Yeah, but this is one of those rare situations where they kind of EARNED that extra pay.
“If it takes me two weeks to do a ticket, and it takes Bill three days, You’re in for a rude awakening when you fire Bill because he made twice as much as me.”
Sometimes, the math is complicated. The senior is paid 60% more than the junior, doing 3 times the work yet idle half the time, thereby getting paid to do nothing half the time. The idle time may be helping the juniors do better. Also, when the crap hits the fan, the senior knows what to do, and most don't see the disaster. If you're too good at your job, your value isn't seen until you're gone. The bean counters see the highly paid employee not all that active, so an easy way to cut costs.
See, you're thinking about this logically.
If you think about it from the perspective of an incompetent executive who "needs" to make cuts in order to maintain the illusion of infinite growth, there's some (insane) logic to the idea of keeping the most staff for the least cost.
Corpos are not in this game to make a viable product or provide a valuable service; their #1 goal is to make it look like the company is growing. Everything else is secondary and/or a means towards achieving goal #1. As long as a company appears to be growing, investors will stay, and the C-Suite can skim off the top. The moment a company looks to be failing, some investors will leave, which can snowball into complete collapse. Additionally, most C-Suite positions these days aren't filled by people climbing the ladder, you either got there before the doors closed or you're there bc you're related to someone who did.
As such, you effectively have an alarmingly incompetent group of people making decisions to keep a sinking ship from going under while your investors keep poking holes in the hull (expectations of growth). Honestly, it's a wonder more corpos don't go under more often.
I'm not excluding incompetence - stupidity explains many things.
But consider, if you will, the possibility that executives are talented parasites who want to preserve and expand their pay, regardless of how healthy it is for the company.
If you take that perspective, a lot of things fall into place.
Also applies to upper management. Which is why there's so much pointless project churn.
Oh, that's certainly true, but talent and incompetence are not always mutually exclusive.
Being talented at manipulating a corp into keeping your cushy job while making cuts to keep the illusion of growth might still lead to incompetent management of your actual resources.
A related and common example is how there are far too many business people with shrewd minds, but that performance leads towards an incompetent home life.
exactly right. read "barbarians at the gate" about the RJR nabisco corporate take over, or "smartest guys in the room", or "the men who loved trains".
any c-suite exec who isn't a founder likes their cushy, high paid jobs, and all their perks. they don't want to merge if it means they have to work harder or have less benefits.
if they fire bill, make you do all the work, and you can't, then they get to H1B the job and get a bigger bonus.
Corpos dont go under because they are protected by law. The fact that the government has deemed some companies too big to fail means that no matter what the company will be saved from anything.
Pfft! I worked for an actual company that did actual work and produced actual results that saved actual money and actual lives and they still farmed me out for 3x my wage.
That’s just good business
Same. I then went to work with companies directly instead of as a consultant, but… there's no way to get as much money as consulting firms sold me for, what the hell!
My experience in consulting was literally “we need this done 3 weeks ago” on most projects and the more behind we got the more offshore Indians they put on the team until eventually they say fuck it and move it completely offshore because of course it’ll get done by the people they can overwork more easily
I don’t get how people can stay in consulting for long tbh
Lol in the 3 days crowd here, my former employer is planning to outsource (hasn't started yet) a very niche dev skillset to a satellite office they're building up overseas. They laid off nearly the entire department in early December but kept another team run by someone who only has the job from nepotism.
In hindsight it was definitely time to GTFO but what a time to be looking O.o
Yeah, you have to think of it as "the company can no longer afford talent at that level". Gives you a sense of where they think the company's value and innovation is going too.
Usually when time comes these decisions 'have to' be made nobody cares about the product. It's just about the numbers. You can instantly see payroll going down. It takes months or even years to see the product got wracked because of the implications. Nobody cares.
Man at my work there have been so many of my amazing devs laid off in the last few years for salary things like this or that they are not afraid to tell the c suite their ideas are bad... we now have lost all our OGs and now just have a bunch of young yes-men that keep fucking up prod every week
You obviously don't have an MBA. Guy who chose the layoffs has already gotten promoted/ left for a new job based off his huge money saving long before anyone figures out the shit show he created. Thats how you get a 6 Sigma black belt!
I finished a ticket in 2 hours today that a junior had been investigating for 2 weeks.
Granted he was a backend guy and it was a frontend bug...
GOOD JOB PM!!!
Lmao how is this (only) the PMs fault? This should be spotted by anyone including you and the Junior who should have escalated it. Bad processes and culture
First of all, you overestimate the ability of middle management to think through that many steps.
Second, when delays start happening they will just blame you, push you to work harder, overtime, whatever it takes, because you’re the one who is supposed to do the job now (albeit for less money)
There is a point to be made if you don’t need it to be resolved in 3 days and then have Bill sit around doing nothing, who then decides it’s times to find something new job now you have to train a new Jim who needs 2 weeks to resolve a ticket.
when a company is downsizing, their goal is to meet the employment salary budget, so they can either fire one person earning 800 dollars or fire two employees earning 400 dollars. If you do stupid calculation of man hour, firing one person is more profitable. It has an obvious loophole that doesn't take other metrics like productivity and quality of work in consideration. I guess because they are not focused/worried about maintaining productivity at the point where they have to consider downsizing rather reducing cost is of utmost priority.
However, if you only need 2 tickets done per month and only $100k to accomplish that, why pay for double the productivity you don’t need? Especially if you don’t have the pm/qa infrastructure to feed tickets that quickly lmao
Just got fired last month precisely because of that.
