> be kind to people facing layoffs. Losing your job is awful in the best of circumstances; going through it in such a public and charged situation must be emotionally grueling. Be kind.
At the beginning of covid, I got laid off from a company the day after I accepted a new job at a different company. I had a meeting with my boss to put in my two weeks in the afternoon, but I woke up to an 9am meeting with our CTO where our entire team was let go. Since I got let go instead of quitting I got severance and health care for a few months and was able to file for unemployment, which allowed me to take 6 weeks in between jobs instead of the 2 I was planning.
It was literally the best possible scenario I can think of for getting laid off and it still fucking hurt to be let go.
Seriously, please remember be kind to the people going through this.
I was once laid off from a company on a Friday but they really wanted to keep me so they told me to call back Monday to see if anything changed (very small company a long time ago). On Sunday I broke my ankle playing touch football and the doctor said I was probably eligible for disability. Called the company back on Monday, they cancelled the layoff and I went on disability for eight weeks then right back to work with them.
I had a miserable job that I absolutely hated before my career in tech. I was saving up money to last me through going to a coding bootcamp and had just sat down and calculated that I needed $X more. I got called into a meeting and laid off and given a severance check for almost exactly $X. I still cried on the way home, even though looking back objectively it was one of the best things that ever happened to me
I just got laid off from Stripe on Thursday. Our team was up to it's neck with work that needed to be done. Other teams as well we're in disparate need of more engineers. They didn't do layoffs because they had excess employees, it was because they wanted to reduce run rate in the face of uncertainty.
Sorry to hear that, best of luck looking for a new job. I hope the following comment does not come off as offensive.
Do you think that this work that had to be done was business critical? My experience while working at FAANGs is that everyone was working a lot but a sizable number of projects were vanity/promotion/keep-em-distracted projects. People imagine overstaffed companies as full of idle engineers but I've seen instances of very busy overstaffed companies working on the wrong projects (migrating to Go because, using Protobuffs for a simple eCommerce API that does not need it, creating a component library for a small internal tool that will not grow much, building your own chat system, etc).
I think your post highlights a good point. The article talks about needing "OSS maintainers", but of course OSS isn't really a thing you sell for money (yes, I know in the broader sense people have tried business models around OSS, but nobody is paying for OpenSSL).
It's entirely an economic problem, not a "too many" or "not enough" people problem.
Sorry you got laid off. If anything, I felt like the Stripe layoffs we're a bit of a special case, because I've seen Stripe churn out tons of useful new features and functionality over the past couple years, in contrast to some of the other tech layoffs where the companies seem like they've been treading water for years.
I've hit that (inevitable, apparently) point as an "IC" with my current employer where I'm so "indispensable" that I'm a required participant in at least 8 hours of meetings a day, which means that it's more or less impossible to meet whatever low-trust gamification metrics like LOC committed or # bugs fixed have been put in place by hands-off upper management. My direct boss knows and appreciates what I do, but when Elon buys the company, he'll just be looking at a spreadsheet that I'll look terrible on BECAUSE I'm good at what I do.
I wonder if you are at liberty to write about the type of work you were doing? Looking from a far it’s hard to see such incremental changes and I wonder how will that affect Stripes future capabilities
I lost my job at BlackBerry in spring 2014. I'm not sure how many rounds happened before that. At least a dozen. The company shed thousands and thousands of us as it entered decline.
Thankfully I had no children, no mortgage and lived well below my means. As such, it was quite possibly one of the happiest moments of my life, instead of the worst. I could only imagine how I would have felt if I just bought a house, or had a child.
I was so eager to sign the papers to move on. In retrospect, I was foolish to have stayed as long as I did. It was an amazing place to work in the early days, lots of talented colleagues I had learned much from, about work, about life, but by the end, it was a shambling zombie, decomposing before our very eyes.
We were summoned into an office with a cheerful HR person, armed with a PowerPoint presentation. A box was passed around to toss our many years worth of phones into. I'll never forget being asked, "Does everyone know why we are here?" at the very start. We did.
I wish good fortune to anyone who has lost their job in the recent layoff rounds. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Given some time and luck, you might even land in a better place (I feel blessed in that respect).
