Tech companies are bloated with leeches. Mass layoffs are necessary in many companies.

Good thread. I agree that silicone valley tech bro companies are bloated. Other sectors like healthcare IT are in shortage. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it since I’m in healthcare IT and see the insane amount of jobs and work out there.

 

Administration and the corporate structure has become a cancer. In healthcare patients pay prime $$ so a lot of these ****ers can have PowerPoint luncheons over the obvious

I’m sure it’s the same way in tech one of my cousins is working with VCs

 

Fersure, I think administration aka Joe in the hospital who justifies his existence by crunching the #s in a redundant role over you probably should go and they should pay you his salary

 

Fingers crossed. I work at a healthcare startup and I like leeching working full remote.

 

I got out of a hospital in part due to the bloat and bottlenecks at the top. There were so many layers of bullshit and the executives would just end up emailing me directly for answers.

Not mad though. I was on a leadership track and decided it wasn’t for me at that specific place.

I’m at a healthcare IT company now and the culture is night and day. But we all bust our asses.

 

My previous job I've had two instances where the CEO decided he was god and forced everyone to stay in office to crunch from 8am to midnight for two weeks straight. Several other similar instances as well.

It really depends on the company / industry. Video game industry for example... I would never in my life work there in any capacity. They normalize crunch and treat their workers like garbage.

My friends are fairly empathetic people luckily, we are aware of it and don't go around bragging but I've seen plenty of colleagues think they are god's gift to this planet and that they are worth 10x other people because their profession scales revenue per person compared to traditional non-tech positions and that they're going to change the world.

I've also seen this attitude in college for CS. While I think the own "entitlement" that exists is a younger generation thing in general, there are a lot of egomaniacs specifically in the tech field as well -- something in the past that I would associate entirely with CEOs / C-levels in terms of being narcissistic sociopaths, you see in a lot of rank and file engineers for some reason.

 

I think the bridge burning is more of a consequence of how employee-friendly the job market for engineers is now and how large the supply of jobs is. Even in a downturn as long as it doesn't reach dotcom levels, its going to be the same thing for the competent workers in the field. Anecdotally speaking once I progressed past what is considered entry-level / Jr. in the tech field I've been bombarded by recruiters non-stop now + even during the COVID 2020 lockdown period.

 

As an anecdote, our company isn't expecting VC money to be available until 2024 at the absolute earliest. 2023 is going to see a LOT of startups go belly up entirely, probably my own included.

 

I'm not surprised, most of the bloat / growth has been in industries where consumer spending was a complete outlier in 2021 and companies took the gamble and assumed it was normal consumer growth.

 

Yep and regardless of startups dying entirely, I've seen first hand in the past runway & cash reserves don't matter. Even if companies can do nothing and outlast a recession, poor markets, lack of available credit, they will still tighten the belt.

That being said, it only seems horrifically bad because of how much of a rollercoaster its been the last few years.

2020 was a black swan
2021 was an overcorrection in the opposite direction
2022 was/is a market correction to 2021 after everyone realized that 2021 was an outlier in terms of consumer patterns
2023 is going to be a regular recession
2024 likely will signal a return to normalcy once the recession ends, inflation is curtailed, hopefully the global supply chain is re-calibrated (its going to take the US companies pulling out of China since China is still opting for zero-covid) and investors start getting comfortable chasing SUSTAINABLE growth again.

 

This has been a fun thread, distracts me from the week by week anxiety of wondering "is this going to be the week?"

 

I was expecting a tech bust pre-covid (2013-2018) but since there weren't that many IPOs, many companies stayed private with the blessing of VCs eating and rolling off debt.

This likely fueled the ill-fated SPAC craze a couple years ago that has morphed into a series of dumpster fires with no end in sight.

Some folks have blamed SoftBank for being reckless with its dumptrucks of dumptrucks of money coupled with Son's crazy gf streak of "if I can't have you, then I'll destroy you" moves against anyone not taking that check he signs.

Just a lot of excess in general that enabled pie in the sky optimism and now-shitty bets.

Tech might rebound faster than main street, but I'm kinda hoping we have some destruction of shitty behavior that wasn't spotted nor corrected after 08. Maybe it's too late and there's always a sheik or insane Japanese billionaire nearby to sign those checks.

 

I also just wanted to add one more thing:

I'm not sure how much depth you have in trying to evaluate engineers (arguably as a CEO that shouldn't be something you are doing directly -- unless you are fly by night you should have a CTO and likely several directors and VPs under a CTO), but its a pretty difficult thing to do.

Quotas do not work (LoC in a vacuum is a stupid metric and most other metrics that might be useful can be easily gamed). Its very possible that certain people that seem to be "doing nothing" and "are entitled" are also doing very meaningful glue work that can enhance the work of the team at the detriment of not being trackable quantifiably or qualifiably.

This is something that I never quite figured out when I was on the manager track, trying to find a way to evaluate engineers quantitatively -- but its a testament to how young this field is relatively and how a lot of things are not solved problems. A reminder that compared to other professions software engineering is VERY young.

 

Prince's law... The square root of a company's workforce produces 50% of the value.

100 employees? 10 superstars.
1000? 30 superstars.
70000 like meta? 250 or so.

This is the nature of the beast. As you grow, you hire, attract, and retain exponentially more poor performers.

All that being said, I believe there's practically entire disciplines (and even industries) that don't add any value to organizations and whose entire purpose is to justify their own existence.

 

Yeah, not worried about healthcare, although my accounts are all government like VA and SSA. But we have signed contracts for 5 years so they’re fairly recession proof. People definitely aren’t getting younger or healthier in the US.

 

Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 people: report

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3734974-amazon-plans-to-lay-off-10000-people-report/

 

Why does OP view everything in absolutes…

At any rate… yea tech was in a bubble so they expanded too rapidly. Much like what the O&G sector went through from 2019 until present.

Seems pretty elitist to call all these folks “leeches”.