> from a Snap survivor: ”So it’s frustrating; they expect us to still go out and win with these products, yet we have fewer resources.”
I don’t know what function this is it their manager is telling them, but this quote really reflects a bull market mentality that success is a function of resources applied without acknowledging the inefficiency of throwing money at a problem. People who want to be successful over the next 5 years really should be thinking in terms of how to operate efficiently and leverage what they do have. I think a lot of young VC-funded tech workers misunderstand how elastic resourcing actually can be in the software world, and how much past resourcing was speculative and incremental-not essential.
Yeah. People don't appreciate how wasteful companies can be; being brutal about it, odds are a lot of those resources are unnecessary.
I say this as someone who was an unnecessary resource. In the early 10s I got hired into the "machine learning" division of a ~7000 person company, which was a local ML startup that had gotten acquired. After starting there, I quickly realized: the acquisition was just done by an exec/VP who decided the company needed a machine learning strategy, but had no idea what to actually do with the acquisition. I was there for about a year, and I couldn't really tell you what me, or anyone on my team, did that provided any value. We played around with Spark; we hired a few PhD students to mess around with some data, for no real reason; we had a dev who spent 6 months writing an insane purely functional CRUD HTTP framework. We ostensibly had some long-term project we were working on, but literally no functional software to show by the time I left. I was well-compensated and treated extremely well (fully stocked liquor cabinet and we start pouring drinks at 2pm on Friday, whoo!) yet probably the most miserable I had ever been in my professional life.
Anyway... I've found that my experience is not uncommon. Companies of 1000+ people have a lot of entire teams who are not really contributing anything to the business. During the boom times it's simply not worth it for management to spend their time trying to hunt down those teams, though; the salaries of 40 people is a drop in the bucket for a company of that size. Plus you never want to make cuts to your own headcount, as that reduces your power as a manager.
It's pretty reflective of the environment these employees operate in, though.
I'm an engineering manager at $BigCo. In my past life, I was a startup founder, so I'm no stranger to doing more with less. As a startup founder, the way I achieved efficiencies was a.) work on the right problems, or as close to the right problems as you can with the information available to you b.) don't do unnecessary work c.) look for efficiencies where the same piece of work can achieve multiple aims and d.) cut communication costs & overhead whenever possible.
At $BigCo, I generally have a set amount of work that my team has to deliver. I can provide input on priorities & goals, but if I, say, redirect product strategy into an approach that gets more users or offers a better user experience, the PM gets the credit, not me. (If they didn't, it's doubtful they would let me.). If I started a brand-new product that's beloved by users, it'll get killed by some executive that's threatened by its success. If I say "Let's not do X, it's not very important", and X is something that's been asked of my team by either execs or another team, I'm branded as uncooperative and will probably be managed out. Same if I cut communication loops and just do things without letting people know. OTOH, if I do lots of unnecessary work that is asked for by other people, and gussy it up so it seems more difficult than it actually is, all of my people get promoted and I look like a rising superstar.
I think this is the organizational variant of Gall's Law. ["A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."]. Once a company has evolved processes and structure and an org chart, it cannot be made more efficient, because the inefficiency is coded into the structure of the organization. You have to throw away the company and start with a new, simpler company that does the same thing.
The best way to fix an under performing team is to reduce it's size. Split the team, move some people to another team, etc. It doesn't have to be about firing people and that actually should be a last resort. 2 is alright as a size. 3-4 is great. 5-7 can still work, anything over that is probably too large. You get all sorts of issues with big teams including increased communication and meeting overhead, scope creep (because those people need to be busy), too many captains on the ship and the resulting conflicts, etc. Most of that goes away if you split teams and allow them to focus. Small teams get more done faster. It's better to have 2 or 3 small teams than 1 large team. Don't have managers in the team, just tech leads. Product management is a cross team function. Not having a lot of team managers makes it easier to move people around as well. That's a good thing and you can adapt dynamically to changing circumstances and needs.
Big companies have a tendency to hire new people rather than to consider moving people that they have and trust already around because it's easier. Managers derive status from their team size and are protective of keeping their team members, especially the ones that get things done. This dynamic results in a lot of negative behavior and this weird dynamic of people being treated like generic resources that are literally hoarded. You get this ego driven empire building where the loudest managers get the biggest teams and the largest budgets.
This results in a lot of people ending up in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. And the resulting problems are fixed by hiring more people. If the company is big enough, you get teams literally engineering around other teams. And then inevitably after a few years somebody realizes that they have too many people and they start firing people. This actually makes the problem worse because the best people won't wait for that to happen and leave by themselves and of the ones that remain some get fired and the remaining people are probably demoralized.
Let’s say upper management considers they need both feature A and B to win the market by end of quarter.
But suddenly your team is half the number of people it used to be. You’re not realistically going to achieve more than you used to just through sheer elasticity.