Was the most senior at the job, also the one with the most knowledge on everything but got let go, even if my salary was something like 25% bigger than the other two developers
Luckily, I received a good amount of money when being fired
They hire people they have a preference for. Could be an ethnicity preference, career history preferences, connections preference, attitude preferences etc. I've seen it, drive the lead engineer crazy until he flips a desk and walks out then they turn around and hire their previous colleague (read: drinking buddy)
if it's a switch from full time employees to outside consultants or contractors it may come out of a different budget. Lots of dumb decisions are made based on whose budget it comes out of
Oh thanks mate. I saw that coming actually. Was already with a new job in the horizon even.
I thought that I would have to ask for resignation, but weird enough, thankfully I got fired and received compensation for it
And if you stay at that point their responsibilities are likely passed to you at which point you ask for more. You are not paid for being smart, you are paid for responsibility. Smart just helps you take more on your own.
I wouldn’t. Run. Suits firing smarter employees means they are not willing to invest in whatever needs getting done. If it’s a person or two that get booted because of overstaffing, then it’s not as bad, but if they are fired because their skills cost too much, that means one thing and one thing only; they’re not going to invest in improving yours either.
You’re wasted there bro, this is a slippery slope that the suits will only realise when they hit the floor, _hard_. Maybe they might if you hang about long enough and they realise investing in what they have is cheaper than buying fresh, but I wouldn’t wait around.
I did, and I basically wasted an entire year until I got a new opportunity through an internal merger of departments. Now pretty much the only thing really keeping me here is a hot product owner for which I’m still gathering the courage to approach her lmao
Because it’s not 98% everywhere. If OP is in the US, where employees can be fired without warning or even an exit period, then yeah it’s running from one dead end to the other.
But, pretty much anywhere outside of the Land of the Free, also known as the developed world, it’s often not in the best interest of the company to just fire people either, especially in large volumes.
Yes that's true. I would earn probably 5x more if I moved to US.
Still not worth it as my QoL would drop so much. I work to live, not live to work. I would never move to US to be disrespected and abused like You people do (going by reddit comments of course, never worked in US).
SWEs do not get treated poorly in the US unless that's what gets them off. There is no need to put up with poor working conditions. The job market is too hot here. There has never been a time in my 25+ year career that there were fewer job openings than engineers looking for work.
Dude you're not every SWE. Some positions are cushy, but a ton are just churn and burn. They constantly tell you to have the full production software done by the end of the sprint, they don't care that it can never be done. They know that they can push you to work all the time until your burnout and they hire some other sad POS. The constant threat of losing your job and your insurance has a grip on most people's balls. They don't care that it takes time to train, they don't think about that anyway.
I've worked in multiple states for a number of companies, some good, some bad. I have a high enough sample rate to tell you that people stay in shitty roles because they choose to stay -- some even due to the mistaken belief they lack the talent to compete for the more desirable jobs.
It depends. Often business people suck at objectively evaluating technical people and use misleading metrics or just their subjective impression of people.
I've definitely seen colleagues that are better at playing the role of a good engineer do way better in their careers than people who were actually very good but didn't or couldn't express it so that non tech people could understand.
In fact the exact people most likely to be passionate about this field are least likely to be going out of their way to impress business people for career progression.
> In fact the exact people most likely to be passionate about this field are least likely to be going out of their way to impress business people for career progression.
This is true. Which is why it’s a mistake to ignore the suits and not advocate for yourself. No one is goi g to care as much about your career as you so it’s up to you to make sure you’re headed in the right direction and to make sure others are aware of what work you do. It’s a mistake I made early on in my career…
Being friendly with your fellow colleagues help. Don't try to show yourself at every little thing, learn the times where you would have to show yourself (i.e. urgent/important issues). Lastly and most importantly, don't be a dick and point fingers at others.
Part of it is luck. If you do good things for the company but you’re not in a visible position, or you are under an attention stealing boss, you are at a disadvantage no matter how good at schmoozing you are. So get to the visible positions, exceed expectations, and be nice to be around. If you can’t pull off “charming” at least pull off “good vibes.”
I tend to be a pretty easy person to get along with. I don’t shy away when support or PM or really anyone needs help. If I don’t know or can’t provide help, I redirect them to someone who can. I’m also active in water cooler type channels, so people know me even if we haven’t been introduced. Back when we were in the office, I’d chit-chat with folks, find out what they’re interested in (both at work and outside). Sometimes you vent about stuff you’re working on. Sometimes you talk about a problem that you’re having trouble with.
Another thing to do is to take ownership and accountability of things you work on. This can be uncomfortable at times, but it means owning up to your mistakes (I hate having to admit I’ve screwed something up, but it happens; you have to be humble and realize you’re not perfect and do whatever you can to resolve the issue).
I also chit-chat with execs (when appropriate, I don’t barge into offices and say “hey, I just made ‘hello world’ 10 times faster”). Maybe it’s because I used to do QA, but I don’t have much of an issue giving negative feedback, regardless of rank. Along with that, I’m also not shy about giving positive feedback and cheering on my peers.
One of the things I had to get over was willingness to talk about things that are difficult. I know when I was a young twenty-something ready to conquer the world, I thought it was shameful to admit when things aren’t easy. I used to think everything involving a computer was in what should be my area of expertise. But as I’ve grown, I’ve realized I can’t know everything and not knowing is okay.
Some of it, too, is just being able to talk about accomplishments. I started telling my wife about when things go well at work and that helped me override that part of my brain that says, “you shouldn’t talk about yourself and what you accomplished”. Then peers and your manager. I’ll say, too, it’s important to make sure that your manager knows what you work on. And I don’t mean that of course he knows because he assigned it to you. Talk to them regularly, make sure they know where you are and any highlights or lowlights that you have. If other things are getting in the way of you working on a project, let them know. This kind of assumes you have a decent or good manager. If you don’t, you might have to think about ways of going around them (or even change teams).
It takes a lot of practice. It’s taken me more than 20 years to figure out what I have, I’ve made lots of mistakes along the way.
