We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs.
Here's the summary:
- 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022.
- Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
> Unfortunately, the term “tech” has become diluted to the point of worthlessness.
Indeed. Nearly every so-called "tech" company is not actually in the business of selling technology products, so they aren't really tech companies.
Of course they create technology (sometimes very nice ones) internally in support of their actual business, but tech isn't the business the company board cares about.
Netflix is a movie production and distribution company. Google and Facebook are advertising companies. At least Apple is an actual tech company.
Wrong. Google and Facebook would be Ad Tech companies if they sold the ad tech. Instead they use the ad tech to sell ads. So I think it’s more accurate to call them ad companies.
The problem is that everything is technology. The wheel is technology.
But since there wasn't any good words to use to describe the practical application of computer science and other skills related to computers, we just used the term "information technology". Because, it's relatively descriptive. Computers are technology to leverage information. Everything related to getting computers to exchange information would be considered technology related to that.
But then it gets shortened to "IT" and just "tech". Networking is "tech", software is "tech", hardware is "tech".
I've come to disregard anything that bills itself as simply "tech". It's smoke and mirrors. You're looking to gussy up something that would otherwise be banal.
The linked blog post reads like the other 43.3% don't seem to have found any new jobs at all (if I'm reading it right). ("There could of course still be many that have found new jobs, which they might not yet update their profiles - a common practice on LinkedIn").
Zero of my friends laid off from google are even looking for a new job.
My wife was always asking me to retire, but after a year or so she’d say “it would be good for you to have a job”. Then repeat. Retiring isn’t that fun when you’re in your 30s.
So I suspect a bunch of them will be back in the job market eventually.
Its actually not that unexpected, a big contributor is inflation.
If you've any experience with Argentina, or other hyper-inflationary events, there comes a point where your labor is more valuable to you than what others are willing to pay you for.
When the store of value is degrading rapidly, and wages in general always lag, those with options will do something else.
Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adjust their wages for inflation. When we were in a 2% inflationary environment, and that 2% could be counted on year after year as being stable, it was more reasonable.
With inflation in the double digits, with real inflation according to previous more accurate methods showing roughly a ~33% loss in value YOY, and the corresponding increase in taxes (as inflation increases your taxes increase as you enter higher tax brackets for the same value), it makes a lot more sense to use your efforts for yourself instead of being on the open market.
Factor markets and producers decide what they are willing to accept, and with a moving goal post in terms of a currency store, it makes more sense to wait in sheltered assets and produce goods you'll use.
People in general won't accept doing $1,000 in work and by the time they can spend it only having $700, or worse for example $1.
Do you think they will continue doing that work moving forward if they have no expectation of getting anything comparable in value in return?
This was actually my thought process to postpone job searching among many other things after my physics PhD graduation last year. I had managed to make substantial savings during the Covid period. I didn’t find ethical to invest them in stocks and the interest rates for government bonds were not close to match the inflation. So I took a time off to allocate time for spending/investing, learning new skills and working on an open source project full time.
So far managed to install 5kW solar panel arrays at two family properties connecting that to the grid and figuring out a way to get reimbursed by government and so lowering final costs around 2500 euro for each installation. Now I have an excess electricity so I invested in a sawmill and hopefully soon will slice a timber for a joy of doing so. Being able to build my own sauna and get some wood for roofing could potentially break it even.
Also investing time and attention into my open source project gives me the basic fulfilment for purpose and creativity urgently needed after experiencing academia. Learning a lot of new stuff - HTTP, onion architecture, QML, public key cryptography and zero knowledge proofs - among many other things. While also being able to express myself creatively in software development than I ever could be in academia. Does not matter much if the developed idea fails, I just really want to know how.
My dislike of investing in stocks comes from supporting the institution, which decouples owners and consequences. When shareholders make a profit at the hands of slave labour, they never get to experience the impact on their environment. Even if they do get some attribution of blame, it is diluted between multiple shareholders and pension funds. As long as CEO makes a profit, no shareholder remotely cares what practices the company uses. The remoteness of owners makes these things much worse than when a union can talk to the business owner.
Also, no small investment makes a difference in the trajectory of how the corporation proceeds. A vision can not emerge on the shareholder’s side when the voting power is highly distributed, and the knowledge of how the company operates is secondary to the stock owners. Thus only a profit-seeking motive survives, and with that, practices of maintaining monopoly power by buying out competitors, ridiculous patent lawfare and restraining the ability to fix things you buy. F** that.
> I didn't find it ethical to invest in the stock market.
Ethics are individual, but I can totally agree with this sentiment.
To effectively make money in up, down, or sideways markets you need to be able to trade options. Options are risky, but you can structure them in combinations to reduce risk, but those positions are handled differently depending on whether you are a primary dealer, or an individual investor.