So either A or B will get done and it becomes a matter of prioritization.
Smaller companies and shops are nimble because they don’t have the burden of the past, red tape and standards that exist at scale.
For engineering orgs the size of Snap’s things take longer and having more people very often does solve the velocity problem.
People have had 10 year careers in tech thinking the world is a permanent bull market. I can imagine how this feels like the world is collapsing around them.
For those of us who have weathered previous recessions, we know the world moves on. Things will be rough, for a while, we will rebound, and hopefully we will thrive again.
I feel the current situation is more representative of the long term job market than the last few exuberant years.
Young, bright, engineers fresh out of college sliding into a big tech firm making 300k-500k / year and being told they are the most important resource in the universe. If you started this train 3-5 years ago you probably just assumed the gravy train would never stop.
I really hope they squirreled away some of those $$ and then moved to a low cost of living area during the pandemic.
I have some sympathy, but it made the tech universe warp around their stock prices. It was very hard to recruit when all the best and above average talent just got sucked up into the giant companies that build advertising machines in SV.
I started my career in 2005 working for an Indian outsourcing company one of whose biggest clients was Lehmann Brothers . I was in a small internal development team of 6 folks while the rest of the entire floor was a 60-70 member team servicing Lehmann who got huge bonuses , partied and were busy.
On a morning of fall 2008 I walked into work and saw the whole floor was empty apart from our 6 member team. The entire 70 member team was gone and the floor was a ghost town.
I will never forget that day ever in my professional life .
Experienced 'survivor' here: You're going to feel (and sometimes be explicitly told) that your stress is not valid, because others have it worse. Both these things can be true. Others have it worse, and the stress you're feeling is real. If you don't acknowledge the effects and act on them (in whatever way works for you), you will undergo entirely avoidable suffering.
Again, others might be suffering more, but nobody wins when you self-flagellate.
If, in addition to taking care of your health, you want to take action on suffering, there are many options. I recommend considering an expansive moral circle and checking out: https://www.givewell.org/
Layoffs aren't what are "rattling" folks in this industry, at least not the tech folks outside of FAANG. If you've worked in startup land, you've experienced layoffs. Probably multiple rounds. You anticipate them, and they aren't scary because the market for your skills is so competitive.
Our "Job Security" comes from the overall state of the hiring market, not finding a job at the most stable company and putting in 30 before retiring.
If folks are rattled, its because of the state of the job market, something I'm actually curious about. Reporting on this would have actual value, as I'm still getting recruiter emails from many of the recent companies that have publicly said they are freezing/slowing down hiring and from many, many startups.
This article just reads like schadenfreude for the majority of tech workers who have never experienced the job security of being at a giant engine growth that never stalled once for 10-15 years.
> I'm still getting recruiter emails from many of the recent companies that have publicly said they are freezing/slowing down hiring
I wonder what a recruiter at a company with a hiring freeze in place is expected to do? I'd be inclined to say, "well then I'll be on vacation until you need me, thanks for keeping the paychecks coming", but I suspect that wouldn't work so well. I think they would want to "keep the pipeline flowing" or however you'd want to say it for a mix of practical as well as BS reasons.
After a layoff, a lot of the best people among the remaining staff end up leaving as well. In addition to the extra work, the workplace acquires a bunch of mental tombstones of a time that would never repeat itself. If you are any good, that lowers the threshold of reasons not to quit, and the upside of quitting remains untouched (higher salary, new experiences, better title elsewhere, more learning). The reasons to stay have to increase to compensate - equity, vesting, higher title, etc. The people who stay have to be the ones you actually want to work with as well.
After a layoff, a lot of the best people among the remaining staff end up leaving as well
Agreed. But I was always the one that stayed. I remember in 1999 when our company got acquired by another company and started doing layoffs - I had a very good friend that chose to leave the company at that point because things were going to be very difficult for a while.
The company they went to turned out to be so much worse though while I made out very well by staying. This pattern has repeated several times in my career.
When I was let go, I had to go through a whole procedure of giving back IDs, being debriefed, etc.
It was emotionally hard.
After it was over I found myself, outside the entrance to the building, with no way in.
I reached into my pocket, and realized I left my keys inside at my old desk.
There’s a procedure for letting in visitors, but it takes a long time. When I went to the receptionist to explain the situation, I was immediately buzzed in, and walked back to my desk to receive the keys.
That meant a lot.
I’m sure there was a security person watching me on video, but that’s a resource intensive courtesy.
Now is the time to be nice. It’s a time for empathy.
Make it a point to get together outside work. Invite folks laid off. Invite contractors. Make it clear they’re still “part of the club.”
People appreciate this, and in the long run it pays off.
