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

You should screen write and direct a movie similar to the premise of "God's not Dead" but instead of a unrealistic situation of someone who never attended college creating a fake scenario of a evil atheist professor failing a student for believing in God, you can screen write a story about about the evils of low and mid level employees via Slack.

 

I've been in tech for over 20 years (but not Silicon Valley tech). It's not bloated, at least not where I am and I'm pretty sure in my industry. The 90s were "bloated". The early 00s were bloated. Bloated in that each of us has maybe 1 major and a few minors project for the whole year. That doesn't mean we goof around - it means we are allowed to do very focused work and take our time to do it extremely well. Now, I have 3-5 major and 10-12 minor projects per year. Efficiency has squeezed the heck out of us already.

While it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not. That's just the nature of this business (and probably every business that goes through cycles of boom and bust). Cut-throat efficiency.

The trend won't ever stop, but there is also a point where the return is negative. Work/Life balance became a thing because our industry did probably go through that point. We will go through cycles of fast hiring during boom time and layoff during bust time.

There is always a Musk out there. Most of them fail. People do not want to work for those people. Elon has been successful, and it would be interesting to understand why - my guess is two main things: very high pay and rewarding work (cutting-edge technology that impacts large population can be extremely rewarding - autonomous electric cars, brain-machine interface, going to Mars, global fast internet, ... ).

We are now in one of those bust phases again. Layoffs are a given now. How many depends on how well the companies are doing more than anything. There are always some leeches, and the layoff provides an opportunity to get rid of them, but there are never so many of them (unless you have a poorly run business) to cause massive layoffs. Massive layoffs are almost always because of a poor economic future outlook and/or bad business financials.

 

1) Unless this is a rogue engineer or PM that went around processes in place (entirely possible), seems more like a process issue OR a lack of clearly defined roadmap or OKRs and general high level vision; people complain about red tape but stuff like that is why it exists. Every considerable use of resources should be centered around some sort of process involving director signoff. Obviously I have zero context, outside of what you posted, but just devil's advocate.
2) Leadership always tended to do a good job shutting this down in places I've worked in the past, but most people tend to not want to rock the boat and keep politics out of the workplace in the first place.
3 & 4) I've seen similar stuff like this, and when I was a manager we laughed in private at how ridiculous half of the reports were.
5) That's fair, take PTO.

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't really disagreeing but curious because at least in American companies (which are taking the brunt of the public criticism for being "too woke" right now) I've never seen any of this sort of behavior. I've worked in conservative and liberal companies, most people just don't care this much about politics.

I don't know if you have but it probably helps to consistently reinforce something along the lines of "you are free to be an activist in whatever you so choose, so long as when you're at work you're committed to the company mission" blah blah blah if you aren't doing so already. I've literally heard that same or similar phrase from every single CEO I've ever worked under and these were at companies that didn't really have employee activists.

 

I said this in the other thread but I think people are equivocating bloat with companies taking big risks in the boom times and backed by cheap debt, and having to fold entire organizations when they need to center back to profitability and protect their cash flow in bust times.

 

Private or public sector? The BLOAT, as I see it, came from publicity traded growth companies - most of which (but not all) happen to be tech. High stock prices = free money to grow with. At Facebook or Google we might not even be talking about actual TECH JOBS, just jobs, like Account Manager or Customer Support.

 

public, r&d

 

She made a viral video that helps people want to strive to work for the company that she works at. I'd say she's doing a good job...

 

For recruiting yes, I agree.

Does paint tech workers as being out of touch though -- that's why I specified optics and not necessarily impact.

 

The Wall St narrative has changed from growth to profitability due to this specific period of cheap money being over. Tech companies over expanded with cheap money and pulled forward growth due to Covid.

 

This thread has inspired me to rewatch Silicon Valley.

 

If it were really that bad, folks would start to unionize.

Job slack to unionize prob won't be painful until AI gets good enough coding at scale.

Woke hr?

...Pls dont fire me

 

Two obvious problems here.

1) that's not her job

2) that video feels like it might be great for recruiting talentless lazy people

Also worth noting product manager at 23 is a gigantic red flag.

 

Entitlement shows itself today in many forms. I think you're seeing a side of that.