When certain options are coupled in certain structures, they form synthetic shares at the broker dealer level which can exceed the amount of shares in the float, and the market maker assumes the risk because they delta hedge to facilitate selling and clearing contracts.
As a result, with sufficient capital you can manipulate the market price down since a synthetic share is counted indistinguishable from a real share and with sufficient capital this can be an arbitrary amount.
The basic mechanics of the market are when there are more sellers than buyers the price goes down, the opposite causes the market to go up.
Algorithmic trading capitalizes on volumes/churn, and can trigger intentional volatility halts with sufficient churn which almost seemed targeted when it might go against a short seller (i.e. moving up).
Overall the markets today from what I've seen are just a very clever way to fleece people's retirement money. For someone to gain, someone must lose. Ethically, its quite tainted, but other avenues for capital investment are generally not easily accessible to accounts less than 100k.
Additionally, while individual investors may be fined for breaking SEC laws, the fines for broker-dealers and hedgefunds almost never come close to the profits (fraud is baked in) at least in any action taken in the last two decades that I've seen.
You have dark pools also that don't have to register the sales with an exchange sometimes until end of day (which isn't reflected in the exchanges market price, at least afaik).
It is also possible to fix prices with two colluding parties through opposite ended contract legs for prices based on volume/active futures/contracts by creating a net zero position between those parties (spot price gold/silver; eligible vs registered), yes, its against the law but the SEC is toothless against the major players doing this, and they can't force the visibility needed to go after them. They lose in court(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Eyo0u4_sYI&ab_channel=ThePr...).
In short, its on their honor as broker dealers that their numbers at the COMEX are accurate, and there has never been an independent audit.
JPM manipulated the silver market for decades and got off free and clear with only a small fine, moved operations overseas and continued doing more of the same in the London Exchange (from what I've heard, though that's strictly rumor so take that for what it is).
Gamestop was another where they were testing gamma with contracts forcing the market maker to induce a short squeeze to cover, The regional bank FRC most recently with a well timed media package (inducing a bank run) after two other bank failures which were known well in advance. Was just criminal.
I saw a completely fake video show up on youtube about that time with people lined up outside a building on a Sunday to get their money with the video headline showing "FRC bank run in progress". Driving down the street filming a building where storefront windows with the reflected text in the wrong direction and a line outside (it was a sunday, banks aren't open).
What was done with the media coverage looked totally criminal for a bank that was on solid foundations and practices (as a model of good banking). With the exception of aggregated indebtedness requirements for a publicly traded company which was caused by the shorting and subsequent drop in share price which forces the bank to have liquidity issues.
If there was not some level of tacit approval for additional consolidation of an already consolidated business sector, where they mention the risks in the previous FOMC meeting for regional banks. Its pretty clear there should have been much more action taken after the third bank failed(Credit Suisse), which didn't happen.
Standard SEC Disclaimer, I hold a long position on FRC which will probably expire worthless at a loss.
I'm from Argentina, even now with 100% inflation YoY I wouldn't call it "hyper-inflationary". We had hyper-inflation in 1989 and that was 79% monthly.
People in general won't accept doing $1,000 in work and by the time they can spend it only having $700, or worse for example $1.
nobody is quitting their jobs because the currency is losing value. You cash your salary and just buy stocks, bonds, crypto, foreign currency and obviously groceries.
Most companies I know simply are unwilling to adjust their wages for inflation
With inflation in the double digits, with real inflation according to previous more accurate methods showing roughly a ~33% loss in value YOY, and the corresponding increase in taxes
yes, some real wisdom here. Here, anybody that's in demand becomes self employed and that brings two benefits: first you can raise your rate as often as you want. Second, your tax rate decreases and gets more predicable for the fiscal year.
We had close friends growing up who were originally from Argentina during that time period in the early 90s, they were clearly traumatized by it. They told stories of raising chickens for eggs, and goats for milk/cheese/food, and the father credited that as the only reason they made it. Their stories left a real impression on me growing up.
I ended up doing a lot of research during my college years. By definition hyper-inflationary is >50%/month, but it always lags and government isn't incentivized to keep it accurate.
Year over year stateside is relatively tame in comparison except its not going to taper off as long as they keep printing increasing amounts of money.
The Fed also broke banking when they departed from fractional banking in 2020 by setting the required deposits to 0% and went with capital requirements which use Basel III (counting capitalization on the stock market as backing deposits), which as we've seen with FRC, stock market exposure for banks in general is a bad idea.
We are talking about people making above >150k/year here right ? At no point does 10-20% inflation mean they are better off growing their own food or some shit like that.
Your point is probably applicable in less developed economies/low paid positions. For highly specialized well paid positions if this was the case you'd probably have a societal collapse.
