Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
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As somebody with over quarter of century of experience managing and hiring people I notice how candidates change over time (trying to adjust for how I change myself). I notice people care less about the company they work for and, honestly, it is more and more difficult to find arguments against.
This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life.
When more and more people started changing jobs every year just to get an incremental raise without even bothering to get the raise at the company I worked for I thought this is shortsighted and it will backfire on them and it will teach them. Well, did not happen. It just became a new normal.
I wonder what new things are going to pass as acceptable.
Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems.
When you run a query on LinkedIn it will show you a list of candidates with their three last jobs. I noticed page after page after page everybody has their third last job starting 2020/2021. Meaning almost all seem to be spending less than a year on each of their jobs in past couple years. And these are all supposed to be senior candidates.
It is no way to have a productive employee base.
You can pay people more to keep them at your company for a while longer, but there is very little you can do to overcome their inherent cynicism.
Work is something I do to earn money. If companies can replace people for less or cut them they do. Why be loyal in that kind of environment? I will work hard for the money they pay me though.
At one point I got a job offer for 25% more than I currently made. I told my current director at the time that I got a job offer for 40% more. The director matched the imaginary 40% and I stayed for another year. This company habitually fired people for the most minor of productivity drop offs. They had just recently promoted me without providing a raise. You reap what you sow.
I would love to work in an environment where I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that. Remote work makes that even harder to find now.
It really messed up my friend, he was really close to a comfortable retirement, but had to borrow against his 401k to make it through until he could get another job. He was the safety officer for the entire factory, 15+ years of experience doing that. Now he's too close to retirement age and no one will hire him, even though he's personally a long way from retirement.
So now he's working a physically demanding job on the line making cars. All that experience and skills with safety? Junk.
No company has loyalty to their employees. It's all about the next quarter.
> It's all about the next quarter.
Not sure that follows from your friend's story. In that particular case, it seems to have been about bad management, unless having only college-degreed folks on the floor improved short term financials.
Definitely an example of a short sighted decision, though.
Companies treat us as replaceable widgets. If widget A is broken just throw it away and use widget B. No reason to be loyal in that environment.
In an era of trillon-dollar megacorps and multi-billionaire CEOs, Marx was ahead of his time:
> He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. [...] As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself
CAN that even exist? The mercenary approach seems to me the only one that doesn't fall prey to living in a fantasy about how things "Should" be -- there is only the way they are: it's a business relationship.
Younger me thought otherwise. I was big into startup culture, enjoyed the comradery of working long hours, taking pride in this thing we were building together. Management was great. Hierarchy was minimal. I felt "valued"... And then we were all let go with a phone call. I remember just being like "...Ohhhhh. Right." It's a business relationship. That's as far as it goes. Anything else is an illusion.
> > I would love to work in an environment where
> > I felt valued as a person but I have yet to find that
> CAN that even exist?
I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities.
I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers)
Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves.
Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way.
I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity.
As an engineer, I understand (at least at a high level) the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. I wish that product managers and executives expended a fraction of the effort to understand what makes good engineering. Higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months... and that's okay, but they are also aggressively disinterested in actually understanding the processes that produce the product they are selling.
Depressing.
Modern software development is highly dysfunctional
but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
Climbing mountains is hard, but not unreasonably hard. We don't intentionally cut people's safety lines and roll boulders down the f'ing mountain at them while they're trying to climb. We don't make them carry bowling balls in their backpacks.
Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly.
But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the feet than doing anything else.
Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.
Fully remote lifestyle business where everyone's workload is around 12-24 hours a week with $100k+ salaries. Everyone in the company makes around the same amount (CEO to junior). Full transparency for the accounting books. Excess profits get evenly distributed to everyone. No investors to answer to. A job that gives enough time and money to do what you want in life.
This is really only for people who are already good at something though.
Every dollar paid to me is a dollar less for the founder/VCs.
It's only when you get fired, you start to see clearly and are able to come out of that flowery lala land of "we're a team", "we're a family" and all that misplaced rather abused analogies.
It's just a commercial relationship rooted in generating profit (nothing wrong with that) for which have to collaborate with others. There's no team, there's no family.
Any prose and poetry beides that is also about squeezing every ounce of profit. It is a for profit activity so at least be direct and honest about it and refrain from borrowing analogies from other social constructs.
IMO "in a team" is actually achievable if you conceptualize it like a pro sports team where you can get laid off for under-performing, change in overall strategy, injuries etc. The players are still part of a team though.