Thanks for posting this anecdote. I have posted many times that too often I see HN commenters arguing that getting laid off is like the worst possible thing that can happen to someone, when this is rarely the case when you are in a growing industry like tech (note I have a very different opinion for those in shrinking industries). I think getting laid off should be thought of in the same ballpark as getting dumped by a romantic partner:
1. Obviously it is painful for the person getting dumped/fired. But long term it's probably for the best as it gives all parties the freedom to choose other options and move on.
2. There are usually signs that should allow most people to prepare long before the breakup/layoff happens. You say "I was foolish to have stayed as long as I did" - can't comment on that, but I do hope that you knew it likely that a layoff was eventually coming and you took adequate preparations (saving more, keeping your resume up-to-date, etc.) for that likely event.
> Unpopular opinion: If you think the industry is overstaffed, you are not carrying the pager enough. The industry is disproportionately staffed.
This hits close to home. The industry is full of sales driven companies that are like a castle in the middle of a lake supported by sticks. Removing even a few of those sticks (engineers) can make the whole thing collapse.
Yeah. There's a real effect where the VCs decide a bodega is a tech company, puts it through hypergrowth based on incredible projections, hires 5000 people, looks around and says "oh my god, there's no way this business can support an organization of this size, it's just a bodega chain!"
The problem is by then it's too late. You now have systems, architecture and processes designed to be an empire, and you can't staff it like an SMB anymore.
Yea, maybe Google has people that can camp out on a roof to "rest and vest" like in the tv show Silicon Valley, but every startup I've ever worked for had half or a third as many developers and every other position (even sales, HR, etc.) as would be required to do the jobs properly.
Maybe it's good if the BigCo's get hit hard in a recession, so some of the startups that do stuff other than advertising can get some of those sweet, sweet "10x programmers".
I still feel very bad for all those laid off, I've been laid off 2 times in the past 3 years due to startups closing and that probably isn't the end of it for me either.
The VC/Execs seem to have latched on to the idea of companies being overstaffed, and this narrative is being amplified by "tech influencers" as a way to explain layoffs. Without data to back this claim, I'm gonna treat it as just another unfounded claim.
A more plausible reason seems to simply be that companies have had their stock prices hammered, earnings fall off, and need to control costs, and for software companies, their main costs are people and infra. There is simply no need for the underperformer myth.
Stop listening to VCs! Don't throw your coworkers under the bus.
But, at least for a large subset of tech companies that have had layoffs, there is data to back up this claim. That is, many companies went on huge, gigantic, enormous hiring binges during the pandemic, often expecting a "new normal" in terms of overall spending on internet and other tech services.
> The VC/Execs seem to have latched on to the idea of companies being overstaffed, and this narrative is being amplified by "tech influencers" as a way to explain layoffs. Without data to back this claim, I'm gonna treat it as just another unfounded claim.
I hate to be "that guy", but I've been saying the same thing for a few years, based on my observation that about a third of the software engineering staff does the vast majority of the actual useful work while the rest is playing around, not infrequently making life harder for the third of actually useful people.
I don't have hard data, just anecdotal evidence.
It's probably not a binary thing though: both could be true to some degree, and details will no doubt differ per company.
Earlier this year, I was the tech lead in a project where 75% of the people were short term contractors. I was one of three company employees who would actually code. The rest of them were managers or product types. I was also on call roughly one week per month.
Management wasn't keen on spending money on medium or long term projects. Instead, they would redirect resources to short term, high single sale impact, or performance critical stuff, thus no good features were added for a while and people got severely burnt.
I suspect that the misalignment in resource allocation with actual requirements, is a larger problem than overstaffing, and all derives from wrong management incentives.
Here’s one way of thinking about this (not the whole picture of course):
At annual profitability of $Y per employee, you have a bar for what you need to earn from hiring your marginal next employee. The “core” business top 1% might be earning $10Y per employee, but if you can earn $1.5Y per employee for 10k new hires to spin up new product areas, you would be negligent (and fired by the board) to not do so.
This is one of the main reasons big companies tend to bloat.
