Teams are becoming smaller
bbc.com
bbc.com
A huge chunk of the ICs got laid off - so managers that had teams of 8-10 now had teams of 3-6. The product org was hit, but proportionally not as heavily. No projects got descoped.
The end result was that the engineers were basically in meetings throughout the day every day, as they'd each suddenly have twice as many projects on their plate. Then because things inevitably were moving more slowly, more meetings got added to track progress more closely. This was earlier in the pandemic, so a bunch of engineers just left for greener pastures.
And as you can imagine, the whole thing ground to a halt.
The big thing I realized is how hard it was to for leadership - whether product or engineering - to say no, or to stack rank priorities. It's hard to blame them, the past decade has been one of abundance. There were always more resources around the next corner, and so having to deal with less wasn't a skill that anyone had developed.
I know my management has clear ideas what they want so even if I am told - it’s my job to figure it out they say what needs to happen (not accepting a No).
Couple weeks in CEO asked when new feature would be ready.
It took that level of complete absurdity for me to finally say no. I eventually rebuilt the entire infrastructure, scaled traffic 3x, hired and trained new team. It was about a year before I would even listen to a request for a new feature. Took me a long time to recover from that job.
This is an indirect no. We can do that, it will cost X and take Y time and have Z impact on the code base and our long term velocity. Is this what you would like to do?
Quite often, they will say no themselves. If you have no trust with management and they ignore your warning, the org is already at high levels of toxicity and there isn't much you can do anyway. Realize that and navigate the position accordingly.
One way I navigated a team through this is that we just halted work on critical stuff and we doubled down as rockstars for politically important critical stuff. As each other team complained, we let the people up the chain kill each other, and eventually got relief from the crazy.
I miss working for her.
It implies that layoffs are hitting non-supervisory non-managers more than line supervisors; but “management” includes non-supervisory specialist managers, and middle and upper management above the line level, all of which could be hit more than line supervisors and those they supervise. (Ideally, not enough to really make a difference in this effect – but an overload of non-line, particularly middle and specialist, management is not an uncommon organizational disease.)
Take care not to let cynicism, spite, or resentment overshadow a strong core argument.
They can lack social skill, be rude, be incompetent, slow the project to and make it ineffective. And many still keep failing upwards.
There are good managers, it is not they don't exist. But bad ones are way more frequent then should be. People completely unsuitable for leadership keep staying managers despite destruction they cause.
Managers have issues too, particularly good ones who care about their direct reports and getting projects done without death marches. The incentive structure is off. They are rewarded for the wrong metrics, things like number of reports (top tier metric and is a primary basis for getting titles like senior manager, director, VP, CTO, etc), which encourages growing your kingdom. Politics, credit for accomplishment when you're only a proxy for work and don't have control of all the constraints.
It's not uncommon to find yourself in the position where making the right call will be bad for your prospects for internal growth. Which means when you don't corrupt yourself, after a time you dust off your resume and try to make the next step at the next position instead of internally.
Still, you work with where you are and what you have and do your best. I want to be able to take a hand on the business side as I'm tired of projects falling apart due to bad business underpinnings I can identify from the outset. That means playing the management game from the inside so I can get to CTO where I hope to be able to make a bigger difference.
I really respected my manager at my last job for frequently saying no, for good reasons that he articulated so well that the other managers who he said no to actually agreed and accepted his decisions.
That's a rare quality in managers that I haven't seen before or since. Most are pushovers who usually agree to do almost anything asked of them, no matter how ridiculous and unrealistic.
I can't speak for other people, but personally, I always speak my mind. I don't care what level the person above me is. I don't do it in a dickish way, but I will say my say. I always feel that is my duty, to let people above me know what the situation on the ground is, because they just don't know. And usually, in a new job, I'll start out small and work my way up to bigger things as I get to know the system and services/products better. And I've never had any kind of weird shit happen to me, like have someone blow up that I contradict them in the slightest way. Especially in knowledge work. Every boss I've ever had has been good with my feedback and has taken it very seriously. Very often they change their decisions with my input. Often I'll say, "No, can't be done, nope" and explain why, unless they know something I don't know which they always let me know if that is the case.
It's all of our jobs to tell our bosses if something can't be done and be very clear about it, or to have them prioritize work, and also give feedback on that as well.
If you have a boss that is a dick and won't listen - time to move jobs.
Resources are finite, even during flush times, companies go out of business due to squandering of resources.
Occurrences of phrases like "better pay"/"higher wages"/"more benefits" in this BBC article: 0
Creative descriptions for intentionally burning people out: I stopped counting, but "maximise their potential" is certainly my favorite euphemism.
Near the end, I could only dedicate about 5% of my time to dev and < 30% to support my largely junior team. The rest of it was wasted on bureaucratic processes that were a vampire of my time. In the end, I didn't think I could honestly protect the team through what was surely to be a painful slide into mediocrity, so opted out. I felt terrible leaving them to whatever came next, but once you realize you're unable to make positive change, it's time to go.
Whether or not it happens seems to depend on the team. Personally, I like teaching people new stuff so it would often fall to me, on the teams I worked in. ;)
Of course, that founder was one of the originators of XP practice, and ran our company on those principles--pairing, fast feedback loops, and mentorship for all (he's since handed over the company to his #2 who he mentored for a decade, and who is continuing those practices).