Five years ago I was working for a large tech company and things were going downhill quickly in our division due to a failed acquisition. We were a very tight knit team that made a point to stick together, meet up regularly outside work, and help each other out through layoffs, departures, and other chaos. I owe my former co-workers a huge debt of gratitude for their help in getting my current job.
I've met, lately, a really massive number of people who work in tech companies but say they work in "marketing" or "branding."
I'm not really sure what they do exactly, but I think it's to do with the amount of money in the ad tech business that drives profit for the likes of G, FB, etc. I guess decisions have to be made on product strategy, I suppose meetings with clients to discuss ad spend.
Question is doesn't that capital spend dry during recessionary times?
Marketing, sales, branding, etc are the ones who largely are doing the work to scale these companies. Ad dollars are one mechanism to grow reach across audiences, and those teams are the ones helping to make it actually happen.
And yes, marketing/ad budgets will likely get cut across all sectors (some more than others) during a recession. It's one line item among many that companies will flex up or down depending on macroeconomic conditions, as well as the position/health of their individual firm.
> Twilio, which laid off roughly 800 employees in September, took steps to ease the blow for employees being let go. Laid off employees received 12 weeks of severance pay, plus an additional week for every year worked at Twilio, and their stock will vest for one more scheduled vesting period.
For a lot of folk, this type of severance will make them leave with a smile.
Well, we should all be very very worried when companies with 1m profit per employee start laying people off. Excesses of SV aren’t really relevant from my point of view
[+] [-] dasil003|3 years ago|reply
I don’t know what function this is it their manager is telling them, but this quote really reflects a bull market mentality that success is a function of resources applied without acknowledging the inefficiency of throwing money at a problem. People who want to be successful over the next 5 years really should be thinking in terms of how to operate efficiently and leverage what they do have. I think a lot of young VC-funded tech workers misunderstand how elastic resourcing actually can be in the software world, and how much past resourcing was speculative and incremental-not essential.
[+] [-] mjr00|3 years ago|reply
I say this as someone who was an unnecessary resource. In the early 10s I got hired into the "machine learning" division of a ~7000 person company, which was a local ML startup that had gotten acquired. After starting there, I quickly realized: the acquisition was just done by an exec/VP who decided the company needed a machine learning strategy, but had no idea what to actually do with the acquisition. I was there for about a year, and I couldn't really tell you what me, or anyone on my team, did that provided any value. We played around with Spark; we hired a few PhD students to mess around with some data, for no real reason; we had a dev who spent 6 months writing an insane purely functional CRUD HTTP framework. We ostensibly had some long-term project we were working on, but literally no functional software to show by the time I left. I was well-compensated and treated extremely well (fully stocked liquor cabinet and we start pouring drinks at 2pm on Friday, whoo!) yet probably the most miserable I had ever been in my professional life.
Anyway... I've found that my experience is not uncommon. Companies of 1000+ people have a lot of entire teams who are not really contributing anything to the business. During the boom times it's simply not worth it for management to spend their time trying to hunt down those teams, though; the salaries of 40 people is a drop in the bucket for a company of that size. Plus you never want to make cuts to your own headcount, as that reduces your power as a manager.
[+] [-] nostrademons|3 years ago|reply
I'm an engineering manager at $BigCo. In my past life, I was a startup founder, so I'm no stranger to doing more with less. As a startup founder, the way I achieved efficiencies was a.) work on the right problems, or as close to the right problems as you can with the information available to you b.) don't do unnecessary work c.) look for efficiencies where the same piece of work can achieve multiple aims and d.) cut communication costs & overhead whenever possible.
At $BigCo, I generally have a set amount of work that my team has to deliver. I can provide input on priorities & goals, but if I, say, redirect product strategy into an approach that gets more users or offers a better user experience, the PM gets the credit, not me. (If they didn't, it's doubtful they would let me.). If I started a brand-new product that's beloved by users, it'll get killed by some executive that's threatened by its success. If I say "Let's not do X, it's not very important", and X is something that's been asked of my team by either execs or another team, I'm branded as uncooperative and will probably be managed out. Same if I cut communication loops and just do things without letting people know. OTOH, if I do lots of unnecessary work that is asked for by other people, and gussy it up so it seems more difficult than it actually is, all of my people get promoted and I look like a rising superstar.
I think this is the organizational variant of Gall's Law. ["A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."]. Once a company has evolved processes and structure and an org chart, it cannot be made more efficient, because the inefficiency is coded into the structure of the organization. You have to throw away the company and start with a new, simpler company that does the same thing.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
Big companies have a tendency to hire new people rather than to consider moving people that they have and trust already around because it's easier. Managers derive status from their team size and are protective of keeping their team members, especially the ones that get things done. This dynamic results in a lot of negative behavior and this weird dynamic of people being treated like generic resources that are literally hoarded. You get this ego driven empire building where the loudest managers get the biggest teams and the largest budgets.
