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A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work (mertbulan.com)
1040 points by mertbio 13 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 960 comments





I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.

There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one. The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.

On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.

To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.


It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself. A company is no less and no more than a pile of someone else’s money that will do literally anything, including destroy your life, to become a bigger pile.

You should do a good job for individuals who will repay you later on. Companies themselves these days can sod off—they stand for nothing.


"Going above and beyond" at a big company, if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted, and getting promoted results in significantly higher pay. I've gotten promoted twice at my current employer over the years, which has roughly doubled my total compensation, and none of that would have happened had I just did my previous level's responsibilities and nothing beyond.

That's the exception rather than the rule. Most people have to switch employers to get a significant pay raise.

Most people who think they deserve a significant pay raise probably don't (or maybe not enough relative to others competing for limited promotional budget).

I've seen enough people extremely qualified being denied promotions because they were "too good" at their current role. Meanwhile I've also seen as of late "promotions" that are just a title change while only adding to your workload with no extra pay. There's no winning with many companies.

If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people involved. But all that already means it may not be a good fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...


Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!

> Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value.

Ok.

> Is that work something that anyone else could do?

Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.

But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.

Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.

We've all been through this, we know how it works.


I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.

And I think you're missing my point. If everyone is perfectly aligned and recognised what will be rewarded, no-one wants to do any other task.

I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.

The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.

So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.

The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.


I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org. I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income. You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization. My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.

> If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business

This is an uncharitable response, no need for that.


My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.

Still being uncharitable and assuming that an employee doesn't see that.

I am not seeing how charitable applies here and to whom. But, I am not interested in a back and forth. Have a good day.

It doesn't matter if you "deserve" the raise or not. If someone else will pay you more, the raise is yours.

over the last ten years the tech industry has 10x'd the value it has created, which is obvious if you look at the accrued wealth of the leaders in the industry.

you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been working in this industry? MY SALARY

we all deserve a significant pay raise you scab


Are employees at google not being paid for what they're risking?

An investor risks their post tax capital, and then when it works like google gets the upside and when it fails they get...shares in blackberry or IBM.

An employee risks their time, which they are guaranteed by law at least for the time they risk, to be compensated in cash and benefits.

An employee also risks their reputation and career opportunity cost for which they get...checks notes...options that go up/down the same as an investor.

An employee is participating in both value buckets, and one might argue at Google specifically, in the most compensatory bucket proportion in the history of all people ever.


Why don't you start your own company, make a lot of money and hire people with 10x salary? Who's stoping you? Show us how you pay 1M to each of your SWE.

It doesnt have to be 10x. Working in "Mid Tech" should at least guarantee you a raise that beats inflation. Sadly, it seems the only way to guarantee a raise that is proportional to the companies increased productivity is to shop offers around.

Either you're too bad (at best average; same thing I guess?) or the company management is shit. Either way you should not be in that company. So what's the problem?

He cant start one because he doesn't have enough money lol

Pay isn't about "deserve". It's about the intersection of supply and demand curves and the amount of friction.

Companies have low friction firing you to get someone cheaper. Will you have low friction firing your company to get more expensive?


If I can find someone to pay me more, whether I deserve it or not is irrelevant.

There's virtually no relationship between who gets a raise and who deserves it.

The people who get raises take active steps to obtain them. Typically that means pushing, or getting a new job. The reality is that life is not fair and corporate America is not a meritocracy.


You’re hired! /s

As with all things, it depends where you are. It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.

And these are the biggest employers of talent. It may not be most people in a startup forum, but it’s a lot of people.

For all others, I think it’s because tech isn’t seen as such an important revenue driver. Lots of places we are still seen as a cost center.


Anecdata, for sure, but my experience working at several big companies in tech is that they won’t significantly bump your pay (and especially not your stock grant!) when they promote you. If anything, they will move you to the minimum of the salary band for the new level.

In my experience, you’re better off getting the promo and looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don’t fault people for playing the game that is given.


> that is what the system rewards

Commensurate to the risk, of course. If you ignore the risk component then your best bet is to forget having a job and spend your days playing Powerball. The system offers much, much, much greater reward there.

If you keep risk in mind then it's not so clear cut. Staying at the job you have, even with lower pay on paper, may end up being the most profitable option in the end. But sometimes you just have to make the gamble and find out! There are winning opportunities for sure.


Risk depends on the market strength. In good times, you could easily jump to a new job with a raise in weeks and there's little risk as long as you're not outing youself at work.

In bad times like this, probably not worth it. The search takes months not, if not over a year, and there's a non-zero chance you're laid off anyway.


Weeks can be a long time if it doesn't work out. And that is, by your own comment, in the good times. The good times don't last forever. Upon some dice roll it is going to turn, and when that one doesn't work out now you could be looking at months or years.

Staying put isn't risk-free either. Not by any stretch. But is comparatively less risky. It is the devil you know, hence the lower risk premium.


> It’s not the case for big tech employers, who tend to have very clear “levels” and (from what I can tell on levels.fyi) it’s often a 25%+ jump in total comp.

You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.

I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).


Managers who are handing our perf-review changes in comp are often very constrained when handling those who negotiated well. They'll typically get inflation level raises for a long time until they're lower in their band

I've always called that a "diagonal promotion" because it's over-and-up.

It's also the only way I have ever gotten a significant increase in compensation, responsibility, and title.


Over the past 7 years, it wasn’t comp I was optimizing for over a certain amount it was increasing in scope and impact and autonomy when it came to managing projects and getting closer to the “business”.

I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.

I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).

Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.

My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.


Those L5s negotiated a good hiring wage, but would see stagnant growth until they hit the median of wages for level + performance rating in their location.

Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.


They also have the advantage of getting L5 pay immediately, while for someone who got promoted internally it can take 4-5 years for all the equity to catch up

The signing bonus stock grants may also have compensated them for giving up the stock grants of their previous employer, so they probably still received less than you had accumulated.

Pay bands for different levels are typically pretty broad, and typically overlap between levels. Just because median pay at level N+1 is significantly higher than at level N, doesn't mean that you will get that being promoted from level N.

It's not an exception at all. People get promoted all the time. Most people I work with have been promoted at least once since joining the company, some multiple times like I have.

Based on my anecdotal experience and the people I've known in industry, job hopping is way way way easier than getting a promo if you're trying to maximize salary. Mine has doubled after a few job hops.

Even better is working for yourself.

Right because “working for yourself” is likely to lead you to the same profit as even the comp of a mid level employee at any of the BigTech companies.

At least your performance has 100% impact, so it's all up to you rather than someone else.

Can I exchange those good feelings for goods and services?

CydeWays post is very similar to my experience as well

> if done in a smart strategic way, is the best way to get promoted

This alludes to the other bit that's not taught enough: Working effectively, efficiently is not about how many problem reports you close, or lines of code you ship or number of hours at your desk. It's about recognition. Pay attention and work toward the stuff that will get you recognized. Pay attention and measure how much effort you put in the day to day stuff and the stuff that will be seen. This work is not "for your company", it's "for your career".

Watch out also for what kind of recognition you get. If you become known as the expert in day to day operation of tool XYZ, you might be parked doing that for the rest of your life. Probably not what you intended.


>It’s worthwhile to “go above and beyond” for individuals who will help you, who may exist in a company… but never for the company itself.

That feels like the correct way to think about it. Everyone else seems to think it's one extreme or the other but really thinking about it on an individual level vs a company level seems more accurate to my own experience.


This can be generalized to life in many situations in my experience.

E.g. replace "company" in the quoted statement by "nation"/"religious organization"/"political party" etc.


I don't think this is true of all companies. My current company doesn't base bonuses on individual contributions, and even went so far as to reduce the number of "story points" that top contributors did in sprints so that the rest of the team wouldn't look bad.

I don't think that's a good thing? (rest of the team wouldn't look bad part)

Fine, what else counts? A company may deliberately lower the effect of this in order to favor that - which they feel matters more, or which they feel is not done enough at that time. What else did you notice that they favor?

I don't think it's just about who will repay you. Our responsibility to each other is not nearly that transactional.

For example, the individual who is most likely to live with the consequences of your decision is... future you.

Future-me isn't going to pay me back, but I am always grateful to past-me when I set future-me up for success.


that's true with publicly traded C-corporations

for private companies, it literally is the people you work with (and whatever legal enchantments they've decided on). some of those people will still fuck you over, but it's not a legally-conjured sentient pile of money the way a C-corp is

B-corps are an interesting attempt to avoid being a sentient pile of money. in theory, it's an egregore that is capable of valuing things other than money. (they haven't really been tested in court. and they might fuck you over in pursuit of some other value, even if they do work. or fucking you over for money might not conflict with its other values)



If you’re interested in learning about this, be aware that S-corp and C-corp are widely used misnomers. A corporation is a corporation (and an LLC is not) but they all can be taxed under sub chapters C, S, K, and others based on the specific details of the entity.

C corporation is just a shorthand way of saying “privately incorporated voluntary association taxed under sub c (probably with dreams of being a public company someday, otherwise they’d be sub s).

Not trying to “but acktchually” you, just suggesting that your next stop after reading about corporations is probably the tax code. (Enjoy that).


extra bonus -- actual attorneys who are familiar with those codes learn not to discuss it at all .. for whatever reasons.. it really is valuable information, as in scarcity

Why did I just discuss them, then?

glad to see an exception to that rule :-)

turns out, i actually meant benefit corporation. (i've heard people refer to them as b-corporations, but didn't realize there was another thing called b-corporation)

> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...

Right.

The company doesn't care.

But I do.

I don't work hard on my craft, push myself to be better/smarter/have more impact, or go above and beyond for my employer.

I do it for myself.


My experience has been that caring about your craft is a great way to get in trouble. As a previous co-worker once told me "it turns out that the less I care about this job the more happy my managers are with my performance."

That's because time pressure is real. We can't all be Knuth and spend our life looking for the perfect algorithm to solve all problems we could ever have. Most of us must ship something that works well enough for a particular scenario, as soon as possible - tomorrow, next week, next month, not next year. If you care too much about the quality of your work, you might end up never shipping; at some point you have to stop caring and just push the damn button.

It's not always time pressure. It can also be, for example, calling out others for doing things that don't make sense or hinder what's actually needed for the job/company, which in turn makes them uncomfortable and leads to discipline for you and not them. My response after having that happen? Fine, I'll look the other way and not care how much we're getting done anymore.

There is an exact and correct amount to care. It varies job to job. It's mostly a matter of just turning the big dial inside yourself until you get it in the sweet spot for where you are now.

This is the wise, pragmatic answer indeed!

Find the Middle Path.

Neither extreme is correct.

Doing the absolute bare minimum to not get PIP'ed is corrosive to your own soul.

Going "above and beyond" when you might get laid off tomorrow, is naive and opening yourself up for exploitation.


I have the same exact experience at my current company. My official performance, which is given by my boss, improved since I started to not care. My output fell, the quality of my work is the same, just less quantity, but for some reason my scores are higher.

On the other hand, I had a job where my performance was rewarded greatly, and I was lucky to be at the right place for that. Almost all of the employees at the same company were not that lucky.


Was that before or after “the consultants?”

time is always going to be a valid term in the equation, probably with an exponent > 1

Indeed. Although I find it increasingly hard to find work that aligns with my expectations about technical excellency (too many companies chasing big returns on half-finished products for example) or even methods of creating software. This is hard to manage from a personal perspective but I guess life goes on... I wholeheartedly agree with the author - life's too short to be wasted on work that may get you some good words in one quarter and not matter the next.

The question to ask yourself then is: why is it that the behaviour that brings you pleasure/meaning/satisfaction happens to align exactly with what the company wants?

I spent most of my career with a similar attitude to yours, and TBH it's still my default. The question I find myself asking more and more is: can I maintain/increase my level of satisfaction while giving less of myself to a company that simply doesn't care?


Perhaps. Pay attention to the time you spend "doing the task well" so that YOU are satisfied. You are now smarter (say) but is your hierarchy going to promote you for this? Or park you and make you do this indefinitely, or blame you for the rest that didn't get done? Is your network as a whole now more inclined to hire you out in their next venture?

That smells like something a person with very little choice would say. At least I was saying similar things to myself in times I had very little choice. It's a very good way of regaining illusion of agency.

The quicker we make peace with the fact that hard work alone will not get us ahead (in most cases) the better it is for our mental health. We can put as much effort into our jobs as long as we accept that the only guaranteed result is our own joy, pride in our work and nothing else (not even a thank you from suits) is guaranteed.

If we are not able to accept that, then just do the bare minimum like most people. OR find a better job, but there is still no guarantee the new job would actually be better than the old job. But hey, at least we might get more compensation in our new job, so there's that


Well said.

I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of. That doesn't mean going out of my way and overworking myself, but it does mean being a good person to work with and writing quality code.

I tend to stick to the scope of work asked of me (though not always) for the reasons in the article, but I don't just phone it in. I put effort into writing good code, tests, and PR reviews.

In my experience, when it comes to getting the next job the only thing that really matters either way are references. If you were a too co-worker and did at least put in the effort to do good work within bounds of the scope asked for, you shouldn't have a problem.


> I draw the line at doing work that I can be proud of.

That's important. I spend more awake time working/thinking about work than really else. I don't know that it's healthy, but at least I want to be proud of the outputs if I am going to spend this much time on something. I just can't really show up and mail it in, I'm just not wired that way, and suspect that a lot if us aren't.


Some of that is inevitable when developing taste, or if the problem has you (so to speak). The problem is when this is the case all the time instead of a season here and there.

Your ability to page out work is a great thing to track.


"The problem is when this is the case all the time instead of a season here and there"

I hope I'm not projecting, and misinterpreting, but I try to explain this to a colleague all the time. His work style is 8 months of the year a couple hours here and then 2-3 months of crazy, intense work.

But I have to show up for 25-30 (I'm self-employed) hours a week, 48 weeks a year, and I find it really difficult to then squeeze in 2-4 months of 50+ hours weeks on top of this.

There is sprinting and there is distance running and for most of us, these are very different things.


Yeah this is super important IMO. Set your own standards for what that means. Makes it much easier to handle the slings and arrows of normal 9-5 headaches, and to understand when you're being pressed to do things you wouldn't be proud of.

I agree with your comment. I have never been laid off, and I hope I don't ever do or at least I see the signs early on to be prepared.

The way I see "work" is that you are going to spend 8hrs of your day doing it, so you better feel positive about it and enjoy it. I couldn't care less about the corporate lords and I very well know I am just a line on an excel, but when I work I want to be sure I feel satisfied, I enjoy it and build trust with my team and meaningful relationships where possible.

I am not a religious person, but there is a famous saying in Hinduism - कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन | मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि|| It roughly translates to "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction."

I love the last line of it where it says "don't be attached to inaction" which means just because the fruit of labour isn't in your control, doesn't mean you can just start behaving like a someone who doesn't care.


I read the Bhagavad Gita a few years ago, and this quote is much of the core lesson that I took away from it. It's one of the most impactful texts I have ever read.

I would take 'duty' in this context to refer not to your obligation to your employer, but rather to people your work is ultimately intended to serve, your coworkers, and perhaps also to yourself. If you've prioritized your efforts well, then you won't regret failure or gettin laid off, because you did the best you could given the information available to you at the time.


> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.

Early in my career I watched a coworker get denied a promotion to management and make a hard turn toward cynicism. To be honest, he was not ready for a management promotion and the company made the right call. However, he was so insulted that he immediately started looking for new jobs and stopped doing more than a couple hours of work per week.

I thought his cynicism was going to backfire, but over the next several years he job hopped almost every year, getting bigger titles at every move. For a long time I was jealous that his cynicism and mercenary-style approach to employment was paying off so well.

Years later I went to a fun networking lunch. His name came up and many of us, from different local companies, said we had worked with him. The conversation quickly turned to how he had kind of screwed everyone over by doing Resume Driven Development, starting ambitious projects, and then leaving before he had to deal with consequences of, well, anything.

He hit a wall mid-career where he was having a very hard time getting hired because his resume was full of job hopping. He was requesting reference letters from past bosses multiple times a month because he was always trying to job hop. One admitted that he eventually just stopped responding, because he'd write a lot of reference letters every job-hop cycle only to have him bail on the company with a lot of technical debt later.

He eventually moved away, I suspect partially because the local market had become saturated with people who knew his game. He interviewed extremely well (because he did it so much) but he'd fail out as soon as someone recognized his name or talked to an old coworker.

The last I talked to him, he felt like a really cynical person all around. Like his personality was based on being a mercenary who extracted "TC" from companies by playing all the games. He was out of work, but asked me if I had any leads (no thanks!).

I'm no longer jealous of his mercenary, job-hopping adventure.


I’ve known many people like this throughout my career, and I have seen the absolute opposite that you observed. These people are perfect candidates for management positions and their focus on office politics pays off handsomely. It’s not for me; might not be for you; but in reality these machiavellian tactics work if you wanna move up and get promoted in most large corporations.

The problem with getting ahead via Machiavellian tactics is that it only works at toxic companies.

Every good company I've worked for has been a bad place for politics and Machiavellian personalities.

So if you're using politics and Machiavellian tactics you may get ahead at some company, but then you're going to be surrounded by people who are also toxic and Machiavellian. Perhaps more so than you. Playing politics is often a short-term win at the expensive of the long-term.


I think there are plenty of toxic companies around and your friend's gamble is just another strategy at succeeding in them. I sometimes too feel envious that I don't have the chops to do this job hopping game.

This is a great point!

The question isn't what strategy works at miserable companies that expect 60+ hour work weeks: it is what strategy will get me well-paid at a job I actually want.


> The problem with getting ahead via Machiavellian tactics is that it only works at toxic companies

Right, so... every company.

It may be hard to see or realize this, but the higher you go up the corporate ladder, it's all politics. Maybe at the individual contributor level this isn't the case and it's a meritocracy, but at C-Suites? All politics.

Don't believe me? Look into the most desirable and successful CEOs. They stay at a company for maybe 5-6 years, make a lot of money for the company but run it into the ground, and then just jump ship. Not only does this work, but these are the most desirable and the highest paid CEOs.


Welcome to every company that pays at top of band…

In my experience this tactic tends to work well for manager positions and backfire easily for technical positions.

If a manager screws things up they get pro or side moted. If an expert screws up and leaves technical debt behind, they just get a bad name.


The standards for managers are also so much lower than for engineers. Most of the time companies don't know how to judge how good a manager is at their job, much less how to interview people for those roles.

Instead, people rely on "how confident do they sound?" as a proxy for competence. It used to be that you could do that in development, but then we started having engineers write code during interviews.


"I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc."

I've been in tech for 15 years and twice was enough for me. I now take on multiple contracts at the same time and make way more than I ever did as a regular employee.

I also won't work for startups as a full-time salaried employee anymore. They will always try to squeeze the hours out of you because they are usually trying to make a fast approaching deadline to get that next round of funding.

I had a well paying 6 month contract last summer and they wanted to hire me as a full-time, salaried employee. The problem was that I worked closely with their salaried employees and they were always overworked (many working on multiple teams) and working long hours on extremely tight deadlines.

The space was also over-saturated and when I researched the company, they were not turning a profit after a couple of years and continuing to take on rounds of funding.

When I refused the offer and wanted to continue as a contractor, they cut off all contact with me and I haven't heard from them since. It really showed me that they just wanted to overwork me and not pay.


What sites do you use to find good contract work?

The usual job sites like indeed.com. Even when I have enough work, I look a couple of times/day.

How do you define “good”? When I looked at contract work briefly in 2023 and 2024, contract rates for enterprise dev and the type of work you find on Indeed was around $60-$80/hour W2. Which is really on the low to median end of even enterprise dev once you take into account no paid PTO, no health insurance, and you can’t even count on working 1800 hours a year.

What types of contracts / work do you do? Website design type stuff (front/backend)? Mobile apps? Other?

backend development.

