Comment by bezier-curve
1 year ago
I don't care how rich he is, he's wrong. Companies need people at the boundaries of context to clue people in, especially at the rate companies like Google lay people off.
1 year ago
I don't care how rich he is, he's wrong. Companies need people at the boundaries of context to clue people in, especially at the rate companies like Google lay people off.
Yep. He's partially wrong. Corporations who stop using small, effective teams and instead hire like mad do end up with management meeting communication facilitators who don't do anything all that essential and end up with excessive layers of management. These are the people companies need less of. What companies need more of is secretaries and people who keep things humming to free up subject matter experts from doing low-value tasks, and people who don't fit neatly in a single, narrow role but demonstrably make things better.
Another way out to avoid laying off or not giving raises to essential employees is better performance management with qualitative and quantitative recognition and characterization without creating specific KPIs falling into Goodhart's law. Peer 360 evals that feed into performance reviews for cross-functional areas to show their strengths when they're supposed to be strong in that area. Also, there should be some discretion given to managers to advocate for staff who improve performance of the team or of multiple teams.
Yeah, about those layoffs. There is heavy coverage of Intel’s plans to lay off 14k a year. People fresh out of college might be impressed but if you’ve been around you’d know they lay off 10k people every few years like clockwork.
It’s enough that it’s the last place I’d want to start a job at because I could get laid off just as soon as I start.
I just don't understand the romanticism that's been cultivated with joining these large companies. I interviewed with Google after they reached out to me many years ago, because I had a chrome extension that someone noticed. At the time I thought that was cool. They rejected me because I was anxiously preparing for it the wrong way. That's part of my bias here as well - they didn't need to reach out to someone self-taught. But looking back, I think of all of the things the recruiter was telling me, and the arrogance of them just name dropping "google" and expecting me to bow, and I think bullet dodged. Employment is a social contract just as much as a legal one, and it goes both ways.
The world has gone mad with status-seeking behavior. It's not even about the money, it's about "what will they think?"
A Harvard/Stanford/MIT education used to be about the rigor, the education, the knowledge, the tutelage. Now it's about having that name attached to yours. Same goes for FAANG.
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