personal software outside of work because at work it could do my job for me or it frees me from the restrictions of shitty commercial software.
* the best way to impress management is to 1. do less work and 2. solve tough problems and share your solutions. Don’t be special. Demonstrate value.
> It’s not you that’s critical, it’s the job you fill that’s critical.
I think at a big enough company the people making layoff decisions don't know or care what job is critical. In some cases that means your job wasn't as critical as you thought. But I've also seen layoffs that seem just downright stupid. Literally saw someone laid off then re-hired to a different team a couple weeks later with a substantial bump to their pay.
At a certain level of abstraction nothing will save you. Critical job? Bean counters don't know the specifics of each team or project. High level? Cost too much, not contributing enough to short term goals.
I was once told that a lot of executive level management was based off gut instinct more than cold logical decision making. It would not surprise me if this also applied to deciding who is laid off.
It’s your manager and skip level’s job to make sure your VP knows the company is fucked if they lay your team off. I can guarantee you that no matter how evil Oracle is — the king of bean counters and mismanagement — they aren’t going to accidentally lay off the core Oracle cloud teams. Your job is to get onto those teams.
Every business has key teams, you just have to find them. For some businesses tge key teams are not in your domain (non-tech company) and you are just a cost center. The only option is to jump ship to a tech first company.
> I was once told that a lot of executive level management was based off gut instinct more than cold logical decision making. It would not surprise me if this also applied to deciding who is laid off.
It would surprise me if it didn't apply to deciding who is laid off.
> I liked writing personal software outside of work because at work it could do my job for me or it frees me from the restrictions of shitty commercial software.
You have to be careful on this one.
Often (it varies by jurisdiction), blanket rules by companies that all software you write in your spare time are their property can be safely ignored as invalid. But if it is heavily related to your current job then (again depends on jurisdiction) then they probably do own the copyright, possibly even if they don't have an explicit contractual provision for it.
If you're using your own spare-time software at work and benefiting from it there, it would be hard to argue it's not related.
Yeah, I got stung by that early in my career. So now all my personal software is licensed either CC0 or AGPL3.0. That is first thing I do. Secondly, I don't talk about it at work.
The key here is don't be stupid. Don't write the software on company time or on company equipment. My experience has further taught me:
1. Most employers don't want the software. They want the person writing the software.
2. Once your peers discover that its you writing the software they use there is a good chance they will immediately move on to something else. In JavaScript world "Invented Here" syndrome is extreme and developers do not trust quality software could ever come from people they know.
3. If the software was in use before you got to the organization then you are in the clear.
4. Have multiple lines of alignment, such as a part time job and/or contractual obligations elsewhere. Employers will not fight other employers to gain ownership of your pet project. In my case I have a part time job in the military and the military has the most liberal IP rules on the planet. Now I am a defense contractor on a project with multiple contract vendors, so who would really own my pet project: the contractor that pays my bills, the client that pays the contract, or the other contractor who manages the contract.
5. If its your personal project you are free to abandon it at any time and use your time to play video games. You are also free to abandon that job and go do something else.
If the company owns your software than you don't have the right to set licensing terms. If the company fights things and wins (a big if), your license terms mean nothing. If you contribute to upstream projects they could have big problems backing out your changes.
Which is an argument for better laws around what you do in your personal time.
Of course as you say, most companies don't really care about such work so long as you are not competing with them.
> If the company owns
That is entirely a matter of initiation. If the work initiates from the employer there is no question the work is owned by the employer. Less clear, but still very clear, is if the work occurs on employer time and/or equipment. If the work initiates from your personal mind far separated from employer guidance then its a personal project.
Yes, I am aware of some Mattel doll lawsuit where a guy created action figures on his own time outside of work and the toy making employer assumed ownership of that personal project. This is an extreme edge case though, because the employer had to prove the personal project was work residual from employment work and had to go to court and sue their employee. The motivation there is that the employer liked the employee's idea enough to want the freedom to pursue that idea as a future business interest.
This never happens in software unless an employee builds something to compete with the business interests of the employer. That is far easier to prove, malicious intent, and not the same thing.
The reason this never happens in software is that it radically opens a liability window that did not exist before. For example, consider Facebook. Facebook is not a software company, which is a company that sells software. Facebook is a media company that provides advertising and happens to write software for internal use. If Facebook were to sue their own employee to gain a new unrelated software product line then they become a software company and then become open to lawsuits, competition, and trust concerns they didn't have to concern themselves with before. If Facebook did want to assume ownership of an employee's pet project it would be far cheaper to just buy it from the employee or pay the employee to work on that idea as a job function. If the employee did not want to give their personal project to Facebook then Facebook could always fire the employee and start the idea from scratch under Facebook branding, which is also cheaper than suing their employee.
To the last point, there are few ways to lose respect faster than spinning your wheels with all kinds of tasks. Without consciously recognizing it, upper management is looking for people who understand and live the Pareto principle.
What did you change careers to?
I was hired as a developer of APIs on this big enterprise API management system, but then promoted to lead of operations on the project.
> The Myth of Job Security in Germany
> Since I was working for a German entity of a company, I want to address a common myth about job security in Germany. Many people believe that it’s nearly impossible to be fired in Germany. While this is partially true for individuals who have completed their probation period, it doesn’t hold up in the context of layoffs. If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
The author decries how he was laid off despite his contribution then - without a hint of irony - says Germany isn't as safe for employees as most people think because layoffs are legally required to take into account information completely disconnected from your contributions at work.
Of course if you have legal structures that make it harder to fire people based on what they do outside of work, you will be forced to lay off people you otherwise wouldn't.
What are the odds the author got laid off despite his contributions precisely because somebody who earned more than him and did less couldn't be fired because they happened to have children? In the US it would be approximately zero. Even if the person picking names knows you have kids - but they don't because they're usually 3-4 levels above you - they have to justify the names to their boss and "J. Doe just had their second kid so let's keep them around until next year" will absolutely not fly.
> If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this.
At least this part is partially wrong. There is an entire law about how lay offs are only allowed if they are “socially justified” with definitions of acceptable circumstances. An employer can not fire you “at will” in Germany.
I had the same reaction. This sort of law makes it very expensive to keep ambitious young folk like the author in a layoff.
I am very confused about how this works in practice though. Presumably you're not expected to keep an old accountant with a family over a young childless developer, but where is that line actually drawn? Can you make such a distinction between teams, or are you expected to reassign people from a team that is being disbanded? What if they don't have some experience you would like, are you expected to train them?
From this article by a German lawyer, "the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.":
https://www.kuhlen-berlin.de/en/glossary/sozialauswahl
> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG provides four criteria that have to be taken into account in the selection decision: Length of service, age, statutory maintenance obligations and the employee's severe disability.
> The employer must first determine which employees work at the same level in the company and can therefore be replaced. The group of employees determined in this way is what is known as a horizontal comparability. Social selection is then carried out in this group on the basis of the legally prescribed criteria. The members of the respective group are then ranked according to their need for social protection.
> Older employees are more in need of protection than younger ones. A longer period of employment also increases the need for protection, as does the existence of statutory maintenance obligations and the presence of a severe disability.
> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG does not indicate how the social aspects mentioned are to be put in relation to each other, which is why each of the four criteria is to be given equal importance.
> When reducing staff, employers often make use of point schemes through which points are assigned to the individual social criteria. It also gives information through which the need for social protection of the employees in the comparison group can be assessed.
> All employees who are interchangeable must be included in the social selection. Criteria that can be used in this examination are the vocational training as well as the practical experience and knowledge that the respective employees have. If there is comparability, these workers are horizontally interchangeable. In practice, the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this makes it much harder for people with severe disabilities to get hired in the first place, especially for progressive degenerative diseases.
If I'm a company that is expanding at the edge of my capability, I'm not going to hire anyone with any "need for protection" that I'm able to suss out during the application or interview process because if I need to reduce staff I'm stuck with them whether they're the best or not.
The hard to lay off makes it harder to hire as well. Sure you get the 6 month probation period, but it is risky to hire anyone because they might make it past those 6 months before bad times come.
There is no good answer.
You will have a hard time convincing me that at will employment and hire-fast-fire-fast mentality is not objectively better than whatever you might call the German-style system. (Notice I didn't say it's good, just better)
The German-style system seems to treat a job as something the employee is guaranteed, that it's their inherent right to have, rather than something the employer chooses to give them. It doesn't seem to line up with reality.
At will employment means it is lower risk to pay employees high salaries. People in US tech clear $500k/year because if you are worth the $500k/yr the business keeps you as the arrangement is mutually beneficial and if you are not worth the $500k/yr you are gone.
You cannot have it both ways. Either high salaries and easy to fire or low salaries and hard to fire.
For me personally, at will employment has been beneficial. I make around 4x as much money as my European peers and I aggressively save. At this point I could be out of a job for 10 years and still be ahead of those working in Europe.
Better for whom? I think most people sleep better knowing that they can't be let go for no reason, no notice and no severance tomorrow.
Yes, you can lay off people in Germany, and France, and Italy. But there are rules, notice periods, and mandatory severances, as well as often (country dependent) consultation periods. In what way is that worse for the employee?
It's worse because people don't want to hire in those countries and the conjecture here is also that layoffs are unrelated to productivity, so there is nothing you can personally do to avoid getting laid off except having a family.
So it's worse for people who are productive in their jobs.
We were approached by a French startup looking for an acquihire and well, French labor law was a big reason not to do it (not because the people at the startup weren't good, but because staffing an Eng office around them was seen as too risky).
To some extent perception is reality here; we didn't really know that much about French labor laws, but the reputation and uncertainty is the issue.
I'm not saying there should be no rules but saying "you can't lay off Employee A because he has kids, you have to lay off Employee B instead because they don't" with absolutely no consideration of work product is pretty asinine on its face.
Laying people off is a business decision - forcing a company to justify that from a business context is probably a Good Thing, but injecting weird social requirements on top of that is silly.
It makes sense if you consider the social cost of having children live through their parents' layoff.
Meanwhile businesses enjoy the privilege of operating in a country where contracts are enforced and people are educated. In exchange they're expected to not treat their employees like cattle - that's not a lot to ask IMHO.
What social cost? You should not be so invested in your job that getting layoffs would have any social costs. There might be economic costs, but there are many ways to handle that so they don't become social costs.
I guess it's a matter of perspective. Duties and rights/freedoms are usually connected. Like you have the right to tiger arms, but that entails the duty to stash and use them responsibly. You have the right to ride your car where you want to go, but that entails the duty of obeying traffic laws. For this specific example: You have the duty to work, but that entails the right to have a job. Does it entail the right to have a job you find enjoyable or fulfilling? Hell no! (hour long commutes or jobs you are clearly overqualified for are things you'll just have to accept according to this model still. "Culture mismatch" is not in the vocabulary of social security payout offices, interestingly) To me it still sounds better than "no job? well guess bad luck for you" though. ymmv
This just doesn't match up with reality IME.
You don't have a right to drive your car anywhere - the state can revoke it. Many states have no laws at all about how to store firearms, and the ones that do in general are pretty hostile to the idea that you have a right to bear arms in the first place. You don't have a duty to work, someone isn't morally wrong because they live off family money. And you absolutely do not have a right to a job, because a job requires someone else to pay you money. Nobody has a right to have someone else pay them money.
> Nobody has a right to have someone else pay them money.
In the not too distant past, you didn't need money to live. If you wanted to brave the elements, make your own shelter, grow/gather/hunt your own food, and deal with the threats on your own, you could do that. Now, you can't do that. Everything is owned. You need to have money to buy or lease land to live on. If nobody gives you money (or land), you can't make a life for yourself, because one must live on land, and all the land is owned.
Does this mean that people have a right to receive money? I'm not sure about that. I think the argument that people should have a right to be able to work and receive money has some merit, although certainly flaws too. It is at least worth considering that the world and society has changed and crystallized substantially over the last couple centuries, and the system of money is forced upon everyone.
> In the not too distant past, you didn't need money to live.
Are you calling prehistory the not too distance past? From what I can tell from history most useful land was owned by someone. How it was owned varied, from tribes that kept other tribes off their land (no personal ownership), villages that kept protected the local's land, "lords" that had control of various amounts of lands.
Sometimes there were plagues and so for a short time you could find land that nobody controlled, but that didn't last long if the land was useful. It might be enough for you to establish yourself on that land, but it wasn't a constant thing.
My recommendation would be: don't make your work be part of your identity, unless it's your work (e.g. your business). The work you do for others is not who you are. Your employer is not your family, nor even your friend. It's a business relationship, and should be taken as such.
This, incidentally is good advice for both sides of an employment relationship: employers sometimes also mistakenly believe that employees are their friends and family and then get a rude awakening when employees suddenly leave with no warning, for a 10% increase in salary.
If your business fails you will consider yourself a failure. Thus these life lessons leads us to buddhist concept of self-detachment.
I agree with the “it’s a business relationship and not family” part, but not with the identity part. Something you spend ~40% of your awake time with is certainly part of one’s identity, and for good mental health should be something one enjoys.
I've been part of layoffs twice (with around 8 years in the workforce by now) and yes, I realised the harsh truth that going above and beyond, putting in the soul and long hours is not worth it. No one cares in the long term, you're just a number in the spreadsheet at the end of the day.
But the thing is, I like what I'm working on, I like letting my passion dictate my actions. I want to go home at the end of the day and be proud of what I have accomplished.
But it's not worth putting in that effort for a company that treats you like any other resource. So I'm starting to become one of those soulless employees. You can call it quiet quitting or whatever. And it's slowly killing my spark.
I started working on my own projects to keep that spark alive. But 2h every day is not enough to build something that's worth it.
Yep I’m in exactly the same boat. I think I’ve largely decided that tech is just a job now; my motivation to code outside of work was tied to also somehow enjoying doing it at work and now I don’t anymore I also stopped doing it for fun.
So I’ve replaced advent of code with various other stuff, music, woodworking, books, the great outdoors and while my life is less rich in technology it’s becoming much fuller in other ways.
I think I prefer it this way.
For me, coding outside of work becomes unsustainable as you age. It's not that you can't, it's because you realise there's more to life than staring at a computer screen. I love coding, but it's also good to go outside sometimes.
For me, there was a rebound.
Recent years (40's) I've been on a building spree of sorts for my own projects[0]
I'm my 30's, a lot of energy went into home improvement projects, establishing a garden, and young kids. Now I find a lot of time and energy left for my own passion projects.
[0] https://turas.app and https://coderev.app
Like you, I like doing work I enjoy, but I have never been in a layoff, so I don't know how I will react to it.
My hope is that after a layoff I would be able to bounce back and find a new company where I can keep on doing fun work.
Life has ups and downs. I don't think shielding yourself from emotions is a healthy path. Just like you don't have to shield yourself from others forever after a breakup. A key ingredient is to have other part of your life to support you (family, couple, friends, ...) when one is failing.
