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Comment by i_have_an_idea | Hacker News Reader

I have no opinion on the MBA bit, but I think you're spot on about people starting to treat companies the way the companies are treating them.

~10 years ago, when I got my first job, I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource", how important is the company "culture" and all of that corporate kumbaya. And, at that point, the vast majority of people around me cared and wanted to do a good job, going up and beyond.

Fast forward to now, and pretty much everyone has the attitude of "f**k these guys", doesn't want to be there and will do the bare minimum to get by. And that's exactly what companies have demonstrated that they deserve.

People are tired of job hopping to get market pay, dealing with bulls**t, and being thrown under the bus at the slightest hint of an economic downturn.

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Nearly 20 years ago, when I was trying to find HR for my first day, there was an older man talking with them already. He said, and I quote, 'Fuck you all, I got your exit interview right here' while grabbing his crotch. He turned to walk away, smirked at me, and said 'what? I'm retired now.'

Point being, I don't think you were the only one who didn't love the company 10 years ago.

Plenty of folks didn't, but even in the 90s and 2000s there was still a good reason to play ball, esp. if you were in a white collar STEM field.

Dude might have grabbed his crotch on the way out, but he probably made $$$$$ for 20-30 years. Modern hires deal with just as much BS but often for lower pay and less long-term stability.

What, your company doesn’t give a pension?

> Modern hires deal with just as much BS but often for lower pay and less long-term stability.

New hires in tech these days make much much higher wages, inflation adjusted, than ever in the past. Stability is down, granted, though it was never great.

No matter what happened, this is not a mature way to talk to people. Even in the face of disagreements, why can't people be decent?

>I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource"

You tread in strange circles. I'd think a cursory look at history ought to be enough to put the lie to such claims.

It's crazy to think but people do drink the kool-aid, despite history.

Some companies operate differently too. Obviously they still watch the bottom line, but some aren't as reactionary and are willing to take more pain to keep employees because they understand the value of that goodwill. More commonly private companies with a strong-willed founder/leader.

Agreed. I work for a privately held company and am a bit less jaded about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the company is my friend or anything… but I know how much the owner hates layoffs on an emotional level and have seen the company do things like shifting everybody to 4.5 day weeks temporarily to avoid the need for layoffs. So I respect that.

I don't even think "pain to keep employees" is the right word here - Amazon for instance is still highly profitable, it's just that the profits went down a bit (which is to be expected if the economy is worse). But they're still laying off people just to make the bottom line look even better...

Believe it or not, Amazon is not a charity. I don't know why you expect them to hold on to employees who are evidently a loss to their bottom line.

That's assuming the downturn is 100% explained by employees underperforming. It's more likely that market forces outside of these employees control caused the downturn.

The correct wording is “Amazon will do anything they deem necessary to make their shareholders happy, no matter if it’s profitable or not.”

I am convinced they have zero data indicating firing these people will be profitable on the long run, only that short term it is, and that’s all that shareholders are interested in.

I’m a big fan of any measure making stock exchange less volatile, like some form of tax on every transaction, to slow down the machine, make short term investments (speculation) less rewarding. This may help in reducing the appetite of shareholders for such short sighted measures.

Your argument is flawed. Reactionary firing tends to be inefficient, but makes shareholders happy on the short term.

Should a company prioritise shareholder happiness over efficiency is the real question here. Their losses don’t originate from these employees nor initiatives; it originates from market conditions.

> Some companies operate differently too.

Can you give some examples? Of big companies with more than a few thousand employees I mean.

Personally I'm doubtful that they exist.

I think it has more to do with the fact that @i_have_an_idea's blinders fell off. Also, at the same time, due to COVID and consequently mandatory WFM, many other people had the same epiphany, leading to so-called quiet-quitting.

Honestly I also feel there's another factor of a lot of depression as people look around and see that cynical view was the truth all along.

I see this too. The Covid restrictions led to people seeing through a lot of the false or thinly veiled assumptions that we live under. After that you are left with a more cynical and apathetic view of the world.

> Fast forward to now, and pretty much everyone has the attitude of "f*k these guys", doesn't want to be there and will do the bare minimum to get by.