The most impactful mentors I've had personally were senior developer / tech lead types. My managers were great, but it's just easier to have the "is this a stupid idea" conversation with somebody who doesn't sign your paycheck
Once I joined I learned that 30% of my time would be dedicated to hiring. The company had a pooled hiring process, and I came to hate it. I spent several hours a week reading resumes, interviewing, reading interviewers' feedback, sitting in roundtables, strategizing with recruiters, and if all that went well, pitching candidates to the hiring committee. Then I would sit back, with no control over the comp, and watch the candidate choose another team, largely because my team wasn't a "sexy" team; very critical to business, but not sexy.
In the handful of cases where my team was the only option, the candidates would turn down the offer due to "insufficient compensation". The company had a "no negotiation" stance on offers. So once the offer went out, that was that. In my first performance review my manager put "hiring" as an area of improvement. I felt this was a trap and would be used to let me go eventually, in spite of the fact my team grew from 3 to 10 engineers from internal transfers and we were hitting all our deliverables.
Between hiring and navigating the terribly siloed corporate structure to build cross-functional teams I had almost no time outside of 1:1s to spend with my own team. It was a really disappointing experience and I felt really bad when I left, because my team and stakeholders were all delightful and capable people. Like you, I felt I couldn't protect them and keep my mental health intact at the same time.
Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a [deleted: decent] place to live, [deleted: a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings].
2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying in our 30s and have things like running water?
That doesn't say much when that's been the long run trend since the industrial revolution.
I say this as a happy father of 2 kids.
And the people who are crapping out kids may not be the ones you'd like to be carrying the torch forward into the next century.
Who are you building this future for if not for your children and those of your friends and family?
Tell me that the Quiverfull types who are having 10 kids are the ones who will appreciate your new app and I'll tell you you're full of crap.
this is basically guaranteed to be the case because in urban areas, the biggest expense is housing, which is inherently a positional good. Paying more wouldn't help, because everyone would just bid up the prices on housing and negate any nominal increase.
The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth created
The fallacy here is thinking that prices was ever or should be set by "economic value". It plays a role, but only as an upper bound; you can't price something that's higher than the value it provides. Many goods/services (eg. food or healthcare) arguably provides infinite value to the purchaser, given that they're required for survival, but I doubt you'd come out to argue that we should reprice them according to their "economic value".
>The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth created
This feels like a tautology to me, because you're defining "excess wealth" as (economic value generated) - (wages/expenses paid), which is just a roundabout way of saying "profits".
And that there's a ratio of profit vs wages taken out of that. That ratio can be larger or smaller. If that ratio is 1, there is no wages, and if it's 0, there is no profit.
The comment is that that ratio is too close to 1.
That factoring wouldn't make sense in the context of the original comment, because it also claims that "The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth created", which clearly isn't the case because we're not paying everyone $0 in wages.
I don't care if it's unions, or work stoppages, or guilds, or industrial action, or what.
But they've been squeezing workers too hard.
Old days: People stop working. Company stops making money. (A|B) Company hires pinkertons to kill off the opposition | Company concedes and gives better working conditions.
Today?: People stop working. Companies beg government to give them money because they're too big to fail. Individuals lose their livelihood/homes/next meal long before company has a deep financial impact.
Just be clear to ‘leadership’ that things take time or money. Clearly communicate much longer timelines, and don’t stress yourself out too much.
which many people - even senior developers - aren't because housing and other CoL expenses eat up wages everywhere, and companies exploit that as they wish.
Additionally, at least in the US and parts of the EU, the complications of legalized slavery aka H1B / other work visas make protesting against bad conditions much harder.
A worse situation does not trivialize a bad situation.
Not everything bad related to work is slavery.
Maybe try a longer commute or a roommate before whining about your cost of living
W.r.t. immigration- you're certainly right. I would be terrified to rock the boat if my employer could put me at risk of deportation
Getting trapped in stressful bullshit that takes years off your life is an unseen price of many purchases; beware people.
What can they realistically build given the resources they have and teams in the time they need to deliver something? It's not magic and too often people fear if they don't commit to aggressive deadlines that they will be punished for it. Yes, this is a tug-of-war, leadership pushes to maximize and the teams push back to minimize until there is an agreement.
However, the important take-away, be open and honest about risks, and blockers. Give early and often reports to upper management about the state of things. As long as you're giving visibility to things you help leadership plan and realign on expectations so they can make course corrections if needed.
Too often I see things fall apart on the ground and another engineer tries to pick up the slack doing extra work. Leadership is never informed and so believe things are going as expected. They just see the work getting done, even if the team on the ground feels overworked and understaffed and so yea, it's not healthy.
The second company recognized my value and gave me a very generous raise. Unfortunately for them, shortly after that I got an offer I couldn't refuse.
So they only recognized a portion of your value.
Using nice round numbers, the following would need to be true for the layoffs to make sense: You have a team of 20, each making 100k/year, but a lot of downtime for all of them. At your current clip, you can only afford 1.5M/year total for your team. You have enough work for maybe 13 at a reasonable pace for your wages, or 10 at a higher pace. So you could let 7 go and risk morale problems with the unchanged wages, or you let 10 go, give 30% raises to match the raised demands, and your payroll is still less than what you can afford. If all of that was explained, alongside copious expressions of ownership on the part of the people responsible for not driving enough business in, I would gladly work again for the people laying me off.