 “Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees - The Verge” I’d like to remind you that lay offs don’t work. The org is generally less functional, less reliable, and less profitable after a mass lay off. Lay offs are also always a symptom of exec incompetence https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-engineering-assistant-hardware 19 comments
I can’t believe I have to say this. Doing something that harms your job to further your own self interest IS NOT COMPETENCE. It’s the other thing. The opposite. Competent executives do their ruthless 3D chess without harming the operations of their organisation. Ask yourself, why is your first instinct to cover for a bunch of rich assholes who manifestly keep screwing up at their jobs? Also, these companies are doing multiple rounds of laying off thousands of people. The effects of a mass lay offs is a completely different phenomenon from team- or department-level inefficiencies or restructuring. @baldur  @baldur I would argue that their job is also long-term viability of the business. Which means it needs to provide the services properly. Layoffs at this scale are the opposite of this. They are an indication that the business is failing. @baldur they sometimes say one developer does in a day what two can't do in a week. it's better to have less people with more skill and dedication than spend time and money that could be spent on progressing a project on organizing with more and more people who aren't helpful enough to make up for it. a lot of large companies seem to struggle to hit the right balance here. @soop Yeah, that’s generally bullshit in this context. All else being equal, for any software project large enough for two people to work on it at once, that’s just plain wrong Also, they aren’t laying off people with less skill and dedication, they’re laying off expensive labour, who are generally the opposite, and they aren’t just laying off developers There are literally a bunch of studies on this going back decades. Mass lay offs are extremely disruptive and leave an organisation worse off @baldur Fair enough. I guess I just sort of wanted to bring up that sometimes it's better to stick with less people. I remember seeing this youtube video at some point about why companies do layoffs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCF78a2wTHM  @soop And they like to pretend that this has to do with some sort of innate qualities of the developers. Most of the time, the developers who go particularly slow do this because they're made to attend too many meetings, fill out too many TPS reports, and stand too many stand-ups. And the developers who go particularly fast often do this because they work for startups who can't afford all the bureaucracy yet.  bureaucracy can work well. standardized processing. no surprises. clear criteria. rational and fair decisionmaking. serves the users of the bureaucracy. but it can easily evolve into rules for rules’ sake, form after form after “wtf you mean I need a 17-E? policy says 17-F!” over function, a blockage, an obstacle. serves only those who control and/or hate it.  |
Gregory's Server
Don’t come at me with that “they’re actually competent because it raises stock prices” bullshit, not unless you want to get blocked or muted for spouting utter nonsense
Their job is profits AND stock prices. Both. These clowns are all utterly awful at their jobs and you people who keep saying they’re competent are providing cover for rich assholes who are so stupendously bad at their jobs that people genuinely can’t believe it’s unintentional
It isn’t. They’re clowns. You’re covering for them.