You realise how annoying it is when you see people around you in the company making as much money as you and doing nothing useful to actually generate revenue. Data scientists that write a blog post about the most used hashtag or emoticon. Or PMs that we don't need...
>You realise how annoying it is when you see people around you in the company making as much money as you and doing nothing useful to actually generate revenue.
Absolutely. I also realize that when a company reaches the firing squad stage it's not a good idea to stick around - better polish up the CV and move to greener pastures. I have no insider information - they could be offering generous (and credible) retention bonuses for critical staff, but I've seen this happen twice before indirectly (I was gone before it started happening) and the people that stayed didn't have a good time, were lied to and left in the end anyway in a worse situation (or waited trough to bankruptcy and had to sue for outstanding wages in first place I worked in)
I have not been impressed with the average tech person's ability to understand parts of a business outside their immediate responsibilities. There were people on here seriously questioning the need for a general counsel for a company that's constantly under legal assault by every country on the planet. Never mind the long recurring "why does an ad-dependent company need people to manage relationships with the big spenders who expect that?" discussions.
By being a free speech platform without the censoring role of an editor, Twitter does not need to care if Qatar is mad about what is written there. If Qatar bans twitter, they ban twitter.
What is a "legal assault" and why does Lichtenstein have an ongoing "legal assault" against twitter?
The previous point is very reasonable, and I think your response is overly flippant and confrontational.
I've had coworkers hounded by managers from unrelated teams because my coworker wasn't working fast enough on a feature that was important to their team. They made assumptions about how many different tasks my coworker might have had assigned to them.
They were juggling like 3 or 4 fairly important features/fixes for various parts of the organization at the time because our team was (in my opinion) understaffed.
But of course, each of the relevant managers can only see "didn't satisfactorily complete my fix in the expected timeframe", and then perf review comes back and collates that info to "doesn't complete tasks on schedule" without taking a step back and recognizing that this is a failure mode of planning where one engineer was responsible for way too much stuff with no reasonable ability to push back.
At the same time, of course, engineers were getting promotions for doing exactly one thing well, which is as it should be.
There are lots of lessons in here, one of which is very likely "push back on work that causes you to overburden yourself", but I'd argue another important lesson is that you just don't see what others are working on. I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.
But while we're throwing ad hominems for the fun of it; I'd rather have a bunch of "bloaters" on my team than the one person who is convinced that they are one of the golden few producing value, and everyone else is a lazy freeloader. I've worked with that type of person before and it's awful. It is rarely the case that they are _actually_ producing an 2-3x the value of other engineers, it's much more likely that they're just reducing morale and causing internal conflict while building some small piece of the pie and assuming that's the majority of the work.
Like someone who builds a button that says "delete my account" and says "I built the delete account feature" while not recognizing that there are a ton of people on the database teams that made the feature possible without performance hiccups or leaving dangling foreign keys.
You are bringing up a completely different problem that's a whole another case than bloat: bad managers that don't realise that some workers are juggling many problems, not just their own. That is very different to people doing a lot of work in secret in an unsecretive organisation, like twitter.
> I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.
This is not the case at all in many work situations, a prime example being when you work on a team and all code and work produced is shared. None works on other teams. The code reviewer and hopefully project lead will know, or have a very good hunch, what everyone is producing.
I would argue that bad middle management is another bloat problem, so in essence; you just made another point for how bloat is very bad for an organisation. I wonder why you are so interested in defending the all too common effect of corporate bloat in an economy where its calculated that a large percentage of jobs are useless and there is a trend to collect multiple useless jobs.
I'm staying and I'm glad the teams are trimmed.