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JoeKrogan ,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

When it was a dark time for the empire the shogun cut off the heads of 141 lords... Maybe we should start there.

Mango ,

Land lords

homesweethomeMrL ,

Executives: We’re doing more with less!

grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room

Executives: Better profits! Lower costs!

SatanicNotMessianic ,

grinding, screeching noises coming from the engine room

To be fair, those are the normal TARDIS sounds.

On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.

uis , (edited )
@uis@lemm.ee avatar

On the other hand, Dr Who doesn’t have an engineering or SRE staff.

Exactly! That's why TARDIS is full on fuel.

mercan ,

Explain me like I’m five - why?

eyes ,

The industry is experiencing historic shrinkage post COVID due to unsustainable growth during COVID.

MajorHavoc ,

Any evidence to back up using the word "historic", here? The dotCom burst was historic, but by the numbers I've seen, this doesn't come close.

I would argue "interesting footnote in the boom/bust cycle".

I know that's not how it feels to the folks going through job searches right now, though.

rambaroo ,

It's the worst market since 2008. I don't know why people feel the need to minimize it. It's certainly more than a footnote.

MajorHavoc ,

And 2008 was the worst since the the great depression. In between we saw the dotCom bust, which was itself the worst since the slump in the 80s.

But the boom and bust cycle is well established.

We don't do eachother any favors by talking like it's the end of the world this time.

I suspect the sensational headlines are meant to distract from systemic issues that feed the cycle.

As long as the narrative is "this time is unique", it distracts from discussing improving the situation.

I don't mean to minimize it, though. It sucks!

stevecrox ,

The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious..

I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc.. Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

SatanicNotMessianic ,

While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.

stevecrox ,

Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory...

Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

SatanicNotMessianic ,

I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.

stevecrox ,

Uhh how?

The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.

Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.

rambaroo ,

Most of these execs actually believed that covid demand would become permanent. What they did was incredibly stupid and irresponsible, and now workers are paying for it

Most of these people are total followers. They just do whatever Google does because thats what dipshit investors want. There was no reason for my company to overhire to the degree it did, we were already able to meet demand.. hiring people doesn't magically increase your capacity to service more users. So fucking stupid. If I can help it I'll never work for an idiotic public company again.

homesweethomeMrL ,

Because the big tech companies are laying off, all the tech companies have decided they too need to layoff people to lower costs, improve profits, report better earnings, etc.

Fast forward to next year when they’re up shit creek because their skeleton crews can’t possibly do All The Things. Executives retire, take huge bonuses; repeat.

SkyNTP ,

There's no evidence that the layoffs at these firms are actually tech workers. Tons of other positions exist at these companies, like managers, sales, marketing, support staff.

My money is on administrative/clerical. This is the easiest to automate.

macaroni1556 ,

What on earth do you mean no evidence? I mean just check layoffs.fyi which specifically tracks this.

EncryptKeeper ,

I’m trying to find where on the site where it tracks the type of employees laid off but it doesn’t seem to track that at all?

macaroni1556 ,

For companies/employees that choose to share (eg in hopes of getting recruited to a new job) you can even get individuals information from that site. That includes actual job titles.

These companies tend to be very light on administrative roles anyway. So the ratios make sense even if they just laid off 5% of staff in total.

EncryptKeeper ,

I’m not seeing that at all. Only total employees laid off and the industry the company is in.

rambaroo ,

You don't know what you're talking about. I personally know multiple devs who were laid off from my company. These companies don't give a shit about your skills anymore, they're purely looking at how much money you cost them.

EncryptKeeper ,

Devs are getting laid off, but he actually does have a point that in the case of several of the biggest companies, the hardest hit were middle management, not devs.

uis ,
@uis@lemm.ee avatar

Reminds joke from Ekaterina Shulman:

New governor gets elected and old governor says to new one: "In my office there is safe, there are three letters in it. When you can't hold your position read one letter."

Letters were:

  1. Blame everything on me
  2. Fire deputy
  3. Write 3 letters to next governor
aew360 ,

Startups need a lot of capital flowing in because they don’t turn a profit early on. Traditional smaller businesses usually don’t have this sort of funding because the reward is lower. With tech, there’s a strong chance that company could become public or could get bought out. Or it could stay private and eventually become profitable. Regardless, they need investments made so they can continue to operate to eventually deliver a valuable product that will possibly offer significant returns to the investors.

The pandemic happened, which led to several outcomes. For one, a lot of boomers retired. Boomers were earning a lot of money. Then they stopped earning money and started dipping into their savings. This had a strong reaction. Capital became more scarce. Don’t believe me? Look at what banks are paying for 12-month CDs and the interest rates in savings accounts. It’s insanely high compared to two or three years ago.