And anybody with that attitude should rightfully be let go. It's mutual.

(I don't want co-workers who act like that.)

> People are tired of job hopping to get market pay

If nobody moved from job to job, there would be no market.

There would be a lot fewer recruiters, and more experienced engineers.

Also a less monolithic tech culture. Right now every employee is more or less compatible across every company because we all seek to be transferable

It would be bad for the industry and would mean greater concentration of talent in one or two corporations.

An interesting thing that I have experienced is that a lot of recruiters and companies don’t care about your experience. All they care about is the exact experience they are looking for. In a world where most people stay in a position for a while, it’s only natural to gain a lot of experience and responsibility but not necessarily broad experience. So in that case, it would be very hard to switch jobs, industries, etc.

So what I am curious about is, did companies used to hire in less myopic ways?

Definitely yes. Over 25 years ago I started a second career, in tech. After 6 months in a Microsoft academic program I got hired by a Big Six accounting firm to do desktop support. My previous education was completely nontechnical (a BA and MA in history, and a JD), as was my experience (10 years as a trial lawyer). No way was I the most qualified on paper for that job, but the people who hired me saw something and acted. A year later I was able to move into a new job with better pay at a Fortune 200 company, originally hired to do applications analysis but shortly after found myself a lead desktop engineer and later a Unix sysadmin. At every turn I was fortunate to have hiring managers that looked beyond my resume to see the potential there.

Sure, in 1997 an HR person told me they needed someone with at least 5 years experience in Windows NT, but in general most interviews I had in the late 90s and early 00s were way less myopic. I'm not sure I'd have the same experience if starting out today.

You would think so but too many people get really comfortable and never expand their skills beyond the minimum required to do their current job. Last year I had an SRE position open I had to interview over three dozen people before I found one guy who could explain anything he had done in any detail. Everybody else was probably in the room when someone else did something, but could not give details of what was done, why it was done a particular way, or what they might do the same or differently if they did it again.

Some of the people I had to be honest with - if they are paying you the kind of money you say to reset passwords and stare at the wall, you should stay where you are and make sure that wall never leaves your sight.

You've been reiterating this across a few threads this month, right?

Perhaps it IS the widespread case that a lot of us are getting paid as SRE for much less than you believe an SRE should know. Ultimately, where you've set the bar is arbitrary

I always wonder how people who are only in the room when things happen have any pride in their work and aren't embarrassed at their lack of production. A couple jobs ago was people who put most of their effort in to making sure their group of shitty engineers wasn't found out. It was a lot of work! Since they were all about quantity of people over any quality, they had to keep hiring more people, so there was a lot of time and effort in to interviewing to make sure they only hired other shitty engineers of their same ilk. I was hired outside of their scheme so we weren't best of friends lets say.

I’ve never understood the people who make no effort to better themselves - they work in technology, everything has a 3-5 year engineering life, they should always be preparing for the next thing.

People often can’t control what technologies their employer uses, but if they have solid fundamentals and I can tell they have tried to learn things on their own, more often then not I’ll give them a chance, and it usually works out because they are doing what they really want to do, and they are always looking for ways to build upon and improve what they’ve worked on.

How excellent do you want to be at generic enterprise CRUD apps?

Somebody has to build and maintain them.

Have you considered that maybe they’re fine with their level of responsibility and can leave work at the office?

That is usually the part where I shake their hands and wish them luck in their next endeavor.

If they are not there because they love working with technology, there are other places for them to be.

Agreed. I personally have seen divorces and breakdowns of entire families and friend groups of my colleagues, but what is most important is making sure that they stay up-to-date with the latest technologies and look to further improve themselves for the company.

Dang you didn't have to do em like that!

spoils19 has been awarded +200 corp tokens, congratulations!

Dystopias happening right in front of us!

Or… am I hearing a new web3 startup?

(If I ever end up doing this; this comment will age super well)

Most definitely! There is nothing more glorious than sacrificing your health, soul, and personal relationships to perfect that CRUD application your users are forced to use to keep their job.

Most programming jobs are utterly boring. You are hoarding yes men and people who are good at lying.

Cringe.