I was "fortunate" to live through the dot com crash early in my career.
When the times were good, the messaging was we were all one big family. When the crash came, there were weekly layoffs. Co-workers that thought they were friends turned on each other to keep their jobs.
I learned to keep a fat emergency fund. I learned to work as a mercenary. I get in, I get out, I get paid. Then I live my life, which is not work. I keep no personal effects, and can be out the door in a second. Coworkers are acquaintances, not friends.
My company brought on consultants. They were having us do the absolute strangest things. Pointless meetings. Duplicating infrastructure. Documenting processes so deeply entrenched in what we did they'd never be forgotten. Then they hired another small team that did basically the same things we did on a much smaller scale.
Then my department got sold to another company, and it all made sense.
Looking back it's pretty obvious that they were bifurcating while duplicating important infrastructure. At the time going through it though I just thought the consultants were total morons, not understanding the business and that we'd be doing twice the work by having two of everything.
They sold it to us while it was happening that we were the domestic team and they were the "global" team, and we bought it as a concept, but we all thought it was a stupid distraction. We were absolutely certain we'd be merging our departments within a couple years.
Finding out that they had been actively lying to us about what was going on for almost a year really... Changed how I thought about companies. They had been lying to my face every single day for a very long time, that really violated my trust.
Damn I was part of may the 4th lay off from Shopify. They locked me out instantly from my crucial immigration related document on my work laptop, and there was no help whatsoever. Very ugly. Still remember.
Was it on your work laptop for a reason?
Good reminder, never mix work and personal. Or at the very least maybe use a cloud service or a thumb drive.
In many countries, a number of visas are employer bound or sponsored, so there's a wide array of reasons why some relevant documents might live in the corporate sphere. Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device. There are often many more documents to a visa than just the visa itself.
Even if it was a sponsorship, I find it strange that you can’t have copies of the immigration docs so that you can at least explain to immigration what’s going on. I’d imagine there is case number or something that you could keep?
Otherwise what happens? You can’t even explain or prove your current situation? Seems draconian.
> Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device.
That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to your machine/the building etc.
Was also laid of from Qantas when my dad died from cancer 2 months ago, I'm still flabbergasted by it
Well, the person who decided to lay you off probably didn’t care enough to know, if that makes you feel any better.
Name and shame, good. Only when we name the perpetrators, we can help others avoid bad employers, of which there are way to many already.
40 years ago an autobody shop near me (where I lived at the time) went bankrupt. The employees came to work in the morning and the door had a new lock. It was 6 months before they could get their personal tools back. Mechanics provide their own tools, so this meant they couldn't really get a new job (or could but only after investing thousands in tools that they already owned but couldn't access).
this is why I regularly back up important documents to my personal computer. payslips, w2's, etc. never know when you might be terminated and lose access.
Don't burn yourself out for anyone other than you. Companies have no loyalty whatsoever and will not show gratitude.
In general I don't think that the style of work that leads to burnout is desirable at any stage unless if it's for your own startup and perhaps not even then.
One day I woke up and grey haired and not rich. I felt that my youth had disappeared, I had various minor health problems. Why did I work till 2am for a fortnight to solve problem X? The project was cancelled after I left or never made any money or whatever - it was for no great achievements. I got laid off anyhow.
I encountered plenty of people that generated fear in others pushing towards excessive work but I noticed every one of them going home at 5pm. Do you have to take note of these bullies? Maybe not - I didn't notice them being any worse to the people who ignored their pressure.
Don't encourage other people to overwork either - be part of the solution.
It's the people that you work with who will be grateful sometimes, in small ways and overcoming problems with them creates friendships. So you must obviously try to pull your weight - I'm not advocating cynicism.
This article doesn't mention it, but being laid off will change you at a psychological level. It can be a deeply traumatic event.
I was laid off over 5 years ago, and, as these things usually go, it was a complete shock to me. The company had been acquired, and my services were no longer needed. It ended up being a very positive change for my career, but to this day, if I ever get a moment of déjà vu, my immediate thought is to check my phone and see if I've been fired.
> being laid off will change you at a psychological level
it certainly can do, but it's also fine if it doesn't
when I was laid off, some family members simply refused to believe that it hadn't had a profound negative effect on how I viewed myself. Dealing with that disbelief was by far the most difficult part of the process
I felt absolutely fine, because at the time I had no emotional investment in my job or career
> being laid off will change you at a psychological level. It can be a deeply traumatic event.
I didn't get laid off, but I project I put years of my life into was shut down (in a "row on a spreadsheet" type of way), and it effected me surprisingly deeply. I'm still dealing with the after effects, and reading this thread is making me realize it was cognitively really similar to a layoff.
I wish it didn't bother me as much as it did, but that doesn't change the impact.
I'm 24 years into my career now. I think you just get used to this after a while.
I've worked on several big (at the time) software products that our company built and shipped to customers for a while, that we have since abandoned. And in those cases, the entire organization within the company that owned the code was disbanded, so there was no one left to know about it or care about it. I'm not 100% certain but I strongly suspect that there is not a single copy left anywhere in the company of the code for those products - code that I worked on for years.
It's strange thinking that there is basically no trace left of something that I put years of professional work into, but I think it happens more than most people realize. I suppose it's no different than startups that fail and everything disappears.
I also think this is why so many software people end up enjoying hobbies that revolve around physical things, like woodworking or restoring old cars. Having some physical object that you can point to and say "I built that" is kind of nice compared to everything else you've done living on a flash chip somewhere.
Wow, I would not expect this kind of news to come via txt or email. This should be manager/supervisor face to face.
I was laid off in a face to face meeting with the VP. Checking my phone might be irrational, but irrational thoughts can be a symptom of trauma. Then again, I do work fully remote, so I'm checking for tell tale signs. Mysterious meetings on my calendar, DMs from the CTO, etc.
I was laid off twice, about a year apart. Both affected me deeply, and clearly in a traumatic way. The last one was about a year ago.
My spidey-sense has been tingling for the last couple weeks, and there's a vesting cliff coming up, so I've been looking at my manager's calendar for suspicious upcoming meetings. I figure there are 8 potential firing days left (Mondays, Fridays, and regular 1:1 meetings) until that cliff, and then I can relax.
One of the things that has helped me cope is to constantly be interviewing at smaller companies. It's a lot less stressful to be laid off when you already have another offer on the table.
This hits me 2 ways, I got laid off in my late 30s and had over 4 years unemeployment. TBH, I'd got bored of what I was doing and it was looking like a career dead end. I took a hobby project and worked on that, learned iOS and eventually got a job in that.
But one thing got me, I developed an original app for the company I work for, that is now one of the focus products. I wish I never, I feel like it was literally stolen from me, never ever go above and beyond for a company, your managers will get the credit.
Why you think it's stolen when company paid for your time? If the app wasn't successful, would you have considered refunding your salary back to a company?
There's paying for someones time, and then there's going above and beyond. I feel like I shouldn't have gone above and beyond
And to throw it the other way around, when someone works over hours and contributes significantly, but burns out, does the company throw out the unpaid work?
> The Myth of Job Security in Germany
> [...] If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
This is not true, and an over simplification.
Yes, you can always technically layoff in Germany, but it might not hold in court. Most people have legal insurance (mine is ~€300/y) which is tax deductible if it has employment protection. Mine will cover costs for an employment-related lawsuit.
If you feel that your layoff is not justified, you can always sue, the judge could decide that your work contract was unlawfully cancelled, leading to the company having to re-hire you and paying your salary for every month it didn't do so. The company posting record profits could weight in your favor in front of a judge. People, especially non-native like me, don't know better, they just move-on and go c'est la vie. If you sue, win and get re-hired, you can always ask to leave for a bigger package.
For companies above a certain amount of employee (50? 75?), if a small amount of employees (I think it's 3 or 4) request it, the company must run a works council election. For any layoff (individual or mass layoff), the work council must be consulted, and has co-determination, they can basically block the layoff, this was done by Volkswagen's work council recently. [1] For large mass layoffs, companies might also have to consult with the authorities.
Last thing, the social scoring is much more complicated than "those with children." If you have 4 kids and got hired 7 months ago, you might be fired, and I, single person, might keep my job with my 15 years of tenure. Tenure, disabilities, children, ... a lot of things take part into the social scoring.
All and all, I agree with a lot of the sentiments and points of the article. But saying that, outside of social scoring, layoffs between the US and Germany are the same is simply not true. There is a reasonable job security in Germany.
[1] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/en/press-releases/agreement...
In addition, except for companies with serious economic problems, layoffs are also simply much less common in Germany, I believe.
this is very interesting, thanks for sharing it! Are you aware of any story involving individuals fighting their case for a job in a tech company? Would love to read about it.
I know of a case where a company laid off a person for unjustifiable reasons. Of course the notice period was observed but the person decided to press a lawsuit and the court decided that the layoff reason was baseless. While they did not get rehired(once the moral is hit hard to go back may be), but they got awarded to 7-8 months of full salary paid. Something that probably played into the favor was that the person just recently became a father for a month after which he was handed the forced redundancy news and the observance of notice period.
According to anti-discrimination law, a ground for layoff(or not hiring) can not be tied to parenthood.
Not in my circle. Usually, threatening to sue is enough. I know people who increased their severance package because they said that "they wanted to talk to the lawyer from their legal insurance before accepting any severance package."
Of course this doesn't work if you have a work council, usually the work-council negotiate a severance package algorithm (= fix_amount + tenure * amount), and this is usually un-negotiable. This makes sense, thanks to collective bargaining, it's most likely one the best deal you could have gotten. (Even though libertarians will flock-in and start going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems unfair!")
> Even though >highly paid SWE< will flock-in and start going "How do I know, that I, as a highly performing individual couldn't have negotiate better!?! This seems unfair!")
I made a correction. Also I really hate the tendency of tech workers doing everything to stay away from unionizing or collective bargaining or establishing work councils. There is this bizarre tendency that it is just somekind if conspiracy and they are able to bargain better deals. This in collective hurts the entire tech crew everywhere.
What’s the legal insurance called in German?
"Rechtsschutzversicherung." You want it to include "Arbeitsrechtsschutz"
I would also advise you to include defamation, in case somebody sue you for defaming them. Usually many legal insurance exclude "internet" from the protection, this means that if you post on hackernews "Hans is an idiot", and Hans sues you, you might have to pay the lawsuit yourself. These insurances usually have an "internet" options for usually ~20€/y which would protect you in this case. You can still deduct the entire amount from your taxes, as it's still technically a labour-law legal insurance.
I understood the claim to be that if you are at the bottom of the social points scale then you are sufficiently vulnerable for it not to matter. That the people who really benefit from Germany's strong labour laws are those with kids, disabled people, old, etc... but not just a standard young person.
Germany is just a strange country IMO. Lots of "nice" stuff like this that sounds great but really only works for the older generation and doesn't really work for young people, who are already hugely disadvantage by the German boomerocracy (probably one of the worst boomerocracys in the world).
I'm not a lawyer, but AFAIK, age doesn't influence your social score, tenure does. If I'm a 30 year old with 10 years in the company, I will have a better score than 50-year-old you who got hired 7 months ago.
The idea is that working at a company "squeezes juice out of you", so you should not be so easily fired after a long tenure, because the company got all the rewards from your juice, but you don't have much left. You can agree or disagree, but I have to admit that there is a logic.
I understood the logic to be instead that older people nearing retirement find it much harder to get new jobs.
And I agree there is logic to all of these things we are discussing. The problem is rather that everything is falling apart in other ways so young people get the raw end both times. Many of these older folk will be on rent controlled flats that are not available to young people, for example.
> but not just a standard young person.
This makes sense in a way, since "standard young people" are very flexible [in Germany]. There are multiple different safety nets and ways to get money, jobs, support, and a lot of basic needs are taken care of by the social system.
Source: I'm a "standard young person" German SWE ;)
Yes it makes sense, certainly on paper, and in a world in which the older generation actually are disadvantaged by their age and younger people are not. Actually it's the other way around. Like so many things in Germany, it's just outdated and from a time when things were actually really good and everything was not falling apart. The boomer generation are the richest, have pensions we will never have, and get to pay far smaller rents than we do. I pay 3x the rent that my boomer neighbours pay for a mirror image flat across the hall.
Well, boomers are on their way out.
But why do you think that Gen X will be better ?
I don't think any generation is better than the other. They are just the biggest. If Gen X were the biggest then there would be some big political distortion in their favour instead.
And no they are not on the way out, they are still here and will be here for a long time. To the extent that Gen Xers will be better or worse, it is only because the demographic pyramid won't look quite as crazy or distorted.
Q : What's the difference between a permie and a contractor? A: The contractor KNOWS they have no job security. ;). Your only real job security is your skillset. If that's good, lay-offs are often an opportunity rather than something to be feared. I've been laid off twice, 20 yrs apart. 1st company folded soon after. 2nd got taken over by bigger one. Was glad to be out in both cases, not happy place to remain. In both cases quickly got a better job, pay rise, and engineered a nice long break between jobs. 2cnd time I wasn't super happy there, but risk averse about moving due to young family. Lay-off was helpful push to look for something else. Found another job, then hopped on in 18 months to a great job. Got rid of a nasty commute in the process. Many people tell this story. Far too many of us stay places too long, we think "better the devil you know". Layoffs can be a blessing..... Caveat - if you're working a min wage job without a marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared and a totally different experience.
Lay off is great if economy is booming(some 2012-2018 and then 2021) but nightmare if economy is screwed(2024-present).
I recall commenting few days back that, the job market is so screwed now that even senior engineers with decades of experience are not trusted these days if they are missing minor experience in some minor tool.
In 2021, I remember everyone with ability to type some code(regardless of quality) land great jobs, remote contracts etc. Everyone I know currently looking to change or were laid off since mid last year are suffering(real bad) and all of these are highly qualified people whom I’d really trust with most critical work.
Being a contractor can be a good play, especially if your spouse carries benefits for your family.
Being a contractor is generally considered low status and temporary, so if you can get over that, then you can thrive.
The upside to this is the understanding that it is transactional and hourly. There is no expectation that you get emotionally invested. Which can actually be a much more health arrangement.
Ironically, if you are a contractor going through a staffing agency, when you are "fired" from a contract, you generally still get paid something by the agency and get "bench time" to train up your skills or work on internal projects. Sometimes contractors have better job security from a paycheck perspective.
Depends on the agency. Many will not pay you (and some may terminate you themselves if you don't have a contract for you, because they are paying your benefits).
> if you're working a min wage job without a marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared and a totally different experience.
That's the majority of the population to be honest
> without a marketable skillset, layoff is indeed to be feared
Which will probably soon encompass a large amount of Devs. large productivity increases usually mean job losses.