My current company did layoffs and I don't think anyone is feeling "loyal" but I certainly feel like a member of a team because my coworkers and I work collaboratively towards shared goals and step in to support each other. We don't do this out of any loyalty to the company but because this behavior helps us work better together in a way that is more pleasant and is rewarded by the company.
I had a team member fired the other day (he probably deserved it) and no one even bothered to tell me. I figured he quit and reached out wishing him well. I felt pretty awkward when I found out he was let go. The problem was they aren't even back filling his role, I just have to pick up the slack. He does a job totally different than mine that I really have no experience doing. I'm just winging it and not really caring about it. If they don't replace the guy I'm not putting in extra hours to ensure what he was doing gets done. Give me half his salary and I'll care.
Maybe I disagree about the part about "only when you get fired". To me it was enough seeing people getting fired, or having promotions postponed multiple times for no reason, or seeing a co-worker getting a verbal offers of a raise getting rescinded after they denied a job offer from another company, or having a C-level give me silent treatment when I disagreed with stupid release deadlines.
E: For reference, I wouldn’t downvote this because it ain’t wrong.
The only difference is that I make a point of leaving my current job in 18 to 24 months. That is the sweet spot. No matter how good or bad I think the job is. Always get a raise in the switch. Rinse and repeat. I actually avoid getting promotions in whatever is my current job, those are detrimental, seldom the raise is compatible with the increase in responsibility.
I worked for companies I liked and for companies I personally hated, the procedure is always the same. Has been working wonders for me in the past 2 decades.
Start your own business.
Those kinds of companies (the examples I know of are small, < 200 folks) actually have a chance of maintaining a coherent, caring culture. Not to say that folks don't get laid off or tough decisions made, but humanity is still present.
I enjoyed Small Giants for more profiles of these kinds of companies: https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-A...
I would do all I could for a job that respected me as a human being. But it’s gotten to the point where you can’t trust anyone above you, no matter what they say. Doing well in a growing company means you have to get more and more cutthroat, so you’re incentivized to try less and less.
When the company is smaller you get managers that are genuinely interested in growing the company – because that's what they grow too. Forget the 'mission' and such nonsense, noone truly cares about that. And the people that are highly visible early on tend to keep on growing their influence, organically.
However, at a certain size, they don't grow all that much if at all. Sure, the company might still be growing on sales numbers, but it's still mostly static. Some new divisions may pop up but they are usually satellite operations that may or may not matter in the long run. The next best alternative is to fight to move up the reporting chain. That means company growth or wellbeing no longer matters; in fact, cannibalizing existing products or whole divisions or bringing them under you is how managers grow. They do not care who or what they have to step on to make that happen.
It's okay, a lot of other companies do. There's plenty of fish in this particular ocean.
Even if you would hire him, nothing meaningful would change.
While I get where you're coming from, it's a pretty big leap to go from what's happening now to "optimizing everything to the max". Twilio tripled in size since the pandemic, and wasn't/isn't profitable.
The same arguments can be applied to most large tech companies. Things got insane, and lean times were inevitable. Given your 25+ years in the industry, you must realize that a huge number of younger engineers have never seen anything other than boom years.
Everything is relative, I suppose, but those are the sorts of things a person might say if they've never actually seen a downturn.
When I say "downturn", I mean: 2001. 2008. Compared to that, 2012 was boom times. I was running a startup then, and hiring was a brutal competition. Maybe not compared to 2020, but again...that's not normal.
In 2008 we were hiring Ivy-league grads into hourly customer support roles. Circa 2000, programmers with decades of experience were going on unemployment.
It can always be worse, but that doesn't mean it's not bad.
Maybe they were bad for someone, but that's always true. I'm sure a brand-new coding school grad has a hard time in most markets, for example.
Most companies just don't really reward loyalty anymore.
We are all contractors and mercenaries now.
They are a vanishingly small minority, and usually not tech companies - but traditional companies that use technology and have in house dev teams.
But nobody should be "loyal" to companies. Companies are certainly not "loyal" to them. To be clear, when I'm on the clock at a company, I'm all in -- they're paying me to be.
But off the clock, no. And I have no problem leaving a position when it's no longer beneficial to me. And employer-employee relationship is a business deal, nothing more.
It's all a symptom of what you mentioned where CEOs, upper level management etc are all so thoroughly disconnected from the workforce that they make boneheaded and bad business decisions that destroy the business 3-5 years out. Though none of them get punished for it because of golden parachutes ensuring even the most failing CEO gets rewarded for destroying the company they were running.
This always gets me. It's as if they think they're doing people a favor by hiring them -- or at least expect people to think they're doing them a favor.
