Some of the companies I've worked the big "family" culture and "our people are our greatest asset" company principles were the ones to do the deepest and swiftest cuts. Meanwhile their supposedly comparatively ruthless shark infested competitors keep on keeping on.
The people I saw most impacted by this were the ones that took the culture both literally and seriously, staying in the big happy family companies long enough to develop far too much company-specific rather than industry specific expertise, just in time to get laid off at 50.
I think this is a great point. Lately this is number one thing I feel concerned about. Though paradoxically they are coming from different direction as pushing buzzword driven development too fast in process making stable products unstable, calling them out of date. And then getting rid of products along the people who worked on them as dead weight.
The powers that be realized an anxiety riddle fearful workforce can get stuff done too just fine as long as they don’t have a better option and you dangle the occasional carrot.
So as long as all corporations move roughly in lockstep you can drastically change conditions without much consequences
It’s a bit like the first big news website implementing a paywall was outrageous and deemed suicide. But if everyone does it…
just another tool to push us to work more for less
It don't work, but you better learn it and use it, because it will replace you and also now you got to delivery 30% more
Aside from that, there's also the matter of fewer people tasked with the same amount of things. The official line on that is that AI makes the remaining employees more productive. The reality is that it's nowhere near good enough for many products, so it just means overworked people making more mistakes and burning out faster.
Amazon is in the same ballpark AFAIK, but the other two have noticeably better comp. The "Microsoft deal", such as it is, was that it's a place where you don't have to grind hard. This has changed now though.
I left in 2018. I was 63 (first level senior) and had offers from Google and Meta for a downlevel (L4) at a 40% increase in total comp. The gap has closed slightly in the last 7 years but not much at those levels.
Also Apple is good at lot of outsourced work for long time compared to many other companies. So they don't tons of non-core software stuff in-house. In that matter they are more like typical Fortune 500 companies than SV company.
What I learned is: you need to hold a high bar, because people can do anything to keep their job, and often not what you want them to do
What you want is someone who is open to feedback, understands it, and takes effective action.
Outside of that, there’s a whole gamut of people. Some get defensive. Some are politely open to feedback but don’t actually try to understand. Some understand but don’t care enough to follow thru. And some try hard but aren’t effective. All of that is bad for your team, and unlikely to change. Just need to cut your losses to open your seat for someone who can do it.
The current person i have is open to feedback, but doesn’t fully understand it and doesn’t care to. It’s like dragging a horse to water. After doing that for six months my manager pointed that out, it’s just not a good fit. I like to see the best in people, and even a little bit of improvement gives me hope. But it’s dragging down our team potential. It’s a hard truth.
But hey I am judging off of basically one sentence you wrote so what do I really know about your situation?
Given what's been happening in the tech industry and the economy at large, I now keep a 1-year emergency fund in a money-market fund at 4% (Fidelity SPAXX). I'm probably losing out on some growth (SP500 grew 11% over the past year, despite the massive drop in April 2025), but at least I have liquidity in case I get laid off.
That's the kind of game I feel I have to play these days.
I think humans are fundamentally flawed in not being able to see alternate history. If they have to pay a union, they will not see all the benefits, and only focus on the 50 dollar union fee.
This was a time where companies were hiring talented developers just to deny them to their competitors. Nobody was interested in shaking up that status quo by becoming part of a union.
Sorry, you misspelled "decades of Republicans disassembling labor protections and enacting garbage like right to work laws, corporations hiring thugs like the Pinkertons to break up and discourage them, and conservative media spewing lies to discourage membership".
Both parties are so in capital's pocket that, at least on labor issues, they are essentially the same.
Yes, Biden could have done better on railroads, but his administration:
* Made millions more workers eligible for overtime pay
* Installed union leaders on the NLRB (contrast to Republicans who fired members, defunded efforts, and gave access to NRLB data to Musk/Palantir/etc.)
* Those new NLRB members issued the Cemex decision making it harder for companies to suppress union voting
* Issued any number of rules in favor of workers i.e. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/olms/olms20230727
* Raised the contractor minimum wage
* Increased funding for the NLRB
* Ensured that companies couldn't avoid penalties by forming smaller companies - a process the Trump NLRB created to make it harder to penalize companies unionbusting
This is only a few things. There is a world of difference.
And this is more true now than ever before since they can (so far legally, if not morally) also use LLMs to whitewash off GPL and other such licenses that would in the past have put practical limitations on their usage.
If you've built up expertise in an open-source projects that lots of other companies use that knowledge is a valuable asset on your resume.
OSS? You mean copyleft? Who does that? Who would use that?
Nor is it something unique to them. As far as I know, the only large US tech company that didn't do layoffs in the past decade is NVIDIA (their last one was in 2008).
That wasn't a traditional layoff - it was a reimagining of the development process and the elimination of SDET which was overwhelmingly a good thing - I also joined in 2009, and SDET was an utter disaster. All the good SDETs got out of that job - either to SDE at Microsoft or to SDE at another company. Those that were left were largely a waste of money, and the entire culture of "this person writes the code, this person writes the tests" meant that a lot of devs got high recognition and rewards for writing untestable unmaintainable garbage that someone else had to try to cover.
Whenever it comes up among my co-workers as a Microsoft product falls on its face yet again, most recently MS Project Online screwing up something as simple as completion percentages during a meeting, I just sigh and quip "Maybe Microsoft ought to consider hiring a QA department."
This seems more of employee's made up rule rather than Microsoft's. I worked in a company in early 2000s' and old timer's told me similar rule "that here pay is less but little work and lifetime job guarantee". It was of course bullshit made up rule. As economy changed not only did they tighten the screws but also had many layoffs since then.
burnt-resistor•7h ago
orochimaaru•5h ago
lmm•5h ago
eadmund•5h ago
Indeed, I think their major trick (in America, anyway) is to make a profitable company unprofitable. Much like the bad forms of private equity from above, they bleed a business dry from below.
lmm•3h ago