About 1% of the US workforce works for minimum wage
There's a lot of minimum wages. Are you talking about the federal minimum wage ($7.50/hr), or the minimum wage local to the worker ($15.00/hr where I live)?
Is that stat accounting for those working in the dark market (ie without proper documentation)
The first layoff is always the worst. You'll treat future gigs as transactional and be better for it. The younger you're laid off the sooner you'll learn this.
You forget over time, and obligations grow.
My first layoff was rough. It was in '00 and I was 21, so I didn't have too many obligations.
My second layoff was in '23 and I was 44 with kids and a mortgage. It hit me a lot harder.
My third was in '24, but I had learned my lessons and had positioned myself better, so I wasn't as badly affected.
I'm so grateful I was laid off just 2 years into my first software gig out of school. I graduated, worked my ass off at a startup, and theeeen covid! It hurt but that was a permanent wisdom upgrade.
> Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company. Instead, continuously explore opportunities so that if a layoff happens, you already have other options lined up.
I personally find interviewing exhausting. I also feel slightly guilty interviewing when I'm happy where I'm at because I have been a hiring manager and know how much goes into a good interview process from the company side. (Not saying don't do that, but it's hard for me to do so.)
If interviewing is tiring, another alternative that requires less work is to be active in a larger tech community. Whether that is here, local meetups, or on social media, being active can raise your profile and keep connections warm. This will help if/when you are laid off.
networking vs interviewing
I was laid off recently. I poured my heart and soul into that role and went far above and beyond in countless ways - even working on a critical business proposal while on vacation with my family. In the end no one cares about your efforts, what you accomplished, your certifications, what kind of SME you are, or what potential you have. If you fit the criteria for a layoff, you will be gone without a second thought. After I was informed, my company reached out to me with a “mobility program” where they supposedly helped me to find a position internally. I talked with several people including a VP who promised to find me something only to be ghosted after my official end date. It’s a very cutthroat industry and there is no such thing as loyalty any more. I know I sound bitter. That’s just the way it is. Save as much money as you can, live frugally, keep your resume updated, and always be prepared to jump ship. Don’t stay in a role too long and try to move on voluntarily at the first hint of trouble.
I was once in a fast-growing startup, where the CEO told us in a company all-hands that we had 18 months of runway and that our future was looking great! Some of us devs booked long-delayed vacations after months of grinding hard on releases.
Turned out that this "runway" factored in dumping all the American devs and replacing us with workers overseas who made ~35-40% of what they paid us.
My recent experience in the "data" world taught me that many companies in the US actually want contractors, but our employment laws make it make being "full-time" not that different than a contractor.
Another thing I learned was to never jump on R&D type projects unless you are in a very close communication loop with the leadership. If they are going to see you as a consultant on retainer, you have to always be delivering and improving on stuff that affects the business. I was put on some sort of "special projects" role in three fast-growing startups and those are always the first on the chopping block when things tighten up (and they almost always do at some point, especially in a startup).
As an "oversees" developer who was getting those 30% and paid almost no taxes for ten years -- thanks for your sacrifice. It was great money for that time and was wisely spent on enjoying life.
It's important to take pride in one's work, but don't forget one second that the relationship is asymmetric; if you choose to be loyal, the company employing you won't be loyal back.
The worst thing you can do is to feel personally and emotionally vested in the relationship, and then be disappointed that "despite" you going full in and giving everything, going above and beyond the expectations, it still affects you.
As the OP correctly states, the decisions are made by others, and they may not know you. But while some people involved may know and value you (e.g. your direct line manager), they will not stand up and fight for you in 99% of cases, because they don't have much power, and they would like to keep their own job.
I've been laid off a few times. I'd add one more "danger sign": you're not busy. If the firm/department doesn't seem to be achieving very much, it's a good sign that no-one's asking much of them. Which means the entire area is possibly for the chop.
But the line in the Excel sheet thing rings _incredibly_ true. It's actually surprisingly rare to be laid off by someone who knows you. Decision is nearly always made by people who've never met you and only have a cursory understanding of what your entire team does.
I've been laid off twice, and both times we were very busy. There were deadlines we were told were absolutely crucial to meet and we were burning ourselves out trying to meet them. The product we were making never saw the light of day and to this day we don't even know why.
The author complains that after all his leadership and hustle:
> to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
But then writes:
> [German] law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children.
It sounds like under German law he had to be treated as a row in a spreadsheet. Cynically, it might have been wiser to spend time having a child rather than hustling for the company.
> It was difficult to process what was happening. Just ten months earlier, the company had gone through another round of layoffs. And at the beginning of the year, during the company’s kick-off event, the president assured us there wouldn’t be any more layoffs.
In my experience, whenever a company assures you there will be no more layoffs, there will 100% be more layoffs. Never make the mistake of believing your employer has any real loyalty to you.
That matches my experience too. If leadership even uses the word “layoff”, no matter the context, it’s coming.
It's been 20+ years since I was laid off when the first internet boom collapsed. I got a decent settlement, spent a while experimenting with self employment, and got another interesting full-time job which lasted for years. I'd rate the experience as significantly less traumatic than my first relationship breakup.
But yes, the first time you experience redundancies regardless of whether you're made redundant or survive is definitely an eye-opener. It's like those financial disclaimers "the value of your investment may go down as well as up". There may be very little warning. It may even happen at a time that's very bad for you personally. And it does break trust among the company.
For me layoff was great:
- 3 month severance, free money
- 1 year unemployment support, more free money
- fat tax return, since I falled into lower income bracket, even more free money
- moving out out expensive city to countryside, less expenses (and yes more money)
I took one year off, finished my opensource project and started consulting. Layoff tripled my disposable income and vastly improved quality of my life.
Once I read May 4th and 2 emails, I knew it was Shopify. I was also affected.
My view of why it happened is a bit different than the author, but my conclusion is wildly different. I've been on tech for almost 20 years, 11 of them in the US.
On average, I do see people that work hard and on important things getting recognized and promoted. I don't have this bleak view that nobody should do anything, it's all random, nothing matters.
I do agree at the end of the day we're just numbers on a spreadsheet for large companies. Most of the time it's not personal, and Shopify probably decided having engineers in Germany wasn't worth, no matter how good they were (and I personally knew a handful that were really, really good, live there, and lost their job).
Those things aren't contradictory. You can work hard and be promoted and get more recognition, and you still can be cut due to decisions completely out of your control. The opposite is also true. Average people get lucky to be on the right project at the right time, sometimes multiple projects in a row. Peter principle and all.
But on average, companies to reward the people that bring value to the company (and its owners)
Really enjoyed reading this, but I will say that the particular circumstances here are a bit rare. Germany got completely gutted in this layoff. Almost everyone employed in Germany was cut. I know a Senior Staff Engineer from Germany who was laid off then re-hired.
It’s not rare for entire business units or country offices to get shut down. That’s the easiest way to do a layoff because it’s mostly isolated from the rest of the company. Executives can meet most of their layoff target without having to get into the weeds of evaluating individual performance.
Often some functions are moved or merged into another unit, and that’s the escape hatch for the few people someone really wants to save.
It wasn't like that in this case. Rumours were it was because people in Germany were thinking of unionizing.
If that were true, then I hope the laid-off people kept a paper trail because there's actual laws protecting them in such a case.
This would not suprise me at all, since Tobi Lütke is vocally against unions.
What I've learned is that, for employees, job security is never real. There is only silent risk. You might get lucky and go through an entire career never losing Russian roulette...but you're just lucky.
But I've also learned that there is no security of any kind in life. People who've lived nothing but peaceful lives will never understand, and they'll even lecture you about "making your own luck," when they should be thanking God for their good fortune.
> Always keep interviewing
Isn’t it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with all the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that something is off? Any seasoned manager will see right through it, but would never call it out directly to you.
Then, let’s say you get an offer, do you say you’ll only sign if you’re laid off? It’s expected you sign the offer and join reasonably soon. I’ve seen offers rescinded after ridiculous start date doubling down by candidates. You will be actively shooting yourself in the foot if you get an offer and don’t take it, because you just wasted many hours of their time, and they may remember that if you apply again…
Outside of all that… where do you even find the time to ALWAYS be interviewing?! I put (exactly) 100% into my current job, so always interviewing means I have much less free time. It guarantees I am always stressed, and being stressed ruins my life. I like the work I do, but find it incredibly exhausting and dehumanizing after long stretches. Five 8 hour days is enough of a long stretch to make me feel I am wasting my life, I can’t even imagine how always interviewing would ruin me…
The better advice in the same light is to always be networking— or at least making sure you HAVE a network. Referrals are your only weapon against the flood of trash applications.
So yes, yes, I get that I am a row in a database, came to terms with that a long time ago— this is the silly game we play for money. Until society collapses, and we miraculously reform it to something better, this silly game we will continue to play. I just want to scrape joy out of as much of that time as I can.
> Isn’t it going to be incredibly obvious after a while, with all the random 1-2 hour OOO blocks during working hours, that something is off?
Working and interviewing remotely, it’s definitely easy to work and interview at the same time. No one thinks twice is occasionally it takes an hour to respond to a message.
Heck even when I am not interviewing I close my Slack and email for blocks at a time to do “deep work”
If a full time job makes you feel like you’re wasting your life, you may never find happiness or solace in life without a winning lottery ticket.
For those wondering, he was laid off from Shopify (quick search on LinkedIn revealed, not mentioned in article)
He clearly didn't want to mention it, so why 'out' him?
I'm not sure he clearly didn't want to mention it - he didn't state he didn't mention it on purpose. I'm sure many people wondered, and going on LinkedIn is trivial. Had it not been on LinkedIn I wouldn't have looked further. If he didn't want to be outed, he could take Shopify off of Linkedin.
You could also comment the same on the 3 other comments that "out" him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42839195, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42843755, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42842682
Amazing job off capturing nearly word for word what I've said to people and thought before, during, and after being laid off. The signs, symptoms, and treatment; perfect. To someone who's never experienced it, it would seem myopic, but it's not, it's just the way it is, do not give more to your company than you can control the outcome of having done so. You don't get to decide that you're not laid off, and the only thing, as sad as it is, that you should be doing, is exactly what you're paid for.
It's not "exactly the way it is" everywhere, though. I've worked at companies that, whenever they laid someone off, they were honest and upfront about it without playing any psychological tricks. Not every company has to be this devoid of soul.
That's true, I've been directly laid off and fired without cause without tricks, but the salient point to me is that usually it's a futile and burnout-inducing mission to try and put in extra effort to attempt to avoid the impending outcome. A manager at any company could just be annoyed with how you responded to a question one time and it'll be burned into their brain to get rid of you. In retrospect, although there have been valid moments where my performance has suffered, it's rare for that to be the cause imo, especially if they really don't know what you do anyway. You could think you're a crucial contributor, and all it takes is oversleeping on the wrong day to screw you permanently.
While being true, this do exactly what you're paid for is so dystopian.
It is? That's a weird position to me. If I go to a store and pay $10 for a sandwich, I don't call it dystopian when I don't get two sandwiches. Similarly, if my working agreement is $X wage for 40 hours of work per week, I don't give them 60 hours, because we agreed on 40. What is dystopian about agreeing to terms and then executing on the agreed terms? That's just how exchanging money for goods & services works.
> Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job. In most professions, the unspoken rule was simple: if you performed well and the company was financially stable, your job was secure.
You hear this a lot but it's the result of developers from sectors that did well during this time period whistling past the graveyard as rolling layoffs hit more mature sectors and firms, such as networking (Cisco) and storage. It's surprising to me that people who are paid to try to imagine how systems perform in different scenarios, and are presumably good at what they are paid to do, fail to apply the same thought processes to the systems that provide them their salaries.
Agree with the headline but I think the takeaways are a little too cynical. You don't really have to take such a confrontational approach with future employers.
IMO the biggest takeaway I had after a layoff: Always try to navigate your career so that you are doing something valuable to the business. You can tell based on a lot of clues whether you're in a position that's valuable or if you're forgettable. Moving "toward the money" not only helps job security but it helps your compensation too.
Say for example your team has a stretch of a few months without any new high priority requirements or requests. A young developer might think, "Yay, finally we have enough time to do all that refactoring in the backlog." But in reality, that situation should make you very concerned.
> Agree with the headline
Which of them -- the original (and still on TFA), "Once You're Laid Off, You'll Never Be the Same Again", or the current one here, "A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work"?
(And YTH did it change to something else??? Weird.)
There was a time when the word "layoff" referred to a TEMPORARY separation due to a lack of demand with the understanding that when activity picked back up you'd be recalled back to work. This was particularly common in the automotive sector and really across manufacturing. These were cyclical industries and while employers couldn't afford to pay idle workers during periods of low economic demand, they also couldn't afford to lose the skillsets. Oftentimes unions would provide partial compensation to these workers until they were recalled.
Somewhere around the mid 1990s, "layoff" became just a euphemism for permanent reductions in force/downsizing.
I think the word you’re looking for is furlough.
i was surprised when I looked it up too but it looks like this was true of layoffs as well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layoff
Nope. Layoffs were always understood to be temporary, up through some point in the 1990s. Furloughs were much shorter in duration, typically days or weeks, and in some cases were partial (one or two days a week).
It feels like a lot of people who joined the workforce after 2008-2010 are experiencing their first "tough times". It's natural to respond in this manner. But there is an important caveat: one must seek out good work and deliver in order to stay employable, and have access to good opportunities. Or, they must develop a good network and essentially hop from one job to another with the exact same set of people (this is much more common than you'd think). For the former, you still need to show up and go above and beyond every once in a while, so getting excited about work is still a prerequisite.
These leave-on-the-day layoffs are really strange to me. Unless there was a bankruptcy or something, I'd most likely be convinced by management to stay my entire period of notice (3 months) because the company would need to PAY me 100% my salary for that period anyway. If they thought I was a risk to keep around, or they had no work for me at all, then they could just give me paid leave for 3 months. But more likely I'd be doing handovers and documentation and whatnot for the 3 months. But like, closing down accounts immediately? Do companies really think any laid off employee is an immediate security risk to the extent they need to lock them out as soon as they lay them off?
I’ve been through several waves of layoffs. Every employee kept on temporarily to transition things over (IMO quite rationally) did the absolute minimum required and I don’t think it was worth the companies money to keep them on. Additionally since their immediate manager was not part of the layoff decision making process, no one cared they were doing nothing.
That’s a waste of resources the company pays for anyway.
> Do companies really think any laid off employee is an immediate security risk to the extent they need to lock them out as soon as they lay them off?
Yes. There are a few case (a handful across the world every decade) where a former employee has done bad things in retaliation. Yes extremely rare, but it happens.
If I was hellbent on doing that, I’d likely pull it off anyway. It seems like a massive trouble to avoid something quite rare.
Not getting in the door or havng access to systems limits the damage you can do. You can still do much but it won't be near as bad.