I think the narrative of “most companies are overstaffed” is a bit of an over-simplification. If the goal is to maximize shareholder return in the medium-to-long-term, this is not so. If the goal is to execute the core mission, sure, but that’s a much less valuable company in most cases. And from a portfolio theory perspective, probably a less durable one too, since you don’t have a backup plan.
Now, Twitter never had $10Y per employee, so you could justifiably claim they are overextended. But I don’t think the same logic works for the MAGMA.
I think this makes sense. Assuming MAGMA is the new FAANG, my experience inside the majority of them agrees.
Everyone knows that there is 1 or 2 golden goose teams supporting the entire rest of the company (iPhone, Facebook Ads, Google Search Ads). But smart people also know that one terrible quarter for any of those and the house of cards comes down.
So 90% of the employees are concerned year-round with goose-hunting. Maybe once or twice a decade they find one.
What does it mean to be overstaffed? I think that's a real question on which we can build.
I define a skeleton crew as roughly 10% of the organization. If you cannot run your basic organization with just maintenance and basic bug fixes on 10% of your team, you have too much complexity in your system and you need to work to reduce your maintenance burden. If you need less than 10%, you have an well-architected system, or you have a very small system.
Everything else in the system is research and development. These are new features that will drive revenue, or reduce non-engineering support costs, or otherwise drive new capabilities of the business. In that sense, every successful business is over-provisioned because they are all working on business bets for more revenue.
So yes, every company can be leaner, but it will be at the expense of growth. Now, there are more subtitles in the article to address within that context. For example, it is also true that managers will keep an underperformer for longer so long as there is a net positive because they may be struggling to hire otherwise, or they may be bracing against future layoffs. (A lean, effective organization in an org that otherwise has game theory about layoffs knows that you keep people around that you're not afraid to lose. It's a terrible way to run an organization but it happens.)
It is also true that we have work to do to level up the engineering management profession, as mentioned by the article.
However, when discussing this, the key driver of employment growth is the pursuit of revenue growth and I think that's the primary lens and disconnect here.
10% of what? Number of employees at the organization's peak? What if it's already shed 70% of its employees over several years, from its peak? Is it still 10% of that? At what minimum number of employees is it no longer 10%? Seems like a pretty arbitrary number to me.
Being kind does not mean you have to put your head in the sand and ignore actual realities. Workers are a resource. They are also humans. Facts are not in conflict. An important to keep both of them in mind
Kindness was only mentioned in the title of the post. It's a pity, because I am pretty sensible on this topic of kindness because one of my former manager told me "you're too kind to level up in this company".
> Losing your job is awful in the best of circumstances
It can sure seem that way initially, but I know two people for whom it was the kick in the pants they needed - they started their own businesses and were much happier a year later.
Sometimes it's easier to just keep going to work every day than do what you really want to.
As ever Redmonk nails it. I agree that lots of well funded and profitable firms are over resourced, and simultaneously not focussed on the core fundamentals. I hope we can all play a part in reallocating talent to the sectors of society that need transformation the most.
He seems to be calling out Twitter specifically, but is anybody really being otherwise there? I mean - I can understand (and will gleefully participate in) the schadenfreude of seeing the self-righteous Twitter censors being forced to find actual work commensurate with their marginal value to human civilization, but he seems to be talking about the rank-and-file types who carry pages and write product documentation.
I think they're more seen as "buffer states" that you can quickly sacrifice on the altar of the Board of Directors to show that you're serious about cost-cutting. While not hurting your core staff at all.
[+] [-] superfrank|3 years ago|reply
At the beginning of covid, I got laid off from a company the day after I accepted a new job at a different company. I had a meeting with my boss to put in my two weeks in the afternoon, but I woke up to an 9am meeting with our CTO where our entire team was let go. Since I got let go instead of quitting I got severance and health care for a few months and was able to file for unemployment, which allowed me to take 6 weeks in between jobs instead of the 2 I was planning.
It was literally the best possible scenario I can think of for getting laid off and it still fucking hurt to be let go.
Seriously, please remember be kind to the people going through this.
