The vast majority of tech companies having hiring freezes or layoffs are the ones that overexpanded post-pandemic. You throw money at people when the money is good, and the hose dries up during a recession.
I didn’t see them call the employees lazy. They said they weren’t productive. And again calling a conscious decision to hire people you won’t need in a couple years isn’t necessarily poor planning. If being the first to release a product gives you a big advantage it’s probably a good idea to hire all those people in the right situation.
If the employees were not being productive, that would show up in their KPIs and reviews and they would be fired. That process already exsists so you can't use it as a scapegoat. This is squarely about leadership's poor planning.
From what I understand, Netflix doesn't cull the herd — they get rid of good (but not excellent) performers too. The article is talking about actually cullung the herd and getting rid of the mediocre performers who previously could skate by.
Yeah true, but this coming from the likes of Facebook and Google, two companies well known for warehousing talent... it mostly just comes across as tone deaf and naive.
For years they've literally hired very smart and capable people, and then shoehorned them into working on some ad-tech engine that an intern could do, just so they didn't work for a competitor. And now they're angry that their employees "don't work hard?"
Holy fuck, for being Google, they sure have some idiots in leadership.
The idea these firms hire people just to stop them going to competitors is popular on HN but I never saw any evidence of it when I was there.
Trophy hires? Sure, occasionally, but they were all doing stuff for the company. And the idea there was some sort of policy is wrong. It may look like that from the outside though, because there was never a strong connection between hiring and need.
This sounds plausible, but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.
Isn't this a failure of the free market? This leads to the obvious question, which is: what could be done to improve optimal talent distribution?
It seems bad to society if rich companies can monopolize talent to control development and output in order to ensure greater political power and control.
> but I'd love to hear if others agree with this claim.
I'm one of those that agree with that claim, I've said something similar a couple of times during the last few years on this forum (I remember that once I even used the term "golden handcuffs" in order to describe the whole situation).
As to why and how this came to happen in relation to the free market? The short answer is that both Google and FB are de-facto monopolies. In a way that can also be extended to Apple and MS. Of course that these companies will make tons and tons of a money during a period when software is eating the world (I know it sounds marketing-ish, but it's the reality). As such, they can use that money to "park" the best developers available among their ranks, so that no real competitor can emerge.
In addition to a surplus of great people, they have lots of mediocre people too, just like everywhere else. There may have been a time where this wasn't true, but now anyone who passes a day of tricky tech interviews is in, and that doesn't always correlate with good performance. At least that's my take having worked at Google.
So we have Facebook destroying lives on a massive scale by knowingly wasting people away glued to the screen. They also knowingly exploit base emotions of literally billions of people to antagonise them just to keep them "engaged" and sell some ad space.
I call this "next level" evil.
Regular evil is, where I live, a small developer (housing) went bankrupt and wasted life savings of hundreds of people. They did a lot of absolutely mind boggling stupid stuff and they knew they are running out of cash and still accepted payments from more people. Given history of these cases here, they are unlikely to ever spend even a day in jail and the most it ever gets is couple of mentions in local news.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills having this conversation. Regular evil is letting the air out of someone's tires or lying to your spouse, not wasting away the life savings of hundreds of people.
> So we have Facebook destroying lives on a massive scale by knowingly wasting people away glued to the screen
If you want a proper "Facebook is evil" point, there's always the Rohingya genocide[1] -- "Facebook has admitted that it played a role in inciting violence during the genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar"
Whoa what? Wasting away life savings of hundreds of people is way worse than regular evil. Why is that on a different level than Facebook or any major corp who are worse because of more power and scope, but still??
Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I think he just wanted to feel important.
More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.
A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.
>would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.
the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the chances of war happening.
>More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime
Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet without air support (which we do actually know since WWII really), and that air support usually, until you operate near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers)
The US litoral ships are 3500 tons 115m length. Russian Black Sea frigates 4000 tons 125m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Grigorovich-class_frig...) Black Sea is deep everywhere, ie. there is no "litoral" area where those frigates wouldn't be able to operate due to their size. And their roles there are currently mostly those of "litoral" ships, like the land attacks.
That would surprise me. I have attended targeted career fairs with both FAANGs and national labs recruiting, and the national labs give off way more 'work-life balance' vibes. Plus, as the largest bureaucracy in the history of the world, the federal government isn't a good place to get a high return on brain damage when you want to actually get something done.
Having said that, the national labs do seem like good places to go geek out in your own advanced intellectual cul-de-sac.
Well from experience of being an undergrad and going to career fairs, this assessment is spot on. You don't realize this whole thing is bullshit until a few years into your career.
Because my frame of reference is being early or maybe early-mid career, where you can't possibly have the necessary experience to be 'best' without working significantly more than 40 hours weekly, and from my perspective most of getting there in the future follows that path too. I'm not discounting that some top engineers could exist outside of working a lot, but for most people the path to that distinction is a lot of work, and in most places that lot of work gets done outside of the hours when people are distracting you with meetings and small talk, which means not stopping at 40 hours weekly.
Having said all that, I don't discount the possibility of work life balance in the 60-80 hour range, but that's a whole separate skillset.
FAANG's currently have a problem with ideological mono-culture. I dont know if recruitment has exactly suffered because of that, $$$$$ can allow for a lot of suppression of personal beliefs, but I do know a few people that have outright refused to work in those companies because of that, who are pretty excellent programmers
Using open source to judge quality seems wild. Maybe people just have no interest in maintaining an open source project. Looking from the outside at some of the stuff people put up with, it doesn't look worth it at all. I'll just work privately
As the sole maintainer of a popular open source NASA project (and contributor to several others), I can say that my open source work reflects very poorly on my work overall. We have a real problem in that there is a drive to open source things, but there is no money at all to support open sourced work. As soon as the open sourced work is no longer something I use day to day, I have to either maintain it on my personal time or it gets abandoned.