Yeah. But again, it basically means you have no handover of anything, and in many (most?) places around the world you are still required to pay employees for a long period after notice. So you have an opportunity for handover that you are paying for, but that you aren't using.
The risk to the business from just dropping things without proper handover shouldn't be ignored in comparison to the risk of an employer going crazy after being notified their last day is 90 days ahead.
"Graveyards are full of essential people" (Bill Clinton). If there is someone who has information such that a handover is needed you as management screwed up by not preventing it in the first place. The person might have died and then there is never a handover possible.
Paying severance is very common even in the US where it isn't required by law (though generally not as long as Europe requires). Severance is what you pay people AFTER their last day.
Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign soldiers. Napoleon’s reply was that it’s simple: soldiers are either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic.
* The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what to do and can rally the troops to do it.
* The smart and lazy I make generals. They also know what to do, but they’re not going to waste energy doing what doesn’t need to be done.
* The dumb and lazy I make foot soldiers.
The takeaway, is that only after you lose your shiny glasses are you ready to take on larger responsibilities.
Don’t become jaded. Don’t carry around resentment - just get on with it - and you’ll Very much be on your way to career advancement
Did he say anything about the dumb and energetic?
"I shot them", he said.
What did he do with the dumb and energetic?
You get rid of them: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/
"I shot them", he said.
My guess, frontlines.
That was "foot soldiers".
As heartbreaking as they are for those affected, layoffs provide incredibly useful information for prospective employees.
For example, was it a small number of people who were laid off with decent severance, or was it a huge mass of people let go unceremoniously with minimum severance? And were the layoffs due to a sustained period of unprofitability or did they occur during periods of profitability? In the former case why wasn't the business doing well and has that fundamentally changed? In the latter case, did they first attempt to reallocate people to more productive areas?
> Everything I’ve shared reflects the current state of the tech industry. It might differ at very small companies, but once you work at a company with more than 100 employees, you’ll likely encounter many of the same patterns I’ve described.
Many tech companies have never needed to resort to layoffs -- not just small companies but medium-sized and/or privately held companies. Personally I consider layoffs of any sort to be a major red flag. It means company management makes poor business or organizational decisions and is willing to tank morale and lose their best people to please shareholders. It means that you're going to be a line in a spreadsheet that can be spun up and down as necessary.
Personally I'd steer clear, but if you choose to enter into a relationship with such a company you should appropriately discount any salary they offer to factor in that risk.
> layoffs provide incredibly useful information for prospective employees.
> For example, was it a small number of people who were laid off with decent severance, or was it a huge mass of people let go unceremoniously with minimum severance? And were the layoffs due to...
Fine idea in principle, but not implementable in practice: Prospective employees don't know who got laid off, and even if they did, they most likely don't personally know any of those people. So they have no way of finding out any of those useful things.
> Prospective employees don't know who got laid off, and even if they did, they most likely don't personally know any of those people.
True, I've never interviewed somewhere where someone I know personally got laid off. But for large companies there are typically news articles about layoffs, their size, and occasionally even their generosity. For publicly-traded companies you can wait for the annual/quarterly reports, but these days there's usually a press release or blog post[1] if it's more than a handful of people. For private companies that are too small to be newsworthy you can still scour Glassdoor and other forums.
But regardless, it's definitely something a prospective employee should ask about during the interview e.g. "Tell me about the last time your organization had layoffs...". Obviously you get a positive spin from an HR or hiring manager, but when I'm interviewing I find those answers most informative.
[1] e.g. https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update...
I was laid off from Google in January last year alongside 150 people in my extended team. I managed to find a different team in Gemini, so now I'm part of Deepmind. I have very conflicting feelings because on one hand I really enjoy the work, the team, and the absolute genius of people I get to talk to; but on the other hand, I have some resentment for being so inhumanely laid off, I am sad for the people in my team who were not as lucky as me, and I know it can happen again any time.
I was 15 years in at one company and got an out of the blue mass firing notice over zoom one day. A significant number of developers with over 10 years at the company were let go. It was devastating to think back over the times I decided to work late versus spend those hours with my kids and wife, the times I was at home but decided to "check in" on things at work, and the fact that I had fused my work identity into my personal identity.
I landed a gig at another well known national newspaper and hated every second of that dysfunctional team. I did fully separate my personal life and my work life. I basically punched the clock and worked my 40. Every six weeks or so I had to pull an on-call shift, but the monitoring setup was almost nonexistent so it was cake. I spent just over three years there before they had a significant round of mass firings. However, I did not keep up with interviews and previous relationships made with recruiters during my last round of looking for a gig.
I came pretty close to flat broke in the four months it took to land another job as I had one kid moving to college and another out of school living at home. I'm still at this current gig, and I honestly couldn't care less about it. We are doing so cool stuff, but every Monday I clock in with the expectation of having a mass firing email when I log in. I have kept in contact with all recruiters that were helpful in this last round and I keep applying and interviewing for jobs. I am a terrible interview, but I'm amazed at how well I do when I am interviewing while having a current job. I'm also applying for a wider-range of jobs that I don't quite have the skill sets for and those interviews go well too.
If you are just starting out and think you landed the job you will retire from, I wish you well and hope that works out for you, seriously. It would also be a wise move to prepare for the unexpected by making relationships with recruiters and HR employees at other companies. Don't ever think you are not replaceable. After the first mass firing, our positions were posted to be filled only from Mexico. The second mass firing was to be filled by Brazil.
You owe no allegiance to the company you work for. Do they randomly gift you with extra weekly paychecks for 10 hours of work you did not do? Why gift them with 10 hours of work they don't pay you for?
Join a union. If every worker at a company was willing to go on strike when redundancies are announced, they’d be forced to do better by their workers, or even something else entirely.
Purpose of corporations is to make money. It's a tool. Nothing less and nothing more. Using people work is the way they are doing it. Expecting something different is very naive.
I think the only wise way to cope with that is maximize your output and minimize your input. If you are here not for experience or mission itself there is no point in undercutting yourself. You can't expect loyalty from a tool. You can expect common decency from a management but that's different story.
Don't become only cynical. It's just how it is. It's an opportunity for you to get more money and experience. From finance perspective it's usually a win.
Good luck! :)
When I read the title, I suspected it might be about Shopify. Unfortunately, my suspicions were confirmed. The company's handling of layoffs left a sour taste in my mouth.
The way Shopify dealt with its staff departures was unacceptable. The lack of transparency and communication during this period not only eroded trust among employees but also created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. The constant silent firings, combined with the CEO's outbursts during town halls, have severely damaged the company's reputation.
I've seen a similar situation play out in my own experience when new management was brought in. My team members were suddenly being threatened with being put on notice, leading to a nasty shift in morale and productivity.
It's worth noting that Shopify's actions aren't isolated to large corporations like themselves. Unfortunately, this type of cultural shift has become all too common in many industries and companies. Nonetheless, this specific incident left a lasting impact on me, and I actively discourage any who asks me about working at Shopify - something I haven't done for any other company I've left _or_ been let go from.
I remember the zoom call when a person from HR was there. Instantly you know.
I have a friend who went into full-on overemployment mode during the pandemic and never stopped once RTO became a thing. Somehow he juggled 2, and sometimes 3, jobs at one time. Of course he was staving off a performance-improvement-plan (pip) at one of his jobs at all times.
He didn't care about work. It was all about money. That worked for him short-term, but longer term Jack became a very VERY dull boy.
> ”Always keep interviewing”
This seems as exhausting as working more than 40 hours a week routinely. I would rather keep a financial reserve to cover the time to get a new job.
It's one thing to informally cultivate a network and another to actively interview all the time. I've done the former which has resulted in my three jobs since the late 90s and I've never done the latter.
I used to work together with Mert at the same company but choose to leave on my own 2 years prior to his layoffs because of similar issues as the one pointed out in this post. Most notably, the lack of vision and the excel table. The company had been dragged down by unbelievably incompetent leadership for some time. You could tell by the composition of teams that employees were not considered based on their qualifications but based on a moving-resources-around-in-an-excel-table strategy. There were also no attempts to gain knowledge from engineers or consider their feedback on decisions. This isn't ultimately something every company needs (bottom up is a double edged sword) but mixed with incompetent management it is a fastlane into chaos.
Hell, searching for my first job changed how I perceive work.
The job market as it is is tough.
Add autism & ADHD to the mix and it gets tougher.
I decided to give as much of a shit about the corporate world as it does to me - which is to say, I stopped searching altogether. I decided I'd rather be unemployed.
Thats the go getter attitude companies are looking for!
Something to hard? Give up. That's sure to get you hired
You can still steal the proverbal catalystic convertor even if its not your employer's truck.
I didn't give up.
I pivoted to content creation.
I mean...
Strategy not yielding results as expected? Better change it up!
Honestly, good for them.
I feel like that not only due to my recent layoff due to cuts, but also due to the job market. I'm tired of applying to ghost openings that exist just to signal growth when there's none.
I was laid off from my first engineering role at the age of 22 and it broke me. Poor leadership, and infighting between me and my supervisor who couldn't reasonably manage me and support a new engineer (he monitored my git commit history to see if I was "working," leading me to make smaller and more frequent commits to inflate my work). He clearly was a legacy engineer that didn't code much anymore (I had to teach him how to use Git) and due to his age, was promoted to management. I was mid restructuring the UI on their shitty product and dated codebase when I got the news. Up until that point I had been pretty excited for what was supposed to be my first engineering gig.
My whole view changed on work and tech companies in a second.
The biggest indicator of layoff is when sales are consistently bad. You should always get to know your sales teams. They are the canary in your coal mine.
> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives. Many companies encourage impactful work to earn promotions, but instead of chasing internal advancements, focus on switching companies to achieve your next career step.
This is probably the most heartbreaking aspect of modern HR policy.
It’s not just about layoffs. It’s about the way the company incentivizes (or doesn’t) worker loyalty and enthusiasm. You could have employees that spend their entire career at a company, and refuse to ever “go the extra mile,” because there’s obviously no motivation to do so.
Loyalty, engagement, and morale usually comes from things other than paychecks. Often, simple, basic Respect can have huge impact on the motivation and loyalty of employees.
It’s actually quite mystifying [to me], how modern HR practice seems to actively discourage things like treating employees with Respect.
I worked for a company that was (at the time I joined them) quite well-known for employee retention. I think the average length of stay was about 25 years, when I joined. They didn’t pay especially well, so their corporate work environment was responsible for that retention.
As the years went on, I watched the HR Department become much colder, and more impersonal. They became absolutely obsessive about constantly reminding employees, at every possible opportunity, that we were simply replaceable cogs in the machine, and that the company could get rid of us, at a whim. They never really improved their compensation, and gradually removed many incentives, so it became all stick, and no carrot.
Performance evaluations became insulting and predictable exercises in humiliation. I was often told to reduce the encouragement in my evaluations (I was a manager, for many years). I used to take pride in specific and eloquent praise in my evaluations. My employees really appreciated that.
HR definitely wanted to make sure that employees felt insecure in their employment. It was obviously a deliberate and calculated policy. Our HR was run by the corporate General Counsel, so, lawyers set the tone.
By the time I left (as a result of a much-anticipated layoff), the employee morale was completely in the shitter, and the company’s much-vaunted employee retention statistic was no more.
Rather like "if you've never missed a plane you've spent too much time in airports", companies believe that there's such a thing as employee retention that's too high; it means you could be squeezing their pay more in order to force them to quit.
Doesn't account for all the tacit knowledge and morale effects of course. Some people just like running the Hunger Games.
& a good corporate reputation is just another asset like a rainforest: something you can burn to top up profits this quarter.
HR departments are constantly looking at "market rates" for jobs which is a fancy way of saying they share salary data or get it from ADP and have much more information about what people are willing to accept.
At hiring time, they are willing to pay market rate (or some percentage of market rate) to get people in the door. Once you are employed, they don't care anymore and will let excellent people slowly fall behind market compensation with 1% to 2% raises.
When those employees get frustrated and leave for 20% bump in comp, the companies seem fine replacing them with a new hire at market rate. So now, they have a new employee making market rate, they have to train the new employee for months before they are productive and they've taken on the risk of an unknown vs. just giving the existing employee a raise to market rate. It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.
> It doesn't make sense unless you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.
I actually makes total sense and a lot of it. I see the take that management doesn't know about knowledge being lost, they don't understand this, they don't understand that. I believed this was case until I started to work for a company that is literally 200 years old.
At some point between joining that company and deciding to leave the previous, I got it -- nobody is actually that stupid, neither people are evil or anything.
Employee being a row in an excel sheet is an important goal that every big company strives to achieve and all the functions, processes and products that are contrary to that dogma are actively rejected by the system as dangerous.
For the company to be the company it must never depend on this particular employee being very smart. Every bit of knowledge that is not written down and confirmed to be in accordance to The Policy is a risk and should be forgotten. That's the intended way.
And of course the only way to discover the market price for real is to spend the money. The cost of losing mister special employee is negative anyway, and for the offchance it's positive, it's worth it.
The evil thing is not this, the evil thing is not being upfront about it. Get a union, negotiate yourself a nice row in the excel sheet and be happy about it or make your own company.
Well I worked for almost 27 years, for a company that made top-shelf optical equipment, for 100 years. They were able to mix heavy process and exceptional employees. It can be done, but is not easy (which is why it’s so rare).
It had lots of frustration and flaws, but consistently, repeatedly, delivered equipment, costing tens of thousands of dollars, that people based their entire careers on.
The trouble came, when they tried to change to a more modern model.
They made a lot of money, for a few years, but ended up crashing and burning. Their brand suffered extinction-level damage.
I’m really hoping that they get their mojo back. There’s a better than even chance they will.
>They made a lot of money, for a few years, but ended up crashing and burning.
I'm not sure whether it proves my point or yours, or both.
>I’m really hoping that they get their mojo back. There’s a better than even chance they will.
Regression to the mean and entropy will eat us all. There is no hope.
In a way, both.
Their structure works really well, for the specialized (smallish) market they occupied for decades, but sucked, in the new market.
I think they may get their groove back, because their core is true, and they are tough. They are a Japanese company that has gone through world wars, depressions, recessions, etc. They are also very conservative, fiscally. That helps you to get past the rough patches.
> you want to telegraph the message that employees are fungible and you don't really care about people.
From my experience, that’s exactly what is going on.
HR was obsessed (and that’s not hyperbole) with constantly telling us that we could be ejected, at any time.
I suspect that it had something to do with legal stuff. Our HR was run by lawyers.
[dead]
> the company’s much-vaunted employee retention statistic
In a job market with more candidates than jobs, why would you need to an employee retention statistic? The reality is that in the current job market, regardless of your employment status or your work, your value has greatly diminished.
