
Silicon Valley is evolving and focusing on employees - howsilly
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/02/silicon-valley-evolving-focusing-employees/
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sixdimensional
I am, by accident, a small part of a "culture transformation" at a large, well
established corporation.

The group doing this has the same intention (to improve the employee's
experience), but I have observed this is consistently at odds with the
leadership's desire to keep employees at arm's length, and maintain the
strategic control over employees.

For example, you can't be nice to employees and then lay them off at the same
time- such an act instantly violates trust, therefore leaders say they want
things to be better for employees but are often not willing to make the
sacrifices necessary to follow through.

So then you get stuck in a conundrum, and the leaders look and often act like
hypocrites. Employees do that too.

It's been an interesting time in this role, like I said, for me it was
somewhat accidental and I can clearly see the arguments from both sides. Still
working on it but, I'm not sure how you resolve some of these issues without
the right attitude - that maybe we are not "leaders and employees", but that
we are all "professional colleagues" \- and then following through with the
proper organizational supports and programs to help such an organization
survive and operate, and still be able to compete.

~~~
Waterluvian
"you can't be nice to employees and then lay them off at the same time"

You absolutely can and you must. Being professional and being nice are not
exclusive. Quite the opposite.

A professional manager understands that being nice doesn't mean protecting
someone from reality just because reality sucks. It means showing them respect
during the process.

~~~
throw2016
The word 'professional' itself is a way to distance yourself from your actions
and consequences and works to dehumanize the people you work with. What does
'professional' mean'?

Is it 'unprofessional' to deceive your employees and customers or users? Is
abusing the privacy of your users professional? Is it unprofessional to layoff
workers for short term gains? Its definition itself is contextual to power and
what it defines at that time. Individual bad behavior is not unprofessional,
its just bad behavior.

~~~
akiselev
There is some well tread ground here, albeit not in the software world. The
National Society of Professional Engineers, for example, has a (in my opinion)
clear and detailed Code of Ethics [1]. The "Fundamental Canons" section is as
good a description as I can think of for what it means to act professional as
an engineer:

    
    
        Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
        Perform services only in areas of their competence.
        Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.
        Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees.
        Avoid deceptive acts.
        Conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession.
    

[1] [https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-
ethics](https://www.nspe.org/resources/ethics/code-ethics)

~~~
YZF
I thought we were talking about managers here. And that laying people off as a
manager was somehow the "professional" thing to do. But let's interpret this
in the context of the Professional Engineer ethics. Let's say there's a bad
quarter. Is laying off people to make the results look a little better for the
next quarter promoting the health, safety and welfare of the public? Is it
honorable? Was the company clear about this policy in advance? If not is it a
deceptive act? When companies issue statements about layoffs are those
typically objective and truthful?

Maybe we need a code of ethics for managers.

~~~
mbrumlow
That is a simple view of how a company works. It's much more complex than
"make the results look a little better for the next quarter".

Entire forecast change when numbers are missed. People are also hired based
off those numbers. Should we also not hire more employees when the out look is
better?

Companies need to be healthy to continue to be able to employ at all. So yes.
It is the duty to cut cost and maintain healthy balances based off future
expectations.

It would be far more dishonest to simply let the entire company fold
effectively laying off everybody to prolong a subet of employees jobs for a
little longer.

But beyond that it's rare that layoffs happen for a single quarter miss. And
unless you are pure EBITA driven laying off probably won't make anybody
looking for revenue groth happy either.

Companies are complex living organizations. The notion that laying people off
is always bad is a bad notion.

~~~
YZF
My experience from an S&P 500 tech company is that people can be laid off one
quarter only for new people to be hired the next. The people making those
decisions are completely disconnected from the hugely negative impact this has
on the company's ability to execute. There was no real need to layoff anyone,
there's plenty of cash, it's purely for engineering the business results and
ultimately trying to engineer the share price. The people laid off could have
been contributing immensely and the new hires contribute nothing if not
negative for a while.

Economic cycles are not a surprise, they happen, a company with enough
resources can easily absorb them, use the down turn to double down on
developing new products, and come out stronger on the other end.

Laying people off isn't always bad, but at least 80% of the time it's the
wrong long term decision. You've spent years on these people learning your
products and technology, and now all that knowledge is gone. The impact is
continuously felt years down the road. The movement of people this and a
variety of other reasons is a net drag on companies. This treatment of people
as some sort of "resource" that can be scaled up and down on demand is a joke.

All that is not to say that if you have a problem with specific employees you
can't fire them, that's a completely different question.

EDIT: Lemme give you another example I witnessed personally from a multi-
billion dollar company. Production of a certain (highly complex) product in
was moved to Mexico for a projected cost saving of about 5%. The factory was
closed, hundreds of people were laid off. Years later the production cost in
Mexico was higher than the cost in the original factory and production was
moved back. It was absolutely clear the original decision was iffy but it was
done for the optics of making it look like the company is working on cutting
costs. It impacted not only those people who got laid off but local supply
chains etc. Overall a negative decision for the company, the economy, and the
people involved, driven purely by bean counters with no clue. If the company
did "focus on employees" and really considered the loss of know-how, the cost
of recruiting and training people, the loss of trust, the impact on morale
etc. maybe we would have had a different outcome.

