Kindness, tech staffing and resource allocation

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I gladly left.

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.

Absolutely not. I’d be neutral.