I'm very cynical but I also kinda agree with this.

Don't be loyal to the company, because the company isn't loyal to you. Don't overwork, don't neglect family, friends and hobbies. It's simply not worth it, you'll burn yourself out, and it won't save you when the ax falls.

But do a good job, because it's good for you, your self-esteem, your mood and your skills. If you "quiet quit", you're doing yourself a disservice. (Barring extreme cases, of course).


I'd rephrase this to: don't be loyal to work but be loyal to your coworkers. Be the person everyone wants to work with.

I would nit and say "quiet-quit" to give you the time to work on finding your next job. Do it as a means, not an end.

Love this distillation!

Yeah - hard agree with this. There's a lot to be said about giving your best effort in proportion to all the other things you're doing in your life.

> There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one

This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years. Early 2010s it was more common but this practice is dead. Now every company is a new slate. In fact, I've seen people repeatedly rewarded for jumping ship and build there career on that. Companies have stopped investing in devs, so why should devs not reciprocate?

And there are so many startups. More than you can count. There are more new ones every day than you could ever have time to apply to. They don't all have time to talk to each other.

Not saying it's not good to have pride in your work, but within reason, and within a framework of fairness and quid pro quo. Don't let people exploit you any more than you exploit them. Employment is 100% transactional and the moment you forget that is the moment you get taken advantage of.


It's not about references. It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work. Many years ago, when I started doing consulting/contracting work, literally all my of my jobs came through people I had previously worked for or with across a variety of companies. And if you play your cards right, as the years roll on, you won't even have to apply for jobs other than as a formality. Instead, people who's respect you've gained will try to bring you into where they work.

> It's about building a network of colleagues who respect you and your work.

The network is actually holding you back. You don't need a network to get a new job AND if that person in another company has enough pull to get you in it's actually likely a sign they've been there too long themselves if they're not directly in control of the hiring budget.

Just job hop. This ain't your daddy's profession.


> This is completely false.

It's not completely false at all - but it does depend greatly depends on which country you're based in.

Where I am, in Spain, your network, and your reputation within it, are _everything_. Good jobs will sometimes not even be advertised, as the first thing a hirer will do is ask around their network for recommendations, and those recommendations count for _a lot_. On the other side, when you are looking for work, the first thing you do is ask your network for an intro - and again, that intro counts for a lot.

That's not to say that the traditional interview process will be skipped, but candidates coming from recommendations will have a massive head-start over others.


Well... That doesn't bode well for me. I'm in Spain but I've always worked for companies in other countries (including my current remote job).

You can still cultivate all these people in random places in your network. Apparently you are in a line of work where other country corporations will do fine, and these people will still need you in their next ventures or posts.

Their point wasn't reference checks it was the power of a network of people who want to work with you again because they know your work is more than just transactional.

And sometimes it's funny how little it takes. Some people called me simply because they knew of me (I barely had heard of them). They did that because that was soooo much more efficient that some automatic "job posting" circus and they valued their time and deadlines.

Reference checks happen a lot. You just don't see them.

Most companies stopped asking for references because everyone just games the system. Managers are afraid of giving anything but glowing references because they want to keep their own network opportunities strong. Giving positive references is basically a networking game these days.

So that's not how people reference check. Now, they go on LinkedIn and look for mutual connections they trust. They check for people they know whose work history overlapped with the candidate's time at a different company. They go ask that person without the candidate ever knowing.

I get probably 10X as many backchannel reference requests as I do formal reference check requests.


Why would I even have as a connection on LinkedIn with people who I don’t think I made a good impression on? They are useless to me.

> This is completely false. I literally haven't seen someone do a reference check once in the last 10 years.

I understand this might not be your experience, but it's far from being "completely false".

I have had background checks/reference checks done on me (thankfully my would-be boss told me they were a formality and nobody cared about the results. I say "thankfully" not because I had anything to hide, but because the contractors doing the background checks asked for the dumbest things). I was also contacted by US-based consulting firms and asked to provide references on a former boss of mine, who was now applying for an engineering position... and to my surprise, the reference check involved getting on a call with me!

More recently, a relative was applying to a fintech and was asked for references for all her pasts jobs since she started working in the relevant field.

I know lots of companies don't care, but many others do.

Besides, like other commenters said, it's not only about formal references checking. It's also about the networks you build with coworkers whom you can potentially meet again in other jobs, and whom you want to speak favorably of you. I know I've informally vetoed coworkers whom I knew were terrible at their jobs and I heard recruiting was thinking of making an offer to. Likewise, I've enthusiastically recommended past coworkers who I would enjoy working with again.


The effect’s source is much more direct than that.

It’s not a reference check to see “is sam0x17 a good dev?” at the end of a hiring pipeline, but rather “I’ve got an open role and remember that sam0x17 is one of the best devs I’ve ever worked with; let’s get them into the company!”


Or you can drop a line to someone who you've worked with in some manner and ask to meet. That's how I got my last 14-year job.

“okay boomer” (context: I’m 50, I am being sarcastic/self deprecating).

That might have been feasible pre 2020. But once I started working remotely and looking for jobs outside of the metro area where I spent most of my career, the usefulness of my network dropped dramatically.

In my case, I also did a slight pivot and my old network of people who I worked with for the first 25 years of my career can’t speak to my current suitability for a job.

You would see the same from someone early career. Their skills would progress so fast it would be crazy to ask someone for a reference who worked with them when they were 22-24 and now they are 27-30.


I'm not sure which market you're in, but companies here absolutely do reference checks. They will even reach out people you didn't list if they're a shared connection.

My standing recommendation to everyone is to do good work and get better at advocating for yourself to make sure you're either getting the experience or the comp you need to achieve your goals. If you're not getting that, switch jobs. It's much much better to switch jobs every few years if that's what you need to stay motivated than to stay, do the minimum and collect a paycheck.


I can guarantee you that no large tech company takes the time to find shared connections.

On the other hand, why would I have connections who I didn’t make a good impression on? they are useless to me.

I currently work at a 600 person company, I just invited everyone as reference that popped up as a suggestion - I did the same at AWS. Good luck trying to find the people who actually worked with.


They're talking about referrals, not reference checks. Getting good referrals is hugely important, especially at smaller companies that don't the capacity to do a rigorous hiring process.

I spent the last few months interviewing at various bay area startups for senior SE roles. About half of them wanted references. This was my experience so YMMV

A lot of companies tend to ask for them. No idea how many actually follow through and contact them.

When I was a hiring manager, I found that reference checks were _more_ predictive of eventual performance than the interview cycle was.

After the first time I got burned hiring someone I couldn't get a strong reference for, I got over my laziness and did my job.


How so? I’m never going to give you a reference of someone who isn’t going to say glowing things about me

2 points:

I've had people not know why I'm reaching out; I've also gotten references selected by the candidate that did not have good things to say. eg "X is difficult to work with."

And most people aren't good impromptu liars. So pushing a bit with a reference on what did you work on together? Why is this person fantastic? Would you hire this person? can get you far. And if the reference has left their shared employment, the classic: why haven't you hired this person?


Truly bad candidates can’t provide references at all, or are entirely oblivious to how poorly they are perceived.

True. In spite of my earlier comment, someone earlier in their career who didn't work out--especially at a smaller company--may have trouble providing a reference. It is also the case that I've seen people get fired who just had no clue that they were obviously unsuited for their job and were totally blindsided.

You’d be surprised by how many people don’t think that through. There are always a surprising number of people apparently just going through the motions.

Seems a bit weird. Unless you're really bad, surely you can round up a few buds who who will say glowing things about you.

It's not at all false IME, though I'm not in SV or the US. Most job want up-front references from at least 2 people, one of whom must be your current supervisor/boss (or someone else higher in the chain of command). You can occasionally get away without it, but it's difficult.

No one is going to let you talk to your current manager and let them know you are looking for a job.

On the other hand, many companies don’t allow managers to give references.


> No one is going to let you talk to your current manager and let them know you are looking for a job.

What on earth do you mean? Who is going to stop me from talking to my manager?

Over my 20+ year career, in all-but one case my current manager has always been one of my referees and has known that I'm looking for other jobs.

Maybe this is a cultural thing. Here (Aus) references from colleagues are basically disregarded and all that prospective employers are interested in is referees from current and former managers.


Typo, I meant no one is going to let you talk to their current manager.

There is no way I’m going to let my current job know that I’m looking for a job. That would be completely illegal advised.


It's a job; not a cult. People come and go. If I were working somewhere that made me feel like I couldn't leave without being super secretive about it, that would be a huge red flag.

What do you think happens once a company knows you are looking for a job and then you don’t get the new job? Do you think they are going to give you the plumb assignments? Raises? Promotions?

If you think Australia is some utopia where the advice isn’t the same

https://www.seek.com.au/career-advice/article/should-you-tel...

https://www.sprintpeople.com.au/should-you-tell-your-boss-yo...

https://mane.com.au/news/how-your-boss-can-tell-you-are-look...


> What do you think happens once a company knows you are looking for a job and then you don’t get the new job?

Maybe it depends how useful you are. IME, they're grateful to have you say a while longer.

One of the guys I work with had accepted another job and was virtually out the door when the new job fell through. My company gladly welcomed him back, kept giving him challenging work and eventually promoting him.

A couple of months ago I told my boss and my boss's boss I was going to start looking for other jobs. They tried to see if there was something that'd make me stay, and when there wasn't, they were 100% supportive. If I said tomorrow "actually, I've had a change of heart, I'd like to stay" they'd be genuinely pleased. This has basically been the story my whole career.

Sure, if your boss is an arsehole they'll do arsehole things. My advice is not to work for arseholes.


reference checks are pointless if employee gives you a list of favorable references

It happens all the time as you get higher and higher on the org tree, I had jobs not only call my references by ask if they could also speak to my former bosses.

When the money is seriously on the line people care.


Reference checks aren't what matters, it's referrals and getting a job that wasn't ever advertised, because someone knows you're good and offers you the position directly.

Can confirm 17 years in, past performance has never impacted future job prospects.

In 17 years you never had a past co-worker contact you about a job? That's confirmation that your past performance is affecting your future job prospects. And if you have had that kind of contact, then your statement above is a lie.

People are vastly overestimating network effects when you and your peers have similar experience and backgrounds. You'd likely get the job anyways, and the job probably isn't that great (in terms of upward momentum) to begin with.

As someone who's done hiring look at the people who have a list of good references. It's basically just the same position/level for _years_ because that's all your network can give or feels comfortable giving you (why would they give you a better job than they have).

It's a socioeconomic trap.

Just job hop. I promise you nothing else matters.


Is all you care about in a job the money? And are you looking at your total comp, or your hourly rate?

In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value all my time, not just my bank account.

What does my reputation buy me? In the worst job market in the last 20 years, I had two offers in hands within three weeks. I can bring top performers willing to work for regular salaries into wherever I land. All of that is because a lot of people who worked with me in the past would like to work with me again, and the companies we build software for benefit.

I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement, not just a bigger number. And it has been plenty lucrative.

Startups don't succeed because the code is good, but they sure can fail because it is bad. When a company needs to save itself after the underqualified mercantile engineers have left a spaghetti mess of lambdas scattered all over the org or a spaghetti mess of a monolith with every model in one folder, they are very happy to pay for actual expertise.


I care about my well-being and being able to float for extended periods of time if necessary. I can go many, many years without a job at this point and suffer absolutely zero quality of life issues.

>the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks.

I mean don't overwork for an employer who doesn't care about you (none of them do)? Just go switch jobs.

>I've built my career on jobs with _actual_ advancement

This just reads like a no true scotsman fallacy. What does "actual" advancement mean here? Again, I have plenty of security (not job security) right now.

>I can bring top performers willing to work for regular salaries into wherever I land.

So you're fine with exploiting people? What? Just because someone is willing to be a fool doesn't mean you should stand by and let them be one.

And also, I question the "top performers" part of this, given your other qualifiers throughout the post. Especially the comment about big tech. The numbers don't add up in your favor.


> In my experiences, the places that pay the most _have_ to pay that much because the job sucks. By the time you divide their salary by hours actually worked, people at FAANG end up making significantly less than I do. I value all my time, not just my bank account.

This is the type of copium that you usually hear from people who have never worked in BigTech…

BigTech could afford to pay me 50% more as a mid level employee than working a lot harder at a 60 person startup and that company was paying about average for a local enterprise dev in a major metropolitan area.

I’m no longer there. But I had to get a job as a “staff” level employee to even get in the range when I left of my job as a mid level employee at BigTech. Comparing the leveling guidelines, it’s about the same as a “senior” at the equivalent job at BigTech.


That advice is valid for dime-a-dozen coders working dime-a-dozen jobs, which, granted, is the majority of developers, but we're on Hacker News. The more specialized and deeply technical a role is, the smaller the pool of qualified people is and the really senior folks tend to know each other. Networking matters much much more in these smaller tight-knit communities.

It's the opposite? You don't need someone to vouch for you if you have a highly specialized skill set. I certainly haven't.

You might rely more on your network when you don't have any notable skill sets that set you apart from other developers.

Your claim isn't rational or practical?

This is what I mean, your attributing certain outcomes to an action that's effectively just a placebo effect. It doesn't actually matter.


I had to look for a job both in 2023 and last year. For me it was both a network and specialized skills.

Specialized skills for me was cloud + app dev consulting and working at AWS (ProServe) and even more specialized was that I was a major contributor on a popular official open source “AWS Solution” in it niche and I had my own published open source solutions on AWS’s official GitHub site.

That led to two interviews and one offer within three weeks.

My network led to offers where a former manager submitted me to a position at the company that had acquired the company we worked for as a “staff architect” over the technical direction of all of their acquisitions. They gave me an offer.

My network also got me an offer from a former coworker who was a director of a F500 non tech company. He was going to make a position for me to be over the cloud architecture and migration strategies. He trusted me and he had just started working there.

Last year, my current job just fell in my lap, the internal recruiter reached out to out to me and that led to an offer.

I also had another former CTO throw a short term contract my way to tide me over.

But on the other hand, my plan B applications as a standard enterprise CRUD developer working remotely led to nothing.


We also get paid a lot more than the dime-a-dozen coders.

As is so often the case, optimizing for the short term comes at the cost of the long-term.


My go to reference is a CTO of a startup I worked for. He is now semi retired and a “fractional CTO”.

But honestly, I’ve leveled up so much in the past five years, anything that any of my previous coworkers could say about me would be outdated


> when you and your peers have similar experience and backgrounds.

Then you’ve done a shitty job building your network. No wonder you don’t see any value.

I got laid off a bit ago - after announcing I was looking, I had several C-level folks reach out with roles.

You’re hot shit on an island until the day you aren’t. shrug


>Then you’ve done a shitty job building your network.

Even better! I've been in a position to see "network effects" over and over and over again at the highest levels.

I'm telling you an uncomfortable truth: Job hop.

>I had several C-level folks reach out with roles.

See, this is how I know we're speaking past each other. You're acting as if this means something. It doesn't. Until you can even being to accept this is just a placebo effect it's unlikely you'll accept the effort was wasted.

Something something can't convince a man he was fooled.

Job hop. Get more money. Retire.


Relevant username

By all means, feel free to demonstrate where your network has gotten you. I'm sure we'll all be envious!

You are touching on what I would classify as two different kinds of layoffs.

If you're working for a startup, a layoff is a likely outcome. Most startups fail. Those that don't often end up pivoting, often more than once, and cutting costs tends to go hand in hand with that.

Layoffs from big tech companies is a relatively new phenomenon, really only since the pandemic, and they're fundamentally different. It's actually the sort of thing that Corporate America has been doing for decades. In this case, big tech companies make money hand over fist yet they have layoffs, typically ~5% of the workforce every year.

These layoffs will be perpetual because the reasons for them aren't around controlling costs, avoiding bankruptcy or any of the "normal" reasons for layoffs. The goal is suppress labor costs. People fearful for their jobs aren't demanding raises or better benefits. Plus you can dump the work the 5% were doing onto the remaining 95% who won't say no because they're fearful for their own jobs. And that's the point.

The veneer of tech companies being mavericks who were employee-focused is completely over. A lot of the "perks", which are really just part of your cojmpensation package, are getting and will continue to get cut or just made worse through less funding. At some point, you'll start getting charged for those "free" meals.

In 10 years, all the big tech companies will be indistinguishable from Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.


Actual salaries haven't fallen. The point of paying those salaries is you have to earn every penny. If they overhire and a bunch of people start taking the money for granted, that breaks down the social contract

Half of the perks e.g. sabbaticals or sleeping pods don't even make sense in a competitive working environment


Compensation gets attacked in a number of ways.

Your base salary won't tend to drop but at the same time you'll get an annual 1.5% increase when inflation is 9% and the company made $300 billion in profits last year.

Bonuses for normal employees (below VP) are essentially formulaic at most big tech companies, for the most part. So if you're a senior SWE with a 15% bonus target, well that's based on yoru base salary. It hasn't gone down in nominal terms but it has in real terms.

Also, depending on your company, there's a pool of discretionary funds on top of the formula. Your bonus can even be taken away and given to someone else on the team (yes, this happens). How big is that pool? Has it increased over time? Decreased? Or stayed the same? On a per-employee basis. You don't have visibility into that unless you're a manager.

Next is stock compensation. Your initial grant is obviously known. Annual refreshes if you get them tend to be formulaic too. But what about discretionary grants? That's where the big money is. How much is being thrown around in total? Is it going up or down over time? You have no visibility into that.

All of the above have, as input, your performance ratings. There are quotas for each performance level at a certain level (usually 150+ people or director level) so not everyone gets Greatly Exceeds Expectations. What are the quotas ("target percentages") for each bucket? Has that changed over time? Some compoanies now have targets for subpar ratings (ie ratings below "Meets Expectations"). It's the pipeline for getting rid of people and getting people to do more for the same money.

So technically you have to do more now to maintain a Meets Expectation rating than you did 5 or 10 years ago. Is that a pay cut?

And then we have promotions. The typical way this works is a company will divide promotion candidates into pools. A promotion committee will essentially rank the packets they have. At a certain level there is a quota for promotions to hand out. Those get distributed to those from the top down until there are no promotions left to give out.

Companies have allegedly reduced costs by simply reducing the promotion target percentages / quotas.

And then there are all the benefits that have a tendency to get worse over time. Health sinsurance, 401k matching and less tangible benefits like food, facilities and so on.


But supposing this happens across the economy, there's less inflation. E.g. if housing costs track tech salaries and soak up most of the surplus available, the relative wealth gained/lost is hard to predict

> Layoffs from big tech companies is a relatively new phenomenon, really only since the pandemic.

Not really. E.g. I remember the mass layoffs at Microsoft back in 2009, and that wasn't even the first one. Google also had plenty.


> your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one

Don't over index on this. It's a small factor among many.


strong disagree. from extensive experience. it's a huge factor, and good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job

Strong referrals almost always leads to a job that your network can place you in. You might have limited options for companies and teams, based on who is in your network. If the job market is abundant then having a strong referral is less valuable, but is often the best path to more senior positions. If the job market is not abundant then a job referral might be a way to be placed in a position in weeks instead of months.

I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself. I keep good relationships with former co-workers, we maintain group chats for each of my previous companies where we keep each other up on our careers. I even went to barbecues hosted by a former manager, until he moved out of the Bay Area. None of these have ever actually materialized into a job. It just doesn't work that way. We're all entry level worker bees and don't have any way to put our thumb on the scale at our own companies. If someone in my network reaches out to me asking for help with getting a job at MyCompany, the best I can do is review his resume, coach him on interviews, and then ultimately point him to the link in the job board, where 90% chance he will be ghosted.

Where are these companies where I can tell my boss "Hey, Mike is a good programmer and he just applied. Just give him the job without interviewing! Or accelerate him through the process!" I suppose if it were a two person startup where it was me and my boss you could do that, but at a normal 1000 person CRUD shop with dedicated HR machinery? No way.