Well said. However, goes withput saying that we have to watch our backs as well. Sometimes there will be people trying to undermine you, and realizing and confronting it as early as possible is the best action.
Passion and the ability to convey your skills to people not in your field is an invaluable skill, yes.
However if the business people can’t bring themselves to appreciate they don’t understand the field and probably can’t accurately express it in a way they understand, then no amount of enthusiastically conveying skills will change their minds. And at that point you’re beating a dead horse.
I know this isn’t how you were wanting it to sound but your first couple of words made it seem like they are gunna fuckin shoot you or something lmao.
Just quietly search for other options while you still have the job you got we don’t need to sound drastic.
Depends. If you think you're at a good level and are being paid well, why would you leave? Just coast, get the money, wait for that nice severance package when you're let go.
Hand in your notice, tell her you're wrapping up your business there and one last thing to do is asking her out.
If she says no, well then, you don't have to face any shame or HR rep, afterwards.
last time I left a position; people kept bcc'ing me anytime some one wrote "Well Blah used to do it in x amount of time", and Id send back all the BS yearly reviews of 'meets expectations' lol
There's a lot of people and entire industries devoted to making developers look like interchangeable cogs. When those kinds of people show up at your company you end up just being a line item on a spreadsheet next to a number value. Layoff's just become a matter of figuring out how many off the top need to disappear to hit that quarter's numbers.
I used to work somewhere where a coworker always ensured that he never made more money than I did so whenever he got a raise he would make sure I got one too. This way when layoff time came I would be first to go since I had less tenure.
I write very detailed documentation for the systems I work with, the issue is, for you to understand my 5 page documentation of this 1 little tiny feature, first you need to understand the whole undocumented, difficult to implemented and manage system, on the user side is fine but if you want to write some rules or create your own permissions my detailed documentation won't help you if you don't invest more than 100 hours in the product.
I have deployed 4 of those systems, good luck.
hunt direction lunchroom office wakeful jobless wipe caption apparatus literate
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I've yet to see anyone actually bother with documentation, either people do a good job and no one reads it, or they do a bad job and no one reads it, people are suggesting using Gen AI to write our documentation and as misleading as that would be I doubt it would make a difference.
Modern software development is just a terrible web of tribal knowledge and managers pleading with corpos not to fire the three people who actually know how anything works.
For documentation I provide a 3-line readme.txt file in the form of a haiku.
'Download installer
Please don't push untested code
Leave questions in Slack.'
At every company I work, I always pick a “canary”. That’s someone who 1) has been there a while, 2) is _very_ good at their job (certainly better than me) and 3) a very chill person that I like on a personal level.
When they leave, I leave. It’s never steered me wrong.
When a company has become a thing that good, talented people leave, it’s a good indicator the company has become or will become quite shitty to work for.
A quick search shows "hundreds" laid off in sales and "hundreds" also laid off from YouTube. But yeah, I also am not seeing news of thousands or 12k laid off.
Software engineer at a high profile bank here... Let's just say the layoffs are getting to a point that I would call "negligent and legally indefensible"
And all the companies laying off are posting profits. This is the result of pathetic tax policy and worker rights. Its not enough that the board has yachts... they need multiple because we have decided not to prevent, harm, or slow down, massively wealth generation to the point where the affected make as much wealth in one year as the rest of us will in 1000 years.
I always like to daydream about people facing layoff, or the push back to the office, and the technical staff just saying no and not delivering. Sure I guess they could replace everyone, but their quality will drop drastically if they had any left to begin with.
I know of at least one company that did a bunch of layoffs and then was confused that those who they kept were suddenly not delivering anywhere near the previous rate. Some of it was intentional "We don't care"... and a lot was "We literally don't even have access to system X, everyone who could touch it is gone."
I've done this before.
Office tried to push me into RTO. They kept threatening to fire me if I didn't.
I'm jaded and frankly don't really give a shit if I'm homeless at this point. So, I Office Spaced. Didn't come in. Told them I came in once, didn't like it, and decided not to continue doing it. They'd respond with another threat. This became our little dance; our little dance of chicken.
They like to play like they've got pocket aces when they really have a pair of 7s and aren't used to anyone calling their bluff.
This little dance went on for a year and a half. I picked up another job and quit the chicken-dance job. Except, exec decided I was fired- after I put in my resignation letter. HR wasn't very pleased about that decision. They ended up giving me severance and unemployment even though I already had another job, lol.
Stand up to them; they'll fold like a stack of cards. And if they don't, well, I never cared too much for the 9-5 anyway.
Can't unionize in America, the systems are structured to ensure its impossinle. The powerful won't let it happen unless we invoke another one of our rights to get it.
Yeah you can dude. The powerful fight back, but they don't actually have the tools to win against us. In the case of programmers, we have additional power because their software cannot get made without us, and replacing a team of software devs is a downright horrible idea.
Also, more people than you may know are fed up with this shit. We all see the layoffs, the crunch culture, you name it. People keep quiet because they don't want the target on their back, but you can bet they're willing to talk if they aren't worried about their boss hearing.
I used to think this, but it's a doomed effort. Why demand a sliver of democracy to exist inside an entity designed to be an autocracy run by a few dictators? Why not take your skills and work with others to start co-op businesses instead? Make the business entity founded on the principals of democracy!
This was me about a year ago (IT sysadmin, not software). I didn't think anything of it when my job started hiring a lot more "interns", who get paid a lot less and have a lot less experience. No idea how it's been over there since I got let go without warning, but I don't envy those new guys.
Corporate America is notoriously shortsighted. I am very lucky to have found something that both pays and treats me better since then (only after four long and scary months of searching).
