Let go of the wrong people, and now the best of those won't be back. Ever wonder why aerospace/manufacturing has a hard time getting the crème de la crème? This is why. We got layoff/rehire cycles at least once a year.
It's like when you sell all of your crap in an RPG but then find out no one will sell you back the Really Cool Thing you whoops-dumped in the sale. It's an eff-up, but when you got cheat codes, it really doesn't matter.
An analogy for the desperate looking for employment, colluding to suppress wages across the industry, skewed supply-demand ratios in their favor. Take your pick.
Financialization. The capability to create "today money" from "tomorrow money" at extremely low levels of perceived risk. Sometimes we dip our webbed flippers into the idea of negative risk, with predictable - but extremely today-dollar-rific - results.
Offtopic, but this magical money-generation capability is commonly perceived as a standin for any value-generation capability, from aerodynamics to materials science. Go wander the C-Suite of a major aerospace firm and count the engineering degrees, then go back and count the MBAs. It's every bit as absurd as late-stage Soviet Russia injecting "Socialism" into fields like fluid dynamics.
If this disagrees with anyone's ideology, I preemptively apologize. Go ahead and throw stuff at the monitor.
Being laid off and re-hired later is common in blue-collar professions, and that's the way we are moving to in the long term. Be frugal, save money, because the future doesn't look very bright.
Yeah, I was unemployed for four months this year due to layoffs. It was unpleasant, obviously, but I am extremely glad that I have been really vigilant about saving money for the last few years. It sucks not having an income, but it sucks less if you have a nice, healthy savings to draw from. It moves the problem away from the "how will I eat or afford rent?" territory, and more towards the "I guess I'll buy that thing next year" territory.
That is very interesting, and I suppose it speaks to the historical amnesia among IT specialists, since I believe the majority of us don’t really see ourselves as belonging to the working class.
If the majority of your income comes from labor, as opposed to interest on capital, you are working class. The non-working class likes more divisions between the working class, so works to perpetuate this misunderstanding.
There are only 2 classes, the worker class, and the ownership class that doesn't really have to work (e.g. could stop working tomorrow and be fine until retirement/death)
Whether or not the future looks bright, this is sound advice for everyone. As an immigrant to the US, one of my biggest culture shocks was how little the average American saves, and how little it's emphasized in the culture. Perhaps it speaks to how much faith the public has in government-provided social programs, despite the popular notion that the US does very little for its poor and elderly. (Are things different in Western Europe?)
From what I've read, it actually appears to be somewhat generational; apparently Gen-Z has, broadly speaking, actually picked up some good habits and seems to be saving money at a higher rate than previous generations. [1]
Of course, speaking about people in terms of generations is not something I really enjoy doing (especially since it does seem like millennials get a disproportionate level of hate on that front), but I think in the case of Gen-Z a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of them grew up right around the 2008 financial crash and realized how important saving money is.
Companies continue to want to pretend like software development is a factory assembly line. Weird how those sprint commitments never get hit in the same way as “we want X cars to roll off the line this month.” It must be the workers. /s
Maybe they can standardize this crap through more abstractions like React using the new AI available LLMs. So that now you pull a 3GB of code to compile just a "Hello World" website.
I am not a financial advisor, but I think most financial advisors would not recommend you save all your money in cash, in no small part because of potential inflation.
I think the typical rule is to save N months of bills [1] in cash (or something cash-adjacent like a CD or T-Bill), and the rest in an index fund/ETF from something like Vanguard of Fidelity or something like that. This allows you to somewhat "outsource" the problems of inflation to corporations.
[1] the size of N probably depends on the person and cost of living and all that fun stuff, but I think it's usually 6.
Link to another discussion pointing out that M$ layoffs were the result of wall st. investment firms and hedge fund managers wanting to reduce tech salaries.
What evidence is there to indicate the board of directors or CEO of one of the world’s richest and most profitable businesses is controlled by much less powerful and less wealthy Wall St investment firms and hedge fund managers?
A lot of "rich" tech CEOs don't have massive amounts of cash, they have big equity stakes in their companies. It's paper wealth strongly tied to their company's share price.
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
You could make the same argument about the US government, and yet the "much less powerful and less wealthy" groups still have a ton of influence over it. You are expecting it to make perfect logical sense, when it could all be very easily explained with one word: greed.
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and stop believing that the ultra rich don't all work together to take more of your money, because they do, they have been forever, and they continue to do so forever.
I have no management experience, but I wonder if there's a certain level up the ladder where one person just can't do most/all things well? There are so many problems and teams, even being accountable to a fraction of them would be taxing.
Not saying this to remove accountability, but I know I would personally collapse in that job.
Whether we actually do something about companies constantly introducing volatility to our social livelihoods, abusing workers, and eroding our buying power is really up to us though.
You have to make it heinously unprofitable, since that's really the only mechanism in capitalism that would course-correct this behavior.
> Companies that handled layoffs poorly are likely to have a harder time convincing ex workers to go back, Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School who's studied layoffs, said.
Yeah, you don't need an MBA to know that, but good that's being said
> Salesforce execs, and Benioff in particular, have over the years encouraged workers to view their colleagues and the company itself as "Ohana," a Hawaiian term referring to family.
That's level 8 of drinking your own Koolaid. From Salesforce? I'd consider them only less impersonal than Oracle, and pretty much that's it.
This is a lazy article that just says that these companies are still hiring people. Big companies will always be hiring people as there is constantly positions that need to be backfilled or new priorities that need extra headcount.
Having a layoff doesn't mean a company will never hire anyone ever again. It's common for people who were laid off from something the company is no longer prioritizing to be able to find a position in an area that the company is now prioritizing.
The industry used to have lifers in the last century. That reduced to 10 years at a company in the dotcoms. That reduced to 4 years at a company in the 00s. That reduced to 18 months pre-pandemic.
Right now, I don't even know why software engineers should do anything but keep hopping jobs all the time. There is less value in promotions/raises/loyalty than in constant hopping.
The "more to life" part cannot even be obtained at massively profitable companies because the companies will yank you at the slightest sign of slowdown.
You might not want to hop but the company might want you to hop.
Maybe it's the era when I started working, but for ICs, I think 2-5 years is the sweet spot. Any shorter and you weren't fully productive at the company and never built connections. Any longer and your skills get too tied to the company and your perspective become stale.
Readit News
It's like when you sell all of your crap in an RPG but then find out no one will sell you back the Really Cool Thing you whoops-dumped in the sale. It's an eff-up, but when you got cheat codes, it really doesn't matter.
Now, if someone takes your cheat codes away . .
Offtopic, but this magical money-generation capability is commonly perceived as a standin for any value-generation capability, from aerodynamics to materials science. Go wander the C-Suite of a major aerospace firm and count the engineering degrees, then go back and count the MBAs. It's every bit as absurd as late-stage Soviet Russia injecting "Socialism" into fields like fluid dynamics.
If this disagrees with anyone's ideology, I preemptively apologize. Go ahead and throw stuff at the monitor.
Deleted Comment
Whether or not the future looks bright, this is sound advice for everyone. As an immigrant to the US, one of my biggest culture shocks was how little the average American saves, and how little it's emphasized in the culture. Perhaps it speaks to how much faith the public has in government-provided social programs, despite the popular notion that the US does very little for its poor and elderly. (Are things different in Western Europe?)
Of course, speaking about people in terms of generations is not something I really enjoy doing (especially since it does seem like millennials get a disproportionate level of hate on that front), but I think in the case of Gen-Z a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of them grew up right around the 2008 financial crash and realized how important saving money is.
[1] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/gen-z-financial-goals-2...
Dead Comment
I think the typical rule is to save N months of bills [1] in cash (or something cash-adjacent like a CD or T-Bill), and the rest in an index fund/ETF from something like Vanguard of Fidelity or something like that. This allows you to somewhat "outsource" the problems of inflation to corporations.
[1] the size of N probably depends on the person and cost of living and all that fun stuff, but I think it's usually 6.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37643608
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/with-75-ownership-of-the-sha...
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and stop believing that the ultra rich don't all work together to take more of your money, because they do, they have been forever, and they continue to do so forever.
What a great testament to the management acumen at these companies.
Not saying this to remove accountability, but I know I would personally collapse in that job.
Whether we actually do something about companies constantly introducing volatility to our social livelihoods, abusing workers, and eroding our buying power is really up to us though.
You have to make it heinously unprofitable, since that's really the only mechanism in capitalism that would course-correct this behavior.
Yeah, you don't need an MBA to know that, but good that's being said
> Salesforce execs, and Benioff in particular, have over the years encouraged workers to view their colleagues and the company itself as "Ohana," a Hawaiian term referring to family.
That's level 8 of drinking your own Koolaid. From Salesforce? I'd consider them only less impersonal than Oracle, and pretty much that's it.
Having a layoff doesn't mean a company will never hire anyone ever again. It's common for people who were laid off from something the company is no longer prioritizing to be able to find a position in an area that the company is now prioritizing.
Right now, I don't even know why software engineers should do anything but keep hopping jobs all the time. There is less value in promotions/raises/loyalty than in constant hopping.
You might not want to hop but the company might want you to hop.
Because if you do, they'll stop hiring you - that only goes one way.