This trend likely won’t last forever. Gen Xers and millennials have been moving into vacated roles by the boomers and are now earning more than before. They’re able to generate excess capital that investors can use to fund startups. There’s no shortage of innovative ideas in the western world, but there is a shortage of capital.

Not every county in the west is going to recover the same way. The boomer generation is the largest generation in history. Not every country kept having kids at a relatively similar pace. Typically, developing countries have much higher population growth. As countries industrialize, we see certain trends like both men and women joining the workforce and people moving to the cities for work. People generally have fewer kids with these trends as they are more focused on their careers and have less room to raise them. Nobody wants to raise a child in a one-bed apartment!

The United States is one of the rare exceptions. With a trend of consistent domestic population growth and immigration, the U.S. has avoided the fallout from rapid industrialization. Because of that, we’re seeing some interesting trends:

  • Under Biden, the post-pandemic POTUS, the U.S. has entered a prolonged period of rapid onshoring of manufacturing jobs. The addition of factories, distribution centers, and more have been increasing exponentially.

  • Germany, Italy, South Korea, Japan, and other similar economies have seen the impacts of a shrinking younger population and a ballooning senior population. These nations will likely keep the design of their products onshore, but will send manufacturing offshore. The U.S. and Mexico are the biggest winners here, but Mexico is at a disadvantage compared to the U.S. due to a greater difficultly in maintaining infrastructure.

  • Emerging technologies make the production of goods in the U.S. more feasible. Advancements in AI, robotics, and renewable energy will make production in the U.S. more logical despite the higher wages its workers command because less workers will be needed, or other savings in the realm of security, stability, and access to transportation infrastructure offset that factor.

There will not only be excess capital generation in the U.S., but there will also be excess capital flowing into the U.S. It’s also not to say that tech jobs will never recover outside of the U.S., but the reality is that we are in a capital shortage for a specific, acute reason. Less people of working age able to not only fill the vacated roles left by boomers, but also difficultly in paying the pensions and benefits offered to retirees. This will dry up even more capital in those particular nations.

Tech jobs have always been finicky. That won’t change going forward. But if you’re in the U.S., there’s a strong chance you’ll see things bounce back quicker than they will in other countries.

mercan ,

Wow, thanks for such a thorough answer!

ricecake ,

Interest rates were low, which made banks lend money very cheaply. It also led to a lot of money being put in the stock market, which made it go up.

Companies used that money to, in part, hire people. A lot of people. The stock market doing well also means businesses try to grow, because everyone is spending more money.

Interest rates are starting to come back up. This means loans are more expensive, which means there's less cash available. It also means there's less money in the stock market.

Less cash on hand and lower stock value makes businesses want to cut costs, and people are very expensive, particularly in the tech sector.

Additionally, commercial real estate is running into major problems: people don't want or need to work in offices.
This means the contracts are being allowed to expire, and less money for the large companies that own the properties.

A lot of money is invested in these companies. Anticipation of them doing badly makes companies fear an economic downturn.

So with less money available, less tolerance for risk in the stock market, and a fear of a significant economic upset, companies are looking to cut expenses, and people hired because cash was cheap and risk was okay are easy to justify cutting.

They ideally would like to let go of people they can do without, keep their stock price high, and when the market bottoms out spend the cash they can justify with their high price to buy viable companies at a discount.

mercan ,

Thank you!

chemicalwonka ,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

always been

Municipal0379 ,

Always will be

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Hmmm. I’ve seen threads on social media from experienced devs having been unemployed for a year now and rather devastated by it.

Taleya ,

A certain subset of dev thought they were untouchable. Now they are finding out they're the same level of peasant as the rest of us. Hard fall. :/

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

It can also be a common occurrence and devastating to an individual at the same time. It sucks, and people vent.

I've been in this game a long time and been laid off from about half my gigs. It sucks every time. If it wasn't for the fact that the pay is good and that I like doing it, I probably would've moved to something more stable already.

SatanicNotMessianic ,

I’m not disputing their experiences - I’ve replied otherwise on this thread - but I’m going to guess that a lot of those experienced devs didn’t go through the 2000-2002 ish dot com crash, or maybe even the 2008 recession.

Sometimes the money goes away for a while. The money has currently gone away. Eventually they drop the interest rates, people decide that real estate or EVs aren’t sexy anymore because they’re overbought, and the money floods back in. Then it gets too much, to the point that some kid gets $60M for the idea of selling barbecues and charcoal over the internet, and the cycle repeats.

We thought Keynes fixed this but then decided it was more fun for a handful of people to make shitloads of money and then crash the economy every decade or two.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Some claimed to have been around long enough to gone through the 2008 recession, but dot com crash would certainly be very unlikely.