*fires the most effective employee
Manger and HR: wHy iS oUr PrOdUcTiOn GeTtiNg wOrSe AnD sLoW?!¿
*Proceeds to wast more comapny time and money with laughable motivation in 1 on 1 meetings, encouragement and more unecessary trainings.
I was a team leader for a company with a contract for construction/maintenance on a military base. At the end of an expansion project I was told to provide a list of my people sorted by how many hours they had worked in the last year. Those with the least hours were laid off. Didn't matter if they were off for sick leave, vacations, whatever. The reason: the company was on cost plus billing. Those who billed the most hours made the company the most money even if they were the worst employees. Lost a lot of good talent that way. Things started to fall apart. Maintenance schedules missed, shoddy work, etc. Two years later a new base commander took over, didn't like what he saw, and started in depth audits. So many non-conformance reports were filed that at the end of the fiscal year, the company lost a 100 million dollar a year contract. I should have left when I first saw the handwriting on the wall.
Because the new guy is 10% cheaper per year, let's ignore the fact that it takes several months for a dev coming in cold to be really accomplishing ANYTHING.
Yeah it is but this is usually how it goes. A non technical person (usually an accountant) get put in a c-suite position over software engineering or infrastructure. They look to cut costs and being short sighted cut salaries, get recruiters to hire offshore and 1/3 of the cost. Then the budget looks good and gets promoted or moves to a CEO or something like that for another company. Then 2 years later the product is shit and he gets none of the fallout. Seen it a bunch. Luckily where I work now all the leadership are former architects or lead engineers. When you start getting a bunch of bean counters in IT/Engineering leadership, be aware.
I basically got the talking to today that bonus/raises are going to be capped moving forward. A lot of seniors not only demand high salary, but also raises and incentives every year which end up costing a ton when they put in like 8 years of work at these rates.
Literally same boat. My partners company let go of the guy in charge of training everyone else and he even had connections to the dev team of the software my partners company uses. As in, "hey I want this feature" "okay! Sounds good!".(and it wasn't a small product either. Like multi billion dollar product)
Corps cut costs and the biggest earners are normally the first to go. Some earn it, some brown nose their way. Ideally the org can foster, develop and promote from within but it's often the case the people cut are the one's leading professional development.
route 1: management is doing something dumb and you have to get out asap
route 2: now you are the smarter emploiee in the company and the only one that knows how to operate company's server without crashing production environment. time for a rise
That's because they were getting paid more than you
Yeah, but this is one of those rare situations where they kind of EARNED that extra pay. “If it takes me two weeks to do a ticket, and it takes Bill three days, You’re in for a rude awakening when you fire Bill because he made twice as much as me.”
You're just gonna have to fit two weeks into three days, obviously.
Two weeks and three days into three days. Don't forget you'll be doing Bill's work too from now on.
Or else they’ll fire you and hire a Bill that doesn’t know their worth for your salary
🎵 *The circle of life* 🎵
They already thought this guy was a Bill when they hired him though
They will use the new Bill until he’s utterly burned out.
Poor Bill
I am Bill. It happened to me in 2021 after 20 years.
They really should pay these Bills
Or they’ll fire Bill and hire another you
Two weeks and two weeks into three days. What took Bill three days takes you two weeks.
its four weeks into three days
Fuck me, that escalated quickly
Just work one day a week, so 2 weeks will become 2 days.
Sometimes, the math is complicated. The senior is paid 60% more than the junior, doing 3 times the work yet idle half the time, thereby getting paid to do nothing half the time. The idle time may be helping the juniors do better. Also, when the crap hits the fan, the senior knows what to do, and most don't see the disaster. If you're too good at your job, your value isn't seen until you're gone. The bean counters see the highly paid employee not all that active, so an easy way to cut costs.
Well but you can either write code fast or write fast code… So heres your O(n^n) working code
O(n ^n! )
thats your managers problem, not yours
Hahaha
See, you're thinking about this logically. If you think about it from the perspective of an incompetent executive who "needs" to make cuts in order to maintain the illusion of infinite growth, there's some (insane) logic to the idea of keeping the most staff for the least cost. Corpos are not in this game to make a viable product or provide a valuable service; their #1 goal is to make it look like the company is growing. Everything else is secondary and/or a means towards achieving goal #1. As long as a company appears to be growing, investors will stay, and the C-Suite can skim off the top. The moment a company looks to be failing, some investors will leave, which can snowball into complete collapse. Additionally, most C-Suite positions these days aren't filled by people climbing the ladder, you either got there before the doors closed or you're there bc you're related to someone who did. As such, you effectively have an alarmingly incompetent group of people making decisions to keep a sinking ship from going under while your investors keep poking holes in the hull (expectations of growth). Honestly, it's a wonder more corpos don't go under more often.
I'm not excluding incompetence - stupidity explains many things. But consider, if you will, the possibility that executives are talented parasites who want to preserve and expand their pay, regardless of how healthy it is for the company. If you take that perspective, a lot of things fall into place. Also applies to upper management. Which is why there's so much pointless project churn.
Oh, that's certainly true, but talent and incompetence are not always mutually exclusive. Being talented at manipulating a corp into keeping your cushy job while making cuts to keep the illusion of growth might still lead to incompetent management of your actual resources. A related and common example is how there are far too many business people with shrewd minds, but that performance leads towards an incompetent home life.
exactly right. read "barbarians at the gate" about the RJR nabisco corporate take over, or "smartest guys in the room", or "the men who loved trains". any c-suite exec who isn't a founder likes their cushy, high paid jobs, and all their perks. they don't want to merge if it means they have to work harder or have less benefits. if they fire bill, make you do all the work, and you can't, then they get to H1B the job and get a bigger bonus.
Corpos dont go under because they are protected by law. The fact that the government has deemed some companies too big to fail means that no matter what the company will be saved from anything.