[+] [-] ojbyrne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrumbledober|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|3 years ago|reply
> and was able to file for unemployment
Reminder to people that H-1b holders are not eligible for unemployment claims. They pay INTO the system but are not allowed to take out of the system
[+] [-] tintor|3 years ago|reply
Why was it hurting? You already committed to leaving.
[+] [-] thunkle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hectorlorenzo|3 years ago|reply
Do you think that this work that had to be done was business critical? My experience while working at FAANGs is that everyone was working a lot but a sizable number of projects were vanity/promotion/keep-em-distracted projects. People imagine overstaffed companies as full of idle engineers but I've seen instances of very busy overstaffed companies working on the wrong projects (migrating to Go because, using Protobuffs for a simple eCommerce API that does not need it, creating a component library for a small internal tool that will not grow much, building your own chat system, etc).
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
It's entirely an economic problem, not a "too many" or "not enough" people problem.
Sorry you got laid off. If anything, I felt like the Stripe layoffs we're a bit of a special case, because I've seen Stripe churn out tons of useful new features and functionality over the past couple years, in contrast to some of the other tech layoffs where the companies seem like they've been treading water for years.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Temporary_31337|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aosmond|3 years ago|reply
Thankfully I had no children, no mortgage and lived well below my means. As such, it was quite possibly one of the happiest moments of my life, instead of the worst. I could only imagine how I would have felt if I just bought a house, or had a child.
I was so eager to sign the papers to move on. In retrospect, I was foolish to have stayed as long as I did. It was an amazing place to work in the early days, lots of talented colleagues I had learned much from, about work, about life, but by the end, it was a shambling zombie, decomposing before our very eyes.
We were summoned into an office with a cheerful HR person, armed with a PowerPoint presentation. A box was passed around to toss our many years worth of phones into. I'll never forget being asked, "Does everyone know why we are here?" at the very start. We did.
I wish good fortune to anyone who has lost their job in the recent layoff rounds. There is light at the end of the tunnel. Given some time and luck, you might even land in a better place (I feel blessed in that respect).
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
1. Obviously it is painful for the person getting dumped/fired. But long term it's probably for the best as it gives all parties the freedom to choose other options and move on.
2. There are usually signs that should allow most people to prepare long before the breakup/layoff happens. You say "I was foolish to have stayed as long as I did" - can't comment on that, but I do hope that you knew it likely that a layoff was eventually coming and you took adequate preparations (saving more, keeping your resume up-to-date, etc.) for that likely event.
[+] [-] mkl95|3 years ago|reply
This hits close to home. The industry is full of sales driven companies that are like a castle in the middle of a lake supported by sticks. Removing even a few of those sticks (engineers) can make the whole thing collapse.
[+] [-] coffeefirst|3 years ago|reply
The problem is by then it's too late. You now have systems, architecture and processes designed to be an empire, and you can't staff it like an SMB anymore.
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
Maybe it's good if the BigCo's get hit hard in a recession, so some of the startups that do stuff other than advertising can get some of those sweet, sweet "10x programmers".
I still feel very bad for all those laid off, I've been laid off 2 times in the past 3 years due to startups closing and that probably isn't the end of it for me either.
[+] [-] pm90|3 years ago|reply
A more plausible reason seems to simply be that companies have had their stock prices hammered, earnings fall off, and need to control costs, and for software companies, their main costs are people and infra. There is simply no need for the underperformer myth.
Stop listening to VCs! Don't throw your coworkers under the bus.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|3 years ago|reply
But, at least for a large subset of tech companies that have had layoffs, there is data to back up this claim. That is, many companies went on huge, gigantic, enormous hiring binges during the pandemic, often expecting a "new normal" in terms of overall spending on internet and other tech services.
I mean, look at Twitter employment over time: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit... . With the layoffs they'll be not much under pre-pandemic levels. Jack Dorsey even said he hired too fast: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600. The same rationale was given by Patrick Collison for Stripe's layoffs: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...
[+] [-] Beltalowda|3 years ago|reply
I hate to be "that guy", but I've been saying the same thing for a few years, based on my observation that about a third of the software engineering staff does the vast majority of the actual useful work while the rest is playing around, not infrequently making life harder for the third of actually useful people.
