Hacker News Reader

Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

My take is in general you are right. No human is irreplaceable. However, what I really translate this to be is you should consider the business viability of the org/department/team you work in. The things that don't add value, the things that cost money, the long risky bets will be first to get scrutinized.

If you are making money and not a cost center for your company, you are likely safe during times of economic turmoil. Being on profitable and important to core business teams is great during any time. I remember a team I was on which was responsible for a large amount of yearly revenue. You can imagine we never got questioned about team lunches or miscellaneous snack and drink reimbursements even though there was a company policy to instill frugality. When times are good, times are good. When times are tough, you want to be a money maker.

View on HN

If you're laying off an entire division, sure, your comment applies. However, from anecdotal experience at Meta, the layoffs seemed entirely random that hit both ICs and Managers. People internally tried to reverse engineer the formula used, but it wasn't always clear why. It also seemed unrelated to several projects getting killed. Those employees were simply asked to change teams if they wanted to stay.

It's weird to me that these companies, all of them, still very much flush with cash, have now engineered this an environment of FUD in everyone's mind. For creativity to thrive and ideas to launch during the next boom, you need an environment of safety. Tech had always been been synonymous with optimism.

> If you're laying off an entire division, sure, your comment applies. However, from anecdotal experience at Meta, the layoffs seemed entirely random that hit both ICs and Managers. People internally tried to reverse engineer the formula used, but it wasn't always clear why.

It feels exactly the same at Google. It's certainly true that some job functions were hit harder than others, and some orgs were hit harder than others, but certainly no one was guaranteed to be safe merely from working on an "important" product.

funnily, I was whispered that exact same thing when I was doing internal interview rounds for a big tech company before the 2008 recession. The group of newly hired heard pitches from a bunch of different groups that needed people and we were able to have some say into which group we joined. I took the advice to heart and went with the group that was considered by most employees to be the most sure thing and, by far, the most solid financially. 2 years later, that group's position in the market cratered and the layoff axe fell on a large percentage of people. I still don't disagree with your advice, but it is often hard to predict what will still be a business viable group in the future.

Cost center / profit center paradigm shouldn't be applied to companies like Google who hire engineers just to possess them. The whole company except for ads is basically a highly-paid cost center.

Many things go into the ads infrastructure that make it actually able to run in a profitable way, spanner, borg, and much more. So this doesn't really narrow things down.

it does if you know enough about the business. where can you squeeze more money out in the short term -- infra cost savings or building a better mouse trap? as a non googler i have no idea but i would imagine leadership does and that will drive layoff decisions.

I guess they decided they didn't need to possess as many? Even Google isn't hiring just because. They hire because someone leader wrote a doc and justified a line item to staff something and pay for the infra to make it go. What I said doesn't change at Google. Look at the areas of these big tech layoffs, they align with my premise.

And you just have people who have been there for a long time, have made a ton of money, don't have a great fit any longer, etc. They're not even "resting and vesting" necessarily but they were in some valuable role at one point and now they're someone expensive who just doesn't have anything especially important or matched to their skills to do.

Sad to see the long risky bets getting cut.

Excess perks, I don't care about. I can buy my own drinks and coffee. But a company that isn't taking bigger and bigger risks is a company that is at risk and just ignoring it.

Surely this only applies to a limited set of companies where the products cannot have meaningfully negative impacts on people. You would for instance not say this about a company producing (software for) elevators, or airplanes, or pharmaceuticals.

An interesting question then follows: are those companies where you can take larger and larger risks without adversely affecting people, actually adding anything of real value? Or is it all broken window fallacy?

This is not to say that e.g. Google is a useless company. Surely its products have provided a lot of benefit from people. But it is also clear that taking risks as Google can cause clear negative consequences for people. So the question is more for a hypothetical company that can take arbitrarily large risks.

I don't think releasing shoddy things is taking risks. That is being reckless.

Taking risks is working on new products to expand the company. Possibly refined versions of existing products, possibly explorations of related offerings. Could be green field recreation of what you have to see if you can make it better. Could be isolated improvements.

Such that, if you think it is only risky to possibly harm someone... I don't think we are talking about the same things.

Seems like the safest jobs are also going to be the most boring and soul sucking, so maybe think hard about what/if you want to optimize this way.

At some level, that's probably true. Boring and soul sucking is very fungible but, so long as you're reasonably good at it, why swap you out for someone else? Whereas for someone more specialized, roles change or expire and there may not be an obvious fit for someone anymore without essentially applying to a new job. And, at many of these companies, there isn't a lot of new hiring going on.

Soul sucking is a bit extreme, this is at-will employment after all. 99.9% of readers are not working on sexy change the world problems. Call it soul sucking but I call that perspective jaded.

I've been lucky to work in consumer facing engineering that isn't soul sucking. In fact, it's market segments that I find interesting as a consumer too. I still optimize this way because I'm in a place in life where I want stability when my head hits then pillow in my home that I have a mortgage on. I have a family and stability yields solace and solace yields clarity of mind which allows me to be a better employee. It really is a virtuous cycle.

I think I agree. Although, aren’t all employees cost centers for their companies at some level?

For example, companies would choose cheaper employees for the same output, if possible, even if they are responsible for a lot of revenue.

Not if more is more. There is opportunity cost, perhaps, but not if you have the cash and the need. If an employee nets you a dollar, it's still better than nothing.

This mindset destroys innovation because people are then afraid to try non core stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com