SatanicNotMessianic ,

I’ve been working in tech in one form or another since about 1994 and even before that if you include “writing some software for some guy’s cash register.” I’ve been through a few of these. They suck, but two years from now it’ll be forgotten.

corsicanguppy ,

Ohai. I rode the 1998/99 wave, got hit with the crash, took a cut in one job and grabbed a side-hustle, got laid off in 2006 in the company's 117th round of layoffs (bru-tal), and never been laid-off again. Because if I even smell a whiff of stink-of-death, I'm out. I still have the side-hustle, and in the gaps I just bulk up on it to narrow the gap. Works okay. Now my main gig is union, and since I deliver on my goals and I'm not a sociopath, I have some confidence they'll keep me around for a few years. That'd be neat.

SatanicNotMessianic ,

Yup. I went back into academia, then rotated between that, military, and government work. Now I’m waiting to see if the other shoe drops and I either sponge off my partner or buy a beach house in Mexico.

Taleya ,

I adjusted to the lower tier fish. Less money, but more stable and less stress.

Agent641 ,

Whats your side hustle?

Taleya ,

'97 here. Could do this shit in my sleep by now lol

dylanTheDeveloper ,
@dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world avatar

Since you survived through the year 2000 you gotta tell us your Y2K story

SatanicNotMessianic ,

Oh, that’s a fun one. By the actual Y2K I think I had already transitioned into a dot-commie (where it pretty much was ignored), but the run up was interesting. I was previously in a much more Office Space kind of situation. I was the hot new talent using modern technologies like Perl and Java, but virtually everyone else was writing cobol on green screens for an IBM midrange system, with many many hours dedicated to updating code to use four digit dates. These were the days when news channels were predicting airplanes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would melt down, and cash registers would stop working entirely. World ending chaos.

The people around me were doing basically the same job for 30 years. I don’t even know enough cobol to write a joke in it, but we’re not talking about Donald Knuth here. I’m talking about green screen terminals connected via token ring or some kind of crap like that.

This is when Gateway Computer stores were in shopping malls and came with stickers on the front boasting about how they were “Y2K compatible” and were upgradable so that 16 MHz 386SX was the last computer you’d ever need.

Getting old is fun, other than the back pain, organ failure, and that memory thing I can’t remember the name of.

rambaroo , (edited )

I don't think the money is magically just going to come back this time. I doubt that interest rates will ever drop to the levels they were at before the pandemic.

I fully expect this lull to last at least a few more years, and I doubt the industry will ever recover to pre-pandemic levels. History rhymes, it doesn't repeat, and two very different situations from the past are not necessarily indicative of the future. Plus even if it does recover, you still have to get noticed with 1000 scrubs applying to every job they see. Or pray that your network lands you something, if you're lucky.

aesthelete ,

Spot on. A word of advice to people in the tech field: save while the sun shines because another thing you can't time besides the market is when the money will be flowing your way.

I'm somewhat optimistic about the long term prospects because if new technology isn't the future then what is?

But seriously, don't pretend like your high salary will last a lifetime and plan accordingly.

corsicanguppy ,

I know a guy who was let go a year ago. Dude's like 170 IQ - and while people say that, this guy's dizzyingly smart. 3 degrees, he can teach, code to spec, rebuild your delivery pipeline so it fucking howls, manage nerds, and he's been interviewing like it's his job for a year without lasting results.

Some shitty company in Connecticut just flew him out for a project wrap-up, as he's been helping save their ass since their completely out-of-his-depth manager reached out on a public forum for some clue. Like, without him they'd've been 4 kinds of fucked and he was looking for something to keep him sane for a few weeks.

Handshake and a free dinner and sent him packing. Because they could. They got what they needed, and they foolishly think they can get it again when this idiot fucks up again in a month.

I worry a lot of nerds are getting fish-hooked like that, when they just want to make things go and maybe also eat regularly.

afraid_of_zombies ,

Handshake and a free dinner and sent him packing. Because they could. They got what they needed, and they foolishly think they can get it again when this idiot fucks up again in a month.

Pretty common with OEMs. They hire to develop the new product line, let them go, and make the products until they literally can't anymore.

EatATaco ,

Is this a joke? Software development regularly comes out on top as one of the best jobs. Good pay, relatively low stress, and good work life balance.

theneverfox ,

Good work life balance? Low stress? Well paid? Not soul crushing?

Nah fam. Pick one, hope to get your second pick, and if you're lucky, skilled, and play your cards right you can get three. You might get none of them.

No one gets all four... Despite what it sounds like, it's an inherently creative job where you rarely get to pick your project and are regularly put on an impossible timeline.

Wage suppression is well documented, and for some reason no one gives raises... Despite the fact even the best devs need half a year, bare minimum, to be fully up to speed with a mature system. If you're lucky, when you jump after 18 months (the optimal time at a place to keep your salary growing, especially in the first decade) you'll inherit a system in good condition with people who can explain it. If you're very lucky.

That being said, it's one of the only middle class industries left. I recommend it to everyone who has the aptitude - it's one of the most useful skills to have, even if you rarely use it.

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