NIST and other government institutes are not known for open source work mainly because most of their work is a combination of science and technology communication. They deal in publications, conferences, and reference datasets. In my industry, NIST and the NIH produce the most important R&D reference datasets in the world, and everyone else looks to them for guidance. With that said, the NIH also occasionally produces world class software too (NCBI BLAST, etc.) although they do have some issues with parts of their software engineering culture being a bit out of date.
That question is pretty meaningless unless you can somehow measure the quality of an engineer. Is it the engineer who can build systems nobody else can, the one who can build the cheapest system that performs to spec, the one that can work well in a team, the one that is always available, the one that can teach others, etc etc etc etc. I'm sure anyone can think of many more aspects to being a good engineer.
I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all-round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG devs have literally been filtered through an "are they good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by "being a good engineer" that does not mean much.
Indeed, but "works to the highest (quality) standards" is only one of the many aspects of being a good engineer. For example: government engineers are often not as good at completing projects within budget.
As someone who was a government worker, a lot of the issues why projects go over budget is because management believes that a single developer can do the workload of 4. So the product never gets delivered and that developer leaves to work somewhere else.
I think that dilutes the meaning of "quality" to nothing. Like if someone says "that's quality work" or a "quality engineer" I think of something specific.
For example I'd call a BMW a quality car. I wouldn't call a Lada a quality car, though it's much cheaper and has a much higher bang-to-buck ratio than a BMW.
In that sense sometimes government work has to be the highest quality, especially when it concerns security or safety. Sure it could end up being magnitudes more expensive but I'd say that's a question of efficiency not quality
Feds have some of the most useless engineers/bureaucrats in the world. They do have a very, very tiny amount of mission motivated folks who are the best of the best, but that number is a rounding error. Ask anyone who has left.
Not firing folks, low pay, focus on the best work life balance in history, heavy affirmative action, politics, and having to work hard to carry the coasters isn’t an environment that naturally attracts skill and competence. Work 500% harder than the next guy and get the same promotion. No thanks.
The gov and contractors, like it or not, are jobs programs first and foremost. A remarkably effective jobs program if you just measure folks employed and not output.
I am at a loss for words if people expect Facebook of all companies to not access the data on their platform. Of course they will access the data on their platform. Texts and apps like Signal are a different story.
Working from home isn't synonymous with a rich social life. Personally, even though I have/had healthy work and personal relationships, I used WFH as an excuse to unhealthily isolate myself for just about all of 2020. Also, I'm inclined to believe employers don't give a damn about our social lives. They want more work out of us and more money.
I hope that didn't come across as my point. Some have a rich social life and prefer the office, and others wfh. Some have a poor social life and prefer the office, and others wfh.
My point was just that those who fill their social life outside of work don't always need everyone working from the office. And that's okay.
And these types are the ones that interrupt me to ask obvious questions that can be figured out with a little research on their own or catch me in the hall for a “quick” chat about trivial matters or gossip that lasts for 20-30 minutes several times a day. Meanwhile, I stay late to get work done since several hours have been wasted commuting to the office, chatting, and going to inefficient meetings.
Bottom line is that companies save money on real estate and utilities, have happier workers, live in healthier environments due to less car pollution, can hire from a larger pool, and attract the best talent when they offer work from home.
Companies that do not take advantage of this will be at a structural disadvantage, so the almighty savings of dollars will likely make this trend unstoppable.
How exactly are secularlists disenfranchising religions? There is a large swathe believing the separation of church and state is religious oppression, and they act like the country is not for those of all faiths.
When a court rules that a particular area is outside of elected officials' power to legislate, in a sense they are disenfranchising those who would vote for officials to make such laws. Leaving aside whether it is right or wrong, the underlying issue is that someone's set of values has been elevated outside of the democratic process. This has always been happening since the beginning, but in recent years we've experienced a significant lack of agreement over those values such that one side feels disenfranchised.
There are a million things in this country that don't follow the democratic process such as the electoral college. But is that what you're really arguing?
The fact that you disagree with that particular democratic process does not mean it is not in fact a democratic process. Not a perfect one, but one nonetheless. As for your second sentence, I don't understand what you are getting at. I am really arguing the argument I put forth, not some other argument. If you disagree with that point, happy to entertain a rebuttal but I have no interest in participating in a culture war so you can put down your dog whistle detector.
Only one group of people complains about secularism in America, and it's Christians. Notice that Hidus and Muslims in the US do not have a problem with the separation of church of state like Christians do.
I only dislike Christians trying to jam their God into law and make the US a theocracy like Afghanistan. Their hope is that people like you see any criticism as an attack on Christianity. They hope useful idiots do exactly what you are doing.
The question misinterprets the dynamic. Point is, people disenfranchised ("left behind") by secular administrators are turning to religion for community and identity. That's the undercurrent in the context of the thread. It's not about the legal separation, it's about a change in the upstream culture as a reaction to the politics. The official principle of agnosticism that the separation of church and state represents is not official atheism either. In fact, it's the opposite. The US system was famously said to be vulnerable by it's founders, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." While it can tolerate almost every kind of minority belief, it doesn't survive a shift to complete atheism and nihilism. The American system is predicated on the universalist idea that, "people here are free to have both kinds of beliefs, theistic AND deistic," and the trend I was pointing out is religion is becoming a reactionary tendency.
That has nothing to do with secularism and people turning to religion for a sense of belonging. That has everything to do with housing policy being bent so in favor of the rich, most American homes are built to be secluded with no real way to walk around or dine in neighborhoods.
So everyone has to go out of their way and make reasons to feel connected with their fellow man.