Sadly, this is true, but this company was world-famous for insanely high-Quality products. It was definitely crucial to their brand. They needed to attract top-shelf talent, and that brand reputation was important for this. I worked as a peer, with some of the top scientists and engineers in my field.
That reputation took a big hit, over the the time that I worked for them. I think they damn near went belly-up, after 100 years.
They seem to be (slowly) getting their act together, once again. I sincerely wish them luck.
A company having a Human Resources department sounds like a red flag. (And who is surprised by this : such an Orwellian term !?)
A company cop can be called "People's Partner" and North Korea could be called Democratic Republic, but everybody knows what is happening.
Great read OP. My only hope is that somewhere in the future, when these "efficiency-focused" companies close. (Nobody there will build anything special soon and they can easily be disrupted.) Maybe, just maybe, someone would start something that will do things differently, and others will follow.
Without reading the post. Why is the person changing their view of their relationship with their job in the first place?
Doesn't he/she know of people who have been laid off before, among their family/friends etc? Even reading anecdotes of layoffs on the internet will reveal that one ought not be too psychologically entrenched in one's job.
It feels like companies are moving towards annual layoffs akin to stack ranking and removing bottom.
ie annual cull rather than oh no financial results are weak.
Last round did spook me a bit too. Decided to up the emergency reserves as a result
Sorry to hear that. I could imagine that leadership actually didn't know you were being laid off. So the VPs and C-level execs might actually be pissed that someone laid off their go to person. Another perspective I'd like to offer is one of renewal. You can move forward and find something that suits you even more. Something I am quite envious about right now to be honest. Maybe a sabbatical?
good write up, let me share my experience coming from the other side.
"3. Lack of Vision from Leadership" comes in different flavors.
One scenario is exactly as described: leadership genuinely lacks vision, which inevitably leads to layoffs. Another, is when management is already aware of impending layoffs but cannot talk about it yet. While this may seem nefarious, it often has legal implications that restrict transparency. I've been in the difficult position to continue to manage teams while the companys closure was already known to management. Not allowed to inform people is one thing but trying to emotionally prepare them for whats coming is a different, so the drop may not be as high.
Forcefully reducing server costs by 50% and cutting of contractors is hardly considered a vision. 'A lack of vision' could be the actual message. By the time I knew what is going on and costs got reduced I encouraged the best kind of development within the team: CV-driven-development with vague sprint goals!
You want to make use of the new fancy LLM APIs and play around with it? Sure! Introducing a new tech stack? I can not think of a better idea!
While its far from an ideal scenario, its often better than wasting energy on dead features. My idea was to giving people the opportunity to work on something they find personally meaningful and is driven by self motivation. I hope it helped, at least after speaking to every one personally after the bomb dropped, no one was really surprised.
"You should never worry about betraying your workplace because given the chance, your workplace will definitely betray you. Loyalty to individuals. Relationships. That's what makes the world go round."
- Raymond Reddington.
It's hard to read posters in this thread that disagree with the article when citing their 15+ years of experience. Sounds like a mix of time healing all wounds, survivorship bias, and maybe a little Stockholm syndrome.
"Just be positive" about wasting almost 1/2 of your waking hours a week once the curtain drops doesn't sound like a very sustainable solution to life to me.
Or maybe it just hasn't been long enough since my burnout and layoff ;)
The author's advice to do as little as possible will ensure a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In every company I've worked for, everyone knew who the "little as possible" workers were. They were not respected by their coworkers. When people left to do startups, those people were not invited. When layoffs came to town, those people were the first to go.
If you're confident in your abilities, use the layoff as the kick in the butt needed to found your own startup. Invite the high performers at the previous workplace. (I've known people who did this, and would relate to me much later how the layoff was the best thing that happened to their career.)
> Those who made the poor decisions remain, and some are even promoted, while the people carrying out the work are let go.
That's usually accompanied by some mealy mouthed communication from the CEO that "the decision rests with me" or some other poor faith mea culpa while you end up scrambling to get health cover for your wife and kids and figure it how far and severance will get you
I've been laid off a few times in my 35-year career. Being laid off felt like a betrayal to me for a long time. But I was operating under a false model: that because I worked hard and did good work, that the company would value me and take care of me.
I also used to shake my fist at the bad outcomes of stupid decisions made by people above me.
It took me this long to realize that this is all a game of chance. Me choosing a company to work for is me playing the odds. The decisions my superiors make are bets, too. And sometimes, even good bets don't work out.
It's still worth it to work hard and deliver what your management wants in spades. I've been brought along to any number of new employment opportunities because I'm remembered well for being a person who did those things.
I've come to see my career as a series of stops, and my current stop is just what I'm doing right now.
Many companies could be so much more efficient if they were actually meritocratic.
It's very hard to measure this accurately at scale.
If you create metrics, they will be gamed. The people that succeed, then, are not necessarily those with the most merit, but those who are best at manipulating their metrics.
We started measuring progress this month by measuring how many percent of last week's planned tasks were completed, and it's already showing.
Everyone is reporting 100 % which means they're probably doing three days worth of work in one work week to keep the number up.
One product owner showed 12 tasks out of 57 being completed and still gave out a 100 per cent completion rate because he retroactively rated those 12 as critical and the rest as unimportant.
I've never been laid off, but once was part of a company that went bankrupt and was one of the last people to leave the payroll (which is like being laid off, but where your employer is dead so at least you can console yourself with being the guy turning off the lights)... That said I did a lot of laying off for that company. Almost everyone ended up much better off after a few weeks or a month or so of searching. People would rightfully worry about if their actions caused it or why me instead of ___. The truth was that it was really about spreadsheets.
For me, I ended up getting a much better job that paid 2x what I made at the bankrupt company. But the feelings of having your livelihood rug-pulled are really difficult.
I'm convinced layoffs are a persistent management memetic where we've convinced ourselves these are necessary, good, and magically creates efficiencies.
In reality it's a desperate shotgunning your org chart since you've apparently no better way to figure out what you need or don't. It's incredibly destabilizing and demotivating and creates a culture as seen in this post where you no longer have workers that feel aligned with the success of the company (because you're telling them they aren't). It should be reserved for absolutely existential moments in the company, not when you're seeing record profitability.
I think the article, although well built and clearly criticising crucial points in the modern work structure, fails to see the fundamental issue that is at the core of these layoffs.
In fact, the recommendation for those who are still employed is incomplete and therefore doubles down on the issue without realising it.
While everything in the article is true, that you shouldn't romanticise your job, focussing on the job description only, only ever working the amount required and making lean résumés will reaffirm the status quo and aggravate the situation long term.
It does this because it doubles down on what fractured the working landscape to begin with, which is individuality, competitiveness and alienation.
You can't treat an alienating job as if it was already the job you dream of. This is wishful thinking. But going full hostile to your job won't make your situation any better.
Here's what I suggest instead.
Do everything the article says if you identified your work environment in the descriptions in the article.
At the same time do a honest and deep evaluation of your values and what you aim to be in 5, 10 years time. Thinking long term will have first the effect of putting the immediate problems into perspective and will highlight what's missing in your career today in order to get the job you'd want for you.
Invest in your portfolio. Keep doing interviews. Don't compromise on deliverable quality, because if you go down the road of actively crippling your performance, you will eventually become the bad developer you are allowing yourself to be just to get back at the current company that doesn't value you.
Remember, you don't get a dream job and then you become the great developer you think you should be. It's unfair, but the reality is you first become the great professional you want to be and then you get the dream job you want, if you are lucky.
It's never guaranteed. It's always a game of probability. The only constant and the only thing you can control is you and your relationship with your work as an ever flowing, ever changing process.
"It feels as though the trust between companies and employees is now broken."
I'm afraid we haven't hit rock bottom yet, they won't change until no one applies anymore.
Huge opportunity for companies willing to do the right thing!
Do NOT work only your contract hours. It might seem like the logical choice but it rarely is because of following reasons :
1. You cannot build strong skills working just contract hours. 2. You cannot market your achievements by working only 40 hours. And in turn this makes you dispensable and more disposable. 3. You can't control your work which is probably the most important element of all this. 4. you can't search for great positions with the new skills you achieved if you only work 40 hours ...
Work in such a way that you get recognition for the hours worked.
Do important projects, not crappy side projects and MARKET THE HELL out of your work. Everyone should know what you are doing.
Every day at a job is a campaign to increase your salary massively - either at the job or somewhere else. (Btw, this is how most people in NYC think thought they may not admit it.)
You have to do impressive things and then use 3x your time marketing them to everyone else in the company. Everything else - money and promotions will follow. (Process won't be pretty - but you won't be floundering nearly as much as others who don't take this advice.)
> they only do what’s strictly required to avoid a performance improvement plan. No one goes above and beyond anymore; no one takes initiative to improve things. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.
I see this at large Canadian financial institutions, too, but for the opposite reasons - employees recognize that it's really difficult to fire people based on performance. It's so hard, in fact, that it's easier to talk them up and get them hired internally by another team and make it someone else's problem.
You can strike the word Canadian out of it just fine. And anyway, it's not like firing a person is any different -- they just become a problem of somebody else.
> For those like me who’ve experienced layoffs, work has become just that—work. You do what’s assigned, and if your company squanders your potential or forces you to waste time on unnecessary projects, you simply stop caring. You collect your paycheck at the end of the month, and that’s it. This is the new modern work: no more striving to be 40% better every year.
This is why I've always enjoyed working at startups or being a consultant on my own. You have more risk, but you also reap the rewards of getting better.
The author was young and learned the hard way. There is no single country on Earth that is integrated in the ultra-financiarized western economic sphere that is not potentially affected. It is the end of stable jobs and pretty much the end of all economy altogether, except for the crony capitalists that leech off the printer. Every company is owned by Blackrock. They take major shortsighted decissions to the tune of the imaginary casinos ("investors", or "the market") or fund scorings. Productive activity no longer matters. Experienced people no longer matter. The game is a different one and you are not even a player.
I know some folks that very much take the cynical approach to work. They work very hard to eek out every penny they can from each employer and switch jobs a moments notice for more money.
I feel like this has a strange re-enforcing cycle that they find employers who are just like they are (looking to eek out every hour from their employees) and so they get more cynical.
>Always keep interviewing
Man that sounds like a full time job on its own...
> They work very hard to *eek out every penny they can
*: Eke.
This really seems to me like a big warning that says to avoid hiring people that were laid off.
Better advice. Be who you are. Work for and with people you like. Do what interests you where you are valued. You will spend a lot of time at work. Try to make sure it feels good.
> Stick to your contract hours. If your contract says 40 hours, work 40 hours—no more, no less. Protect your personal time and well-being
If you want to be mediocre and/or don't care to get promoted sure?
This article is wrong in so many ways and not generalizable. I can see on bigger companies, you may be an excel sheet row. But, the reason why someone would get laid-off is the exact opposite IMO - not adding value. But in a smaller early stage company, you are responsible for team's success or failure and you are the only reason why someone are getting laid-off.
I was laid off about a month ago. I worked as a software designer and one of the top experts in the world on the software and its subject matter. Didn't matter, they broomed me anyway.
Broken trust, indeed.
I once contracted for a company that laid off 6 of my bosses in 7 months. The one who hired me was fired 2 days after I started. In the end, they didn't extend my contract, basically because nobody knew anymore where I belonged in the company structure, who do I report to, and who should actually extend my contract :-)
Click bait.
I'm sure that the author who is capable of writing such a post is also capable of reading other post/articles of people who have had layoffs in the past, and hence none of anything that happened should be a surprise for him.
So my guess is that he has written it for the clicks.
It's different when you're contracting and expect your contract to end at any minute.
But I was doing some work for this startup ages ago and at some point out of the blue one of our full time contacts asked us if we've been paid because they haven't been. Must have been a lot less fun for them (I had other projects besides them) than for me. I only lost the pay for like 1/3 of a full time month.
I’ve been working for almost 30 years and I’ve had 10 jobs. A layoff for me has not been “traumatic”. It’s a nuisance.
“Always keep your running shoes around your neck”.
After staying at my second job too long and becoming an “expert beginner” in 2008 and being stuck, I said “never again”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39629190
1. I keep enough savings in a liquid account to pay my expenses between 9-12 months.
2. I keep my skills up to date.
3. Don’t be a “ticket taker”. This link I posted to HN describes my thoughts perfectly (It isn’t my blog)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42818169
4. Keep your network strong.
My first layoff was in 2011 when the company was sold for scraps and they let everyone go. We all knew it was coming. Management was up front with us about the difficulties the companies was facing and that kept us apprised of the companies that our investors were looking to for acquisitions. Our investors also promised us that we would get paid for every hour we worked.
Most of us stuck around to the bitter end, when the time came, they gave us our notice, we all went to lunch together and came back to the office and just joked around for awhile.
The CTO had a couple of recruiter friends reach out to us. From looking at LinkedIn, everyone got a better job within a month. Our major customer arranged for me to finish my work as a contractor for them after making an agreement with the acquirer to let me keep the code while working for the customer.
The second time was the year before last and it was Amazon. I commented here about four months after it happened.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988
I honestly didn’t think about the layoff three weeks after it happened. It was then my 8th job since 1996, I got my severance and moved on to my ninth job three weeks later.
The next job after that one ended up being mote shitty than I could imagine. I got laid off from there last year. I replied to an internal recruiter from my current company and again had a job three weeks later.
> Stick to your contract hours. If your contract says 40 hours, work 40 hours—no more, no less.
Why not work less?
It's important to note that not all organizations operate in this manner. My own experience with a layoff last year included a two-month notice period and a severance package equivalent to nearly a year's salary. During my notice period, our manager encouraged everyone to prioritize their job search.
The guy mentions layoffs between Germany and US are the same. They are not. After probation is harder to lay off people (you have 3 months notice) and usually good severance packages. I have friends who were laid off and actually they made a buck.
This hit home for me, thank you for sharing. I was a bit surprised that you didn't mention or explore a path outside of employment, rather chose the content path of receiving paychecks and wasting time not being very motivated to push yourself. Don't give up on your potential!
Layoffs are just a symptom. Overhiring and easy money are the cause. Companies aren't there to "take care of you", they aren't welfare departments
They hired a bunch of people who took the money for granted, and at some point that's no longer going to sustain itself
> If a company decides to lay off, for instance, 40 employees, German law doesn’t prevent this. Instead, the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children. In this sense, when it comes to layoffs, the difference between Germany and the US is minimal.
From what I have seen in the past, the set of people with children and a mortgage can be difficult. Some really do not want to be there, but stay for job security.
I'm also not entirely sold on prioritising those lay-offs based on social elements, such as children. I can see incentives being good to have more children in a society, but you shouldn't be punished for not having them. Ultimately from the company's perspective, you want to maximise your company's future success.
I would amend some points:
> Stick to your contract hours.