Actually, increasing rates of inflation do mean people are better off sustaining themselves and leaving the credit based economy that has a rising inflation rate with its credit based currency. The weak buying power of an individual currency unit, like a United States dollar, indicates a geopolitical state and economy that is beginning to lack the ability to sustain further revenue increases in a generalized shareholder account of wealth. And middle class or bourgeois laborers are those general shareholders in the hypothetical credit based economy and state I'm talking about here. Basically, a credit bubble is naturally popping to combat real overpopulation and making a lot of money (like a billion dollars, actually) here might actually be a fool's game. So investing in outside assets, relative to the indicated failing state and the credit based assets its domestic production offers its domestic shareholders, is the rational move to make in this theoretical game.
So the question now is: what can we do and invest in as part of our survival motivated escape from the failing society?
Lets do some basic math, and then afterwards I think it will be clear how it might be better to grow your own food.
Also, not everyone makes that much, and you seem to think that's a lot but its really not, especially if inflation is eating away at your stores regularly (over a greater time period than a year).
So, here comes the basic math available from looking up some publicly available figures. I only say this because some people have past trauma associated with math in general, but its really critical to make any kind of rational comparison.
The Federal tax rate above 89K is $15,213.50 in taxes plus 24% of the amount over $89,075 for Federal up to ~170k, and then you also have State taxes which may be as high as 13.3%; more if you own property (% based on fixed value), plus its counted as ordinary income so social security and medicare take off another 15.3%. Anything you buy has sales tax so another ~7%, and fuel/vehicle taxes.
Overall, at 89K ordinary income, 15213 = ~17% +15.3%+13.3% = ~45.6%, nearly half of what you get paid on goes to the government. Now comes along 20% inflation, and this is a tax because they printed too much money and couldn't balance a budget.
So 65.6%, assuming inflation is at 20% and not much higher, then there's taxes on various goods you have to purchase such as fuel and general sales tax, property taxes, it varies, but we'll say 7% or more on any dollar you spend, and depending how much you have to drive, that could be about 3% (to make it round), since vehicle costs and taxes are non-deductible.
So factoring in all taxes on that income you receive, somewhere between 65 and 75.6% with 20% inflation goes to government. If you are self employed, you have more options to make certain costs deductible, and if you are not its about half of that 15.3% less so there's some leeway.
So, you can work 80 hour weeks, stressful job, making that 89K/year or more, and only take home ballpark around 30,616 after factoring in inflation, and taxes. If you don't reinvest in an asset that sheltered from inflation you lose that much or more of your surplus/stores the following year and each subsequent year thereafter whereas business simply passes it through to you in higher costs.
Alternatively, you can grow your own food, produce your own products, work less, and keep 100% of what you produce and use, and if you have surplus sell some of it if the price is right and they'll tax you on that small amount.
Should you trade 4160 hours of your life for 89K, when, by the time you get it and can spend it, you only take home about 30K and the prices may have risen just as quickly during that time to net 0 or negative.
That's part of the horror of hyper-inflation, and while it hasn't by definition hit 50%/month yet, nothing fundamentally has changed to stop inflation despite what the news may be saying.
Those that have lived through similar situations know they have to invest their efforts in producing their own goods such as raising chickens, goats, milk and cheese. Without food security and having people who have specialized labor that can help out, you are at the mercy of creditors and the producers you depend on for daily necessities and they will pass inflation costs on.
This is the best little nugget of wisdom I've come across in a while, thank you for sharing it. It was well written and concise, and I feel like I understand the world a little better
I would kill to retire. All I want to do is make art, music, cook, hike, kayak, and travel on the cheap. I have about.... 1/20th of the savings needed.
I retired in my 20s. It's a fun novelty, but it wore off quickly. Your friends and family aren't around in most of your free time, and those things you used to enjoy in your limited free time now can't stretch to fill the new 10+ hours a day you have.
Like most things, the grass is greener on the other side.
I think we need to redefine retirement as “financial independence and free to do what you want”. I could honestly fill several hundred years of retirement with things I want to do. The people who get bored really puzzle me.
I retired by starting businesses early (16, all failed) and learning the lessons early to run something more successful when the opportunity arose. Those who train for it seem to get the most luck.
I thought the same as you and as an avid game, tech enthusiasts, electronics enthusiast, outdoorser reader and social person, I thought I'd be fine.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I find these things hold no intrensic meaning beyond the enjoyment of the moment - which I love, but isn't enough to satiate. None of these things bring fulfillment or accomplish any goal beyond thr arbitrary ones I set myself.
I suppose all goals are arbitrary at some level, but in my years retired I'm yet to work out how to bring that sense of real accomplishment back in my passtimes.
As such, I moved back from retirement to semi retirement after about 3 years. I still live on my own schedule, but I run a number of small businesses designed to do but not take over my life. I also volunteer and raise a family. I can't imagine ever fully "retiring" again, and I can see why a lot of older people give up on life after they do.