This results in a lot of people ending up in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. And the resulting problems are fixed by hiring more people. If the company is big enough, you get teams literally engineering around other teams. And then inevitably after a few years somebody realizes that they have too many people and they start firing people. This actually makes the problem worse because the best people won't wait for that to happen and leave by themselves and of the ones that remain some get fired and the remaining people are probably demoralized.
[+] [-] duxup|3 years ago|reply
I work at a small shop, 3.5 devs. That presents limits to some extent.
And yet we were faster and more flexible than a company who had wads of cash thrown at them by some parent company who is now shutting them down.
[+] [-] solalf|3 years ago|reply
Let’s say upper management considers they need both feature A and B to win the market by end of quarter. But suddenly your team is half the number of people it used to be. You’re not realistically going to achieve more than you used to just through sheer elasticity. So either A or B will get done and it becomes a matter of prioritization.
Smaller companies and shops are nimble because they don’t have the burden of the past, red tape and standards that exist at scale. For engineering orgs the size of Snap’s things take longer and having more people very often does solve the velocity problem.
[+] [-] darkerside|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angarg12|3 years ago|reply
For those of us who have weathered previous recessions, we know the world moves on. Things will be rough, for a while, we will rebound, and hopefully we will thrive again.
I feel the current situation is more representative of the long term job market than the last few exuberant years.
[+] [-] bitexploder|3 years ago|reply
I really hope they squirreled away some of those $$ and then moved to a low cost of living area during the pandemic.
I have some sympathy, but it made the tech universe warp around their stock prices. It was very hard to recruit when all the best and above average talent just got sucked up into the giant companies that build advertising machines in SV.
[+] [-] nus07|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orzig|3 years ago|reply
Again, others might be suffering more, but nobody wins when you self-flagellate.
If, in addition to taking care of your health, you want to take action on suffering, there are many options. I recommend considering an expansive moral circle and checking out: https://www.givewell.org/
[+] [-] b1gnasty|3 years ago|reply
Our "Job Security" comes from the overall state of the hiring market, not finding a job at the most stable company and putting in 30 before retiring.
If folks are rattled, its because of the state of the job market, something I'm actually curious about. Reporting on this would have actual value, as I'm still getting recruiter emails from many of the recent companies that have publicly said they are freezing/slowing down hiring and from many, many startups.
This article just reads like schadenfreude for the majority of tech workers who have never experienced the job security of being at a giant engine growth that never stalled once for 10-15 years.
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
I wonder what a recruiter at a company with a hiring freeze in place is expected to do? I'd be inclined to say, "well then I'll be on vacation until you need me, thanks for keeping the paychecks coming", but I suspect that wouldn't work so well. I think they would want to "keep the pipeline flowing" or however you'd want to say it for a mix of practical as well as BS reasons.
[+] [-] dzink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SanjayMehta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 300bps|3 years ago|reply
Agreed. But I was always the one that stayed. I remember in 1999 when our company got acquired by another company and started doing layoffs - I had a very good friend that chose to leave the company at that point because things were going to be very difficult for a while.
The company they went to turned out to be so much worse though while I made out very well by staying. This pattern has repeated several times in my career.
[+] [-] bitlax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boffinism|3 years ago|reply
So, only bad enough that an employee might consider quitting? That... really suggests it's not a particularly bad situation.
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koinedad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
It was emotionally hard.
After it was over I found myself, outside the entrance to the building, with no way in.
I reached into my pocket, and realized I left my keys inside at my old desk.
There’s a procedure for letting in visitors, but it takes a long time. When I went to the receptionist to explain the situation, I was immediately buzzed in, and walked back to my desk to receive the keys.
That meant a lot.
I’m sure there was a security person watching me on video, but that’s a resource intensive courtesy.
Now is the time to be nice. It’s a time for empathy.
Make it a point to get together outside work. Invite folks laid off. Invite contractors. Make it clear they’re still “part of the club.”
People appreciate this, and in the long run it pays off.
[+] [-] five82|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mancerayder|3 years ago|reply
I'm not really sure what they do exactly, but I think it's to do with the amount of money in the ad tech business that drives profit for the likes of G, FB, etc. I guess decisions have to be made on product strategy, I suppose meetings with clients to discuss ad spend.
Question is doesn't that capital spend dry during recessionary times?
[+] [-] chevman|3 years ago|reply
And yes, marketing/ad budgets will likely get cut across all sectors (some more than others) during a recession. It's one line item among many that companies will flex up or down depending on macroeconomic conditions, as well as the position/health of their individual firm.
[+] [-] sys_64738|3 years ago|reply
For a lot of folk, this type of severance will make them leave with a smile.
[+] [-] perfecthjrjth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djohnston|3 years ago|reply
They aren't being completely exploited by their companies so they deserve to be taken down a peg to the sorry state you're in?
[+] [-] AzzieElbab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjr225|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]