Do additional hours where required and you are able, but make sure they are visible, and compensate yourself them back. It increases your perceived value.
> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives.
For your own sake, take pride in your work. Don't become stale.
> Always keep interviewing.
Many stop doing this because it's a pain and stressful. I think it is enough to keep your toes in, try to figure out what salaries are being offered, what kinds of jobs are available and how desirable you are. Try to learn those things with as minimal effort from yourself as possible.
> I can see incentives being good to have more children in a society, but you shouldn't be punished for not having them.
Isn't this self-contradictory ?
There's a carrot and stick. Losing your job seems like a heavy stick, whereas a small redistribution of tax seems more like a carrot.
Layoff culture will create companies full of Dyatlovs from Chernobyl, covering their ass, not that brave, not that innovative. Focused on maybe a promotion or surviving the next round of firings. It's sad to see the tech industry self-sabotage this way.
I’ve been through multiple layoffs in my life and I’m going through them again, but this is the first time I’ve heard the term “impacted” used so often in this context. It’s used 5 times in this article and it’s said constantly in our company town hall meetings when discussing the current rounds of layoffs.
Op missed a sign..."Sudden C-Suite departure". Just be sure a lay-off is near!
I keep saying this: A company is a legal person, and you should not try to be loyal to a legal person because legal person can not be loyal to you,
You can, however, be loyal to your boss, and your boss can be loyal to you, as long as this does not conflicts with his duties to the company.
Op writes sage advice.
However I would encourage that the "don't give a shit about the company and colleagues" is not quite as simplistic.
Yes, fuck the company, they don't care. You should always assume this. But you _should_ care about your colleagues. They are your network, and greatest asset at the next company. If you are shit to them, they will not recommend you.
So my conclusions, and or advice to younger people is this:
o Learn what the business wants, it'll help you make better decisions/products, and often gives you fair warning about being laid off.
o Be suspicious of the company.
o if there a clash between business priorities and you, you will always come off worse.
o Go over and beyond for your colleagues, not your company.
o fight for your colleagues not the company
o your colleagues are your CV.
While true, they might not recommend you anyhow. I thought I got along well with my co-workers, and I consistently got feedback at year end that they enjoyed working with me, but when I was laid off and asked them for a recommendation on Linked In, only the most junior of them did it. Even after I left all of them great reviews there.
I am still surprised by this. They didn't get laid off. Just me.
I'm not angry at them, just very confused about their reasons not to leave me a good review to help me get a new job.
> confused about their reasons not to leave me a good review to help me get a new job.
At a guess: They're afraid your stigma of not currently having a job will "rub off" onto themselves.
As an employer, I remain confused about the common notion that being an employee is somehow safer than owning a business.
The opposite is true.
First, I don't have need unemployment insurance. You are my unemployment insurance. I am hedging against your mistakes, as well as mine.
Second, I assess the situation to the best of my abilities, but also: How I see fit. As an employee, on the other hand, not being able to decide might as well feel like getting struck by lightning. (Here I would only add that as an employer it also feels like that if people fire you — as in: they quit — for any reason. It's just that you get more chances to practice it.)
Reconsidering the supposed safety aspect of an employment (since it's such a sticky idea) is certainly one thing I hope we would do. Unfortunately, when trying to discuss the issue with employees (not necessarily those who work for me), they mostly seem to rather not want to think about it.
Other thoughts. Why I run a company: It's certainly not money. I would even argue I (and most people I know running SMBs) relatively care a lot less about job money than the average employee does. I do it because would hate to work on something I think is bad and where attention is not spent, where it should be (so exactly what a lot of employees complain about in their company).
Best I can tell, a good reason to work for a company is getting to work on stuff that excited you and that you could not do better on your own. But I think more people should consider doing their own things more often! I would welcome more meta-competition in organizing work in a better way.
Points of disagreement with the post:
- People will miss things and systems fail, but I can't think of any reason why a CEO would not want to be able to spot the people who a) are not assholes and b) gel really well with the company. I don't want anyone to work overtime for me, but the above will still hold true. A company is complicated, and you being a considerate human being makes everything so much better.
- Yes, Excel is how you work with numbers, also those pertaining to human beings. That's just the responsible way to organize information about things. But if you think that robs me of my ability to think about or care for human beings, I am mostly confused. Can you not think of humans when you write code, because it's digital characters on a screen? Still, it's of note that even highly analytical people find something dehumanizing in that, when it pertains to themselves.
> I can't think of any reason why a CEO would not want to be able to spot the people who a) are not assholes and b) gel really well with the company.
The CEO might want to be able to spot that, but in any company of some size they won't be able to spot it. Simply because they're the CEO, and there's far too many people working under them for them to keep that close track of every one. A team lead (of a not-too-big team) may be able to do that, but then they'd have to simultaneously be the CEO. i.e: It only works for companies the size of not-too-big teams.
First time I was let go, I was fresh out of university. I had only been in the position for around 3 weeks. I came into the company at the worst possible time and they gave me a task which, in retrospect, was very difficult for a recent graduate; the project had around 30K concurrent users at its peak and I had to make it so that their results tables would update in realtime... They gave me only 3 weeks to do that task (which I had to complete along with some other tasks/bug fixing)... Also, I had to learn git which was not mainstream at the time (this was before GitHub). This was also before WebSockets were widely supported and before Socket.io existed. In retrospect, I should have asked to be assigned to an easier task as a starter, or should have negotiated down the scope. Anyway this was my first job and I was deeply passionate about web technologies so it was a painful experience to be rejected for something which was the center of my universe at the time.
After that, I held onto, in fact, excelled at every job and was often one of the top software engineers wherever I worked. I also launched some popular open source projects since then. I experienced some success in crypto (after facing a lot of adversity). I led significant improvements in the crypto project I worked on and things were looking up, the blockchain became highly stable and supported some unique features which would allow it to scale and meet its original vision; but after a couple of years, founders decided they wanted to go in a different direction which I did not agree with and so I had to quit. I made such an impact on that project that I managed to earn income from it for about 3 years after quitting the company; the biggest crypto voting cartel in that ecosystem broke up and re-formed just to include me as a member. Then after 3 years of horrible decisions, the founders essentially ran the project into the ground (no surprise to me); they did such a bad job that they then had to migrate their token to a competitor's platform. I lost my passive income... Though I must have earned like 200K EUR from it over the years. Best years of my life; no job, earning passive income while working voluntarily on open source project I cared about. I was not beholden to anyone and had no responsibilities besides just keeping my node running.
After that, I had to go back to working 9-to-5 doing the most tedious jobs, for lower pay. I was forced to accept work for a company in the mainstream finance sector which was the antithesis of everything I knew and believed in, literally going to work every day believing 100% that I was making the world a worse place. I struggled to find motivation; I did my best to hide it but I got fired after almost 1 year (coincidentally, just a few months before my shares would vest). Talent cannot make up for lack of enthusiasm it turns out... It was an unsettling experience hearing the CTO tell me how smart I was and that I won't have trouble finding other work... while firing me... Like 2 weeks after giving me access to their Stripe control panel where I could see all company finances! At that point, I had full access to everything, all user data, all services, all infrastructure. They'd literally put me in a position of ultimate trust, before pulling the rug from under me. I left in a very classy manner and on decent terms, as I always did before. In retrospect, the whole experience working there was very strange.
Anyway it's been a struggle to find motivation since then. I don't take my career too seriously now; having seen both the lows and the highs and seeing how talent and determination doesn't doesn't actually make a difference in the face of political machinations (which are pervasive in the industry). I don't think I would even care much if I got fired again. I'm now more political myself; I do the bare minimum. In effect, I've become like the people I used to hate, but I don't hate them anymore because I now understand why they might have been that way.
To the author, if you're reading this:
If you were on such good terms with VP of Eng and C-levels, why didn't you reach out to them and ask what's going on? They could interfere and prevent your layoff.
Quite on point, for me it made me value the team, and no longer believe in whatever management tells about "we are family", "company values", or whatever else they feel like selling as the vision and company culture.
The last 2 years fundamentally changed how a lot of people perceive work. I've witnessed layoffs in the past, but they didn't seem to hit as many people as hard as they did this time.
That said - having seen how layoffs are organized from the inside (multiple times), I can _guarantee_ that the list of suggestions on this post ("Suggestions for Those Who Haven’t Been Laid Off (Yet)" - particularly the first 2 points) are the best way to get included on the layoff sheet, in almost any organization. They might be good ideas for mental health reasons, but definitely an easy "name on the list" if you're perceived as "just doing the minimum" (I know that doesn't sound fair, but that's how boards think).
Though it was about the finance sector in ‘07/‘08 and its obviously different circumstances, I enjoyed the way the movie Margin Call portrayed layoffs as the author here described them—cold and myopic.
I’m the cofounder of Life360, a company I’ve grown from seed to IPO, now with about 600 employees. This whole issue can be addressed by embracing a straightforward social contract, something I share openly with everyone I hire:
No promises of lifetime employment. I’m focused on the long-term health of the company, and our needs will inevitably change. If we continue to grow, it’s almost guaranteed that not everyone will be the right fit at every stage.
No expectation of loyalty. The flip side is that we aim to attract ambitious, hungry people, which means we need to provide real opportunities for career advancement. If we can’t, I understand you’ll move on.
If we let someone go after a single bad quarter, that’s on us for being shortsighted. We know people have ups and downs, and we don’t want to be overly sentimental, but we also don’t want to act rashly. On the other hand, if someone’s job-hopping every year, that’s usually a sign of short-term thinking. From 2014–2021, job-hopping didn’t matter much. Now, it’s becoming clear that those signals are important again.
At the end of the day, it’s not about judgment—no good/bad or right/wrong here (aside from obvious dealbreakers like dishonesty). It’s just adults making tradeoffs.
That said, I’ve seen how some companies shy away from being upfront about this, which leads to cynicism. We’ve had moments like that too—at some point, we started calling ourselves “a family.” I shut that down fast. It wasn’t popular, but it helped clarify our stance. You know what you’re signing up for with us.
> You’re Just a Row in an Excel Table
Usually those just above the layoff line will have a fun time inheriting the work of those below the line.
I was working for a German startup that had been acquired by a big American company. The relationship between my team and the big corp was strained from the start - we felt that they simply didn't understand what we did and didn't give us the liberty to decide how best to do things. They also didn't seem very mindful of time zone differences or understanding of German worker protection laws.
When they laid off the other team that was working in our office (on an entirely different product), they of course assured us that we were safe - they believed in our product, yadda yadda.
Then at some point, things started getting weird - a job position was cancelled right before we were going to offer the candidate the job. A trip to HQ was cancelled last minute. An external team was getting increasingly involved.
About a year after the other team had been fired, the second highest ranking executive was visiting our office, something he would do once in a while. When the visit was announced, we were joking that "if he brings Pattie from HR, they'll lay us off". I got the message from my coworker on my way to work: "Pattie is here."
The speech the executive gave us was the stupidest thing I've ever heard somebody say to me. He literally said: "In a couple of years, you will look at this as a big opportunity." We just rolled our eyes at each other. When he left the room, we picked up the remotes and started playing stickman against each other. It was the only thing that seemed appropriate.
We had a very nice office and so we were looking forward to be able to spend our notice period together, playing video games, making music and doing the bare minimum in terms of handover duties. Unfortunately, covid happened at right that time and our time together was dramatically cut short, which I still consider a tragedy.
One woman in our team was pregnant and fought the settlement they were offering us. As far as I know, they had to keep her on for longer and she eventually negotiated a better deal - pregnant people are especially protected under German labour law.
To this day, some in my former team doubt that what they did was really all that legal and think we should have fought back, because it later turned out that they lied to us about a bunch of things. But I doubt it would have been really worth it. They just wanted us out.
After being laid off a few times you start to understand it's all just a show - theater.
The young employees believe it entirely because they have never known any different.
The more experienced become more realistic about the way the entire system works.
Oh, I don't know. In my current and previous job I was, frankly, amazed at the ronin-like attitude openly expressed by those new, young hires. I was nowhere near this radicalized, when I started my first 'real' job. Management is in for a rather rude awakening.
Always prioritize physical and mental health over work. Only go above and beyond for your employer after you’ve done so for yourself.
> 3. Lack of Vision from Leadership
I think layoffs at my employer have been imminent for 5 years...
"कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन | मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि" - Bhagvad gita, chapter 2, verse 47.
You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.
A great heartfelt essay. I got the feeling it was written with magnanimous restraint.
It would be good to do a study on how tech workers feel in an era of such commonplace betrayal and dehumanisation. If anyone has stories they want to share please get in touch at UK Cybershow and let's see if there's an episode in it.
From my stint at a big corporation, the person I knew most closely who "succeeded" the most (for themselves, not for the company) would routinely interview for competitive offers and threaten to leave. I saw on a few occasions this same person lie in meetings to cover their ass to people who were less technical. I know of one person who has somehow managed to do the bare minimum at two full time remote jobs simultaneously.
To everyone reading the comments that describe corporations as the ones who treat their employees with contempt, it's sadly a two way street. It comes down to shitty people polluting expectations at all levels of society, and people dialing back their expectations accordingly.
With all the Luigi talk in the air, it's important to remember this goes for insurance companies as well. Insurance fraud is a huge drain on the industry and it's folks of all levels of wealth committing it. It's a part of the reason why insurers squeeze harder to keep the profits flowing. That's obviously no excuse for delay/deny/depose tactics--I'm just saying that in an environment of fraudsters who add friction to a company that does business honestly, you will find that the cheaters and bad actors will bubble to the top, more so than usual.
"However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. "
And that is exactly how corporate America works. Shareholder value before everything. The billionaire keep the stock price up not for the value, but for their simple greed. F** you and your self-worth.
RIF. Reduction in force. Spend every end of week, on the clock making three envelopes: your resume, an envelope which says 'blame everything on the previous guy' and the last envelope? 'make three envelopes'
That's why all of the bootlicking wording from employees now makes me puke: "teamwork" "passionate about my work" "making an impact" "standups" "going above and beyond"... all of that is bs. Go to work, collect a paychech and leave as early as possible. Reserve teamwork for your group of friends, passion for your hobbies, raising a family or having fun out of work. And never, ever give them 2 weeks notice. When you find a better job, just walk away and email them when you are at home. Fire the company that will not give you 2 weeks notice for layoffs.
>> ...to the company, I was just a row in an Excel sheet.
TL;DR it won't make you feel better but you're not a row in a spreadsheet; you're a fungible generic resource.