It just ain't so. The reason companies hire people is because they'll make more money by doing so. It's not a favor, it's just cold business. Employees should not feel "thankful", they should feel as if they entered into a business relationship.
We, especially Hacker News's readers, workers in tech and tech-adjacent roles are very much a small percentage. If you've read older books, especially autobiographies, biographies, and journal-like books you'll likely see that the following:
> This whole trend of optimising everything to the max without caring for people is going to create an employee base that is completely disillusioned about their role or prospects or what's their best strategy for life.
already existed even before during the great industrial revolution. It's very much related to human nature I think. On another point:
> Any company needs some people who care about what they do. But these are in shorter and shorter supply every year, it seems.
Surprisingly, there ARE a lot of people like this, the biggest problem I've found (having been in the hiring seat) is their competence and skills do not match what the companies need and are looking for. This is also correlated to why outsourcing has become such a big part of large companies today. Not just the cost benefits. Unfortunately, a lot of companies don't invest into training and investment and likely if they already are, they cannot get employees to commit because of wages (financials for both the company and employee).
> It is no way to have a productive employee base.
We are still largely far away from this and likely why cities will still be playing a big part of greater economic change even amidst remote work. I even might venture to write that we have yet to truly see one besides what currently exists akin to Silicon Valley, MIC, and adjacent employee bases.
Anyway, I lost my train of thought now. Feel free to discuss
They already admitted in September they overhired just for the sake of growth and they lost focus through the process.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/14/twilio-lays-off-11-of-its-...
It is the same old story, really. First hires are careful and frugal decisions. But at some point when there is money laying around that needed to be spent people will hire almost anybody just for the sake of being able to report progress on the hiring they were supposed to do or to grow their kingdom or to jumpstart a new potential product that wasn't really thought through very well or a lot other reasons.
Exactly, after 2 decades in this industry I've learned to let myself go with the flow of my build-up of cynicism.
I hate interviewing, from both sides, so I tend to stay longer than what most other tech workers do (my stints vary between 2-4 years in general) but it's absurd how the pattern always repeat: I start a new job with a lot of motivation to learn the business, learn how I can have good impact in the product, foster discussions; just to eventually get jaded by management, start being cynical and working with the mindset "it's just a job, do what's expected, take the cash" until eventually I overcome my hatred of interviews and start looking for something else.
What surprises me is how long I can keep the game of doing the bare minimum after getting cynical, I don't stop delivering but I know for sure if I was more motivated/less jaded I could deliver more, hell, I've done it at multiple places but it's extremely hard to not get affected by seemingly stupid decisions from upper management. I do my job well because I care about my colleagues and don't want them to have extra work, I don't do my job well for the companies sake or bottom line, not for the past 10-15 years at least. I simply don't care about the business at some point.
I learned, several decades back, that it's always a mistake to actually, really care about the company you work for. Care about your work, absolutely. Care about your professionalism. Care about your coworkers.
But not about the company. No company cares in the slightest about you (and especially not companies who make a big show about how much they care). Caring about them is simply dysfunctional, opens you up to being taken advantage of, and sooner or later, will harm you.
https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-problem-with-accounting-for-empl...
Spoken like a manager trying to conserve what remains.
That "shit in the pond" is just fertilizer. Enough senior-ish people from big-ish companies are being let go that there are bound to be some startups forming. And likely bootstrapped startups given how frightened VCs seem.
They know enough to eat the parent companies' lunches. But that's not the real threat. The real threat is that they know what those companies could have done and exactly how except that those companies were too frightened or conservative to do it. Those people can not just eat their parent companies' lunches, but all tomorrows' lunches. Nom nom nom.
All you recently laid off: find one another, band together, turn that spite into progress and kick some ass!
> It is no way to have a productive employee base.
Does it follow that LinkedIn's misleading statistics, to filter candidates, is also no way to build a productive employee base?
There is an unused cloud service burning money at one of my jobs. Tens of thousands kind of money. Make a case for me even bothering to tell someone about it.
You can’t.
If management discover that you knew about the wastage, and did nothing, then it can be said that you aren't acting in the best interest of the company. Possibly the opposite, meaning you'd be fired. So there's that.
If there is a culture of apathy and zero oversight and you are 100% sure no will ever care to show that you knew about it, then I pity your situation. Not bothering to tell someone about the wastage it is perpetuating that culture. Eventually company will fail or at best struggle.
I'm my experience it's nicer working at profitable companies where everyone is doing their best to help the company to profit. That doesn't mean your income is less important than company income. But you agree on the former, then do everything in your capability to help with the latter.
