[HN Gopher] Kindness, tech staffing and resource allocation
___________________________________________________________________
Kindness, tech staffing and resource allocation
Author : mooreds
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-11-08 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (redmonk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (redmonk.com)
| aosmond wrote:
| I lost my job at BlackBerry in spring 2014. I'm not sure how many
| rounds happened before that. At least a dozen. The company shed
| thousands and thousands of us as it entered decline.
|
| Thankfully I had no children, no mortgage and lived well below my
| means. As such, it was quite possibly one of the happiest moments
| of my life, instead of the worst. I could only imagine how I
| would have felt if I just bought a house, or had a child.
|
| I was so eager to sign the papers to move on. In retrospect, I
| was foolish to have stayed as long as I did. It was an amazing
| place to work in the early days, lots of talented colleagues I
| had learned much from, about work, about life, but by the end, it
| was a shambling zombie, decomposing before our very eyes.
|
| We were summoned into an office with a cheerful HR person, armed
| with a PowerPoint presentation. A box was passed around to toss
| our many years worth of phones into. I'll never forget being
| asked, "Does everyone know why we are here?" at the very start.
| We did.
|
| I wish good fortune to anyone who has lost their job in the
| recent layoff rounds. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
| Given some time and luck, you might even land in a better place
| (I feel blessed in that respect).
| mkl95 wrote:
| > 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.
| ok_dad wrote:
| 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.
| canucklady wrote:
| Y'all have dedicated HR? Usually startups I work at have some
| underpaid "office manager" who is both HR and a mom to the
| entire office.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Yea, that's my point, my HR recently was the CEO, now it's
| the CFO, maybe tomorrow I'll be the HR person!
| napolux wrote:
| Kindness was only mentioned in the title of the post. It's a
| pity, because I am pretty sensible on this topic of kindness
| because one of my former manager told me "you're too kind to
| level up in this company".
|
| I gladly left.
| NickC25 wrote:
| I also was told in my last job that I was way too kind.
|
| They fired me 2 days later, one of the reasons being "you're
| not cutthroat enough for this business".
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| I guess the proper response to that is to slap them in the
| face?
| zach_garwood wrote:
| I think, instead, they wanted their throats slit!
| vaidhy wrote:
| I am wondering if that was Amazon. It was the reason I left.
| napolux wrote:
| Nope, not Amazon.
| adamc wrote:
| Kindness was definitely in the post though -- the whole point
| of the closing was to be kind to those facing adverse
| circumstances.
| Jensson wrote:
| Writing online what people did wrong isn't unkind, it could
| help others avoid the same mistakes. I'm not sure the world
| would be better if everyone just was kind instead of trying
| to be helpful.
| superfrank wrote:
| > be kind to people facing layoffs. Losing your job is awful in
| the best of circumstances; going through it in such a public and
| charged situation must be emotionally grueling. Be kind.
|
| At the beginning of covid, I got laid off from a company the day
| after I accepted a new job at a different company. I had a
| meeting with my boss to put in my two weeks in the afternoon, but
| I woke up to an 9am meeting with our CTO where our entire team
| was let go. Since I got let go instead of quitting I got
| severance and health care for a few months and was able to file
| for unemployment, which allowed me to take 6 weeks in between
| jobs instead of the 2 I was planning.
|
| It was literally the best possible scenario I can think of for
| getting laid off and it still fucking hurt to be let go.
|
| Seriously, please remember be kind to the people going through
| this.
| acchow wrote:
| Glad you were able to get through this. The severance is
| especially nice.
|
| > and was able to file for unemployment
|
| Reminder to people that H-1b holders are not eligible for
| unemployment claims. They pay INTO the system but are not
| allowed to take out of the system
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I was once laid off from a company on a Friday but they really
| wanted to keep me so they told me to call back Monday to see if
| anything changed (very small company a long time ago). On
| Sunday I broke my ankle playing touch football and the doctor
| said I was probably eligible for disability. Called the company
| back on Monday, they cancelled the layoff and I went on
| disability for eight weeks then right back to work with them.