<For all but the smallest organizations>
At a certain level and/or for specific events, executive leadership is playing checkers not chess. You see this in overall staffing, budgets and lay-offs. Your executive is tasked with very excel-like tasks, such as "cut n people" or "trim your budget xx%". They then get political and attack specific initiatives or teams, or peanut-butter it across everyone. By definition they need to work at a generic level to "scale". When it gets to selecting the actual people, it's either done by the people who DO know individuals but you might not have credibility and a good reputation (or worse, they actively target you), or at an even less related metric, like a calc that provides the perception of "fairness" (true story: I saw HR try and calc how much "experience" we could get for each dollar of salary). IME only if it's a very small layoff (~ < 10-15%) and selected by the front-line manager do you see the high performers saved, and it's still political.
Context: I report to the CTO but still have lots of direct interaction with ICs. I struggle to meld these worlds at the intersection almost daily. I've been involved it doing the lay-offs at two companies.
Aside: there are TWO failures in doing what is the incredibly unpleasant job of laying people off:
1. Everyone knows you only get one lay-off before it's all over. After the second round nothing gets done. You almost always hear "this is the only round" and I believe leadership actually believes this, there's just know way they can know for sure.
2. Botching the order of operations. You need to get your sh!t in order and not do stuff like send out the laptop return courier before the announcement, or cause extra panic and confusion with timing and poor messaging. Ignorance, Incompetence or Schadenfreude; I have no sympathy for less than perfect behaviour and execution here.
LinkedIn bellyaching is hitting HackerNews now, good grief.
> Layoffs were uncommon when I started working, and being a developer felt like an incredibly safe job.
I'm in the US.
I'm mid career, entered the job market 22 years ago, and have another ~22 years before I retire.
Layoffs were very common in the 1990s when I was teenager. In the US, if you think layoffs are a "new thing," you're very naive. (Remember, the author is from Germany.)
One thing I did very early in my career was learn enough about business to know that businesses, markets, and products don't last forever. Most don't even last a whole career. Sticking in a job long enough to get laid off with a severance is a good thing: You don't get money when you leave a job voluntarily.
(Granted, there are good reasons to leave before the layoff, but keep in mind that if you loose out on a severance, you've left money on the table, especially if you can get a job before the severance runs out.)
I feel fortunate it's not layoffs that made me cynical. But working for mid and big companies.
I had the incredible luck of starting my career as the first hire and thus lead developer right out of college. The startup which hired me eventually ran out of steam, but the experience I got is priceless.
Now big corporations on the other hand are a shit show, and from what I can tell have always been a shit show. Have laid me off 3 times. And none of it has affected me much. Always quickly found another good position, and that's with being absolutely terrible at live coding challenges.
I'd say try to find work you're interested in. If you can, also try to keep your commute as short as possible. And live in a place you like.
And good luck.
The author seems to have just discovered that capitalism does not have loyalty to anyone other than the shareholders. And those shareholders do not care whether you have contributed to their profits much more than anyone in the recent past - if it looks like they can make more profit that quarter by laying you off, they do it.
Maybe we should start calling this the "enshttification" of work? As capitalism is enshttifying everything, it was unimaginable that work would not get affected...
Getting laid off was the best thing to ever happen to me.
It woke me up from a dream I was in. I believed if you worked hard and provided great value to a startup you would be valued and have a place.
After five years at the company (as employee #1), I was laid off. I realized my mindset was delusional and I swore to never work for anyone ever again.
Several years later, the founder that laid me off asked if I wanted to co-found a new company he was creating. I sorta felt vindicated then :)
insert godfather meme
So, did you join him, or did you mean your vindication was "No way; fuck you, too!" ?
I heard him out and considered it. I ultimately decided not to join him.
I am honestly confused by how much people are willing to sacrifice for the false sense of security of a big company job. Folks seem to see employment as something akin to marriage, while I'm completely unable to see it as anything other than a transaction.
There is so much to unpack from this post.
1. Post Dot-com bubble dev naivete: most Post Dot-com devs (ie those who joined the work force sometime after the bubble burst) have only known the summer of tech (ML flourishing, everyone can code movements, nonsensical startups raising ridiculous amounts of money, companies hiring devs they don't need to keep competitors from having and BigHead kind of devs able to keep a job). These are the devs that used to go to r/cscareerquestions and tell everyone that they should get everyone to learn to code and program, the kind that believed in chasing aggressive salary growth at any cost. True summertime devs who have known nothing but joy and love in the tech world. These are the devs who OD'ed on the tech corpo koolaid
2. The super-meritocracy fallacy: following from point 1, these devs believed in the increasingly rare concept of promotion-only growth, the idea that if you worked really hard, your salary and your job title willl eventually reflect your hard work. While this is somewhat true, the extent to which your hard work is actually compensated seems to be overrated by most devs. This a rather peculiar thing as you would expect most devs to be data driven and to actually research whether this is true in general for most companies. Any veteran knows that career progression and salary increase by promotion has a very early point of diminished returns hence the job-hopping
3. The existential meaning of a job: this is another peculiar aspect of devs given that they see themselves as rational. An employeement relationship is a business relationship (like a partnership) where continuous work is exchanged for money. Yet these devs seem to have somehow assume some kind of existential meaning to this transactional relationship the terms of which they should have known. Placing the meaning of your life in a transaction is clearly misguided and it shouldn't take a layoff for someone to realise that. Yet here we are
4. The Saviour Dev Hero myth: this also follows from point 1. Devs being marketed as corpo heros is just that marketing. The supply and demand ratio is not a fixed thing. It changes. Devs were never going to be in demand forever. Business needs change. No one is irreplaceable. No matter how good. There is always someone good enough that will work for a similar salary (or less). During the summer of tech, the demand was higher than the supply so layoffs were rare. But summers don't last forever.
Ultimately, the lesson that devs, for all their self-described higher intellect and rationality, never seem to learn is that the goal of all companies is to increase their profits, everything else is secondary. Other goals exist only to help that. Layoffs while declaring record breaking profits is not surprising. Given the job market, new hires could be acquired at a lower salary and perhaps not as many are needed. As an employee, you are there to help increase profits and the company owes you a salary. This implied idea that efforts should be rewarded even when it makes no business sense, that the company should provide an existential meaning to your work or that it should always need you even when it makes no business sense is in my opinion delusional and a by-product of Post-Dot bubble conditions that no longer exist.
The market has changed (and it will change again) and all agents within must do so as well.
Perfectly echos my thoughts as a 25+ year veteran engineer who has been laid off 3 times. Your writing style is poetic as well.
I would add a few more.
1) There is no permanancy in tech, only impermanancy - hence, stay on your toes, be a learning machine, and not be attached to your laurels. You could one day be a hero, and the next day a zero.
2) Bandwagons come and go - internet, web, cloud, ml etc etc. Be a learning machine with a strong grip on the fundamentals of the math and the science.
3) Most of us are picking up lottery tickets - but confuse skill with luck. An early google engineer may walk with a swagger, but he/she has been lucky.
4) Keep saving for the rainy day, as they usually will come. In your financial calculations, do not take on long term obligations assuming your job will last.
Thank you. This is a very underrated (yet) thoughtful and wise response.
A job is a means to an end.
Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives.
It's been my experience that accepting whatever dumb challenge management presents is how you get kept on. The advice that "your job is to make your manager look good to his manager" rings true to me. I would add that boosting your manager's ego goes pretty far, too. I find both activities detestable, but necessary in corporate life.
Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company.
I've never understood how people can muster the energy for this. I'm sure it's a great idea, but I would burn out immediately.
I am in the middle of being laid off right now, and might as well share some of the details, because my situation is a bit weird.
My team of 12 was reduced by half in November. They told us that 6 would stay and 6 would go. I was told I was staying, and that my position was "unaffected", but I was also told that I was going to have an end date in either February or March, which to me sounds like my position is pretty well affected...
They have refused to give any of us an official end date, or discuss our severance terms in writing. Right now, I have been assured that my last day will be 2/28 and that I'll get 2 months if severance, but they could change their mind if they wanted to since they won't commit. I have voiced that this keeps me from effectively planning my next career move. What if I'm offered a job starting in March, and my current employer decides to they want to keep me until April? I'd be forced to choose between receiving a severance vs. accepting the new job.
All the while, they have us training our replacements in India, as if we have the motivation to do anything that benefits the company right now. Most of us are only cooperating at all because we want out in March and don't want to be dragged along for months while they try to keep the product afloat.
And the reason they aren't terminating our entire department and product is because they want to maintain the few million dollars in ARR they get from our customers, even though that ARR is 1/10,000 of the company's total revenue.
And they won't keep that ARR because they're getting rid of the entire customer success team and transferring the responsibility to a call center in India that is demanding to only work on India time (ending business hour product support entirely for our predominantly North American customers). They also have zero experience with the kind of product we make, and have no chance of successfully addressing the kind of work they're going to be expected to do for our customers.
All because the people who made these decisions have absolutely no clue what anyone in our org does. We really are just lines in an Excel sheet. We were a startup a few years ago that this much larger company purchased because they wanted to use our solution massively at scale inside of the company. Revenue wasn't even how we were supposed to be measured, and they're going to actively destroy the entire product that they spent so much time and energy implementing across the business.
Alternatively the real lesson here is to put less effort into coding and engineering and more into organization. Small groups that handle entire business verticals are the future. Modern tools and machine learning can enable small groups to outperform big organizations without the wretched chaos that leads to ruthless and unfeeling reorgs and pivots. And clients large and small often prefer dealing with small and focused groups more than large and hard to handle giants that currently dominate markets.
"prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees, such as those with children"
This is so discriminatory, I don't even know where to start. Also, employees with children are more likely to need urgent time off, and have more stringent time constraints than the ones who don't.
Mostly a bad advice.
Why? Seems pretty sensible. Employer-employee is a business relationship. Treat it as such.
Worked with some of the teams making the first iPhone and bringing the Internet to everyone in a pocket sized slab was way more than a job it was a dream. Didn't turn out quite as expected, but this idea that work is only that is in my opinion dangerous. Millions are made selling sugar water and there is a famous multimillionaire with warehouses full of nickles, but business can be much more than that and it is up to all participants to build, man, and steer the boats.
> but business can be much more than that and it is up to all participants to build, man, and steer the boats.
If you own the galley you're a "participant"; if your job is rowing it, you're something else entirely.
Why do you think so?
I skimmed this and I'm glad this person learned this.
I don't think you need to be laid off to learn this, you can just OBSERVE reality and will find this to be true easily. I did and hopefully don't get to suffer what OP did but I know it's just one random event from happening.
I'd add another: don't trust future plans or promises. Get yours now or assume it won't happen because "circumstances changed" is a typical trick that's pulled on people.
> 4. Sudden, Vague Meetings
These aren't actually that rare.
Modern finance is the true villain; it removes businesses from the hands of the real founders who understand it and puts it in the hands of clueless MBAs.
> However, during a layoff, it seems that who you are and what you do doesn’t matter. In most cases, the decision is made by people who don’t even know you.
I think this is a key observation. I of course cannot speak for every case, but in the couple of layoff rounds I've been witness to, for unrelated companies, layoffs are done without relation to individual skills or contribution.
Or rather: they may start with low performers, but these aren't enough, and then the next people that get axed are good performers (sometimes brilliant in my experience) for areas that the execs deemed not important enough for the company. Key words "not important enough", not unimportant. They are also done by people who don't know the team or its members, resulting in firing people who were later found to be essential, and their manager cannot speak for them because the manager was also laid off.
In the end, remember this when judging your "loyalty" to a company.
One warning sign not listed, if your company has lots of offices around the world and leadership visit your office when they never do before. They're talking about changes within that office which is generally the structure of the office.
Signs of a Layoff
6) Senior management is mysteriously missing and impossible to get ahold of. (They're not allowed to say anything to anyone.)
I just started a new job in Hamburg, Germany, same location as the author, and one nice thing they have here is an extremely negative view on overtime, making it very encouraged to remain within hours
It's not just a "negative view on overtime", there are also very strict laws around the amount of overtime, how much rest you need between workdays and compensation.
> one nice thing they have here is an extremely negative view on overtime, making it very encouraged to remain within hours
Wait until your probezeit ends and your POs metrics get strained.
My coworkers have passed their Probezeit, do you think it's also like them too?
Also, what is with the negativity? Are you depressed? I bet you're just going to say "I'm a Marxist" or something
I'm sympathetic but this person comes across as young and (previously) naive. I suppose everyone has to learn the company is not their friend someday.
yeah this is just someone losing their work virginity
the real pro-level insight is understanding that the people left behind are often in a worse position - inertia keeps them locked into a dying company
In response to the suggestions at the end:
>> Stick to your contract hours. If your contract says 40 hours, work 40 hours—no more, no less. Protect your personal time and well-being.
100% agree, a company is (almost) never going to say "that's enough, you shouldn't work so much". They will say they only want you to work XX hours but they aren't going to chide you for going over.
>> Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives. Many companies encourage impactful work to earn promotions, but instead of chasing internal advancements, focus on switching companies to achieve your next career step.
Ehh, I mean don't kill yourself for a company that doesn't care but the idea of jumping companies every few years is not appealing. You might make more money but I kind of doubt you'll be happier, to each their own.
>> Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company. Instead, continuously explore opportunities so that if a layoff happens, you already have other options lined up.
Gross. Interviewing sucks and the idea of trying to onboard at a new company while interviewing sounds horrible.
>> Leverage external offers for salary growth. Companies often resist giving substantial raises to existing employees but pay top dollar for new hires. Regularly interview elsewhere, and if you get an offer with a 20% or higher salary increase, consider taking it. Many people have seen their compensation triple or quadruple this way in just a few years.
You can do this 1, maybe 2 times at a company before you paint a target on your back. This will work in the short term but not in the long term (At a single company)
>> Don’t overthink your résumé. Worrying about short experiences on your CV isn’t worth it. You can always tailor your résumé—leave out brief roles, or consolidate short-term jobs as freelance experience. Ultimately, your résumé is just a starting point; your skills will be assessed during the interview process.
Completely agree, your resume is not your record, it's not "official", you tailor to the job you want. Leave off technologies you don't want to work with, leave off jobs that aren't the type of thing you want to do, etc.
The worst part is finding out how many things depend on your job. I needed to move out when I was laid off, but good luck finding someone to rent to you when you don't have a job.
Yes... I'm in the UK, in London. For renting, even as a founder who has a profitable business that was active for a year, they're still either asking for upfront payments (12 months...) or a guarantor. This was the case for multiple locations (SE13 + E16).
They said if my business was running for 2 years or more then they'd accept that as low enough risk.
A bit understandable in this economical situation, but man, it's hard. Even for the guarantor, they need to own a house and have at least 40x the monthly rent as proven (PAYE or business with 2+ years) yearly income.
I knew only one person who could be a guarantor that fits the requirements.
Alternative was AirBnb or other monthly accommodation which was of course more expensive.
The worst cases is when they don't even accept the 12 months of upfront payment !
Wow, I never imagined that to be possible. What was their reasoning?
It was bullshit. The real reasoning was of course, as usual : lots of 'buyers', few 'sellers'.
