If you work at one of the large tech companies that, in the last few weeks [or months], have laid off thousands of employees, you may be wondering what the hell is going on. Especially if the company you’re working for is not actually struggling economically right now. If you work for Google, say, you must be thinking, “What is it about the coming recession that makes a company that’s doing just fine institute broad layoffs for the first time in its 23-year history?”
The answer, my friend, is class warfare.
It’s always something about “improving performance” or “lowering overhead”. The real reason is money. If the company looks like it’s improving the stock value will go up and the right people will make money. An easy way to do that is fire a bunch of underperforming employees before a shareholder meeting. It doesn’t hurt production too much if they’re underperforming compared to the average employee and it doesn’t require a large capital spending plan to improve things.
Of course ‘looks like it is improving’ and ‘underperformed employees’ tend to be abstract numbers on spreadsheets that only exist to increase short term stocks. Productions in general doesn’t fall off for some time even if you fire the best employees, so anything below that will prop up the company while it coasts for a few quarters before the wealthy that know start dumping the stocks.
I was laid off in March of this year. The company didn’t over hire during COVID. We lost a few people right at the start and slowly hired replacements towards the end. It was completely unexpected. The company was doing great and my team was responsible for maintaining and continuing development of a product that was still making millions. I was laid off with a few other incredibly valuable members of the team, some of which had been with the company long before the team was bought from previous management.
I’ll never understand why it happened, and it was a very stressful time to happen so unexpectedly. Thankfully I recovered and got a pay bump but still, what the fuck.
If your company was publicly traded, the answers may be out there. They are beholden to shareholders and your board of directors.
An introduction to class
Nah, OOP sucks, not reading further /s
The answer, my friend, is
class warfareThe answer is that you were working at an overhyped over inflated company that was hiring too many people on the back of incredibly low interest rates, you weren’t providing any real actual productive value, and the economic correction has forced you to leave the big tech companies and go to the various banks and other institutions that have had severely dilapidated software for decades for your contributions will actually boost the economy and help people’s lives.
I have next to zero empathy for these software developers who were running around making 100k while committing code like twice a day which these big tech companies were absolutely filled the brim with and probably still have tons of.
You’re rolled the hype train and you got burned, you made your good money well it was still in low interest rate hike mode and now you need to get out and do something else.
Expect life to get even harder, because we don’t even need these programmers right now, not as much as we need people out there building homes and working in factories. Expect your pay to stagnate until being a construction worker looks more lucrative than your current job, and your job comes more and more into competition with an excess of people going into computer science because that’s where the money is, or that’s where it was 10 years ago.
-a software developer
You might have a point there. If it weren’t for the record profits. There will never be a shortage of overhyped, cash grab startups, companies, and projects. “We’re the AI of X!”
But companies like Netflix, Google, etc would not be where they are today if there wasn’t some real value they provided. They may not have the wisest leadership and so aren’t making a profit, but that’s the point. None of the issues at Netflix are due to engineers. None of the issues at Google are due to engineers. So why then is there a globally concerted effort to drive down the labor cost of engineering? If this were a true market correction in a free market, why isn’t pointless middle management and failed leadership being replaced or cut?
As a software engineer with more than a decade of experience, I have been at companies where I only got 2-3 commits approved in a month. But that was due to the refusal of middle management to do anything except coast. The vast majority of the problem is “leadership”, not engineering.
Ask yourself this. Why are you so upset about this that you go on a rant that’s targeted at the engineer “making 100k while committing code like twice a day”? With where inflation is at, that’s actually a really low salary if they’re able to make two good commits a day. If I could hire someone who makes two good commits in a day that’s closer to being worth $150K, at the very least.
- A software engineer who builds companies
I agree and disagree. I am also a software developer atleast in title(mostly do validation stuff). The issue in the factory I work is almost everything has “software”. Almost everything there is based in software, the operators are really only there mostly to put the part in the right place and sometimes plug it in. I could hire almost anyone do those jobs so the pay will always suck. Yes I respect them but mostly the job just requires a pair of working hands. Pure software companies may be different but I still think the only field to grow and have decent pay will be helping to automate stuff.
That’s a fair point, and it’s possible we see software continue to take off but only in those sectors where it’s contributing to something like factory productivity.
The other thing I noticed is the younger generation seem to be less experienced with computers.
Yes they have used computers most of their lives but when I talk to interns for example the number of them who don’t know what the POST on a computer is or how to use a command line is astounding.