| tintor wrote:
| "It was literally the best possible scenario I can think of for
| getting laid off and it still fucking hurt to be let go"
|
| Why was it hurting? You already committed to leaving.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Feelings are rarely rational.
| scrumbledober wrote:
| I had a miserable job that I absolutely hated before my career
| in tech. I was saving up money to last me through going to a
| coding bootcamp and had just sat down and calculated that I
| needed $X more. I got called into a meeting and laid off and
| given a severance check for almost exactly $X. I still cried on
| the way home, even though looking back objectively it was one
| of the best things that ever happened to me
| [deleted]
| Southworth wrote:
| As ever Redmonk nails it. I agree that lots of well funded and
| profitable firms are over resourced, and simultaneously not
| focussed on the core fundamentals. I hope we can all play a part
| in reallocating talent to the sectors of society that need
| transformation the most.
| binarymax wrote:
| When talking about kindness, start by not referring to people as
| resources.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Being kind does not mean you have to put your head in the sand
| and ignore actual realities. Workers are a resource. They are
| also humans. Facts are not in conflict. An important to keep
| both of them in mind
| quesera wrote:
| Time, money, and people are all resources that must be
| applied to a project.
|
| If people feel diminished by being compared to money
| (capitalism yes? but fungible perhaps) or time (clearly the
| most important thing that any individual can allocate), then
| I am not sure how to comfort them.
|
| I try to avoid using the word. It's easy enough to do. But
| I've never understood the objection.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I think that's simply wrong. A company can be reasonably
| sure that they will stay in control of their money, and
| damn sure that time will pass. But at the end of the day
| they have no control over people. People are free to leave,
| and you can't do much about it. So in my mind a headcount
| is a company resource, but a head isn't. And that's
| important to remember.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I disagree. To me a resource is something the company
| controls, e.g. money, materials or, yes, a headcount. But no,
| the company does not control an individual person. Employees
| are free to leave and the police will not help you bring them
| back. Thus I think it's sloppy to think of or refer to
| engineers as resources in most context, unless of course you
| are capable of replacing them with someone else at a moment's
| notice.
| uoaei wrote:
| Engineers are hyper-literal. They would appreciate the formal,
| technical term: "human capital stock".
| bjornsing wrote:
| It's called "intelligent". ;)
| mooreds wrote:
| I agree, I thought that was a bit discordant. A better title,
| imo, would have been "Kindness, Tech Staffing and Employee
| Allocation".
| mcrad wrote:
| Funny that low performers are seen 100% as a bug and never as a
| feature. Future leaders need minions too right?
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| I think they're more seen as "buffer states" that you can
| quickly sacrifice on the altar of the Board of Directors to
| show that you're serious about cost-cutting. While not hurting
| your core staff at all.
| thunkle wrote:
| I just got laid off from Stripe on Thursday. Our team was up to
| it's neck with work that needed to be done. Other teams as well
| we're in disparate need of more engineers. They didn't do layoffs
| because they had excess employees, it was because they wanted to
| reduce run rate in the face of uncertainty.
| Temporary_31337 wrote:
| I wonder if you are at liberty to write about the type of work
| you were doing? Looking from a far it's hard to see such
| incremental changes and I wonder how will that affect Stripes
| future capabilities
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've hit that (inevitable, apparently) point as an "IC" with my
| current employer where I'm so "indispensable" that I'm a
| required participant in at least 8 hours of meetings a day,
| which means that it's more or less impossible to meet whatever
| low-trust gamification metrics like LOC committed or # bugs
| fixed have been put in place by hands-off upper management. My
| direct boss knows and appreciates what I do, but when Elon buys
| the company, he'll just be looking at a spreadsheet that I'll
| look terrible on BECAUSE I'm good at what I do.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think your post highlights a good point. The article talks
| about needing "OSS maintainers", but of course OSS isn't really
| a thing you sell for money (yes, I know in the broader sense
| people have tried business models around OSS, but nobody is
| paying for OpenSSL).
|
| It's entirely an economic problem, not a "too many" or "not
| enough" people problem.
|
| Sorry you got laid off. If anything, I felt like the Stripe
| layoffs we're a bit of a special case, because I've seen Stripe
| churn out _tons_ of useful new features and functionality over
| the past couple years, in contrast to some of the other tech
| layoffs where the companies seem like they 've been treading
| water for years.