------
imh
>Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin invent Google in their dorm
rooms.

This is such a ridiculous version of "Stanford PhD candidates Larry Page and
Sergey Brin invent Google as part of their doctoral research."

~~~
orcdork
Almost as ridiculous as "Silicon Valley is evolving and focusing on employees"
I'd say.

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golemotron
My advice for anyone starting the world of work is become debt-free as quick
as possible, invest, and save. Smile and say yes to any company that tries to
tickle your feels.

No matter who you are, you are expendable. Don't ever forget it.

~~~
techntoke
This is why we have so many tech companies doing unethical things.

~~~
reidjs
I disagree. If your employees are desperate to work for you, exhausted, and
utterly dependent that’s when unethical products are built. Employees with
more mobility and freedom are less likely to get their hands dirty unless
their sick perversions align with their manager’s.

~~~
geggam
If you are living in Silicon Valley and not independently wealthy you are
desperate to work. The cost of living there demands it.

~~~
azernik
If you are the holder of in-demands skills like coding or UX design, you do
need to work; just not at any particular company. Hop on to the one that
doesn't offend the conscience.

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bsenftner
"Silicon Valley has empathy" propaganda. The only empathy SV has is how to
masquerade empathy for dollars.

~~~
bilbo0s
That's not unique to Silicon Valley, the entire economy works like that. Which
is why so many working class people are falling further and further behind. At
it's root, this economy is basically the capital class doing the minimum they
have to do to protect capital investments. It's just that the minimum the
capital class has to do in Silicon Valley is more than the minimum they have
to do _outside_ Silicon Valley.

~~~
FakeComments
My experience of $bigcorp2 is much better than $bigcorp1, and I completely
believe it has to do with the second not being a tech company — but instead a
traditional company that moved into tech.

So, I think tech companies have a kind of pathological treatment of their
workers we don’t see broadly.

(You’re also greatly simplifying why working class people are falling behind,
to the point of misrepresenting it.)

~~~
amyjess
My company takes care of their employees much better than pretty much any
other tech company I've ever heard of, and while it _is_ a tech company, I can
only conclude that it's for the following reasons:

\- It was founded and is still headquartered in the suburbs of Dallas and has
nothing to do with SF/SV. We _technically_ have a sales office in SF, but
that's just a place for our account managers on the West Coast to meet with
clients (we also have similar sales offices in NYC, London, and Amsterdam...
though I think the London office has been expanded into a real office with a
handful of non-sales people regularly present).

\- We're an enterprise B2B telecom, not some web/social/mobile-driven B2C
company. B2B has a number of different cultural mores from B2C, and that's
reflected in our internal values. And telecom in general is a whole 'nother
ballgame entirely. It's a much more conservative industry than the rest of
tech. When I tell random people what kind of company I work at, I usually say
"we're kind of an enterprise ISP", which is about as far from SV-typical tech
companies as you can imagine (though I stress the _kind of_ , because we're
more than _just_ an ISP).

Working here doesn't feel like working at a tech company at all. It feels like
working for a traditional enterprise, and I _like_ it that way.

And that's not just me talking: we regularly win awards on Glassdoor because
lots of other people think that way. We also have a TV screen in the office
that shows our latest Glassdoor reviews. One day, I noticed a particular line
scroll by, and it was interesting enough that I hopped on Glassdoor to ctrl-F
for it so I could look at it in its entirety. Here's the Pros section from
this person's review:

> Good work/life balance. Management has Texas values rather than imposing a
> Silicon Valley-style groupthink. Growing and profitable.

It looks like I'm not the only one who's realized that the reason this company
is so good to their employees is because they're not from Silicon Valley.

~~~
dominotw
[https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Masergy-
RV...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Masergy-
RVW21604548.htm)

link for the lazy

------
burger_moon
I'm guessing SpaceX isn't part of this given they share the front page with a
story about laying people off.

~~~
almost_usual
SpaceX also isn’t headquartered in SV

~~~
drb91
Who cares what’s actually in the valley, it’s just a shorthand for the tech
industry.

~~~
warp_factor
There is still something special about the Silicon Valley location vibe that
you only see while living there. Everyone in tech around you making a LOT of
money but pretending it is not their goal. That they want to make the world a
"better place". Then going to SF and seeing so many homeless and poor people
being down looked by tech hipsters.

~~~
walshemj
Do you think the majority of tech SV workers look down on the homeless and
poor at a greater rate than say traditional blue collar workers do?

~~~
warp_factor
Probably on the same levels as traditional blue collars. What I find shocking
is the dystopia with that morale high ground of "making the world a better
place". It all feels very fake and hypocritical.

