Re:Uber cuts 3000 more jobs, closes 45 offices
by mkl on Monday May 18, 2020 @07:18PM
(#23229521)
Quoting for readability:
"""
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
"""
- Building a high-quality product is a longterm investment and most technology companies know that. As a result, in my experience companies who expect growth would always prefer to keep engineers and PMs as investments.
- Companies generally find it hard to hire Engineers and PMs that meet their standards, especially in competitive markets like the SFBA, NYC, Boulder/Denver, Seattle, Austin etc. (You can argue whether that's caused by overly stringent hiring standards - that's a much more complex question). As a result, companies are somewhat more likely to "hoard" engineers if they expect that they'll need them to grow.
- Because engineers in these markets are expensive, it makes economic sense to spend to improve their productivity. If I have 100 engineers on my team and I can make them all just 1% more productive by hiring an additional engineer who focuses solely on internal tools or open source libraries that improve developer QoL, that's arguably money well spent.
- Many products at scale are more complex than one might expect from the outside, which demands a lot of ongoing product/engineering effort to maintain. If you're working on something that has a credible path to revenue or clearly makes/saves money now, your job is probably fairly safe.
"""
Please don't use code formatting for text. If you want bullet points, put a blank line between them to make separate paragraphs: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc