Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’ | Hacker News Reader

Meet Silicon Valley’s rattled layoff ‘survivors’

fortune.com

55 pointspseudolus70 comments

> 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.

Amen.

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.

We had the same discussions recently at a large big tech company. We just need couple.of planning meetings and 3-5 senior devs to launch, but nah never happens, security, privacy reviews, leadership presentations, etc, etc

Yup, it's not perfect but we get stuff out the door fast.

Other company, I assume they have the same stuff going on. Super ambitious ideas... not out the door.

I can just merge a branch all on my own most repositories if needed. Now that's not ideal but if you're disciplined, it's fast / effective.

There are times I wish we had more people / structure and such, but also times not.

The flip side of this is all the small, 3.5-dev shops that are fast and flexible—just so they can slam hard into a wall and tie themselves into permanent knots.

While many of the inefficiencies of larger companies are, indeed, highly wasteful, it is also true that some of those inefficiencies are to increase resilience. Looking around and seeing lots of fast, flexible small companies is, at least in part, survivorship bias.

I’d love to meet this half person

I'm overweight and count as 1.5 developers.

I gained 80 pounds last year and got a 50% raise!

They're learning, transitioning out of a more customer facing role and training their replacement so skills are still getting developed and their time is split ;)

At small shops, very much a thing.

The phrase "half-assed job" must have come from somewhere.

Ah yes the 0.5 dev, conjured up by the manager to push 4 devs work onto 3 realistic devs

Cynical nonsense. In a small shop, more likely that the manager codes but considers themself only 0.5 a dev because of overhead.

and that's one of the many reasons why project got delayed, manager gets optimistic and consider himself a 0.5, only to realise halfway that he is overwhelmed by meetings, and his superior is asking why is he even coding? He then simply leave it to the team, which is actually the best outcome in this situation. But like inflation, the initial estimation based on 3.5 dev is probably not gonna get revised because it has been committed to the boss or client.

The best thing a manager can do, is to support team when he can and NOT consider himself a resource, even if he does the coding.

a person being half- on the project or a contractor working 50% of the time is also possible.

I think your statement may be a bit broad here.

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.

Realistic outcome: management tells the team they still need to achieve the same work with half the people through heroism. The remaining members notice they're expected to do twice the work under a lot more stress, in a workplace that suffers the typical post-layoff low morale, and they quit themselves. Feature B doesn't get done, feature A gets rolled out by a bunch of enthused fresh grads and is buggy and unstable.

> For engineering orgs the size of Snap’s things take longer and having more people very often does solve the velocity problem

Your comment is totally fair. I will say though, that the impact of having more people is a function of how independently they can be deployed. One of the biggest challenges for hypergrowth companies is how to decouple things as they scale to keep people productive without drowning the org in communication overhead. Brooks' Law looms large in single product companies when they start to hit 4-figure engineering team sizes.

This is so well said.

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.

Fresh-out-of-college engineers weren't making $300k, let alone $500k. I'm not sure where you got these numbers. Even at the highest paying BigN, fresh grads don't typically get over $200k.

> 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.

The talent crunch has been getting worse for the past couple of decades. Don't expect this bear market to be some sort of cataclysmic change that would reverse the trend permanently, not anymore than 2008 was. Even 2001 only lasted for a fairly short while, and demand for top tech talent back then was a tiny fraction of what it is now.

That, essentially, is why this crunch exists: the number of highly talented engineers has remained about the same for decades, while demand skyrocketed.

Also, what other companies stand ready to receive all this "above average" talent? Small companies, which in this market, are having an even tougher time? BigN by and large haven't gone through massive layoffs, while small and medium-sized companies are getting massacred. Like Snap which lost 90% of its value.

Startups are in an even worse spot. Funding is going to be very tough for the next couple of years, and startups have been extremely stingy with their equity. That's why they're having trouble recruiting: BigN are paying far better, while startup are much riskier, and if they do succeed, there's very little upside for engineers who are granted ridiculously small amounts of equity.

I wouldn't hold my breath for all these "above average" talents being desperate enough to accept bad deals from startups that don't want to give out equity, nor is that a desirable outcome of this situation. Startups should either start granting more equity, or start gasp targeting less talented people.

I am just working from my anecdotal experience hiring engineers into high end infosec consulting and what we were told about other offers. Even now, with companies pushing for in office again and the stock component of BigN salaries crashing down to earth it has changed things in our recruiting pipeline noticeably.

I'm also involved in recruiting, and the biggest change I see is that folks who were laid off or pushed out of prestigious tech companies are now in the market. These are not your "top talent", these folks are still happily employed at their BigN job.

I hear similar stories about 2001. The folks who get laid off are mostly the lower performing engineers, who clear the lower hiring bars typical of frothy economic times.

> These are not your "top talent", these folks are still happily employed at their BigN job.

Assuming layoffs are both primarily designed to and effective at retaining general talent, both statements need more corroboration. Will they keep the ones who are "indispensable" in the short term, like an engineer who maintains a specific system? Often yes. Are they the best? Often no, and over-specialized knowledge is particularly irrelevant to another company. Even so, anecdotally Big Co layoffs seemingly affect all levels and all talent, almost indiscriminate. That's probably because there are many other factors before an individual-against-individual comparison is ever made. From a C-level perspective teams and even orgs are more likely to be top-of-mind.

Layoffs at big corps are not 100% based on performance. Clearly there are exceptions, some of which you mentioned, and many talented people will be caught in the net.

However, the typical way layoffs happen is that managers are ordered to submit the names of their most dispensable reports, and typically these are the lower performers.

Of course, some of these will be high performers that the manager personally dislikes, and some of those spared will be low performers who just happen to be indispensable due to various irrelevant factors, such as specialized knowledge, or great politicians.

My point was more that if you're smugly waiting for the best and brightest to lose their jobs at BigN and come to work for you for the same bad pay and terms they rejected last year, you're going to be disappointed. The layoffs are going to be limited, and mostly affect lower performers, while any high-performer laid off is going to get multiple competitive offers and remain quite picky.

This is the sort of mentality that keeps recruiters chasing after already employed people and allowing age discrimination to flourish. Very few companies are organized well enough to layoff only the poor performers.

Not sure what it has to do with "age discrimination". If you're implying that big corporations lay off older people disproportionally, then that's illegal and should be handled through the courts.

I agree that many talented folks will be laid off, but not nearly in the numbers that will make a dent in the overall talent crunch. See my response to klabb3 above.

> or start _gasp_ targeting less talented people.

I have seen this work in the B2B startup world. Hire ambitious ppl with some dev experience, but definitely not from top CS programs, and have them grind to implement custom solutions that steal enough paying customers from some larger co, who will acquire you to force you to stop, even though it is clear that there is no scalable "product" there.

Well-designed and scalable solutions take time to build, even by the best, and sometimes they are simply not necessary. Aggressive and customer-centric ENG-OPS can do wonders.

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.

In my experience "hiring freeze" at a large company usually means "hiring freeze, but..."

Exceptions can and will be made, but need higher level approvals. The problem at these companies is that managers just want to infinitely expand their teams, because more people in your chain of command = more important manager, so they tend to use all of their budget regardless of whether they actually need to expand staff by 10% this year. Naturally, these approved hires tend to be specialized senior positions that are seen as business-critical.

In general, I think anyone with 10+ years experience will be fine, but now's a shit time to be a new grad trying to break into the market.

Oh, I pretty much get all that, but I'm just saying that even if there was a 100% freeze, a recruiter at said company still needs to look busy somehow, but of course they're in a silly position if that's the case; though I assume they still have mouths to feed and provide health insurance for.

Totally, I suspect pursuing a bunch of these "opportunities" would lead to dead ends, but I'm not looking for a job currently so I haven't found out.

This is why I'd find reporting that tries to figure this out a bit more interesting and relevant for most of our industry.

Layoffs are inevitable, will getting a new job after be a lot more difficult? Is the current deluge of recruiter emails still being spammed at me an illusion/a lagging indicator of where the hiring market is actually at?

Fired, probably. Recruiting, as a department, is unfortunately seen as expendable and the pipeline doesn't need to flow. Not that I think that's a smart decision.

Most tech recruiters seem to be recent college grades that have a string of a couple 6-12 month gigs before they move on. I am not really sure how any of these provide any value to the companies that hire them.

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.

The best people leave first, triggering the death spiral.

Just to add a bit, the better ones will know the layoffs or downturn is happening and jump ship well before it happens.

The writing is almost always on the wall: change of tone in all-hands meetings, lack of hiring / no new faces. Then it gets worse.

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.

https://archive.ph/cjSR4

> The situation is bad enough that the Snap employee said they’d considered quitting since then.

So, only bad enough that an employee might consider quitting? That... really suggests it's not a particularly bad situation.

Or that... people don't have many other opportunities in this economy?

This is a real concern, reminds me of: https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/to-those-that-c...

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.

https://archive.ph/LF895

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