I really think all these tech companies are going to be in rough shape when the other shoe drops.
Yes, right now, it's making a lot of sense to their bottom line. Record-breaking profits can surely be even more record-breaking if you slice headcount. Yes, a correction after pandemic hiring is likely in order.
But fostering an industry culture where everyone is afraid of being laid off all the time is not going to work out well long term.
For a long time, the best-performing tech companies have had an engineering culture that stressed mentorship, having senior/staff folks doing "glue work", force multipliers, etc.
I remember distinctly hearing the phrase "automate yourself out of a job."
There was a very real sense that the best engineers were striving to train and teach more junior folks and build automations to improve efficiency.
@rodhilton It’s already gone from a large swath of the industry. I notice a lot of tech workers—from junior to senior—no longer care about making great products; they just want to get paid and not laid off. They have zero loyalty to the company, product, or brand.
This shows up in how people organize their days: They orient their energy around delivering things that show up on their managers’ spreadsheets (e.g. status updates, story points etc), and not on creating things people want to buy or use, or improving product quality.
@drahardja Yeah I mean another thing these companies are doing is telegraphing how little they care about their employees, how disposable they are.
All that "we're a family" shit is out the window now. Anyone who shows up to work doesn't care if the company succeeds anymore, except to the extent that going under means being unemployed.
@Caryjm That's what I'm saying. The culture of engineers being so in-demand across the industry has allowed a mentality to develop where engineers aren't afraid of losing their job, and a LOT of the fundamentals of good software engineering and agile development are all byproducts of that culture.
Now it's gone. So people can expect the industry to shift to look a lot more like other industries where people are securing themselves into their jobs for life by hoarding knowledge and skills.
Back when companies started tracking LoC output as a measure of engineer quality, it wasn't long before engineers started making their code extremely verbose and needlessly long.
If you make someone's paycheck depend on something game-able, they're going to game it.
And all the goodwill around "collective ownership" is going to disappear in favor of "job security" real soon.
Teach this junior engineer how the code works? Pfft, why? So you can lay me off?
"Clean Code"? Why? So someone else can take over this codebase after I get laid off? Hard pass.
We're going to see a major increase in code silos, code that is difficult to read, land-grabs, and people being protective of what they build. Whatever people have to do to become costly to lose, that's what we're going to see.
If you make someone's paycheck depend on their ability to prevent someone else from taking over their code, that's what is going to happen.
All of the collective community support engineers offered to each other was a low-layoff-phenomenon.
I've worked in environments where employees are stack-ranked and the bottom x% is removed each cycle. One thing you will notice in those environments is there's no such thing as going into Slack and asking for help. Nobody will help you. The more you struggle, the less likely they are to get canned.
The environment where I work has changed over the last couple of years. Initially it wasn't perfect by any means, but people were not against helping each other, and it's getting now a bit towards a cobol-like situation, and people are getting somehow "stack-ranked",...
@rodhilton@Migueldeicaza it also creates an incentive for managers to cultivate some low performers to offer up later, instead of putting resources into helping them. But don’t tell them they’re underperforming! They might leave too soon by themselves and not count.
One consistent thing about these layoffs seems to be how "random" they are, that it doesn't seem to be performance-based.
That pretty much eliminates any motivation someone has to be a top performer.
If you want to protect your employment, kicking ass at your job isn't the way to do it. The only way to do it is to be the only person who understands x, y, z modules in the codebase. Become unfireable.
If you're a top-level manager and don't see the moral hazard that creates, big oof.
@rodhilton and if they fire you have the systems setup to likely break in ways that mean they need to hire you back (as a consultant probably at 3x or more your old rate) to get things running.
(I’ve seen this happen a few times - decades ago was hired once to figure out a codebase so the company could stop paying their former employee to maintain it. He had stuff like hidden back doors that needed to be used to install or update the systems)
There's a reason why COBOL programmers are few and far between but extremely well paid. They know the person trying to hire them is desperate to have someone come on to operate their extremely important legacy module that nobody else understands.
Imagine doing that to your entire codebase because a 10% RIF helped you make a slightly larger profit this quarter.
@gudenau I know someone who was just asked by a manager today to pair-program with someone else to get them up to speed.
This was someone who loved pair-programming. But that was from a time when he knew he'd be able to get another job within a matter of days if he needed to.
His immediate gut reaction to being asked by the person who signs his paycheck to pair with someone else was pure skepticism. "Am I being fired?"
This is not a healthy or sustainable way to build your culture.
@rodhilton I'm partially glad that I'm just a tech at this point, a fairly low level low paid position that just kind of needs to exist to grind through work...
