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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

I think Amazon, Google, and Meta workers should band together and get funding to start competitors to these companies. If there were some smart investors, that would be a great way to start a new company.

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I've worked for Amazon and have friends that work for Meta. As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think that as a whole those who were laid off would make a very good company. There are exceptions, like I think Amazon made such heavy reductions in the Alexa org that there were probably some very competent engineers let go. But mostly the layoffs affected (1) HR and product, (2) low performers, and (3) people with very little political savvy. This doesn't sound like it would make a good company.

Point 3 is fine, wasting all time and energy being political has nothing to do with contributing to the companies end revenue stream.

Think the manager who does nothing, but is a smooth/shit talker, hence is very let go. Does and contributes nothing except for the moments they have to.

That’s a great idea! We just need to write a design doc for the company, get comments, write up resource usage tickets, pass it by ux, contact sales for input, iterate on a new design doc because the old one used an outdated framework for business organization, get the final business plan doc through our autolinters, and setup 6 automated tools to track our progress - then we should be ready to contact some VCs.

Should only be a handful of quarters - if you don’t count time for retrospectives and writing packets about how complicated and impressive the process was ;)

That is what happens. That is the cycle. Also most will fail and the ones that don’t will be bought by the monoliths.

I suppose if there were backers who would issue loans instead of investing in equity, the workers could form a cooperative. I don't think that would fully eliminate the risk of them getting fired (by each other), but perhaps it would be a start?

The thing is they kept everyone from the 2-5 main teams that actually run these companies. And what sucks even more is those people don't know that they are so critical and worth millions if not billions each.

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