I don't have hard data, just anecdotal evidence.
It's probably not a binary thing though: both could be true to some degree, and details will no doubt differ per company.
[+] [-] manuelabeledo|3 years ago|reply
Management wasn't keen on spending money on medium or long term projects. Instead, they would redirect resources to short term, high single sale impact, or performance critical stuff, thus no good features were added for a while and people got severely burnt.
I suspect that the misalignment in resource allocation with actual requirements, is a larger problem than overstaffing, and all derives from wrong management incentives.
[+] [-] atopia|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theptip|3 years ago|reply
At annual profitability of $Y per employee, you have a bar for what you need to earn from hiring your marginal next employee. The “core” business top 1% might be earning $10Y per employee, but if you can earn $1.5Y per employee for 10k new hires to spin up new product areas, you would be negligent (and fired by the board) to not do so.
This is one of the main reasons big companies tend to bloat.
I think the narrative of “most companies are overstaffed” is a bit of an over-simplification. If the goal is to maximize shareholder return in the medium-to-long-term, this is not so. If the goal is to execute the core mission, sure, but that’s a much less valuable company in most cases. And from a portfolio theory perspective, probably a less durable one too, since you don’t have a backup plan.
Now, Twitter never had $10Y per employee, so you could justifiably claim they are overextended. But I don’t think the same logic works for the MAGMA.
[+] [-] kridsdale2|3 years ago|reply
Everyone knows that there is 1 or 2 golden goose teams supporting the entire rest of the company (iPhone, Facebook Ads, Google Search Ads). But smart people also know that one terrible quarter for any of those and the house of cards comes down.
So 90% of the employees are concerned year-round with goose-hunting. Maybe once or twice a decade they find one.
[+] [-] ebiester|3 years ago|reply
I define a skeleton crew as roughly 10% of the organization. If you cannot run your basic organization with just maintenance and basic bug fixes on 10% of your team, you have too much complexity in your system and you need to work to reduce your maintenance burden. If you need less than 10%, you have an well-architected system, or you have a very small system.
Everything else in the system is research and development. These are new features that will drive revenue, or reduce non-engineering support costs, or otherwise drive new capabilities of the business. In that sense, every successful business is over-provisioned because they are all working on business bets for more revenue.
So yes, every company can be leaner, but it will be at the expense of growth. Now, there are more subtitles in the article to address within that context. For example, it is also true that managers will keep an underperformer for longer so long as there is a net positive because they may be struggling to hire otherwise, or they may be bracing against future layoffs. (A lean, effective organization in an org that otherwise has game theory about layoffs knows that you keep people around that you're not afraid to lose. It's a terrible way to run an organization but it happens.)
It is also true that we have work to do to level up the engineering management profession, as mentioned by the article.
However, when discussing this, the key driver of employment growth is the pursuit of revenue growth and I think that's the primary lens and disconnect here.
[+] [-] cableshaft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] binarymax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooreds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uoaei|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
At some point there may come a real crunch and recession, and things may be a bit hard for a year or two, but it won't be a "New Normal".
People need to give up on this idea that every dip in the market or whatever reflects a permanent change in condition.
[+] [-] nerdponx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] napolux|3 years ago|reply
I gladly left.
[+] [-] adamc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaidhy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NickC25|3 years ago|reply
They fired me 2 days later, one of the reasons being "you're not cutthroat enough for this business".
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
It can sure seem that way initially, but I know two people for whom it was the kick in the pants they needed - they started their own businesses and were much happier a year later.
Sometimes it's easier to just keep going to work every day than do what you really want to.
[+] [-] Southworth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
He seems to be calling out Twitter specifically, but is anybody really being otherwise there? I mean - I can understand (and will gleefully participate in) the schadenfreude of seeing the self-righteous Twitter censors being forced to find actual work commensurate with their marginal value to human civilization, but he seems to be talking about the rank-and-file types who carry pages and write product documentation.
[+] [-] mcrad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kridsdale2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trashdigitalnom|3 years ago|reply
Absolutely not. I’d be neutral.