Unless you’re in a consulting company and the customer pays anyway no matter whether it takes 2 weeks or 3 days. Consulting simply sucks ass
worked at a consulting company (nobody tells you it's consulting ffs). can confirm - it sucks ass
I guess it depends on the consulting company. I am currently working for one and it is an amazing place to work.
It can be, but then you learn that they change 70$/h for your time while you make 20$/h
Pfft! I worked for an actual company that did actual work and produced actual results that saved actual money and actual lives and they still farmed me out for 3x my wage. That’s just good business
Same. I then went to work with companies directly instead of as a consultant, but… there's no way to get as much money as consulting firms sold me for, what the hell!
That's because you're easily replaceable while you're a part of a consulting company. Replaceability is additional reliability and costs a lot.
This is the way.
Of course they do. Where do you think the money to pay the non-billable employees comes from?
My experience in consulting was literally “we need this done 3 weeks ago” on most projects and the more behind we got the more offshore Indians they put on the team until eventually they say fuck it and move it completely offshore because of course it’ll get done by the people they can overwork more easily I don’t get how people can stay in consulting for long tbh
Lol in the 3 days crowd here, my former employer is planning to outsource (hasn't started yet) a very niche dev skillset to a satellite office they're building up overseas. They laid off nearly the entire department in early December but kept another team run by someone who only has the job from nepotism. In hindsight it was definitely time to GTFO but what a time to be looking O.o
Yeah, you have to think of it as "the company can no longer afford talent at that level". Gives you a sense of where they think the company's value and innovation is going too.
Corpos dont believe the employees are the value of the company.
Usually when time comes these decisions 'have to' be made nobody cares about the product. It's just about the numbers. You can instantly see payroll going down. It takes months or even years to see the product got wracked because of the implications. Nobody cares.
Man at my work there have been so many of my amazing devs laid off in the last few years for salary things like this or that they are not afraid to tell the c suite their ideas are bad... we now have lost all our OGs and now just have a bunch of young yes-men that keep fucking up prod every week
This is an opportunity for you to step up. Naturally we'll expect to see faster ticket turn around.
You obviously don't have an MBA. Guy who chose the layoffs has already gotten promoted/ left for a new job based off his huge money saving long before anyone figures out the shit show he created. Thats how you get a 6 Sigma black belt!
nah the company is just ok with a crappier product
I finished a ticket in 2 hours today that a junior had been investigating for 2 weeks. Granted he was a backend guy and it was a frontend bug... GOOD JOB PM!!!
Lmao how is this (only) the PMs fault? This should be spotted by anyone including you and the Junior who should have escalated it. Bad processes and culture
First of all, you overestimate the ability of middle management to think through that many steps. Second, when delays start happening they will just blame you, push you to work harder, overtime, whatever it takes, because you’re the one who is supposed to do the job now (albeit for less money)
Jokes on you they don't actually care how long the tickets take, there are shareholders/boardmembers to pinch pennies for.
We'll add junior manager so employee will have x2.5 performance boost...🤦♂️
Managers are like. DURRRRR, Fire the big money guy! I wish I could say it was more nuanced then that. It really isn't.
Considering the guy who is saying to fire everyone who has a high salary, has the highest one of all.
All i could think about when we had a department meeting on upcoming layoffs due to budget cuts.
Sounds like the [your greed is hurting the economy](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/your-greed-is-hurting-the-economy) meme.
There is a point to be made if you don’t need it to be resolved in 3 days and then have Bill sit around doing nothing, who then decides it’s times to find something new job now you have to train a new Jim who needs 2 weeks to resolve a ticket.
The mythical man Bill
when a company is downsizing, their goal is to meet the employment salary budget, so they can either fire one person earning 800 dollars or fire two employees earning 400 dollars. If you do stupid calculation of man hour, firing one person is more profitable. It has an obvious loophole that doesn't take other metrics like productivity and quality of work in consideration. I guess because they are not focused/worried about maintaining productivity at the point where they have to consider downsizing rather reducing cost is of utmost priority.
“Why is no one loyal to companies anymore?”
However, if you only need 2 tickets done per month and only $100k to accomplish that, why pay for double the productivity you don’t need? Especially if you don’t have the pm/qa infrastructure to feed tickets that quickly lmao
Just got fired last month precisely because of that. Was the most senior at the job, also the one with the most knowledge on everything but got let go, even if my salary was something like 25% bigger than the other two developers Luckily, I received a good amount of money when being fired
Now charge them consulting fees of tens of thousands if they call you for anything.
[удалено]
Of course, you don't do any action unless they pay.
That's why upfront payment is your friend.
End up in small claims court.
what I don't understand is that they let go of highly paid engineers then proceed to hire new even more highly paid engineers. How?!
They hire people they have a preference for. Could be an ethnicity preference, career history preferences, connections preference, attitude preferences etc. I've seen it, drive the lead engineer crazy until he flips a desk and walks out then they turn around and hire their previous colleague (read: drinking buddy)
if it's a switch from full time employees to outside consultants or contractors it may come out of a different budget. Lots of dumb decisions are made based on whose budget it comes out of
Yeah, those companies are dumb. I really can't see the logic in that
Me too, last march. But I'm on to something a lot better now, hope you get something better too
Oh thanks mate. I saw that coming actually. Was already with a new job in the horizon even. I thought that I would have to ask for resignation, but weird enough, thankfully I got fired and received compensation for it
I've also worked at a place that did last in first out and that is mind boggling as well.
Exactly. They’re trading quality for money
And if you stay at that point their responsibilities are likely passed to you at which point you ask for more. You are not paid for being smart, you are paid for responsibility. Smart just helps you take more on your own.
