Laid-off masses have a message for Zuckerberg, Benioff: We'll never come back
fortune.com
fortune.com
If some don't return, they'll relax hiring requirements until they're filled. Hiring requirements from top companies have a lot of room to relax - easier questions, less interview rounds, etc.
Maybe this time is different with higher interest rates?
Absolutely. Startups are a low interest rate phenomenon. With high interest rates, investors become a lot more selective. Fewer reasons to risk money on startups when the government is paying out a nice return. The higher the interest, the harder it is to get credit, therefore there'll be less money circulating which puts the brakes on inflation but also slows down the economy given that easy credit is one of the drivers of exponential growth.
What is a low interest rate phenomenon is the unicorn growth strategy and dump trucks full of cash going in to stupid businesses that don't really have a path toward solvency but have really nice marketing.
Will also be impacted due to higher interest rates on their credit lines. Perhaps not as much but still.
> dump trucks full of cash going in to stupid businesses that don't really have a path toward solvency but have really nice marketing
That's what I meant by startups though. Startups that aren't doing that are just regular small businesses.
Software touches every single interaction anyone has in the world anywhere unless they live in some of the very, very few subsistence cultures still in existence. Some people may use less modern tools but even selling grain or fruits you grew will likely still need some kind of software and some kind of technology and touch markets in international places. The world is no longer local.
Maybe it's different this time. I don't think so. Interactions will be changed. Habits will be reconfigured. Software is not going away or getting easier. LLMs may make it easier to crank out some rote CRUD app but they still cannot replace reason, interpretation, or the development cycle.
I’m old enough to have suffered through .com and the whole “outsourcing will take our jobs”. LLMs aren’t nearly as useful as on offshore junior engineer in a 12 hour different timezone.
Alternatively, how much more they'd have to pay to get the same quality of people? I'd assume it's close to 20% more, which should be significant
It's lying for clicks and engagement.
>Over half (58%) of 6,000 professionals who responded to a recent Glassdoor poll said they’d never return to a company who laid them off. In the tech sector specifically, just 46% of workers said they’d boomerang. Men were slightly more likely to consider boomeranging than women, and older workers were more open-minded than younger ones.
It's not a super majority, but 54-58% does feel like "masses". I can see it both ways here.
The title didn't imply otherwise to me.
Sure, but I think the point is less "companies that layoff lose good employees for good" and more "if you layoff employee you lose that tribal knowledge forever". Is that something that a company will die from? Probably not, at least not in one fell swoop. But having half the people feel that way is some non-neglible brain drain.
Remember that part of the original reason the Big companies paid that much was as an anti-poaching measure. They didn't want competition getting top talent nor for top talent to be future competitors as they startup their own business. I wonder if the latter is going to pop up more with these kinds of movements.
sheep: we love our freedom, we'll never come baaack
farmer: no problem, i'll just be over here by the food if you change your mindGuess the sheep have little choice.
See also, Ken Burns documenting the death of the American Buffalo. Endless habitant encroachment keeps killing great parts of the earth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38056854
Farmers protect sheep, supplement their feed, have medical care and also keep the grass healthy.
But tech workers know how to fend for themselves, like using their hands and traveling and social skills and they know how society and things like farms work, right?
Sadly tech works have become so useless they don't have multiple tech skills anymore, many don't have any tech skills, just look at HN. Many blame Google because they can't even use search.
[0] sorry for the analogy.
Many tech workers are paid well but overworked so even if they can't find an equivalent paying job you can still find a less stressful still comfortable to live on wage.
After all the improvements are infinite time is finite.
Single tech position gets like 100 applications, thousands of its remote. I think this guy is out of reality!
Devs in countries like Poland are now thriving, many of those jobs moved into cheaper regions!
- Timezone
- Culture
Working with people in vastly different timezones is difficult. Just ask anybody working with people from the the US East coast and West coast. That's only a 3 hour time difference and it gets difficult.
Culture is another barrier. One of the things that's been hard for US-based companies to learn with working with people from India is in their culture it's impolite to say "no." They use other signals to indicate no. Americans miss those cues. They don't hear what the think is pushback and so they proceed as though everything were fine. Americans also find it difficult to work with Germans as their bluntness is seen as being rude. This is just scratching the surface for the culture barriers that abound.