If your still not convinced please consider the environment. Cloud services consume not insignificant physical resources.
If it's something simple like an unused service, I'll just shut it off.
That said, if you aren't an owner of the company then I think it's unhealthy to be emotionally invested.
In my last job, I had received a competing offer and informed my boss that I would rather not leave but that this other offer was too financially good for me to ignore. My boss responded by beating the other offer and I stayed there for about five more years.
I later admitted to him that I felt guilt about leveraging an offer in this way. He said something that really stuck with me: "You've got to put yourself first".
In retrospect, the thing that actually stuck with me is that I'd gleamed into the mind of upper management. That is, they are putting themselves first, and so should you.
In my case, it has been required.
I'm very fortunate, to have worked for 27 years, for a company that had many, many faults, but always treated their workers as if their career at the company was a critical factor.
That's because it was a "classic" Japanese company.
The best managers that I had, were Japanese (including one that eventually because the Chairman of the Board). The worst ones -by a large margin- were the Americans.
The Americans had very little Integrity. They also tended to be casually dishonest, in a jaw-dropping way.
Eventually, my team was dissolved, and I was laid off. I got a year's severance (It was capped -by the Americans, otherwise, it would have been more). My manager flew in from Japan, to tell me. He was next on the chopping block, himself.
Integrity is important, and very, very rare.
I like to feel as if I demonstrated it, in my own management. My employees seemed to agree.
If I talk about it here, I tend to be met with some fairly sneering, insulting responses.
Her name was struck from the lists. It's as if she was never there.
Damn good at her job. I suspect that the "classic Japanese" culture of our company didn't give her the opportunities that the more modern company she joined, would.
I'm deliberately being vague, but both companies are household names.
These chaps can have millions of dollars' worth of diamonds in their pockets, and they routinely exchange them on a handshake basis.
Integrity has worked for them for a long, long time.
It's not dead. It's just resting. Probably pining for the Fjords.
If you are viewed as lacking, you will largely be restricted to doing business with people and companies who are also lacking because others won't give you the time of day.
It's the same for the ostensible loyalty towards ones hometown. I've been just as comfortable living in China as I have back in the states.
I have no loyalty to abstractions like symbols, countries or companies. Loyalty is reserved for friends and my family.
Human connections are great and important. But feeling an attachment to the company is neither of those things. Have connections with people, not with instruments of economic production.
I used to agree with this, but I've changed my tune recently. Working 8 hours a day on something you're not emotionally invested in for years is incredibly depressing and puts you at risk of burn out. My more nuanced opinion is that you need to find the right pieces of the company to be invested in. I can take pride in the quality of the code, in trying to help out my co-workers, etc.
The pay rate ranks third or fourth on my list of important considerations.
Another point to make is, it's possible to know this, put yourself first, and still love your job.
I know I’m speaking about effort, and you’re speaking about becoming emotionally invested, but the latter is a natural manifestation of of the former; the emotional investment arises because of the effort I put forth.
This doesn't mean "take the highest offer", it means putting yourself first. In your situation, going back to your boss was clearly an ask to stay because that was what you wanted. It's possible to be comfortable and content with your work and your job, and to prioritize that over chasing more money too.
What I didn’t know was that the company that was trying to hire me was also in contact with my boss/team leader, which actually accepted the offer and left.
We still have a good relationship and I still consider him a friend (hope it’s the same for him) and we meet from time to time for a beer with other former colleagues.
Needless to say, that was a very formative experience.
I'm part of several alumni groups on slack and they continue to be one of the most important networks for all kinds of opportunities. Way way better than Linked In.
Essentially all the trust benefits and social capital of being part of the corporate tribe continue beyond the end of employment.
Edit: fix really long sentence
Yes, if you expect corporate America to always treat you fairly you're going to end up disappointed. But spending 9 years at a place and not even giving a little bit of yourself to the company seems even worse.
It's OK to think that your boss cares about you as a person, it's OK to make friends at work, and it's OK to believe in the company mission, as long as you don't overdo it.
What should the author have done differently and how would that have changed things?
> The email said we'd lose access at 12:30pm. At 12:28 I decided, "I'll break up with you before you can dump me." I signed out and closed my work machine for the last time.
> And then I started to cry.
> I cried despite the generous severance package. I cried despite emotionally preparing for the moment. I cried despite being genuinely excited for what comes next. For nine years, so much of my identity has been wrapped up in my relationship with Twilio, and that relationship ended today.