On the flip side I’ve worked in 4 companies over 12 years and 2/4 were jobs that I got because I knew someone. The other two, a significant cohort of the people who worked there knew each other from previous workplaces.

Nobody is getting jobs without any interviews, but people are absolutely getting interviewed before/without a job listing, or starting the initial screen with recruiter/hiring manager with an upper hand of “Mike said you’re good to work with”. Even at a 1000 person company with HR.


>> I keep hearing about these "network placed" jobs on HN, but in 25 years, I've never seen it myself.

Same here, also =~ 25 years (working as a professional programmer since 2001). I never had a problem finding a job myself (either switching jobs or being laid off, it happens) but it was always "cold calling", apply on a job board / Linked In and go through the interview without any referral or inside help.

And when I tried to refer someone, they were blissfully ignored. Even had managers / HR go after me: "we need someone ASAP, don't you have some referrals?". Reached my acquaintances among former workmates, convinced them to make a personalized CV so I can send it to HR, nothing happened next. They didn't even call the guy, completely "forget about it".

So I learned my lesson of corporate helplessness and don't give a fuck anymore. Don't recommend anyone, don't care if HR or managers need someone urgently, I do my job and don't get involved with anyone else anymore.


Yup, another similar situation here - ~20 years in Bay Area, almost 15 years at one company, no one in my "network" said anything about jobs. I did contact a few directly and "not hiring right now". A bunch of others (since I was one of the younger ones at this company when I joined in '08) had since retired.

Got a new job through a LinkedIn ad, found a former co-worker here.

I mean, it could be that I'm not a great networking person, but.. I'll agree that network hasn't helped me much so far.


> We're all entry level worker bees

You're going to need to pitch your buddies a lot more aggressively than that.

You've worked closely with Mike in the past at ExampleCorp, where he was one of the team's top contributors. He was great at code reviewing, a calm and reliable voice during production incidents, and always ready to help out new graduates. Mike was the guy people turned to with their most difficult WidgetStack bugs, fixing problems that had stumped other developers. He would be a great asset to the company, and a great fit for this role - which you note needs WidgetStack. He has your strongest possible recommendation.

The thing is - the pitch also has to be true.


That's not how it works. What happens is an organization decides to hire for some reason, now has the problem that good candidates are hard to find. So people say "well I know this guy who I worked with at xxx that's looking for a job".

I'll give you a couple of examples I've been involved with:

1. I was applying for a job at Company A and I had a former co-worker working there. I think it was down to me and 2 other people and the manager asked my former co-worker about me and I believe his feedback tipped the scales in my favor.

2. Same situation as above but in this case it was my feedback. A different former co-worker was applying for a job at Company A(now that I was working there) and the manager hiring asked both me and my former and now present co-worker about the candidate as it was between him and another person.

3. A former manager straight up offered me a position at his new job because I'd be a good fit for the role as they were building exactly what I had done before. I turned him down(nicely) as I had stepped away from that particular type of work.

4. I've given negative feedback on a candidate that I'd worked with that was interviewing for an open role but it wasn't just me. All 3 of us including co-workers from (1) and (2) above had previously worked with the candidate and we didn't think he'd be a good fit for our org but it was ultimately up the manager of the team that was hiring to make the decision.

Granted I'm at a smaller company but these "network placed" jobs do happen. Sometimes it's just tipping the scales and sometimes it's a straight up job and sometimes it could be the reason you didn't get the job.


My first job was a student worker at my school district in Information Services. Got that because my physics teacher put in a word for me (and I interviewed ok).

My first 'real job' out of college was a 'noc techician' at a company a good friend was working at. Although that wasn't a great use of my skills, at least it got me started, and I think there was a chance of moving towards development, eventually.

Next job was through a niche job board.

Since then, I've been hired my original skip level boss from that job twice.

Job interviews are a lot different when they are trying to convince you to join, vs you trying to convince them to let you.

Making an impression on someone who has opportunities for you later can work out well.

I've also had a couple other people reach out for what I think would have been a similarly easy interview for me, but one of them I didn't want to work with again, and the other one, the company location and business wasn't a good fit for me.


There's a power law here.

Most developers don't work in giant companies, but the programmers who do work in giant companies mostly don't know many programmers who work in the medium-sized companies where most of the jobs are right now.

If you are interested in diversifying your network, you can purposefully choose a job at a different scale of company when you are next looking, but you can also start going to conferences or user groups or get involved with an interesting open-source project.

Not every piece of networking has to be with coworkers. Not putting all your networking eggs into one basket can give you options, especially as the layoffs are flying fast and furious.


Well, there's also a difference between liking someone and liking to work with them. I've had a lot of coworkers I liked that I wouldn't bend over backwards to hire. That said, this process might not work at Google or what have you.

I've never worked in a company so large that I couldn't go a step further and actually talk to the hiring manager and tell them they would be stupid not to take someone's resume seriously. But it's more about fast tracking the interview than skipping it. No one is just going to blindly hire referrals. They shouldn't anyway.


> We're all entry level worker bees

Not one of your former managers that like you has gone on to high-level positions?


[flagged]


This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. There’s a great bit in Margin Call about this: Kevin Spacey’s character challenges the plan to sell the firm’s entire MBS portfolio with the point that once their counterparties figure out they’ve been sold a bag, they will never trust them again. The firm insists on the plan anyway, so when Spacey tells his floor the news, he acknowledges that this will be the end of many of their careers, and as compensation the firm is giving each trader a $2m bonus for selling through their slice of the portfolio. They’re basically giving them an advance in exchange for making themselves unhireable, because ultimately the economy is made of people working with other people.

That's maybe true in finance / investment / hedge funds. I don't think it applies to tech / software much..

If you can get as good a signal on someone's performance in 5 hours of interviews as you can in five months of working with them, either you are a genius or you are not paying attention at work.

I have a guess as to which it is.


The better someone is at their job, the less I think of what they are doing at work, because they make my problems disappear, so I can actually think of the things that matter to me (e.g. my family/friends and hobbies).

An interview is a process targeted specifically at evaluating performance of a candidate.

If you have time to pay attention to 100 other people at work and think about their performance - you either have a super easy job where you can slack, or should focus more on improving your own work.


Lol wut? Where are you getting this?

Strong referrals may lead to interviews at larger companies. But rarely jobs. You still have to go through the interview process and most of the time how you came in isn’t even known to the interviewer.

Now if your network includes directors and CxOs who can just push a job through specifically for you, that’s different. Especially if it is a strategic hire for them. Those types of jobs usually don’t involve formal interviews and they are more of discussions about mutual fit.


At least for me that was not true, I came back to Google after more than two years and did not have to interview.

That's returning to a former employer. That's very different if you left on good terms - they already "interviewed" you for some number of years.

Referrals may operate within a network, but references do not necessarily so.

An internal referral by someone at the company you are applying to might carry some weight, or at least get you a foot in the door (interview), but I think it's been years/decades since past employers were willing to say more than "yes, he worked here", for fear of lawsuits.

References these days are usually with individual coworkers, rather than a company reference.

It usually isn't "is this person a good developer?" either. Instead, it is open-ended questions without any one right answer. How much structure did this person like? What about your work place helped them be successful? What role did they play on the project you worked on together? What impact did they have on the team?

If someone's reference didn't work with them closely, that's as strong a no-hire signal as if they outright said "this person sucked." If they don't have anyone they can hand you the phone number for who has specific, detailed praise about them and their work, you can safely move on to the ten other candidates who do.


This is true in giant companies, but in smaller companies it is less true.

In smaller companies, "I worked with this person and they are really solid." carries a lot of weight.


> good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job

Yeah, no. They're one factor in many. I've managed just fine throughout almost 4 decades of career without referrals.

I'm fairly OK with how that career turned out.

It has drawbacks. Some of my jobs were odd kinks in the career curve - though I did enjoy them. (Roughly, ESA -> Industrial Automation -> Consulting -> Startup -> Video Games -> FAANG. It is not the straightest path :)

Referrals are definitely a large plus (IIRC, the industry stats say about 1/3rd of job offers are internal referrals, even though they are far from 1/3 of the candidates).

They aren't the only way, though.


Yeah, and companies pushing that angle are losing top employees because of it.

Because it's stupid.

Kissing ass and doing good work are two entirely different activities.


I respectfully disagree. Parent comment is hardly over-indexing; it's a big factor. The world may be big but the communities are small.

Usually when you’re in a shitty situation, all the people who know who you are are also in bad situations and probably can’t hire or protect you. That’s how business works—things go bad at the same time. All correlations go to one in a crash.

Not today or tomorrow, but next month, when one of them has started a cool startup, another is VP at her friend’s company, and the rockstar made it into Big Co

What ends up mattering more is your ability to form good relationships with co-workers at your last job and sell yourself on your resume.

Most of the people who end up getting high paying, high ranking jobs are not very skilled technically, but are skilled personally - even engineers.

So I'd say - do your job as well as you can (don't go too crazy with work), be friendly with people in your company, and phrase your achievements in terms of % value/speed/users added.


When you are just starting, yes. But after a while, if you pay attention to cultivating it, you amass a significant network. Small factor initially, big one later if you work on it.

> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.

I sacrifice an evening - but not to my company, but to studying Leetcode to move on to the next company. I also have side hustles that I devote time to.

> when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.

I am helpful to most people when they need help, and they remember this. My code is clean and well architected and well tested, and they can see this too. They also know that I know the language and platform we're using, and general programming (and business) knowledge. Few care whether I'm a "standout contributor" in terms of getting many stories done. Actually if I have a good lead or manager I might go above and beyond for them in terms of doing more.

> a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.

Well, this is correct. I help my co-workers.

Things are situational. If I got a job helping set up LLM's or something, I might dive in and work a lot of hours just because I feel it is benefiting me too. On the other hand I can be somewhere where it doesn't make sense to work more than forty hours (if that) a week.


Don't really agree. The benefits you mentioned are already there for 50-70 percentile employees. Like doing a bit more than minimum, occasionally helping others, not slacking too much so others had to pick up your work etc. No benefits to bust your ass to be the top 5%.

And when more and more people are like this, the average quality goes down, so it is even easier to be average.

Pride in my work? Sometimes I have pride in my work. Doesn't mean I should open myself to be exploited.


My perception of work changed after a layoff last fall. I had the typical C-Suite reaching out and 6 months of severance. After giving over a decade of my time to a company and given 6 months of pay in return my thought process changed. I was offered a job due to their contacts, but I would be in a similar situation with no laws to protect me, so I decided to decline and left the country. I had a contact in Mexico... after reading about their labor laws I decided while the pay was 50% of what i made in USA. I didn't have to worry about layoffs. For perspective had I been laid off in Mexico and worked the same amount of time my severance by law would have been about 3 years salary. That was the bare minimum by law (if the company offered a savings accounts, which most larger ones have here). A friend in HR down here did some calculations and said I would have been most likely closer to 4-5 years because of stipulations in contracts.

Why would I recommend a standout performer for a position at my company? So they can outshine me? I never recommend the "true believer" tool, always the average performer I got along with.

"A players hire A players and B players hire C players”.

I’m not saying I am necessarily an “A player”. But I am secure in my skills and the ability to convince someone to pay me for my skills. I was instrumental in hiring three people at a job who were all better than me at the time. I learned so much from them while I was there, it helped set me up for my next job that was my first job as a lead.

Why would I want someone that can’t help me be successful at my current job and whom I can’t learn from?

Even there I would ask my then former coworkers first advice.


99% of people hiring are "B/C players”

If you think so, I'm sorry for wherever you've worked.

A vs B vs C isn't some fixed thing we're assigned at birth: it's a matter of learning, investing in ourselves, having both humility and pride in our work, maintaining our boundaries and building up our coworkers.

People who have fully replaced intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation won't ever get to A level, because the incentives are non-linear. Actual A players keep investing and collaborating, whether they get rewarded for it now or later or never, just because it is the right thing to do.


It's a simple numbers game - the A teams hire rarely and don't turn over staff constantly and when they do hire they pick up talent internally if it exists.

The rest hire as per the quote previously, turn over staff, build empires for their own egos etc. This makes up the bulk of market facing hiring.


This is utterly false. My motivation and I assume most people who go to work is their insatiable addiction to food, clothes and shelter. “Passion is Bullshit”.

Everything I do at work is and has been since 2008 (I have been working a lot longer) is to feed those addictions. While we did get off the hedonic treadmill and downsized a couple of years ago and I focus much more on work life balance, I work hard now not for the maximum comp. But to maintain my autonomy at work and be trusted and because my current job is pretty straightforward (for me at least) and has unlimited PTO and allows us to pursue our travel hobbies.


I don't think most people would agree on what is an A, B or C.

I don't think it is consistent company to company what is an A, B or C.

And that’s often good enough depending on what your needs are…

The reality that nobody wasnt to say out loud is that the top 10-20% of the people you interviewed for a role would all have been just as great as the "best" candidate (and often enough the amazing candidate turns out to be terrible anyway).

If you are hiring for your standard enterprise CRUD developer or “full stack” developer, once you have a few seniors (real seniors not “codez real gud” seniors), you can go down to the top 50%

Or you can hire juniors, and after a couple of years have a whole team of A-players.

It's like the story about the coach who watched two runners run the same time, one with perfect form and the other a total mess. He let the total mess onto the team, and the runner with perfect form got mad, "but I ran better than he did!!!" The coach replied, "I can't help you go any faster than you are, but the total mess is going to be incredibly fast with just a little form."


The juniors are doing negative work. I need people who are neutral or positive shortly after they come on board. Besides that, once a junior gets experience, they are going to jump ship.

My expectations of a mid level developer is once given mostly clear business requirements, they should be able to turn those requests into code. They should be able to handle any “straightforward” task I throw at them.

From the definition I have seen from leveling guidelines:

Straightforward problems or efforts have minimal visible risks or obstacles. The goal is clear, but the approach is not, requiring the employee to rely on their knowledge and skills to determine the best course of action.

I expect a senior to handle “complex” tasks.

Complex problems or efforts involve visible risks, obstacles, and constraints. This often requires making trade-offs that demand expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to influence others to build consensus on the best approach.


It should be about raising the bar, not lowering it. You’d grow if you weren’t the smartest person in the room. Unfortunately this stance prevents one from seeing that.

Even if I am, and I’ve been hired multiple times to be the “smartest person in the room” , I want to hire people who can outshine me because that means I can just delegate high level concepts and they can run with it so I can move on the other initiatives.

While doing that was half the reason that I got let go from my last job, I delegated the work I was doing to the person I hired and moved on to a newer initiative that was pulled, I still have no regrets.

I got a chance to put leading an impressive “AI” project on my resume and it helped me get my current much better job.

Before anyone starts groaning , it was a framework to do better intent based bots for online call centers (Amazon Connect and Lex). The perfect use case for it.


Yeah... the overenthusiastic tool bringing up labor intensive ideas for minimal gain just means I can't hit the gym at lunch. Not putting up with that so a meaningless metric can go up by 0.5%.

true corporate strategist here... i recommend people i trust and beleive in and want to work with. if they can outshine me i can get better by working with them. i dont give a rats ass about my performance reviews. just quality of work and nice collaboration , preferably with people better than me.

So you don't have to spend a lot of time cleaning up their messes.

I bet you're a joy to work with.

> leveraging job offers for raises, etc.

That is a double-edged sword. You can do it, but it really should come from a place where you're fully prepared to leave, and you'd really prefer you didn't. Sometimes, companies underpay. You should be continually engaging in price discovery, and you should demand to be paid what you're worth.

Just be aware that your company may well say "oh well, good luck", and the new company may be worse. In smaller companies, you might set yourself up for resentment if you stay. Large tech companies really will just coldly look at "is she/he worth it? Yes/no", make that decision, and move on.

> but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.

You build those contacts by helping people, not by helping the company. (Also, referrals are massively overvalued, IMHO. I'm not seeing them happening very often - but maybe my friend group is an outlier. Wonder if there are stats)

> carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.

Realism, however, is helpful. Your company will throw you away like a used paper tissue. Make peace with it. Don't believe the "we're family" BS, because you aren't. You're at best the equivalent to a sports team. And when the team doesn't need you anymore, you'll be let go.

And that's fine. What makes it painful is lying to yourself, pretending a company could actually care about you as a person. (Small carve-out: Tiny companies, with <30 or so people, still can manage to care)

That doesn't mean phoning it in, or doing shoddy work. It does mean being clear about the fact that you have to look out for yourself, your wellbeing, your health, your career.

You're right in that your co-workers are the only ones who have the capacity to love you back. But I can guarantee you that working harder won't make you more loveable. Work well, but be clear where your boundaries are.


> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.

That hasn't really been true in my experience. This might be another one of those cultural shifts. work connections in general are looser and you need to do a lot more than just casually chat at work to really "stand out". People are arguably overworked and have no time to perceive who does what work how efficiently unless you're a direct co-worker or a lead.

I agree with don't be a grouch. No one like a grouch unless its calling out bad leadership. But I think being nice is better than trying to be the best. People remember how you made them feel, and current work (epecially WFH) may limit how much you get to impact a specific person's workload.

>On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.

YMMV. how you process that matters a lot. If you use some cynicism you can protect yourself. If youre all cynicism you become a grouch.

>Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.

only in a market as bad as this where you don't want to go back to job searching. But normally, I wouldn't do this. Especially in my industty: give them an inch give them a country mile, and then that "crunch" period has become 70 hour workweeks for 6+ months.


This is surely a healthier take than the article's, but isn't there more to work than selfishly pursuing what's best for ourselves? If we pursued our careers because we find the products interesting and their objectives valuable, then shouldn't that be a big part of why we work?

Companies will grow and shrink, layoffs will happen, employees will make bad or unfair decisions, but at the end of the day, companies exist because we are more productive as an organized group than we could be on our own. Of course you have to be strategic, but ultimately the healthiest motivation for working I can think of is to just focus on creating something of value.

The core fallacy of this blog post is that he expects the company to value and appreciate him. He gives positive examples of helping customers and coworkers, but concludes that they were for nothing because he got laid off. But a company is not a person that can affirm or reject you. It's just some abstract way of organizing labor with some CEOs and managers doing their thing. It makes no sense to work -for- the company. Yes work for yourself, but also for your coworkers and the people the company serves.


> To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.

Yes, and that hurts that first time. Especially when you gave a lot (like some 70hrs weeks and then you immune system shuts down) or working during a funeral, in the back room...


I’ve also been working in tech for almost 30 years - 28.5 to be exact.

Work is purely transactional, I give the company the benefit of all of my accumulated skills and experience for 40 hours per week, they put money in my account and I then use that money to exchange for goods and services.

Whenever one party or the other decides that the transactional relationship is no longer beneficial, we part ways.

If I find a company where the transaction is more beneficial - pay, benefits, work life balance, etc - depending on my priorities at the time, I go work for that company. I’ve worked at 10 companies in the past almost 30 years and 6 of those have been in the past 10 years.

> Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.

Uh yeah that won’t happen unless it benefits me in some way like I’m learning a new to me technology or finishing a project I am leading will look good on my resume.

I made an exception when I was working for a company that sent nurses to the homes of special needs kids and they wouldn’t get paid on time if the project wasn’t done - before Christmas. They would have gotten paper checks that they would have had to either pick up from their central office or get it mailed to them and when I was working for public sector clients during Covid and it helped them get their disability and unemployment checks on time.


I can relate. My perception is that a company is for me, not the other way around. This really flips how work is handled.

"sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care...is worth it now and then" That same company will fire you and escort you out but expect you to give 2 weeks notice.

The brutal experience of “fire and escort you out” is a consequence of Usonian fondness for firearms: before that, another typical location for mass shootings besides schools was the workplace, where angry terminated employees would lash out bullets at the “sucks being you” managers that just doled out the news.

> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc

Would you consider employers to be "fully cynical" about their affairs and interactions with employees? I do. Being a happy little cog is it's own reward, but ine has to be clear-eyed about it.

> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles.

You are presenting a false dichotomy - one can be an outstanding contributor while working 40 hours per week.


I think employers are, and I think it costs them a ton of money.

My intrinsic responsibility isn't to the person handing me a check: we have an explicit contract. It is first to myself, second to the people whose lives are affected by the software I write, and third to my coworkers.

When developers pretend the relationship with an employer is just the two of them, they are giving up most of the leverage they have to change how their work functions.


My first responsibility is to the people - including myself - who depend on me to have money in my account to support our addictions to food, clothes and shelter

I think your comment bears some truth in that turning to bitterness is only going to tint a persons worldview towards an overall undesirable shade. Also it is absolutely necessary to keep up that "above and beyond" image for coworkers/managers to improve chances of a next successful hire. Mix that with the reality as described in the article and you get the play-pretend so many of us find exhausting

I can strongly agree with you while understanding how the OP feels (and I certainly don't condone all his advice). IMO, culture plays a role in it; as an EU citizen, layoffs are effectively rare here.

I was laid off once, when I was being widely praised for my work. It's been 5 years, financially it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, and it still hurts that it happened. So yeah...


It feels like that requires an outgoing personality and great people skills that many people just don't have. There's lots of people who are friendly and pleasant to work with, but they don't have the dynamic personality that's going to lead to someone remembering them when an opportunity arises; even if they have they went above and beyond in their work.

It's certainly true that the charismatic have a better go of this, but after 12 years in the industry I've built up a solid list of quietly excellent engineers. Whenever I see an opportunity they could shine, I reach out to them.

Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for me), the industry seems to be fairly market efficient, and they're usually already happy at some other highly compensated position (Empirically, 1 M$/yr seems roughly to be the going rate for "Damn, I really wish I could work with that person again")


> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before.

Guess what. That's cynical too.

> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.

No, it's not. Cynicism is just having the correct model of reality and learning to thrive with it is the best skill you can possibly develop. But the first step is becoming a cynic. Overwhelming bitterness is of course bad, but it's not the end of the road for cynicism, it's just the beginning. A non-cynic can see only this and it looks to him like a cliff that would crush him. Seasoned cynic sits high on top of the cliff of bitterness he climbed, quite happy, having a clear look on both sides. On the world of people who fear cynicism and on the smooth hills on the other side that non-cynics can't possibly fathom.


> If people know you are a standout contributor

Yes, each person's network is more important now than ever - as we seem to have achieved pretty thorough uselessness of classical job postings, job boards and applications. Some parts of building that network are simple: do ask people for contact info for example. And another part is simply showing up, doing work and getting it recognized by the people around you - that's more long term effort certainly but has nothing to do with how much you don't respect the corporation that employs you or the least palatable of your co-workers or managers. On the contrary, find the more competent people in that mess around you, and favor them.

Even the people you don't respect might easily some day be among the people in other companies that will need you. You may then do everything you can not to work for them, but even keeping that lack of respect out of sight is in your interest. (And okay, for some of these people it's hard.)


Anger can be a strong motivator. It's a double-edged sword, you don't want to sustain it.

> but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one.

[ citation needed ]

Every job I've worked at has specified when we provide references, we're to say "X was employed from Y to Z" and if we would hire them again, yes or no. The employee described here would get a yes from me. The fact that they didn't go "above and beyond" will not help them get a job, at least if they happened to work for any of the companies I have.

> If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles.

I guess we could quibble over definitions then, because I as a senior dev managing other devs am perfectly happy with someone who clocks in, does the work on-time and to-spec, and then clocks off as a "standout contributor." I've chastised a few people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job to prevent burnout, voluntary or otherwise.

Burned out devs turn out worse work, and they feel worse in the bargain. Textbook definition of a lose-lose. Whatever code is being a pain in the ass today is just that; code. It will be there when you get back from the weekend, it will be there when you get back from a doctor's appointment, it will be there when your kid is done being sick. Life matters. Code... does, but to a lesser extent.

> On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you.

Which is why I don't want people feeling bitter about their job, and putting in the extra work to, by your own admission, be just as damn likely to get the axe for reasons that are out of your control? That's embittering as fuuuuuuuck.

> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you.

False dichotomy. I love what we build, and I want my subordinates to have fulfilling, happy lives. And I proportion my energy to both of those things in accordance with their importance.


> I've chastised a few people in my time for committing code on the weekends too, not because I don't appreciate their contribution, but because I consider it part of my job to prevent burnout

The best way to avoid burnout in my experience is to work when you have "the itch" to do it. If you're feeling it on a Saturday, why not go for it? You might not be feeling it on Monday and will need the break then instead. If you forego the prime opportunity and then force yourself to do it later when you are not in the right mindset, that is when the burnout is going to get you.


Answering the rhetorical question - because it may set a bad example for other, more junior employees; it may set a new expectation; if the good manager who prevents burnout gets fired, and is replaced with a worse person, they may come to expect you to work six days a week, and instead of preventing burnout by working when you want, you're now being burned out by working not only 5 days a week without any break, but also on one of your weekend days.

Exactly this. I worked for a place long ago, where we had this junior guy who basically didn't have a life. He just wanted to code. He stayed late every day, and would occasionally come in on the weekends and code all day. He was not making any extra (in fact since he was junior he was probably making much less than the rest of the team). He was not angling for a promotion from what I could tell. He just liked to code and that was his entire life. Well, his manager gave him some public praise once over E-mail, basically saying the project was moving along much faster due to how productive you are. That's all it took. Suddenly, the whole team felt pressure to pull 60-80 hour weeks and burn themselves out. And we didn't really get that much more done, because it was 80 low-quality burned out, demoralized hours, not 40 high-quality hours. The team eventually disintegrated along with the company during one of the tech downturns. All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.

> All that wasted stress because one guy doesn't have a family or hobby.

It reads like the real problem was that the other developers fell into what developers seem to love more than anything: Pedantry. Instead of playing along with the false praise, they set out to prove the claim in the email wrong.


Regardless, there was a problem.

Yes, no doubt the person who sent the email ended up feeling a little silly when the pendants showed him.

There sounds a lot more issues with that team, personalities, and company vs "one guy doesn't have a family or hobby"...

This is what open source was made for.

I once had a coworker like that who hadn't taken a vacation in two years. I told him that vacation time was how the company funded his open source work, and suddenly he took his full five weeks off each year to recharge by coding different code.


To add: it also sets bad expectations from other leadership. If managers consistently see your guys putting in off the clock hours:

a) it makes me look a bit of a moron, because it implies they can't get their work done within office hours, and my job is to ensure that

b) they then expect that level of work regularly and will feel slighted if it stops being put in. See aforementioned comments about burnout.


> within office hours

You are running a factory over there? That makes the weekend perspective a bit more reasonable, given the constraints. Tech work, on the other hand, descends from agriculture. You work when the sun is shining and rest when it is stormy, metaphorically speaking. There is no reasonable concept of defined working hours. The brain doesn't operate on a set schedule like that, and trying to ignore that reality is where the burnout stems from.

If we were talking about tech, you certainly would look foolish applying factory concepts to an entirely unrelated field.


I was at one place where we tracked every bug introduced, and discovered more than 90% were in code written after 5pm. We dramatically cut our bug rate just by shutting down PRs outside of business hours.

The problem is that when our performance declines, so does our ability to judge our performance. We can feel more productive while actually doing a much worse job.


> more than 90% were in code written after 5pm.

Intriguing. Did you find that remained true through DST periods, assuming DST observance? Meaning, did you find that it was literally the clock that determined when bugs would seep in, or did bugs also increase if you didn't counteract times changes for whatever human factor (circadian rhythm?) made 5 PM significant?

> The problem is that when our performance declines, so does our ability to judge our performance.

Sure, but what sees performance magically decline at 5 PM?

If it was the clock, did you try removing the clock from the equation? Did bugs show up the same if developers had no idea what time it was?

If it was some other human factor, did you see uniformity across all participants? Were the "night owls" who were just getting started at 5 PM just as likely to introduce bugs after 5 PM as those who had been working since 9 AM?


If it were me, I would write the code, commit it, and open the PR Monday afternoon

That is what the individual is going to end up doing if they encounter the guy who thinks software is built on an assembly line, but is not ideal. The reviewer might get "the itch" before Monday. It would be a waste to see him fall into burnout because he had to artificially wait because you had to pretend to wait.

You don't burn out because you weren't working. That's not a thing.

I am concerned about how you describe coding as an addiction. That sounds like something worth bringing up with a therapist & investigating the root cause of. It can be literally dangerous to identify that much with only our work, especially in this economy.

But if you don't want to do that, if you have some rare code-or-die health condition, just contribute to some Apache project instead. The entire internet is build on projects people wrote that their companies didn't pay them to write. We don't have to give our whole creative selves to our employers.


> You don't burn out because you weren't working.

If you never had to work then you would never burn out, sure. But returning back from la-la land, most people are going to have to work. As was stated before, burnout ensues when one forces themselves to work when they are not in the right frame of mind to do so. If you code by the rule of the calendar, that is what is going to put you at risk of burnout. If you code when your mind says "Let's go" and stop when your mind says "That's enough", chances are you'll never experience it.

Denying a "let's go" moment on Saturday, to fight with a "that's enough" moment on Monday because the calendar says you cannot work on Saturday but must work on Monday is a good way to end up with burnout. But why fight it? Why not just work on Saturday and take Monday off? It is not going to make any difference in the end. The deliverable will be there at the anticipated time either way.

> I am concerned about how you describe coding as an addiction.

What is this addiction you are referring to? I can find no mention of it anywhere in this thread before this.


Not a matter of when the office is open, it's a matter of how many hours have been worked vs what's expected. I'm obviously fine with folks working whenever they want, that's half the benefit of work from home in the first place. What I'm not fine with was this particular dude clocking in code at all hours all week, then putting even more in on the weekend. And mind you this is not simply from commits, it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.

> it's from when he's emailing me his time spent on various tasks and I can see he's wildly passing the 40 hour mark.

I'll grant you that it is red flag that he would want to take your energy telling how long something took. It doesn't even mean anything in the given line of work. An interesting problem might be given hundreds of hours of thought – in the shower, while sleeping, etc. – but only take 15 minutes to type afterwards. What would you report? The 100 hours? The 15 minutes? Invent some kind of weighting system to offset parallel activities? And for what? None of them mean anything.

The manager's job is to take the unnecessary burden of externalities off the rest of the team, but it is a team and that means it has to cut both ways. The rest of the team has to take the unnecessary burden of internality off the manager. If that was the best political way to say "please stop, you are needlessly wasting my energy", then that makes sense, I suppose. Or, perhaps a good manager is brutally honest above being politically sensitive? A team is, after all, characterized by their willingness to remain bonded even amid strife. Without that, you just have a group of people.


1. Will you survive to see a new manager if you don't work on the weekend? Without that, under the given scenario you are either:

- Forcing yourself to work on Monday. Burnout ensues. Will you be able to continue while burnt out?

- Skipping Monday too, seeing you only work four days a week. Will you be able to continue under performance expectations?

2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to stick around even if working hours remain the same? He is still going to express his badness in many other ways. He wouldn't be bad otherwise.


> Without that, under the given scenario you are either:

I reject the false dichotomy that my options are "work on the weekend when I'm excited to write code, or suffer and burn out during the week". Maybe that works for you, but I have to show up on Monday regardless of whether I wrote something inspired on Saturday.

> 2. Do you really need to worry about this hypothetical future? If the bad manager shows up, are you going to stick around even if working hours remain the same?

Weirdly, the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.


> I have to show up on Monday

For what, exactly? If it is simply to appease the whims of your manager, you already have the bad manager. Another hypothetical future bad manager is the least of your concerns at that point. Chances are the hypothetical future bad manager will be less bad than the horror show you are already in.

> the bank expects monthly mortgage payments regardless of whether my manager is bad or not.

There is some risk there, but most tech people already price in that risk by demanding much higher than normal compensation at their job, allowing them to have their mortgages discharged before the bad manager arrives. You might get caught in the unlucky case, but on balance the good managers don't disappear that quickly.


Do you not have coworkers?

There are more people involved in software creation than just you and your manager.


I don't have coworkers who buy into mob programming. If I write code on Saturday and withhold pushing the commit until Monday afternoon or write the code Monday morning and push the commit thereafter, nobody is ever going to be able to tell the difference.

You must work in one of those cults that stand around the meeting room to recite the commit log as if nobody in the place knows how to read, exclaiming "no blockers" to signify that the metaphorical torch is being passed on to the next person?


If any of that cohort of most tech people has enough money left over to pay off my mortgage, I'd be open to that. But I'm not a member of that hallowed club.

If you are not a member of the tech club then you don't have the tech risk. So, yes, while that may mean it will take longer for you to pay off the mortgage without a high tech salary, you aren't under the pressure that necessities the high tech salary to get the mortgage paid ASAP.

FYI that burnout is not "working a lot". Burnout is the feeling of little control, ineffectiveness, COMBINED with stress. Working weekends could instead be an indication of excitement and enthusiasm, which as a manager is worth nurturing. Over time those kinds of people should be given broader ownership and the ability to delegate, where they see fit.

A response to a feeling of ineffectiveness or lack of progress can be 'I need to catch up' which can result in weekend work. That IME can be a spiral. You don't get the rest you need. You feel less effective...

Yeah, but what always happens is the more you give, the more they squeeze, until you have nothing left.

I don't think it's references that matter, as much as reaching out to former coworkers who have jobs elsewhere, and can be your "in" to a new job.

If people are seeing the only way to be a "standout contributor" being about putting in more than 40 hours a week, we may have found the disconnect.

I don't work more than 40 hours a week, but when I slack off I just do the work put in front of me. Rather than hours, it's about energy.

If companies want more than 40 hours a week, we can negotiate overtime. But I put extra energy in during the work week not because I think it makes me extra money or protects me from layoffs. I do it just because I think it is better.


We're not as far apart as you might think. Clock time is correlated with performance, but by no means determinative. More important is initiative, enthusiasm, leadership, reliability, etc. All in, I work very little overtime.

And you're right, this is a marathon, and working sustainably is absolutely the most important thing. One can do both. If you love what you build and you're leading a balanced life then I would say you're Doing It Right.


spoken like a person with other people in their lives that they care about. You seem good to work for. Thanks.

> The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.

This is an argument in favor of managing optics. Whether people perceive you going above and beyond may matter, even if actually going above and beyond truly does not.


> I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.

Totally agreed. A big downside of taking contracting job is that one does not get equity. There can be exceptions but in general equity is reserved for permanent employees.

That aside, I highly recommend people view the employment as an alliance. When employee aligns with the company, work hard. When the alliance is not there, break apart and no hard feelings.


By “equity” do you mean statistically worthless equity in a private company?

Most companies don’t give equity. But even if you are talking about equity in the form of RSUs in public companies. It’s just comp. I’ll take guaranteed cash comp any day. When I was getting RSUs, I had it set to immediately sell as soon as I was vested and diversified.

Employment is not an “alliance” it is a transaction, they pay me money, I give them labor


I'd go with transactions too. Either way, a company is not a family. No hard feelings if I leave my company or my company lets me go.

Contractors can get equity, it depends on the contract. But ISOs are available to contractors, and RSUs are too.

> Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you.

My thoughts, exactly.

I do good work, because I can’t live with myself, if I don’t.


> next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before

I've been in this field for ~7 years and have never found this to be true, yet people parrot it all the same. I have never once received a job via reference, and only once was able to get someone else a job by reference. I feel this is only true when you're at the very senior level.


Only my first job after university was via a regular advertisement and application. The other jobs and contracts happened thanks to:

- one of my bosses

- me talking at an event and meeting another speaker

- getting recommended by a person that knew me


>There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one.

No it doesn't.


The most your ex coworkers can do for you at a decently paying corporate job is get you past the resume screen. And even then, there are constant complaints at my employer about our recruiters never contacting our referrals. The person referring can certainly not be allowed even the appearance of influence over the interviews or debrief.

You might be hired on the strength of reputation or recommendation into an early stage startup, but these roles only make sense if you’re 23.


The referrals come from the c-suite. They can call up board they're on and friends that they have. I was laid off last fall and went straight HR told them where i applied and they reached out to the ceo and he called someone with me in the office. Had a job offer 1 week later

Also you get payed 60% for a year on unemployment benifits in germany (or until you find a new job), which is amazing.

There is a cap to unemployment benefits, and at salary levels of most tech workers it is nowhere near 60%

2.5k, tax free. you'll need to earn about 100k to hit that I think.

This is good advice.

People who do good work, and get good at craft, do it as much for their sense of pride as they do for some kind of reward. Rewards are nice, but the joy you get from them are fleeting. Enjoying the work itself is evergreen.

Work is work. Even at a job you like, you'll have days where you'd just rather be out having a day off. Don't get indoctrinated into hustle culture.

But don't get cynical and start being a pleb about jargon or whatever. It's like a person stuck in traffic complaining about traffic as if they aren't... traffic?


> your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one

Not my experience.


I’ve never been hired from contacts so maybe they all accurately think I’m a sellsword and it hasnt affected anything

I mean sure I’d love smooth sailing at a FAANG interview with all my friends in the process. I know some of you guys are getting on niche teams that way

but in the mid market and other startups, I’ve found there are enough to go around. Reputation doesn't matter one bit, and the “glut” is in entry level and former FAANG employees only looking for FAANG compensation.

I just keep 2 mid market and start up roles at once if I have some financial goal and its close enough to decent FAANG compensation. I don’t put short stints on my resume, and get exposed to a lot more.

My only studying is bombing another startup’s interview process and using what I had forgotten to ace a subsequent one

I could study to get above average FAANG compensation that would eclipse my 2-job situation. but I’m pretty busy with 2-jobs and the market for speculation and trading carries the rest.


Realism is easily mistaken for bitterness and cynicism.

The TL;DR of the article is about not doing more than you are paid to do. Not going above and beyond, and that's a reasonable approach to take in today's environment.

Companies have been exploiting these type of people for decades, and its gotten worse in recent years so much so that people have died working for some black companies.

At the end of the day, there is no amount of pay you can receive that is worth your sanity or your life.


You have no self respect.

The thing that bothers me most about layoffs due to “financial difficulties” is when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money on something in one year, then announcing the following year that they have to make cuts to baseline, “low level” employees that don’t cost much at all.

This kind of managerial behavior seriously kills employee motivation, because it both communicates that 1) no one has job security and 2) that management is apparently incapable of managing money responsibly.

“Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.


> Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants

A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people. During the pay freeze a colleague suggested that we might save a significant amount of money by hiring staff, rather than paying the large number of consultants we had hired. I think the ration was something like getting rid of two consultants would free enough money to hire three developers.

Managements take was that we should keep the consultants, because they where much easier to fire, two weeks notice, compared to four. So it was "better" to have consultants. My colleague pointed out that the majority of our consultants had been with us for 5+ years at that point and any cancelling of their contracts was probably more than 4 weeks out anyway. The subject was then promptly changed.

In fairness to management large scale layoffs did start 18 months later.


There’s the whole capital expenditure vs operating expenses angle too, and depending on a company’s particular situation, one might look better on paper than the other. Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.

This distinction is even more relevant for earnings. So companies will optimize this for taxation and accounting to win shareholder brownie points.


I am wondering whether a company "optimizing for shareholder brownie points" is a good signal to either look for employment elsewhere or as an investor start investing elsewhere. It seems like a company who prioritizes this either has reached their potential (which might be fine) or is just not able to innovate anymore.

A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?

> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?

This is great advice.

For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.

At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.

But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.

Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.

My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.

Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.

I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/03/flower-delivery-company-ftd-...


