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Comment by aliqot | Hacker News Reader

You mean *consolidate worker power. Critical people don't get layoffs unless they work for a muskcorp.

In the recent layoffs I've seen some very senior high-performing engineers get the axe, because they were very expensive and the org could get two juniors grinding out CRUD for the same value as one super senior architecture astronaut.

Things brings about another question. Will the change in economic climate encourage these companies to ditch over-complicated Rube Goldberg machine stacks in favour of ones that allow Juniors to grind out CRUD. One can but hope

I can’t help but feel this misunderstands why systems become complex, and conflates simplicity with sanity.

Ditching an architecture also directly implies adopting a new one. If juniors are at the forefront of that, I don’t think the resulting architecture will somehow get magically simpler.

Architecture is a topic to be debated, no doubt. But if anything, I’d expect the departure of senior talent to solidify complexity, not enable some magical escape from it. The risk of changing a system goes up significantly the moment the people who understand the system walk out the door.

I doubt it. Who is going to get a promotion with a sane architecture?

> Critical people don't get layoffs unless they work for a muskcorp.

Citation needed.

Critical people don't get layoffs unless they work for a muskcorp.

Google have just let Chris DiBona, Jeremy Allison, and Cat Allman go. I guess you might not consider those people critical to Google's mission, but laying them off is probably going to have an impact on Google's ability to recruit people from the open source community in the future.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/

That's a (maybe intentional?) misunderstanding of what is normally meant by worker power. We're not talking about the individual influence of workers within the organization, but about the group ability of workers to affect the working conditions.

Many of the higher profile high performers who are now unemployed would seem to be a direct counter example to this claim.

What you’re describing doesn’t seem to match the recent layoffs we’ve witnessed.

Actually it matches what I'm seeing. Are you not seeing all of the recruiters/HR being let go in these layoffs? Seems like there are many more than SRE's (SRE's are what I'd consider to be business-critical).

I don't have hard numbers though, even layoffs.fyi doesn't have a great breakdown of who was affected by these layoffs by department. If anyone has hard numbers I'd love to be proven wrong.

I’m not claiming there aren’t reductions happening in non-critical/discretionary roles, but that this does not seem to be the primary target of recent layoffs.

This is different than what we’ve seen in some years past where layoffs seemed more about trimming dead weight.

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