> Unpopular opinion: If you think the industry is overstaffed, you are not carrying the pager enough. The industry is disproportionately staffed.
This hits close to home. The industry is full of sales driven companies that are like a castle in the middle of a lake supported by sticks. Removing even a few of those sticks (engineers) can make the whole thing collapse.
Yeah. There's a real effect where the VCs decide a bodega is a tech company, puts it through hypergrowth based on incredible projections, hires 5000 people, looks around and says "oh my god, there's no way this business can support an organization of this size, it's just a bodega chain!"
The problem is by then it's too late. You now have systems, architecture and processes designed to be an empire, and you can't staff it like an SMB anymore.
Case in point, the former CEO of Peloton just raised 25m for a company that delivers you "beautiful, custom rugs for your home". No idea why that would need funding from tech VCs. Yet here they are with several engineering job postings https://www.ernesta.com/careers/. If your business model is custom rugs, maybe just create a shopify store and sell your rugs.
> We believe that high-quality custom design shouldn't be out of reach for consumers and we aim to address this need in the multi-billion dollar global rug industry.
This would be fantastic satire if only it wasn’t real.
Yea, maybe Google has people that can camp out on a roof to "rest and vest" like in the tv show Silicon Valley, but every startup I've ever worked for had half or a third as many developers and every other position (even sales, HR, etc.) as would be required to do the jobs properly.
Maybe it's good if the BigCo's get hit hard in a recession, so some of the startups that do stuff other than advertising can get some of those sweet, sweet "10x programmers".
I still feel very bad for all those laid off, I've been laid off 2 times in the past 3 years due to startups closing and that probably isn't the end of it for me either.
More often than not, the part-time HR is just plain bad and unreliable. Every small company I've worked for has had payroll and benefits issues. I've seen everything from late paychecks to benefits getting terminated because someone forgot to do something. Also, there's always on-boarding problems. At larger companies, this rarely happens because they have actual HR professionals.
This hits close to home. The industry is full of sales driven companies that are like a castle in the middle of a lake supported by sticks. Removing even a few of those sticks (engineers) can make the whole thing collapse.