I'm in a VC-owned business with a 50% profit ebitda. But a common trick is to just load it with debt. The VC firm pays out all profits as dividends, all investments into restructuring, M&A and new technology is paid for by high-interest loans from the shareholder. What's left is a company that barely cashflows as all profit goes towards paying interest to the VC firm.

The appointed management team has to operate within that scope (i.e. no real budget to work with, despite the 50% interest), and they squeeze a bit more each year, meaning it's an uphill battle each year to get a raise or promotion. On top of that it's a cashcow in an otherwise dying and slowly shrinking business sector.

In other words a terrible place for general salary growth.

So I'd add two points to your list which is to: look for (1) profitable companies, (2) in expanding markets, (3) that aren't owned by VC.

Startups have their own set of rules where (3) doesn't really apply as much.


Most VC backed private companies aren’t profitable. If it is a public company the information is readily available

Sure, and then there's all the private companies backed by non-venture capital, and the profitable ones running on revenue.

You don’t find too many profitable “lifestyle companies” in tech.

There are plenty of mid-size tech companies that are both not-public and not-lifestyle.

My employer is one of them. Several thousand employees, global reach, and owned by PE (Blackstone and Vista).


You stated that there aren't many profitable lifestyle companies. And the insinuation put forth is that they are very rare to the point of almost nonexistent.

This comes off as rather reductionist and absolute to me; tech is a massive industry, do you know every sector within and adjacent to tech to have reached this conclusion?


No. But I do know statistics. The largest employees in tech are the public companies that we have all heard of. The next largest segment are VC funded companies with the smallest segment by far being the “lifestyle companies”.

Do an exercise, go to any job board and put in filters to match the types of jobs you are qualified for. How many of those do you think are going to be profitable, private, lifestyle companies?


I would put money on all of big tech and all public companies combined not employing more than 30% of professional programmers. At least in the US only 15% work at a large company (500+).

I didn't say anything about '"lifestyle companies" [sic]'. I don't even think we were talking just about 'tech'?

Those are the companies he meant by "public companies", ie publicly traded not government owned.

I don't think by 'public companies' they meant 'private companies', no.

There's still a question of what you consider profitable.

A company may make more in revenue than strictly expenses but stock-based compensation is often not considered an expense so if you add those into the expense side it could change profitability.


Stock-based compensation is absolutely considered an expense under US GAAP.

Which is why companies report non-GAAP numbers.

https://abc.xyz/assets/71/a5/78197a7540c987f13d247728a371/20...

> We provide non-GAAP free cash flow because it is a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business and acquisitions, and to strengthen our balance sheet.


But honestly, profitability doesn’t matter. All of the major tech companies were profitable and still had tens of thousands of layoffs between them.

Layoffs in big tech are mostly to place workers in their place and shake the market, they've definitely been able to drive down salaries these past two years.

Yes - I think layoffs are also backlash against WFH.

Employees were getting a bit too uppity.


That would be a red flag to me.

Companies that make a shit ton of money generally don't like changes.

They're just looking for the next fool to squeeze.


Large US companies that I’ve worked with or for do this as a SOP. It’s not a calculation being done at the hiring manager level as much as a path of least resistance because that’s the way it’s been done for so long.

> contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure

You know, operational expenses are the ones that get an immediate tax break, and capital expenditure the ones with a depreciation period.

Changing the expenses that way can only increase the company's tax payments. The only reason one could possibly want to make that change is if they want to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings.


This is exactly what has changed [1]: R&D costs had been an immediate tax break, but since 2022 became an expenditure requiring a 5-year amortization period.

That change had been planned to be canceled before coming into force, but it was not canceled on time.

Hence the wave of layoffs in 2022, as companies were urgently trying to improve their balance sheets, as investors and the Wall Street requested, AFAICT.

[1]: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof...


> to fraudulently show the money paid for the contractors as earnings

Bingo. That's the main reason to shift opex to capex.


If you have time, how can capex, an expense, appear as earnings? (I'm pretty clueless about these things)

Aha, it's that: "Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes" (I see in other comments here),

but capex is not subtracted, so then it looks as if the company is doing better, on paper, although it's not. And this works only for a while, maybe some years? Which might be long enough for the current management, if they leave before things get too bad?


"Capex expenses" are investments. And the investment is one of the two things a company may do with profits, the other is paying dividends.

Just by classifying something as capex, it's automatically classified as profit already.


Thanks!

Most of the people in charge of making these kinds of decisions are not that smart.

Without going into too much detail, contractors will be hired typically to contribute to capital expenditure and employees to the latter.

That doesn't make any sense. In any situation in which a contractor expense would be capitalized, an employee's salary would also be capitalized. Labor costs are labor costs; whether someone is a contractor or an employee is a labor law issue, not a tax issue. (Internal R&D was the big exception to the capitalization rule, but that loophole was closed, which is what prompted a lot of tech and videogame layoffs over the past 2 years.)


Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money? Or is this all some nonsense setup by the company to shuffle the numbers to look superficially better for a specific metric?

To my understanding, it's the latter.

"We spent 1B in one-off costs for increased future growth" is a much happier story to investors than "we have recurring costs of 1B", put simply, even if the actual recurring cost number is worse.

(There's also some complexities in some industries around money from, say, grants, which you can only spend on certain types of expenditures...)


It’s all about accounting for the spend. Wall Street often looks at Capital Expenditures as a sign of growth or at least net neutral, but they view Operating Expenses as negative. If you can reduce your operating expenses by 200k, but increase your capital expenditure by 400k, you’ve reduced overall profit in order to increase growth potential because your investing 400k into new stuff that will bring in more revenue.

This strategy cannot work long term unless there is growth happening elsewhere in the company to make up for the excess money burned on contractors and reduced number of employees. But it can definitely work short term if the growth numbers for the quarter are going to look bad, and it has the benefit of giving management someone else to blame when the project work doesn’t get done.

If your company starts replacing employees with contractors, that’s a bad sign.


That might be it, this company was obsessed with CAPEX vs. OPEX. Everything was always put into the context of CAPEX or OPEX. OPEX being bad and CAPEX good.

Wait, when did that change? I thought the prevailing wisdom in our industry is that CAPEX sucks, OPEX rules. I understdood that's what's driving SaaSification of everything - replacing some internal tool and labor with a SaaS is literally turning CAPEX into OPEX, and it was supposedly what the investors liked.

The only real difference is tax treatment. Opex is subtracted from earnings before public reporting and before taxes. So opex are more tax-efficient, but they lower your reported earnings.

>Can you explain more how paying double for a contractor for tax reasons saves the company money?

This may vary due to region. For example in the U.S where you can fire people quickly the contractor benefit is less apparent, but in EU where after a short period you may have to spend a long time to fire someone it may be beneficial to hire a contractor rather than going through a lengthy hiring process only to find out you want to fire them.

Contractors in such an environment often are a reasonable investment for a project that has a particular dedicated timeline. Like we expect 1 year for project to finish. We hire for 1 year, and opportunity to extend for 3 months 2 times in case it goes bad.

Otherwise you have to hire for project and then do these layoffs everybody here is complaining about.

Furthermore in EU if you are paying 10000 for an employee, you probably have extra fees on top of that so you are paying 14000 (estimation) then for contractor you are not paying 28000, but 20000. The pricing is not great, but there are lots of factors that can make it seem more attractive than it might appear on its face.

Finally, Contractors tend not to do any of this quiet quitting or whatever, probably because for them it is more a business and they are also earning significantly more that makes it an interesting business to be in and to maintain.


In my experience long time contractors will absolutely "quiet quit" if put into the same catch-22 situations that push employees to do this.

The main difference at least in my region is that if you're a contractor then it's much quicker for you to quit and find a better job so the incentive to stay isn't as strong. In other words, tech workers who become contractors here usually are better contributors and have an easier time finding good offers.


You can give workers temporary contracts and extend them as you see fit. None of what you are saying makes any sense to me.

Also, I will repeat this as many times as possible: you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law. You need to give your employee a WRITTEN letter of termination, to make the termination legally binding. Then all you have to do is give them notice (or pay the salary out immediately if you want to get rid of them immediately).

Paying double so you can fire contractors is illogical. The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months, after working 20 damn years at a single company, which means at worst the company would have to pay half your salary out a single time to get rid of you immediately. None of this 2x every year multi-year bullshit.

The reason why you hire contractors is that you do not need the full output of an employee. You might only need three months or maybe just a week. It's the same reason companies rent equipment instead of buying.


> you can fire employees in Germany exactly the same way you can fire employees in the US. You just need to follow the damn law.

That is overly simplified. First, you have to commit to one of three types of layoffs, only one of which usually is applicable (betriebsbedingte Kündigung). But if you do that you have to consider the social circumstances of the employee and also other comparable employees. Which absolutely can result in not being able to fire the employee you would like to fire without also firing a number of other employees first. That could be really disruptive, so it is not quite so easy for German employers.


> The maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to is 7 months

I believe the maximum amount of notice you can be legally entitled to as a contractor is whatever your contract says


- an employee is an "expense" that bogs down your money-machine.

- a contractor provides a "service" that improves your money-machine output.

(or so it's said).


Then simply fire all the employees and hire contractors!

Or as wind-up to a merger /acquisition.

Outside of the US this optionality does have some value to deserve at least some premium.

Hire an extra dev for the same money looks good on paper, but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.

(I do understand that there's a historical context to keep in mind, and that the relationship is often asymmetric in the other direction as well)


> but employment being the trapdoor function that it is in some jurisdictions does muddy the water.

Absolutely, I should have clarified, this was in Denmark. Laying off someone is pretty easy, unless they happen to be pregnant, a union representative or work-place-safety representative.

And I should know, I was laid off from a job after two months because they decided that they didn't have the budget anyway.


Two months in much of Europe is within 6-month trial period, it's easy to let anyone go.

Furthermore, the "additional cost" of an employee in Europe is a further 35% of the salary due to social fees. That is why contractors often don't cost more to the company, although it might seem like that to employees.

5+ years "consulting" would probably be reclassified as employment by most courts.

In this case a consulting company was hired, so these where employees, just with a different company. They just opted to station the same people at the same client for all those years.

In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities (you may "accidently" bump into each other in the cantine, but not go together), or share the same office equipment for coffee, having to go down the stree to get coffee while employees get theirs from the kitchen, and so on.

The one that is most ridiculous and sad IMO (I'm in the US) is that contractors aren't invited to the Christmas party.

Why is that ridiculous, I work in consulting. Why would I expect to be invited to the Christmas party? If you had consultants from McKinsey working for you, would you expect them to be invited to your Christmas party?

Because in a lot of places the consultants and employees work side by side, sometimes for a long time, on the same project/work. They operate as one team, more or less. The consultants are more like staff augmentation, than McKinsey consultants.

If I was a manager of that team, I'd worry about the effect of treating part of my team differently.

If I was an employee on a team like that, I'd feel really bad about my team mates not being allowed to participate.


There is admittedly a difference between staff augmentation and McKinsey style strategic “consulting”. The distinction is usually who owns the project?

If the client company owns the project and you are just coming in as a warm body, that’s staff augmentation.

But if the client company is putting out Requests for Comments to different companies and they sign a Statement of Work and your consulting company comes in and does the work, that’s “consulting”. In the latter case, you don’t usually get let go as soon as there is no work for you - ie when you are “on the bench”.

Even if you are a more junior employee at the latter company where you are more hands on keyboard than flying out to meet customers and sometimes you might even be doing staff augmentation for the client, it still feels differently.

My consulting company has internal employee events, is responsible for my pay, performance, etc - not the client.


At the same time, a consulting company's employee might spend 30 times more time together with the employees of his/her client, and then it might have felt more natural to join them on Christmas dinner too, and a bit sad to be "left out" (although of course everyone probably understand why).

The client's employees can be your "real" coworkers that your at every day, for years and years? Although maybe your company does shorter projects (?), what do I know


No experience with McKinsey directly (thank goodness) or any consulting groups like that, but why not invite them to the holiday party? But certainly we should invite "Sheryl from accounting" who is technically a contractor, or the janitor who works for the landlord. These people are coworkers, whether or not our paychecks have the same signature on them.

If you were working with a general contractor where you signed a contract with them and they just went out and led the work and kept you updated with statuses, would you invite them? Would you invite the subcontractors? The actual construction workers?

This how true “consulting companies” work. You sign a statement of work with the requirements and costs and then they (we) go off and take care of staffing and lead the project. Your company will probably never interact with anyone besides sales, the tech lead and maybe the people over sub projects of the larger project (work streams) and their leads.


OK sure, but I never once mentioned any of this and have no idea what the social customs are around hiring general contractors to build buildings or asking CIA-adjacent consulting companies how to jack up the price of bread. I just know that half my coworkers have a slightly different email address for "legal reasons", and they aren't allowed to come to the Christmas party. This is, in my opinion, simply mean. Basically we seem to have invented a kind of at-will apartheid that 0.0001% of the population understand and even fewer benefit from.

That’s staff augmentation which is completely different. If your company doesn’t know anything about Salesforce for instance and you just need a one off large project, you are going to hire a consulting company to go off and do the work and leave.

It doesn’t make sense to build the competencies in house if that’s not your core line of business’s

I left our part of my explanation of a general contractor. I meant when you are having a physical structure built like a house or in the case the analogy would be adding on to your office building


OK, have a good day. Hope you're feeling well.

Many companies use consultants as easier-to-fire employees. I've occasionally worked with the same consultants for years, with them acting as team mates doing the same work as every other internal. And we were team mates in everything work related, except the parties.

I understand the contractual and financial logic but from the human perspective excluding the people who are otherwise just as much part of the team as anyone else is definitely eyebrow raising.


I’ll admit “consulting” is an overloaded term.

I have worked for third party consulting companies for 5 years. Companies hire my company to do a job or issue guidance and then leave. If I am on the bench, I still get paid. I report status to the client company and they are ultimately responsible for signing off on work. But they don’t manage my work.

I’m not embedded into their team, we might embed them into our team. But at the end of the day, we are leading the projects.

Then you have staff augmentation “consultants” like you are referring to.

I saw both sides a few years ago when I was the dev lead for a company. We hired both staff augmentation “consultants” where we paid the contracting agency $90/hour and the end consultant got $60-$65 and we also paid the AWS consulting companies $160/hour and I have no idea what they got paid. But it was a lot more.

That’s what made me work on pivoting to cloud consulting in 2018. I didn’t know AWS when we hired the consultants.


Nothing ridiculous about it. That came out of the permatemp lawsuits in the US by contractors a couple of decades ago which resulted in employers avoiding doing anything that made it look like contractors were being treated like permanent employees. Squeezing for money by a few contractors ruined a good thing for the rest of them.

Why is that ridiculous? Contractors are not employees, so why should they be invited to a give thanks party for employees? Become an employee if you want to partake. Feelings of entitlement are wrong here. Decency though tells us to invite everyone.

> Become an employee if you want to partake.

It's not necessarily up to them.


Christmas part is not special "give thanks to employees" party, it is more of end of a year party. It makes perfect sense to invite contractors. Even if it was "give thanks" party, contractors worked on projects.

I remember a work Christmas party attended by a contractor. The company was an sme and as usual we closed the office at mid-day and headed for a local restaurant to eat and socialise. The contractor as chatty and sociable, and seemed happy to be dining on the company's bill. Wine flowed.

Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.


I have seen employees doing exactly the same, so I do not see anything worth anger here. It is never the case that everyone goes to christmas party. Unless not going is punished in some way, in which case they go, but only to avoid punishment.

> Then at the stoke of 5pm, as we permies were discussing which pub to move on to, the contractor stood up, mumbled his thanks, and left. Billable hours over for the day.

Or, maybe, had better things to do. :)


wait - was that me? Because I don't drink.

It was was a long time ago. And based on your id, not you.

yeah it was just my facetious way of observing that there could be other explanations that he was gone as soon as he couldn't charge for his presence, in fact when I consult I would never charge for going to one of those things - but I would of course expense it on my taxes.

I don't know. We get to invite clients and all the other business partners, why not contractors and people that work for them with us on a project?

Its caste. The cleaning lady is part of the company and its a horror that the dalit are dis-included from all company activities. The only actual reason is to divide and conquer and prevent them being part of any employee unionization.

I've been a consultant/contractor, less than 4 months in, and I still have been invited to (great) Christmas party, and even shared paid buses that took whole company and also given free accommodation.

Human decency is human decency, nothing more to that.


Because contractors most of the time deliver as much as many employees.

> Feelings of entitlement are wrong here.

How dare people have feelings right? A lot of contractors (like myself) are treated like employees who are easier to fire.

I understand the separation from a legal perspective, but at the same time I've developed relationships with the people I work with and enjoy working with them. Being entirely honest? It hurts being excluded from things and not everyone has the option to just "become an employee".


Yeah, that's the line at a Christmas work party. Is it about Christmas, or is it about work

> In Germany now there are laws in place for this, you get ridiculous stuff like as consultant you are not allowed to eat together with team mates from the employer because that is seen as bounding activities

AFAIK in Germany the model of using temporary agency staff (AÜG or "staff leasing") is now tightly regulated. It works for a limited time period and tries to guarantee some equitable conditions for temporary workers like fair treatment, equitable wages, and benefits, aligning with the protections afforded to permanent employees.

Consultancy has no such protections.

I have never heard of any laws that prohibit internal employees from socializing with the externals (consultants or AÜG), or eat together. Bonding can happen equally at the desk or the lunch table. And I haven't heard of any company or institution enforcing this. Legislating who one is allowed to eat with sounds crazy.

What many companies probably enforce is "no internal benefits for consultants", so the free company coffee, parking, canteen, or maybe even a desk/office are not available for the externals, and they have to look elsewhere. Or maybe some unwritten internal rules to discourage bonding.


You get that at many companies whose legal department is too worried that AÜG might somehow be triggered for them, or have a strong union that would rather see all consulting folks be gone, which I understand when placed in the shoes of internal folks.

That's a manifestation of your specific environment and not a general rule. I guess it is the work of some overeager compliance department, because it is the kind of overreacting self-mutilation that happens if people do not understand a law and want to be absolutely sure (cf. GDPR).

[1] is a PDF that tax advisers and lawyers distribute to employers to check if freelancers are only ostensibly self-employed. The checklist at the end of the PDF is all you need if you are an employer. If you are a freelancer you must also check if you are employee-like and possibly file an application to be exempt. The PDF tells you when. Watch the 5/6 distribution of income (not law, but established judicature)!

[1] https://www.sup-kanzlei.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Scheinselbs...


There was an lawsuit against Microsoft in the past that they lost because they used to treat contractors almost like employees. I'm guessing that is why these days most contractors are employed by someone else and not truly independent.

https://www.reuters.com/article/markets/companies/dont-treat...


In most places, it doesn't work that way.

“A former employer decided to freeze pay for a few years and later later start laying off people”

Why would anyone stay at a company that had pay freezes for a few years. I would have been looking for another job the moment they announced them.


There are soft perks. I have a pension that counts how long I work for the company (I have no idea what the real terms of it are, but that simplification will do for this discussion). Long term than pension is - hopefully - worth far more than a couple years of no raises. Depending of course on how long I live - statistically I will die sometime between 60 and 100 with the most likely age being 80 - the longer I live the more than pension is worth, on the low end it is worthless.

That said, when the no raise hit I made my boss aware of my displeasure in that (As a senior engineer at the top of the pay scale I expect my raises should just match inflation, but no raise is a clear pay cut). I did find a transfer position in the company that resulted in a nice level promotion and thus raise, which is sometimes the best option.

Though your mileage will vary.


I forgot that pensions are still a thing in some places.

But when you calculate the the present value of the pension (ie discounted future cash flows), is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it? (serious question, not trying to be combative)


> is the difference between staying and going and making more money elsewhere worth it?

That is a great question that is at least partially unknowable. You cannot discount future cash flows without knowing how long you will live and thus how much you should discount. Also things like inflation are unknowable.