Hey, I'd wager I'd love to be retired. If you want that true back-to-the-grind experience I'd be happy to hold on to that nest egg of yours until I get bored. You can have my job. Check back on me any time, I guarantee you I won't be bored of retirement.
That doesn't mean I won't be programming and doing work-y type things, but just doing the ones I want to do.
I hope you get there and you're right! There are positive aspects of course, but like anything it becomes normalised.
It amazes me when I travel the world how many people live in places with absolutely stunning backdrops they take for granted because they've lived there so long. They forget and seem confused at first when you mention it. Anything becomes normalised and less exciting when it's your day to day.
Buncha folx humble bragging and moralizing about retiring at 30 after building trivial CRUD for dubious ad tech as some apex achievement and we surely will mourn their departure into the sunset.
I realized not long ago that all I really want to do is walk all day maybe listening to audiobooks sometimes. That’s my retirement plan until I get bored with it.
> I get the impulse, but why isn't this viewed as profoundly selfish?
I get that impulse, but that is like saying that most of our current jobs are reasonable and for the greater good cause?
Most of the real value providing and necessary jobs are currently underpaid, while on the other spectrums end few people can reap automations fruits that actually should be shared by society, or somehow like that.. ( I know, opinionated can derail into endless discussion topic and other's may express better).
Also, why isn't seen making music and art as a contribution to society while some of the current jobs are hurting society?
Is your reasoning here that it is selfish, because not everyone can do that, and if everyone could/did, then society would collapse due to no food production, garbage collection, emergency services, law enforcement etc, as all those people would also be out painting/kayaking etc?
I ask because as I first read your comment I was unable to see the selfishness, since GP outlined that they lacked the financial means to support that lifestyle (also implying that taxes would still be paid and money would flow through the system all the same). It took me writing out a reply to you, asking how you thought it selfish, before my brain came up with the potential answer I outlined in the first paragraph.
Right, my thinking here is that the dream of running away from the very society that granted you the freedom to run away seems like you're not "paying it forward" enough, to enable others to have the freedom you'd be taking advantage of.
Rather, I would imagine the "not-selfish" version of this would be to spend your life doing those things, and finding ways to help others get to where you're lucky to be.
I just find the "I'll get mine and fuck off" attitude to be less than ideal.
> Right, my thinking here is that the dream of running away from the very society that granted you the freedom to run away seems like you're not "paying it forward" enough, to enable others to have the freedom you'd be taking advantage of.
I see it completely the opposite. If someone has already made all the millions they'll ever need, it's better for society to free up that job for someone else who needs the income instead of keeping amassing more and more millions to one single person. Paying it forward here is opening up the opportunity for the next person.
Not that you asked, but that's not the attitude I have, and not the impact of retirement. Retirement is the freedom to do what you care about without the fear of going hungry or homeless. It's a luxury and a privilege, to be sure. But it in no way is telling anyone to fuck off. If that were the case, every retiree at 65 is telling the world to fuck off. Or is there some arbitrary number at which you're not telling the world to fuck off? Is it ok to retire at 65 but not 55? Or 45? Should we work until we're dead?
A life of "leisure" still contributes to society. I would of course still pay bills and buy things, supporting business. I'd still pay my taxes, supporting the government. I'd still volunteer, like I do now outside my job. I'd like to teach, write, and create more (I like to sing, make music, art, furniture, etc). And I'd really like to start an informal class for underprivileged youth to learn computer skills and get a job without going to college, like I did.
If I didn't have to work, I'd have a hell of a lot more time to make the world a better place. In addition to the selfish kayaking, cooking, traveling, etc, that I already do with a job.
That society took from you before you were born, and "getting yours" is merely getting back to zero. You have assets and liabilities. Liabilities include a requirement for basic poverty-level food, shelter, and (if necessary) medical care. Your assets balance those liabilities around $1M. So in my view that's actually zero. In fact you're not even really a full legal person until you own property; otherwise you're on the hook to rent an apartment just to maintain a driver's license or a voter's registration.
So... noone should exercise this freedom, because doing it is selfish? Then what are you paying forward for? Freedom noone should ever exercise? It feels like a prison with transparent bars.
Not sure it's any more selfish than working for giant corporations for a fat paycheck. Both are selfish in their own ways, and both can also help people in their own ways. I wouldn't say there's something inherently wrong with being selfish on its own.
Selfish how? Like not contributing to society? Do we really want to have an introspective philosophical debate about the societal impact of working for a tech company?
Seriously, why don't more people work so the investors can get a chunk of their value for doing nothing? How dare they do something so utterly anti-social as spend more time doing things with people that aren't making investors money? Why must the rich investor class make-do with their own money pile when a chunk of your effort could make their pile bigger?
$20,000 a year income puts one in the top decile of income worldwide. At $50,000 you are richer than 98.5% of the global population. That’s less than the median American worker ($54K) or the mean ($74K).
A lit more than any investor class are rich by any historical or global standard.