It is abundantly clear that the author invested too much emotion and too much of his identity into his employer. Your relationship is not one of family. You can't fire your brother or child [1], but company can and do fire their employees. The fact that he had such a profound reaction means he needed to invest less emotion in his employer and adopt a more mercenary attitude. I've been laid off before, it happened to me when my previous employer was heavily impacted by COVID. I didn't cry, my attitude was "yep, makes sense - I'd probably do the same in their shoes." I don't want to sound mean or belittling, but it's just not healthy to have the author's reaction to being laid off.
I find it funny how people talk about a "mercenary" attitude in the workforce with a negative connotation. What's not ethical is when people treat military service like picking up jobs off LinkedIn, and apply the same attitude of the civilian workforce towards the profession of arms. It's totally normal to have a "mercenary" attitude in the civilian workforce. It doesn't mean don't be friends with your co-workers - I'm sure the dudes at Blackwater and Executive Outcomes are friends with their co-workers - but it does mean you need to be prepared for the day that the company decides your employment is no longer necessary.
1. to be pedantic, people do cut off family members, but usually for reasons far more serious than maximizing profit
What did this emotional investment cost him? Slightly more pain when the relationship ended (and it seems like they're already excited for what's next)?
Moreover, why would I let a corporation or other business do that?
Im genuinely curious where your thinking is at with this and hope you’ll elaborate beyond this short reply you gave.
And got fired anyway.
Having followed some of Greg’s work when I was doing developer relations, this particular post hit me closer to home than most, and is just another reminder of the caliber of people impacted by these cuts.
When I voluntarily left my job last year to refocus on my mental health for awhile, it was one of the harder decisions to make and I was an emotional wreck throughout the process. Having this happen suddenly is something I'm grateful I haven't yet experienced. Posts like this are a good reminder of just how personal many of these layoffs are for people, and I have nothing but empathy for everyone going through this right now.
This person was a true believer. They stuck with the company for 9 YEARS.
If you want to shift the company, then do that -- and take your true believers WITH YOU.
This isn't leadership on Twilio's part. This is a scared company. They aren't making smart decisions. They're just cowing to investors.
That’s what company do… keep the investors happy.
That’s also why some companies underline at every possible occasion that they are bootstrapped (ie: they’ve grown organically without investments from vc firms or similar).
Not being loyal to the company doesn’t mean not being kind and good to your coworkers, or being a poor leader.
It doesn’t mean you have license to be pessimistic, jaded, poisonous, and an asshole.
It does mean your identity isn’t you work for Google, and your worth isn’t your continued relationship with your employer.
It does mean make good financial decisions for yourself, your family, and avoid giving home team discounts.
The company terminates access effective immediately (maybe with gardening leave) for security reasons.
The immediate loss of institutional knowledge causes fucking havoc across the board.
So some people will be taken back on as contractors for a while at extremely expensive rates.
This also means there's a weird incentive to start hoarding knowledge if you suspect layoffs are coming down the pipe...
Was working on fixing an issue one morning, got roped into a meeting, and escorted from the building. Next week, saw an email from a coworker asking how to do something with the service. Told him, politely (don't burn bridges) that I didn't work there anymore and wasn't interested in helping that company without payment. Yeah, it might be thought of that I hung him out to dry, but that wasn't my intent. I just won't work for free, particularly when I was booted without much chance to get my affairs sorted
Or they get hired back as a contractor for 3x-4x the hourly wage as you mentioned.
I (and my team) already knew it was coming. The writing was on the wall, and we had our affairs in order. My Japanese manager appreciated it. I think the American HR manager was a bit disappointed that there wasn't much of an opportunity for the casual bullying and shaming that they do, in these circumstances. The last HR manager was OK. I had zero respect for his predecessor.
HR had the highest turnover of any department in the company. I tended to have a somewhat adversarial relationship with most of the HR managers, but the one that I respected most was fired in an explosion, more than twenty years ago, and now manages a much more prestigious organization. I sincerely wish her well, and she has my respect; little as I'm sure that means to her.
In Marketing and Sales organizations, it's common for people to be walked out the door, immediately after handing in their resignation.
There must be some kind of cult of personality phenomenon that applies to companies as well as people. I hope that the one good takeaway for this person is that unless you're a majority stakeholder or have ownership in the company, one should learn to be detached about where your paycheck comes from.
"Thoughts on getting laid after nine years at Twilio..."
and my first though was "...and I thought my job was bad!"
If over-hiring was the reason for the layoffs. Then shouldn’t the recently hired people be fired?
There, but for the grace of God, go I.