As I said, I did leave. I stayed with the same company but found a different division. Which is the best of all worlds. I think, perhaps I could get a better offer elsewhere? If so would that better job still exist or would I now be laid off for months before finding a new job and thus destroying all the income gain from that new job?

There are a ton of unknowable factors. I can say it worked out okay for me so far, but that is about it.


It depends on who you are and what market you are in. Many people in recent years have reported putting in over a thousand job applications and only netting a couple of interviews, none of which resulted in a job offer. But if you have a network into available jobs and can short cut all of the pipeline insanity going on now, making a jump would be smart. Then again, the type of companies that play these games typically don't have top notch talent in the first place. Many people might endure it because they fear they don't have other options.

Exactly. Generally, when one company institutes pay freezes, they're probably also in a hiring freeze, along with the rest of the industry. Everything's nice and coordinated and they all use the same "macroeconomic environment" as the excuse. So an employee doesn't really have the option to just hop jobs, nobody else is hiring. Ironically, the best time to hop jobs is when you're getting raises because the economy is strong and everyone else is hiring.

Depending on your level and how much of your life is built around your job - it's not always as easy to leave as you might think.

Think about a wider scale than your employer: if the costs of the consultants goes in fact in the pockets of the investors of your employer, that money is not lost.

Management tend to get a bee in their bonnet about headcount, specifically full time employees, while they don't count consultants as being under the same kind of restrictions. It does often end up in the madness you describe, like that time there was a data entry consultant costing at my 0 company 100k, which a full timer would have been paid 35k max.

How exactly does one become a consultant on a 1099? Go work for a consulting company a W-2? That’s how I did it four years ago. Well, the consulting company takes a nice chunk above what they bill you out for.

How does one do it freelance? I also would prefer contract work or consulting work, I like that no feelings are hurt when I leave having done a good job, leave em better than you found ‘em.


You have to legally start a company. That means some legal work (you don't need a lawyer, but it helps). You need to do the books yourself - and because this is very different areas of tax law you really should hire an accountant (only an hour/month, but having extra eyes look at the books is useful). If you do this right you make more money, but there are problems if you miss some legal detail that W-2 employees don't have.

Many times you cannot get called as a 1099 as some places won't work with you. however most of the big consulting companies have others working for them on a 1099 and will be happy to deal with you. However the amount they pay you doesn't change so you have to really understand how to make tax law work for you to make it worth out. (perhaps you can give yourself a 401k with a match - check with the lawyers/accountants above to see if that is legal and if so what the rules are. If not there are other loopholes that work similar)


As I understood it, you're also on the hook for valuing yourself properly. You may think you're making more money, until you factor in vacations and medical and retirement and slack time and...and...and

In the United States you can create a company just by operating as one — “sole proprietorship.” A 1099 can also be issued to an individual.

It’s useful for a variety of reasons to have an LLC or an S-corp but you don’t need one to get started as a software contractor.


dang wont let u see this

but that's a good way to set sued as an individual

if ur serious, have multiple clients, can't guarantee u won't piss off a client somehow... get an LLC


The easiest way is to reach out to consulting companies and ask if they take subcontractors. Second easiest is to ask companies that want to hire you if they’ll take you as a contractor instead.

Consultanties get brought in to provide ass cover for management but they cant just say that.

In quite many places, hiring consultants has a very high corruption potential (e.g. the hiring manager favoring one of several suppliers). With employees they don't have this leverage.

Many companies have a policy like “freelancers, once kept on for 12 months, must be either hired full time, or fired” to deal with this

I was laid off once. The reason on paper was budgetary, times are tough, etc. But the real reason was that I was a bad fit for the role - for a variety of reasons.

I got pipped, and foolish me tried hard to work on the items in the pip (to no effect). The layoff came right on schedule.

A few years later, I was chatting with an old coworker and I came to find out that the director of engineering had demanded it. It was in direct response to me refusing to participate in building a knowingly DMCA-violating product.

The pip was theater. The "times are tough" bit was theater. The reality is that the director wanted me gone, and that is how they did it for legal coverage reasons.

I don't really blame the company - I was a bad fit, and I can see that clearly in hindsight. But it did teach me never to accept budgetary layoffs at face value.


I don't see the theater as bad or good. If anything, it's slightly good.

It gives people an out; a soft landing. Being fired because you suck is going to destroy your confidence and tarnish your work reputation (because layoff is public).


Imagine getting fired because you wanted to respect the DMCA of all things. I'd be curious for details, though you probably shouldn't tell.

I was never really concerned about the ethics, but was more worried that I'd be personally liable for it. I kept thinking about the VW emissions scandal, where the engineer that implemented it was given prison time.

In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about. I also never should have expected that I'd be able to change the director's mind by refusing to do what he said.


> In hindsight, it was probably a stupid thing for me to worry about.

Wrong take.

You did the right thing. Fuck that guy.


you absolutely did the right thing. Are you doing well now?

Yes, I bounced back.

Getting soft-fired really shook me, and it was a hit to my self-confidence. I did learn some valuable life-lessons from it though, and including that nobody should ignore office politics.

Afterwards, I found a job that was a much better fit. That next job changed the direction of my career, and I'm very happy with where I am now.


Also mostly it's speculation of an accepted kind. Executives can say, listen we have these initiatives, I think they will print money next year, so based on this prediction I will raise the budget for the FY. Then when the prediction of revenue fails, you do cuts, oh well you were wrong. But next year you can do the same thing. Game theory wise this works because if you're right, you bet big, hire big, are ahead next year vs your competitors that invested less. If it goes wrong you are seen as a serious executive that has the courage to have layoffs when needed, and if your market is ebbing your competitors will also be suffering somewhat.

It's also easy to make the next year prediction be whatever you want since in a small company it's just you saying a number that the board doesn't think is too outrageous and in a large company involves you asking an analyst to increase the word of mouth factor of their model or whatever.


This happened to a friend of mine. Executive made far-fetched PowerPoint slides and tried to raise a budget, the board loved the powerpoint. They restructured, the company laid-off dozens, and hired new foreign contractors. Because past engineers got the blame, and the legacy code. They rewrite from scratch using X this time. Massive failure because of poor morale, brain drain and over-ambitious features. So what now? well let's do another round of layoffs, make new powerpoint slides and repeat the same process.

That is the problem with presentations of all sides - doesn't matter if it is power point, a blog post, a NYC article, government report, a documentary, or something else. Whoever writes it gets to choose what arguments and facts to bring out. However listens to it is generally primed to think it is correct and not ask hard questions - often they don't even know what the hard questions would be. And so garbage gets approved all the time because it looks good.

Oh, those hyperspecialized employees that can only work in one project and could never do the exact same thing if the thing's goal changed...

And yeah, those quick to materialize gains, where the manager can easily discover if a project worked within the same fiscal year...

Also dragons and unicorns, I guess... what a world those people live in!


One that is functionally different but causes the same type of morale hit is managers and upward equipping themselves with fully loaded MacBooks and iPhones, but equipping rank-and-file employees with shitty Dell laptops and budget tier Android phones.

That happens more at traditional companies than tech companies, but it immediately signals that it's a crappy company steeped in "rules for thee but not for me" culture.


Managers have a budget. They can't save it, and may spend big on consultants to create a buffer for their team when cuts hit. This is especially true in government, and big companies are similar.

There is only one person who really can stop cycles hitting budgets and that is the CEO. IIRC Warren Buffett lamented the fact that the CEO is more of an investor than a manager and that spending budgets as a senior manager gives them almost no experience in setting those budgets.


Governments have lost many skills to do fuck all. The consultant justification is just hiding the fact that years if not investing in skilled people have resulted in a lot of clueless administrators that can't do much.

The government would never pay their internal employees the amount that consulting companies pay theirs. It would never be approved.

budget based economics may be the worst thing to happen to large organisations

Suddenly I'm connecting the relationship between "budget based economics" and "agile" as commonly implemented. It's trying to fit creativity into a budget. In the places that do it well, it's like "We're supposed to make some really great art, here's the crayons we can afford, sorry if it's not exactly right but it's what we could manage, do whatever you can, we will take it!" In places that do it poorly, it's like "we need you to make the Uber of the Mona Lisa, I'm gonna need you to find a way to make that work, but we can totally be flexible on this, which crayons do you need."

The key differences being that in one case there's well defined constraints on resources but open ended results, and in the other the resource constraints are poorly defined but the end result is much more fixed.


Worse is trying to fit creativity into a tight schedule.

Everything gets corrupted, today's agile is way worse than what came before in practice.


I have never even understood the approach. The sub-budgets within an organization seem so arbitrary and become games in and of themselves, often leading to frivolous purchases just to use up the budget and not get your budget slashed.

Does anyone know when this came into favor? What was used before? What are the alternatives?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Managers play games because they are looking out for their own team, not the company's bottom line. Budgets constrain this. Overspending is bad, but so is underspending, because they are tying up resources - companies will have a desired internal rate of return (maybe something like 10%) - if they can make 10% on their investments then a manger tying up capital is costing a lot.

Maybe https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/10/the-identity-manag... is Joel Spolsky's suggestion - get the team behind the goal, keep morale high, and share information. Sharing information at least cuts down on some of the issues. Keeping morale high isn't always possible - you need someone to drive it, a great founder / CEO can do it to some extent (see Steve Jobs) but it has a limit at scale.

Splitting orgs into more or less independent businesses gets done sometimes.

Bezos just turns everything into a clockwork machine, I think.

Ray Dalio has spent half his life and an unbelievable amount of money trying to solve this problem, some would say with very mixed results (see the book "The Fund" - my reading is he basically tried to create a system where everyone is indoctrinated and rated against his principals, but it just doesn't work as well as he hoped).

There's better and worse ways to try to get around the Principal Agent Problem, but it's a very hard problem.


This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.

It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.


Conversely, budgets are based on estimates and forecast of resources needed. It's not like a manager gets a random number out of the blue and then needs to find ways to spend it. Budgets in engineering, especially software dev., are mostly based on number of people (aka 'resources') needed in the team, so a manager will want to fill their headcount otherwise it means they don't actually need this number of people.

Feel free to contradict me with personal experience, but I actually posit that (like many interesting phenomena in life), the truth is exactly the opposite. The number of people in a team expands to fill the budget allocated. That budget flows from a legible & convincing narrative told to the check-writers (internal or external) that may or may not overlap with reality.

Managers have an interest in expanding their "fiefdom" and thus push to get more and more people (either by grabbing actual work or by generating work). This is indeed how you create a "legible & convincing narrative" to increase your budget (end goal being more people, more power).

In some startup envrionments the execs may want to show growth by hiring as much as possible but that's not your typical company.


That's because they have a budget which is planned ahead (e.g., 2024 for 2025) for everything.

Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).

I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.


Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which don’t factor in continual employment of staff lead to the morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn’t actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale high is a goal (which it definitely isn’t at many companies.)

Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.

“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.


I agree.

Mismanagement of funds is one of the worst things. Is it pure incompetence?

Or is that they don't give a damn and that "let's get together 500+ people for a fully paid weekend" is too cool to cancel?

...like better an egg today than a hen tomorrow. I mean, they don't get affected anyways, they do get the egg and hen...!


Playing devil's advocate: Firing people has a huge financial impact - around $100,000 per person per year. The event only cost $50,000 once. So it might not be that significant, and at least the staff gets to enjoy a nice event. Why eliminate both when the event's cost is equivalent to just half a position?

This one's easy. Because you value your people more than the parties they can throw. The cost/benefit are not just monetary. If they were, the event would have no reason to happen under any circumstance.

You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.


I think it has more to do with the psychological effect than with money itself.

We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.

When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".

It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...


Let's hope the budget includes success then...

I'm not disagreeing - but I think it's worth pointing out that an employee on $40K actually costs the company a lot more ( can be as much as > 2x ) - not just employers tax, pensions contributions etc, but also the cost of factory/lab/office space and equipment and consumables[1].

[1] Assuming the consultants aren't also in the office with a desk etc


Employee headcount is also evaluated less favorably when potential investors evaluate the company's health. They're implicitly seen as a promise to continue paying them in the future, whether that's materially different from what the company does with contractors or not.

And some of that is probably fair. As an employee, a layoff of a bunch of employees is a lot more troubling than a bunch of contractors not having their contracts renewed.


$40k is a tiny salary, too. Taxes, facilities, and benefits are going to be more than 2x that. A contractor paid $200k/year is likely cheaper in total cost than an employee paid $100k/year.

Surely this is a question of having skin in the game, where management is all game and employees all skin. If the clowns making decisions would get hit by bad ones, things would look differently. You now, actually "taking full responsibility".

One thing I learned the other day is to never believe the internal corporate newsletters. For an entire year, pretty much every single day would bring in an e-mail from Company BU A, or Cross-Company Initiative X, or Podcast with CEO, or such. Every single one of them would talk about the great successes in recovering from the economic crisis, the amazing results this quarter, the great product release here, another successful merger there, new perspectives on Bitcoin or AI or such from CEO, whatnot - all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed. And then a layoff wave finally reaches your department, and you learn that apparently the whole BU is deep in the red and they're forced to cut staff across the board, and it's been like this forever, and that's why there was an emergency meeting last Thursday (called "Financial Update Q3 for BU Y" or something, non-obligatory and otherwise not announced or discussed), and "don't you ever attend town halls?".

(Yeah, no one at PM level or above does, there's nothing relevant in them. Until one day there is.)

Newsletters, meanwhile, continue coming and announcing even greater growth due to digital transformation in the age of blockchain or AI or stuff.

Lesson learned: the first impression was correct - it's all internal marketing, and it's about as truthful and helpful to the recipient as regular marketing, i.e. not at all.


When narratives fail, to casual observers the failure seems sudden and out of the blue, but there are usually unmistakable signs of "narrative breakdown" that often become obvious to most observers only in hindsight. One of the most dramatic stories of a "failed narrative" we have ever read comes from Barton Biggs, in his book "Wealth, War and Wisdom":

>> "...the Japanese official battle reports and the Japanese press reported the Battle of the Coral Sea as a great triumph, and Midway was portrayed as a victory, not a defeat, although some loss of aircraft and ships were admitted. Although casualties must have been noted and grieved, Japanese society at the time was so united behind the war policy and believed so totally in the invincibility of the Japanese military, that defeat and economic failure were virtually inconceivable. It would have been unpatriotic to sell stocks..."

>> "Not every investor in Japan misread the battles at Coral Sea and Midway. Food was in short supply, and railings in the parks around the Imperial Palace were being dismantled for their iron. The Nomura family and Nomura Securities in mid-1942 began to suspect the eventual defeat of Japan. Although the newspapers and radio broadcast only good news about the course of the war, the Nomuras apparently picked up information in the elite tea houses of the upper class. Many of the naval officers and aviators involved in the battles at Midway and the Coral Sea had geishas, and when the officers failed to return, rumors began to circulate."

>> "The Nomura family, sensing something was amiss, began to gradually sell its equity holdings, and even sold short. Later they purchased real assets, probably reasoning that land and real businesses would be the best stores of value in a conquered country. These protected assets allowed the family to have the capital to finance the rapid expansion of Nomura Securities & Research in the immediate postwar years and eventually emerge as the dominant securities firm in Japan."

When did the narrative above "officially" fail? Many date it to August 15, 1945, six days after the 2nd atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, when Emperor Hirohito addressed Japan on the radio to announce Japan's surrender, noting "...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage..."


For most execs/people, there's a big difference between what people will say in a meeting and what they will write down. They feel the permanance of the writing or recording.

one of lessons i learned hard way: do not trust - or avoid - managers/higher-ups who do not want their things in written - even e-mails. While still have you sign all kind of stuff.

"the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small." - https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/

Centralised rule, surveillance, privileging the upper classes, meaningless statistics, perfomative loyalty; things capitalists say they hate about communism, they love when designing companies.

> "all giving you the picture of the enterprise being like literal USS Enterprise hitting warp speed."

Everything whizzing rapidly upwards while your cube farm gets more crowded and your tools slower and your once-respected skilled work devalued in favour of pump-n-dump funny-money schemes?

> "The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies -- more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"


> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.

One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.

Basically:

* We were spending money like it was going out of style

* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.

* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.


This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech, that you need to try and get as much money out of your initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.

If it makes you feel any better, there is usually little connection between management wasting money last year and laying off employees this year. Downsizing targets are based on predicted future needs so if business is trending down they'll cut just as many employees even if they have an enormous amount of cash saved.

Everybody makes mistakes. Higher up in the company (or goverment) mistakes are usually more expensive. Painful, but I see no way around this.

What's even more absurd than cost cutting after mismanagement is a layoff and cost cutting while having record profits. Look at most of the big tech layoffs last year and the year before. Every one of them was reporting more profit and revenue than ever before and still doing layoffs

when you observe management wasting absurd amounts of money

Working in corporate America has caused me to view layoffs as proof of managerial incompetence. I understand that the market doesn't see it that way, but that's the conclusion I've come to.


I think that the honorable thing in those companies is for a CEO to demand seppuku from a significant portion of the c-suite. At least as a form of solidarity with the workers put to the sword.

> management is apparently incapable of managing

That’s frequently the fundamental issue really.

Measuring a developer’s productivity as an IC is fairly easy. Measuring quality of manager’s decisions is tricky


Lets just add a metric (like loc or stockprice) - that will solve things. Gambling metrics will continue till lipservice improves.

It doesn't matter what the reason is. The reason is whatever will look least bad in the news (if it ever makes it in the news) - and is legal. Ignore the reason, it has nothing to do with you, it's not about you, it's a technical detail. But yes, it would be nice if the manager was helping their employees understand that.

Even for an investor keeping an eye on their holdings, give minimal weight to the reasons for a detail level layoff.


It's just normal late Capitalism syndrome - no one takes responsibilities, and everyone, at least everyone that is close to the trough tries to get his/her head into it.

From politicians to corporation managers to civil servants, it's everywhere. That's it.


"low level" do count in stats if need to show "savings" and can be easily replaced when needed. Also they do not generate profits but need resources (mentoring etc.). On the other side costs are tax deductible.

Um, I have seen irrationality all across the board. Market participants shooting themselves in the foot.

I have seen investors not invest even $10K into a project and then line up to invest far more for the SAME amount of shares.

When you apply for jobs, you see recruiters (who get commission from placements) tell you that your background isnt a fit when it is a perfect fit, and prefer to not show candidates.

I have even explained to recruiters that there is an opportunity to represent the candidates, like a Hollywood agent or like a seller agent i Real Estate. That the candidates would also pay a commission out of their salary, if placed in a job they actually like. And that all they have to do is call their counterpart recruiter and vouch for the candidate, which usually a quick call. But most are stuck in their ways and don’t want to tap new opportunities, no matter how easy. To their credit, some are not.

And so, it is no surprise to me that businesses waste money and then cut their task force. Many of them don’t care about you, but expect you to care about them. They’ll even expect you to stay late and demonstrate commitment, but they won’t pay you overtime.


In my experience, the consultants likely recommend the layoffs, probably even helping select who to let go.

If they cut more than five $40k employees, they've made their $200k back.


It's not just overspending it's over hiring too. IME they always go hand in hand.

Then those who spent years working hard with minimal staff are the ones to be laid off.


We are apparently going through a "year of efficiency" and most of us know what it means. After "more with less" round come layoffs so one might as well do some basic prep work, dust off resume, reach out to your support network.. just saying.

not a single comment about overpopulation?

They don't spend $200k on consultants just because it's fun. They do it when there are already difficulties in figuring out how to productively use the employees who make $40k (say 20 of them).

This is not to say managers don't make stupid decisions, but they are more like bets. Somewhere between the fall of Nokia and the hit of iphone are thousands of decisions that lead to hiring or firing some 10-100 people.


After being laid off more than once, I think I'd adjust the advice a little:

- You're only obliged to work your contract hours. If you do more then make sure that you, personally, are getting something out of it, whether that's "I look good to my boss" or "I take job satisfaction from this" or just "I get to play with Kotlin". Consider just not working overtime.