Until you actually start equating cost of living and buying power. You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had. If you're willing to move to a rural Indian slum, you're sure to live the most regal life one can afford there, but you will lose out on a lot of the value that you get from living where and how you are today. Which is better? Shrugs, everyone has their place and I'm sure you'll find yours too.
> Until you actually start equating cost of living and buying power.
The picture does not change substantially if you look at measures of income adjusted for purchasing power parity. The West is far richer than the Rest and the latter much more populous.
> You may be making much more raw money than a 17th century monarch was, but that doesn't mean a hill of beans if everything costs more and you aren't afforded the same liberties that they had.
I eat better, fresher, cleaner food than they did most of the year, have far more variety in it, have access to vastly more cultural artefacts, and I have access to modern healthcare. I’d be dead but for antibiotics. The same is probably true of one of my children. My housekeeper lost a sister to illness at 21. More than likely she’d have survived if she’d had access to even the level of care standard in Shanghai twenty years ago. Being rich is in fact better than being poor and living in a rich country better than living in a poor one for the large majority of people.
You are arguing that your standard of living would increase by living in a slum because you would have more purchasing power? What?
I think you much overlook how great it is to have (somewhat) functional law enforcement, infrastructure, and access to goods and services and healthcare. This is what makes us rich, not the ability to buy cheap things.
So, if someone has made enough to retire early, they shouldn't. Instead the should grow thier pile even bigger, because that wouldn't be selfish on account of all the other people in the world not being able to grow thier piles bigger?
Jobs are high paying because someone thinks they provide (a lot) more value than they are paid. “Freeing up a high paying job” means someone who is worse at the job, on the margin, does it and less value is provided to everyone, aka society.
Not everyone needs to go get a job immediately after being laid off. Most people I know that when laid off from a tech company, take a minimum of 60 days off before starting a new job.
If you're 22, saddled with student debt, just signed a lease on an apartment and just bought a fancy new car you might be in a different situation but there's a lot of engineers in their 30s and 40s where a 3-6 month break from employment ("sabbatical") is something they've been planning for, for a few years now anyways.
An "X" company tells you (and them -- that's why companies position themselves) how to think about what they do.
So WMX is "in the trash business": sure they have logistics, and surely some custom software, but what they do is pick up the rubbish and bring it to the dump. End of story.
So Google (the world's largest advertising company) is called a "tech" company because without continuous work on their advanced technology they'd lose almost all their revenue. (what the rest of the people employed there do -- who knows? Nothing else contributes meaningfully to revenue). FB the same. Companies as diverse as Rambus, Cisco, NVidia, Apple, Boom (if they still exist), WhatsApp, Twitter (once upon a time) Snowflake...etc: technology is the linchpin of their work. Even Tesla, but not, say, for their BIPV (the roof tiles), which are decades-old me-too technology with no R&D at all.
At the opposite extreme, why was WeWork considered a "tech" business?
Uber employs a lot of programmers but I don't think of them as a tech business: their competitive advantage is their business model and their moat is branding, and they are all about piece work in small scale transport. There are plenty of useful SaaS companies who connected some existing packages and came up with a good new business, but aren't in the technology business; if they dumped k8s or Airflow or whatever and changed their stack it wouldn't matter much (so they never will).
There was a time when one or two people could make a product and be a tech company (Visicalc, 1.2 programmers; Intuit, 1 programmer), but nowaday if you can get into revenue with one or two programmers I'd say it's not a tech business. Can be a great business, don't get me wrong, but value, like Uber's, will come from domain strength and marketing/branding.
And to be a bit ad hominem: there's a higher density of tech businesses in Silicon Valley and a much lower density in SF. You can tell because the nerds in boring suburbia worry about bits and bytes and the folks up north use phrases like "founder lifestyle".
Stripe. They are a payment processor and work in Finance. What significant contributions to tech have they produced? I'm not being snarky, I'm just not familiar with any off the top of my head like I know React came from FB/Meta, Google & Amazon produce all sorts of cloud computing stuff, Apple produces lots of libraries/frameworks (most likely for their own hardware/ecosystem), Bootstrap came out of Twitter, etc.
Providing an API abstracting over the complexity of payment processing is the technology.
Google's search engine is technology but you would probably say "isn't that just a researching documents"?
A bit weird how you only deem companies technological if they have released popular OSS or Apple because they produce libraries/frameworks they use internally. Pretty sure all software companies use internal libraries.
That just seems to feed the point to me. Google was competing with organizations particularly created for a new tech market that didn't exist before them. NYC library was maybe the largest player available to consumers? (Before the emergent search tech like alta vista and yahoo that Google disrupted.)
Stripe is a payment processor with the most disruptive automation, competing with other payment processors older than the web. Every industry will be shrinking in people per net work, few industries are new things (at least for the public) enabled by automation.