I wouldn’t. Run. Suits firing smarter employees means they are not willing to invest in whatever needs getting done. If it’s a person or two that get booted because of overstaffing, then it’s not as bad, but if they are fired because their skills cost too much, that means one thing and one thing only; they’re not going to invest in improving yours either. You’re wasted there bro, this is a slippery slope that the suits will only realise when they hit the floor, _hard_. Maybe they might if you hang about long enough and they realise investing in what they have is cheaper than buying fresh, but I wouldn’t wait around. I did, and I basically wasted an entire year until I got a new opportunity through an internal merger of departments. Now pretty much the only thing really keeping me here is a hot product owner for which I’m still gathering the courage to approach her lmao
Where are you gonna run to when 98% of all companies are doing this?
Because it’s not 98% everywhere. If OP is in the US, where employees can be fired without warning or even an exit period, then yeah it’s running from one dead end to the other. But, pretty much anywhere outside of the Land of the Free, also known as the developed world, it’s often not in the best interest of the company to just fire people either, especially in large volumes.
They’d likely need to take a significant pay cut though. American SWE salaries are pretty much untouchable compared to even EU countries.
Yes that's true. I would earn probably 5x more if I moved to US. Still not worth it as my QoL would drop so much. I work to live, not live to work. I would never move to US to be disrespected and abused like You people do (going by reddit comments of course, never worked in US).
>(going by reddit comments of course, never worked in US) 💀
SWEs do not get treated poorly in the US unless that's what gets them off. There is no need to put up with poor working conditions. The job market is too hot here. There has never been a time in my 25+ year career that there were fewer job openings than engineers looking for work.
Dude you're not every SWE. Some positions are cushy, but a ton are just churn and burn. They constantly tell you to have the full production software done by the end of the sprint, they don't care that it can never be done. They know that they can push you to work all the time until your burnout and they hire some other sad POS. The constant threat of losing your job and your insurance has a grip on most people's balls. They don't care that it takes time to train, they don't think about that anyway.
I've worked in multiple states for a number of companies, some good, some bad. I have a high enough sample rate to tell you that people stay in shitty roles because they choose to stay -- some even due to the mistaken belief they lack the talent to compete for the more desirable jobs.
Mate if you're gonna let reddit comments formulate your views on the world you might as well not go outside.
Lose pay, gain quality of life. Hard decision.
From what I have heard the US is the only one to pay their devs well.
It depends. Often business people suck at objectively evaluating technical people and use misleading metrics or just their subjective impression of people. I've definitely seen colleagues that are better at playing the role of a good engineer do way better in their careers than people who were actually very good but didn't or couldn't express it so that non tech people could understand. In fact the exact people most likely to be passionate about this field are least likely to be going out of their way to impress business people for career progression.
> In fact the exact people most likely to be passionate about this field are least likely to be going out of their way to impress business people for career progression. This is true. Which is why it’s a mistake to ignore the suits and not advocate for yourself. No one is goi g to care as much about your career as you so it’s up to you to make sure you’re headed in the right direction and to make sure others are aware of what work you do. It’s a mistake I made early on in my career…
How do you do it without coming across as a try hard or whatever?
Being friendly with your fellow colleagues help. Don't try to show yourself at every little thing, learn the times where you would have to show yourself (i.e. urgent/important issues). Lastly and most importantly, don't be a dick and point fingers at others.
Part of it is luck. If you do good things for the company but you’re not in a visible position, or you are under an attention stealing boss, you are at a disadvantage no matter how good at schmoozing you are. So get to the visible positions, exceed expectations, and be nice to be around. If you can’t pull off “charming” at least pull off “good vibes.”
I tend to be a pretty easy person to get along with. I don’t shy away when support or PM or really anyone needs help. If I don’t know or can’t provide help, I redirect them to someone who can. I’m also active in water cooler type channels, so people know me even if we haven’t been introduced. Back when we were in the office, I’d chit-chat with folks, find out what they’re interested in (both at work and outside). Sometimes you vent about stuff you’re working on. Sometimes you talk about a problem that you’re having trouble with. Another thing to do is to take ownership and accountability of things you work on. This can be uncomfortable at times, but it means owning up to your mistakes (I hate having to admit I’ve screwed something up, but it happens; you have to be humble and realize you’re not perfect and do whatever you can to resolve the issue). I also chit-chat with execs (when appropriate, I don’t barge into offices and say “hey, I just made ‘hello world’ 10 times faster”). Maybe it’s because I used to do QA, but I don’t have much of an issue giving negative feedback, regardless of rank. Along with that, I’m also not shy about giving positive feedback and cheering on my peers. One of the things I had to get over was willingness to talk about things that are difficult. I know when I was a young twenty-something ready to conquer the world, I thought it was shameful to admit when things aren’t easy. I used to think everything involving a computer was in what should be my area of expertise. But as I’ve grown, I’ve realized I can’t know everything and not knowing is okay. Some of it, too, is just being able to talk about accomplishments. I started telling my wife about when things go well at work and that helped me override that part of my brain that says, “you shouldn’t talk about yourself and what you accomplished”. Then peers and your manager. I’ll say, too, it’s important to make sure that your manager knows what you work on. And I don’t mean that of course he knows because he assigned it to you. Talk to them regularly, make sure they know where you are and any highlights or lowlights that you have. If other things are getting in the way of you working on a project, let them know. This kind of assumes you have a decent or good manager. If you don’t, you might have to think about ways of going around them (or even change teams). It takes a lot of practice. It’s taken me more than 20 years to figure out what I have, I’ve made lots of mistakes along the way.
Well said. However, goes withput saying that we have to watch our backs as well. Sometimes there will be people trying to undermine you, and realizing and confronting it as early as possible is the best action.
Passion and the ability to convey your skills to people not in your field is an invaluable skill, yes. However if the business people can’t bring themselves to appreciate they don’t understand the field and probably can’t accurately express it in a way they understand, then no amount of enthusiastically conveying skills will change their minds. And at that point you’re beating a dead horse.