I've worked in IT for Fortune 500 companies for over 30 years. I've seen many changes over the years and our company has been purging and outsourcing IT for over a decade. We're now in the process of purging our outsourcing. They are starting to realize, you get what you pay for. And the people we have left after the decades purge are all we need to continue business. The outsourcing people are just a waste of money except for the most mondain tasks.

I've always made sure to make my resume my job security because you never know when then unthinkable could happen. I can do Salesforce (LWC), AWS, .NET, any kind of DB, React - just about anything distributed I have decades of experience with all kinds of large systems from billing to imaging to investments to customer facing enrollments. I've always tried to find a way to bring value to whatever I do. And because of that, I've not only survived the many layoffs we've had, but they constantly do whatever they can to make me stay longer even as I near retirement. Bottomline...I don't feel I'm entitled to anything. I earn it.

As a side note on the turn of the thread - we have an Inclusion Officer that I must say I'm very impressed with. She's a black female who came out and said we talk about inclusion but what about the older, straight white males. It was odd but very refreshing to hear that. I know old white men have had it beyond easy for centuries but you have inclusions that are occurring everywhere that want to include everyone but that group. How can you have inclusion when you want to ignore or exclude a large part of your group? She's got my mad respect.

 

Kind of weird of anyone to think they are entitled to a job. Layoffs in tech are often, regular, and even predictable.

 

1. You can argue that she’s going “above and beyond” what her job is, which is something all companies look for

2. Possibly, that’s up to the hiring managers to vet. No tech company is going to want less applications.

 

Nobody openly talks about the ongoing meltdown at Meta. Don't think it's the fear of NDA, more like worrying the share price could go down lower.

Twitter is real good at diverting attention away from everything else. Like a blackhole of engagement and everything else its followers cross post elsewhere. Well...Trump already knows that.

 

Some people think that way. One of the layoffs was a guy that worked for MSFT. Even published a few things for them in their magazine when they had one. He’d come in at 10:45 and take lunch at 11. Then leave at 4:30. It was like clockwork. Now if he used his abilities during the time he was here he might still have a job but he’d take naps and just surf the net doing very little work. He came to me afterward and said he was laid off and couldn’t believe it. Kevin - you’re a smart man - how could you not see it? He seriously thought he was as good or better than anyone else.

 

Anecdotes of entitlement can be expressed by any generation of people.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/13/bosses-share-their-advice-for-young-people-on-taking-time-off.html


Anyways a lot of these anecdotes seen like the talkings of some 60 year old gen x middle manager poisoned by the leaded gasoline epidemic.

I can do anecdotes also. I work in a middle sized manufacturing company that designs and manufacturers automated factory machines for food processing. In house we do our own design, machining, and assembly. That means our weekly production meetings includes everyone from all design engineers, including us juniors(mostly gen Z and some millennials), machine shop manager, assembly supervisor, sales and all upper management including often our two owners.

But it is often funny seeing the dichotomy of problem solving between the generations. Upper management and owners often raise voices and spend half the production meeting doing the finger pointing game while the millennials and gen Z engineers are just thinking of solutions and never try to do the finger pointing game and often cover for each other. It's a very different mindset between generations. A lot more competitive with the gen x generation I've noticed.

 

I saw this a bit during consulting. People aren't machines and will change over time. I'm older and don't feel like working 10hrs/day to prove myself or hone my edge. Some folks 10-20 yrs older are still at it, and they have my respect, even if I disagree that should be the standard.

80-20 rule is still a powerful thing. It's all relative too. Sometimes you want to take up the extra slack for something meaningful. Other times you go with the flow. I've quit environments where they promised a cool, "IG-Worthy", work-life culture with unlimited vacation. I ended up doing more because "work-life balance" only applied to half the employees while the other half who cared about customer deposits did the heavy lifting to make sure the app didn't fall off the rails.it sucks being on that end, and not feeling other people are picking up the slack for the shared responsibility of the job either infuriates you (toxic) or ramps up the apathy (parasitic).

P.S. This kind of rot plus scale is why most companies don't survive beyond 50 years. Cities are much better at being longer lasting and efficient compared to multinational corps. Something for Cons to think about.

P.S.S. Kevin will do fine.