| hectorlorenzo wrote:
| Sorry to hear that, best of luck looking for a new job. I hope
| the following comment does not come off as offensive.
|
| Do you think that this work that had to be done was business
| critical? My experience while working at FAANGs is that
| everyone was working a lot but a sizable number of projects
| were vanity/promotion/keep-em-distracted projects. People
| imagine overstaffed companies as full of idle engineers but
| I've seen instances of very busy overstaffed companies working
| on the wrong projects (migrating to Go because, using
| Protobuffs for a simple eCommerce API that does not need it,
| creating a component library for a small internal tool that
| will not grow much, building your own chat system, etc).
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| >migrating to Go because, using Protobuffs for a simple
| eCommerce API that does not need it
|
| I would imagine improving throughput a fractional percentage
| point could have multiple millions of dollars in return for
| any company close to FAANG size. I fail to see how these are
| good examples of 'wasted' engineering effort.
|
| Building your own chat system is a good one though,
| definitely seems like a vanity project.
| hectorlorenzo wrote:
| Agree, that's why I specified "because" in the Go example,
| and "for a simple eCommerce API". Almost all technical
| solutions have a place under the sun in the right context.
| My point is that this "right context" gets lost when the
| incentives are far removed from business needs and that not
| all overstaffed companies are "idle".
| closeparen wrote:
| While the phenomenon of promo projects is absolutely real,
| "not my favorite technology choice" is bad evidence that work
| is wasted. When you have a platform org that offers tooling
| and support for a golden path, it matters a lot whether
| you're on it. It is actually easier to do gRPC APIs at my
| work than to cowboy RESTy stuff. And the golden path changes
| over time. Python was a supported language years ago, now Go
| is. So of course things are being migrated to Go, not because
| that's objectively best, but because if you don't then your
| Python builds and deploys on our infrastructure could stop
| working at any moment and no new library versions will ever
| be released. We also had a team operating Mattermost at one
| point because that team's wages cost less than Slack.
|
| I do think the platform org's choices can cause a lot of low
| quality churn for the rest of engineering, and everybody
| resents having to switch out a perfectly fine dependency for
| somebody's half baked promo project, but even the platform
| group when it does these things is trying to save _itself_
| the headcount involved in maintaining legacy. As things get
| leaner, support for older stuff gets worse, and we have to do
| even more migration work of dubious value to tread water.
|
| If I were starting a Big Tech tomorrow I would put a lot of
| value on choosing a stable, long term supported tech stack
| and laying it out so that platform teams can iterate without
| distributed migration efforts. But no one ever starts a Big
| Tech. All that is awkward in Big Tech is due to path
| dependence flowing from the understandably odd choices made
| by tiny startups.
| thunkle wrote:
| Yes
| jupp0r wrote:
| If you think this point further though: does that make
| companies overstaffed or just mismanaged? Apparently cash
| flow supports companies to have these dev teams on staff,
| what if they worked on something that was a good investment
| of their time? Being overstaffed would mean that there was no
| way for companies to create more revenue by investing more in
| the right areas and I think this is a fallacy. The world is
| still so mindblowingly analog and inefficient in so many
| places that I don't think software is done eating the world
| yet.
| hectorlorenzo wrote:
| > does that make companies overstaffed or just mismanaged?
|
| Good point. The end result is the same: inefficient
| allocation of resources that could pass for productivity.
| Weird incentives at the management level.
| kdmccormick wrote:
| An third possibility: Management and/or engineering
| leadership sees real problems but is investing in them
| poorly. For example, resourcing multiple teams to
| rearchitect your backend when the real issues lie in test
| coverage and observability, or something like that.
| tompt wrote:
| The results may look similar, but they call for very
| different responses.
|
| Firing productive engineers isn't going to fix managers
| whose vision is not aligned with business needs.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This is the part the really got to me once I started to
| realize that my contributions started really impact a
| team in a positive way, but the vast benefit of that
| impact was bestowed upon the manager. More annoyingly,
| even when the manager was poor ( and, I do not understand
| why, there seem to be a lot of those around ), the blame
| was always that of underlings. I was under clearly
| deluded impression that leaders gets blame and glory.