If we want to call all disruptors tech companies, why not also call the old companies that transform to compete with them tech companies too? Then every industry is tech. But really it is the opposite, tech as it ages becomes regular business that is more dependent on trademarks, relationships, etc, so some things we consider tech from recent decades are less so now and companies that stay primarily in them are more like old industry than tech companies that compete for the newly emerging fields.
U got be kidding me. I'm not from Stripe but fintech is insanely complex when you want to do the dirty work and untangle all kinds of legal and financial mess to provide services globally. They are not called aws for payment for no reason
Does that mean that any company doing finance is tech? If we, as a community, decide to tag every industry with "tech" like fintech, agritech, edtech, etc. to companies that are disrupting some industry it loses any meaning. Is every SaaS a tech company? Is disrupting the time tracking or invoice industry mean that is tech?
I think the qualifier is for companies that contribute something back, which many of those disruptor companies are using. Usually this contribution is some by-product since there are only a few companies who actually have main products as Tech.
Personally I avoid using the word "tech" and just say I do software stuff. Most people outside of computing just think its all the same anyhow ("can you help me with my wifi?" - In Laws, everywhere).
SaaS companies that are linking one business function to another where the entirety of the product is some software running on the cloud.
This isn't saying that they don't do development, but rather that they're not breaking new ground in tech. They aren't working on any cutting edge problems or developing frameworks to enable development at scale.
I worked at a company that did some logistics. There was an app for phones, some servers, and some software that did routing, provided ETAs to customers, and produced some reports.
I would lump it in the broad umbrella of "tech" but it isn't a company that's building the next big thing (or even small thing) that will change the world.
I'm the lead engineer at one of these and you nailed it. If I catch anyone "innovating" we have a talk about what it is they're working on to make sure it's part of our core business. It very rarely is.
I probably suck to work for in that way, but the reality is this is not a job about pushing the envelope, it's a job about executing as cleanly as possible. You work at one of these if you love to implement simple tech to solve non-tech problems, and I make that clear while hiring.
It's a moderately lucrative job, and can be very rewarding for certain types, but I totally understand if, coming from Google, it would be a system shock as it is decidedly not "tech" as most folks mean it.
Sometimes you have to NIH to understand why things the way they are. Granted, it's hard to justify on the company dime. From the perspective that 99% of software is awful and writing more is making things worse, I'm sympathetic to your position.
On the other hand, in my little corner of the world I've seen plenty of damage done by an "invent-nothing" mentality and an approach to software architecture that permits only plugging together popular open source components with fancy websites and corporate backing. For lack of a better term I call it "noun-driven development". You needed a disk reachable through an ssh server and an Apache directory listing, you ended up with Artifactory. You needed a library to replicate data with a Merkle tree, you ended up with someone's Kafka + etcd + memcached + redis + glusterfs Frankenstein monster, etc.
Isn’t this basically just saying “the way we’ve always done things here is optimal”? That is very rarely the case. Improvements, optimizations (even of a radical nature) are almost always possible. But yes it sounds like a lot of folks here would not like to work with someone so set in their ways.
The SaaS shop that I worked in had two Java devs, two JavaScript devs, a python gluer, and a mobile developer.
Building the even a basic framework takes hundreds of hours of developer time... for no real competitive advantage.
It's fine to work on innovative things (there was a point were something about Java annotations clicked and the report writing part got rewritten in a week)... but building big things that give small gains aren't viable in small shops.
Doing innovation on "how can we compress this web page even more" makes no sense at a small shop - if it's an issue grab Minify off the shelf and use that. Don't spend half a year writing your own that you'll need to support.
The small company is best served by working on things that give the competitive advantage - not working on those big ideas (unless that big idea is the competitive advantage).
Big tech companies have the advantage that they've got thousands of developers some of whom have some free time or the competitive advantage is removing another 200 bytes from a web page.
That small tech shop had 4000 hours of Java dev time to "spend" a year.. and another 4000 hours of JavaScript, and 2000 hours of python, and 2000 hours of android/iOS. There's a stack of 5000 hours of bugs and features for each of those parts of the app. Spending 500 hours of anyones time on something that can be solved off the shelf for under 10 hours to integrate is far from an optimal use of time.
Actually even this is wrong. Every laid off employee with a LinkedIn account that changed their employer on LinkedIn. I typically am not in a hurry to change mine.
The analysis is full of bad assumptions. For example, the section titled "Top Impacted Countries" is completely off: the article was written in Feb 2023 and in most countries the layoffs hadn't even begun back then (in a bunch of countries, including a couple "analysed" in the article, the layoffs are still to take place as I'm writing this).
If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the employees anonymized by title that were laid off in California (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
Surprised any FAANG uses teams. I think the only headshot you might need is for your badge, can't imagine any serious company mandates LinkedIn (that would be your boss deciding that and not HR).