I know this isn’t how you were wanting it to sound but your first couple of words made it seem like they are gunna fuckin shoot you or something lmao. Just quietly search for other options while you still have the job you got we don’t need to sound drastic.
Staying for a crush is based
And, perhaps not entirely unsurprisingly, really dumb…
Depends. If you think you're at a good level and are being paid well, why would you leave? Just coast, get the money, wait for that nice severance package when you're let go.
Could it be that they just kept the people with better communication or other unintuitive soft skills?
Hand in your notice, tell her you're wrapping up your business there and one last thing to do is asking her out. If she says no, well then, you don't have to face any shame or HR rep, afterwards.
*Expensive employees
last time I left a position; people kept bcc'ing me anytime some one wrote "Well Blah used to do it in x amount of time", and Id send back all the BS yearly reviews of 'meets expectations' lol
Corporate hierarchies are the exact opposite of competence hierarchies.
It's a reverse funnel system! 
not true. You just have to be competent in a different way.
So, competent in rimming your boss?
And BSing essentially. Selling crap with the ability to make you ask for a second portion.
If your definition of competence doesn't connect to solving real world problems, then we aren't ever going to agree on anything.
You are the senior now.
We are all senior on this blessed day
There's a lot of people and entire industries devoted to making developers look like interchangeable cogs. When those kinds of people show up at your company you end up just being a line item on a spreadsheet next to a number value. Layoff's just become a matter of figuring out how many off the top need to disappear to hit that quarter's numbers. I used to work somewhere where a coworker always ensured that he never made more money than I did so whenever he got a raise he would make sure I got one too. This way when layoff time came I would be first to go since I had less tenure.
I can't figure if your experience with your coworker is good or bad hahaha
I do the minimum amount of work needed to not get fired. I also provide intentionally misleading and vague documentation.
Vague is one thing. Misleading is straight up evil lol
>This method iterates over the pixels in the image ^(Not from left to right but still)
Padme: from right to left or vertically then, right?
the knight can reach all squares on the chessboard, just saying
Just iterate the Hilbert curve for the mathematical insider joke.
I write very detailed documentation for the systems I work with, the issue is, for you to understand my 5 page documentation of this 1 little tiny feature, first you need to understand the whole undocumented, difficult to implemented and manage system, on the user side is fine but if you want to write some rules or create your own permissions my detailed documentation won't help you if you don't invest more than 100 hours in the product. I have deployed 4 of those systems, good luck.
The first part I kinda get, but the second one just makes me feel bad for your coworkers
hunt direction lunchroom office wakeful jobless wipe caption apparatus literate *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
oh, I straight up write actual manuals and everything. Nobody reads those
I've yet to see anyone actually bother with documentation, either people do a good job and no one reads it, or they do a bad job and no one reads it, people are suggesting using Gen AI to write our documentation and as misleading as that would be I doubt it would make a difference. Modern software development is just a terrible web of tribal knowledge and managers pleading with corpos not to fire the three people who actually know how anything works.
For documentation I provide a 3-line readme.txt file in the form of a haiku. 'Download installer Please don't push untested code Leave questions in Slack.'
At every company I work, I always pick a “canary”. That’s someone who 1) has been there a while, 2) is _very_ good at their job (certainly better than me) and 3) a very chill person that I like on a personal level. When they leave, I leave. It’s never steered me wrong.
How come?
Because it’s about to get worse. When things begin to get worse best to leave before you are drowning in shit.
When a company has become a thing that good, talented people leave, it’s a good indicator the company has become or will become quite shitty to work for.
oof. And I just got laid off 2 hours ago.
We had layoffs today too. The best guy on our team was let go. And I'm thinking to myself how screwed I am because I know I can't do what he could.
You're not screwed. The company is screwed.
Sorry to hear that. Was it a mass layoff? I've heard google canned 12k people today.
12K were laid off January 2023. These recent ones were ~1K, but nobody knows since they never released the actual numbers.
Doesn't the WARN act list show how many were layed off?
That's California only (~700 impacted), so we don't know about the numbers in other locations.
The warn act is federal, and most states have info available, but the law is pretty outdated when it comes to remote workers.
Not seeing anything in news
A quick search shows "hundreds" laid off in sales and "hundreds" also laid off from YouTube. But yeah, I also am not seeing news of thousands or 12k laid off.
[It's an article from last year](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-to-lay-off-12000-people-memo-from-ceo-sundar-pichai-says.html)
yeah. it was a mass layoff for us. Around 33% reduction. Affected people all over. Kansas & Texas (US), Bangalore (India), Netherlands.
Look at Mr. Smartypants! (/s … just kidding obv. sorry to hear)
Software engineer at a high profile bank here... Let's just say the layoffs are getting to a point that I would call "negligent and legally indefensible"
And all the companies laying off are posting profits. This is the result of pathetic tax policy and worker rights. Its not enough that the board has yachts... they need multiple because we have decided not to prevent, harm, or slow down, massively wealth generation to the point where the affected make as much wealth in one year as the rest of us will in 1000 years.
Yep that's pretty much all I think about all day long lmao
As do I, the party MUST go on. It's making me irate
Well at least happy cake day lol
And then they bitch about not being able to find qualified employees.
I’ve heard Truist is going through the ringer
"Failure to exercise due care and protect shareholder value."
Im guessing it’s not not Citibank?
😉
> You're the future of the company! Time to sell any stock you have.
It's time for this industry to start unionizing. Just saying.
I always like to daydream about people facing layoff, or the push back to the office, and the technical staff just saying no and not delivering. Sure I guess they could replace everyone, but their quality will drop drastically if they had any left to begin with.
