Comment by misswaterfairy
7 hours ago
> You lay off 1100 who are late in their career for younger people who will work more hours for less.
Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience, that also walks out the door laying off those 1,100 people 'late in their career'...
It's not possible to cram 25 years of experience into two.
> Yet management always seems to miss the institutional knowledge, and experience,
If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.
They usually don't though. Those left behind have to figure it out again with whatever new tools they have at their disposal, thus continuing the great circle of corporate life.
Or corporate death if they don't figure it out in time and it is actually important. But even then, the management won't miss anything.
Most of the time, management don't even know what they don't know. As a result, entire America lost engineers and builders and now don't even know how to build rails, factories and rockets to moon.
Relevant post with some military examples as well:
https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-thing...
(Has some AI tells though, probably AI-assisted?)
I'm very sympathetic to this standpoint, but an obvious retort is why don't the engineers become their own boss and do better? What's stopping them?
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Have you missed that they recently sent a rocket to moon?
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>If they actually miss it they can call it back to work for triple the going rate.
That’s great in theory, it rarely works in reality. Those people almost universally find new work quickly because they’re good, or retire because they can.
In both instances the idea of going back to bail out a company that just screwed you, operating with a giant target on your back when the inevitable next layoff occurs, isn’t worth it for 10x the salary. Ignoring the fact a business of any significant size isn’t approving paying someone to come back for 3x, they’ll just caN the manager for the fallout.
It takes two years to get up to speed on a job. It seems laying off will cost the company time even if they are saving money.
Half of Cloudflare employees have less than 3 years in the company.
Hired as a code monkey, fired as a code monkey.
Do they always miss it, or is it that they are aware, but disagree on the cost-benefit of hiring experienced engineers?
This is contextual on a number of factors. It seems difficult to establish in the general case.
How do they miss them? Companies just move on from what I’ve seen.
Maybe that's why they hired first, and then fired.
Give the new people 6 months to benefit from all that institutional knowledge.
Can't wait for the next couple of outages! Let's see how long it will take.
Lately it feels like it's possible. Freshers in their first job are now capable of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks. The feedback loop is definitely shortened - noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be. Experience matters now mostly at the architecture, and decision-making levels, not at implementation.
I was reviewing some code done by a junior hire at my company last week, and it certainly didn't look like he was cramming 25 years into 2. It looked like he had no understanding of anything he had generated, because it was garbage. Meanwhile this week I've just reviewed the largest single PR I've ever seen, from a senior dev who disclosed it was mostly generated and cleaned up by him, and the code was perfectly fine and it was a breeze to review.
LLMs are a great tool, but more often than not it does show if the person using them knows what they're doing or not pretty clearly. Especially if it's anything larger than a trivial small change.
Yeah they seem to just amplify who ever was behind it.
Freshers certainly can give the appearance of taking ownership and shipping full stack features in a few weeks.
The problem is that "I copied the issue on claude code and then committed the code it produced" is not actually taking ownership.
> noone appreciates the years spent "googling and looking at stackoverflow" anymore, and frankly, they shouldn't be.
Well, I do, and I hard disagree with you there. If the human does not understand what the machine is producing, then I need a different human.
Every time i see a comment chain like this i'm annoyed. In the last 3 decades we never truly found the words to define what kind of skills, problems, and people /-space exist in the industry, and AI has literally added a whole axis to the space so we're more unable to communicate than ever.
Having said that, and feeling more with you than the other guy, there is nothing for you to "disagree" with.
Mediocre was always buggy and broken in some ways, but for all intents and purposes it was good enough. Today somebody with a year of study can reasonably deploy something - for which the appearance of taking ownership and shipping a full stack of features has reached the bar of good enough.
Consider 10 years ago: Did you believe it was more likely that in the quality-distribution-of-software that we would, over time, create proportionally more quality? I dont think so and AI didn't meaningfully change the trend.
It changed the work dynamics, and still is changing, and with our inability to communicate is going to be an annoying mess.
Dont let the annoyances blind you to what LLMs can do for your point in space, or to where most of the points lie for the rest of the world.
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I'm not talking about some hypotethical scenario - but what I observe. When I started out, us interns were tasked with "nothing". Now the skill floor is so much higher, and I'm seeing freshers accomplish tasks that were previously thought of strong mid-level or early senior ones.
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boomers wish