@rodhilton@gudenau If the culture drives employee skepticism to the point of frequently asking, "Am I being fired?", that paranoia will breed defensive me-first employees & is a horrifying disease that will rot a company.
Protip: Executives treating employees like numbers ("you are replaceable") is the canary in the coal mine.
An organization can reverse this trend but it's a decade long effort & firing a whole lot of management.
@rodhilton It also sucks to be a mid-level manager, because you can SEE the effects that these layoffs are having to your staff, but you can’t do jack shit about it because the RIF came from the Senior VP. To your reports, you’re the face of the company, whether you like it or not.
@ottobackwards They say that one of the major reasons why Android has so many chat apps is because Google as a company built a culture centered around launching new products for promotion.
Show me an environment, and I'll show you a population that adapts to survive in it.
Sounds like you just optimized population selection for the trait of being able to successfully write code so confusing that AI can't train on it.
@rodhilton There's another old language like that which Edinburgh council uses. Forget what it's called now. Honestly half our systems hang on a tiny thread of 3 people who know how their legacy code works because it was written in something only a dwindling minority of people in the entire world are familiar with.
Even something as simple as "iterative development" is a byproduct of a culture that isn't worried about job security.
Releasing software early and often, then iterating on it is not the strategy if you're worried about being laid off.
A better strategy would be to delay a big-bang release as long as possible so that the company is afraid to fire anyone working on it until it launches out of fear of risking the delivery.
Getting working software in the hands of customers isn't it.
@rodhilton I never believed agile development to be something to make software development better for client or engineering team. Main reason why it is popular it is that it tries to make software development into a commodity.
Side effect is moving of ownership (and, in effect - big picture enginering) to non-technical PMs or hand waving architects, but it's another topic.
@kbielnik@rodhilton it's definitely better for clients. Getting their hands on something early is very valuable as it's usually quite hard to imagine how something will work even with mockups.
It's usually hard to nail down requirements or processes so there will be iterations, earlier is better
@kbielnik@rodhilton the clients I work with are a lot happier when we went from shipping every 3-6 months to monthly releases with nightly test builds allowing them to continually test how their requirements turned out
@Paxxi
Definitely interesting when your manager is convinced that what works in software, also works in hardware.
"We need to spin this board, because..."
"How long before we have the board in hand?"
"Nailing down the root cause of the problem, decide on design changes, manufacture, shipping,... 3 weeks at a minimum. Probably 4".
"So you're proposing you'll work on something that won't provide Value To The Customer by the end of this 2 week sprint? @kbielnik@rodhilton
Very much on point, but I am damn jealous of where-ever you worked that had a strong mentoring history. Nearly everywhere I've worked for the past 30+ years has has abysmal mentoring.
As for code silos, I'll bet they won't be malicious. They'll be created because of all the quick fixes layered on top of tech debt that no one remembers.
Whole lotta key internal systems will suddenly just collapse.
Employment precarity sends people out to look for jobs.
An effective form of dumb-sizing.
After layoffs, a company has publicly acknowledged their incompetent management & rarely enjoys the same profits because they got rid of innovators & revenue generators.
Senior management get bonuses & shareholders a fleeting stock price bump.
The investment class are desperate to invent a timely 2024 recession but instead they're freeing skilled labor to competitors.
Why do you assume those running the company care?
Corporations have been steadily trying to reduce tech workers to fit into the, "replaceable office drone" mold that all other non-management workers have been shoehorned into ever since the first commercial computers were sold (or leased, as the case may be).
Decreases in tech efficiency in their worldview are more than offset by increases in manageability.
I highly recommend, "The Computer Boys Take over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise" by Nathan L. Ensmenger for a history of the phenomenon of programmers vs managers.
Also? Frameworks make tech workers far more replaceable, which is part of why COBOL programmers are sought after. They have to learn the code they work with at a much lower level because it's usually quirky. And COBOL was a halfway step to where we are now in terms of interchangeable workers.
Sort comes with the aging of the tech industry. Tech used to be cool and it built stuff that was vital and world shaking. So lots of young people studied CS and were in demand. Now tech struggles to find useful new things to make and surveillance capitalism just isn't very cool. So there are more tech workers than the industry can sustain. What happens in such an economic reality is workers get treated poorly. Companies develop dysfunctionalities. Capitalism finds its balance.
@mastodonmigration@rodhilton would like to disagree but being honest so much of the industry has been making stuff of very little economic, practical or social value for a very long time. This more than any hype about AI is why I think development is over as a viable career
@rodhilton I would like to think that you are right but I've been through this before and my experience is that after the initial shocks wear off, people have short attention spans and soon just jump back on the treadmill. People muddle through.
(I used to say that the problem with people problems is that people don't blue screen - they just find a way to muddle through.)
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