|
| In my corporate life, I saw total of two exceptions to
| that rule ( now and my previous boss ).
| jupp0r wrote:
| That's the exact opposite of what a good manager would
| do. They'd take the blame for things that go wrong and
| credit the team for everything good that was
| accomplished. They'd be an advocate for their team and
| their reports individually. I've been fortunate to work
| with a few of those managers and they've been the ones
| that have been really successful long term. Keep
| searching or take the management route yourself and show
| them. It's very rewarding!
| Jensson wrote:
| Managers gets promoted by getting credit for
| accomplishments, any manager who got promoted a few times
| will be good at getting credit for what you do in some
| way or another. Some deserve the credit, others don't.
| itronitron wrote:
| work expands to fill the person-hours allotted
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > * does that make companies overstaffed or just
| mismanaged?*
|
| My guess is "undercompeted", though I'd hope there is a
| better word.
|
| If an organization has a large and secure revenue stream
| whether is works on improving output or not, it will focus
| inward, on making life better for the insiders, not the
| customers.
| adamc wrote:
| Agree with the advice. If nothing else, be kind and respectful of
| people facing adversity.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > be kind and respectful
|
| He seems to be calling out Twitter specifically, but is anybody
| really being otherwise there? I mean - I can understand (and
| will gleefully participate in) the schadenfreude of seeing the
| self-righteous Twitter censors being forced to find actual work
| commensurate with their marginal value to human civilization,
| but he seems to be talking about the rank-and-file types who
| carry pages and write product documentation.
| davesque wrote:
| Careful, friend. Sounds like karma has its eye on you.
| theptip wrote:
| Here's one way of thinking about this (not the whole picture of
| course):
|
| At annual profitability of $Y per employee, you have a bar for
| what you need to earn from hiring your marginal next employee.
| The "core" business top 1% might be earning $10Y per employee,
| but if you can earn $1.5Y per employee for 10k new hires to spin
| up new product areas, you would be negligent (and fired by the
| board) to not do so.
|
| This is one of the main reasons big companies tend to bloat.
|
| I think the narrative of "most companies are overstaffed" is a
| bit of an over-simplification. If the goal is to maximize
| shareholder return in the medium-to-long-term, this is not so. If
| the goal is to execute the core mission, sure, but that's a much
| less valuable company in most cases. And from a portfolio theory
| perspective, probably a less durable one too, since you don't
| have a backup plan.
|
| Now, Twitter never had $10Y per employee, so you could
| justifiably claim they are overextended. But I don't think the
| same logic works for the MAGMA.
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| I think this makes sense. Assuming MAGMA is the new FAANG, my
| experience inside the majority of them agrees.
|
| Everyone knows that there is 1 or 2 golden goose teams
| supporting the entire rest of the company (iPhone, Facebook
| Ads, Google Search Ads). But smart people also know that one
| terrible quarter for any of those and the house of cards comes
| down.
|
| So 90% of the employees are concerned year-round with goose-
| hunting. Maybe once or twice a decade they find one.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Earlier this year, I was the tech lead in a project where 75% of
| the people were short term contractors. I was one of three
| company employees who would _actually_ code. The rest of them
| were managers or product types. I was also on call roughly one
| week per month.
|
| Management wasn't keen on spending money on medium or long term
| projects. Instead, they would redirect resources to short term,
| high single sale impact, or performance critical stuff, thus no
| good features were added for a while and people got severely
| burnt.
|
| I suspect that the misalignment in resource allocation with
| actual requirements, is a larger problem than overstaffing, and
| all derives from wrong management incentives.
| atopia wrote:
| Maybe the overstaffing is in middle-management all along...