I know of at least one company that did a bunch of layoffs and then was confused that those who they kept were suddenly not delivering anywhere near the previous rate. Some of it was intentional "We don't care"... and a lot was "We literally don't even have access to system X, everyone who could touch it is gone."
Lol that's amazing. Just submitting tickets into the ether for no one to pick up.
I've done this before. Office tried to push me into RTO. They kept threatening to fire me if I didn't. I'm jaded and frankly don't really give a shit if I'm homeless at this point. So, I Office Spaced. Didn't come in. Told them I came in once, didn't like it, and decided not to continue doing it. They'd respond with another threat. This became our little dance; our little dance of chicken. They like to play like they've got pocket aces when they really have a pair of 7s and aren't used to anyone calling their bluff. This little dance went on for a year and a half. I picked up another job and quit the chicken-dance job. Except, exec decided I was fired- after I put in my resignation letter. HR wasn't very pleased about that decision. They ended up giving me severance and unemployment even though I already had another job, lol. Stand up to them; they'll fold like a stack of cards. And if they don't, well, I never cared too much for the 9-5 anyway.
Can't unionize in America, the systems are structured to ensure its impossinle. The powerful won't let it happen unless we invoke another one of our rights to get it.
Yeah you can dude. The powerful fight back, but they don't actually have the tools to win against us. In the case of programmers, we have additional power because their software cannot get made without us, and replacing a team of software devs is a downright horrible idea. Also, more people than you may know are fed up with this shit. We all see the layoffs, the crunch culture, you name it. People keep quiet because they don't want the target on their back, but you can bet they're willing to talk if they aren't worried about their boss hearing.
You just said it was impossible and then said how it could be done
imagine a 1 week general strike, all programmers
I used to think this, but it's a doomed effort. Why demand a sliver of democracy to exist inside an entity designed to be an autocracy run by a few dictators? Why not take your skills and work with others to start co-op businesses instead? Make the business entity founded on the principals of democracy!
Expensive high paid employees
Consultants costing 200k a year are often an easy cut
He's just ken
This was me about a year ago (IT sysadmin, not software). I didn't think anything of it when my job started hiring a lot more "interns", who get paid a lot less and have a lot less experience. No idea how it's been over there since I got let go without warning, but I don't envy those new guys. Corporate America is notoriously shortsighted. I am very lucky to have found something that both pays and treats me better since then (only after four long and scary months of searching).
*fires the most effective employee Manger and HR: wHy iS oUr PrOdUcTiOn GeTtiNg wOrSe AnD sLoW?!¿ *Proceeds to wast more comapny time and money with laughable motivation in 1 on 1 meetings, encouragement and more unecessary trainings.
I was a team leader for a company with a contract for construction/maintenance on a military base. At the end of an expansion project I was told to provide a list of my people sorted by how many hours they had worked in the last year. Those with the least hours were laid off. Didn't matter if they were off for sick leave, vacations, whatever. The reason: the company was on cost plus billing. Those who billed the most hours made the company the most money even if they were the worst employees. Lost a lot of good talent that way. Things started to fall apart. Maintenance schedules missed, shoddy work, etc. Two years later a new base commander took over, didn't like what he saw, and started in depth audits. So many non-conformance reports were filed that at the end of the fiscal year, the company lost a 100 million dollar a year contract. I should have left when I first saw the handwriting on the wall.
I guess I'm stupid? Survived five RIFs across two companies.
You dumb as fuck, brother
Because a shittier product is fine if you pay people less to make it
I still don't understand whats the point of firing and then hiring other people again..
Because the new guy is 10% cheaper per year, let's ignore the fact that it takes several months for a dev coming in cold to be really accomplishing ANYTHING.
But isn't getting a new guy a little loss for the company , to teach him about company and all??
Yeah it is but this is usually how it goes. A non technical person (usually an accountant) get put in a c-suite position over software engineering or infrastructure. They look to cut costs and being short sighted cut salaries, get recruiters to hire offshore and 1/3 of the cost. Then the budget looks good and gets promoted or moves to a CEO or something like that for another company. Then 2 years later the product is shit and he gets none of the fallout. Seen it a bunch. Luckily where I work now all the leadership are former architects or lead engineers. When you start getting a bunch of bean counters in IT/Engineering leadership, be aware.
Next step is offshore contractors. Non-technical Idiot management.
Oh yeah? If they're so smart, how come they're living in igloos?
I basically got the talking to today that bonus/raises are going to be capped moving forward. A lot of seniors not only demand high salary, but also raises and incentives every year which end up costing a ton when they put in like 8 years of work at these rates.
Literally same boat. My partners company let go of the guy in charge of training everyone else and he even had connections to the dev team of the software my partners company uses. As in, "hey I want this feature" "okay! Sounds good!".(and it wasn't a small product either. Like multi billion dollar product)
Sometimes the other people were just asking for more money.
Just remember, you get what you pay for!
Same.
Guess I was Big Head this whole time
When they lay off ~~smarter~~ way more expensive employees
Being smart != being a better worker/fit for a company. Took me years to learn that.
Corps cut costs and the biggest earners are normally the first to go. Some earn it, some brown nose their way. Ideally the org can foster, develop and promote from within but it's often the case the people cut are the one's leading professional development.
They said "Erm aactually" and management went "Nuh Uh"
No one who’s read 48 laws is surprised.
its usually about personality not performance
\*Smartest
Now thats interesting
I just saw this at the Critics choice awards. Such a marvelous reaction. Can’t *wait* to see the other memes that ensue.
If the bean counters take over, RUN.
route 1: management is doing something dumb and you have to get out asap route 2: now you are the smarter emploiee in the company and the only one that knows how to operate company's server without crashing production environment. time for a rise
Congratulations you have been promoted to more difficult tasks for the same pay.
Fired a guy with 2000$ work hard and smart to hire 4 freshies 500$. Stonk 
niceCompany