Tech layoffs: Google, Amazon, Snap and Zillow announce new job cuts
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
“noting the layoffs were not necessarily cuts in total head count.”
The devil is in the details and I know I’m way too lazy to go through all that paperwork and find out. Looks like everyone else is too. :)
Like how Bill Gates amd Steve Balmer used to tell Wall St how bad things are.
(disclosing bias, contributing to tech organizing efforts and scholar of the macro)
Can you elaborate on this?
CEOs collectively saying "you must return to office because we say so" driven by feelings, status, etc with media doing the PR lifting.
That hasn't really been my experience at companies I've worked at which experience layoffs. There's a huge morale hit from the layoff and survivors soldier on, but certainly not with renewed pep.
can confirm here too, myself included.
From my experience it's quite obvious that people with families amidst layoffs and a difficult job market will work harder (or look like they are) to ensure they keep their jobs.
This is no longer a worker's market, meaning your labor has been devalued and competition has increased. Increased globalization and rising unemployment rates (latest report has a .5% increase) will spell disaster for those of us who keep the same attitudes we enjoyed the last couple decades. I'm just a worker like most people on here, but I'm really steeling myself for what's to come. I don't think now is the time to sit on your laurels and hope that your tenure is enough to keep your job around.
That is never the case. You get the desperate types sucking up to management more perhaps. And people complain less about the snacks in kitchen. But people who already deliver start biding their time, looking around, and do the minimal needed to look acceptable.
TIL that Google actually had a team addressing user complaints
Beatings will continue until morale improves.
"... and all liberty is cancelled until morale improves."
In 1863 the words of Voltaire were alluded to in a memoir by Lord William Pitt Lennox who described the hazing experienced by pupils at the Westminster School in England: "...of having a flogging, to encourage the others, as a Frenchman said of the execution of Admiral Byng."
The first known reference to the specific wording "...until morale improves" dates to a 1961 US Navy comic:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c2582589&seq=737
After that cartoon was published we see many different variations on the phase pop up such as, "The layoffs will continue until morale improves" from 1964.
The first reference to the specific phrase, "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is from a 1989 Usenet post on soc.culture.nordic:
https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=soc.culture.nordi...
It's almost certainly older than that though because it's said as if it were a common phrase by that point.
Of course they did.
Got to love seeing the stick so clearly.
Employees can feel how they want to feel but most of my peers seem to have much a much greater fear layoffs than they should have. Many of those folks just haven't been laid off before. I've personally been laid off at least 3 times that I can recall. Once it's happened to you a few times that whole fear goes away, at least in my opinion.
"Wondering if your job is safe" is really not productive. There's no such thing as "safe" in at-will employment.
In my experience, layoffs are the most lazy but antagonistic way to treat those being laid off and the employees that remain. They are almost 100% due to either shareholder/investors wanting a quick cost savings and/or poor executive management and decisions. They don't have anything to do with the employees themselves, although the employees are the ones taking all the risk and receiving the consequences of others' actions.
Those who don’t know how to code
Also, the condescending tone is unbecoming.
Software developers get cut more often because we don’t think about work politics. It’s one of those classic mistakes
I haven't been keeping my finger on the pulse of the issue recently, but in prior rounds of layoffs, engineering had been much less impacted than sales, marketing, HR etc.
Eventually they all forget how to to (I did too) so that’s why it’s important to stay hands-on