- Take initiative, but do so sustainably. Instead of trying to look good for promo, or alternately doing the bare minimum and just scraping by, take on impactful work at a pace that won't burn you out and then leave if it isn't rewarded.

- Keep an ear to the ground. Now you've got a job, you don't need another one, but this is a business relationship just like renting a house or paying for utilities. Be aware of the job market, and consider interviewing for roles that seriously interest you. Don't go crazy and waste the time of every company in your city lest it come back to bite you, but do interview for roles you might actually take.

The last two points are fine, however.


Indeed. The real discovery in the article is that the people who manage performance and the people who manage headcount were completely different people. The article writer had (common mistake) assumed that impressing the former would take care of the latter. It doesn't; the techniques to manage the headcount people are different.

I wholeheartedly endorse your adjustments - it is fine to go above and beyond but for heavens sake people please think about why beyond some vague competitive urge. Going above and beyond without a plan just means the effort will likely be wasted. Some cynicism should be used. Negotiate explicitly without assuming that the systems at play are fair, reasonable or looking out for you.


> the techniques to manage the headcount people are different

I would like to hear a little bit more about those techniques.

The only one I am aware of is to make sure that you have promotions under your belt: The arm's-length people who plan layoffs know very little about the individual's other than their job title and rank. But this advice is hardly useful: it is extremely rare for an individual to have a choice of whether to be promoted or something different.

What other techniques are you aware of?


There are several types of layoffs:

1. The company-wide 5% layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're not in the bottom 5% of performers, and the people above you know it.

2. The shift-the-legacy-products-to-cheap-countries layoff. Avoid this by making sure you're working on products where you're fixing bugs and making improvements, not just keeping things ticking over.

3. The lay-off-the-entire-department layoff. Avoid this by working in departments that bring in more revenue than they cost, or at least have a good chance of commercial success; and in an area where the company's strategy calls for growth.

4. The lay-off-the-entire-office layoff. Not much you can do about this, except working at the head office, or a very large branch office where important projects are based.

5. The there's-just-no-money / entire-company-goes-out-of-business layoff. Not much you can do about this - but if things are heading in this direction, it's a good time to start sending out resumes and maybe getting the unemployment insurance on your car loan.

Of course these are very risk-averse strategies. I've heard of some people having great success with the opposite strategies - some people say maintaining ancient legacy mainframes for banks is highly profitable. Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving. So none of these are hard-and-fast rules.


Thank you for this.

In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.

As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.

I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.


There is a halfway between 1 and 3 where the manager is told to drop 5% and rather than picking one dev per team the manager just squashes one “nice-to-have” application and drops that team.

There's also the shifting over-correction from "stack ranking is problematic and risks lawsuits about bias in performance counting" (because no one trusts performance metrics anymore) and 1 becomes "layoff a 'random' 5%" because "random" is the new "fair".

Or 5% and someone identifies a certain level that is costly and cuts that horizontally across the org to backfill with cheaper lower level employees.

There is one other thing you can sometimes pull off: tell your boss you could work for a different division. Often (but not always, perhaps not even the majority of times) when layoffs happen there are also moves to a different division that is hiring people. So you want to make sure you are on the list of people to recommend to the other division. (this sometimes means getting skills the other wants before the layoffs)

Good points.

The key point is that people need to face today's economic/political realities which is that it is all "Realpolitik" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik). You either learn how to play the game based on circumstances or suffer.

S.Jaishankar, the External Affairs Minister of India said this recently which i think is highly applicable here (https://www.news18.com/india/eam-jaishankar-advice-stress-ma...);

Jaishankar stressed that no one should feel dejected after a setback and constantly strive for self-improvement. “When I look at my own particular responsibilities now but even earlier as diplomat, I had to aspire to reach the 3Cs of success. CONTACT – the more people you know, the greater your reach. CHEMISTRY – If you get along with people, they are more likely to do things for you. CREDIBILITY – if you are known to be good on words, people take you seriously," he said.

“My most honest answer (to manage chronic stress), you normalize the abnormal. You build your life around it, you de-stress it by making it a part of your life. If your phone rings in at 2 in the night, you answer it and go back to sleep and get up at 6 or 7 and try to remember and hope what you said was right."

So make sure you have good contact with Management/Marketing/Sales/HR, good chemistry with your Manager/Peers/Team, good credibility on your Knowledge/Work and finally, de-stress by normalizing the abnormal (with caveats).


> Others have told me the fastest way to get a senior title is a failing organisation, where senior people keep leaving.

I actually thought about doing this early in my career and know folks who intentionally did this to cut a few years off their path to being able to (ethically, without lying) put "Senior" on their resume.

It works, and surprisingly well, however if you are considering this I would also suggest you do it in a market/business area that you don't particularly care about. I've been in more than one interview where a senior executive who was very tied in on the business side (knew all the big players, had the cell phone numbers for all the major company's CEOs, etc) immediately saw this on someone's resume and raised it as a red flag.

The odds of that happening are honestly pretty slim, but it's something to consider.


I generally agree with all that. You can absolutely be in the wrong place at the wrong time sometimes and there's not much you can do about it.

Yes. When the first dot-com bubble burst, my father was working on semiconductor manufacturing machines.

The machines worked fine. They worked just as well the day after Webvan went bankrupt as they did the day before. The business was cashflow positive, not some crazy gamble.

But suddenly the chipmakers realised they had more capacity than they knew what to do with, and put growth plans on hold. At the same time, understandably, a lot of investors decided to get out of tech stocks.

Even the largest boats rise and fall with the tides.


I think it comes down to a previous discussion on HN, "don't just crush tickets".

Crushing tickets gives you localized visibility and job security but doesn't help when your managers managers manager has to make cuts.

But if you get name dropped for launching a big feature at the monthly all-hands, are getting added to higher level calls, or even chat up your managers manager at the off-site, that's the difference between being an Excel row and being a person.


It might be. But I’ve been in the room when a very high performing team was given the ax. This was a team that had all kinds of kudos and objective measures showing they were better than their peers.

But their office lease was up sooner and getting rid of that magnified the savings.

I’ve done many layoffs and been laid off many times, and the advice I’d tell people is don’t think it’s a reflection on you if you get laid off _or dont_.

Most of the time it’s just macro factors out of your control.


Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets off the board and my team did $x”

You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).

You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours.

It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.


> trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there.

This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.

IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.


I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012.

No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.

When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.

I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.


The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.

But no one to a first approximation is going to do it. Statistics show that on average, people only look at your resume for 6 seconds.

And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.

I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.

I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs


I generally disagree with the CV point but the "6 seconds" anecdote doesn't ring true to me except for obviously unfit applicants. I have definitely spent less than 10 seconds looking at a resume but it's because I immediately rejected the applicant - for example, the role is a solid mid-level or senior role and the applicant just graduated college and has no relevant experience or open source projects.

I want to be interested in your resume. If I'm interviewing you, you can be absolutely sure I've spent at least 20-30 minutes reading over your resume, looking up your past companies/schools, getting a sense of what you've done and pulled out a few relevant or interesting things to ask about.

I think the "6 seconds" thing is mostly HR drones who are barely qualified to write the resumes they're reading, let alone judge them, and are simply sorting into "yes" and "no" piles.


Do you think that most managers spend 30 minutes reading over a resume and do everything else they have to do?

I can guarantee you that none of my managers spent more than 5 minutes looking over my resume and 4 of my six lady jobs have been strategic early hires, 1 was at BigTech where one person in my loop was my eventual manager and my current one was for one of I think 25 highest level IC positions at my current company of 600-700 people.


I am not buying the oft-quoted statistics in HR/Recruiting which like most popular adages is mostly made up from a few anecdotes and widely disseminated which people then accept because "everybody says so". The key is to hook in the reader from the summary/qualifications on the first page.

The "tell me about yourself" question is one of the worst to ask and i never do this. It is so open ended that people start rambling. Instead get them to focus (this also calms their nerves) by asking about notable jobs picked from their resume "what did you do as ... at ..." and dig more as needed. Do this for a couple more jobs if available and you will get to see how confident the candidate is, how he communicates, the depth of his knowledge and his modes of thinking. From here, you generalize to what the job actually needs and give the candidate some idea of the job and its environment and ask how he hopes to fit in and contribute. This makes things clear to both interviewer and interviewee.

I also do not place much weight on personality/psychology tests/questions. People generally cannot be truthful in their answers to questions like "how do you deal with conflict with your co-worker?" etc. Here i trust to "gut feeling" based on non-verbal impressions, verbal communication and pointed questions (challenge the candidate by taking a contrarian stance and see how he responds).

Finally, i make sure that the interviewee at the very outset understands that though i am the interviewer it does not mean that i am more knowledgeable than him in his areas of expertise. This works great by boosting his confidence which then leads to a more natural interaction.

Recruiting/HR is a complex art where you have to consider various factors to build a picture of a person (suited to a role) from factual data and psychology. IMO a good way is to start with an understanding of Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory For a nice overview, see the book Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.


The fact is that every open req especially for remote positions get hundreds of resumes within the first hour, who is going to read that? An 8 page resume goes straight to the trash. Part of a job of a “senior” is good communication skills and knowing your audience. An eight page resume shows laziness since they didn’t take the time to make it shorter and no one is going to listen to or read anything 8 pages especially as a manager who just wants to know what is going on a high level.

I ask the tell me about yourself question partially to assess their communication skills and getting to the point.

Do you think people who are conducting an interview loop at large companies are going to go through an 8 page resume? Yes I’ve been on both sides of a BigTech interview loop and have gone through the interview training process there.

Even at smaller companies when building a team and I’ve had 80% of the say so about who gets hired, I still needed evidence to take the CxO/director and couldn’t go by “gut feel”.

And when dealing with customers (I work in consulting now) or “the business” you have to have a strategy to deal with interdepartmental conflicts, different stakeholders have different priorities, some people don’t want to change etc. I’m not talking about a conflict with another coworker arguing about which design pattern to use.


You have missed the point of the long CV. It is not that the recipient has to read everything. As mentioned, the first couple of pages is the resume. However the details are there to provide more info. as needed. Contrary to what you think i have had very good response to such a layout. Often times they see a company/project/technology there (even if old) which rings a bell with them and which they are then eager to discuss. That is the point; Give them all the info. in which you are strong so that they can make a better informed decision. The same is what i look for when i am the interviewer; a few bullet points on a 2-page resume which basically tell me nothing is useless.

Incidentally, Jeff Bezos does something similar with his 6-page memo (plus annexes) for meetings; Same idea different domain; More details help better decision-making.

"Gut Feel" is absolutely needed to give your input on Team Fit, Conflict Management and similar other intangible Human factors. Some companies are doing Myers-Briggs etc. but i give them lower weightage (because they can be gamed by practice) over subjective feelings.

A report on a interviewee should include objective assessments (knowledge, experience etc. and your inferences based on them) and subjective assessments (temperament, maturity etc.)


I worked at AWS for three years (Professional Services). Using Amazon as an example of a good corporate culture and how companies should behave is not the argument you think it is.

But I see a few scenarios.

You have a strong network and the resume is a formality. In that case it’s easy enough to tailor your resume for the job. I don’t need to put that I wrote FORTRAN and C on VAX and Stratus mainframes in the mid 90s. There is no need for an 8 page resume. The year before last I had two offers for strategic positions based on my network.

The second case you are targeting a company where you know you have a competitive advantage, again in that case, you only need to have a resume that focuses on what gives you a competitive advantage. In my case, now I focus on strategic cloud consulting positions that focus on app development. In that case, I only need to focus on my job at a startup in 2018, talk in broad strokes about my time at AWS (working there automatically gets call backs by the way), and when the day comes, when I leave my current job as a “staff architect”.

The worse case is if you are spamming your resume far and wide and you are looking for any generic job. I look at an 8 page resume and then I have to take the time to see what is this person trying to communicate - it goes in the trash and I move on. I have hundreds of other resumes that I can get through quickly.

Of course if the company is reaching out to me, it’s even easier to tailor my resume for the job requirements. I have my “career document” to pull from either way that is as long as needed.

But even then I’m not going back even to the low level work I did in 2012 for Windows CE devices.


I am not talking about general Amazon corporate culture so your caveat makes no sense. I am talking about the practice of one specific technique which leads to better decision-making and which has also been validated by other people adopting it. Here is Jeff's own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg

I consider 2-page resumes no better than a powerpoint presentation (i.e. almost useless) and furthermore when i see people tailor it to what they think i should know i consider it maybe trying to hide something. This is because by omitting companies they take away a vector for me to check references and more. Note that this is different from highlighting relevant experience/knowledge.

Your scenarios are nothing new from what you have already mentioned earlier; And spamming is not what i am talking about. That is a policy decision made by each person based on his circumstances.

You and most folks are simply parroting current practices in HR/Recruiting which are broken and need to be rethought from the ground up. To repeat once more, all details matter at some level in recruiting. As they say "measure twice and cut once" and "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".


Well, since most people at least in the US don’t do 8 page resumes and yet they get hired everyday and most managers aren’t asking for 8 page resumes and aren’t complaining about two page resumes, you ever thought you might be the outlier?

On the other hand, do you pay top of market? Would anyone be clamoring to expand their resume to eight pages because you prefer it?


Well, did you ever realize that you have a "bee in your bonnet" regarding the number 8 which is not the point of my example resume? It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels) with nothing omitted. The rationale has already been pointed out viz. a) Different job fit than applied for job b) background reference checking c) indicators of self-motivation/adaptability/breadth of thought etc. all of which are very relevant.

As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken. So being a outlier in this case is good. Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter. When i do send in my CV, recruiters invariably call me back which then helps me to prime them with specific relevant experiences listed in the CV which they then forward to the actual interviewers. It allows one to stand out from the crowd.

Finally, most 2-page resumes look all the same with keywords/boiler-plate sentences/paragraphs with nothing giving me any additional insight into the person. The self-imposed page limit causes them to self censor their words/sentences unnecessarily leading to loss of info. For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.


Well, seeing that my success rate over 25 years (not counting my first job the i got via a return offer from a internship) is also 100% across looking for a job 9 times as far as send my email to a recruiter -> get an interview with only two pages at most, I think I’m doing pretty good.

Admittedly before 2020, those were local recruiters with local jobs.

> It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels)

Let’s say I was looking for a job next year. I wouldn’t want to use my one hour I have with an interviewer to talk about anything I did before 2016. I’m looking for high level staff roles at small to medium companies. I want the entire conversation to be about signaling that I have competencies with leading a project from initial discovery with stakeholders to implementation and getting it done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

I also want to signal that while my breadth in my chosen domain is wide and I’m going to highlight projects that show that breadth, I’m not a paper tiger who can’t do hands on keyboard software development or “cloud engineering”. I can demonstrate that easily in 2 pages by leaving off anything before 2016.

Within those 10 years I can demonstrate a steady growth from being a barely competent lead developer, to being an architect at a startup, to consulting and working on projects with increasing “scope”, “impact”, and “ambiguity”.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

> As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken.

Even if recruiting is broken , it’s a “gravity problem. Just because you may not like gravity, if you jump out of 50 story building, you will die. While I’ve avoided the leetCode grind, I’ve played the “how to be successful at system design and behavioral interviews” game with aplomb. You adapt to the reality

>So being an outlier in this case is good.

Or you can just be an outlier by having a skill set and experience that sets you apart from the crowd in whatever niche you decided to pursue.

> Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter.

The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. I once had an interviewer ask me a “trick question” about C in 2014 for a C# development position. Even at the time I was six years removed from any C programming. I answered it and got the job. But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.

> For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.

Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”. I communicate my expertise on my resume by telling how I used my knowledge to achieve an outcome.


Again, you are not saying anything new at all with this wall of text. You can claim any competency you want but that has to be evaluated and judged by the Interviewer's (and his team's) standards. This is the key; since your opinion of yourself does not count for that much, you provide all the info. you can to the Interviewer so they can pick up on it and dig deeper on all aspects (coding, designing, requirements specification, system architecture etc.) as needed.

Also a lot of words/phrases you have used above are general platitudes. By themselves they mean nothing unless you can tie them to a specific usecase/experience from your CV which should contain the details. Both the "Forest" i.e. big picture/business need/overall system/architecture/etc. details and "The Trees" i.e. languages/tools/libraries/frameworks/techniques/etc. matter.

You have to deal with Reality even if it is broken but you can do it differently than the norm (but stand out on the positive side) and get excellent results. To paraphrase a wellknown saying; "It is no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick [recruiting process]".

> The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. ... But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.

This depends on what i am interviewing you for. As pointed out above, my requirements/needs trump your view/opinions of the role.

As an example, my very first job was implementing a Personnel Information System using Cobol85 on a Cyberdata mainframe. Using Structured Analysis and Design methods (this was before OO became mainstream) I implemented a RDBMS inspired design using ISAM files and also a UI using ansi escape codes. So even though i do not remember much of the Cobol language itself i remember the design which is still useful today. Hence i can demonstrate knowledge of Relational Theory/RDBMSes as needed. This is only possible if it were listed in the CV in the first place.

> Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”.

You have failed the test. This only shows you have no business evaluating any resume for a C++ developer. It is actually an advanced expertise which most good interviewers understand and appreciate and design teams need.


“By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.”

This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.


I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process.

One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects.

The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.


Honestly I don't want to read narrative prose which is as likely to be a lie as anything else on the resume/CV. A half page might be fine if you've got a dozen CVs to look at for an ultra-specific role. If you just need a half-decent Golang developer and have 80 resumes that pass the initial screen? I'm not reading 40 pages of fluff, and if I'm not going to read all of its it's unfair to read any of it.

If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.

I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.


I already pointed out in my other comments that the first couple of pages is the resume but the details are given to consult as needed. This is how it should be since more details help one make better decisions. The current Recruiting/HR practices are broken which nobody seems to question. Human Resource is very important in this highly competitive economy where a single employee can change the entire future of the company, and yet people are using keyword searches, bullet point explanations and snap judgements for recruiting. Add in the fact that there is almost no training given to new employees nowadays which means it is even more important to recruit the right person.

You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.

A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg


> You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making.

So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?

> A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations

Well first there is a huge difference between what Amazon says in public and what actually happens (like the Bullshit leadership principles especially the one about being the best employer). I can tell you from personal experience from actually working at Amazon that there were a lot of PowerPoint slides in internal meetings and especially when dealing with customers. I did my share of them.

Second, instead of using an analogy, we can actually talk about resumes at Amazon and how the hiring process works. No one ever submits 8 page resumes, nor does anyone in the hiring loop bemoan the fact that we only got 2 page resumes. I was on both sides of the hiring process there.

Never did they mention a word in the “Make Great Hiring Decisions” training program that they really like candidates to give them 8 page resumes.

Do you really want to keep bringing Amazon up as an example to someone who actually worked there?


First see my other comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42885210

> So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?

Yes, if only to confirm veracity. The mantra is "Trust but Verify".

The point of bringing up the Amazon example was to show a specific technique which works and has been adopted/validated by others. Amazon is a giant company and you were just one small cog in the wheel so pointing to your Amazon experience is not very convincing. This was not something imposed on every trivial meeting but for important strategic ones. There is good logic behind such a practice viz. helps to get the entire team on the same page w.r.t. some subject. Finally, i did not say that Amazon did the above for recruitment but suggested that recruiting in general would be far better if they (and everybody else) adopted such a logic.


This...

And tell you what, the posts on linkedin and the blogs like this, where the take away is 'I got fired and next time I'll work LESS'. Really?

Errr, might want to reconsider that strategy, unless you think that you are going to get binned no matter what, and just cruising until that happens is the solution. Just seems like a massively negative outcome.

That, or they are going for the spiteful 'hopefully I convince everyone else to lower the standard, so others get sacked, or so I look good again'.