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| Unfortunately, just like Congress, the people with the power
| to allocate, allocate to benefit themselves.
| mateo411 wrote:
| Middle Management doesn't really control the purse strings.
| They can certainly lobby for it and they do. In most
| companies budget's are allocated at the executive level to
| each of the departments.
| uoaei wrote:
| They are positioned critically as information
| transmitters between high level and low level. As such
| they are conveniently situated to shape the narrative to
| flatter themselves, in both directions. No wonder then
| that so many middle managers blame their underlings and
| insist they would be good at their job except for the
| meddling engineers. So of course execs would hear this
| and think "middle managers deserve more money, engineers
| need to improve their performance so let's dangle bonuses
| but not raise their salaries".
| mateo411 wrote:
| I don't think blaming your underlyings is a good strategy
| even for the mediocre middle manager. That might make
| work if there is a re-org and your entire org is changed
| and you inherit a new one.
|
| However, your org is typically the one that you hired,
| trained, and grew. So, if you are saying that you failed
| to make the commitments that you promised because your
| org sucks, then you are just telling everybody that not
| only did you not fail to meet your commitment you are
| also not good at building an org.
|
| You can't blame your underlings, if you blame your
| underlings then people aren't going to think you are
| doing a good job. If you have any character you will take
| responsibility and admit that you failed. Then you will
| work with others to fix the issue, it's not the end of
| the world.
|
| Now, if you really want to deflect blame, there are many
| better places to deflect it. You can blame
|
| 1. The business/sales/product/external factors ...
| whatever, they imposed a deadline that was unrealistic.
| You were brought in too late and you did the best to
| salvage the situation.
|
| 2. A parallel org that you had an external dependency.
| Bonus points if you compete for budget with this org. If
| you can successfully deflect blame to those yahoos in the
| parallel org, then maybe you'll capture some of their
| budget and get more head count to grow your org. Yes, you
| want to grow your org. This is another reason why blaming
| your underlings is a bad idea. Why would you get more
| budget to grow your org, if you've done a bad job at
| hiring and training your current org.
|
| In conclusion there are a bunch of bad middle managers
| out there, and it might be widely thought that blaming
| the underlings and ICs is a good move. But it's a
| terrible move for both selfish and selfless reasons. Even
| bad managers will know that it's a terrible move.
| ebiester wrote:
| What does it mean to be overstaffed? I think that's a real
| question on which we can build.
|
| I define a skeleton crew as roughly 10% of the organization. If
| you cannot run your basic organization with just maintenance and
| basic bug fixes on 10% of your team, you have too much complexity
| in your system and you need to work to reduce your maintenance
| burden. If you need less than 10%, you have an well-architected
| system, or you have a very small system.
|
| Everything else in the system is research and development. These
| are new features that will drive revenue, or reduce non-
| engineering support costs, or otherwise drive new capabilities of
| the business. In that sense, every successful business is over-
| provisioned because they are all working on business bets for
| more revenue.
|
| So yes, every company can be leaner, but it will be at the
| expense of growth. Now, there are more subtitles in the article
| to address within that context. For example, it is also true that
| managers will keep an underperformer for longer so long as there
| is a net positive because they may be struggling to hire
| otherwise, or they may be bracing against future layoffs. (A
| lean, effective organization in an org that otherwise has game
| theory about layoffs knows that you keep people around that
| you're not afraid to lose. It's a terrible way to run an
| organization but it happens.)
|
| It is also true that we have work to do to level up the
| engineering management profession, as mentioned by the article.
|
| However, when discussing this, the key driver of employment
| growth is the pursuit of revenue growth and I think that's the
| primary lens and disconnect here.
| cableshaft wrote:
| 10% of what? Number of employees at the organization's peak?
| What if it's already shed 70% of its employees over several
| years, from its peak? Is it still 10% of that? At what minimum
| number of employees is it no longer 10%? Seems like a pretty
| arbitrary number to me.
| [deleted]
| pm90 wrote:
| The VC/Execs seem to have latched on to the idea of companies
| being overstaffed, and this narrative is being amplified by "tech
| influencers" as a way to explain layoffs. Without data to back
| this claim, I'm gonna treat it as just another unfounded claim.
|
| A more plausible reason seems to simply be that companies have
| had their stock prices hammered, earnings fall off, and need to
| control costs, and for software companies, their main costs are
| people and infra. There is simply no need for the underperformer
| myth.
|
| Stop listening to VCs! Don't throw your coworkers under the bus.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-08 23:00 UTC)