Some people have a family, or otherwise time consuming personal lives, which does limit the ability to learn new things outside of work. I wouldn’t really blame them for not ”bettering themselves” if they don’t get to do that on paid company time.

I have never had an engineering (or really any!) job where learning on company time was absent. A lot of people like to grow and a lot of people don't. And a lot of the latter realize their waning usefulness and how they're one algorithm update away from being obsolete so they put time and effort in to masking that.

I enjoy being the dumbest person in the room. Others find it threatening.

And for those who are so busy outside of work that they can't grow inside of work, I feel for them because that sounds like an exhausting life.

>everything has a 3-5 year engineering life

This isn’t true for all industries. Some have software systems with engineering life measured in decades

True, but what percentage of software engineers work on those?

The only pool of software that both employs a large number of engineers, has an engineering life measured in decades and isn't rewritten every 3-5 years to a large degree is enterprise software, in my experience. Think C/C++/Java/.NET middleware type stuff.

And I imagine 90% of HN actively runs away from those jobs :-)

I wouldn't know. But I imagine there's an availability bias.

I've worked in more 'traditional' engineering fields (manufacturing, energy, healthcare, aerospace) and the vast, vast majority are long tenured systems built for dedicated uses. I've worked on many systems that are older than me. For those in SV, I imagine it's the opposite. Like you said, HN may be biased to a specific type of development which often leads to biased claims. Tbf, my main issue is with the "everything" modifier in the OPs claim.

Sure there's a market for cheap disposable stuff hastily thrown together by people who barely know what they're doing because they're always using the latest tools for the first time to pad their resume.

But there's also a place for durable things of lasting value, built by people who enjoy perfecting their skills, technique, and craftsmanship with mature tools to solve problems well, learn the domain well, and build lasting relationships with customers who are big spenders.

It's kind of naive to assume that those people are making no effort to better themselves just because they're not always chasing after the latest hot new thing.

> everything has a 3-5 year engineering life

Nope. 30+ years of experience here working for different software companies in 5 different countries. I still use most of the knowledge today that I learned 30 years ago.

Software development fundamentally changes very rarely. However software development fashion changes all the time. But the latest fashion is just a slightly different implementation of the same underlying fundamental things I already understand. It is just a slightly different flavour of ice cream.

There also would be less innovation as there would be less cross-pollination.

Arguable. Too much cross pollination leads to super-monoculture.

It's important to have distinct subcultures to progressultiple fronts sometimes.

> ~10 years ago, when I got my first job, I was in the minority, pretty much the only person cynical about big companies' claims how "people are our most important resource"

Tell that to Johnny Paycheck.

Difference here is that Johnny Paycheck was signing about the common man being screwed.

White collar STEM jobs have historically been very lucrative and most Dev / IT types have had a good incentive to shut up and play ball.

Could be also an age thing. I don't know how old you are but maybe ten years ago most of your colleagues were twenty somethings and now they are in their thirties or forties?

eh what? even 15 years ago it was common knowledge to just jump around every few years to advance your career. maybe it wasn't all out "f* these guys" but we definitely had no illusions about employer "loyalty" lol.

Likely depends on your age and/or experience.

Indeed. Similar discussions were held when the dotcom bubble burst. I doubt it was the first time.

> People are tired of job hopping to get market pay, dealing with bulls*t, and being thrown under the bus at the slightest hint of an economic downturn.

So it's cool for employees to quit and job hop to get better pay, leaving their former employers with the effort and expense of replacing them, but not cool for companies to lay off employees to save money when markets contract?

The main motivation for job hopping is that it's usually easier to get a raise or promotion than staying around for too long at your company.

A lot of employers have the unfortunate tendency to see their most loyal employees as furniture.

yes, it is cool for employees to do so because of balance of power.

Companies have more power than employees when thinking about the size of the event:

they can fire you unexpectedly (with/without severance) so for your life (and probably your family) this is the main event happening.

But if you leave for a company that is usually a minor event that will probably not have any effect (or very limited) on their "life" (income/profit/culture ...)

well salaries also went up significantly in the last decade

as per levels.fyi Senior Principal SDE at Amazon makes about a million $$$. Entry level salary is $168K

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

Inflation is a thing you know?

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