Do you have any data on accuracy/completeness of LinkedIn profiles to accompany this? I get that LinkedIn is the most used platform, but as someone who doesn't use / update it (I have a largely dormant profile), I got the impression my demographic, while a minority, is still a relatively large minority.
Presumably the "total number of identified LinkedIn profiles" & the "total reported layoffs" figures don't match up: what happens to the data gap in your reporting?
Does your dataset include names or personally-identifiable information (IMO being able to key by all those 1-person companies counts)? If so, that seems a little... scuzzy? Would you consider pulling the dataset or at least making it coarse and pseudonymous? I would guess many of the people included and monetized here wouldn't expect or wish to be.
If the response is public scraping is legal, then I might suggest your company's framing of the product is making incorrect claims about this group. From your blog page:
"[N] people indicated a change of employment in the last 4 months (from the date of writing i.e. 14 February, yes Valentines’ Day) - aka ex-Googlers that got laid off."
That 'aka' doesn't necessarily follow, though? People leave companies for many reasons, and therefore this is not a valid "laid-off Googler" dataset.
(Edit: I might be misunderstanding but Google's layoffs were announced less than a month before Feb 14. Why look at the three months before that? Edit 2: noting sibling comment already asked this, didn't mean to duplicate)
Less important, while you do mention some biases inherent in the source (LinkedIn use by country, who has/updates a profile), please note that some of your blog article's headline claims are contradicted by publicly-available data available from press and WARN act filings.
Re: WARN act filings, here's a list of all the titles that were laid off in california (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
> We then used ChatGPT to clean up and categorize all 2-thousand and more roles into 9 main categories. Finally we did a quick manual comb-through to correct any discrepancy.
Yeah, that's a good question. Considering main revenue sources Google is a marketing/ad company and "tech" is simply an implementation detail.
I think a good litmus test is - if the Internet would die then would a given company be killed off by that. Ford and GS can function without it (it would be much harder but still they did that for decades) but for Google that would be the end.
> if the Internet would die then would a given company be killed off by that
That would select for Internet companies, not tech companies. And neither of the two is a strict subset of the other.
> for Google that would be the end
With no Internet, we'd still need comms, and mobile phones (and Android) would seem to be important there. And if that wasn't enough to keep them alive, they'd buy companies to do that.
> We actually tracked every laid off individual from Google to understand the story behind the layoffs.
This is an extremely inaccurate statement and really makes me question the validity of your research. And after I read it, there's so many problems that I think nothing conclusive can be drawn at all from it.
Equating "Everyone who changed their employer on LinkedIn from Google to somewhere else between these dates" and "laid off from Google." is embarrassingly bad methodology.
Even in a time of layoffs, hundreds, if not thousands, of people leave Google every month for their own reasons.
If you want a more comprehensive list, here's a list of all the titles that were laid off in california (the only state with google warn filings that publicizes titles in their warn records): https://www.warntracker.com/?company=Google
Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
If so, perhaps the layoffs are a good thing—in my experience, the worst tech companies to work for are those dominated by non-technical employees. Perhaps layoffs are being used as a blunt instrument to shift the balance away from that.
I guess working on your empathy skills and trying to understand emotions of others (instead of solely focusing on your own) might make your life easier.
I have met many engineers who thought along the same lines of “technology is the end and sales and product managers are the means to have me do whatever I want to code" and agree that these people struggled in environment focusing on "the customer".
I doubt, that "customer and product centric" companies will become less "customer and product centric".
A reason for the changes we are observing is less access to cheap capital which - as far as I can tell - will shift attention more towards "money, customers and products" and away from "engineering pet projects".
The most shocking thing to me I’ve observed during my career is how many good technologists lack empathy. I hazard it’s because the same neurological structure that optimizes for what makes a good dev/technologist is also what makes empathy and social skills lacking, very broadly speaking. You can learn/fake it with enough time and practice (I’ve met those who do), it just doesn’t seem to be that common of a hack.
A lot of people discover that they can get respect despite being an asshole if they're skilled enough.
You see this pattern of behaviour in all disciplines, but in tech it seems that social skills are less important than elsewhere so those types are attracted to the field, and we've also cultivated a culture that glorifies people who are assholes but are also visionaries - Jobs/Musk/Zuckerberg etc.
Being a visionary is mostly tied to having a budget line item for paying a PR firm that specializes in that kind of work. If you would like to be a visionary there's a whole fleet of companies over on Post St who would be happy to take your money and get your name in blog posts on Fortune and Bloomberg's website.
I am not a psychological professional, and I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t believe this is terribly unique to the tech sector. I think this is more closely linked to institutionalized people. That is, people who spent long amounts of time in schools, the military, prison, and so on. These large organizations themselves lack empathy. A person formed by such a machine will begin to find that treatment normal and replicate that treatment. As many technologists are university graduates, they’d fall into this category of institutionalized people. It doesn’t help that many then get hired by megacorps which are also institutions.