> But today, companies are announcing layoffs alongside record-breaking financial results. You work hard, focus on impactful projects, and receive praise from your lead—only to find yourself let go by someone who likely doesn’t even know you exist
This what happens when country policy and businesses are driven by awful neoliberal economic theory and neoclassical/orthodox economic policy.
For the past 40 years, we have seen:
- wage stagnation for labor
- decreasing worker protections (in tech, this means forced NDAs, arbitration, non-compete clauses)
- significant decreases in social safety nets
- increasing wage disparity across the board
- decrease in investment of labor and company and emphasis on stock —manipulation— buy back programs and layoffs for short term gains
- decreasing participation in labor unions and thus decrease in collective bargaining power for labor
- non-transparent pay grades across the industry
- rampant wage theft in the form of: “instead of paying overtime, give you a title, a salary, and expect you to push more than 40 hrs a week” (or do a job that usually requires 3-4 people)
- decreasing worker loyalty to companies
- increasing consolidation of power and money through monopolies and monopsonies
If workers don't do something about it (other than complain on random websites) and everyone else is happy with their record breaking profits, you can possibly expect any changes to do this aside from going further in the same direction
At any large commercial organization, you either represent capital or you do not. If you are not part of the ownership class, you are entirely disposable - whether or not you are in actuality critical to the business functioning. There are many situations in which the financial incentives of ownership are directly opposed to those of the hired help. Took me a long time to realize this because most people aren't sociopaths, while corporate management and certainly the super wealthy have a significant proportion.
I've been laid off many times, for many reasons (mostly startup financial issues), but what I've taken away from it a mantra that's a bit different.
I need mutual respect. I want to believe in whatever the company is doing and enjoy my work there. At the same time, I want the company to respect my personal time and further my career growth. This enables me to give my best effort. I have no delusions about the workforce - I am a cog in the machine as we all are, but I will at least be a well greased cog.
When it's all said and done, I would like to leave a company feeling good about my time spent there, and if I am happy with how I am treated and the work I do from the start to the end, then however it ends, I feel good about it.
Strongly agree with the author. I was laid off two years ago, and I am experiencing the same feelings he is describing: I no longer want to give my 100%, I no longer overcommit. I do the minimum required and feel emotionally detached from the company and my colleagues.
It's a waste that so many individual contributors who, as the author said, had good performance and were close to the users went through a laid off. Now a new generation of previously high achievers work force will get back in the market and no longer use all their potential for their job. Like it wasn't the fault of the new company that hired me, that now I do the bare minimum, they won't see the full potential I gave before. And I, I cannot prevent it. My work ethics and motivation died after the lay off.
I read a book called “The Goal” by Goldratt and he describes his theory of constraints. One of the main predictions of his theory is that the existence of many resources working at maximum capacity is symptomatic of a wildly inefficient production system. Thus you shouldn’t feel guilty about not giving 100% every day. This behavior is necessary to properly balance the total throughout of your company. Ideally only one person should be giving 100% in any given company, and in a fair and balanced system this would be the CEO who is concomitantly receiving massive compensation.
That was one of the most eye opening books for me. I think it all applies to Software development as well. It is not uncommon that you work all weekend to finish your task, only to see it waits two weeks in the next person's queue.
I've applied it to my studies as well. You will achieve little by learning a bit of everything. There is always one area of knowledge you are urgently lacking in, that you should hyperfocus on, in order to alleviate the information bottleneck of the system you are working on. It's the same as in the book: the teacher is always whittling down the incoherent problem space to the critical piece of wisdom that the protagonist then has to discover on his own.
This theory feels like it’s making tons of assumptions and leans heavily on semantics.
In a factory you have many components operating near or at capacity. In a high growth environment you want all of your components working at capacity to explore the problem space and optimize.
Yes, think of it like this: the point of the Tortoise and the Hare isn't to go to the pet store and start a racing league.
The book is worth reading. Unless your work is highly parallelised, it’s hard to not create bottlenecks.
Well, if this generation is all like you then they’ll be replaced by the next generation of hungry graduates
Hmm… not really, bars are high, no one is hiring fresh graduates anymore, and new generation is more detached with better sense of real world and focus on work-life balance and more personal growth, unlike previous generation who usually tied their identity to their work and gave their 500% for peanuts and glory(always fake and meaningless).
The kids are way smarter than that.
Eh, the kiddos seem to be realizing that the rat race is, after all, for rats.
This feels a bit too far in the opposite direction to the point of hurting yourself
I understand. But since I have decided to reduce my time and energy dedicated to a company, I put this extra time and energy more towards my personal hobbies. I feel like I am living two lives in one day, at work I am detached and do only what's required, while outside work I am deeply invested in my things.
It's disappointing that you feel detached from your colleagues. They're in the same boat as you. Also, increasing your network doesn't hurt. There's a risk in being known as the quiet or moody guy who doesn't interact with anyone. It might make you enjoy your work more too.
Partially agree. I still network, and actually found my current job thanks to my network. I still interact with ma colleagues, help them, socialize. But I try to keep some emotional distance. When I got laid off, my colleagues were also my close friends, so on top of the laid off turmoil I was living, I was sad I would no longer work with them.
This is how you generate more layoffs for yourself. Having money saved and living within your means greatly reduces the impact of being laid off. You need to be impactful and putting yourself out there at all times or you lose trust. Several people who have allowed themselves to be beat down mentally at my company have lost trust and are on the chopping block. It can take a year or more before you get sacked. You can also reverse the course at almost any time.
While not bad advice, but careful - you will die and you don't know when. You can't take it with you (almost all religion agrees on this, though if yours doesn't then I guess I won't argue religion here). Have a reasonable amount of saved money, but make sure you are using the majority of what you earn on things you enjoy (well at least things you enjoy consistent with the law and religion should either of those conflict with what you enjoy)
Thank you for your advice. I agree. I am still working and completing my tasks, so far I didn't give anyone any reason to complain about my work. But I would not put again the extra hours or extra creativity. I save money and live within my means. And I live in a country with great unemployment benefits if it happens again. When I got laid off, I didn't suffer financially thanks to our support system, but emotionally it was hard.
I mean, the author needed a layoff to understand this?
I thought it was a given.
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Full disclosure, I've never been laid off.
OP sounds very bitter and - frankly - melodramatic. Getting laid off is terrible, but this person makes it sounds like they'll never heal/never be the same/all companies suck/etc. when none of those things are true. There is an implied business relationship with an employer that can end anytime, and that's expected because it's a two-way street.
I agree with the top commenter - seanc - when he says:
> Carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.
Finally, income diversification pays huge dividends. I had a startup job where suddenly I found myself with a $65k/year pay cut one week. I had side work from folks who were asking me for more anyways so I quit that same week on Friday. Now I employ 10 people and pull in nearly a million a year. Really makes the emotional part of having lost income that week completely meaningless in the long run.
I appreciate the downvote internet stranger - remember that I'm laughing all the way to the bank. :)
You'll never be the same again regardless. Food for thought.
I was thinking that it seems strange to fire a 10x dev that has regular one-on-one meetings with a VP. OP could have contacted said VP and outlined that he was worth keeping, until I got to this line :
>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees
This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.
While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.
I had to look this up, and the law states that the Sozialauswahl (social selection) only applies to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. The law applies when the company is doing across-the-board layoffs (e.g. because they have become unprofitable).
It says that employees who have been longer at the firm, have disability, need to support family etc. should be let go last, compared to employees who have the same qualifcations, rank etc. So, in theory, what you're saying is wrong – the company would not lose their "10x devs" (whatever that means) because of this law.
Also, OP mentions the law, but does not say that he was affected by it.
At no point does the law force a company to fire a high performer. The company can literally just fire one fewer person - if the employee really is 10x and if the company has its shit together, that's what would happen.
Let us face it, the European welfare model is a blind alley. No one in the world is going to copy this from us again, now that it is clear that it makes us
a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;
b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;
c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.
IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.
Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.
The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.
The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.
I'm not sure what you're expecting demography-wise : would you rather have this, an unsustainable population growth or an average lifespan of 40 years ?
But also, yes, in the "West" we've been living way above our means for almost a century now, and the chickens are starting to come home to roost.
Yeah the system doesn't work. Nothing has convinced me more of that fact than living in Germany has. If your system only works for a single generation in which you have an unusually large working population and relatively few children and relatively few old people, then your system doesn't work. The German system never worked, it was always just running on borrowed time.
The system that Bismarck established in the 19th century "only works for a single generation" - sure.
Back when the life expectancy at birth was forty you mean? And the system has expanded greatly since then. Handouts for almost everyone except normal workers who pay the highest taxes on labour in the world after Belgium. And yes the system has stopped working now the population has stopped growing. Germany as an antiquated boomerocracy is unrivalled as far as I am aware.
Life expectancy at birth is irrelevant, people who die in infancy don't consume many resources at all. What matters is the percentage of the population that's of working age, and here Germany is fairly typical for a developed country.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in welfare mecca with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is breaking under the load.
Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.
The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.
This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.
This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.
Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.
Everyone suffers like this.
Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.
The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.
Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??
Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price
> heqlthcare is breaking under the load.
I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.
And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.
Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?
Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.
Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.
It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.
Please pick any semi-advanced economy other than USA when talking about healthcare. USA is well known for its corrupt healthcare system. You are picking the worst of the worst as an example.
They're picking the US as an example because the person who started this discussion was saying that the European model is in their view unsustainable. It's possible that that person wants to change Europe into Singapore or something, but given this site, I consider it much more likely that they meant "unsustainable compared to the US".
He is probably getting downvoted by Americans who want to implement the same failing policies in the US.
Or by Europeans that don't care for the 1000th clichéd "EU bad, America good" debate which invariably attracts low-quality comment as is immediately evident.
The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.
It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts of the world has been rapidly shrinking.
It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.
But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.
When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of tossing our aging population out onto the street we cannot do much more than increase immigration - something those old people don't like.
So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.
Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to deal with the aging situation than others.
The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.
The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.
No, not always, no.
A mix of capitalism, socialism and communism is the key, they complement and balance each other
Trying to ostracize one model to favor the other is the recipe for a collapse
Perhaps that's what the USA is, a disposable Empire
My experience is that many liberal Americans tend to admire European welfare systems as a counterpoint to the more cut-throat US systems, and really, really don't want to discuss the downsides.
People need to dream, I guess.
The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
> But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.
What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).
Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.
A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry. Yeah, there are outliers again, but that is the core demographics here.
The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.
Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...
That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.
By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.
> A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry.
You'd be surprised.
I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.
…and a major reduction in services.
I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.
It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.
The Slovak government literally wants to try slavery light for doctors.
They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.
https://minutovezpravy.cz/clanek/slovensko-chce-prinutit-lek...
That made a lot of news. It is every bit as bad as it sounds.
Slovakia under its current government is literally the second-most anti-EU country of the EU (after Hungary - though maybe Austria will soon follow suit), so I'm not sure if that illustrates your point well.
They aren't doing this because they disagree with the EU-wide consensus on general welfare / healthcare policies, though. Fico isn't Javier Milei, he is a pro-Russian populist social democrat, precisely the type of politican that promises unrealistic levels of welfare for a relatively poor state.
As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.
Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.
> Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations.
Yeah, and Elon Musk is stoking Alternative für Deutschland. Not sure what's going to come out of it but it doesn't look too good for Germany either.
What does "European welfare model" even mean? Europe consists of many countries, and different countries have significantly different welfare models.
Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed.
"Europe consists of many countries, and different countries have significantly different welfare models."
In general, single payer healthcare + pay-as-you-go pension systems + relatively comfortable welfare systems + high taxation and regulation to support those systems.
Yes, there are meaningful differences across the continent. But visible outliers are scarce. One of the really nasty consequences is underfunded defense, which caught up with us once Russia started acting on its imperial dreams.
"Many EU countries have enough wealth, the problem is that it is unevenly distributed."
A typical EU government spends about 40 per cent of the GDP, with the heaviest part of the spending being pensions. The worst outlier, France, around 55 per cent. If this is not enough, it will never be enough, short of mass expropriations.
We already have a massive brain drain to the US. More punitive taxation = more brain drain.
It makes sense to me that a big portion of government spending goes towards social welfare and healthcare – at the end, that's one of the most important things.
I agree that defense was underfunded in many EU countries. But hindsight is 20-20. If you remember the 2000s, everybody was optimistic about eternal peace in Europe, and global trade without tariffs was at its heights. The lower investment into defense came not at the cost of higher social welfare.
The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that.
"The gap between poor and rich is still increasing, and we need ways to address that."
Do we? For what?
We already have a serious problem in Europe that we totally missed the IT revolution. In the list of the biggest corporations in the world, US tech giants dominate. The first European entry is Louis Vuitton, a producer of luxury handbags.
Either we are going to have a robust economy that can support the levels of taxation which carry the welfare state, but that means that someone is inevitably going to become very rich. If someone succeeds in building European Amazon, they will be in the same category of rich as Jeff Bezos.
Or we will still have our legacy giants like Louis Vuitton and a more equitable distributon of poverty. But hey, no new digital parvenus up there.
You are concerned about the gap between the rich and the poor. What about the gap between the US and the EU economy? That is growing pretty fast.
Already we are small brothers to the big brother overseas. 20 or 30 more years of our current stagnation and we will be global nobodies; no one will bother to implement our strict regulations to gain access to our markets.
> Do we? For what?
Because when the gap gets too large, you get an oligarchy. Like here in the US. And I don't think you want a homegrown Elon Musk to run your country.
Also it makes the economy a sham held up by billionaires. I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots. I'm currently looking to instead get a visa in another country for starting up a business.
On a global markets, there always will be huge corporations, and nowadays they usually grow huge because they provide some useful or at least highly sought-after services. And their owners are certain to become rich.
You can drive them out of your particular tax domicile, but you won't squash them globally, and the result will be that you will be dependent on them anyway. As Europeans, we have to deal with Musk from a position of weakness. European Musk would be easier to control than American one, but hey, we did our best to redirect all the future Musks, European or South African, to the US...
"I literally cannot start a company here in the US because even my engineering salary is not enough to bootstrap a company without licking VC boots."
You have to realize that a lot depends on your level of ambition. You can start a small local company anytime, tech or non-tech, plenty of people do that every day, but your market reach will be naturally limited to one city or so.
But if you want to start a globally relevant technological startup, hey, that was NEVER in the power of a random median engineer. At least you now have options, including those VCs. There aren't any such options in other places.
OP didn't got it right. It only applies for those with the same qualifications (i.e. given two 10x devs, the most vulnerable one is kept) so the company gets to keep a 10x dev. He's just externalising his problems to the easiest target (ie. vulnerable people). His own situation is partially his fault and he admits as much when he describes a list of what he would have done differently.
People expect things to always work the same way and they get upset when they don't.