This is why I say remote work != offshoring. They're two completely different animals.
Google did a hiring spree for its Warsaw office last year because yes, they require people to show up there on a daily basis.
The pay was uninspiring though - something around $75k reportedly.
Meanwhile ClickUp offered close to twice that when it was present on Polish[0] job boards recently.
Remote contracts land somewhere in between in terms of salary.
[0] it's useful to note that these are also functionally Ukrainian boards, considering how the Russian invasion affected businesses.
You are not competing with 100 other applicants (unless you put zero effort into your resume and have no experience, in which case you have bigger issues).
The amount of blatant errors I've seen in resumes is massive.
I was not let go, but I left a company along with a wave of others (mostly those senior enough to be certain that they’ll find great work) when the company U-turned on their remote work promises. The team I was on was responsible for a major feature of the product, and only had two very senior software engineers, who both left in protest when it was ultimatum-style demanded that they’d move into commutable distance. It’s almost like we were let go. Like many people, we had moved away from an expensive city during the pandemic and were not looking to come back.
The company has replaced us with more than 15 contractors of junior to mid skills. Despite this, they are now periodically emailing us to come back, and work remote. It started as “come back, we will let you be remote”, and has evolved to much more appealing offers over time.
The difference between us and many more contractors is not that we’re John Carmacks and the contractors are graduates. It’s part seniority, but much larger part - a ton of knowledge about the systems the company had and the types of systems in the industry used for the feature we were responsible for.
Good luck replacing institutional knowledge with cheap labor. Every company thinks they’re special and they’ll have a great time with this footgun. And good luck to them! But I don’t know anyone who has found good employment now and wants to return to that.
Some layoffs could be more “amicable”, so I can imagine people wanting to return. But it will be hard for those in the industry who legitimately got much better jobs, which a lot of seniors that dedicated long tenures to the footgun company did. On the other hand, juniors might be easier to swap out than long-time seniors, though there are still costs to training them. It’s a lot of extra work before one employee is fully replaced by another.
I'm not sure that's a genuine ask. As soon as you help train the newbs up, they'll lay you off all over again.
But also realize that you and your co-worker were n=2 out of maybe 1000. You might be rounding errors on the effects management were looking for.
Engineers above the senior level were far more likely to leave than juniors. This was because finding remote, well-paying work even today is still a lot easier for a senior, principal, fellow engineers, than it is for those less experienced. I would say principals and seniors were most likely to leave. They left the company I was talking about 2:1 compared to others.
Fellows/distinguished level engineers didn’t leave much either. But probably because the RTO mandate was negotiable for them, as many other things. Moreover, it might be difficult to move laterally to a different company and remain at that level, with that pay.
It was mostly that the middle fell out.
I guess companies always think they’ll get the undesirables and replaceables out with layoffs, but through a lot of secondary effects (morale, distrust, lack of stability, leaving friends, and so on) they often get rid of the people that are most in demand and hardest to replace.
It might not be 2:1 in every case, but I do believe that the ones in demand are most likely to leave in “soft” layoffs like forced RTO or whatever Musk was doing at X, where the employees themselves choose whether to to or stay and submit. If you just decimate the company evenly, the outcome could be less destructive.
So as an employee (not necessarily you, though), if you're angry that you got laid off, it's because you drank management's gas lighting kool-aid. And further, you shouldn't be amazed at how far the C-staff will go to protect their bonuses. Even if it means reducing your "Fameo" to 1/10th of what it was.
I'm also sure they made a calculation. If they want to get rid of 1/2 the company, lay off about 1/3. The rest will be through attrition. Those co-workers getting laid off, they're not usually management's problem anymore. They're yours to figure out. Hope you can self organize after half your staff is gone!
But in all honesty if management just said, "Thanks for you hard work. The company is doing really well. We're fortunate enough to be growing instead of shrinking..." -- I think that level of honesty would do wonders for employees when it came time to do a layoff.
[1] https://archive.ph/2023.10.23-081817/https://www.nytimes.com...
They might not come back but there will be plenty of new people willing to.
It’s nice they are finding more to life and about themselves to enjoy. Maybe the greybeards they made fun of had it figure it out all along and welcome you to your future.
Just attach more c̶a̶r̶r̶o̶t̶s̶ cash on the stick when their employees rent rises and they will start running back.
“That’s foootball”