Empathy doesn't seem particularly valuable in a work context. Wether I empathize with a non technical manager who creates more problems than they solve or not doesn't change the impact that person has on the people around them. Is it empathy that keeps someone like this employed? We tolerate their meddling and chaos because we feel bad for them?
Off the cuff, I observe people who have social skills also find social commercing and social power pleasurable in itself and desire the activity for that end as well, far more pleasurable than sitting around solving logic puzzles and factoring the solutions; maybe on the side, like someone who plays Sudoku, but not as something occupying their day.
Unless your mob or pair programming all day most of the week, the actual work involved is rather isolating.
I don't have programmer friends, my friend group has consisted of social people owing to a series of incidental factors that began late in high school. I was consistently the person first to be exhausted going into late night where they seemed to have a replenishing reservoir of energy.
One of the programmers I used to work with took an online personality test, and told us that it reported him having "less empathy than Stalin". He was a good programmer, though!
many years ago i signed up for an online dating site where i had to take a very long (maybe 200 questions) personality test. I reach the end and it says "due to your personality our services cannot help you" or something like that. That was a blow to the old ego heh.
/happily married for 13 years now with two kids so i guess my personality isn't that toxic heh
> Does this suggest that a large fraction of laid off employees were in non-tech roles (e.g. pro{ject,duct} managers, scrum masters, sales, etc.)?
A lot of them were in "tech-adjacent" positions. PM, tech recruiters or evangelists, community managers, sales, DEI folks... At one point one layoff announcement had "returning to a healthy ratio of engineers to non-engineers" as a goal.
There is a wide mix of roles across most "tech" layoffs I'm aware of. HN only really surfaces the big figures and engineering/dev cuts, but there are a lot of business support folk being laid off _outside_ the tech industry as well, so I'd expect an even mix given a large enough sample.
From the original post, the next biggest category after “tech” is “Business & Professional Services“ at 24.2% of total (or 171 companies). This category includes - quoting the top few industries - financial services, business consulting, advertising services and recruitment.
With the exception of some financial services, these do not sound like industries whose companies have large internal IT presence.
The next largest categories are manufacturing/engineering, health, government, and energy. I agree that all of these fit your bill (government, perhaps less so).
I work for a construction company and there’s like 15,000 employees but only like 500 of us are software engineers (we’re outnumbered a lot by other engineers, obviously) It’s still enough people to fill up a nice sized building.
I've spent most of my career at places that most people here would classify as "non-tech" companies and have spent my time there working with programming, statistics and data analysis and data science research.
Hey, never said otherwise! Just wondering if non-devs are being laid off disproportionately.
For the record, I think layoffs of tech employees can also be a good thing (if done right, i.e. solely with respect to performance). Layoffs can be a great opportunity to purge underperforming dead weight employees en masse who have only managed to stick around because the process to PIP them is too onerous.
Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
>Sadly, performance did not seem to be the primary criterion for laying people off at many companies.
That's because layoffs are meant to adjust headcount due to changing business conditions (budget, etc). If you're using performance as a criterion, the word you're looking for is "terminated for cause" or "terminated for performance".
That’s not necessarily the case, especially at smaller companies.
A friend of mine leads a department of ~20 people at a midsize company (~1000 employees). They were told late one afternoon that the company was announcing a 10% layoff the following day, that they needed to reduce their departmental payroll accordingly, and to submit a list of employees to lay off by next morning, using performance as the primary criterion for whom to cut. This was feasible and fair, since a manager of 20 people can know exactly how well each of them is performing. (In fact, the employees my friend ended up dismissing were ones they’d wanted to get rid of for a while, but didn’t quite meet the stringent criteria for PIPing, so it was actually a relief to be able to let them go.)
At bigger companies, layoffs cannot get decided with such granularity (decisions come from several levels above managers familiar with each and every employee being laid off), so individual performance is a much smaller factor.
I'm calling BS on the "startups" number...I think this is a lot of people hacking around on side projects on their own dime
No mention also of how many will permanently leave tech...this may come down to who has the most savings to fall back on...if you just have to get paid to pay off that BMW lease, you're going to find work wherever you have to
No but having a severance package that covers your expenses for at least 6 months means that the BMW lease is still covered in the near future even if you don't have savings.
Sorry to hijack this thread and be pessimistic, but whenever you get emails from recruiters about a startup that's got "ex-Google and ex-Facebook" on the "founding team" - keep in mind that it's 99% bs.
Here's the summary:
- 747 out of the 2,762 laid-off Googlers have since updated their profiles to indicate a change of employment status in the last 4 months since November 2022.
- Only 56.7% of these people joined a tech company.
- 1/3 of these ex-Googlers joined startups.
See the full blog post here: https://nubela.co/blog/1-in-3-ex-google-employees-in-15-bill...