The point of the article isn't to just "work less", but rather that working above and beyond what you're contracted for in a large organization in the long run ultimately won't matter. The takeaway is that your "extra" efforts can be better spent elsewhere: family, personal projects, interviews for next gig, etc.

The article makes it very clear that they're talking about large, 100+ staff companies; when you're just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Today it's seldom that the person doing the layoffs is also part of the day to day operations, hence the you're "just another row in an excel spreadsheet" call out. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves by thinking at the boots-on-the-ground level (known individual/quantity, appreciated) instead of the macro COO/CFO costs tracking level (unknown individual/quantity, interchangeable.)


Nah, its just them playing the victim. You can totally get noticed in a big company. Or overlooked in a small.

Throwing in the towel and saying I'm not going to bother in the future... yeah I'd never be hiring you in the first place.


I don't think the original post is advocating for just "throwing in the towel" here. Instead they're simply stating that working what you're specifically contracted for is a more reasonable and sustainable model than always going "above and beyond" for little to no gain to your work life and at great cost to your personal life.

Corporations by design don't "care" about you, they only care about maximizing profits and returns for their shareholders. Sure you can get "noticed" by higher ups, but those individuals have no obligations to you in the day to day operations unless you're getting cozy with the (increasingly externally conteacted) deciders/architects of the next upcoming re-org.

It's not explicitly stated in the article, but their call-out of the behavior of large companies speaks to the missing piece of the puzzle here: the "stage" of the company's lifecycle plays a crutial role in how much your "above and beyond" contributions matter. 10 person start-up? Matters significantly. 1000+ person org? Drop in the bucket.


Nothing magic or particularly reliable, but a few things stemming from the basics - layoffs happen because the accountants say there isn't enough money, and [Function X] seems to cost more than [Profit/Opportunity Y] that is assigned to it. Then a bunch of people have no job the next week. So to avoid being picked up in a layoff, it is helpful to talk to the accountants, figure out what Y is and what X you are in, and if the numbers aren't promising work to get re-categorised as a Z, increase Y or negotiate to change how things are measured.

Most product teams are organised around the idea that someone tells them what to build, then they build it. That means they never talk to anyone who cares about profit. Short-circuiting that and being in people's ear about "is this going to secure income?" can be good for everyone.

Is that sort of thing guaranteed to work? No, sometimes the hammer is too big and heavy to divert. But a lot of the time software people show no interest in whether the plans they are signing off on are going to be viewed as leading to more money.

Eg, in the original article I see things like "Occasionally, the VP of Product would message me directly to ask if a feature was feasible to implement". Cool. The VP of product isn't politically aligned [0] to put old mate on profitable features. He is going to potentially put old mate on features that are hard to implement, moonshots or potentially get someone to stop bothering him. So old mate build up a reputation for technical excellence (aka on track to Staff Developer), but not a reputation for being essential to making the accountants happy. Eventually parts of the business that aren't under VP Product's control sack him.

If an accountant thinks you are responsible for 1% of a companies revenue and your salary is less than that, your job is secure. Iron clad. Really have to screw up to get fired. So proactively talking to them and associating with things that push revenue up is a strategy. Negotiate to make it so.

[0] If he's a good VP he will be, but that isn't something that can be assumed.


I never understood the advice of to take on impactful work. How does work? The team is assigned units of work and then individuals are usually assigned the tasks. The only way I see it to work is to be on a team that works on impactful projects.

I know this probably doesn't help you now, but I negotiated this as a requirement of my employment. I showed up day one, walked around & engaged about 20 or so people on the floor in what they did over the first few weeks I was there, picked up a few low hanging projects that seemed interesting & then just kept doing whatever the hell I felt like. Was I qualified to do this? No. But, honestly, I wasn't qualified to do anything at the place, anyways.

I mentor all of my junior engineers to do the same, and management really likes it. The rule of the game is you must finish what you start, and you must clearly communicate schedule.


> picked up a few low hanging projects

In what industry does a new hire just not have someone telling them what to do?


>individuals are usually assigned the tasks

The higher you go, the more vaguely your "tasks" are defined, the more scope you have for interpretation and for choosing subproblems and related problems to dig into and run with.


Just got accepted on my first job last month. Yet, last week, company (>500 ppl) already announced some small layoffs.

Do you always lurk for opportunities outside the current company (maybe some roles are more stable)? If so, how to explain in the interview that you're currently employed somewhere but concerned of their stability?


If you're actually down to jump ship you can probably be upfront about it.

It's a negative point but the good managers I've had were usually realists so unless you have multiple questionable things or get overly defensive/weird when answering they'd just take it as "shit happens" with a small minus.

Edit: To me it feels like all of the talk outside of technical knowledge is essentially based on vibes. My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate but after I stopped explaining it too much and just went with "shit happens, my bad" it stopped being much of an issue.

If you wanna lie you can also say that you took the job as filler until you find a position in/with CERTAIN CRITERIA and you made your employer aware of this. I don't know how common that is but my current situation is kinda this. I worked for my current fulltime employer as a student and when offered a fulltime contract past graduation I asked for a shorter notice period due to wanting to move to Switzerland and they agreed.

Of course be careful not to do it too often since you don't want multiple couple month gigs in your CV.


> My CV is pretty bad since it took me way too long to graduate

I don't put dates on my education anymore. shrug


I don't even put education anymore.

I dropped out of university, so in my early years it took a lot of tuning my resume to give the impression that I had a degree without actually saying it. Thankfully I had taken summer courses at a different, nearby university for two years before college. Eventually I would just put the years, the universities, and the major I was pursuing. Now I just leave it off the resume.

I had one manager who found out after the fact and told me he wouldn't have hired me if he realized, but he was glad he did.

I had an interview where they asked for a college transcript and then grilled me on why I failed Martian Geology and why I only got a C in Vector Calculus. I was given an offer, but declined it because of that experience. I dodged a bullet too; I've seen reports that the company sues former employees just to cost them money.


> you can probably be upfront about it.

But for the unwritten interview rule: Don't be negative.

Even if the interviewer knows you're in a dumpster fire, you have more to lose.


If you just started at your first job i would focus first on becoming an asset for your team.

Being well regarded by key technical folks will allow you to leverage them for introductions and recommendations if you need a new job. In general, find a good mentor, develop soft skills and maintain friendships.

There are no guarantees and with minimal experience you are for now more vulnerable, but this should minimize the risk better than always searching for the next job. My 2c.


Well, you say just that. It even demonstrates a beginning of business acumen.

Everyone does it, recruiters aren’t naive. Once I became old enough to hire people, I understood it’s ok (depending on the audience, beware) to say “I can start on Monday but I’ll take two weeks of holidays during the same month, because it’s already planned.” Better have employees who are mature enough to take care of their worklife balance, than employees who burn out and end up grumpy. An employee was relocating and I told him during the first month he shouldn’t work more than 6hrs/day and use the rest to settle his private life (rental, bank, insurances, child care, etc.).


There's no need. Just tell them that you're keeping tabs on the job market and would switch for a compelling offer. It's up to them whether they have one for you.

Whether or not you start actively looking for other jobs, you can take any opportunities you have to better develop your network. It's harder just starting out but post my first fairly extended role out of grad school, every one of my jobs was through someone I knew.

I read somewhere that 1 in 20 job postings is fake.

So you just explain to the fake job interviewer that you're the 1 in 20 fake job candidate.

There's a 5% chance they'll understand.


I agree with this, maybe I'd summarize things in a slightly different way: think of employment as a mutually beneficial transaction. That doesn't necessarily mean simply working the contracted hours, but keep in mind that jobs are, these days transactional in nature.

I can go above and beyond, work on the weekends etc, but there should be a benefit to me. That could be because I learn something and it sets me up for my next job, I increase my chances of a promotion, or just that it's something interesting to me personally.

I think there is probably less cynicism this way too, because this is how most companies look at employees too.


Also, keep yourself employable. What you get hired to do and what you'll find yourself doing 6 months later, 2 years later, etc. aren't going to be the same. Whatever you are doing, keep in mind how much of it is really a marketable skill and how much of it is specialized to a small slice of the industry or perhaps even just your current company. Move within a company to keep working on what is useful to one's own career. I would only accept dead end work for a significant pay bump or as I'm finalizing for retirement.

Not sure why you got downvoted for this. My current role started very tech-heavy and morphed into almost completely documentation as my management found out I'm one of the only ones at the company who doesn't suck at grammar and photography. Now my day-to-day really wouldn't be useful for getting another job with a similar title (and pay) to my current one, and I need to devote extra time outside of work to keeping up with actual tech skills that I used to be able to develop on-the-job.

One of my earliest jobs was supposedly programming but was actually a slow descent into tech support for in house applications under the hood and I glad I took that as a hint to move elsewhere. Since then, it has always been a balance between doing what the company needs but also making sure I'm positioned to learn new technology or otherwise be growing my career in some fashion.

I was laid off during dot-bomb and was lucky enough to land a good (actually better) job through someone I knew pretty quickly. Pay wasn't great and they barely came through dot-bomb themselves later. But whatever.

I can't say I was surprised when it happened. I knew things weren't going well and I wasn't really bringing in business. Was actually happy to move on except for the fact that the job market was really tough at the moment.

But, yeah. Under most circumstances knocking yourself out isn't worth it most of the time. I have had some product launches and on-job site projects where I sort of did for a while and that was OK. But don't make a practice of it in most cases.


> through someone I knew

The best interview hack


Yeah, I think the first email I dropped was to this guy who owned a small company we had been a client of in an earlier role. He invited me up to lunch and was there with his (later) COO. It was basically a casual interview. Later, we discussed some contract work but he basically decided to just hire me. Which was nice because it was basically nuclear winter during dot-bomb--nothing else that even vaguely resembled a lead.

I think this sort of thing bugs a lot of people here because they think that some sort of theoretical skill assessment should be what matters. But that's not how the world works for the most part.


this is great and subtle advice worth reading twice. I'd add that a great "getting something out of it" reason is learning and reputation.

I've experienced a company not only treating its employees as numbers in a sheet, but also actively lying to them.

I was part of a well performing team in a corporation in the US. Management told us that we've been making a real impact in the company's goals and they are going to increase our capacity to accomplish even more the next year by adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks. The facade was well maintained - we got expanded goals for the next year, celebratory meeting for exceeding expectations etc. but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management. Little did we know that we ended up training our replacements.

Majority of my teammates got kicked out of the company by security, getting paperwork on their way out without a chance to even say goodbye. I was offered a role in another team, but the trust by that point was severed so much that I instead decided to take severance and leave as well.

The lesson for me has been to always act like an independent contractor or business owner, even when employed by a corporation or "family-like" startup. Based on mine and many of my friends' experiences there's no such thing as loyalty in the business setting anymore. You are on your own and you should only engage as much as it makes sense to you. Extra hours beyond what's required (e.g. beyond 40hrs) should directly and clearly benefit you.


> adding several more engineers in India to help us with tasks

Haha this is what my current company is trying to do now. Bet we are dragging our feet helping the team in India. If they chop our heads off now, you bet they’re gonna be left with ruins. Fuck them.


Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.

I saw IBM uproot an entire support team, persuading them to sell their homes and relocate their children to another U.S. state with more lenient layoff laws. Once the team had moved, the company made everyone redundant.

The proportion of psychopaths on the boards of most companies is off the scale:

"...Hare reports that about 1 percent of the general population meets the clinical criteria for psychopathy.[11] Hare further claims that the prevalence of psychopaths is higher in the business world than in the general population. Figures of around 3–4 percent have been cited for more senior positions in business.[6] A 2011 study of Australian white-collar managers found that 5.76 percent could be classed as psychopathic and another 10.42 percent dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_in_the_workplace


Nothings going to change until consequences for this behavior is established.

Reason #54298 why IBM deserves nothing.

That something like this can be legal shows how f*cked up the US is.

Not a clinical psychologists, so something about grains of salt.

I use term 'highly functioning sociopaths', you can see them often in management since they are attracted to pay, power and percieved 'prestige'. You know the types - smart, hard working, ruthless, learned to fake genuine nice emotions and human interactions to almost perfection over years at least under normal, controlled, and previously experienced settings. Once some novel bad situation happens, cracks start to show.

Banks and anything re finance is probably the highest concentration. Another areas are those with real power, whatever that means. Its trait like every other, not binary but gradual. In my experience its more 1/3 of these in middle management, C suite most probably majority. Can't be a nice guy and get, survive and even thrive there.


How many people are involved in scheming such strategies? There must be leaks of the planning, right?

In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant. Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid off about half the team, most of them being from the subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they were all like “Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!”.

The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract since I was a specialized SME.


> but you could clearly tell something was off in meetings with management

What signs were there? Or was it simply some subconscious feeling?


Only one was obvious in the hindsight: management stopped caring and sometimes attending product demos, but really cared about India's part in the deliveries (justified as we want them to level up quickly).

Everything was subtle:

Managers distanced themselves from the team, had more meetings between themselves ("for efficiency - team grew so we cannot include so many people in the meetings anymore"), they were looking at each other often when making decisions (which to me looked as if they were trying to think how to handle requests knowing the team will be laid off soon).

In the final weeks management started suddenly taking/reassigning tasks out of US team's hands in ways that didn't make sense.


That's what happened during my first job almost 10 years ago. "we're different than other companies, we're family", "business is always personal", yadda yadda

Then one day out of nowhere "hey btw we're not going to renew your contract, we're nice so we give you an extra 10 days of vacation don't bother coming back tomorrow, oh and all your accesses have been revoked". At least I got the reality check right away, some people get that way down the line when their whole persona has already been built around their job


One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best.. yet most jobs are just a game of lies and end up being the opposite (there are some good bosses but the stats are low). It's like two needs that can never meet.

I've been part of two really good teams, one went away because the company closed, the other because it was managed into smithereens. It honestly seemed like it didn't sit right with any level of management to have a bunch of at best average teams and then one very good team in the same org chart, they seemed to prefer to just have every team scrape along.

Maybe society is submitted to a law of averages..

True, one can build a society with no layoffs etc. but collectively we are just not smart enough to do it.

Systems built around profit seek efficiency, thus standardization.

even without the notion of profit, averages reduce risks and helps survival imo

No that’s not it. Averages are easy to reason about top down. Averages are like manufactured parts; you can replace them when they break or slot them in where they’re needed. They’re easy to herd as a manager because they all work the same way. Before we had societies, this sort of reasoning wouldn’t have been very useful. A tribal chief doesn’t need uniformity, he needs to understand his members, all of whom he knows from birth, well enough to utilize their talents.

The purpose of the system is what it does

The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big proponent of high quality public education; it's a necessity. But the reason we have it is because businesses and corporations need workers.


You can graduate from high school and leave your hometown, but the attitudes of high school remain in the office: the cliques, the cruelty, the in-groups and out-groups, the manipulation, the brown-nosing, the behind-the-back-shit-talking. The C students from your high school are now mid level managers above you and brought the mentality straight from there to the office.

if I assume that the system is a neutral emergent phenomenon, i'd say it values "skills" required by businesses because these are strong indicator of what ensures survival of the group (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)

that said i'm curious if there are cities or groups who reduce the importance of material economy / business and promote real deep and beautiful learning


> (we might all study cosmology and get hawking IQ level in the end, if we don't know how to grow food, we're toast)

I first read that as "we might all study cosmetology ...", so my mind went to an altogether different space-based metaphor.


>The whole system of education is designed to channel this type of behavior from early childhood.

So what exactly are the parent doing all along?

(I think I know the answer - they are inexperienced/dysfunctional themselves)


Obedient workers.

>One thing that astonishes me, is that most people want to have a real team to be part of, contribute, give our best..

What astonishes me is that people fall for that BS.


I think one has some deeper issues to tackle if one is basing their whole persona around their job. This is not a healthy thing to do, regardless of layoffs.

Difficult to avoid when there's lots of culture encouraging it, and especially once your hours are long enough that the rest of your life gets eroded.

At some point there is a kind of sunk cost fallacy entering the game ("I can't reinvent my ego/persona now, I'm 40 it's too late"), and maybe some form of addiction ("I love my job and I would be bored without it")

I know people who could easily retire or at least get a much chiller job but they stay in their high responsibility positions, complaining about it everyday, stressing them to the point of having physical consequences.


We also start, or encourage starting work quite early on in our lives, and so it naturally grabs a place in people’s existence in their formative years as “a thing that they do”. Is it any surprise then, that it naturally ends up becoming at least a non-trivial part of people’s sense-of-self?

You have to work. If you really want to you can live on much less - rice and beans in a tiny apartment would let you live on a tiny income. However most people like luxuries in life. In addition, most jobs you cannot get anything done in an hour - it takes times to remember what I was doing the day before before I can write code again.

For the above reasons you will be working a significant number of hours. As such work will be a significant part of your existence. I would hope you are doing things you enjoy, and that in turn means it becomes a part of you.

The important thing though is make it an easy to replace part of you. Have other things you do. Hobbies, a family, sport, volunteer. There are lots of options. If something goes wrong in any of the above you have the rest to replace it. (family is the only one where you should strive to not have something go wrong - but even there it often does)


We encourage starting work extremely late in advanced societies, due to the need to fit in education before then.

I can’t imagine how one would do this, period. No job has ever come anywhere near my persona.

The people who do so have always seemed utterly insane to me. It’s a business transaction like buying a loaf of bread. Why do people act like it’s like getting married?


Peer pressure, if you were raised and lived life in such environment, its the default. Ie here in Geneva, Switzerland Calvinism originated. It promoted utter focus on work as a method of self-realization and achieving inner happiness by ie working hard consistently, finishing when work is done, not when its time to clock out and so on.

Of course it wasn't designed with modern soulless corporations in mind, but there were number of jobs in the past veering on bullshit, although not so common.

But yeah its a stupid approach in 2025. Find a passion. Not a hobby, not mowing lawn, or bbq, I mean passion that will make your heart pound and make you feel alive like you are a hormone-ladden teen. I have a few (hiking&camping in wild, climbing, via ferratas, alpinism, skiing, ski alpinism, diving etc), and then I juggle them based on what I can do. Then, corporate jobs with their wars and pressures will become just little broken kids playing zero sum games of who has bigger wiener, and can be safely and easily ignored.


It happened to me, though I resigned when I hit burnout during covid. My whole identity was just being good at my job, and then I was no longer that. In part I think some blame is also to be placed on these companies who try to make the employees feel like a tribe or family. Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

I'm sorry that happened to you. My own experience with burnout was pretty damning, but oddly, that happened with a career that was far more aligned with who I really am than my current career. There was a click, for me, that made me realize I cannot define myself by what I do for a paycheck and since then, my current career rarely comes up in IRL conversation, contrary to my HN history (which has more to do with my job being tech-related, so it fits in the context of HN comments).

But you touched on something that I struggled with for years; a sense of belonging. Humans are, by nature, fairly tribal. That's both a good and bad thing. However, we as individuals have to be mindful about how much we are acting on our sense of belonging. At the extreme end, when we let our desire to belong to something larger than ourselves call the shots, we tend to get radicalized or fall into religious zealotry. On a more day-to-day experience, our sense of belonging can drive us to seek external validation from people who simply will not offer it, which spawns things like discontent and resentment that cause more irrational behavior and damage your self-worth. It's a slippery slope.

What I have found is that being mindful about self-validation helps mitigate that. Reminding myself that I am good enough despite my flaws, I was not born to toil/be busy/make someone else rich, and my experiences and perspectives are valuable to me have become tools that help me make decisions about work/tasks that strategically avoid burnout. I never offer too much, and I know my limits very well, at this point. The result is most people see and respect that about me, where the ones that do not will quickly lose interest and move on to find someone they can successfully abuse.


> Since I've always been alone it was easy to slip into that false sense of belonging.

Same thing happened to me. Work was the first place where I felt I actually belonged and knew my own worth. It can be very intoxicating.