I grew up with someone who is now in the C-Suite of one of America's largest corporations - a company that has been in the Fortune 100 for decades. He has bounced from directorship to C-Suite in Fortune 500s for the past 12 years, and I asked him about this phenomenon over cigars about six months ago, he said this:
"cbozeman, you have to understand these people. Most of these people making these decisions are raging narcissists. What do you think sounds better?
'I managed and led 500 people.'
'I managed and led 5000 people.'
And when you compound that on top of essentially free money, and then you also throw in the desire to lock up the best talent so your competitor can't have them, you have a recipe for indiscriminate hiring."
This person has been working in a high-level capacity in the corporate world for over 15 years now. He has seen some truly reprehensible shit, and shared quite a bit of it with me when we meet up once a year for ice fishing. I can tell you right now, not only is not "nonsense", it's perfectly logical - just not to you, and not to a lot of other HN users, because entirely too many people think in the logic of 1s and 0s, and not in the logic of people. High-level business decision makers - the kind who make these decisions - don't think like you. They don't value what you value. They see engineers and programmers as expendable and easily replaceable - and many of them are. For every 10x or 100x engineer / programmer, there's 500,000 no-namers who can be slotted in and out without much trouble.
I was talking about pay not perks. How much do FAANG/big-tech workers earn vs everyone else in the industry.
And maybe let's not victimize big-tech workers so much. Yeah, you have 17% chance of being laid off, but while you worked there you managed to save way more than people who work elsewhere.
And everyone gets treated as cattle. But big tech workers get treated like those premium beef freerange cattle that get massages and fetch 200 dollars per kilo VS everyone else that gets treated like a slaughterhouse cattle.
I grew up with someone who is now in the C-Suite of one of America's largest corporations - a company that has been in the Fortune 100 for decades. He has bounced from directorship to C-Suite in Fortune 500s for the past 12 years, and I asked him about this phenomenon over cigars about six months ago, he said this:
"cbozeman, you have to understand these people. Most of these people making these decisions are raging narcissists. What do you think sounds better?
'I managed and led 500 people.'
'I managed and led 5000 people.'
And when you compound that on top of essentially free money, and then you also throw in the desire to lock up the best talent so your competitor can't have them, you have a recipe for indiscriminate hiring."
This person has been working in a high-level capacity in the corporate world for over 15 years now. He has seen some truly reprehensible shit, and shared quite a bit of it with me when we meet up once a year for ice fishing. I can tell you right now, not only is not "nonsense", it's perfectly logical - just not to you, and not to a lot of other HN users, because entirely too many people think in the logic of 1s and 0s, and not in the logic of people. High-level business decision makers - the kind who make these decisions - don't think like you. They don't value what you value. They see engineers and programmers as expendable and easily replaceable - and many of them are. For every 10x or 100x engineer / programmer, there's 500,000 no-namers who can be slotted in and out without much trouble.